Granizado de Limon: Andalusia in a Glass

Throughout Granada and Seville in arid southern Spain there are tiny shops and street sellers peddling their icy cold wares to thirsty travelers. Among them the crisp granizado de limon is probably the most refreshing, the tart and juicy flavor trickling down the throat with the deep "aaaaah" of genuine relief. If you have a drop of vodka added the "aaah" factor increases (I'll save the limoncello recipe for another day to share with you). 

via

These past few days have been so hot that the granizados de limon have been numerous around here, though not all alcoholic of course. In a moment of sharing I unearthed this home recipe for granizado: you'll need 1 kilo of fresh, heavy for their size lemons, 1 kilo of water, 1/2 kilo of sugar and some caramel color. You can see the rest on the video. The drink also goes great with ginger or mint leaves. 

Chloe L'Eau de Chloe: fragrance review

Cast your eye back to the days when you were a kid in a floral print sundress, pig-tails hanging down the sides of your face, flowers pinned carefully on the hair by an older sister or attentive mother, and selling lemonade off a kiosk outside your school or terraced porch to amass money for summer camp (or something along those lines). I hear this gets done a lot in America. I can only tell you that I hadn't had any of those experiences, but lemonade drinking I did as a kid. A lot. It was the official drink of summer (along with sour cherry juice which is just as delicious, if not more) and gulping it down, all thirsty after a run in the fields cutting off wild roses & poppies or a swim in the sea, was one of the major joys of careless late spring and summer days. Perhaps there's something of that ~childhood-reminiscent, innocent and eager about it all~ that is so very refreshing and uplifting when we encounter a citrusy smell. Perhaps that's also why perfume companies are sure to bring forth a slew of citrusy colognes and fragrances into the market with the regularity of a Swiss clock, each spring as soon as the caterpillars turn into butterflies. There's just something optimistic, open and joyous about them, isn't there. Which is where L’Eau de Chloé comes in; from its frozen lemonade top note into its rosewater heart and down to its cooling, mossy base, it's an improvement on the previous Chloe edition* and a scent which instantly puts a smile on my face, even if it doesn't really mesh with my style, having no dark nor serious intentions.

Nikiforos Lytras, The Kiss

The recent "madness" for Eaux
Perfumer Michel Almairac was commissioned with a citrusy built on "clean" rose with a dewy character. Eaux are big as a variant in existing fragrance lines lately, rather than just a rehash of the citrus-herbal Eau de Cologne recipe, with predictably good results; especially at Dior (who had it all with their classic Eau Fraîche) with their Miss Dior Chérie L'Eau and J'Adore L'Eau Florale. Other contestants in this revamped "eau" game include Chanel Cristalle Eau Verte, Chanel Chance Eau Tendre and Chance Eau Fraîche, the three Ô de Lancôme, Eau de Shalimar by Guerlain (a different attitude as this is a complex citrusy oriental rather than just a citrusy, fresh, uncomplicated splash on), Hermes Eau de Gentiane Blanche and Eau de Pamplemousse Rose, even Serge Lutens with his L'Eau Froide and the previous L'Eau de Serge Lutens. It's a good alternative for warm weather wearing when you live in a hot climate.

Perfume impressions and formula structuring
Almairac used the transparent, luminous and at the same time lightly sweet and delectable natural note of rosewater (a distillate from rose petals) in L’Eau de Chloé to counterpoint and at the same time accent, via the common elements, the tart lemonade opening and the lemony magnolia blossom in the core. What was less easy to accomplish was how to stabilize it into a formula that would retain structure. The perfumer opted thus for a mossy-musky base accord which simmers with the angular, lightly bitter beauty of chypre via patchouli and woody ambers (ambrox). The fragrance belongs in the genre of Versace Versence or a modernised/watered down Coriandre by Jean Couturier.
The effect is that of a fizzy, sparkling, tingling the nose grapefruit and citron opening, vivid, spicy and refreshing at the same time with the gusto of carbonated fizz drinks bursting on your face which is prolonged into the proceedings. The peppery, crisp freshness evolves into the bold rosy heart of L’Eau de Chloé, balanced between powdery-minty and retro; non obtrusive for casual day wear, but with enough presence to uphold itself throughout a romantic afternoon. It's because of this that the fragrance projects more as a feminine than a citrusy unisex, which might create its own little problems (i.e. usually unisex citruses are the best). The mossy, patchouli-trailing with a warm, inviting "clean musk" vibe about it is discreet and rather short-lived (as is natural for the genre) and I would definitely prefer it to be darker and more sinister, but the fragrance overall serves as a reminder that small miracles are what we're  thankful for these days.

Advertising images
L’Eau de Chloé utilizes the familiar girl in a field of grass imagery in its advertising, first used by Balmain's classic Vent Vert (which did have something very meadow-like about it!) and perpetuated into recent releases; I'm reminding of Daisy Eau So Fresh by Marc Jacobs for instance. The young sprite is mythologically loaded, reminiscent of nubile teenagers in Greek classical myth deflowered by philandering gods, and it remains a feminist concern thanks to its sheer helplessness (who will hear your cries in the distance?). But perhaps we're injecting too much into it. Perhaps just rolling on a field on a warm, sunny day is a joy into itself and in this land of perfume fantasy all the big bad wolves are programmatically kept at bay or exitinguished with a squirt of a well chosen perfume sprayer. It's a thought...

Notes for L'Eau de Chloé: lemon, peach, violet, natural rosewater, patchouli, cedar.
Available from major department stores.

*NB: I'm hereby referring to the screechy laundry-detergent like Chloé Eau de Parfum by Chloé (2008) and not the excellent, violet-tinged nostalgic powdery fragrance Love, Chloé.

Model: Camille Rowe-Pourcheresse. Shot by Mario Sorenti, Music: Lissy Trullie / Ready for the floor.
More at www.chloe.com/eau

Painting by Greek painter Nikiforos Lytras, The Kiss.

Amouage Ubar: fragrance review

The exotic-sounding name of Ubar by parfums Amouage comes from a lost Omani city founded in 3000BC and still functioning during the first century AD, which consolidated a reputation as a tremendously wealthy trading post of frankincense en route the Silk Road. Nicknamed "Atlantis of the Sands" by T.E.Lawrence, its mysterious past lay hidden beneath the sand dunes as a result of divine wrath against the amorality and greediness of its inhabitants (according to the Qur'an). Although archaeological study had been going steady following surface archeology methods, it was only in 1992 that satellite imaging fully revealed Ubar to the world.

Commemorating that event and marking their Silver Jubilee, the Omani-residing brand of Amouage first issued a fragrance named Ubar in 1995, yet like the lost city the fragrance disappeared soon afterwards as if engulged by the sands. Luckily for us, Amouage re-issued the Ubar fragrance in 2009 under their new Creative Director, Christopher Chong; some formula tweaking didn't change the resulting composition too much, but enough to render it more baroque and extremely lasting.

Comparing a vintage sample I had languishing in my collection with a new batch which a generous friend recently provided , I can sense that the original 1995 Ubar consisted of a distinctive woody orientalised composition without much citrus up-top, while the re-issued Ubar is a floriental, with a dominating floral heart and a soft oriental aura on its lush lemon top and its silky woody bottom. Luca Turin gave it maximum points in his Perfumes the Guide quarterly update, mentioning how the older version had also received high marks of respect from connoisseurs, and I can see how it would.

What is most interesting about the re-issue is that Amouage Ubar is a regular shape-shifter on its ~very long~ course on my skin! Ubar's beginning mingles the discernible and very lush bergamot and lemon brightness with some "cleaner" notes (listed as lily of the valley, more of which here) cutting through the voluptuous richness; yet already a velvety aura radiates warmth forth ~the magical radiance of civet, conferring a restraint upon whatever tangy nuances might have been feared. You never had such a lush lemon before! Give it some time however and it becomes a throbbing, pulsating, thorny dark rose, the way the classic Montana Parfum de Peau behaves, while jasmine later embraces the composition fully. At this stage Ubar is a statement-making evening diva, not your average office-friendly perfume and indeed to treat it thus would amount to terrible waste. Atter a brief phase that seems to take a more masculine direction, the longer it stays on skin the more it reminds me of the peculiar lemon-cupcakes accord which was the pinacle of charm and naughtiness in Guerlain's Shalimar Light, with a very discreet suede-like accent in the base (perhaps due to a little labdanum): for something so naughtily laced with animalic civet, Ubar retains an always opulent yet elegantly sexy vibe (same as Ormonde Jayne's Tolu does), never veering into vulgarities: it wears hand-sewn dark lace, not red vinyl, as befits something evoking the romance and splendour of the Arabian Nights.

Although Ubar is appealing to me in no uncertain terms, I find that it is hard to surpass my infatuation with Jubilation 25, despite its many merits. It is worth noticing that men however, especially men attuned to rose and sandalwood mixes, might find it less outrightly feminine than the former and thus find it a better match to their sensibilities.

Amouage Ubar notes: Bergamot, lemon, lily of the valley, rosa Damascena, jasmine, civet, vanilla.

The original Ubar from 1995 came in Eau de Toilette concentration in a twisted pyramidal-shaped bottle (pic here) and cost "around $60 for a half ounce", according to the NST reportage. The re-issued Amouage Ubar comes in Eau de Parfum concentration and costs $250 for 50ml and $285 for 100ml at Amouage.com and Luckyscent.

Related reading on Perfume Shrine: Amouage scents, Parfums Fourrure/Animalic scents.

Pic of Oscar de la Renta fashions shot at Palmyra, via Corbis.

O la la, how fresh! ~O de Lancome: fragrance review

Inhaling a lemon grove's foliage trail in the morning air under hot azure skies, set to savour the day with optimism, full of joie de vivre must be one of life's simplest and most satisfying pleasures. Fragrances that give a lift to my step and make me face the mornings with élan are precious.
The task of achieving just that is not easy: it has to be uplifting, but also suave, not rasping on the senses which are slowly winding up to function from the night's inertia. Optimistic but with a hint of the stoic that marks the nature of my thoughts. Ô de Lancôme with its playfully double entendre of aqueous name and cool, dark green chyprish tendencies puts the right balance between the zesty burst of yellow hesperides and the alchemy of green herbs, interwoven like baroque music with its rounded forms philosophically puts some semblance of order into chaos.

The first advertisements for Ô de Lancôme emphasised the back to nature vibe that the French do so well with artistic merit: young women on bikes emerging from the rampant countryside, drenched in sunlight but with the coolness of spring air and dew in the fragrant grass, putting goosebumps on the skin at the hint of a breeze. It is so rare to encounter such a blatantly unpretentious image in fragrance advertising any more. Seeing those advertisements while leafing spring volumes of French Elle magazine, yearly devoted to beauty rituals of what seemed an arcane yet factually a simple mode, made me realize at a tender age how the natural world hides secrets of longing in the grass.

Composed in 1969 by perfumer René Gonnon, Ô de Lancôme came out at the time of Paris students' revolt and became an emblematic fresh Eau, taking the uber-successful Eau Sauvage one step further with the inclusion of synthetic aroma-chemical Thujopsanone. The consolidation of greenness under the crushed lemon leaves in the palm, with a subtle woody background resembles a viola da gamba supporting a clear, young female voice singing rounds of couplets in an allemande that converge on the same sweet surrender of a third majore of Provence in the end of a song in minore. Almost thirty years later and it retains the fresh radiance of a young girl, nary a shadow under the eye, curiously a tad sorrowful for the joys of life she has yet to experience.



Like the song goes:

Une jeune fillette
De noble coeur
Plaisante et joliette
De grande valeur
Outre son grès,
On l'a rendue nonette
Celui point de lui haicte
D'où vit en grande douleur
~{see the translation and musical notation on this page}

Ô de Lancôme was according to Osmoz the start of

"a new olfactory adventure [..] and perfumery would continue to explore its charms and powers until the early 80’s: Eau de Rochas, de Courrèges, de Guerlain, de Patou, de Givenchy, Eau d’Hadrien (Annick Goutal), Eau de Cologne d’Hermès, and even Cristalle (Chanel) and Diorella (Dior) would successfully pick up the gauntlet of those fresh, signature thrills that left their mark on an entire generation".

Notes: bergamot, citron, mandarin, petit-grain, jasmine, rose, honeysuckle, (witch hazel in 1995 version), basil, rosemary, coriander, oakmoss, cedar, sandalwood, vetiver.

Eau de Toilette comes in 75ml/2.5-oz and costs €48.50 and lasts incredibly well for this kind of fragrance.
Available at major department stores and Sephora.

The fragrance was re-issued in 1995 with a slight change in colouring in the packaging, which is helpful in identifying batches: the band around the bottle changed from ambery brown to bright green, same with the colour scheme of the box. The motif on the glass, like 60s wallpaper as Susan Irvine succinctly put it, remained the same.

There are two "flankers" to the original fragrance, both futile in my opinion for different reasons: O oui!, a fruity floral in a similar bottle with the palest white-ish blue colouring, aimed at generation Y, so saccharine-full generic and dull that it barely made a bleep on the radar; and a men's version in a green capped spartan column of a bottle called O pour Homme , marketed with the symbol of Mars (and male too) as the variation on O. Pleasurable thought it is, it seems like a redundant attempt to market what is already an eminently unisex fragrance in a new packaging to the opposite sex.
No need to splurge in getting both: the original is perfect on men as well and I highly recommend it.

Pics from parfumdepub.
Clip of popular song Une Jeune Fillette arranged by J.Savall from the exquisite film Tous les matins du monde, originally uploaded by Peteronfire on Youtube