Have you tried Etat Libre d'Orange Sécrétions Magnifiques yet? You should do it on camera. If for no other reason than I want to see someone's face when they first put it on. And then desperately try to wash it off. (And this one seriously clings!)
I made my friend Diane try it. Diane is predictable in her tastes in that she likes pleasant things. Which made convincing her to put on a few dabs of Sécrétions Magnifiques all the more gratifying. She was only mildly repulsed at first, but the following morning at 6 a.m. I received an email saying, "I smell like I had crazy sex with a stranger last night. And I just him to pieces!"
I almost want to buy a bottle just to have it around, the perfume equivalent of a whoopee cushion, I guess. But also because I almost like it. And it makes me a little sick to my stomach. It's a little like going on a roller coaster, where you're laughing and getting sick at the same time.
Wouldn't that make a good episode of KP Smells: "Tonight on Katie Puckrik Smells, Katie smells, laughs, and then gets sick on herself!" Think about it.
Oh, and if you're brave, you won't just smell it out of the vial, you'll actually apply the stuff to your skin.
Okay, so there's been a seven MONTH break between London Part 1 and this, the second and final installment. And the only reason why my dithering isn't dragging on any longer is that I've got another London visit coming up...uh...tomorrow. So I'm going to blend my last trip's recap into my next trip's precap, and pretend that I planned to do it this way all along.
I did go a little crazy-ape with fragrance acquisitions on that last trip, and I hope that I've learned something from the bad example I set for myself in February. I perfume binge-shopped like never before -- like the rapture was upon us and all those helpless bottles of fragrance were about to be swallowed by the fires of damnation. Unless I rescued them by the power of my pocketbook. 'Tis a merciful thing I did, truly.
Here's the whole haul:
Agent Provocateur Diamond Dust
Amouage Asrar Attar
Arabian Oud Hajar Al Aswad Comme des Garçons Daphne
Mona d’Orio Nuit Noir
Ormond Jayne Tolu parfum
Parfumerie Generale Intrigant Patchouli
Parfumerie Generale L’Oiseau de Nuit
Rosine Rose Kashmerie
Rosine Secrets de Rose
Solange Azagury Partridge Cosmic
Solange Azagury Partridge Stoned
The frenzy was somewhat justified by the fact that some of the fragrances weren't available back home, and if they were, it worked out cheaper to buy them in London. But frankly, the word “justified” is pretty flimsy in any context that brings together Katie and another bottle of perfume.
That's why I'm happy that a few of them, at least, were gifts from folks whose brands are on the bottles. Perfumer Linda Pilkington kindly gave me my favorite flavor of Ormonde Jayne, Tolu, and boho-luxe jeweler Solange Azagury Partridge laid Cosmic and Stoned on me, in their fantasy bauble bottles. These were delightful treats, and I received them with the slathering gratitude of a luxury-deprived factory worker in Soviet-era Novosibirsk.
Katya was the best-smelling worker at assembly station 7.
An even more delightful treat was lunch with Linda Pilkington, which fully ensured that I'd never be able to go back to that Lada assembly line in Novosibirsk ever again. Not with any sense of contentment, at least.
Linda shared a documentary's worth of fascinating stories about her path to perfumery, as well as her creative process. I practically forgot to chew as Linda described how a background as a self-taught candlemaker led to a job creating Chanel-scented candles expressly for the London Chanel boutique, which led to studying perfume, which led to traveling the world to personally source ingredients, which led to opening her bijou Mayfair shop...all interspersed with tangents involving exciting but bad boyfriends in glamorous locations, a stint as a soy farmer in South America, and inadvertent Nazi hunting in Uruguay, where the odd elderly war criminal can still be found lurking in the forests.
Um, I'm finding it hard to make a smooth transition from Nazis back to perfume, so I'll just awkwardly jump-cut to my visit to Roja Dove's top floor fragrance salon at Harrods. Here's where hard-to-find Diors, Guerlains and Carons nestle in the opulent splendor of what looks to be a Tsarina's boudoir. There's lots of black and gold and velvet gussying up the joint, and I found myself compelled to whisper for no apparent reason.
I whispered to the sales assistant that I wanted to revisit Les Larmes Sacrées de Thèbes, the $3,000 perfume (the cost mostly attributable to the ugly Baccarat 1980s-style crystal pyramid encasing it) that I'd tried on a previous trip. The back story sounded like horse-pucky -- something along the lines of “they cracked open King Tut's tomb, and wouldn't you know it, there on the kitchen table lay the recipe for his favorite perfume” -- but I liked the fairy tale anyway.
Bad bottle, but perfectly good UFO.
And loved the perfume! Dense jasmine and rose supplying the feathers in the pillow beneath sharp and woody resins -- frankincense, myrrh -- all that old-time sacred stuff. I wanted to try it again, thinking I might shell out for the cheaper refill version, but was out of luck. “The Sacred Tears of Thebes” had been discontinued, and I was reduced to smearing a bit of crusty resin on my wrists that the SA had managed to dig up from the bottom from an old bottle.
This time in London, I'll try to strike a balance between perfume binging and being frozen with the kind of indecision that results in begging SAs for leftover goo.
I'm cracking up looking at this list, because I've just realized that between Myrrh's myrrh and Ayoon al-Maha's frankincense, rose and oud, I seem to be subconsciously recreating Les Larmes Sacrées de Thèbes. Who's controlling the dials inside my robot head, anyway? King Tut?
Fumies, any other perfume marvels I need to explore while in London? (I will be checking out the Perfume Diaries exhibit at Harrods, including the "Science of Scent" presentation on September 23rd.)
When I uploaded my review of Guerlain Shalimar onto YouTube, yays and the nays came flooding in -- along with a handful of gents who chimed in on Shalimar's suitabilty as a men's scent. One of them, TSXAgility, has even devised a dude-friendly code name for Shalimar:
When people ask this fella what cologne I have on when I'm wearing Shalimar EdT, I tell them it's Favre. It works every time.
And onto the nays. whafah says:
I really dont like Shalimar...even if they say IT'S THE best frag in the world - i dont agree at all - i like heavy scents but not shalimar. Why evrbody crazy about it??
The answer comes from daisynation:
I love to think of Ava Gardner putting this on before meeting Frank Sinatra. I love its perfect balance of heavy and light, the morning sunrise amber and vanilla, the lemon of gin and tonics, the musk of seduction.
To conclude, Sevipants19 posed a kind of heavy-breathing phone call question...in reverse:
Ok, if I'm wearing shalimar...what kind of clothes am I wearing?
My answer:
You're either wearing a party dress...or nothing.
Steve at the Scent Bar asked me what my "Scent Concept" was going to be for my upcoming trip to London. The question was funny, and what was even funnier was that I was already working on one.
So far, I think I might be wearing Bruno Acampora Musc. When I've worn it lately, menfolk have piped up with an unsolicited "mmm...you smell good!". I want that "mmm!" response to enhance all my other concepts.
Katie
Katie,
I love "scent concept"! It intellectualizes and elevates the whole process of slapping on perfume. I wish I were more of a scent concept kind of person.
Dan
Dan,
Hey! I was at Neiman Marcus today, and Maison Francis Kurkdjian's CEO, Marc Chaya, was there to introduce two new scents released to celebrate MFK's first year anniversary.
They are "absolute" versions of Cologne Pour le Soir and Cologne Pour le Matin (which means they are EDPs instead of EDTs, with some different ingredients, said the handsome French fellow). Absolue Pour le Soir is now looking like a strong contender for my London Scent Concept.
I'd found the original Cologne Pour le Soir appealing, but ultimately too cloying, sweet and unchanging. But the Absolue version seems like what people are ultimately craving when they seek out something along the lines of Frédéric Malle Musc Ravageur: it is animalic, sensual, leathery and incensey. Charlotte Rampling enjoys home-brewing her own Absolue PLS.
I really think Absolue PLS is the perfected version of Cologne Pour le Soir! (In fact, it sways a bit to the beat of Lutens' Musk Kublai Khan. Perhaps it's the feminine version of MKK?) I excitedly told CEO Marc that it smelled like a church in a zoo, and he laughed politely, probably wondering if he could catch an earlier flight back to Paris.
At the start, Absolue PLS is reminiscent of Serge Lutens Ambre Sultan: that aroma of warm, fragrant weeds and resins. Then it gets alarmingly bestial, but that tapers off a tad, turning into the powdery animal fur niff found in Parfumerie Generale L'Ombre Fauve. It also shares a “bad kitty” vibe with Miller Harris L'Air de Rien and Un Petit Rien.
Powdery bad kitty-bunny
But later, when J smelled Absolue PLS on me, his spontaneous proclamation was "Incense!" I quizzed him on the leather barnyard component, but husb shook his head and restated firmly, “Incense!” The incense is indeed emphatic, more so than in Cologne PLS. It's the billowy, smoky kind, not the piney, sappy kind.
Oh, and CEO dude said Francis K used the original Cologne ingredients (benzoin, rose honey and incense) as a springboard, and amped it up with ylang-ylang, cedar, cumin and sandalwood for the Absolue. He didn't mention woodland critters or sweaty leather, but you can certainly smell them lurking within.
Katie
Katie,
When you namecheck both Musc Ravageur and Ambre Sultan in describing Absolue Pour le Soir, I'm guessing it's not for me. After those two, it was hard for me to even finish the paragraph.
One encounter with Absolue PLS, and it's already in the running for your still-undecided London Scent Concept? Would I be taking too much credit if I believed my insanity was rubbing off on you a tiny bit?
Dan
Dan,
Hah -- I just re-read our earlier exchange on MFK Cologne Pour le Soir, and it's only ratcheted up my desire for the Absolue. I need to stop hanging around with me -- I'm a bad influence. And you wrote this:
It's sweet and sexy, with just a little rasp initially and then a soft undercurrent of earthiness.
Add to which, you said you'd be "pleased as Punch" to wear it. So now we've both retroactively talked me into getting the Absolue. Is that the insanity to which you refer?
Katie
Katie,
I take that back. I put Cologne Pour le Soir on again at 9 a.m. (wrong time, I know) and here we are at noon and I'm a little sickened. It's just so sweet. Not sleazy sweet in that men's cologne way, but more adult female sweet, and yet somehow too sweet and not enough female or adult. Like a fruitcake with a little rum in it. Which I don't like, the cake or the rum. Cologne Pour le Soir is simply something I don't like.
I bet I didn't talk you out of it, though, because it's much easier to talk both of us into things than to talk us out of things.
Dan
Dan,
What? Sorry, didn't catch that -- too busy huffing Absolue, and it's a real Absolu-lu! And I'm almost out of my sample now....
Katie
Absolue Parfum du Soir is available at $175 for 70 ml from Neiman Marcus and LuckyScent.com
OsMoz, the blogging arm of fragrance and flavors firm Firmenich, has unveiled a series of whimsical videos exploring three common perfume-oriented issues: feeling naked without scent, feeling invisible without scent, and feeling drunker without scent.
Yep -- turns out there's a fragrance version of drunk dialing, but the results aren't any prettier than when you're sobbing snot tears into your ex's answering machine, begging to get back together.
In a short entitled “The Reflect”, a disheveled a-ha-looking guy surveys the detritus of his bachelor pad: empty wine glasses, heaving ash trays, far too much black leather furniture, appearing understandably dismayed.
Despairing, he picks up a decanter of what is either Advocaat or human bile, and attempts to chug the whole thing in one go. Like the bummy Lost Weekend dipso he is, a-ha guy spills half of it down his undershirt, and stumbles into the bathroom to fish the back-up bottle of Baileys from its hiding place in the toilet cistern.
He gets distracted by the lipstick kiss print on the mirror, flashing back to his previous evening's tranny-romp-for-one, fueled by too many White Russians and the John Cameron Mitchell film festival on cable.
Hmm -- Revlon's Cherries in the Snow really does skew blue-red, a-ha guy muses as he studies the lipstick smudge. Momentarily cheered, he spritzes on a dash of Jessica Simpson Fancy, and that's when things really start to get weird. He suddenly does a horror-movie morph into Michael Douglas from Wall Street, smugly pops his collar and struts out into the world, greased hair in place. He's moisturized his situation, preserved his sexy, assembled his shit.
And then the horror-show kicker: it's all in his head. We see him wandering out the front door, looking dazed, still in his Advocaat/bile undershirt, holding a briefcase like he's not really sure what it's for. As the door closes behind him on his pigsty of an apartment, we want to scream, “No! Nobody's expecting you at your pretend job! Take a mental health day! Order in some pizza -- and a maid -- and for the love of tiny kittens and all that is holy, reassess your life.”
Message: Just because you smell better doesn't mean you are better.
Jesus, “The Reflect” is practically a PSA!
Moving on from a pathetic perfume drunk to a fun perfume drunk, it's instructive to revisit the peerless Charles Bronson in his masterful commercial for Mandom:
Message: All the world loves a lover...of Mandom.
At least I think I understood those messages....
Flowerbomb by Viktor & Rolf was the pink cumulus cloud my girlfriend, the artist Georgie Hopton, lived in when it was released in 2004. She'd discovered it after years of wearing Chanel Gardénia, and now that I think about it, perhaps there is a bridge between Gardénia and Flowerbomb: the candy-sweet jasmine that is a hallmark of both.
My friend Georgie is fiercely smart and ferociously stylish, and could never be written off as a ditz, as I want to do with Flowerbomb. Flowerbomb is a real creampuff of a perfume, with everything that would make a little girl squeal, “YummeeeeEEEEEE!” if it were glopped into a sundae bowl at her birthday party.
There are those sugar-crystallized flowers, that hot wisp of cotton candy. But it doesn't venture into the pain zone inflicted by the shrill, soapy musks present in teenage “carnival gourmands” like Viva La Juicy, and for that I forgive Flowerbomb its other excesses. It wears persistently, but softly, and even develops an appealing, low-wattage spiciness in the final fade-out.
Georgie has long since moved on from Flowerbomb, but not from her perfume sweet tooth. She's swapped her caramel sundae for a root beer one: Annick Goutal Myrrhe Ardente.
The winners of the four Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab goody bags are:
glindasgal
ModderRhu87
the13ers
duckduckgander (stand-by winner)
The winners were randomly chosen using the mysterious computer alchemy of Random.org. Congratulations winners -- and please use your magical smells for the power of good. (Even though the "bad" witches on Bewitched always seem to have much more fun than Samantha!) Mucho thanks to everyone who entered.
The fine print:
Winners, please private message me on my YouTube channel with your name and mailing address. If I don't hear from you by Monday, September 13, 2010, your prize will go to a lucky stand-by (randomly chosen) winner.
Revisit my interview with BPAL headmistress Beth Barrialhere.
I quietly picked up a couple Mark Buxtons on sale: Comme des Garçons Ouarzazate and White. Ouarzazate is my second favorite of the Incense Series, much lighter and more relaxed than Avignon, although the Road Runner anvil is lighter than Avignon.
And White is lovely, though I always thought it was merely a flanker of the original Comme des Garçons, the one that smells like poison potpourri. And maybe it is, it's been so long since I've smelled the first one, but White is excellent nonetheless, a crisp spicy cedar, a comfort cedar, if such a thing is possible. It makes me feel snuggly and no other CdGs make me feel snuggly.
This is all so minor as good news goes, it's barely worth writing. But I didn't want to buy anything without telling you. Which makes you the opposite of almost everyone else I know. Today I brought a few perfume samples to my friend Sara and they were sitting on the sink when her husband came home.
"What are these?" he asked. And I sheepishly told him I collect perfume, as sheepishly as someone would admit to collecting pornography. Perfume is my pornography, not in a deviant way, of course, but as a source of embarrassment. Which is so minor as embarrassment goes, I don't know why I'm sheepish. Or why I'm writing about it. Not every email can be about the continuing crisis in Afghanistan. Wait, quickly, should I buy Tann Rokka Signature (formerly Kisu) for half-price? Would you bite? (The auction ends in 40 minutes and there are no bids.)
Dan
Dan,
Apparently Jude Law has been known to wear Tann Rokka Signature, and he's with your imaginary girlfriend Sienna Miller, so maybe that's a recommendation.
Fun fact: Jude Law is a cannibal.
In my “perfume hotline” capacity, I've just applied my samp of TRS in order to advise you. It smells a bit like Bulgari Jasmin Noir, but featuring violets instead of jasmine. It's a little odd. Odd but likable. The violet smell also has a licoricey edge to it, which I know will interest you.
This Tann Rokka Signature could be a Histoires de Parfum: old-fashioned and newfangled at the same time. It's nice, but I don't see it being of high rotation interest for you, Dan. Not like Ouarzazate, which is very nice! I wish Ouarzazate was longer lasting, though.
Katie
Katie,
I've been wearing Ouarzazate for over two hours, and while I've been doing nothing but sitting and reading, it hasn't vanished on me. Though it keeps threatening to. There's an arrogance about these excessively subdued perfumes, like a quiet-talker who requires lots of leaning in and concentrating to be heard.
And as for TRS, I now own it. You can't go too wrong buying a $185 perfume for $90 (it's a full bottle) because you can always sell it off without losing anything. Of course, buying a perfume with the idea of selling it off isn't very optimistic. Or romantic. It's like making your perfume sign a pre-nup.
Dan
Dan,
Ouarzazate is now striking you as arrogant? Just because it's obediently staying where you put it? That doesn't seem fair!
Katie
Katie,
Ouarzazate is bewildering because while I like it so much, it won't give me the time of day. (Like Sienna Miller.) I find myself constantly smelling for it and while it hangs around for a little while, it always has one foot out the door. From the moment I spray it on, I can tell it's looking at its watch. It's like me at a party. It's my love-child with Sienna Miller and it possesses our very worst qualities: it's anxious and aloof and while people are initially attracted to it, it never quite commits and inevitably just disappears.
Tonight I cracked open my new bottle of Annick Goutal Myrrhe Ardente, and at first I was delighted by the root beer accord. But the perfume soon turned sort of sweet and then just stayed there, smelling simultaneously spicy and sweet and smoky, not at all unpleasant during any particular moment but a little much over the course of an entire evening.
And it's definitely lasted the entire evening. It's like hearing a song you enjoy played twenty times in a row, at an uncomfortable volume. By the end, not only are you unsure about your feelings for the song, you're also grumpy.
Wearing Myrrhe Ardente reminds me of a teenage prank I once played. I was having pizza with a friend and there was a rather loud jukebox in the corner, in which customers were dropping in their coins, choosing their favorite Journey songs, and sitting down and waiting for them to come up.
My friend and I, rapscallions both, ended our evening in the pizza parlor by trading several dollars for change, discretely dropping it all into the jukebox and playing "Happy Birthday." Not once but many, many times: 1st selection, G-56, "Happy Birthday"; 2nd selection, G-56, "Happy Birthday"; 3rd selection, G-56, "Happy Birthday", over and over and over again.
What's more painful than listening to Journey? We were all about to find out. Except "we" didn't include us, because my friend and I slipped out before our selections started and watched through the windows from outside.
The first "Happy Birthday," a generic '50s-style group sing-a-long that was plenty loud enough to hear from the street, was met with wide smiles and people curiously turning and looking around the restaurant for the evening's honoree. Maybe it was a secret "Happy Birthday," we imagined them thinking, for a shy little girl or boy. Or maybe it was a mistake. Oh well, we'll get back to Journey in a minute.
Except after two annoying verses, with the celebrant's name appearing as "la-la's", as in "happy birthday to la-la...", it started all over again. Two more verses, two more la-la's, and an increasingly irritated pizza parlor.
By the third or fourth version, fathers were standing up, hands on hips, looking like they wanted to club somebody over the head with their pizza pans. And by the fifth go-round, several people had gathered in front of the jukebox and from the street it appeared as if they were somehow trying to convince it to stop, to please just stop playing.
Around that time, a couple of families walked out and spotted our hysteria over the monumentally stupid scene we had created, and so we made a hasty departure and missed the ending.
And right now, I'm convinced Myrrhe Ardente is my punishment at last. Because it just won't stop, it keeps singing "happy birthday to la-la" over and over again, and I want to gather up all the angry dads in my neighborhood and find somebody to club with our pizza pans. Except it's 2 a.m. and they're all asleep. And they can't smell it anyway. It's only me. Me and Myrrhe Ardente, all unrelentingly heavy and sweet and by now more painful than listening to Journey.
Dan
Revisit Dan Rolleri's initial high hopes for Myrrhe Ardente here.
