Chocolate Essay III - Alien Dust: Dior Homme & Dior Homme Intense

The original Dior Homme by Olivier Polge released in 2005 was strikingly beautiful, combining a stunning particularity of Tuscan iris with cocoa, leather, sage and amber. There is a traditional lavender note rubbed through the composition too, adding to the haunting bruised quality the fragrance has as it settles onto the skin. Dior Homme really shook up the world of men’s fragrance, being both ethereal and sensual, with a strange ambiguous edge that caught the mood of the time. Yohji Homme and Hanae Mori Men had been sweet and strange too but Dior Homme drifted on a razor’s edge. It has always reminded me of a particular Charles of the Ritz powder my mother used, a peachy, caramel scented dust that was quite particular to the brand. It is this troubling androgyny that has unsettled so many since the launch. The rich Tuscan iris gave the fragrance a bloom and silvered texture that was extremely rare in men’s perfumery. It seemed almost feminine, soft and floating in a sea of its own musky subtleties.

I think it is probably one of the finest men’s fragrance launches of the last 25 years and altered the way many men wanted their skin to smell. It also proved that a non-niche scent could fundamentally shift men’s scent on its axis. In many ways, the launch of Dior Homme was as important as the seismic shift in women’s fragrance after the appearance of Mugler’s magnificently divisive Angel.

The ambiguity and quietly pared down style of Dior Homme was welcome relief from the raft of sweaty, pheromone saturated releases flooding the market and dull sports replications of the great granddaddy of them all: Pierre Bourdan’s calone drenched Cool Water. Everything really started to smell very similar, clone upon scented clone. Bottles mimicked bottles, packaging looked uniform and deliberately generic, campaigns used music stars and sports stars in an attempt to appeal to a more bankable and trend driven customer base. The speed of new releases seemed extraordinary. Flankers were stretched to breaking point with colour (Red, Noire etc.), sport, metallic and Night etc variations. Some brands toyed with stronger concentrations like eau de parfum for men such as Terre D’Hermès.        

The test of a true classic is longevity. Along with Jean-Claude Ellena’s original Terre D’Hermès, another modern marker in recent men’s fragrance development, Dior Homme sells in huge quantities and still smells very unusual considering how many fragrances have tried to copy it’s formula: Van Cleef & Arpels’ Midnight in Paris, the rather predictable Avant Garde from Lanvin, Victor & Rolf’s shuddering Antidote and a whole raft of high street horrors from clothing brands such as G-Star. One of their recent releases is so similar as to be shockingly plagiaristic, albeit a badly done photocopy where the toner is running low…...

Even Polge’s own Power for Kenzo channeled the same powdered weirdness and androgyny, not quite achieving the same level of beauty however, something always twisted the formula the wrong way on my skin and I was left with a whiff of burnt metal that made me feel unwell and dizzy. 

It was the rendition of the iris accord in Dior Homme that was so very unexpected. There had always been iris in men’s fragrances before, especially orientals. Guerlain’s Mouchoir de Monsieur has lilting iris touches in the base offset by vaguely Parisian pissoir notes. Creed’s Green Irish Tweed flatters the Florentine Iris with violet and verbena and the Different Company’s Bois D’Iris by Jean Claude Ellena sets the iris amid a backdrop of narcissus absolutes, geranium, vetiver and cedar. But Dior Homme was the first mainstream male scent to rally ramp up the powdered more feminine aspects of this most luxurious and strange of flowers.

Extracted from the root of the iris, (the best comes from iris pallida or iris florentina), orris butter: the result of hanging, aging and maceration of the best roots, is one of the perfume world’s most exceptional and beautiful ingredients. It has an incomparable quality and texture in fine fragrances, a silken shimmering sensation that lies across the skin like glittering grey spider webs. I love the ghostly effects of iris and when it is given full rein in fragrance the effects can be utterly sublime. The recent Mon Numéro 8 by Betrand Duchaufour for L’Artisan Parfumeuer was an ice-cold sheath of iris and musks, chilled like death, but incredibly moving. Jo Malone’s limited edition Iris & Lady Moore blended the green fragrant leaf of an English garden with the silvered powder of iris to great effect. And Prada have ben tweaking and amplifying their obsession with iris for years. I do have a nostalgic love of Hermès’ Hiris by Olivia Giacobetti. Dusty and dazzling in equal measure, it fills the senses and plays out a complex portrait of iris over notes of honey, carrot, hay, rose, vanilla, woods and Ambrette seed.

I admit to phases with iris. It needs a time and a place. I often need to be cold, or feel chilled, the onset of frost, snow, and dampness. These are more than abundant in Scotland, so I do wear a lot of iris as I criss-cross this majestic city. Sometimes it can feel like you are wearing a veil of metallic threads. I crave a tempering, a whoosh, a melting. So when I first smelt Dior Homme, I knew it was right. The subtle interaction of iris and musks almost floating on a sea of dark chocolate whipped up by leather tinted zephyrs. The construction was perfection. Odd, sweet and highly addictive, (you were always tempted to drown in the musky sea) just so right.

I wore it obsessively and never got bored. It always smelt beautiful. I always smelt beautiful. Arrogance? Not really, it is just the way Dior Homme is. Adaptive, sensual, personal and oddly secretive.     

Then Dior Homme Intense came along and a whole new world opened up. A world of disconnections, cocoa dust, obsessions, sensuality and deep deep skin cravings. Authored by Patrick Demachy, it was a brilliant and darker twist on Polge's original formulation. It had a really magnetic pull on the senses, the cocoa note throttled up, darker and richer, all ganache and dusted patisserie. A touch of animalic Ambrette seed (musk mallow), pear, cedar and a deeply sexy injection of earthy lavender. I could happily keep on spraying until the bottle is empty. It has been re-formulated already since its release which is a little disappointing. The pre-reformulation recipe had a more rounded Guerlinade-style smoky base to it. This resinous bass vocality has been lost a little, replaced by a thinness than becomes more apparent as the fragrance stretches itself out over the drydown. The cocoa note has become a little cheapened too, as if a bar of 85% cocoa solids has been replaced with 50%. There is a more of a lactic, creamy quality now and a turned edge to the scent, which was not there before.

But you know what, even reformulated, Dior Homme Intense is a extraordinary experience, wrapping you in layers of olfactory sweetness and powder, woods and subtle yet persuasive masculinity. Like a trust exercise where you fold your arms and allow yourself to fall backwards and be caught. There is a reassurance in falling. You can topple into this strange and mesmerising fragrance. It has an otherworldly quality I just adore. A kind of replicant charm and sniffability other fragrances can only dream of. In another world I am plastic and walk flickering cocoa dusted streets. I leave faint traces as I walk trailing silvered powder in the air like fire. A car shimmers to a stop and someone says my name. The sky flares with light, a sudden burning setting of moons. I get in and smile, the engine roaring into life as I slide into seats of the softest leather I have ever felt. All around cocoa dust swirls and obliterates the view. A hand presses mine. My skin takes time to reform. I smell iris everywhere like frozen air. The man in the car is blurred and strange, radiating power. I am giddy on The Man Who Fell To Earth eeriness of my own skin. The cocoa and iris glow like a halo in the dim mist of the car interior. I am kissed and smile. I love this fragrance, the intensity and depth, the smudged ambiguity. Engines purr. I sleep and dream.

I have a friend whose signature scent is Dior Homme Intense. He wears swimming pools of it. When he moved into the city last year, he smashed three bottles of precious pre-reformulation Intense. His descriptions of scented grief and anger, of time slowing, of iris and leather leaking like blood were dramatic and fuelled by frustration and rage. He said he was overcome by a sudden desire to roll in the shattered glass and evaporating scent just to relive the dying moments of his favourite fragrance. Ah. Such is the power of Dior Homme very very Intense. Fellow replicant dreamers and lovers, wear it and it will love you forever.

Click below to Watch the Dior Homme Ad campaign directed by Guy Ritchie, starring Jude law and Michaela Kocianova.

http://youtu.be/M27e6dmFhTU

A Special Luminescence: Mona di Orio, Roudnitska and the Sensation of Light, Part II

This post is dedicated

To the memory of Mona di Orio, 

1969-2011

If Mona Di Orio’s oeuvre is viewed as a body of work, rather than individual pieces then it coalesces into something different. A subtle and deliberate attempt to create beauty from nature as she had been taught. If you consider the nature of light and the multi-facetted changes it undergoes around us, the profundity it has at certain times; dawn, dusk, in darkening rooms, churches, on water, in a lover’s eyes; all of this can be toyed with and applied to scent in terms of notes and structure.

If you think for example of an ocean, of the sparkling particles trembling at the surface reaching toward the sun and then down deeper to the richer aqua and emerald tones and the light leaking away way down to basso profundo depths, towards an inky silence where flickers of luminescence spark in the darkness. This can be suggested in the journey from sparking citric top notes, through richer, rounder floral heart notes down to musky, murkier more sensual depths. Colours, moods, notes, light. Everything moving to create mood and atmospherics.   

This use of chiaroscuro in scent is quite rare and hard to balance correctly. Often the tonality is too dark or too bright and over-exposed, the notes too screechy. But Di Orio understood the subtlety of chiaroscuro and her lightness of touch moulds her classic fragrances Lux and Nuit Noire, both of which dip in and out of shade as you wear them, flickering across your skin like the softest impressions of vintage cine film. Just when you think there is depth, something to stand on, the ground beneath you dissolves away. I love this unpredictability and movement. It allows me to wear the fragrances differently each time. I know the perfumer has wondered about the effects and imagined how it will travel and unfold on the skin.  

Di Orio’s scents really do polarize people. I know many people who loathe her work. But I know many like me who love her perfumes. She was an artist first and foremost.  And like a lot of art, it is very personal; one has to live with it for a while to truly appreciate its true worth. Her most recent releases were a beautiful and rather unexpected body of work called Les Nombres D’Or The Golden Numbers), working with very high quality ingredients inspired by mathematics’ golden ratio to achieve exquisite results. The first three eaux de toilettes were Cuir, Ambre and Musc, each of them beautifully balanced and harmonised with great dexterity and restraint. They seemed like musical compositions, the notes moving together to produce olfactory music of hypnotic depth and charm. I had always admired Mona’s work but suddenly it seemed she had found her true voice. Yes there were still fingerprint traces of her master on her compositions, but that was inevitable, however her exploration of light and floral anatomy was producing work of lucent beauty very much her own.  

My favourite from the collection is Les Nombres D’Or Vanille, laden with orange, ylang-ylang, cinnamon, tonka bean and vanilla absolute. It is very erotic and boozy; a drunken reel with a man you’ve loved for years and never had the courage to approach. A hot summer’s beach party, a fire sparking into the shadows, laughter swallowed by the night. Dance and forget. It’s a beautiful soft scent, creamy with an atmospheric smokiness that burns off in the woody and spicy drydown. I love my vanillic scents, can’t get enough of them, but they have to have the real thing, the split pod, the fleshy, plastic burnt truffly depth of true vanilla, not the cheap toffee fix of vanillin. Granted, there’s a time and place for that… But for serious skin and seduction, real vanilla rolls off the flesh like a howl in the night.

My first Mona di Orio scent was a later one, Chamarré, one that many reviewers disliked. I had toyed with Lux and Carnation and liked them both a lot. I almost bought Nuit Noire but it resolutely refused to settle well on my skin and dropped away to zero as if the notes were oil and my skin water. Chamarré was different; it married beautifully to my skin. It was very different to the fragrances I usually wore, sparkling and green with highly ornamental floral structures. Chamarré translates as bedecked, adorned, the implication in French is overdone, a slight sneer, of de trop… a little ostentatious perhaps. But to me the decorative elements of Chamarré are more akin to Flemish tapestry, the rose, iris and violet threaded like sliver and gold through a deep background of ambergris and cashmeran. The surface dazzles with aldehydes and a very strange wash of lavender that seems to set fire across the top of the scent like a flaming Sambuca. As with all Mona di Orio, the notes need time to really settle and stretch across the skin.

I like the idea of dressing and adornment in fragrance, when I wear my beloved Vanille Absolument by L’Artisan Parfumeur it feels like a bejewelled cloak, doge-like and russet gold. Nothing austere, just limitless depth and inhalation of luxury. We all need ornamentation and lashings of adornment from time to time, something to slip into, sigh into and moan against starving skin.

This idea of wearing textured scents, imagining a touch, a rub, and plush is a beautiful thing. Some perfumers instinctively understand the need to go a little further, to dress our skin and live through it.

When I decided to wear Chamarré, I also decided to only wear it in private, in front of darkening mirrors, Salomé-like, shedding inhibitions. I love the suggestive sway of the drydown, the twist and sigh of the notes that are so artistically arranged to form an impression of something glinting just out of the corner of one’s eye. The swelling rose absolute that rolls and caresses the aldehydes in such an unexpected way, like a lick of subtle fire. There is a delightful burn of Oppoponax that flares up as it settles, sending shivers of desire through the composition. The cashmeran in the base is intriguing, used so carefully as if weighed by eye alone, it gives the formula a silken glitter akin to running your fingers over finest Siberian mink. A whisper of ambergris floats a marine verdigris facet across the drydown like a warm smoky salt kissed breeze. The disparate elements of florals, woods, fur, fire, animalics, aldehydes, day, night, sex and privacy are caressed and moulded with consummate skill. It is quietly ablaze with dazzling scented effects and was one of Mona Di Orio’s best works, an exercise in embellished sadness. Wearing it reminds me how close perfume can come to art and how close Di Orio was to bridging that tenuous and oh so debatable gap.

As I come to to the end of writing this piece, I stop and apply some Chamarré. I pause for a while and wander through my apartment. It has been raining all morning, but now the sun is burning off the cloud. I open the window and smell the wet earth on the ruined herbs in the window box. My cat jumps up. As I close my eyes and turn my face into the sun, the cats’s warm fur beneath my fingers, Chamarré rises up from my pulse points. For a moment I imagine Mona di Orio under a French sun in Grasse, sampling a bloom, imagining how it will fracture apart in her mind. Her work has great emotional resonance and beauty and I will always love wearing her perfumes. It is hard to believe she is gone. 

For more information on Mona Di Orio, please click below:

http://www.monadiorio.com/

A Special Luminescence: Mona di Orio, Roudnitska and the Sensation of Light, Part I

This post is dedicated

To the memory of Mona di Orio,

1969-2011

The death of Mona di Orio at the young age of 42 following surgical complications was a tragedy for all who knew and loved her. A part of the perfumed world had suddenly gone dark. I listened to her recently on YouTube, describing in her beautifully enunciated French her apprenticeship with her maître, the mighty Edmond Roudnitska. Her vibrancy and ability to communicate her passion for fragrance, to philsophise and romance the complex and often pretentious world of perfumery will be sorely missed. She was a rare presence in perfumery; sociable, accessible, modern and yet delicately classical. Mona was an obsessive perfectionist applying this ruthless desire for finish and detail to all aspects of her perfumed work. For someone so preoccupied with the concepts of light and chiaroscuro in perfumery, the extinguishing of so bright and sensual a light is particularly poignant.    

Mona was a direct link to Roudnitska (1905-1996), one of the world’s greatest perfumers, the man who created Diorissimo for Christian Dior in 1956, perhaps the finest example of a white floral ever known. Christian Dior was captivated by the beauty and simplicity of the classic muguet blanc. At his lavish and moving funeral at Saint-Honoré-d’Eylau in 1957 his casket was laden with sprigs of lily of the valley and the church was awash with the extraordinary white scent of them. Mourners were overwhelmed by their perfume.

It is Roudnitska’s rendition of muguet blanc, or lily of the valley that will ensure his name will be remembered as one of the true artists and innovators of the fragrance world. Lily of the valley cannot be extracted therefore Roudnitska had to build up layer upon layer to create a painstaking portrait of the flower that captured its beauty, its magical lemony pepper freshness and its almost ethereal shimmering fleetness of presence. It is not just the portrait of a flower, but also its surroundings, a spring dawn, dew and the soft uniqueness of the southern French light. He often referred to it as his ghost flower as he was haunted by his search for its scent. He planted it below his window in Cabris near Grasse as he formulated his masterpiece for Dior. Today’s version of Diorissimo is different as it must be in the light of time moving and reformulation and shifts in taste. The underrated François Demachy has been quietly tweaking the classic Dior scents and sending them back out into to face the world. On the whole they are rather moving, a tribute to times gone by and artistry that will never be seen again. I have been sampling them recently and was very taken with the re-working of Diorama; it smelt astonishing on my skin. I never wear anything like that normally, but all day long I just kept returning over and over again to the crook of my arm. The delicacy of the original was hovering inside a more robust casing of modernity, but it still smelled remarkable.

For me however the re-orchestrated Diorissimo has lost a lot of the creaminess and flow of the original. This was inevitable, but in the spaces between the notes, as the fragrance meanders a little from its mission statement of creating the purity of Roudnitska’s Cabris muguet, you can still detect tiny flashes of tremendous beauty and you realise that Demachy is a talented and instinctive chronicler of these archive classics. 

I had a friend who was always given Diorissimo by her mother for her birthday. She used to moan it was too old for her, yet is always swathed her in a glorious smoky green wrap of clarity and nostalgia. I have a photo of her sitting on a bench sullenly smoking in Benetton cashmere and you can actually smell the tangy white notes and green squeak of soft floral muguet roll out of the frame.

Roudnitska also created Eau Sauvage for Dior, a hedione drenched feral citrus that still smells timeless, Eau d’Hermes, Cristalle and the elegiac Le Parfum de Thérèse, a melody of white notes and passion that Roudnitska created especially exclusively for his wife Thérèse Delveaux. He eventually allowed Frédérick Malle to publish it as part of his Perfume Editions. This has allowed the rest of us to experience its poignant personal majesty.

Roudnitska was a true master of perfume. He understood the way women wanted to be scented, the relationship of nature to skin, the way we wanted fragrances to work in harmony with our inner heat and desires. Above all, there was glamour and mystery, a sense of another time, an echo of something past, lingering on the skin, dancing to life in the air. Try wearing his elegiac Parfum de Thérèse; I defy anyone not to be moved to smiling sadness by the shimmering accords of jasmine, rose and plum bathed in light and underpinned by Roudnitska’s masterly use of leather and cedar. There is a hint of melon like a steady candle flame beckoning in a window which I love as the scent settles on the skin. To love someone this much and create a masterpiece for her is a startling, Wuthering Heights thing. It never fails to move me.       

This understanding of scent was instilled in a young Mona di Orio during a sixteen-year apprenticeship alongside Roudnitska in Cabris, learning how to read nature and understand the beauty of great perfumery. She first met him in July 1987 when she was just 16 years old. He told her to wait, study and learn. This rencontre would have an impact on her perfumed psyche and oeuvre that would last until she died. She read and absorbed his influential work L’Esthetique en Question, still an important work in terms of reflecting how we view fragrance. Roudnitska argued that fragrance has a role as art, as a creative force, moulded with aesthetics, capable of moving us like great music, painting and literature. There is also a practical side to bestowing a cultural status on fragrance, protecting by law formulae, bottles and packaging in both niche and mainstream fragrance production. This would essentially help in the battle against fakes and plagiarism that has long been a problem in the fragrance world.

Interestingly, in January this year, the French Government, at the behest of the Ministry of Culture and some not so subtle maneuvering by Frederick Mitterrand, has acknowledged perfume as a form of art and a major contribution to French culture. The Société Française des Parfumeurs has been lobbying for this for many years. Five perfumers were inducted as Chevaliers des Arts et des Lettres. Diplomatically they each represented the five big fragrance and flavour companies. They were Daniela Andrier of Givaudan, Françoise Caron of Takasago, Olivier Cresp of Firmenich (and brother of Françoise Caron…), Maurice Roucel of Symrise and Dominique Ropion of IFF.

There is a lot of symbolism and some tokenism is the selection. However the recognition of perfumery as art must not be underestimated. It subtly enhances the industry with a veil of stylised power that did not exist before. Something Edmond Roudnitska has been fighting for all of his perfumed life. It was touching that his son Michel, was present at the ceremony, as a perfumer in his own right and taking pictures of the important day.

So this deeply argued and passionate belief in perfumery as art was installed in Mona Di Orio very early on in her apprenticeship with Roudnitska. She would have been exposed to his aesthetic rigours as she studied alongside him for 15 years in Cabris, near Grasse, the spiritual heartland of French fragrance. Surrounded and profoundly influenced by nature and above all the beautiful natural light of the South, Mona learnt her craft from one of the true aestheticians of the perfume world.    

Mona’s perfumed oeuvre was formed by a search for balance and perfection. This again was inculcated in her by the rigour of her training with Roudnitska. A lot of contemporary perfume training involves reverse engineering, students studying what is in existing scents and attempting to deconstruct or unravel the twist and turn of notes. Roudnitska did things a little differently, he would set Mona an exercise where she would pick a flower from the extensive parkland surrounding Cabris and analyse it. She was however expected to describe the essence, the soul of the natural flower. This unique and deeply connective approach is more akin to life drawing, compelling a more detailed and scrutinising examination of the subject. I watched a documentary recently on Lucien Freud. While not his biggest fan, it is true his portraiture is incredibly compelling and seems to reveal truths about the sitters that are buried beneath the surface. A lot of his work is uncomfortable and full on, however there is now denying the power and flayed honesty in his work.

Mona di Orio had trained as an art student and would have understood this detailed and scrupulous approach to studying a flower or scented source. She carried this delicate and precise attention to detail into her own work and you can see in it for example in her passion for jasmine and its indolic magnificence and her later robustly sensual and feral rendition of oud.

Her perfumes have both delicacy and robustness of line, and examine the interplay of notes and the all-important movement to drydown. There is poignancy, character and above all truthfulness. This is in part Di Orio’s talent and personality shining through her work but also the spirit of her master, Roudnitska, guiding her hand and her heart. It is hard to entirely shake off the imprint of a maître. Arguably Di Orio never really reached dizzying heights as a perfumer and certainly never produced anything to rival Roudnitska’s classic creations. This was in her future and her Nombres D’Or Collection was an indication of even more beautiful things to come. 

http://www.monadiorio.com/

Rose Essay VII – A Surface of Translucency: ‘L’Eau de Chloé’ by Michel Almairac

Imagine a soft white gallery space. The roof and walls overhead are glass, filtered with screens to protect the space from direct sunlight. The room shimmers with diffused emerald light, flooding across floors and walls from high shaded windows. This from reflections of the grass outside, like motes of chlorophyll floating in space.

The room is empty except for a single work hanging on a vast white industrial wall. From a distance the work consists of a single image of a calamine rose on a white ground. Some texture, engraved marks in the white. No frame. But as you move closer you realise the rose is warmer, deeper in tone with tiny flashes of mauve through the captured images of the petals. The winter background is in fact washed with a subtle soft shade of green, a diluted sap tone that has settled into tiny imperfections across the canvas. Underneath the green there are tiny traces of violet and pink, washed off and the new work inscribed above, palimpsest-like.

This is how I breathe, feel and imagine L’Eau de Chloé; the latest incarnation of Chloé by Michel Almairac who also created the smash hit original all-conquering rose scent from 2008. Chloé hit a chord, the marketing campaigns were superb and the juice itself was a stylish and non-threatening blend of aspirational warm sexuality. Most of all everything felt feminine, empowered and right.

There have been other fragrances since then, the hypnotic Love Chloé (super sexy campaign…) and the oddly clinical Eau des Fleurs collection of Capucine, Neroli and Lavande. But this new interpretation of the original Chloé for me is the best so far. Almairac has pulled the elements apart and reconfigured what made the original so addictive and still managed to reassemble the parts into something fresh and utterly captivating. The most important aspect of this new scent is the articulate use of naturally distilled rose water that flows through the entire composition. This transforms the notes, coalescing the whole into a dewy palette of extraordinary delicacy and conversely steely strength and persistence.

On first application it seems as if the entire composition has been drenched with rose water, it suffuses everything. It smells and feels like one of those perfect all American verdant lawns, bordered with white picket fences, watered by the hypnotic put-put-put of a water sprinkler. But Almairac is a master of subtlety and impressionism as he proved last year with the soft floral leather he created for Bottega Veneta. His impressionistic portrait of a room with leather-bound books, open windows, grasses, flowers, the walls witness to subtle generational wealth with mannered grace and an appreciation for beauty made the fragrance a near perfect exercise in perfumed restraint and elegance.

There are lovely glistening citrus notes of cedrat and grapefruit at the top of L’Eau de Chloé, both of these ingredients have bright, sharp aspects to them, but a certain sweetness too, cutting gently through the headier more sugared tones of violet, rose and sweet peach. I do detect a underlying cocktail facet to the design of the scent, as if a dash of rose syrup was slugged into a Bellini mix, or perhaps rose petals bruised in the glass with ice then the cocktail poured over.        

The base notes are cedarwood, amber and patchouli. Heavy sounding, but in reality, warming, supportive and very sensual. The amber especially gives the rose water a glow as it settles. Last year’s deliciously juicy Rose

Water & Vanilla from Jo Malone was a textbook lesson in how to use rose water, sprinkled from on high with laughter and spices, cold and silvery, like mountain spring water giggling through snowy rocks. Almairac has used the rose water in L’Eau de Chloé to soothe, seduce and caress the senses. The initial freshness drops away and reveals little wafts of vintage face powder; a delightful retro note tucked away in the witty use of violet and rose petals. But oh I love the translucency, the elegance with which the layers have carefully draped over one another to enhance the initial gauzy gulp of happiness that comes when you first spray it. Because that’s what you get, a sense of joy.

Perfumes rarely make me smile; I tend to be of a darker hue in my outlook on life. However, this fragrance did made me smile, albeit fleetingly. It’s not doing anything radically new (granted the rosewater flushed through it is invitingly innovative) and yet it feels somehow like it is.

I made a couple of student films when I was younger with student filmmakers who worked at the same arthouse cinema as me. It was chaotic and fun. And I died a little every time I watched myself. One of the films had a scene filmed in grainy Super 8 style video in a field where I had to walk toward a man near a tree in very bright sunlight. I had a boa, I can’t remember why now; I probably just suited it then. I trailed a cigarette in one hand, the other raised to shield my eyes from the sun. My hair was so long back then and whipped around my face. The music that played over the final version was weird and melancholy, but I was a lover, lost then found, meeting the flame of my life beneath a tree where we carved an anchor into the bark to celebrate our desire. As I lived with the L’Eau de Chloé scent on my skin, wearing it for several days, it was this weird scene of me swaying almost drunkenly through high grass, smoking and laughing in the bright summer sun that kept playing over and over again into my head. And I realised how much I loved the fragrance, the wealth of rose, the powder and dew, the retro violet and the kindly way it wrapped the skin in just the right amount of memory.    

For more info on this delightful fragrance, click below:

http://www.chloe.com/#/collections/fragrance/chloé/eau-de-chloe/en

Chocolate Essay II – Feral Taste of Desire: ‘Chocolat Amère’ by Il Profvmo

Chocolat Amère by Il Profvmo is my touchstone chocolate fragrance, dark and bitter, it sits on the skin like lacquer. A masculine chocolate, designed to settle into moaning darkness and fever dreams. I have never tired of it and every time I wear it I am asked what I have on. It turns heads; people sniff the air expectantly, searching for an animalic trail, a whiff of hunt. It is not something I ever thought I’d find in a chocolate scent.

Il Profvmo was founded by Italian aromatherapist and cosmetologist Silvana Casoli. She recently created a bespoke scent for Pope Benedict XVI, inspired in part by the Pontiff’s alleged hankering for his beloved Black Forest. The fragrance has notes of lime blossom and grasses. Silvana has already authored two fragrances for the Catholic church; Acqua Della Speranza (Water of Hope) and Acqua Della Feda (Water of Faith). I like the uneasy mix of sacred and profane in her work. The classic Catholic dichotomy. Nice to see it pop up in fragrance, albeit rather glibly. The website is a little disappointing, poor info, typos and an irritating soundtrack. It’s a pity because the range is underrated and has some very special things buried amid the rather messy graphics and orientation issues.

The fragrances are often hard to find (Luckyscent, Amazon weirdly…only a few though). I came across them in Harvey Nichols in Edinburgh who as usual stocked them for six months, failed to promote them properly, buried them away in the corners of their perfumery with Rancé and then discontinued them saying they didn’t sell. This is the HN way. But you do stumble across them in the oddest places: a clothing store in Amsterdam, niche homeware stores in Manchester, department stores in Moscow.    

Casoli’s perfumed oeuvre is intriguing and varied, ranging from floral fragrances to gourmand interpretations, spicy and green offerings and interesting experiments in abstraction. Two other favourites from the line are Nuda and Macadam. Nuda is skin incarnate, supposedly skin in ecstasy, but it has a disarmingly creamy softness that tugs the mind between carnality and comfort. The use of white musks is billowing and layered perfection. The perfumed expression of Renaissance marble.

Macadam is the perfumed personification of Roger Vivier patent shoes skipping along springtime Parisian streets, water flung from flower shops, freshly washed hair, a touch of pavement, a whiff of car, that special early vibration of Paris mornings. It is a very odd scent, a gentle collision of floral, green, forest and musky powder. It works, audaciously, just.

The range also has a range of oil-based fragrances called Osmo Absolus. These are quite something. The website has lots of puffery about evaporations curves, skin osmosis…. blah blah. But the reality is a line of well-made oil based scents with warm and lingering drydowns that rise constantly from skin to the brain. I have tried three. They are intense, with complex body interactions. They drop into the skin and then work out their own way to smell. I loved the Patchouli Noir, this smelt astonishing as a base under the Chocolat Amère, ramping up the truffly woody aspect of the cocoa bean. The Vanille Bourbon is sweet and silky, gorgeous for vanilla lovers like me. And the Musc Bleu is a glittering intensity of skin musk. It smells like turning the lights off and turning to realise your lover is glowing in the dark like white fire.

I have a real passion for chocolate. I love it cheap and sweet, white and fleshy, truffly and serotonin boostingly deep. I’m not a chocolate snob, I like the elegance of high percentage cocoa solids with roasted nuts and black cherries say or just on its own melted in the mouth with clarifying Earl Grey Tea. But I crave the simple rush of Cadburys milky smoothness too. It’s a mood thing.

It’s the same with chocolate in my fragrances. Sometimes, I want the dramatic cocoa show of Amour de Cacao by Comptoir Sud Pacifique or the milky peach fuzz softness of the original Omnia by Bulgari, white chocolate notes and mandarin. My skin adores the new Angel flanker, part of The Taste of Fragrance series, a collaboration with Parfums Mugler and Helene Darrouze, the Michelin starred chef, based at the Connaught in London. A huge whoosh of dark cocoa has been added to the original candyfloss and caramel infused formula. The result is quite beautiful, red berry rich, truffly and skin-lickingly sensual. Musc Maori by Parfumerie Generale is another favourite, white musks, coffee, cocoa bean, tonka and vanilla. But strong and woody, with tremendous verve and personality, the man in the room you just can’t stop looking at out of the corner of your eye. Something I sampled recently and can’t stop thinking about is Greedy Chocolate by Montale, the purveyors of all things oud. Love the name alone. It is glossy chocolate ganache with orange smeared undertones and a massive lashing of dirty vanilla. Very odd and really should not work. Like the dessert you know you really should not have, but god it tastes amazing. Cocoa, moka bean, bitter orange and vanilla; the notes are simple but balanced with a patisserie chef’s master hand.

One of the first chocolate gourmand scents I remember owning and loving was Eau de Charlotte by Annick Goutal, created for her daughter in 1982. The subtlety and delicacy of the gourmand notes is interlaced with cassis, mimosa and vanilla. It is a very French fragrance, the pale yellow tones of mimosa drifting across a breakfast scene of bread, jam and warm hot chocolate. Like many perfumes, it has specific memories folded through it for me: of a boy, tattooed with random text from Baudelaire, sharing my Sunday breakfast over a rough-hewn wooden board, scattering crumbs over smoky trashed sheets. Kisses tasting of chocolate and Bonne Maman jam.

It’s the contradiction of sweet stuff on skin that draws us in. The gourmand thing has gone AWOL these days, with so many dizzying permutations of sweetness. Caramel, strawberries, toffee, licquorice, milk, hazelnut, popcorn and of course every style of chocolate known…..But a counterpointing is needed to fan the flames of sweet desire, to enhance the feral qualities of good chocolate; a touch of shadow, some vibrating rose damascones, vetiver bourbon, deep shrubby patchouli, Madagascan vanilla, tobacco, creamy orchid or indolic Casablanca lily.  

The Aztecs made the raw cocoa bean into a cold drink called xocolātl, a Nuhuatl word meaning bitter water. The beans were fermented and the drink was consumed in vast quantities with presumed aphrodisiac qualities. The Mayans preferred their version of the beverage warm and this appealed to the voracious Spanish invaders who took the bean home to Europe in the 16^th Century. It was hugely popular at the Spanish court and spread across Europe. The first chocolate house opened in London in 1657.

Some of like us like it dark, some of us like it sweet. Chocolate I think can be rather telling. White chocolate is baby soft and safe, the chocolate equivalent of the missionary position with the lights off and no talking. Milk is comfort, oozing and creamy, skin-like and lickable. We know this stuff, Cadburys, Galaxy, the melt in the mouth, the sensation, the chemistry.

This was done so well in Missoni Missoni by Maurice Roucel, a masterpiece of floral gourmand counterpointing. The milk chocolate notes are tempered with magnolia, peony, orange, Japanese apple and amber. The Italian love of hazelnuts is woven through it giving the composition a soft kiss-kiss drydown that is dewy and highly addictive. Missoni later released Gianduja, a massively ramped up nutella-tastic scent (with added praline and hazelnut facets) that just reeked of smeared animalic amber and chocolate. I loved it. Smelt kinda morning after sexy on me. Although occasionally it made me feel like I’d been at a Nutella orgy and passed out somewhere after the foil was broken on jar three…

A near perfect essay on the history of chocolate was created by Bertrand Duchaufour for L’Artisan Parfumeur. Released in 2002, Piment Brûlant was inspired by the Aztec chocolate love potions downed by Montezuma before he visited the women in his harem. A creamy raw chocolate note has been blended with red pepper lending the composition a bizarre red-hot and sweet combo like sugar dusted electricity. A really gorgeous silvered poppy seed facet mingles with clove and vanilla to round off this abstracted gourmand scent. It was launched originally with Olivia Giacobetti’s Safran Troublant and Poivre Piquant, also by Bertrand. The collection was called Les Epices de la Passion, all three fragrances promoted with an aphrodisiac angle. I love the way Piment Brulant sits on my skin, the chilli smells like freshly cut bell pepper as the scent opens out. The chocolate has a fabulous raw edge to it, like sniffing melted 90% cocoa, earthy and dirtysexy. Along with the Chocolat Amère, it has the feel and drugginess of real quality cocoa.

As an aside…….Amid the recent Mugler reboots, the only one I didn’t like was the Amen re-orchestration, with red chilli shot through the original gourmand formula of coffee, chocolate, musks, lavender and tonka. Oddly the element of red heat unbalanced what for me is already a rather chaotic and thin scent. Smelt like putting your tongue to the knife that cut the chocolate and chilli. Cold, oily and metallic with a little tingle of fire. Not impressive.

But lets return to the theme of chocolate as a revealer of sensual types… Dark chocolate is bitter, smooth and to be savoured in small quantities with a fine port perhaps or an aged malt. There is elitism in the high solids, the upper echelons of darkness. There is an implied sense of connoisseurship and appreciation of fine craftsmanship in the consumption of the bitter, darker cocoas, either on their own, single estate bars, or concoctions designed to enhance the beauty of the bean.

As with fragrance, chocolate flavourings have gotten a little crazy. I do like sea salt and caramel blends. Sea salt on its own it very odd and works well with a fine green tea. I sampled some herb chocolates last year, and liked one with tiny echoes of sage running through it. Nutmeg is a favourite note of mine and black tea as well. I’ve tasted Islay malts, damson and mushroom in dark chocolate recently and found these bleak, dank notes marry well with the brooding nature of dark chocolate. It seems the darker cocoa lover is the person who can whisper your name and melt the skin from your bones.                   

The reason Chocolat Amère works is the witty and handsome blending of materials. Like a man who knows how to put together his fabrics with subtlety and grace, the fragrance presents itself with warmth, passion and understated elegance. The gourmand facets of the scent are played off against spices and white flowers. As in Roucel’s Missoni Missoni, where a similar counterpointing plays out between the sweetening flutter of magnolia and peony with the rootier chocolate, amber and hazelnut facets. The keynote in Chocolate Amère is the galbanum, the earthy resin that gives classic fragrances like Must de Cartier, Balmain’s Vent Vert and Penhaligon’s cult Bluebell their distinctive woody, green aroma. Cut with the bitterness of dark chocolate and lit through with incense and spices (particularly a lovely rounded sweet nutmeg note), the galbanum lifts the whole gourmand accord to an altogether more complex atmospheric experience. The dispersion rate of the structure seems to spread like the cooling of quality ganache on marble.

I know a lot of people deplore the rise of gourmand notes in perfumery, but with studied application of chemistry and natural oils the results can be sensual and deeply satisfying. There is the strange struggle between comfort and desire that plays out in our mind as we inhale the sweetness on skin, be it our own or the skin we’re loving. The transition from a state of comfort and spooning to licking, clawing and fucking can be shockingly sudden and feral. This beautifully rendered portrait of dark chocolate desire reeks of this.   

For more info on Il Profvmo and Silvana Casoli's fragrances, please follow link below. 

http://www.ilprofumoshop.com/