Perfume Journal

One of the most rewarding things about putting yourself out there on the Internet is that occasionally you meet someone, albeit in cyber space, who truly is a world apart from you, and not someone you would likely encounter in daily life. A few weeks ago, I received an email from natural perfumer Dominique Dubrana, a French-born gentleman living in Italy, who is also known by his Sufi name, Abdes Salaam. He told me he was launching a new fragrance inspired by his pilgrimage to Mecca, and asked if he could send me a sample. “I would be very interested to know your true valuation, even at the risk of a negative review,” he said, impressing me with his honesty and adding, “I understand that no perfume is able to please everybody “

I did not tell him this, but I had already browsed his website several times over the past few years, as his fragrances have been lauded by more than a few people (Linda from The Perfumer’s Apprentice, Helg from Perfume Shrine, and the perfume world’s most famous critic, Luca Turin, to name a few). From that standpoint alone, of course I was very excited to sample one of his fragrances, but even more intriguing to me was that here was a man who had made his religious pilgrimage to Mecca. “In Mecca, the scents of labdanum resin, of benzoin, frankincense and of the precious agar wood invade the streets together with the 4 million pilgrims who pour to the streets 5 times every day, walking to the great mosque like a river,” Salaam writes eloquently in a thoughtful pamphlet which he enclosed with the fragrance—and which echoes the words of renowned author Huston Smith, who in his book, The Illustrated World’s Religions, states:

The basic purpose of the journey is to heighten the pilgrim’s commitment to God and his revealed will, but the practice carries fringe benefits. It is, for one thing, a reminder of human equality, for upon reaching Mecca, pilgrims exchange their clothes (which are status-ridden) for two simple sheet-like garments. The gathering also promotes international understanding. In bringing together people from multiple countries, it demonstrates that they share a loyalty that transcends national and ethnic barriers. Pilgrims pick up information about other lands and peoples, and return to their homes knowing more about the world.†

Isn’t that beautiful? Oh how little we know about the world, and each other really, until we travel and cross paths. The media, no matter how far it reaches and how prolific it seems, cannot tell us these things, in my opinion.

But onto the fragrance. Balsamo Della Mecca is composed of notes of labdanum, tonka, frankincense, tobacco, tuberose and rose, and its opening notes have all the gravitas of a prayer: they are weighty and deeply resinous—almost medicinally so, such that I could swear I smell the astringent lash of clary sage among them, though perhaps it is a figment of my imagination, as the perfumer does not list it among the notes. After five minutes, the labdanum and frankincense combination become smokier and more ash-like, with a little bit of tarriness that makes me also wonder if there might be a hint of castoreum, too, in the fragrance. As it continues to dry down, the fragrance softens considerably but continues to unfold. The smokiness is still there, but it is ever so lightly sweetened by the balsamic and ambery tonka note, and then rounded out by the warmth of tobacco. The floral notes go unnoticed, as their function here seems to be that of a soothing olfactory balm, if you will—taking the edge off the rawer notes and lending softness and depth to the scent .

What is most impressive about Balsamo Della Mecca is that it does what most all-natural perfumes don’t do: it stays with you. After its weighty opening, it becomes this wonderfully breathy tobacco scent that you fear is going to disappear on you—it becomes a tobacco-y skin scent, really, a rare thing among tobacco scents—and remarkably, it goes the distance. I get at least seven hours of wear from two generous spritzes of Balsamo Della Mecca. The many-hours-later, far drydown has a faint tickle of the honeyed-beeswax smell that sandalwood begets on my skin and which I absolutely adore. (Though again, I must pause to say that I have no idea whether there is actual sandalwood in the fragrance’s base, or if it’s a phantom note of my imagination.)

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Abdes Salaam is not only a talented perfumer, but a kind and generous man. He sent me a 16-ml bottle of the fragrance, enabling me not only to test it thoroughly but to offer the chance for my U.S. readers to try it too. If you live in the United States and would like a chance to win a 5-ml decant of Balsamo Della Mecca, please drop an email to me at suz@eiderdownpress.com by midnight, EST, on Wednesday, February 10^th, when I will randomly draw TWO winning names. (If you’ve won something on my site before, you are still welcome to enter. Also, your email will only be used for the purposes of the drawing and will be kept private).

†The Illustrated World's Religions, copyright © 1994 by Huston Smith (HarperCollins, New York, 1994, p. 163)

Balsamo Della Mecca can be purchased online from the www.profumo.it, where a 16-ml bottle is currently priced at €34.17 and a 50-ml bottle is €91.67.

Bottle image was provided by the perfumer.

Posted by Suzanne Keller, 2/6/2010.
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WHAT I WANTED TO TELL YOU

“I can smell your perfume,” my husband said to me in a quiet voice, in a briefly quiet moment, as we passed each other in the flooded basement of our house this past Monday. A midwinter thaw had ended in a torrential rain that arrived under cover of night, surprising us. We spent the morning outside in it, wrestling with long pieces of corrugated plastic pipe in an effort to direct the rain away from our waterlogged foundation. After that we’d gone to the hardware store to purchase a wet-dry vac, which, by this time in the late afternoon, we had assembled and were exercising to the full limits of its horsepower.

“I can smell yours, too,” I said, managing a tentative smile. The only happy arrival on Monday was the morning mail, containing two packages of perfumes; before we tackled the basement, I’d taken a moment to rip open the packages and anoint the both of us with a spritz. He was wearing Sonoma Scent Studio’s Tabac Aurea; I was in L’Arte di Gucci. We smelled like movie stars though we looked as bedraggled as a wet cat—not to mention we’d been acting like one, too.

Prior to this moment, in which we spoke the kindest words we’d said all day, we’d had the day’s big argument. On the basement floor, next to our rarely-used woodstove, was a pile of old firewood he had brought into the house two winters ago, and which the basement’s humidity had reduced to a pile of pulpy logs with decaying bark and mossy crumbles. After vacuuming up as much water around it as I could, I began sopping up the floating bits of lichen and wood chips with paper towels. When he saw me doing this, he peevishly protested: “No paper towels! I don’t want all those paper towels ending up in the landfill.” “Would you rather the new wet-vac end up in the landfill,” I asked him, “when it chokes on all of this debris?” He replied by grabbing a sponge-mop and bucket and painstakingly soaking up the watery pulp. When he suggested I take over with the mop, I ran upstairs for more paper towels. This kind of back-and-forth went on for two or three hours, sandwiched between pissed-off glares and the not-so-silent silent treatment under the roar of the wet-vac.

But then came this moment when he said “I can smell your perfume,” and I knew the worst of our day was behind us. There was a sweetness to this sentiment that, though perhaps not evident in the retelling of it, was palpable, and what I would savor later, recognizing it as the deceptively small hinge on which our relationship keeps turning.

* * *

Like most people, I associate perfume with glamour and beauty, but much of the time life is decidedly unglamorous: it is full of challenges, some of them mind-numbingly pedestrian, and others, downright messy and sad. When all that exists before me are endless hours of drudgery, being able to catch a whiff of beautiful perfume on my wrists is what keeps me going. Standing in my flooded basement this week, I realized that perfume is one of the few luxuries you can take with you into places where some kind of solace or beauty is sought, and where not much else exists to support such comforts. It’s invisible and weightless, while being fully present; it’s somewhat discreet and secretive (depending on how much you wear), yet immediately accessible. It’s a spirit, really—and yes, I mean that in the supernatural sense of the word—which is why, for me, it connects to my own spirit more powerfully than any other art form.

This realization was driven home in a profoundly moving way later in my week. By this time, the basement was cleaned up, the flood forgotten, and daily life was moving forward again. The weather too had returned to normal, throwing up back into the deep freeze. On Thursday afternoon, a woman emailed me to purchase a decant of Serge Lutens Un Lys. After filling her order and letting her know it was sent, I received a note back from her that evening. “Thank you,” read her spare and elegant reply. “This is so unrelated, but my young son just died and I wanted the lilies to remind me of him.”

It’s the kind of confidence that stops you in your tracks—that affects me even now and makes me question whether I should include this in my journal. It’s the kind of confidence that connects you to another human being—even to someone you don’t know—at the deepest level possible.

I wrote a note back to this lovely woman, and then I went upstairs and put on a spray of Un Lys, inhaling its pure beauty. It smelled as tender as robin’s egg blue, as brilliant as sunlight, as fragile as a heart, and as eternally sweet as the love between a mother and a child. “I can smell your perfume,” I wanted to tell her. “And through you, his,” I wanted to say.

And though I have no idea whether she reads here, I am hoping she does so that I can tell her what my paltry words failed to say in my email. Not that these long-about words are much better, but dearest R, if you are reading here, please know this: I can smell your perfume. It’s on my wrists and encircling my heart, and it’s more exquisite than words can say.

Posted by Suzanne Keller, 1/31/2010.
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ON PICKLED LIMES AND CREED ACQUA FIORENTINA . . .

Today is a beautiful, light-filled winter day, but the past three days were monotonously drab as, is often the case in mid-January in Pennsylvania, a dinghy blanket of gray clouds mantled the cold earth. “It is pickled-lime weather,” I muttered to myself as I rooted through my perfume samples pile, trying to find something that would reawaken my dulled senses. I did not want something ambery or smoky or cozy, much as I embrace those kinds of fragrances at the start of the season, when the refreshingly icy Canada air makes its first bold dips into our state and puts me into a romantic swoon that has me pronouncing “Oh my, it’s fruitcake weather!” at every turn. That famous line, from Truman Capote’s wistful story A Christmas Memory, is preceded by the story’s opening sentences: “Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago”—which not only sets the nostalgic tone of the story, but lends it its ring of truth and immediate sense of connection. Enthusiasms and romantic notions are easily and naturally borne on a coming-of-winter morning. It’s on a middle-of-winter morning that they languish.

On a particularly dreary middle-of-winter morning like the one we had yesterday, I take a cue from another literary classic—Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women—and, recalling one of my favorite chapters from this childhood book, I search for the perfume equivalent of pickled limes*. Not that I’ve ever had a pickled lime, mind you, and not that I’m searching for a perfume that smells like limes (though come to think of it, I would dearly love to have a good lime fragrance in my collection). What I’m looking for is something that has any kind of bite to it—something that is unusual for me to wear (which eliminates my go-to floral and chypre scents) and thus has the potential to jolt me out of my doldrums. My sample of Creed Acqua Fiorentina fits the bill; last summer, when the weather was unusually gray and rainy, I turned to it and was shocked out of a period of fragrance ennui by my very reaction to it. It smells childishly fruity in its first fifteen minutes of wear—the thing most serious perfumistas dread—which makes it shockingly perfect on days when being a serious perfumista seems like the dullest thing in the world.

Acqua Fiorentina has notes of greengage plum (often used in cuisine as a dessert plum), plum, rose, carnation, bergamot, Calabrian lemon, Virginia cedar and Indian sandalwood. According to the Creed website, it takes its inspiration from the orchards and gardens of 15^th century Florence, Italy—and the company classifies it as a fruity floral. However, other than a gentle flourish of rose, the florals aren’t very conspicuous in this fragrance, and you can almost divide Acqua Fiorentina up into three stages. The first stage is a deliciously tart and juicy amalgam of fruit: at the very top, it smells like a pink grapefruit, soon giving way to a peach-plum-watermelon infusion that has a certain sparkle and giddiness to it. There is a diaphanous quality to the fragrance, such that even if you think you hate fruity fragrances, I would urge you to give it a try: these fruits are cheeky and tart, but with a thin-skinned transparency that makes them easy to wear. To experience the first stage of this fragrance in the dead of winter is rather delightful: like biting into what you think is going to be a grocery-store plum with no flavor and instead getting a taste of something that bites you back, that awakens your taste buds and reminds you of what fruit is, after you’d forgotten for so long.

In its second stage, the plum comes to the fore, dismissing former associations to other fruits, and the fragrance starts to smooth out. Cedarwood becomes evident, but only in the way that it seems to accentuate the plum, imparting a dryness that deepens the note and gives it a light touch of sherried sweetness. At this point, and at every stage of the fragrance’s wear, Acqua Fiorentina maintains a gossamer quality: this combination of plum and cedar has presence but is not at all weighty. It provides a long and gentle segue into the third stage of the fragrance—the far drydown in which sandalwood emerges and the fragrance becomes a silken remembrance of fruit more than anything else...not unlike the remainder of a creamy meringue on which a mélange of plums and other sherbet-like fruits once rested and have now left their colorful stain. ~

*Pickled limes were the favored treat of Amy, youngest of the March sisters in Louisa May Alcott's book Little Women. In Chapter 7, titled “Amy’s Valley of Humiliation,” she sadly confides to her older sister Meg that she owes pickled limes to a dozen of her schoolmates. “Are limes the fashion now?” her sister asks, to which Amy replies:

“Why, you see, the girls are always buying them, and unless you want to be thought mean, you must do it too. It's nothing but limes now, for everyone is sucking them in their desks in school-time, and trading them off for pencils, bead-rings, paper dolls, or something else at recess. If one girl likes another she gives her a lime; if she's mad with her she eats one before her face, and don't offer even a suck. They treat by turns; and I've had ever so many, but haven't returned them; and I ought, for they are debts of honour, you know.”

“How much will pay them off, and restore your credit?” asked Meg, taking out her purse.

“A quarter would more than do it, and leave a few cents over for a treat for you. Don't you like limes?”

“Not much; you may have my share. Here's the money. Make it last as long as you can, for it isn't very plenty, you know.”

“Oh, thank you! It must be so nice to have pocket-money! I'll have a grand feast, for I haven't tasted a lime this week. I felt delicate about taking any, as I couldn't return them, and I'm actually suffering for one.”

Next day Amy was rather late at school; but could not resist the temptation of displaying, with pardonable pride, a moist, brown-paper parcel, before she consigned it to the inmost recesses of her desk. During the next few minutes the rumour that Amy March had got twenty-four delicious limes (she ate one on the way), and was going to treat, circulated through her `set', and the attentions of her friends became quite overwhelming. Katy Brown invited her to her next party on the spot; Mary Kingsley insisted on lending her her watch till recess; and Jenny Snow, a satirical young lady, who had basely twitted Amy upon her limeless state, promptly buried the hatchet, and offered to furnish answers to certain appalling sums. But Amy had not forgotten Miss Snow's cutting remarks about `some persons whose noses were not too flat to smell other people's limes, and stuck-up people who were not too proud to ask for them'; and she instantly crushed that `Snow girl's' hopes by the withering telegram, “You needn't be so polite all of a sudden, for you won't get any.”

Creed Acqua Fiorentina eau de parfum can be purchased online from the Creed website, as well as from Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman and LuckyScent.com: 30-ml for $130, or 75-ml for $230. My sample was given to me from a fellow perfumista.

Bottle image is from the CreedBoutique.com.

Posted by Suzanne Keller, 1/21/2010.