Perfume Journal

This week I have been wearing a perfume called Hindu Kush from La Via del Profumo and thinking I should try to write a review that has some connection to its name, but as is often the case, that line of thinking has failed me. Hindu Kush refers to the extremely high-altitude mountain range that stretches between central Afghanistan and northern Pakistan—a sub-range of the Himalayas—and fittingly, this all-natural perfume smells of high-alpine air: green, arid and woody, with a spiciness that its perfumer, Abdes Salaam, describes as evocative of the bazaars of that region. I can envision the picture he has painted with his perfume, and writing about it as such would seem easy enough to do: my husband and I still have adventure travel catalogs that date to a time when we dreamed of hiking in places like Bhutan and Nepal. But perfumes often insist on getting personal—and this perfume stirs up memories instead of dreams. Memories of the Catskill Mountains of New York, and the surreal little town I lived in for the first six years that I was out of college and on my own; a town that had more cows than people when I moved there in 1984, but which was also shaped by the fact that it hovered north of New York City by less than a three-hour drive.

“Where city and country meet” was the description on the logo of the agricultural firm where I first worked, and though to look around the town one could only scoff at that remark, a peak around the edges would prove this to be true. If you wanted a little Catskill Mountain high, you didn’t have to look far; pot, cocaine and amphetamines seemed to be everywhere—something that shocked me at first, but which I would eventually shrug off as normal, which is what one does when everyone else is doing it. This meeting of city and country was evident in other ways, too: on weekends, our local watering holes swelled with out-of-towners looking to escape the Metropolis or their suburban lives in New Jersey—to repair to their vacation homes or cabins in this area they referred to as “Upstate,” even though we weren’t technically that far “up.” But when Monday came, the city slickers disappeared and the local population, as one might expect, was of a distinctly different mix. In a rural town without much in the way of jobs, young people didn’t stick around, and the ones that did either accepted low-paying jobs in factories or high-paying ones in construction. To no small degree, the locals were a graying population of folk who liked bingo, bowling and simple pleasures.

In a nutshell, here was a blue-collar town that was in many ways quaintly old-fashioned—where little old ladies baked cakes and served tea—but which also attracted a transient and upwardly mobile group of people who brought with them their love of modern recreations.

It was a town where merely being new to the place and a young woman in your 20s got you every male attention, wanted and unwanted, you could ever imagine. Where men you’d never even talked to and who only observed you in passing would leave love notes with telephone numbers pinned to the antenna of your car. Where a carpenter working for a construction firm that was building a house on a route I liked to walk once left me a trail of Polaroids of himself—none of them of his face, but I knew who had planted them when I looked up from the photos and saw him, naked torso’d and waving at me from behind a gaping window frame on the second story.

Despite its air of desperate male hunger, it was a town where I always felt safe, and I often walked or ran for miles on end on country roads that provided spectacular views from its ridge tops. You could be out in the middle of nowhere and run into someone you knew—usually an elderly couple out for a Sunday drive, who would insist on making you get in their car so they could drive you back to your apartment so you didn’t suffer heat stroke. You could be driving around its reservoirs in winter and spy a pair of bobcats prowling across the road, their hiss and growl an eerie thing to be greeted by when you rolled down your window for a better look.

It was a town that had a small but very good library and where I learned to play a fine game of tennis; a town from which the Glimmerglass Opera and other arty concerns were only a forty-minute drive away.

And it’s the town I imagine when I put on Hindu Kush and get that first rush of what smells like green vetiver spiked with ginger, as cool as the winds that funneled down from the mountaintops on even the sunniest summer day; as brisk as a dip in Launt Pond, where everyone went to sunbathe and swim and wax their cars (who knows why?) on summer Sunday afternoons. Though the perfumer describes the spice notes in Hindu Kush as being warm, there is something about the way they combine with the scent’s green, woody notes that makes me feel like I’m experiencing something invigoratingly cool, as if pine trees are expiring as I mentally lay on that beach at Launt Pond (it is, after all, a beach carved out of a forest clearing). Arid coolness is how I would describe it, which is probably why I love this fragrance so much. It’s got uplift and affects my brain the same way high-altitude weather does, making me feel buoyant and crisp and alive.

In the six years I lived in that small town in the Catskills, I’m pretty sure I made every kind of mistake a young person can make. It was the kind of place where Nancy Reagan’s “Just say no” speech failed to reach me, though my mother’s “Just say no” voice probably kept me from making worse mistakes than I did. It was a town where I dated all the wrong men (and where, surreally, all three of them were named Jim); it was a town where I once almost drove my car off the mountain in a snowstorm on a night when I knew it wasn’t safe to drive. But it was a town where I felt my own heart beating, where I paid my own rent, and where I was not afraid to walk alone. And somehow when I put on Hindu Kush, I am back there, remembering what it was like to ride the thermals and fall from the sky, occasionally, and be forgiven.

Hindu Kush is an all-natural, vegan perfume with has notes of cypress, ginger, cumin, nutmeg and pepper. (It smells like it has vetiver, too.) It can be purchased from the perfumer’s website, which is worth going to if only just to read Salaam’s beautiful and moving description of Hindu Kush (both the land and the perfume). Prices are in Euros; as of this writing a 33-ml bottle is € 71.40 and a 50-ml bottle is € 98.18.

My review is based on a sample I received from the perfumer when I recently made a purchase of one of his other perfumes.

Photo (top of page) by Jake, snapped in the Catskills town where I once lived; bottle photo is from the perfumer's website.

Posted by Suzanne Keller, 1/27/2012.
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Guerlain Aroma Allegoria Exaltant: Beauty in Perpetuity

Back in the 90s, I took a year-long class in herbalism with a teacher who frequently used the world “exaltation” when she took us out into the fields and forests to gather plants—particularly when we were making flower essences, which is not at all a perfumed essence, or even an herbal tincture, but a way of capturing the “vibrational imprint” of a flower. The vibration of the flower supposedly resonates with the person who uses it as a treatment (taken internally) to correct mental and emotional imbalances. I found it difficult to believe in the flower essences concept, but enjoyed the making of them anyway, and can still recall the specific instructions of our teacher, whose first rule was this: Only gather flowers from plants that are in a state of exaltation—in other words, at the very peak of their blooming cycle—because, to leave an imprint on a person, they must be at the height of their flowering expression.

Despite not being a believer in the essences, I’ve had a fondness for the word "exaltaton" ever since, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately because a perfume friend from Denmark—the very classy Asali (guest writer at All I Am – A Redhead, Ines Stefanovic’s blog, and Ines’s partner-in-crime when it comes to sniffing out Paris’s best perfumes)—sent me a fragrance package which included a discontinued perfume from the house of Guerlain called Exaltant. Launched in either 2001 or 2002, Exaltant was one of a trio of perfumes belonging to what Jean-Paul Guerlain defined as his Aroma Allegoria line: fragrances built around natural ingredients chosen for their therapeutic effects of being either soothing or stimulating to the mind, but which were still very much in the vein of classic perfumes. Of the three, Exaltant—the French word for “exalting”—was created with the intention of being an olfactory intoxicant of the highest order. Warmth, sensuality and beauty at its fullest is what Jean-Paul Guerlain hoped to convey in Exaltant, and he succeeded with this gorgeous woody-oriental perfume that smells like sandalwood infused with candied cinnamon, floating like a fairytale ship on a sea of balsam and other spices.

While trying to find a list of notes for this perfume, I read a description on osMoz.com in which it is described as being voluptuous—and while I agree with that in certain regards, what I find most interesting about Exaltant is that it manages to be gorgeously spicy and warm while maintaining a lean character—even what I would call a calm character—and I think this is due to the amount of wood notes in this perfume. There’s not only creamy sandalwood, but also the evergreen woodiness of cypress and the dry, fruited-pepperiness of cedar. To my mind, the combination of these wood notes makes for a perfume that has a satiny depth that is distinctly different from the kind of depth one gets from a more amber-based Oriental. Ambery Orientals are glorious creations, but one can fatigue of their fat-bottomed, baroque beauty. Though more angular than pillowy, Exaltant is a resplendent and complex perfume: its woodiness is married to an almondy, marzipan-like sweetness and an exotic spiciness punctuated by cinnamon and, to a lesser degree, cardamom, while there’s enough tonka bean at its base to lend it some vanillic splendor, which is what one expects in the signature of a Guerlain perfume. My husband, without any prompting from me, says it makes him think of Christmas, and though I’m the type of person that would wear this perfume at any time of year (I love wearing a spicy Oriental in the heat of summer, when a surfeit of humidity adds a whole new dimension to an already three-dimensional perfume), I would agree that Exaltant smells festive in a way that puts one in mind of the winter holidays. This is not to suggest that it smells like a Christmas potpourri, but to say that it encapsulates the glowing warmth of the winter festival itself and the kind of spices one associates with that time of year.

Had Exaltant been constructed around a plump, ambery base, the fragrance would have had too much amplification, I think, resulting in the kind of monster spice perfume that brings to mind YSL Opium. (Not to cast aspersions on Opium; I’m only saying that the perfume world doesn’t need another imitation of that iconic fragrance.) After sampling Exaltant for many days and being impressed with the way it possesses both an elevated sense of beauty and a calm sense of equilibrium, the latter of which I’m attributing to the woody notes, I find it plausible that Jean-Paul Guerlain truly was intent on making a perfume with an aromachology aim to it—and not simply another Oriental perfume labeled in a creative way to lend it a certain marketing appeal. Whatever his intentions were, though, it hardly matters because the end result was that he created another fabulous Oriental perfume, period.

Perhaps if it had been advertised and marketed in a similar manner to Guerlain’s other trophy perfumes (like Shalimar and Jicky) it wouldn’t have been discontinued, though that, too, is hard to say. If I have learned anything over the years, it is that beauty does not make something immune from casualty—and the state of exaltation for anything is brief: blink and you will miss it.

But I also believe that true beauty never really dies. It might slip beneath the tides of consciousness for various reasons, but it will surface again.

How else to explain how a French perfume launched ten years ago, and discontinued not long thereafter, crossed the sea from Denmark to me, to be exalted in these pages?

Guerlain Aroma Allegoria Exaltant has top notes of bergamot, cypress, cinnamon and bitter orange; middle notes of Virginia cedar, neroli, cardamom and coriander; and base notes of vanilla, tonka bean, pepper and sandalwood. Though discontinued, bottles of it still surface on auction sites like Ebay.com.

Images: (top of page) illustration by Danish artist Kay Nielsen (1886-1957) for a story title "The Man Who Never Laughed." Nielsen once worked for Walt Disney but ended up living the last years of his life in poverty and dying in obscurity. His work went unrecognized for many years.
Bottle photo of Guerlain Exaltant is from Fragrantica.com.

Posted by Suzanne Keller, 1/18/2012.
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At the Moment …

READING an old paperback book that once sold for fifty cents and which is full of dark and witty short stories by the British writer, H. H. Munro (1870-1916), whose pen name was Saki. The name of the book is Incredible Tales and it has a couple wonderfully macabre stories that appeal to me right now, probably because I’m getting over a cold and my mood is less than sunny. I always feel slightly spiteful towards the Universe at large when I'm sick, and somehow reading satire seems to help (makes me feel like I’m getting revenge—against who or what I’m not really sure). My favorite story from the bunch is one in a which a boy who is under the care and guardianship of a dreadful cousin—one of those mean, spinsterly women one finds in childhood fairytales—begins worshipping a ferret that he is secretly keeping in an old shed in a forgotten area of the garden. (He is also secretly keeping an old hen in another area of the shed; a creature not worshipped like the ferret, but lavished with affection, since the boy’s affections have nowhere else to land). He names the ferret Sredni Vashtar and eventually his devotion to his idol pays off, as the great Sredni Vashtar makes quick and certain dispatch of the nosy old cousin. As you can tell, the stories in Incredible Tales are not new in their ideas, but the language is so perfect and smart in that uppercrust British way which makes reading them feel like one is partaking of bon-bons:

Conradin was dreadfully afraid of the lithe, sharp-fanged beast, but it was his most treasured possession. Its very presence in the tool-shed was a secret and fearful joy, to be kept scrupulously from the knowledge of the Woman, as he privately dubbed his cousin. And one day, out of Heaven knows what material, he spun the beast a wonderful name, and from that moment it grew into a god and a religion….Every Thursday, in the dim and musty silence of the tool-shed, he worshipped with mystic and elaborate ceremonial before the wooden hutch where dwelt Sredni Vashtar, the great ferret. Red flowers in their season and scarlet berries in the winter-time were offered at his shrine, for he was a god who laid some special stress on the fierce impatient side of things, as opposed to the Woman’s religion, which, as far as Conradin could observe, went to great lengths in the contrary direction. And on great festivals powdered nutmeg was strewn in front of his hutch, an important feature of the offering being that the nutmeg had to be stolen. These festivals were of irregular occurrence, and were chiefly appointed to celebrate some passing event. On one occasion, when Mrs. De Ropp suffered from acute toothache for three days, Conradin kept up the festival during the entire three days, and almost succeeded in persuading himself that Sredni Vashtar was personally responsible for the toothache. If the malady had lasted for another day the supply of nutmeg would have given out.

The Houdan hen was never drawn into the cult of Sredni Vashtar. Conradin had long ago settled that she was an Anabaptist. He did not pretend to have the remotest knowledge as to what an Anabaptist was, but he privately hoped that it was dashing and not very respectable.†

And now that I'm able to smell again, I'm wearing Idole de Lubin eau de toilette (not to be confused with the newly launched eau de parfum, which is not merely a stronger concentration but a variation from the original). Here's my review:

Smoky, spicy, boozy, leathery—most of the time when I hear those words in regard to a perfume, I imagine fragrance molecules so dense that, if thrown against the wall like spaghetti, they’d more than stick: they’d peel the paint off when you went to retrieve them. But imagine these molecules getting the Olivia Giacobetti treatment—which is to say, imagine them in the hands of a perfumer who is skilled in the making of olfactory smoke rings and parachute cloth; in other words, skilled at transforming heavy notes in a way that allows them to breathe—and even float—while maintaining their recognizable personas. Idole stands out from a good number of other Giacobetti fragrances in that it is one of her bolder creations: it has impact, and on initial application smells like dried orange peels doused in rum and lit up by a flambé torch. But after its top notes relax, Idole becomes a spicy, woody leather scent that hovers somewhere in the airspace between Sultry and Ethereal. Inspired by the ancient maritime spice trade, it’s one of those rare perfumes in which I find myself nodding my head and saying, yes, here’s a concept that has been thought through and executed convincingly. Idole’s distinctive bottle, designed by Serge Mansau, takes its inspiration from the sail of a traditional wooden boat, and coupled to the fragrance, it’s easy to feel like you’re on a ship of old, riding waves and wind as you convey the spice of the Orient to its new destination. Idole is extravagantly spicy—the exact notes aren’t listed (see list, below), but cardamom and clove are prominent to my nose, and I think I detect nutmeg too—and as it dries down, Idole segues into a supple leather scent enhanced by wood. It smells of these things diaphanously, however; as if they arrive to the nose on an arid wind.

Or, as a blogging friend—the lovely Asali—recently put it: Idole lies over the skin “like a veil”—proving that extravagance need not equate with heaviness. In this regard, it reminds me of Frederic Malle Noir Epices, as both fragrances eschew the heavy amber-and-vanilla base of traditional spice perfumes. (There is some vanilla in Idole, but it is a svelte amount.) Not that they smell alike—Idole is a more rustic spice scent, with its smoky, boozy bent, while Noir Epices offers up a polished and urbane take on the theme—but both manage in their own ways to make spice soaring and weightless.

Idole de Lubin eau de toilette has notes of rum absolute, saffron, bitter orange peel, black cumin, Doum palm, smoked ebony, sugar cane, leather, and red sandalwood. It can be purchased at LuckyScent.com, where a 75-ml bottle is currently $120. A decant of this fragrance was gifted to me by perfume blogger Christos of Memory of Scent.

Botte image is from a perfume seller site from Poland, www.missala.pl; book photo is from paperbackswap.com.

Posted by Suzanne Keller, 1/13/2012.
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Parfum d’Empire Cuir Ottoman: Leather, Straightforward and Sexy

When I cast a quick glance around my home and my personal effects—when I turn an inward eye on my life—I have to ask myself, why the infatuation with leather scents? True, I grew up riding horses and was well acquainted with leather saddles and tack, but that seems a lifetime ago. And today, aside from purses, shoes and winter gloves—none of which I collect with abandon—I don’t own much leather. I don’t have a car with leather seats, nor leather upholstery of any kind, and while I’d love to have these things, by the same token, I don’t spend time thinking about them. The thing I do fantasize about, that I associate with leather, is men—yet for as often as I’ve cocked an admiring eye at photos of Johnny Depp in his reckless-bohemian wardrobe of leather jackets and bracelets, my ideal sexy man looks like a cross between George Harrison (who was always the most beautiful Beatle, in my opinion) and the intellectually suave (yet oh so cute) actor Edward Norton. Neither of whom I associate with leather. Still, after checking off my list of things I associate with leather and finding myself delightfully stalled here, in the good-looking men department, I’d have to say that’s the attraction. Leather smells masculine to me in general, and that’s probably why I will always own more leather fragrances than leather purses. (I’d rather be in the company of a good man—even an imaginary one—than an expensive leather purse.) It’s probably also why, much as I enjoyed sniffing the decidedly feminine leather scent Bottega Veneta this past fall, the leather scents I prefer to own feature a more brooding and intense form of the note. Oh, they can (and should) be offset by feminine notes—as is the one I’m about to review—but there is within them that lean, hungry leather note that is sexy beyond words.

Such is the case with Cuir Ottoman eau de parfum from Parfum d’Empire. I’m going to give you the list of notes for it, right up front—jasmine, leather, iris, benzoin, balsams, resins and incense—because I won’t be talking about them much otherwise. This fragrance, to my nose, is a play in two parts that can be summarized in two notes: leather and iris. Scene One, which begins the very instant Cuir Ottoman hits the skin, is when some very strapping, leather-clad man rides up on his horse. He is not even my kind of man—I’ve never been fond of excessive brawn—but I keep looking (which is to say, huffing my perfumed wrists) because there’s something sooo electric about him. I’m not sure what he did before he came riding up on his horse, but I can guess that he must have whipped a town of bad people into shape and thrown out all the bullies, because his declarative, butch leather says so. I spend a lot of time admiring his leather until we get to the end of Scene One, but I don’t mind because I am the kind of girl who likes to look, and I get the feeling he does too. Indeed, I detect something that smells like a smile curling the edges of his lips as he takes his sweet time getting down from that horse, and eventually I realize he’s the kind of man who knows when to lay down the law and when to retire it. Because now we’re at Scene Two, in which leather submits to powdery iris. Sure, I can still smell the leather, but it’s buried in a whirl of petticoats and talcum-powdered sweet nothings and doesn’t seem in any hurry to leave. This man is declarative all right: To Whip and Be Whipped is what he’s all about. If I were going to write a two-act play about Cuir Ottoman, that’s what I’d name it. There’s nothing intellectual about Cuir Ottoman, but neither is it “light reading”: this is a damn fine bit of perfume erotica, and for that it gets my full approval.

By the way: Perfect movie pairing for Cuir Ottoman, without getting literal (in regard to the Ottoman part of the name)?. The 2008, Dutch film Bride Flight, which you can watch on NetFlix, if you’re a subscriber. This film centers on three women and one man, all of them from Holland, who meet on a plane ride to New Zealand in 1953, where they are all looking to start new lives away from war-torn Europe. All three of the women become tied, in one way or another, to the handsome and strapping Frank, who is man who knows how to love a woman. Frank can’t be with the woman he falls in love with during the long flight—the innocent yet sensual Ada, who is already married to a young man who has gone on before her to Holland—so he makes time with other women while he holds her in his heart. If you’re the kind of person who gets turned off by relationships that are not monogamous, you’ll probably find no sympathy with these characters. But I think one of the purposes of the film is to show how desperately clingy humans are when it comes to love—how clumsy we are about the whole thing, in any kind of relationship, even the ones we have with our children—and it does this by allowing us to see the beauty of people who love as Frank and Ada do. I’ll never be so enlightened as these two—I’m as possessive as anyone else—but I like to entertain such thoughts. If you’re wondering why I couple it to Cuir Ottoman. it’s the declarative, up-front way in which the hunky Frank lives and loves. Like Cuir Ottoman, he’s not intellectual: he already dwells at the heart of the matter in all things; there is something both potent and pure about him.

Parfum d’Empire Cuir Ottoman eau de parfum can be purchased from LuckyScent.com, where a 50-ml bottle is currently $75. If you ask me, that’s a steal. My review is based on a decant of Cuir Ottoman that I received from perfume blogger Christos of Memory of Scent.

Images: Top, actors Waldemar Torenstra (Frank) and Anna Drijver (Esther) in the 2008 film, Bride Flight . Movie poster, from IMDB.com, shows Waldemar with actress Karina Smulders, who plays Ada.

Posted by Suzanne Keller, 1/7/2012.