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Fragrance Friday: 6 roses for golden Autumn & rainy Autumn
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Fragrance Friday: 6 roses for golden Autumn & rainy Autumn

I love Chemist in the Bottle’s list of rose fragrances for autumn, as rose is one of my favorite fragrance notes. I have put away some of my more summery rose scents in favor of those that have a more autumnal spice to them, such as Jo Malone’s Tudor Rose and Amber and Miller Harris’ Rose En Noir. Any other suggestions for autumn fragrances, with or without rose notes?

lucasai's avatarChemist in the Bottle

October has brought golden Autumn filled with colorful leaves in shades of brown, orange, yellow and red that gradually fall from trees turning into vivid and rustling carpets on top of the park pavements. Autumn like that is pretty and can be enjoyable even at times when a chilly wind is blowing behind our backs. On the other hand there are days when the sky is completely grey and it looks as if it was about to start to fall on your heads. Days filled with gloom and rain are definitely less enjoyable but at least they give you a good reason to stay at home as you wrap yourself with a fluffy blanket with a big cup of your favorite tea or coffee in hands, watching some movies.

I bet many of you have already done that or are in the process of deciding if its the high time to…

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East of the Sun (and West of the Moon)

Scentbird: Asia’s unprecedented and unspoiled beauty has been an eternal inspiration to designers of perfumes, who simply cannot suppress the urge that…

via Perfumes Inspired by Asia —

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Love, Loss and Perfume

Jean Carlos Mendez Perez, 35, and Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon, 37, were also reported dead on Monday. The Orlando Sentinel wrote that the couple fell in love when Perez charmed Wilson-Leon into buying perfume at the store where he worked.— Reuters provides some personal details about the Orlando shooting victims; read more at Victim’s Last Snapchat…

via Found love at the perfume counter — Now Smell This

Fragrance Friday: June and Roses
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Fragrance Friday: June and Roses

June is National Rose Month and, just in time, the New York Times has published this: In Fragrance, Rose is the New Unisex. I love roses — flowers and fragrance — almost as much as I love lilies of the valley. More, in some ways, as the flowers of roses are so varied, much more than lilies of the valley.

David Austin of England, pictured above meeting HRH Queen Elizabeth II at the Royal Chelsea flower show (where he won another gold medal at the age of 90), is a giant in the world of roses. He began his ambitious rose hybridization program decades ago, to bring back to modern roses the strong fragrances and softer shapes he knew from the roses of prior centuries. David Austin English Roses are the happy result — and they do make me happy! I can only grow a couple in my mostly shady, hot and humid Southern garden but they live up to their reputations as highly fragrant, beautiful roses. The one that does best for me is “Teasing Georgia”, a soft yellow rose I grow on a metal obelisk structure.

Yellow climbing English rose Teasing Georgia, by David Austin Roses, grown on a pillar.

“Teasing Georgia” rose; photo from David Austin Roses.

Mine isn’t quite as glamorous as this but it comes close! It has a strong tea rose fragrance.

There is one perfume house that specializes in rose-based perfumes: Les Parfums de Rosine. From the website: Continue reading →

May Muguet Marathon: Diorissimo
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May Muguet Marathon: Diorissimo

Today is the last day of May, so it’s time to address the most legendary muguet fragrance of all: Diorissimo. So many words have been published trying to describe Diorissimo in its many forms and reformulations! CaFleureBon has a wonderful short article by perfumer Michel Roudnitska, son of the legendary perfumer Edmond Roudnitska who created Diorissimo for Christian Dior. It includes his memory of the large patch of lilies of the valley his father planted in order to study and capture their fragrance.

There are many discussions of Diorissimo on various notable perfume blogs and websites, listed here: Now Smell This, Bois de Jasmin, The Black Narcissus, The Perfume Expert, Perfume-Smellin’ Things, The Candy Perfume Boy, The Perfumed Dandy, The Non-Blonde , Undina’s Looking Glass, Australian Perfume Junkies, and even perfumer Ayala Moriel at Smelly Blog. These people are very knowledgeable, so please read their insights!

I own a few versions of it: a vintage eau de cologne in the tall, ribbed bottle; a mini flask of eau de toilette from a “Dior Voyage” set that includes Tendre Poison, so it must date after 1994 but before Tendre Poison was discontinued by 2010; a 2013 bottle of the eau de toilette; and a 7.5 ml flask of the parfum from December 2010. (For dating fragrances or cosmetics, try CheckCosmetic.net if you have the batch number; for dating Dior perfumes, read this helpful post by Raiders of the Lost Scent, and for dating Diorissimo by bottle, go to Perfume Shrine; these are all really helpful if you decide to try to buy a vintage bottle). Continue reading →

May Muguet Marathon: Guerlain Muguet 2016
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May Muguet Marathon: Guerlain Muguet 2016

Deep breath. I am not an experienced perfumista and I’m not sure I can do justice to this new Guerlain, but I will do my best. The new Guerlain Muguet 2016 is an entirely new eau de toilette by Guerlain’s in-house perfumer, Thierry Wasser. It builds on the tradition, begun in 2006, of Guerlain releasing its 1998 formulation of Guerlain Muguet every year in a different limited edition bottle on May 1, the day when traditionally the French present bunches of lilies of the valley to friends and loved ones as a “porte-bonheur”, a good luck token or “bringer of happiness.” So to start, I defer to “Monsieur Guerlain”, the longtime blogger and Guerlain aficonado, to describe Guerlain’s tradition: Muguet.

As you can see, the limited edition bottles are all beautiful, including this most recent one, which is a crystal bottle encased in silver-plated filigree, designed by the Parisian jewelers Ambre & Louise and influenced by the Art Nouveau master Alphonse Mucha. I saw the actual bottle at Neiman Marcus on May 1 this year, which I visited for the express purpose of trying this new Muguet. Continue reading →

May Muguet Marathon: Muguet Porcelaine
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May Muguet Marathon: Muguet Porcelaine

Thank goodness. I have been eagerly anticipating the release of the new (and last) Hermessence by Jean-Claude Ellena, Muguet Porcelaine. I love his Jardin series very much; the transparency of his fragrances appeals to me although some other perfume lovers do not like it. And I truly love lily of the valley scents, so I was keeping my fingers crossed that Muguet Porcelaine would not disappoint. And it doesn’t.

Before I got my own sample, I read some comments that used words like “cucumber”, “melon”, “watermelon” and even “bubble gum”! No, no, no, I thought, surely Ellena would not play such a cruel joke on perfume lovers who look forward to his new works, or on the lovely lily of the valley flower that has so inspired great perfumers like Edmond Roudnitska, whom Ellena holds in high regard.

He did not. Continue reading →

May Muguet Marathon: Muguet Fleuri
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May Muguet Marathon: Muguet Fleuri

My oh my, muguet! Oriza  L. Legrand’s Muguet Fleuri opens with a decisive, spicy greenness that comes from top notes of green leaves, grass and lily-of-the-valley, per Fragrantica. The middle notes are galbanum, angelica, violet leaf and lily-of-the-valley; base notes are lily-of-the-valley, oakmoss and lily. Kafkaesque attributes the spiciness of the opening to the violet leaves, but I wonder if it doesn’t also come from the angelica. The firmness of the green top notes reminds me of the leaves of lily of the valley, which are very beautiful in their own right and offer just the right contrast to the delicate silver-white bells of the flowers on their long, slender stalks. The leaves are sculptural in their form, larger than the flowers and sometimes even hiding them. They are smooth and firm like the leaves of hostas, and reach to the sky in pairs like hands lifted in prayer.

Lily of the Valley leaves

Lily of the Valley leaves; photo from Verdure

I love the opening of this fragrance. It just happens that I am staying this week at my sister’s house, where she has an old, well-established patch of lilies of the valley, so I am able to compare the perfume and the flower directly while I type this. Continue reading →

May Muguet Marathon: Premier Muguet
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May Muguet Marathon: Premier Muguet

Premier Muguet by Bourjois is a bit of a mystery. The nose behind it is listed in many places as Ernest Beaux, creator of the legendary Chanel No. 5 and Chanel No. 22, among other Chanel fragrances. Bois de Jasmin has a wonderful post about him, which is mostly in his own words, a magazine article he wrote about perfumery, translated from French. M. Beaux created a few perfumes for Bourjois (a cosmetics house whose early, but not first, owners were the Wertheimer family and which was sold just last year to Coty), including an early favorite and perhaps their most famous fragrance, Soir de Paris,  or Evening in Paris. He is supposed to have created Premier Muguet for Bourjois in 1955, during the same decade when others were creating muguet fragrances like the legendary Diorissimo and Caron’s Muguet du Bonheur.

UPDATE: the master and perfume legend Luca Turin, now blogging on WordPress at perfumesIlove, sent me this information which he kindly solicited from perfume historian Will Inrig: that Premier Muguet was in fact created in 1955 by Henri Robert, the nose behind Coty’s Muguet des Bois, who had recently joined the house of Bourjois-Chanel (they were jointly owned at that point). I have a small bottle of what I believe is the eau de cologne of Premier Muguet, full and in its original box and bottle.

Continue reading →

May Muguet Marathon: Always in Bloom
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May Muguet Marathon: Always in Bloom

In 2010, the famous Longwood Gardens of Pennsylvania hosted an exhibit called  “Making Scents: The Art and Passion of Fragrance”, noted by Now Smell This. It sounds as if it was wonderful and I would have loved to experience it, based on this description and this video:

An intersection of flora, fashion and science, the exhibition will transform the Gardens’ gemlike conservatory into a museum for the senses. Visitors to the exhibition will experience the actual plants and flowers behind iconic perfumes, explore the mysterious power of the sense of smell, discover the unique combination of creative artistry and intricate science behind perfume composition, and have the opportunity to compose a basic fragrance.

Fortunately, we can still experience one small part of the exhibition: Always in Bloom, a fragrance designed by Olivier Polge before he joined Chanel as its lead perfumer, following his renowned father Jacques Polge. Continue reading →