Fragrance Friday: Un Jardin Sur le Nil
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Fragrance Friday: Un Jardin Sur le Nil

The weather has hit the high nineties in my part of the world, complete with dense humidity and hot skies. It is steamy and hot, and we just spent a weekend with friends at their lake house. The house has a huge, high-ceilinged screened porch with two swinging daybeds suspended from its beams and ceiling fans rotating lazily above. I spent most of Saturday lounging on one of those porch swings, reading and looking out over the lakeshore where my teenagers alternately baked themselves in the sun and dipped into the water. And boy, was I in the mood for Un Jardin Sur le Nil! I spritzed myself with it liberally throughout the day and just basked in its green mango and lotus flowers. This fragrance truly blossoms in summer heat and humidity.

Bottle of Un Jardin Sur le Nil fragrance from Hermes, floating on a lotus leaf

Un Jardin Sur le Nil; photo from hermes.com

Citrus-based fragrances are not usually high on my list but perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena is a magician with grapefruit. The opening of Un Jardin Sur le Nil is my favorite part of the fragrance — a gust of grapefruit and green mango that I find very refreshing and alluring. The entire impression is very green, which likely comes from notes like bulrushes, tomato leaf and carrot, with that wonderful fruity-but-not-sweet opening. It is a different green than most “green florals”, though light floral notes emerge as the citrus dries down.

The story of Un Jardin Sur le Nil and its creation has been masterfully told by Chandler Burr, first in this story in The New Yorker and then in longer book form, in The Perfect Scent.

Book cover of The Perfect Scent by Chandler Burr

The Perfect Scent

After experiencing Un Jardin Sur le Nil on such a steamy, hot, humid day, I am appreciating its charms anew. In such an environment, it wafts off the skin in gentle waves of fresh coolness, as if one is about to sip the most delicious, refreshing drink in a green oasis. After the green mangoes and watercolor floral notes, the sycamore and incense notes at the base lightly suggest exactly the kind of setting in which I found myself this weekend: a wooden porch looking over a body of water, a humid breeze, a daybed heaped with pillows, ceiling fans turning gently above. In other words, there is a suggestion — just a soupcon, really — of this kind of room at the Old Cataract Hotel in Aswan, Egypt, where the Hermes team stayed during part of their exploratory journey:

Porch of the Old Cataract Hotel in Aswan, Egypt, looking over the Nile River

The Old Cataract Hotel, Aswan, Egypt. Photo: sofitel.com

Others have described and reviewed Un Jardin Sur le Nil in much more expert terms than I, and I encourage you to read The Perfect Scent, as it opens a window into the arcane world of perfumery in both Paris and New York. If you want to try the fragrance itself, I suggest that you try it on a hot summer day, when it truly comes into its own.

Bottle of Hermes fragrance Un Jardin Sur le Nil against background watercolor of lotus flowers

Un Jardin Sur le Nil, hermes.com

 

Fragrance Friday: Lovely Day
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Fragrance Friday: Lovely Day

Ramon Monegal is a perfumer based in Barcelona, a member of the fourth generation of the family that started Myrurgia. He started his eponymous fragrance brand, Ramon Monegal Parfums, after a long career with Myrurgia and Puig, where he helped to develop fragrances for brands like Adolfo Dominguez, Antonio Miró, Aigner, Ines de la Fressange, and Massimo Dutti. Lovely Day was inspired by his son’s wedding:

An olfactory poem dedicated to the value of love. A Mediterranean composition to celebrate my son Óscar’s wedding. Happiness, intensity, joy, light, glow, affection and lots of excitement. Inspired by the bride’s white rose bouquet, because roses are the flowers of love.

He describes it as an “floral rose aqueous-watery” scent. The notes are: Sambac jasmine absolute, tea rose absolute, licorice absolute, iris on cedarwood and cassis. He invokes a “tone” of opal on a golden background, which is interesting because Lovely Day does have the diffuse quality of an opal that flashes bits of different colors unpredictably, changing with the light.

Different reviewers have made wildly different comments about Lovely Day. Continue reading →

What Went Well: Thankful
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What Went Well: Thankful

It has been a while since I posted my weekly “three blessings” on What Went Well Wednesday, but I feel the need to do so in light of the tragedy in Orlando last weekend. It is so easy to feel overwhelmed by the evil and anger that prompt such an act. But it is better to remember to light one’s candles in the dark. My three blessings this week:

  1. I go to an amazing church that rallied quickly to hold a beautiful service of remembrance on Monday night, to mourn and honor the victims in Orlando. And it was straight clergy who did that, understanding that our LGBT congregants were so grief-stricken that they needed our community’s love and support.
  2. At that service, our extraordinary Bishop spoke eloquently, lovingly, passionately, inclusively, about how evil is real but God is much, much more real.
  3. I have been reaching out to students and getting very appreciative responses, which reminds me of what I enjoy about my work.

Do you have “three blessings” to ponder in this week of sadness?

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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

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Fragrance Friday: “As temperatures rise, flowers emit less scent”

The diverse and delicious fragrances of flowers brighten our days and inspire poetry. The more practical reason that flowers produce scent is to attract pollinating insects to the flowers’ reproductive organs, thereby ensuring the continued existence of plant species. New research has now indicated that increases in ambient temperature also lead to a decrease in the production of floral scents.

Source: As temperatures rise, flowers emit less scent

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Fragrance Foundation Awards ~ 2016 winners — Now Smell This

The Fragrance Foundation has announced the winners for the 2016 Fragrance Foundation Awards (formerly the Fifi Awards), known as the “Oscars of the fragrance industry”. And the winners are… Read the rest of this article »

via Fragrance Foundation Awards ~ 2016 winners — 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: Demeter Lily of the Valley
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May Muguet Marathon: Demeter Lily of the Valley

And now for something completely (okay, not COMPLETELY) different. From the heights of expensive perfumery and Muguet Porcelaine, to the more prosaic and affordable Demeter Fragrance Library’s Lily of the Valley. I love the whole idea of Demeter Fragrance Library: that they try to capture individual fragrances of everyday objects, places or even weather, and you can combine those into whatever blend you like. From the company’s website: “Demeter was conceived in the East Village of New York City in 1996: a unique point of view about fragrance, a perspective that still remains unique, but that continues to expand. The original mission was to capture the beautiful smells of the garden and nature in wearable form. Consistent with that mission we took the Demeter name, inspired by the Greek Goddess of Agriculture.” Continue reading →