Will you go to the Ball?

June 27, 2012

 

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word “Ball”? For me it’s Cinderella and her Glass Slipper (though in the version from my childhood it was a Crystal Shoe, which sounded even more romantic), the first ball of Natasha Rostova from War and Peace and a strange game we would play as kids.

The host would start with a rhyme (loosely translated):

Lady of the Manor has sent you some money.
She has instructed: you buy what you want;
Don’t wear black or white during your jaunt;
“Yes/No”’re off-limit and even when funny
Don’t dare laugh or smile,
Don’t twitch at all!

Will you go to the Ball?

From this point participants will answer different questions about the imaginary ball, their attire, means of transportation and so on and so forth – until one of them slips the forbidden exclamation or adjective. You would think that this game is like Tic-tac-toe: once you know the algorithm it should end up in a tie every time. But no: kids’ minds are very inventive and persistent. “Are we there yet?”

With all that in the background, could I not be predisposed to like Grand Bal from Dior’s La Collection Privée?

Grand Bal by Dior – created in 2012 by Francois Demachy, notes include bergamot, orange blossom, jasmine, ylang-ylang, musk and sandalwood. I really-really-really wanted to try it. I contacted a friendly SA from a Dior’s boutique and he was kind enough to send me some samples of Grand Bal.

The first attempt wasn’t successful: the package had arrived with two completely smashed vials. Rusty had inspected the content of the envelope and found it interesting for playing with (I didn’t allow him to proceed with that) but useable only as a room freshener (I kept it for a couple of days in that role).

Rusty and Broken Vials of Dior's Grand Ball

The second time was a charm and I got a chance to wear Grand Bal on the skin. It’s a lot of jasmine. When I tested Jasmin Rouge by Tom Ford I thought I didn’t like jasmine as a dominant note in perfumes. But unlike Jasmin Rouge and Sarrasins by Serge Lutens that both come out unclean on my skin Grand Bal smells very clean, uncomplicated and easy flowing. It reminds me of this Waltz of the Flowers scene from the animated film from my childhood:

 

 

I know that there are notes other than jasmine in Grand Bal but for my nose jasmine dominates the composition allowing all other components to play an entourage on its appearance at the ball. And only when I smell it in parallel with other jasmine-intense perfumes I detect orange blossom and realize how different all those jasmine perfumes are. It’s hardly an original thought but it hit me. Probably because on previous occasions of testing those perfumes I just thought habitually: “It’s a lot of jasmine…”

Will I go to the ball for a bottle? Yes No I don’t know yet. I will try wearing the remaining portion of my Grand Bal sample “for real” (sprayed multiple times and not only on my wrist) and then decide.

 

Image: my own

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Posted by Undina

Laughs, Lemmings, Loves – Episode 13

June 17, 2012

 

Last Saturday was a very hot day the Bay Area (99F/37C) and I managed to miss it because of a short trip south (!). By the time we came back the heat wave was over. I’m overjoyed: during a very cold summer last year I realized that it was exactly how I liked my summers.

Because of that trip I haven’t had enough time to comment on all the posts I wanted to (but I still plan to, so it’s not an excuse – just an information), but I read (and now present to your attention) posts that covered perfumes I want to try, posts that made me laugh or described something I love.

Cat Parade Quilt

 

Lemmings

Suzanne (Eiderdown Press), as she describes Chypre Palatin by Parfums MDCI, finds exactly the right words to appeal to my cat-loving soul: There is a gentle fruitiness to the floral heart of the perfume that is what reminds me of Jubilation 25 a bit, along with a creaminess that smells a touch oily and mink-like, like the scent of a good fur coat or a very well-groomed cat.

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Steve (The Scented Hound) makes L’Ombre Fauve by Parfumerie Generale sound really appealing: It feels like it hugs the skin, but you find that it comes up to greet you as well… playing tricks on how it sits on your body. The amber is just so lightly sweet which makes this perfect for both men and women alike.

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I have a soft spot for Tom Ford‘s perfumes (they work for me in more cases than not) so the upcoming Café Rose perfume release mentioned in this article produced a sizable clowder of cats lemmings.

 

Laughs

Meg (parfumieren): Wearing Jasmin et Cigarette is an olfactory ventriloquism act: it throws its voice, and the hearer perceives an entirely different entity than the one you might think you know. […] Oscillating between wood and smoke, flowers and ashes, vulnerability and toughness, Jasmin et Cigarette is a mercurial scent that switches its tactics constantly. What to make of it?
It all depends on which zone you’re standing in when you smell it: smoking or non-smoking.

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Birgit (Olfactoria’s Travels): That oud in there is giving its very best barnyard performance and there is civet in there and not just a dusting either. Leather Oud is positively growling on my skin in the drydown. I kept checking my sons diaper and giving my husband the evil eye, but both were innocent. The animal was me.

 

Loves

It’s not an ordinary selection for my Loves section since it’s not about perfumes (I can’t believe it but there was no coverage for any of my favorite perfumes this week!). But it’s still about something I love. I’m almost positive that everybody has seen the cutest post ever by Arielle (The Scents of Self) – The Difinitive Guide to the Perfume Bloggers’ Cats but if you missed it somehow you absolutely have to read it! Has she forgotten any cats? 

 

Image: I can’t find the source.

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Posted by Undina

In the Search for the Perfect Linden, Take 2

June 14, 2012

 

I’m not much of a spontaneous person, if you haven’t noticed yet. I try to plan most things in my life. It gives me the feeling of comfort and control. But, as with many other things we crave because we do not have them – straight/curly hair, lighter/darker skin, etc., from time to time I wish I would do something on an impulse, without going through every detail in my head first.

My vSO is even less spur-of-the-moment man. So when a couple of weekends ago he told me: “Let’s go to Santa Cruz mountain wineries!” in less than an hour we were on our way there.

*

I just couldn’t pass by a small boutique named Scentsations# – a tiny soap and cosmetics shop. An older gentleman, most likely an owner, peeked over the newspaper he was reading to greet me. A usual small shop small talk (as I keep sniffing different soaps):

- It’s a nice day. What are you doing today?
- Yeah, it is. We’re here for the wine tasting.
- Are you even old enough to drink?
- (I laugh: I know I’m old enough to have a kid of a drinking age but since he’s old enough to be my father I do not feel bad about his obvious flattery) Thank you, I appreciate it.
- Where are you from?
- (my habitual answer to such questions) I live in the Bay Area, my accent is from…
- I thought so. You should try this one…

He hands me a bar of soap. It is tender green and smells of linden. On the paper wrap it says “Tilleul” and “Made in France”. How could I not buy it?

Linden Soap And Rusty

In my last year post I told the story behind my affection towards linden blossom and reviewed briefly perfumes that I tried while looking for the perfect linden-centric perfume: French Lime Blossom by Jo Malone, Linden by Demeter, Tilleul by Provence Sante and Zeta by Tauer Perfumes. I didn’t find the perfect perfume then so I kept looking.

Waltz No. 14 by Tokyo Milk – notes include linden, honeyed rose, wisteria petals and white musk. To my nose it’s a bitter green scent. I can smell what is supposed to be a linden note (it’s not a bad representation of linden if smelled alone without comparing to other takes on the same scent). I do not smell rose in Waltz – honeyed or otherwise. It’s nice and crisp on my skin for the first 10-15 minutes but then gets a little soapy for a while. Like most Tokyo Milk’s perfumes that I tried it doesn’t stay for too long. The sample sent me by Victoria of EauMG (thank you!) will stay in my scents library. Read her real review for Waltz.

Tilleuls au Vent by L’Artisan Parfumeur isn’t really a perfume, it’s a room spray but it usually doesn’t stop a real perfumista in the search for a perfect scent (thank you to Vanessa of Bonkers about Perfume for sending me this sample). What can I say? It’s a room spray. Tilleuls au Vent is a very pleasant scent but it’s too single-dimensional and lacks depth.

La chasse aux Papillons by L’Artisan Parfumeur – created by Anne Flipo in 1999, notes include linden blossom, lemon tree blossom, orange blossom, jasmine and tuberose. I tested it for several times and even though I couldn’t smell too much linden in it, I enjoyed the scent. And then I read Victoria’s (EauMG) review for La chasse aux Papillons and now I cannot help smelling in it tuberose to which I didn’t pay attention before. I do not like tuberose and now it haunts me in this perfume. I’ll try to test it again in a while but for now a sample in my scent library is all I need.

Linden Soap And Rusty

Unter den Linden by April Aromatics – created by Tanja Bochnig in 2012, notes include linden blossom, mimosa, frangipani, honey extract, bergamot and gardenia. I haven’t heard about this brand until I read Asali’s (All I am – a redhead) beautiful review for Unter den Linden. Asali was very generous and sent me a sample. I’m very grateful to her but I’m not sure if I’m glad that I’ve got to try it. It’s a very pretty perfume and I take back my original impression that Unter den Linden smelled like a more lemon-y version on one of my favorites Jo Malone’s French Lime Blossom. Unter den Linden is lighter, more refined and blended more seamlessly than French Lime Blossom (I still like the latter though). What makes me unhappy is the price: however beautiful, this perfume isn’t unique enough or using really expensive and rare ingredients to justify to me $7/ml price for EdP. But if it weren’t for that I’d love to add a bottle of Unter den Linden to my collection. I still might.

Honey Blossom by Aftelier Perfumes – created by Mandy Aftel in 2010, notes include linden blossom, orange blossom, ambergris and benzoin. It is not a linden perfume. For my nose it’s a very sweet honeyed floral bouquet, warm and soothing scent. I like smelling it from my wrist but I do not want to wear it as a perfume. It makes a perfect sleep scent for me though. So once my small parfum sample that I’ve got from Mandy via Natalie (Another Perfume Blog) – thank you both – is gone I’ll probably buy the next one. For a real review read Victoria’s (Bois de Jasmin) Aftelier Honey Blossom : Natural Fragrance Review.

Ma Plus Belle Histoire d’Amour by DSH Perfumes – created by Dawn Spencer Hurwitz in 2012 for the YSL Retrospective Collection, notes include bergamot, lemon, ozone, Bulgarian rose absolute, Dossinia orchid, French linden blossom (accord), honeysuckle, linden blossom absolute, lily of the valley, sambac jasmine, wisteria, ylang ylang, Australian sandalwood, civet, East Indian patchouli, musk and vanilla. This perfume got me by surprise: it was the last perfume in the collection and I didn’t expect it to be a linden scent. I like it. Will Ma Plus Belle Histoire d’Amour become a full bottle in my collection once I’m done with the sample sent to me by Dawn (thank you!)? I don’t know yet.

Linden Soap And Rusty

I still can’t say that I found the perfect linden perfume but I will suspend my search until I get a chance to smell a real blossoming linden tree to re-acquaint myself with the aroma of my youth. On my recent trip to Baltimore I saw those pre-bloom linden trees and almost cried – two more weeks and I could have smelled something I hadn’t smelled in 15 years. Maybe next year…

If you are looking for a linden-centric perfume definitely give a try to Unter den Linden and Ma Plus Belle Histoire d’Amour and judge for yourself. You might just fall in love.

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# Address for Scentsations: 402 Ingalls Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95060, (831) 423-8900

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Images: my own

34 Comments | "Four legs good", Not a Review, Single Note Exploration | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Undina

Laughs, Lemmings, Loves – Episode 12

June 10, 2012

 

I don’t know either I felt less inclined to laugh or there actually wasn’t anything funny but this week I came across only some articles about move favorite perfumes and adopted a couple of small lemmings. If you read anything that you found amusing please share!

Lemmings, Laughs, Loves

Lemmings

This week’s lemmings aren’t perfume-related. Well, not directly perfume-related. I read two reports about their Paris meet-up – by Suzanne (Eiderdown Press): The four of us stayed at the same hotel in the historic Marais neighborhood and spent the next several days sniffing perfumes to our hearts’ delight, eating enough foie gras and drinking enough kir royals to leave us in a state of purring contentment, and conversing on all manner of subject, from the general and specific craziness of family life to the physical requirements of opera singers… and by Ines (All I am – a redhead): Asali called it “nerding” about perfume and I admit, I kept waiting for someone to say, OK, enough of the perfume talk already, but that never happened. I want to visit Paris and I want to meet at least several of the blogo-friends I’ve got to know through our mutual passion. Not necessarily in this order or combination.

 

Loves

This was the only post last week that was supposed to make my LLL series so I moved it to this week: Christos (Memory of Scent) reviews one of my all-time favorites: Chanel No 19 is the perfect example of what leather is to fragrance. It is the illusion created by the artistry of the perfumer, Henri Robert in this case, using the ingredients to evoke memories of leather. It reminds me of those abstract pictures that are supposed to become three-dimensional images when you squint and look sideways. When you focus on what you look at the illusion is lost.

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Blacknall Allen (aperfumeblog by Blacknall Allen) reviews “the year round floral”: Antonia is called a green floral, but this is only partly true. The top of the fragrance is green but of a very softly engineered sort. It reminds me of the smell of tulips and the pollen that you always smell in them. (and here’s my Shahrazad story about Antonia by Puredistance)

 

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Posted by Undina

Entertaining Statistics: May, 2012

June 6, 2012

 

I can’t believe it’s summer already. At least according to calendar. May was cool and I could still wear my ambers though I noticed a more floral and lighter tendencies in my perfume choices.

For many months I concentrated on being fair towards my favorite perfumes. And I succeeded: I wear one of them on most days. Then I’ve added another resolution/goal: not to buy any samples until I reduce the number of untested samples I already have. In the last five months I bought just five samples (it was a really good deal – $8 including shipping). And I managed to decrease the number of untested samples. But in pursue of these two goals at the same time I didn’t realize that it resulted in me not being fair to new perfumes I was testing. How?

I created a list of all perfumes I tested in May for the first time. Then I rated what I remembered was my reaction when I tried them: like, don’t like or indifferent. Then I compared that to my notes. Not only I remembered my reaction correctly in only 66% of the cases but also in 24% of the cases my recollections were worse than a reality. I got curious and pulled a similar set of data for the same period last year. Results were slightly worse (61% of guessing right and 28% of more negative memories) – see the chart below.

My thoughts: it doesn’t make much sense to test new perfumes if I can’t even remember if I liked those that I tested or not. So now I’m trying to decide how I should change my testing practices.

May 2012 Stats

Quick May stats:

Numbers in parenthesis are comparison to the previous month’s numbers.

* Different perfumes worn1: 27 (+1) from 19 (+1) brands on 31 (+1) occasions;

* Favorite perfumes worn: 20 (-1) on 23 (0) occasions;

* Different perfumes tested2: 45 (-5) from 28 (+1) brands on 56 (-1) occasions;

* Perfumes I tried for the first time: 29 (-3);

* Perfume house I wore most often: Chanel and Tom Ford;

* Perfume house I tested the most: DSH Perfumes;

* Most popular notes (only from perfumes I chose to wear) are almost the same as in March: top – (not counting bergamot) galbanum, pepper and mandarin; middle – (not counting rose and jasmine) iris root and ylang ylang (the same as last year); base – musk and sandalwood;

* Perfumes I tried for the first time and liked enough to put them on my wish list or bought already: Ambre Noir by Dior, Iris Silver Mist by Serge Lutens, Rose d’Amour by Les Parfums de Rosine and The Beat Look by DSH Perfumes.

 

How do you test perfumes to get the right impression of them and keep it? 

 

1 For the testing I apply a perfume to one area on my arms easily available for the repetitive sniffing. But, most likely, I’m the only one who can smell it. I can test two, sometimes even more perfumes at the same time.

2 When I wear a perfume I apply it to at least three-four points and usually I plan to spend at least 4-8 hours with the same scent so I’m prepared to re-apply if the original application wears off.

 

Image: my own

17 Comments | My Stats | Permalink
Posted by Undina

(Open)Sky is the limit?

June 2, 2012

 

Sometimes a small stupid thing rubs you the wrong way, you keep thinking about it and just can’t let it go. Usually I let it steep for a while and then just drop it. But sometimes I feel like I still want to say something. This is one of those cases.

Many popular perfume blogs published recently information about the upcoming Chandler Burr’s project, which he runs under the umbrella of a “social shopping” (whatever it means) site OpenSky.com. I won’t repeat PR information but if you somehow missed all the postings about this project I refer you to the post on Olfactoria’s Travels from which I learned about it first.

 Sky and palm

The idea

For anybody whose interests are in the perfume field the idea of a blind sniffing isn’t new. Basenotes monthly blind sniff threads come to mind (e.g. March Blind Sniff Orient Express – The Red Line). Earlier this year I read about Blind Sniff Roulette: pronti, via! Ready to go! project at La gardenia nell’occhiello blog (you can read also Christos’ story Pomegranate Noir: the joy of blind sniffing revisited about his participation and re-discovery of one of his favorite perfumes). I even ran my own blind comparison projects (Déjà vu, Episode 2: huge floral vs. abstract floral and Déjà vu, Episode 3: powdery fruit vs. peony oriental vs. sandalwood jasmine). And these are just off the top of my head. Why do we all it? Because we know that we’re susceptible to external factors (brand, packaging, LT&TC’s opinion, you name it) and are curious how we’ll feel about the scent if we remove any surrounding noise.

 

The implementation

“Definitely let me hear from you. Keep in mind, please: This isn’t about guessing what the fragrance is. The point is the experience of a work of olfactory art on your arm without a name or anything other than what the artist set, in its purest state, before you. So gives us that experience.”

Does anybody need a 50 ml bottle to experience “a work of art” on their arm? Let’s say it together: NO!

I usually complain about 50 ml of the perfumes that I know I like…Why on Earth would I want to pay $50 (+$3.75 S&H) for an unknown scent? To prove what? Chanel No 5 and Shalimar are extremely well made and beautiful perfumes – with or without the packaging and marketing hoopla. But I wouldn’t want to wear any one of them even if I got them for free – leave alone paid for an ugly decant bottle.

Just to make it even more real, would you want to pay $50 for a decant of Paris by YSL, Le De by Givenchy, Calyx by Prescriptives or Cologne by Thierry Mugler? I didn’t just come up with those perfumes – I got them from different Burr’s articles where he gave those very high ratings.

On Birgit’s blog the argument was made that Art can’t live without money. I completely agree that art requires investments! And I do not mind paying for going to a gallery or an exhibition. And I wouldn’t mind paying for a carefully curated blind sniffing art project: ten 3-5 ml unidentified sample bottles for $50-$60; plus an option to buy an actual manufacturer bottle of the perfume you liked for an offered price but still not knowing the name. I understand that a shopping site is supposed to generate an income to those who run it so actual names might not be revealed for some time (more than a month) to prevent people from going and finding them cheaper somewhere else. Something along these lines might have intrigued me enough to gamble.

 

“Don’t trust anybody. Trust me. “

I do not think Chandler Burr is in this project for money (we’re talking about $5,000/month revenue even if all 100 decants will be sold – it’s nothing). But it’s definitely not for the art. This probably is Art. OpenSky is commerce. And marketing. And publicity: see, we are talking about it.

So, buyers shouldn’t be influenced by brands’ ad copies, clips, packaging and names. They should doubt their own perception of a perfume because it’s distorted by “sensory noise”. But it’s OK to buy a 50 ml (sorry, I can’t get past it) bottle because Chandler Burr said that “it’s one of the few scents I know that smells like a state of grace” and that it is “almost unnervingly perfect. It has an astonishing olfactory texture, soft, cool, precise.” Because it’s not like he’s trying to sell them anything, right?

 

32 Comments | Perfume News | Permalink
Posted by Undina

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