The "scents of the 70s" are back.
Perfume and flying: some women smuggled perfume on board (imagine!) before the TSA eased restrictions on carry on fragrance last week, two women on the Ukrainian Women's National Wrestling team were caught shoplifting perfume in the duty-free store, and here is one good reason why perfume might best be left in checked baggage. (Note: removed links to 4 articles here as they're no longer working)
Plumeria, pikake, gardenia — these fragrant tropical flowers seem to make people either swoon with joy or retreat to a cool, dark room with some extra-strength aspirin. The scents of these flowers are extravagant and are often described as: sultry, intoxicating, enticing, suffocating. I enjoy these flowers’ fragrances on the air, outdoors; in a greenhouse or in a bouquet, they can overwhelm me and even, up close, smell unpleasant.
Since I would never wear a perfume that features these flowers (too feminine), I enjoy their opulent, creamy floral aromas in room sprays, candles and soaps.
Mālie Kaua’i is a new company based on the “Garden Isle” of Kauai, Hawaii. ‘Mālie’ means “beautiful, calm water”. The flowers and fruits used in Mālie Kaua’i’s products are water rich, and do not possess much essential oil. The company uses a high-tech distillation process (a patented vacuum technique using high pressure but low temperature) that preserves the “integrity” of the plant aromas it gathers. The end result of this process is called a hydrosol…
...hope to be back on Sunday.
Fracas was launched in 1948 by Robert Piguet. Like yesterday’s Bandit, it was created by perfumer Germaine Cellier, and like Bandit, it eventually disappeared from the shelves. In 1996 it was reformulated by perfumer Pierre Negrin and relaunched. The notes are bergamot, mandarin, hyacinth, tuberose, gardenia, jasmine, lily of the valley, jonquil, violet, neroli, rose, orange blossom, iris, musk, vetiver, cedar and sandalwood.
Fracas, love it or hate it, is indisputably the queen of all tuberose fragrances. “Every single person making a tuberose fragrance is trying to knock off the classic, which is Fracas,” commented Frederic Malle when discussing the creation of his own tuberose scent, Carnal Flower (via Women’s Wear Daily, 9/30/2005). Roja Dove notes:
Fracas is the big tuberose reference of perfumery, and tuberose is the most carnal of the floral notes. It smells like very, very hot flesh after you’ve had sex — that’s the bottom line. It’s very much in fashion just now, but current fragrances don’t use such an incredible concentration of it. While they may nod towards something carnal, Fracas is carnal all the way. (via The Independent, 12/14/2002)
Fracas, as the name suggests, is not a subtle fragrance. It is in-your-face tuberose…
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