I meant to get this poll up and running first thing this morning, but our internet access is not working so well today (so I also don't know for sure that I'll be able to join in the discussion). Better late than never?
The usual open thread: talk about anything you like — the perfume you’re wearing today, the perfume you'll miss when summer is over, whatever.
Or, ask a question about fragrance, then see if anyone else has asked a question that you can answer…
Note: image is lotus1 by ~suchitra~ at flickr; some rights reserved.
I had an intuition that it would change something within the fragrance market, or maybe something in my career. This scent sums up what I think about femininity. It’s beautiful, approachable and easy to understand.
— Perfumer Francis Kurkdjian talks about the new Elie Saab Le Parfum. Read more at Elie Saab’s elegant new fragrance at the LA Times.
Perfumes cling closely to your flesh
As incense to a censer; bright
And dusky nymph, you are all Night,
Secret and passionate and fresh!— Charles Baudelaire (trans. Jacques LeClercq)
This is the end / beautiful friend
— Jim Morrison
I’m sorry, but I couldn’t stop myself from using those images and quotations. What else can one do, when faced with promotional copy stating that a fragrance is “inspired on one hand by Baudelaire’s homage to sweet and deep fragrances, yet on the other hand by the dark and mysterious poetry of Jim Morrison as he seemingly forebode his own demise”? The fragrance in question is Sweet Redemption (The End), the tenth and final release in By Kilian’s L’Oeuvre Noire series. It was developed by perfumer Calice Becker and the notes for this sweet powdery woods fragrance include orange blossom, vanilla, myrrh, opopanax, benzoin and incense.
Overwrought prose aside, what do we have here? Sweet Redemption opens with a top note of orange blossom cocooned in spun sugar. It’s feminine and quite pretty, and I thought for a moment that this would turn out to be one of the simpler By Kilian compositions…
Gelsomino Nobile is the latest from Italian niche line Acqua di Parma. It’s an ‘ode to jasmine’ (gelsomino being the Italian for jasmine), and it joins the two prior fragrances — Iris Nobile, Magnolia Nobile — in what is now called the Le Nobili collection. Much is made in the press materials about the particular jasmine used in Gelsomino Nobile: it’s reportedly a “Jasmine Grandi Flora from Calabria, Italy – one of the last surviving Jasmine cultivation sites, for perfume making in Italy”, and the “green and fresh aspect of this particular type of Jasmine gives a light and airy effect”.
I have not smelled that jasmine in person, but the fragrance, developed by perfumer Michel Almairac, is very light and airy indeed; in style it is so close to Magnolia Nobile that I can recycle bits and pieces from the review I wrote for that one…