Perfume Like Champagne

Posted by Angela on 31 December 2012 127 Comments

fizzy champagne

At midnight tonight, many of us will toast the New Year with a glass of Champagne. Fizzy wine goes so well with New Year’s Eve’s party dresses, flashy jewelry, and dance music. Well, so does fizzy perfume.

Here are some of my picks for Champagne-like fragrances:

Yves Saint Laurent Yvresse: There’s a reason Yvresse was named Champagne before the Champagne lobby sued Yves Saint Laurent to change it. This pale, fruity chypre smells like a spill of off-dry Champagne the morning after the party. For me, wine can recall perfume, and the combination of moss and dry peach or apricot often reminds me of white wine. (Rose, violet, and sandalwood, on the other hand, remind me of Cabernet Franc. Leather chypres smell like good Temperanillo. Gosh, I’m getting thirsty.) Yvresse was well named…

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Perfumed Holidays

Posted by Angela on 24 December 2012 139 Comments

A Merry Christmas

(For those of you who don’t celebrate Christmas, my apologies for this holiday-centric post. See you Thursday for more secular reading.)

Today is Christmas Eve, and a looser, more rambling post feels appropriate. Maybe you’re taking a break from wrassling dough for that mince pie, or cuing up some movies to relax by, or wrapping presents. Or maybe, like me, you’re contemplating what to wear that will accommodate a full tummy for the evening’s Feast of the Seven Fishes. The scents of Christmas — fir trees, wood smoke, Satsuma oranges, mulled cider — surround you. Sit down and relax a minute. Dial back your memory to holidays past.

Through the years, lots of readers have commented that they received their first special bottle of perfume at Christmas. The only perfume Santa has left under my tree was a Dana Chantilly gift pack, thanks to my Uncle Brian. One day not long after that Christmas, my mother took me and my sister to visit an elderly woman with long, gray hair. For this special excursion to town, I bathed in Chantilly bubble bath and followed it up with a slathering of Chantilly lotion and a splash of Chantilly Eau de Toilette. I swear I don’t know how we arrived at the woman’s house without being asphyxiated…

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Caron Nuit de Noel ~ fragrance review

Posted by Angela on 17 December 2012 72 Comments

Caron Nuit de Noel

This past weekend on impulse I bought a Christmas tree. I thought I might skip it this year, but as I wheeled my cart of groceries home I remembered the German couple down the block who alway sell crisp Noble firs from their driveway. If the couple isn’t home, you take the tree you want and slip your money through their mail slot. I chose a small, sparsely limbed fir (why do people always call them “Charlie Brown” trees? I prefer to think of them as “Napoleons”) and spent the evening decorating it with ornaments while Nat King Cole serenaded from the stereo. I wore Caron Nuit de Noël Extrait, of course.

Ernest Daltroff, founder of Caron and its nose for 37 years, created Nuit de Noël in 1922. The Caron website lists its notes simply as “jasmine, saxon moss, and amber.” I don’t doubt Nuit de Noël has jasmine and amber, though neither note shines. What I mostly smell is the saxon moss, more commonly known by its French name “mousse de saxe.”

Mousse de saxe is a base Daltroff used in a number of his fragrances, but it commands front and center in Nuit de Noël…

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Parfums M Micallef Ylang in Gold ~ fragrance review

Posted by Angela on 10 December 2012 32 Comments

Parfums M Micallef Ylang in Gold, bottle detail

Last week I interviewed Josh Meyer of Imaginary Authors for a local magazine. I brought some perfume samples, including Parfums M Micallef Ylang in Gold, and when Meyer smelled it, he said, “It’s so smooth. That’s their style.”

At home, I dabbed some on, and I couldn’t agree more. Ylang in Gold is as smooth as silk charmeuse. It’s whipped into a soft, creamy blend that reminds me of custard. Like custard, Ylang in Gold transforms and unites its materials into a mellifluous whole. Also like custard, Ylang in Gold is sweet. Really sweet.

Ylang in Gold, a floral oriental, was created by house perfumer Jean-Claude Astier…

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Sonoma Scent Studio Nostalgie ~ fragrance review

Posted by Angela on 3 December 2012 60 Comments

Flowery Words

What does nostalgia mean for perfume? The vintage perfume I love doesn’t smell like it did when it was made. Top notes aren’t as sharp, and sometimes a certain “pruniness” has crept in. Like yellowed letters and recordings full of snaps and hisses, an old perfume can be hard to appreciate simply as a fragrance. Instead, it is changed by time and weighted with the aura of another age. I still cherish vintage perfume for its unfashionable composition and beautiful materials, but it’s not the same as opening a box of, say, Christian Dior Diorama in 1951 and inhaling its lively splendor then. Smell as I might, I’ll never know exactly what those fragrances meant in their time.

Sonoma Scent Studio Nostalgie attempts to recapture the beauty of a vintage fragrance. But Nostalgie is brighter and fresher than the bottles vintage perfume I’ve smelled. It also speaks to modern perfume lovers by being a little softer and less “growly” than many old bombshell fragrances. Maybe this is what it would have been like to crack open a perfume bottle fifty years ago…

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Now Smell This

a blog about perfume

Perfume Like Champagne

Perfumed Holidays

Caron Nuit de Noel ~ fragrance review

Parfums M Micallef Ylang in Gold ~ fragrance review

Sonoma Scent Studio Nostalgie ~ fragrance review