5 perfumes: Mimosa

Posted by Erin on 16 December 2011 64 Comments

yellow mimosa

I have always liked mimosa in fragrances. Rather, I should clarify: I have always liked Acacia farnesiana (cassie) and/or scents with heliotropin. The term “mimosa” is a bit of a moving target, even in botany, as there are about 400 species or cultivars of plants under this genus, mostly with pink or mauve flowers, in addition to many other shrubs or trees that produce poofy, cartoonish blossoms and were historically lumped in under the name by the public — silk tree being an example. The sweet, warm, powdery smell we encounter in perfumery, with its facets of almond, honey, violet, craft paste and fresh cucumber, comes from distillation of the soft, feathery yellow petal clusters of the acacia species that most of us in the West know as mimosa flowers. One of my most vivid and happy memories of visits to France is the bushels of mimosa branches tossed out during “La Bataille de Fleurs” or flower parade during the Carnaval de Nice, which winds its way along what must be one of the world’s most beautiful thoroughfares, the Promenade des Anglais.

For all its cheerful straight-forwardness, mimosa appears to be a hard note to use in perfume. There are very few credible soliflores and many mainstream fragrances with a strong mimosa presence come off as airheaded and shampoo-like. With the IFRA restrictions on heliotropin, it has become even more difficult, if not impossible, to base a fragrance around the flower. Looking to include perfumes with some availability in this list, I found that almost all the mimosa fragrances I’d enjoyed at the beginning of my perfume education in the mid-noughties were discontinued or reformulated. Caron Farnesiana, long the great classic of mimosa perfumes, has gone through so many versions that it is hard to keep track of them all…

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5 Perfumes: Bittersweet Bay

Posted by Erin on 17 November 2011 57 Comments

bay leaf

When the topic of past lives comes up, what time period do you picture yourself inhabiting? For some reason, I always regress to a city in the Middle Ages. No other era or geographical location ever comes to mind. Perhaps I was an inn-keeper, goutishly solid and pink-cheeked and wary. If gender and physical talents are passed through the centuries, then I could have been a wet nurse. If they are not, then maybe I was a monastic scribe and illuminator. (My handwriting is awful.) It is strange to feel so connected to the sights and sounds of medieval Europe. I don’t actually believe in reincarnation. I think my visions come from the more recent past, from pop culture references about the dark ages like The Lion in Winter and The Name of the Rose. What the books and movies are notably short on, however, is odors.

Most of us think of this time period as smelling pretty ripe: burning garbage, sewage in the ditches and rivers, halitosis, mildew everywhere, the sick and dead of the Bubonic plague years, all those buckets of fermented urine that alchemists were supposed to be distilling into gold, etc. But years of reading foodie articles on panforte, mead and sweetmeats have perfumed my personal medieval fairy tales with honey and almond milk, dates and chestnuts and raw milk cheese, fruit jellies and poached pears with long pepper. Most particularly at this turn of the seasons, I start to dream of the scent of mulling spices. As the cold sets in, there is something instantly cheering and sustaining in the thought of hot mulled wine or cider. And for me, no simmering pot of either would be complete without a bay leaf…

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5 Perfumes: Ylang-ylang

Posted by Erin on 16 September 2011 47 Comments

ylang ylang bloom

Like many others who share my hobby, I believe, I was wary of florals when I started my perfume education. I was willing to countenance many a gourmand or woody amber barbarity, but I avoided flowers — and especially white flowers. I was going through a phase of sampling niche series perfumes — the Comme des Garçons incense fragrances, the Bois line of Serge Lutens — and I regarded white flowers as unsuitable material for such elaboration. Comme des Garçons White, purporting to be a more floral alternative to their original Eau de Parfum, instead smelled quite properly of sour spices and wood, and I viewed Lutens’ Un Lys and Tubéreuse Criminelle as singular and humorous experiments, fascinating to sniff on a blotter, I thought, but created with a kind of magisterial, Gallic indifference towards anybody wearing them. As a smell, white floral notes were heady, insistent and complex: in a word, “perfumey”. In perfume, didn’t that make them too, well… obvious?

But I couldn’t help noticing I was drawn to ylang-ylang. I had dried blotters all over my place at that time, and still do: I use them as bookmarks, clothing or car fresheners and post-its. Though I was doggedly wearing my modern roots and resins, my incense and tea scents, I was forced to admit that I stood transfixed when a lush tropical cloud of ylang breathed up out of my reference books, purse or underwear drawer. There were so many facets to the smell…

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5 Perfumes: Best of the 1990s

Posted by Erin on 22 July 2011 110 Comments

Dior Dune

Twice, recently, I have walked past a rack of discount CDs that includes a “Best of the 90s” compilation. The cover features a pair of pouting Material Girls with tousled two-tone hair, red lipstick, neon off-the-shoulder shirts and black vests and leggings. I did not look at the track list, because I was so put out by the photo. I was a teenager in those pre-Y2K times and I think the producers of this album might have missed the last nine years of the decade. When I graduated high school in 1997, that look had already made at least two rounds as a retro Halloween costume. Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam were no longer touring and Kurt Cobain had been dead for three years, but my yearbook confirms we were still wearing plenty of jeans and plaid flannel,¹ though people had mercifully stopped requesting Nirvana’s Heart-shaped Box, possibly the world’s least danceable song, at every party. Girls wore straight hair, pixie-cut or long and center-parted. I had a programming geek boyfriend, and after a few years of BBS posting using my family’s agonizingly slow dial-up connection, I had decided my future was at a school nicknamed “M.I.T. North”. There, my friends traded their jeans for Microserf khakis. Britpop groups and Radiohead were popular, as was genial stoner music of the Dave Matthews Band variety. Everybody seemed to be reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, watching animated shows on TV and going to a lot of violent, angry movies starring Kevin Spacey or Brad Pitt.² In North America, the Starr report was out and events like Columbine happened, and it felt then like we were living through a very sad, cynical, disaffected era. Looking back after 9/11 and the global recession, however, and a few horrific natural disasters and inconvenient truths later, the nineties seem to me today like oddly sincere, hopeful years. I never expected to be a nostalgic old fool so soon.

I wasn’t obsessed with perfume then. I vaguely recall tropical fruity or citrus-clean skin scents like Calvin Klein ck One and Clinique Happy being very popular…

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5 Perfumes that Got Lost in the Shuffle

Posted by Erin on 14 June 2011 40 Comments

Moving!

I am the restless type. Every eighteen months, I get thoroughly fed up with our living quarters — the creaky floors, the electric stove and lack of water pressure, that bathroom window that won’t open — and decide we should move. My husband puts much less stock in clean slates, being a skeptic with a good memory. He resents the higher rent and costs associated with changing residences, but he always acquiesces with the faint hope that I will keep the new apartment cleaner. (Ha!) And so, a couple of springs, falls and high summers over the last decade, we’ve spent our days packing clothes, dishes, Playmobil figures, perfume and one metric ton of books into boxes. Even after ruthless purges¹ and some inevitable breakage, it seems we end up with more stuff in the new place than we had in the old. Since our last move two weeks ago, I’ve been wandering through the chaos aimlessly, moving papers and knick-knacks from one pile to another.

One of the few pleasures of re-locating is finding things of interest you never knew you lost. Around here, things of interest fall into three categories: 1) perfume samples; 2) books; and 3) jars of gourmet condiments and jams we will never use. Push back the couch and a dusty vial of Bois 1920 Sushi Imperiale rolls out. Dismantle the bookcase and both a sample of Divine L’Homme de Coeur and a copy of Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels emerge. There is an atomizer of Histoire des Parfums Noir Patchouli in the desk drawer with the income tax documents. Ah, old friends! With more than two new fragrances released each day now, it sometimes seems as if I first encountered these scents in the ancient past, rather than only a few years ago. With forgotten favorites in hand, it’s easy to start feeling pretty testy about the rate of release in the perfume industry. But wearing the finds is the best cure for my scent cynicism: they still smell wonderful and they remind me of all the treasures in my collection. Without spending another penny, I could probably spend years surprising and enjoying myself with the samples I already have.

If you’ve been interested in fragrance for a while, you don’t need to go to the expense and trouble of moving to remind yourself to re-try perfumes you’re already encountered…

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Now Smell This

a blog about perfume

5 perfumes: Mimosa

5 Perfumes: Bittersweet Bay

5 Perfumes: Ylang-ylang

5 Perfumes: Best of the 1990s

5 Perfumes that Got Lost in the Shuffle