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Carven Pour Homme ~ fragrance review

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Carven Pour Homme

Carven Pour Homme1 is instantly recognizable as a contemporary men’s fragrance, but it’s much nicer than your average masculine mainstream perfume. Imagine a friend who always dresses like a slob. One day, you see a figure approaching who looks familiar but…different. It’s your friend! But in beautifully tailored clothes, and he’s sporting a great new haircut to boot. Such is the Carven Pour Homme effect.

Carven Pour Homme is a violet leaf scent. We often smell violet leaf in perfumes in loutish guise: loud-mouthed, obnoxious, ordinaire. Carven Pour Homme presents violet leaf made chic…

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Occupy the space

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Yes, because you have to occupy the space, the way that music fills a room. This is where I find a very strong relation with music. It’s an argument I have with a friend who is a music composer, when I say I am a perfume composer, he says, ‘Why do you use a word that belongs to music?’ In French, we make the distinction between writing, painting, composing music, but for perfume there is not a proper language. The reason is that it’s only 150 years old, which is nothing compared to visual art or music.

— Perfumer Francis Kurkdjian, from The Secret Of Scent: What Does A Nose Know? at Esquire.

Elie Saab Le Parfum Resort Collection ~ fragrance review

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Elie Saab Le Parfum Resort Collection, brand images

Who are these people who shop designer resort collections? I imagine a group of jet setters who demand spanking white capris and sorbet-toned nail polish for their stays in Bermuda or Antigua or wherever the resort collection set go. They pack multiple bikinis, and they invest in gym memberships and waxing regimens so they look good in those bikinis. They have friends with magazine-worthy island homes whose casement windows are eternally open to the sun and sky-blue sea. They drink fruity cocktails on the yacht’s deck.

Sniffing Elie Saab Le Parfum Resort Collection Eau de Toilette — whew! let’s just call it “Resort” for short — leads me to think that perfumer Francis Kurkdjian had a similar vision of this (to me, anyway) mythical community. Resort’s notes include orange blossom, jasmine, frangipani, fig, cedar and amber. It’s a well-heeled tropical party in a bottle…

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Maison Francis Kurkdjian A la Rose ~ fragrance review

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Maison Francis Kurkdjian À la Rose, brand banner

Roses, roses all the way! It’s the annual spring rush of my favorite flower in fragrance. I’ve recently reviewed L’Artisan Parfumeur Rose Privée and Aerin Rose de Grasse, and today I’m taking a close sniff of Maison Francis Kurkdjian’s À la Rose. Yes, it’s another “ode to femininity,” another homage to the rose fields of Grasse, another pink juice…but I’m still not tired of roses, so onwards we go.

In À la Rose, “an eau de parfum that evokes the crisp tenderness of rose petals and a radiant aura” as well as “a free-spirited elegance,” Francis Kurkdjian has brought together notes of Damascena rose, Centifolia rose, bergamot, orange, violet, magnolia blossom, cedar wood and musk. (As Robin earlier noted, the fragrance was inspired by Marie Antoinette’s love of roses and the painting Marie-Antoinette à la Rose by Louise Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun…)

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