British niche line Ormonde Jayne will launch the Four Corners of the Earth Collection next month. The set includes Montabaco, Tsarina, Nawab of Oudh and Qi. All four fragrances were developed by perfumer Geza Schoen…
Wallpaper/Steidl Paper Passion & CB I Hate Perfume In The Library: Perfumes for Booklovers ~ fragrance reviews
Before wearing Paper Passion1 I sniffed a lot of books and paper. I sat in front of my bookshelves and wedged my nostrils between many pages. I don’t think contemporary paper has much scent; what I did smell on occasion (especially in art books) was a mild chemical odor (inks?) I did get a definite aroma from watercolor papers — the scent of wet animal fur. Finally, I sniffed a falling-apart edition of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time that was printed in the 1980s (I’m saving the wreck because the pages might make a neat lampshade or “collage” screen); the rough pages were not printed on archival paper (they’ve yellowed and become brittle). Sniffing the Proust and other “old” books I realized that cheap, wood pulp paper smelled the best — vanillic, woody-acidic.
Paper Passion opens with a quick touch of osmanthus “bud” (neither too fruity nor floral) and balsam of copaiba (woody but with a cool “bite”). The musk in Paper Passion’s base is super-light and almost undetectable but complements the overall vanilla-wood character of the perfume. I do smell “old books” as I sniff Paper Passion — there’s a definite musty vibe. The longer you wear the fragrance, the more you’ll smell like your granny’s huge, disintegrating 100-year-old family Bible, or bungalow-sized (silverfish-infested) volume of The Complete Shakespeare…
Paper Passion ~ new fragrance
Publisher Gerhard Steidl, perfumer Geza Schoen and Wallpaper magazine have collaborated to launch Paper Passion, a new unisex perfume with packaging by Karl Lagerfeld and Steidl…
Kinski ~ fragrance review
If you’re going to anoint me with a male-celebrity fragrance, chances are I’d prefer a perfume inspired by Klaus Kinski rather than David Beckham, Tim McGraw or the Pope. Mr. Kinski was interesting for one thing, a wild character — the inventor of his own weird myth (featuring a man-god who did what he wanted — propriety and the feelings of others be damned). Put another way: for perfume inspiration, give me a talented nutcase with over-the-top (legal!) appetites instead of a bland money-grubber.
Does Kinski smell like Kinski? If someone had given me an unmarked bottle of Kinski Eau de Toilette and asked me to wear it and report back on what type of person it evoked, I’d have said a sexy person, a man of a “certain age” who lives in a secluded, art-filled home, which he refers to as a “cabin.” He might also keep an exotic pet…a lemur? He smells of rich amber-y perfume, smokes a joint every now and again, and always has orchids or roses in big silver vases on his desk (with a single blossom tucked in his jacket’s lapel). I’d imagine this man to be a traveler…
Two and a half vetivers ~ fragrance review, and a quick poll
I used to think there were some notes that simply couldn’t be done to death. The fragrance industry has proven me wrong on that score. Raise your hand if you’d just as soon not see another new oud fragrance for a few years?
Vetiver hasn’t yet reached that stage.1 We’ve seen a slow but steady stream of new vetivers over the last couple years, but nothing like the fever-pitch rate of new ouds. On the other hand, you know, there are lots of vetivers out there already, and vetiver, like oud, has a tendency to dominate whatever composition it’s in. So the bar is set high for a new vetiver fragrance.
Today, I’m looking at new(-ish) vetivers from Escentric Molecules and Chantecaille. Many perfumistas already know about Escentric Molecules, the niche line of perfumer Geza Shoen. They’ve released three fragrance duos, each consisting of a single note diluted in alcohol, and a fragrance built around that single note. The third duo, which debuted last year, features vetiver. Molecule 03 (the fragrance I’m counting as a half in the title since it isn’t really what you’d call a finished fragrance) consists of vetiveryle acetate diluted in alcohol, nothing else. As with Molecule 01 (iso e super) and Molecule 02 (ambroxan), it’s probably not the most cost-effective way to get yourself a straight-up aroma chemical, and I’ve always wondered why they don’t release the Molecule fragrances in very small sizes…