Happy Friday and happy Pi Day, plus happy Holi! Birthdays: Albert Einstein, Diane Arbus, Quincy Jones. Our community project for today: wear a fragrance with a hyacinth note, if you have one. If you don’t, pick another spring flowering bulb?
What fragrance did you pick? As always, do chime in with your scent of the day even if you’re not participating in the community project.
I’m on day 3 in L’Artisan Parfumeur Jacinthe des Bois, and I could easily wear this for the rest of the season…
Jo Malone recently launched its springtime limited edition collection, The Bloomsbury Set. Once again, the collection has an appropriately English theme. These five fragrances — Blue Hyacinth, Garden Lilies, Leather & Artemisia, Tobacco & Mandarin and Whisky & Cedarwood — were reportedly inspired by the Bloomsbury Group and artist Vanessa Bell’s Charleston House in Sussex. I say “reportedly” because that information was shared in early press releases, although the Jo Malone website now only refers vaguely to “free spirited artists” living “an unconventional life in their legendary country house.”
Samples of Jo Malone’s limited editions are hard to come by, so this review is based on visit to a Jo Malone counter and a generous application of two fragrances that particularly interested me…
In late 2014 independent perfumer Dawn Spencer Hurwitz released her Brilliant Collection, a quartet of fragrances inspired by an exhibition of Cartier jewelry at the Denver Art Museum. I’ve been sampling the four Brilliant scents this week, and while I could go on and on about this interesting analogy between jewels and perfumes, and the language we use to describe both, I’ll try to stay on topic by sharing my thoughts on my two favorites from the collection.
Jacinthe de Sapphir was created to evoke “a densely blue, gorgeous hyacinth in the ground” and was “inspired by the Queen of Romania Sapphire, one of the famed Cartier jewels.” It has a composition of violet leaf, galbanum, bergamot and hyacinth; rose de mai, narcissus and tuberose; and tolu balsam, Peru balsam, vetiver, styrax and civet. As promised by Hurwitz, this fragrance evolves from “dewy” to “luscious and earthy.” It opens with a stemmy-green burst of galbanum that only gradually fades into a bouquet of floral notes…
The soliflore, reinvented around a remarkable flower, rare in perfume making, the hyacinth. A fluid, profound and richly-faceted flower, velvety, green and crisp, quickened by an unexpected ingredient with a fiery temperament, incense. The spicy aromas of a great perfume in a paroxysm of pure sensuality. Unsuspected mystery and depth.
«By blending notes of incense and an amber base, I imagined a hyacinth with a bold temperament, far from the idea of the emblematic, romantic flower. Supra Floral signals a seductive perfume for women and temptation for men.» Olivier POLGE1
The Thierry Mugler Les Exceptions series launched earlier this year, although they’re still very tightly distributed. Supra Floral was the first that caught my eye when I read about the collection, hyacinth fragrances being rather thin on the ground as it were. I bought an extra bottle of L’Artisan’s Jacinthe des Bois when they discontinued it so I’ve still some left, and there’s always Guerlain Chamade, although that one is not a soliflore. And there’s Tom Ford’s Ombre de Hyacinth, which made so little impression on me that I can hardly remember what it smells like. Do comment if there’s a lovely hyacinth soliflore I’ve forgotten…
Un Coeur en Mai is one of the more recent launches from Parfums MDCI, the French niche brand that packages its perfumes in limited edition, numbered bottles featuring Limoges bisque stoppers. They’re $610 a pop, and anyone who reads here regularly knows that this is precisely the sort of “luxury” that is bound to irritate me beyond measure, and the price of the refills, $235 for 60 ml, hardly helps matters. So it was with great satisfaction that I tested the first 5 MDCI perfumes, found them beautifully done but neither outrageously wonderful nor outrageously interesting1, and moved on to other matters.
As always, I should have left well enough alone, but I dutifully tried the next 4 releases: Péché Cardinal, Le Rivage des Syrtes & Vêpres Siciliennes, and lastly, Un Coeur en Mai. I know Péché Cardinal has found fans, but it was very nearly a scrubber on me (ghastly fruit roll ups), and Le Rivage des Syrtes and Vêpres Siciliennes both left me cold. The last one to go on skin, Un Coeur en Mai, was the one that did me in…