In honor of Dr. Jessica, who celebrates her 10th Now Smell This anniversary today, we’re talking about roses. Three questions, answer as many or as few as you like.
Or, as always, just talk about something else.
1. Name a favorite rose fragrance.
2. Name a favorite rose-scented body product.
3. Tell us about anything wonderful or interesting that has to do with roses, in any form whatsoever…
Les Parfums de Rosine has been one of my favorite niche perfume houses for the past decade, so I always look forward to trying its newest releases. This fall, Rosine has launched Rose des Neiges, “a modern interpretation of a powdery rose” inspired by the image of an unexpected late-autumn snowfall that frosts all the flowers in a rose garden. Rose des Neiges was developed by perfumer Nicholas Bonneville and includes top notes of mandarin, pink pepper, lychee and watermelon; heart notes of rose and white violet; and base notes of sandalwood, ambroxan, heliotrope and musks.
“Powdery” is an understatement here…
Penhaligon’s big fall launch is a quartet of fragrances called Portraits: Chapter 1. Two of them are feminine scents, two are masculine, and they’ve been given names and characters that evoke British mystery novels and period soap operas like “Upstairs, Downstairs.” Penhaligon’s tells us that the Portraits collection captures the brand’s “ultimately British, slightly eccentric, traditional, adventurous and aristocratic character.”
Yesterday Kevin reviewed the two “men” of the group, The Tragedy of Lord George and Much Ado About the Duke, and in another “his-and-hers” follow-up, I’m here to cover the women…
Perfume lovers seem to fall into one of two camps about vintage fragrances. Either they seek them out, eager to try many iterations of their favorites; or they avoid them, fearing that they’ll fall in love with a perfume they’ll never smell again. I fall into the “better to have loved and lost than never loved at all” camp. Usually, that’s fine. I mean, there’s always another good perfume coming along, right? But when my 1.25 dram bottle of Parfums Ciro Danger extrait runs out, my heart will break.
Danger, released in 1938, is a rich, dark rose with an animalic edge. I have to wonder if it was inspired by Schiaparelli Shocking, released the year before. The big difference is that Danger’s rose is balanced by helpings of cinnamon and lavender. The result is seductive and romantic, but intriguingly odd…
It would not really be accurate to say I was worried about what perfumer Christine Nagel would do when she took over as house perfumer at Hermès. Plenty of other things keep me up at night, but not that. But certainly I wondered if Hermès would continue to take the bulk of my perfume-spending dollars, or if I’d have to find a new BFF brand to empty my wallet every so often. What I think of as the transitional fragrance duo — Eau de Rhubarbe Écarlate and Eau de Néroli Doré — that marked the passing of the baton from perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena,1 added to the uncertainty, given that I lost interest in Nagel’s Rhubarbe Écarlate within 30 minutes but fairly quickly bought a small bottle of Ellena’s Néroli Doré (and I’m still sorely tempted by the matching body products).
But perhaps I was too quick to judge. Nagel’s first pillar outing, Galop d’Hermès, is darned good, and while it makes its own way, it also eases comfortably into the brand’s existing line up…