Tauer Perfumes Une Rose Chypree ~ fragrance review

Posted by Angela on 24 August 2009 167 Comments

Tauer Perfumes Une Rose Chypree perfume

The other night, I was talking with friends, and for the first time this year I heard crickets in the garden outside. I said, “Wait, are those—?”, and a friend cut in, “Don’t say it!” She knew I was going to say the crickets’ chirping was a sign that autumn was coming. None of us wanted to admit it. Seemingly overnight the slant of the light has changed. Mornings are cool, although afternoons can still drive you to seek shade. The air smells different. It’s a bittersweet time of year because it is so beautiful but so short and signals that months of cold rain are around the corner. Those heartbreaking few days bridging the warm luxury of summer and the woodsmoke-tinged air of fall are to me what Tauer Perfumes Une Rose Chyprée feels like.

Andy Tauer, the founder and nose behind Zurich-based Tauer Perfumes, describes Une Rose Chyprée as “an oriental rose on a chypre base”. He lists its notes as rose damascena, bay, cinnamon, bergamot, lemon, clementine, green Bourbon geranium, labdanum, oak moss, patchouli, vetiver, and vanilla. In the initial announcement about Une Rose Chyprée earlier this year, Tauer said that each 15 ml bottle of the Eau de Parfum contains one pound of steam-distilled rose petals as well as rosa damascena absolute.

The rose in Une Rose Chyprée isn’t the full, fruity, blown rose of summer, but a darker, spicier rose joined by juicy citrus and definite cinnamon…

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L’Occitane Rose 4 Reines and Neroli ~ fragrance review

Posted by Angela on 6 August 2009 189 Comments

L'Occitane Rose 4 Reines L'Occitane Neroli Eau de Parfum

I suppose we all have our own forms of snobbery. For me, I either want something to be lushly, genuinely luxurious or to be blatantly cheap. Give me either the baguette-cut emerald in a one-of-a-kind setting, or the sparkling 1950s necklace in aqua plastic. It’s the real thing or a showy fake. Nothing in between. Alas, L’Occitane falls in between.

As I’m rediscovering the world of the mall, I see that every store is its own focus-grouped world. The Betsey Johnson store is all pink mini skirts and nineteen-year olds. The Chicos store is loose, putty-colored cotton and menopausal women. The Godiva store displays in its window what they deem to be sumptuous: a tray of flavorless Driscoll strawberries dunked in chocolate. The Apple store, packed with customers, is a clean white laboratory of sales.

L’Occitane’s gig is that it’s a French country pharmacy full of European products replete with natural essences possibly gathered by Provençal peasants at dawn. Instead of Bath and Body Works’ generic plastic containers, a L’Occitane product comes in a vaguely nineteenth-century glass bottle with a paper label. Some are classy glass cubes, others are rectangular with the shape of a plant molded into the bottle, and still others have tactile ridges running down them. They feel good to hold and imagine on your dresser. But they’re pretending to be something that they aren’t, and that bothers me…

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Czech & Speake Dark Rose ~ fragrance review

Posted by Robin on 30 June 2009 83 Comments

Czech & Speake Dark Rose

Czech & Speake is a British bathroom fixtures brand. They started their fragrance line in 1980 as part of an overall strategy to “do everything that has to do with luxurious baths” (they also carry shaving products and leather toiletry bags).¹ Dark Rose is one of their newer scents — it launched in 2003, and I can’t say for sure when it was taken off the market (reportedly due to production problems of some sort or another), but when I first tried it in late 2006, it was already impossible to find. Is it a kindness or a torture that perfumistas routinely share samples of discontinued fragrances?

Dark Rose was re-launched this year, and I was looking forward to trying the new vs. the old. Most unfortunately (or not: sometimes it’s best not to know) my original sample has turned, so I can only tell you about the new. It has rich top notes, with lots of saffron and that medicinal smell that often accompanies oudh wood (the notes: saffron, Bulgarian rose, patchouli, sandalwood, oudh, amber and white musk). It does, undoubtedly, smell vaguely like bandaids for a time…

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A ring of roses ~ scented body products

Posted by Jessica on 28 June 2009 108 Comments

Dr. Bronner's Rose Pure Castile Soap rose-slice-2 Thayers Rose Petal Witch Hazel Toner

The rose has probably received more tributes in writing and song than any other flower; without even trying, anyone can easily think of a famous rose quotation or two. I recently realized that my own formative literary encounter with rose imagery was the classic children’s book The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The Rose is an important secondary character in the story: she is vain and coquettish but secretly vulnerable, and her relationship with the Prince symbolizes some of the complexities of love. (As a child, I was also very impressed by the depiction of the rose in the film version of The Little Prince.)

Although rose is my favorite note in perfumery, I try not to discuss rose-scented products too often, just because I don’t want to be monotonous. However, June is the month of roses, so I’m going to indulge myself by mentioning a few recent favorites here. And, because we should still stop and smell the proverbial roses even (or especially) during a difficult economy, all of these products are available for $10 or less…

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Tokyo Milk Waltz ~ fragrance & scented soap review

Posted by Jessica on 16 May 2009 68 Comments

Tokyo Milk Waltz 14 perfume Tokyo Milk Waltz Soap

Tokyo Milk is a small company with a delightfully inventive (and surprisingly affordable) line of fragrances called “Parfumarie Curiosite” [sic], as well as complementary perfumed soaps. Although I enjoyed reading the descriptions of all the scents in the line, the floral-lover in me was most drawn to Waltz Parfum 14 (formulation not specified, but probably an Eau de Parfum, shown above left) and Waltz Perfumed Soap (scented, somewhat confusingly, with a fragrance blend called “Minuet 14”, shown above right).

Photos don’t really do justice to the sweet packaging of these two products, especially their sepia-toned illustration of mid-nineteenth century dancers promenading in pairs along the length of a ballroom. The label of the perfume bottle is applied to the back of the bottle, so that the picture appears through the liquid of the fragrance itself, and the soap’s wrapper is highlighted with fine, iridescent glitter.

A historical note: when the waltz first gained popularity in genteel European society in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was considered daring and even immoral…

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Now Smell This

a blog about perfume

Tauer Perfumes Une Rose Chypree ~ fragrance review

L’Occitane Rose 4 Reines and Neroli ~ fragrance review

Czech & Speake Dark Rose ~ fragrance review

A ring of roses ~ scented body products

Tokyo Milk Waltz ~ fragrance & scented soap review