The splitmeet (episode 8) is open for business. PLEASE read the instructions! For people who would like to chat in addition to, or instead of, splitting, there will be a poll along shortly.
Don’t know what a bottle split is, or you know but you’ve never tried it? See here.
Please note that the intention of the splitmeet is to split newly purchased bottles of perfume, not to sell decants of fragrances already in your collection…
Reviews of two recent mainstream designer fragrances: Jason Wu Eau de Parfum and Ralph Lauren Woman. Do comment if you’ve tried either, or if you have tested any other recent mainstream designer fragrances that you’d like to tell us about.
Jason Wu’s eponymous scent is his first, and is meant to reflect the jasmine growing near his childhood home in Taiwan — a focus the designer chose after blind-smelling hundreds of raw materials with perfumer Frank Voelkl. Wu may have found his notes by trial and error, but he had a specific idea of what he wanted his fragrance to be like…
Just as autumn is gaining confidence, Amouage and Eight & Bob have released “summery” perfumes (perfect timing for the Southern Hemisphere, at least!)
Amouage Beach Hut Man1 seems to have divided perfumistos: judging from online commentary, lots of men love it and lots wanted to scrub it off immediately. (That’s usually a good sign…for me anyway.) …
Christy doesn’t know the name of the perfumer who developed her favorite fragrance, and she’s not geeky about notes and structure. She’s heard Chanel No. 5 is nice, but it’s never crossed her path. At the same time, she loves perfume and makeup, and she’s loaded with style. I couldn’t wait to talk with her about her perfume collection.
When I caught up with Christy, it was late Sunday night, and she was ironing school uniforms for her daughters. Christy is a single mom in Georgia with three girls between the ages of two and nine, plus a full-time job. Not surprisingly, she lives on a budget. She’s more likely to buy perfume at the mall than toss down her credit card for the latest $400 niche bottle…
Last week I was reading an article about the definition of “niche” in the ever-changing fragrance market, and I started thinking back to some of the first “niche” perfumes lines I ever encountered — L’Artisan Parfumeur and Annick Goutal, in particular. There were others I never had the chance to try, and some of them are now discontinued (Gobin Daudé!), but once in a while an early niche line makes a re-appearance. Le Jardin Retrouvé, for example, describes itself as “the first ever niche Maison de Parfum, created in 1975 by the renowned perfumer Yuri Gutsatz.” In 2016, Gutsatz’s son and daughter-and-law re-launched the brand with reformulations of seven of its original fragrances.
I’ve had a small stack of Le Jardin Retrouvé’s boxed sample vials on my desk for the past few weeks, and I’ve been shuffling them around like a deck of cards…