Victoria: 2602 posts

Wishing you a joyful New Year filled with peace, happiness, and prosperity. May the coming year be a time of tranquility, bringing you comfort and harmony in every moment. Here’s to fresh beginnings and the promise of a brighter tomorrow!

Our “Recommend Me a Perfume” thread is open this week. You can use this space to find perfume recommendations, to share your discoveries and favorite scents, and to ask any questions about scents, aromas and flavors. Or you can just tell us what perfume you are wearing.

Above all, I would like to know what perfumes stood out to you in 2024. What fragrances did you wear the most? What do you still want to try? My fragrance of the day today is Dominique Ropion’s A Rose is A Rose, a composition that hides rose petals in layers of soft amber and dark woods.

How does it work: 1. Please post your requests or questions as comments here. You can also use this space to ask any fragrance related questions. To receive recommendations that are better tailored to your tastes, you can include details on what you like and don’t like, your signature perfumes, and your budget. And please let us know what you end up sampling. 2. Then please check the thread to see if there are other requests you can answer. Your responses are really valuable for navigating the big and sometimes confusing world of perfume, so let’s help each other!

To make this thread easier to read, when you reply to someone, please click on the blue “reply” link under their comment.

Photography by Bois de Jasmin

When the mesmerizing Spanish actress, Rossy de Palma, decided to create a fragrance, she selected rose as her main theme. While the choice of such a classical flower for the star of Pedro Almódovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown might have struck some as surprising, the perfumers Antoine Lie and Antoine Maisondieu weren’t taken aback. They were the co-authors of de Palma’s scent, and when it was released as Eau de Protection by the niche perfume house Etat Libre d’Orange, the result was anything but staid. As the perfumers knew, rose had many faces, and it could be made as smoldering or as innocent as an artist’s skill allowed.

Eau de Protection opens up on a spicy but fresh accord of green citrus peel and black pepper, but as the rose unfolds, so does the dark note reminiscent of damp soil and antique woods. Spice, honey, green sap, and fruit, the notes present in rose absolute, are cleverly highlighted in the fragrance, but the overall effect is abstract. The perfume is memorable not only because of its opulent character—aided by the generous dose of natural rose essence—and original interpretation, but also for doing away with the usual gender labels.  For a man who loves patchouli, amber and dark woods, the prominent rose notes in Rossy de Palma’s Eau de Protection aren’t too challenging. On the other hand, a woman who wants to eschew the cliché of “sweet and pretty” would find it a perfect statement fragrance.

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Luca and I had an amazing conversation for nearly two hours talking about classical perfumery, how to learn fragrances, trends, and so many other topics inspired by your questions. Our session is available as a recording. If you couldn’t participate in person, I invite you to listen to our conversation. Available here.

Here are the topics we covered:

• what classical perfumes make Luca’s heart skip a beat
• what exactly goes into those cheap, dime a dozen perfumes
• the future of perfumery
• is it possible to create anything new? and which brands stand out still?
• if you know nothing about perfumery, where to start? (Luca’s great advice)
• which classical Guerlain perfumes we don’t like (yes, those exist)
• and much more!

Luca Turin and I talk about perfumery: fragrances we can’t imagine the world without, trends we hate, industry gossip and other things. Both of us have our distinctive preferences and experiences, and Luca is someone I admire and consider a friend, so we will keep these sessions open-ended. Our goal is to raise money to help my local community in Ukraine, but I can’t deny relishing the pleasure of chatting with Luca on topics both of us enjoy. We hope that this series of conversation will be inspiring, meaningful and entertaining.

P.S. Did you know that you can follow Luca via his Substack?

Here are the projects in Ukraine for which I’m raising money:

• Purchasing art supplies for the free-of-charge art studios that rehabilitate children suffering from post-traumatic shock.
• Supporting animal shelters run by the individuals I know.
• Working with local outreach programs to respond to the lonely elderly and their needs.
• Supporting local cultural preservation projects and traditional crafts.  I

Full disclosure: 50% of the funds raised will be donated to these charitable initiatives. The rest will cover our time and my Belgian tax obligations.

Luca and Victoria recording, €50 (after the payment is processed, you will receive a link to access the recording.)

For more information on Bois de Jasmin classes and other course offers, please visit the Perfume Classes page.

I never met my great-grandmother Olena, who passed away shortly after I was born, but I always felt as if she were a constant presence in my life. Partly it was due to the numerous recipe books that she left behind. The hand-bound sheets covered with Olena’s lacy handwriting detailed her techniques for stuffing a roast, making multilayer cakes or selecting fruit for jams and marmalades. The most intriguing of her recipes was the one she called “a dry perfume for gingerbread.”

Every European country has its own gingerbread recipe and a combination of spices that gives each regional variation its distinctive flavor. Olena’s Ukrainian version was scented with cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, star anise, and a hint of saffron. When I blended it myself following her proportions, I realized that it was similar to the “gingerbread perfume” accord I learned making as a perfumery student, although my liquid version didn’t have the voluptuous richness of saffron.

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One of the first articles I had written for which I won an award for Editorial Excellence was titled Scents of Kyiv, a walk through my native city and a story of its scents. Returning to Ukraine, I keep cataloging aromas that I encounter during my travels–coffee and cigarettes in Lviv, poppyseed rolls and lindens in Poltava, expensive perfume and car exhaust in Kharkiv. So it was with much delight that I discovered a candle collection by Sofiya Dolna, an independent perfumer based in Ternopil, western Ukraine. Sofiya’s candle collection paints the olfactory portraits of three different Ukrainian regions–the south (Acacia Odesa), the east (Rosa Donbas), and the west (Cedr Gorgany). The scents are evocative. The presentation is gorgeous. The candles make a fantastic holiday gift. And yes, Sofiya ships her products all over the world–one of the best things about Ukraine is its amazing array of postal services.

The candle collection was developed a year ago in collaboration with two other artists, with each contributing their own interpretation of their native place.

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