Chypre: 72 posts

Do you know the feeling when you try an outfit and can’t decide whether it suits you or not? You think, “maybe it would be fine if I were to add a different purse or wear my hair up…” Those are the kind of pieces that end up gathering dust in the closet. Perfume is not exactly like clothing, because some fragrances don’t cast their spell on you immediately, but as my recent experience with Chanel 1932 proved, sometimes the first instinct is the correct one.

I admit to having a certain reverence for Chanel. Its perfume collection includes some splendid gems like No 5, Bois des Iles, Cuir de Russie, and No 19, and even releases like Allure and Coco Mademoiselle have the kind of attention to quality that one rarely finds at department store counters. For this reason, I wasn’t ready to give up on 1932, a new addition to the Les Exclusifs collection, but when I first tried it on my skin I found it to be pale and limpid.

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I keep misreading Bottega Veneta Eau Légère as Eau de Lingerie. Perhaps not such a strange mistake considering that it’s a silk slip of a perfume.  Sheer and delicate, it wears close to the skin, and just like a beautifully crafted lingerie, it makes me feel sexy and alluring. Designed as a variation (read, flanker) on the brand’s debut perfume, Bottega Veneta Eau de Parfum, Bottega Veneta Eau Légère has a similarly elegant character.

Elegance is something I fully expected from Bottega Veneta, but I didn’t anticipate anything interesting from its flankers. Brands rarely spend enough effort to develop original ideas, and since the rewards for flanker launches are small, perfumers often have few incentives to try very hard. Bottega Veneta Eau Légère is neither avant-garde nor trendsetting, but it’s made well enough that it stands on equal ground as the beautiful original. It only depends whether you prefer rich and glamorous or gauzy and sophisticated.

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Among niche perfumers, Swiss creator Vero Kern stands out for her unique fingerprint that reminds me of classical Guerlain elegance. But there is more. Under that well-behaved, well-coiffed elegance you notice something smoldering and dark. At first, it may feel disconcerting–and for some, it remains so, making Rubj, Onda, and even the brighter and fresher Kiki love or hate perfumes. For me, it’s the former, because I enjoy exploring Vero Kern’s world through the prism of her perfumes.

The newest addition to the collection, Mito, follows her sisters in their steps, but the perfume feels different from the baroque, Guerlain-inspired themes. It’s a chypre so green, it sparkles. Is its effervescence an allusion to the glittering fountains in the garden of Italy’s Villa d’Este that inspired Swiss perfumer Vero Kern to create Mito?

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By a coincidence, the first time I wore The Afternoon of a Faun, the latest perfume from Etat Libre d’Orange, was to a ballet performance. I applied it earlier in the day and by the time I sat in the darkened theater it already melted into my skin. My companion leaned in and whispered, “I love the smell of theater, the mix of wood and floor polish… Oh, wait! It’s you!” And she was right, Faun smells like worn wood, or something antique and patina covered.

Created by Ralf Schwieger, the same perfumer who authored the brilliant Fils de Dieu, The Afternoon of a Faun is inspired by the ballet choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky for the Ballets Russes. It was first performed in 1912, with Nijinsky dancing the main role. Set to the score by Claude Debussy, L’après-midi d’un faune told the story of a faun who meets and teases a group of nymphs. The erotic subtext of the plot and the archaically styled dance ran so counter to classical dance that it caused a scandal, and Nijinsky could barely escape the angry fans.

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Gardenia is the flower with the most feminine of connotations. It’s a blossom that the jazz singer Billie Holiday tucked in her hair. Its seeds give a vibrant yellow hue that the turn of the century Shanghai courtesans appropriated as a signature shade of their lingerie. More innocently, it’s the preferred flower for a prom corsage–even without water it will remain fresh and fragrant for hours. When Arquiste Parfumeur announced that its Boutonniere no.7  will be a masculine rendition of gardenia, I was intrigued.

The idea behind Boutonniere no.7 was to create a fragrance for a vignette: a group of 19th century dandies standing in the foyer of the Opéra-Comique in Paris and wearing gardenia boutonnieres on their lapel. Perfumer Rodrigo Flores-Roux received the commission to make this story come to life. Flores-Roux is a talented perfumer, but I still wondered if it’s really possible to create a realistic gardenia perfume and yet make it suitable to men?

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