Incense: 73 posts

It’s vanilla! It’s expensive! Strike that; it’s very expensive! And it’s very, very good.  Bad news: It’s only occasionally sold in America.  Occasionally means three times in five years*. It’s Le Labo Vanille 44, an ultra-smooth vanilla pod with woody kick from the trendy Le Labo line whose price ($290 for 50 ml; $440 for 100 ml) jumps out because, well, I can’t afford it and neither can any of my friends.  On second thought, maybe one friend can, but he’s a movie producer and can also afford a five-bedroom home in the Malibu Colony.

Le Labo is the dual-citizenship Grasse-New York house that in addition its regular line of perfumes has a set of City Exclusives whose number supposedly mirrors the number of ingredients that enter into the composition and whose fragrances are only available in the cities that bear their name.  These cost more than the regular line. First-class travel always does. To that end, they issued Tubéreuse 40 (New York); Aldehyde 44 (Dallas); Poivre 23 (London); Gaiac 10 (Tokyo); Musc 25 (Los Angeles); Baie Rose 26 (Chicago); and Vanille 44 (Paris).  To celebrate the recent opening of their Paris boutique, Le Labo made Vanille 44 available in the US for one month via their website and Luckyscent, which gave me a chance to sample this perfume.

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These past few days I’ve been waking up to cold, foggy mornings, and the idea of getting dressed and going outside seemed unpleasant. Just on Monday, I was tempted to break off my engagements and stay at home, wrapped in a warm sweater. As I made up my face and sipped coffee in a hurry, I imagined how good it would feel to make a cup of tea and jump back into bed with a favorite book. The best I could do before I braved the cool air was to spray on something redolent of summer.

And summer has been on my mind a lot, an Italian summer in particular. After a couple of work related trips to Italy, where the fall hasn’t even started, I came back to Belgium in love and yearning for the sun. Italy was the first place I visited abroad, and as I lived with an Italian host family as a student, it was my first immersion into another culture. My warm and generous host mom taught me to cook, to wear red and to tie my hair into a neat bun. But as work and family obligations piled up, my trips to Italy became fewer and fewer, until 10 years lapsed since my last visit.  Returning Italy reignited our love affair. Even Italian, which I thought to be long displaced by French, has resurfaced in my head. So these days I save money for my next visit, read Cesare Pavese, bake biscotti and track half way across town to my favorite Italian deli to buy some prosciutto, dry cured ham.  But the best way for me to get a dose of the Italian sun is through perfumes.

As I drew up my list, I realized that the fragrances  I selected were not just reminiscent of an Italian summer, they were perfect for cold and rainy days. If you’re longing for some sunshine or just want to something beautiful and uplifting, I hope that you will enjoy my choices.
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Amouage makes perfumes that are Arabian corollaries to how perfumes used to be made in the US up until the post-World War II era.  By this I mean assertive, statement-making perfumes with incisive notes. Amouage Lyric Woman (2008) is a blueprint rose chypre for this type of perfume, using Middle Eastern motifs on a classical framework.

Lyric Woman is composed around a central floral scheme of rose, jasmine, and ylang-ylang.  The particular rose used in Lyric Woman is not a Western-type dewy or jammy rose but one that has smoky elements, as if rose were a herbal, rather than a floral, component. This rose is scattered all over Lyric Woman, its dried petals offering a textural counterpoint to rich, rubbery ylang-ylang and honeyed jasmine.

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Scarves are my favorite accessories. I love the way the sheer organza feels on my shoulders in the summer. The warm heft of a thick, cable-knit wool feels comforting on blistering cold days in the winter. My work uniform of jeans and black sweater can be easily spiced up with a piece of silk in cobalt blue or the Russian style tasseled square in red.  In an overlap with my sartorial wardrobe, I have a whole category of fragrances I categorize as my “scarf” perfumes. They usually stay close to the skin and have a warm, smoky drydown. To smell them on me, you would have to lean in close, and I love the intimate aura they create.

One such warm and smoky contender has been Diptyque Volutes, which I’ve been testing over the past couple of weeks. Volutes in French means swirls, as in swirls of smoke, and as Volutes unfolds gently on skin and wraps me in its warm embrace, it indeed makes me think of sweet cherry scented tobacco. The story behind Volutes is of the transatlantic journeys one of Diptyque’s original founders, Yves Coueslant, used to make as a child, crossing from Marseille to Saigon and back. The vision of the “elegant ladies leaning on the ship’s rail smoking their Khedive cigarettes” inspired this languid perfume. These ladies must also have worn Shalimar, because this Guerlain classic was my immediate association with Volutes.

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After months of media buzz, Lady Gaga Fame has finally been launched.  You probably know by now how this celebrity perfume thing works.  Some celebrities—like Sarah Jessica Parker—get down and dirty in the design process, vetting the concept, going through the mods, arguing for dirtier musk, losing argument for dirtier musk, announcing that next time things are going to be different.  Then there are those under whose noses you presume a scent strip has passed, but who have not attended that endless cycle of developmental-phase meetings.

Lady Gaga appears to be of the assertive former type.  Early reports had it that the singer wanted her perfume to be based on blood and semen.  These notes, which might seem shockingly brave, are not new: Etat Libre d’Orange has already done both in Sécrétions Magnifiques.  But as happened with Parker’s dirtier musk, these notes didn’t make the final cut.  Instead, Fame, billed as “the first ever black eau de parfum,” contains “pulverized apricot, crushed heart of Tiger Orchidea, and tears of belladonna.”

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