Happy news for those who’ve been mourning discontinued perfumes from L’Artisan Parfumeur–Tea For Two, L’Eau du Caporal, and Oeillet Sauvage will return to the collection in November 2014.

Tea For Two was created in 2000 by Olivia Giacobetti and was inspired by lapsang souchong, a famous smoky tea from China.  Giacobetti blended smoky notes, adding gourmand accents, ginger, cinnamon and honey. It was one of the first fragrances to be reviewed on Bois de Jasmin, and it was the fragrance I missed the most from L’Artisan.

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Elisa describes her beloved long lost perfumes and considers alternatives.

Perhaps the hardest part of the perfume hobby is seeing beautiful perfumes be discontinued. But that’s only the first stage to get through – often, discontinued perfumes are still available online and through discounters for years after they fall out of production. The really hard part comes when those stocks dry up, and the last remaining bottles can only occasionally be found for sale through unreliable sources and at astronomical prices. Iris Gris – a legendary Vincent Roubert creation from 1946 – is perhaps the quintessential “lost perfume.”

But you don’t have to dig back too far into last century to find lost perfumes. Here are five perfumes from the last 25 years that I’ve fallen in love with, only to find them largely unavailable.

L’Arte di Gucci (1991)

Thankfully, there are still good rose chypres in production. But L’Arte di Gucci was special – a big, fruity, nuanced red rose that brings to mind Eau de Joy, with its facets of aldehydes, cassis, and jasmine. To my nose, the base is mostly about the dark, earthy patchouli, with the oakmoss less prominent than in, say, Paloma Picasso. When Angela reviewed this perfume in 2011, she compared it to “wearing red lipstick with a red dress” – a combination so obvious that Donatella Versace called it bourgeois. But I love the costumey effect of L’Arte di Gucci, the way it references both elegance and power. Victoria recommends trying Dior Diorling, Chanel Cuir de Russie, and Parfum d’Empire Cuir Ottoman, if the dark, dry leather of L’Arte di Gucci is what you loved the most.

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In my new article for the Financial Times Magazine’s fragrance column, Perfumes with a Twist of Japanese Incense, I discover the pleasures of incense in Japan.

I’m sitting in front of smouldering joss sticks trying to determine whether they smell of the milky sweetness of sandalwood or the raspy sharpness of cedar. A young woman with a glossy black bob lights one stick after another, blowing out each flame with a gentle wave of her hand. I’m unused to kneeling for so long, and I feel the crunch of tatami mats through my thin wool trousers. Please read the rest by clicking here.

As Kiyoko Morita explains in The Book of Incense, “unlike perfume, the fragrance of incense can be quite faint and subtle; so much so, in fact, that we can understand why the Chinese used the expression ‘listening to incense’ (wenxiang) rather ‘smelling incense’.” Even so, the delicate suggestion of Japanese incense can be found in some fragrances, whether it was deliberate or not. I mention a few such perfumes in my article.

Photography by Bois de Jasmin

One day Richard Wallace found out two things that changed his life–that he was the illegitimate son of the Fourth Marquess of Hertford and that he was the heir to an invaluable collection of antiques, including paintings by Titian, Frans Hals, and Rubens. He worked as a secretary for the Marquess, but discovering the true nature of their relation was a shock.  When he inherited his father’s collection, the apartment in the rue Laffitte, the chateau of Bagatelle, and the estates in Ireland, he was living in Paris. He married Julie Castelnau, a former perfume seller, and set about taking care of the collection. It was to become his life’s work.

The Franco-German war of 1870-71 and the uprising of the Commune precipitated his move to London, and that’s where his collection currently resides. What is more, its treasures are available to visitors free of charge; Lady Wallace bequeathed most of the collection to the nation.

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Patricia revisits Calandre, a metallic green rose with a chypre heart.

Nineteen Sixty-Nine was a year in which I watched with my family as men walked on the moon, 400,000 young people crammed into the then little known town of Woodstock, NY for a three-day music festival, and the hugely unpopular war in Vietnam was escalating with accompanying casualties on both sides of the conflict. In the same year, Calandre, an avant-garde perfume from the fashion house of Paco Rabanne and created by nose Michel Hy, was launched.

Betty Friedan, considered by some to be the mother of the second wave of American feminism, had written The Feminine Mystique in 1963, and the sixties provided fertile ground for the growing Women’s Movement. Perfume styles were changing as well. The more formal floral style of the fifties and early sixties was giving way to more modern interpretations.

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