Ramón Monegal is both the name of a perfumer and a perfume house.  Monegal is a Spaniard with a strong background in perfumery.  His lineage is the House of Myrurgia, a preeminent Spanish house based in Barcelona—the family business—with which Monegal was associated until he decided to embark upon his own projects.  The perfume house has just entered the market in a big way with the release of 14 perfumes!

The most striking thing about the line overall is the stages of development each fragrance goes through. This came as a surprise to me, since many modern fragrances come at you in a rush of notes.  With the Monegal line, what you smell at first may be dramatically different from the various stages of the fragrance.

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The first thing that I found interesting about Brussels was not its Manneken Pis mascot (chalk it up to the uniquely Bruxellois sense of fun) and not even the common sight of beer drinking at 8am (chalk it up to the grey weather). It was the dense concentration of beauty and hair salons. Every street, whether elegant or run down, has several of them, ranging from omnipresent franchises like Olivier Dachkin to tiny hole in the wall places that look like someone’s living room. Judging by the perfectly coiffed and perfumed grandmothers, age has no bearing on the desire to be beautiful.

The women in my family take their beauty rituals seriously, but spas and luxury salon treatments rarely tempt them. Ask my mom or my grandmother about their tips for silky hair or luminous skin, and you will get a lecture, along with handwritten recipes. My great grandmother left behind several thick notebooks filled with beauty and health advice. Nothing can inspire me to take better care of myself than leafing through the yellowing pages that smell of vanilla and sawdust and wondering if as a young woman, my great grandmother really made hair masks of egg yolks and cognac and rubbed her hands with cucumber juice, as she advises in her delicate, loopy handwriting. The recipe I follow most often is a simple almond oil treatment. The note next to it says, “will make your skin as lustrous as mother of pearl,” and it was all the incentive I needed to go to the store and buy a bottle.

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At one time “drugstore” simply signified the place a fragrance was purchased rather than a pejorative comment on its worth. Consider this–in 1975, Revlon chairman Michel Bergerac pulled the Revlon brand from department stores and placed it into drugstores, at a marketing level known in the trade as the mass market.  Now available at Rexall Drug were Charlie, Revlon’s wildly successful modern chypre; Intimate, Ciara, and Norell. Bergerac made the move when the competing Estée Lauder brand outstripped Revlon in the department stores, where the mid-priced Revlon lost sales to the higher-priced, “premium” Lauder products.

The move enhanced, rather than hurt, the Revlon brand. Its newest fragrance, Jontue, became a bestseller, as did Enjoli a few years later.  Shopping at the drugstores, I would find an array of both classic and modern fragrances that ranged from Dana Tabu to New West for Her to the blockbuster franchise of Elizabeth Taylor. The three decades from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s were halcyon days for drugstore scents, with many of the fragrances becoming near-instant classics, immediately recognizable in their ubiquity and proudly worn by thousands of women. Continue reading →

When I first smelled the Atelier Cologne fragrances Rose Anonyme and Vetiver Fatal, I immediately fell for the sheer, smoky roses and left the vetiver to languish on my desk. Perhaps that day I craved more flamboyance and more glamour which Rose Anonyme amply delivered. But a week or so later, I absentmindedly dabbed Vetiver Fatal on my wrist–there was no other perfume around–and curled up with War and Peace. Well before Natasha Rostova appeared on the scene, I abandoned the book and sat with my wrist glued to my nose. The scent on my skin was bright but moody, rustic but sophisticated. It smelled of sliced oranges, damp earth and fallen leaves–a little vignette of late summer.

At first, Vetiver Fatal makes me think of green tangerines, complete with their leathery leaves–verdant, zesty and tart enough to make my mouth water. The vetiver takes form stealthily, until you distinctly smell its characteristic scent of earth covered roots and milky hazelnuts. Perfumer Jerome Epinette makes a seemingly simple choice by pairing vetiver with citrus (vetiver oil naturally has a  grapefruit-like accent in its top notes), but the harmony and the addition of other elements makes Vetiver Fatal stand out.

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This year marks the 80th anniversary of Dana Tabu,  a legendary fragrance created in 1932 by perfumer Jean Carles. Tabu was complex and innovative, and it gave us a whole generation of oriental fragrances that were unabashedly sultry and rich. The original included notes of bergamot, lemon, basil, tarragon, jasmine, lily of the valley, rose, ylang-ylang, heliotrope, patchouli, oakmoss, musk, benzoin, and vanilla.

This September Dana will introduce a new limited edition relaunch of Tabu called 1932 By Tabu. It was reochestrated by perfumer Brett Schlitter as a softer, spicier version. It will include notes of bergamot, lemon, basil, jasmine, mimosa, rose, ylang-ylang, cinnamon, nutmeg, heliotrope, sandalwood, moss, amber, musk, and vanilla. With Jean Patou, Balmain, Molinard and Jacomo busy relaunching their classical collections, it’s also good to see Dana trying to resuscitate Tabu. Even if the new version will be less animalic and smoldering, Tabu deserves more attention.