So, the debut perfume from singer Lady Gaga doesn’t smell of blood and semen. Yes, I know, you’re very surprised!

Although Lady Gaga promised that her debut perfume will smell like an “expensive hooker” or “blood and semen,” Fame : Black Fluid, smells like “tears of belladonna, crushed heart of tiger orchidea with a black veil of incense, pulverized apricot and the combinative essences of saffron and honey drops,” according to Lady Gaga’s twitter account. Via WWD and Lady Gaga’s twitter updates.

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My father had a photographic memory. He could glance at a page of poetry, a list of numbers or a collage of images and remember them more or less precisely. It was something that left everyone awestruck and at parties he was happy to oblige by memorizing card combinations and such. Sadly, I inherited none of his prowess in this particular area; I had to build my own memory skills. As I became more interested in scents, I realized that more than anything else, perfume helped me reconstruct whole scenes. When I smell the honeyed sweetness of linden blossoms after a summer rain, I’m back in Kiev, walking down the sunlit avenues, a melting ice cream cone in hand. A whiff of Diorissimo—and I’m 5 years old, watching my mother put on her green checkered tweed suit and arrange her bob with a spritz of hair spray.

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Vero Profumo is launching a new fragrance this fall, Mito.  The perfume includes notes of citrus, magnolia grandiflora, white magnolia champaca, jasmine, galbanum, hyacinth, cypress, and moss. It was inspired by Villa d’Este in Tivoli, near Rome

“The warm air is pervaded by a pleasant sensation of white flowers, jasmine and newly blooming magnolias, garlands of moist moss, aromatic leaves and proud cypresses. Slowly the fragrance rises. Up, up, higher and higher still, to join, all of a sudden, the crystalline jets gushing in the fountains and resting on the mirrors of water in the garden. Millions of miniscule water particles intertwine to create a shining, perfumed veil that rests on the cold marble shoulders of countless statues: gods, nymphs, fauns, dragons and mermaids. Time has stood still in the garden: yesterday is today is tomorrow,” writes  perfumer Vero Kern.

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In my bid to fantasize that I’m living in a hot tropical climate, I’ve been starting my day by wearing citrus colognes. When I splash on something redolent of juicy oranges, lemon blossoms or bitter grapefruit, for a moment I forget the overcast skies and the nagging rain. As I sniff my bergamot scented wrists, I might as well be at the seashore, walking on warm sand, kicking up opalescent seashells with my toe.  Better still for my daydreaming if the citrus is wrapped around dark woods, smoky vanilla or luscious amber. Then, it feels particularly sultry and exciting! When I heard about Christian Dior Escale à Parati, which promised to take me to a town on the Costa Verde of Brazil and comfort me with tonka bean dusted oranges, I didn’t hesitate to order a sample.

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by Suzanna

Some of the most intriguing fragrances are meant to evoke environment and emotion, time and place. This is why the newest L’Artisan Parfumeur fragrance, Séville à l’aube, caught my attention. Perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour created Séville à l’aube as a celebration of journalist and perfume blogger Denyse Beaulieu’s remembrance of romance and seduction past. The idea stemmed from a story Beaulieu told the perfumer about an erotic event that transpired during a long-ago Holy Week (this turns up in the scent as an abstraction) and about the smells and associations of that time and place (more literal). Beaulieu describes her experience in the creation of this fragrance in her book The Perfume Lover. Duchaufour documents Beaulieu’s story as an “orange blossom Oriental” in which the sweet and honeyed white flower appears meaty and succulent and the dry resins of the base curl upwards in the manner of incense.

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