Member Blogs

During this project, I am assimilating a list of tempting iris fragrances that I have never heard of. I’m not going to share them just yet, because some appear to be unknown bargains that I, selfishly, want to purchase before I share them with any potential readers. In the meantime, a confession: I bought some Insolence EDP this morning. I am trying to compete this project without spending fortune on new perfumes, but I really want my Insolence EDP in the old style bottle. I already long for the days of individually designed dedicated bottles almost as much as I do the days of coumarin and oakmoss. I would also not mind some suggestions, if anyone reading these posts knows of something I should try. I went into this project...

Insolence EDT does not even try to be classy. It represents one direction that the house of Guerlain might have taken: a grand house sans parfumuer en maison that uses guns for hire for its pillars (what was wrong with Marice Roucel? Perhaps he prefers his independence, for which one cannot blame him, as he has done some of his most interesting work outside of the creative restrictions of larger houses, although I would argue that Insolence is an exception, a wild and unfettered creature that somehow escaped the structures of focus groups and marketing suits). However, Guerlain took a different path, chose the in-house route, and hired Mathilda Laurent. Her work there, and now at Cartier, was, and is, brilliant, and some of her...

Note: this is not in the directory yet. Listed noted are: Cloves, Cinnamon, Ginger and Bergamot; middle notes are Rose de Mai, Jasmine and Ylang-Ylang; base notes are Orris Root, iris, Styrax, Labdanum, Oakmoss, Cedar, Vanilla, Benzoin, Patchouli, Ambergris and Tonka Bean. Sometimes I get lucky with my sample requests from Luckyscent. Elixir Attar is asking something like 400 dollars or more for their Iris Chypre, and Luckyscent wants about $40 dollars a pop for a sample. Ouch. I have learned they won’t always grant my requests for expensive samples with my purchases, but I have also learned the basic calculus of “don’t ask, don’t get,” and so I asked, and I got. I planned to write today’s entry about Bond No. 9 Silver Factory...

Keiko Mecheri is a house that I don't see discussed much here on Basenotes. Fragrantica, which I think skews a little more broad (more enthusiam for designer perfume), young, and feminine in its English-speaking demographic, generallly shows a little more enthusiasm for Keiko and her house. Maybe it's because the house has a reputation for being kind of "Lutens Lite," or maybe it is because the house's perfumes are, generally, more delicate and floral in composition. This is all conjuecture, I have absolutely no proof of this, but all that adds up to a subtle perception of a lack of "seriousness," I think. After al, Keiko went all in on the Loukhoum trend a few years ago; she has not one but at least three variations on its...

Today I woke up to a brutally windy March morning, with dark skies and a steadily dropping temperature hovering in the low 40s. It felt like winter was back, and I was not in the mood for a revisit of our recent blizzard or even a small taste of it. But, I was also not in the mood for a pretty little violet something. I wanted a dark and stormy iris that would capture our gray skies and the dead leaves still blowing around by the back door. I also had a brand new batch of samples that came this afternoon, and the answer was in the bag—Feu Secret. Bruno Fazzolari, one of the most articulate people on the modern perfume scene, has a lot to say about orris butter. He points out, in an interview that I now cannot find, that, in...

Après l’Ondée, is hands, down my most complemented perfume. It always makes women smile, ask me what I am wearing, where I got it, how to spell It, and if it’s at Macy’s or eUlta. Whenever I wear it, men actually follow me down the street and sometimes ask some of the same questions. It has the effect that, I suppose, many people (e.g., not crazy perfume addict connoisseur collector obsessives) look for when they imagine The Perfect Perfume. I don’t wear perfume to attract the attention of strangers, but I understand that lots of civilian users want that, so I think it’s Important to begin with this observation. Which is astonishing for a perfume that has been around for over a century, from a venerable house whose more recent...

There are not a lot of perfumes from Ramon Monegal that strike me as indisputable classics, but there are a few that really stand out—Cuirelle, Entre Naranjos, their magnificent Amber, and Impossible Iris, an iris perfume so lovable and good natured that it almost disproves Iris’s reputation as the difficult Mean Girl of perfume ingredients. This despite its undeniable and perceptible high content of rich but delicate orris butter. Because orris is the first thing you smell in initially spraying it. If you are spraying it on skin. 8 leaves a buttery impression where the very nice RM bottle sends out an even, dense, but fine mist. The scent of orris here is not a cold green early spring garden. Rather, Impossible Iris riffs on orris...

My spring rotation is not made up exclusively of iris perfumes, but between its large selection of iris options, and all the other irises I have in FB and samples, I think I can manage an iris a day. So I will use this space to post some sort impressions or thoughts, as best I can, from day to day. Today's choice is Le Labo Iris 39. It is a green iris, with a very attractive cold musk providing a base coat. Everything smells like "iris," the green iris queens like Chanel No. 19, and maybe YSL Y, but not quite so brutal I suppose the musk acts as a softening agent, and also adds another layer of something that gives an iris "impression" without requiring the ,actual, expensive, complicated, waxy, paradoxcially warm real orris...

I don’t like New Year’s resolutions, but I do like to set new goals and intentions for myself at the beginning of the year. This year, I want to accomplish three things. 1. I want to write at least one perfume review every day. Some days, I might not write any, so when I feel prolific, I will try to write more. The long term goal is to write enough reviews by this summer to get myself into the Basenotes Lounge, although I will probably end up paying for a BN Plus membership in the meantime. 2. I want to be more active outside of the SOTD thread, especially with Sync Fridays. I didn’t even realize I had a dedicated Sync Day, until today, and I realized that my BN focus is too narrow. It is hard for me to keep up with too many...