Louanges Profanes 19
Parfumerie Generale (2008)

Sunny and straight ahead orange blossom-led floral. A slip of a thing in a white shift dress, which somehow manages to be both charming and banal.

A powdery (or is it milky? I can't pin the word or substance) neroli. I smell vanilla and amber as well, but it's the Benzoin. I got many positive comments when I wore this sample, so projection is perfect. I think it's worth buying a bottle.

Genre: Floral

Louanges Profanes opens on soft citrus and sugary floral notes that are almost punishingly sweet. The scent then becomes intensely powdery, with only the rapid emergence of some faintly astringent spices and an animalic, indole-laden lily and neroi accord to pull it back from the brink of unbearable mawkishness. All of this occurs within the first five minutes of wear, in a flurry of olfactory activity that flirts with disaster like the best of physical comedians. In the short time it takes Louanges Profanes to settle into its spicy, indolic white flower heart my respiratory rate is elevated and my knuckles go white. The landing is surprisingly soft, but the highly conventional arrival point is as much a disappointment as a relief after so wild a ride. It's like watching a team of brilliant pastry chefs laboring frantically amidst clattering pans, roaring ovens, and pillars of smoke, with only a tray of brownies to show for the effort.

The spiced lily and neroli accord rests on a soft woody foundation, and the composition becomes cleaner and greener on its way to an extremely soapy, powdery drydown that would not be out of place in an Estée Lauder scent like Alliage or White Linen . Sillage and projection are both more than adequate, and Louanges Profanes has several hours' worth of staying power, but for a high-price niche perfume I find it awfully generic. You can get more interesting white flower fragrances without the cash or the effort required to track this scent down.

by comparison we suffer When I think about perfume I tend to rely on literary or verbal devices. By literary I don't mean particularly lofty in nature, I just mean that we use tricks of the tongue and the pen to get at perfume. I'll use visual allusions, fictions of memory, description and tidbits of narrative. The trouble is that all that words offer is comparison. The device I lean most heavily on is metaphor. 'Perfume X is like a night on the town in Elizabeth, New Jersey.' 'Post-reformulation, chypre Y is a child who's lost her teddy bear.' Relying on words to think about perfume has two effects. The first is a that by seeking connections, it fosters imagination and creative thought. The second is a demonstration of how few tools of analysis for scent our current vocabulary supplies. My problem with metaphor, though, is that it's as much a weak translation as it is true metaphor. The process goes like this: Smell a perfume. Pause, for 10 seconds to two weeks. Piece together words to tell a story. I question whether this method can result in anything greater than the merely clever. You'll hear very talented perfumers talk about story telling and narrative and its importance in perfumery. We perfume users, though, should question this sort of romanticism. Do perfumers who rely on story tell us stories, or do they use story as a device, a sort of imagery that aids them in designing perfume? Can a perfume truly tell a single reproduceable story, not just a subjective olfactory experience, to multiple wearers? Sometimes smelling a scent or fragrance will lead to a sort of sensory hallucination, that blanketing state you feel when smelling a certain perfume, typically one that you haven't smelled in a while. But this is largely a function of memory, and our understanding of the association between sense and memory muddy if not simply incorrect. Every now and then, though, a perfume will launch you into a seemingly more direct sensory experience. The experience doesn't trigger or rely on memory, it feels new. Smelling Parfumerie Générale Louanges Profanes for the first time gave this sort of experience. It gave me a feeling of viscosity. A fluid consistency that isn't thick, chewy, creamy or even watery. It suggested a fluid I had never experienced before. On that had a thick/thin, lubricant viscosity like silicone along with a sweetness that hovered between liquor, elixir and sap. It made me focus on the qualities of sweetness, like the way that glycerin has no smell, but is sweet when you touch it to your tongue, or the way honeysuckle nectar smells and tastes the same. To categorize, Louanges Profanes is a floriental, an orange blossom/amber, to be specific. But this is an instance where breaking the perfume down into its scent descriptors isn't particularly useful, because doing so doesn't capture the experience of the perfume, it just tells you what's in it. The sensation of fluidity and slickness eventually fades as what seemed liquid starts to dry. The perfume continues to suggest states of matter. Louanges Profanes feels like it dries into a set piece, and gives the nose equivalent of drying brushstrokes. Like those deliberate, voluminous stabs of paint you would find in one of the Mulberry Tree paintings by van Gogh. The paint and the perfume both retained an appearance of fluidity as they dried, capturing the appearance of movement and action. On that note of bad visual comparison, the end.

I do not believe that it is only because of the opening phoneme, but Parfumerie Generale LOUANGES PROFANES strikes me as vaguely reminiscent of the Keiko Mecheri LOUKHOUM series. I am working from memory here, having fully drained all three of my LOUKHOUM samples quite some time ago, but looking at the notes I do see that both contain, in addition to a huge dollop of creamy sweetness, hawthorn.

This is a very beautiful and complex oriental floral perfume, which altogether avoids the usual clichés and rampant fads, above all, vanilla patchouli. I find this composition much more oriental than floral, and the benzoin-rich drydown is simply scrumptious, with serious addiction potential!

Interestingly enough, other reviewers (at The Other Site), have compared LOUANGES to another perfume with the same opening phoneme, LOULOU! However, since I do not suffer the unmistakeable LOULOU plastic-madness headache upon donning this far more compelling and appealing creation, I must respectfully disagree...

What an amazing opening this fragrance has -- emitting a very sweet, waxy and almost plasticky floral aroma. The drydown is just as brilliant with the benzoin, leathery incense and creamy resinous wood lasting for hours. I think Pierre is a big fan of Christopher Sheldrake at Lutens -- this fragrance is like a paean to him.

PS. God knows what Luca Turin was smelling when he reviewed this.