Saturday, March 4, 2017

Etat Libre d'Orange You or Someone Like You: Chandler Burr Shares His Inspiration Behind the Fragrance

The staccato bravado of État Libre d'Orange's fragrant creations is the stuff of legend. (Who can forfeit their sentiments upon smelling the infamous Secretions Magnifiques for example?). The credibility and creative inquisitiveness of Chandler Burr is the stuff of steadfast reality. Imagine combing the two into a single item that you can actually claim as your own.

To make it short and concise, Chandler Burr, author of the novel You or Someone Like You among other works, former NY Times scent critic and curator of museum exhibitions and scent dinners, has art directed a perfume for  État Libre d'Orange that officially launches on April 3, 2017, named You or Someone Like You.

Here is what Chandler told me about the inspiration behind the new niche perfume launch You or Someone Like You.

 "There is an Englishwoman who doesn’t exist. Her name is Anne Rosenbaum, and I created her in my novel “You Or Someone Like You.” She lives, with her movie executive husband, in a house high in the blue air of the Hollywood Hills, just off Mulholland Drive, overlooking Los Angeles above the 101. 

 I’m fascinated by LA, this strange dream factory that exists in its eternal, relentless present tense, its otherworldly beauty both effortlessly natural and ingeniously artificial. A movie that makes movies. Palm trees, the symbol of LA, aren’t natural there. They were imported, placed in the hills, “but then,” Anne observes to you, “so was I.” 

Los Angeles’ smells mesmerize, the astringent mint/green of eucalyptus, wild jasmine vines unselfconsciously climbing the stop signs, catalyzed car exhaust, hot California sun on ocean water (although “You” contains no jasmine or eucalyptus; if you need to know what it’s made of, “You” is not for you). 

When Etat Libre d’Orange approached me about creative directing, my perfumer Caroline Sabas and I created not a “perfume” -- people in Los Angeles don’t wear perfume – but a specific scent, the scent someone like Anne would wear, an Angelino Englishwoman high in the hills in the blue air."

Sounds like something I should dig with the fervor of a scent hound. Stay tuned because we have an exclusive interview with Chandler Burr coming up soon. 

NB. There is an Etat Liubre d'Orange discovery set sold on Amazon here and another on on this link.

Free shipping & Gift Draw at Neela Vermeire Creations

Good news for those who love the Neela Vermeire Creations line. Here is the news snippet I was informed of.

"To celebrate March and International Women's Day next week,
we are offering free shipping only within the EU until the 15th of March and you have a chance to win one of our special numbered amethyst bottle of Mohur Extrait (50 ml) when you purchase any 60 ml EDP flacon."

You know what to do...

www.neelavermeire.com

Monday, February 20, 2017

Dame Perfumery New Musk Oil: fragrance review

There are as many types of musk as there are flowers in the field. Musk has diverged from a single ingredient to a pleiad of genres within a scent group. Although most divide musks roughly into either the "clean" or "dirty" camp, depending on whether they replicate respectively laundry detergent ingredients or the nether region gland secretions of a small animal, it is possible to profit of both worlds.

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New Musk Oil belongs to the first camp, yet, without embracing any characteristic of the second, it manages to eschew the clinical sterility that some of its compatriots share. It's clean to the degree that a freshly washed apricot fruit is clean enough to eat. But that does not detract from the fact that it's a succulent, living thing in the palm of your hand, and that you can feel the palpitations of your own heart settle down as you consume it in abandoned pleasure. New Musk Oil is like that; it possesses an unusual fruity quality about it, under the primness of the more standard lily of the valley that's par for the course within this genre of clean musky scents, which recalls an apricot flavor. In fact I'd venture that it shares DNA with another lightly apricot-tinged fragrance in the line, namely Soliflore Osmanthus (osmanthus is a tree with small apricot-smelling blossoms). Makes sense.

Considering that the sensuous application of an oil to one's skin uses touch as the cornerstone of predisposing for the "my skin but better" effect, and that New Musc Oil shares the exact same formula with the alcohol-based New Musk Man cologne, I'd say that with this pretty and lasting oil from Dame Perfumery Scottsdale has won the hearts of women. Not only in the capacity of being attracted to the man who wears the scent, but in the capacity of claiming the oil as their very own.

Like the best out there it looks wholesome but holds a treasure of nuance inside. 

Sunday, February 12, 2017

Diptyque Philosykos: fragrance review

For reasons not very difficult to parse Diptyque's Philosykos is one of my favorite summer perfumes and any time I want to be eased into a warm weather reverie that comes replete with siestas under a generously shady tree and the smell of its dusty foliage and warm, solidly dependable bark, I reach out my hand for it. The idea of spraying Philosykos on one's self is of course synonymous with the elation conferred upon thee on a hot summer's day. But one trip to rainy Ulm, Germany, convinced me of the unsung merits of Diptyque's iconic fragrance at times of melancholy as well.

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Right when the weather was gloomy over the muddy Danube, when the downcast skies of lead threatened with more rain and more desperation of the particular kind that an endless Sunday afternoon cooped up in a small room spells out, I reached in my handbag for olfactory solace. Restricted from airport travel regulations my stash regretably had to remain back home: frustration! But a couple of trusty solids had piggybacked themselves, stacked upon each other. Among them Philosykos, the lover of figs.

And lo and behold, an ordinary yet scenic scenery, like that in mount Pelion which inspired it, unfolded beneath my eyes upon it melting on my wrists. A stone-built cottage with grey-taupe stone roof tiles shimmering in the scorching August sun. A tiny cistern with a bucket going down for watering and the cicadas singing incessantly in the still of noon. The sweetish mix of dust, earth, milky coconut odour off the barks, crackling and oozing fragrant resin, and two small children running down the slope to the boardwalk towards the sea. "Wait for me Alexander! Just wait!"

It's home away from home.

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