It seems the more you throw into a perfume formula the less you smell (as in individual fragrance notes). Looking over the Naomi Goodsir Or du Sérail ingredients list (apple, orange, mango, coconut, honey, rum, tobacco, clary sage, maté, amber, davana, beeswax, cocoa, geranium, ylang ylang, oak, cedar, vanilla, labdanum, musk)…then sniffing Or du Sérail…bears this theory out. Most of those notes just blend in.
I’d love to have a magical machine; I’d place a perfume in the Per/Fume-Separator and order it: “Remove cocoa!” “Delete maté!” “Obliterate beeswax!” It would be interesting to see what notes do make a discernible difference in a scent (and truly, we can’t trust note lists all that much anyway).
Or du Sérail goes on strong and “sticky”: with spiced apples, loads of honey, shredded tobacco leaves mixed with moist grated coconut flesh, the subtle smokiness of oak wood, and a hint of dirty musk mixing with amber. If someone had put this perfume under my nose and asked me to guess the perfume house/creator I would have been dead wrong (I would've said Serge Lutens/Christopher Sheldrake, not Naomi Goodsir/Bertrand Duchaufour).
This is an easy review, because how Or du Sérail begins…Or du Sérail ends; let’s call it a solitabac since all notes, with the possible exception of coconut, are subservient to tobacco. I love the smell of tobacco, whether that note is presented sweet (as here) or slightly unclean. I liked Or du Sérail well enough on first wearing, but as I compared it side by side to other favorite tobacco scents (Costamor Tabacca, Tom Ford Private Blend Tobacco Vanille, Serge Lutens Fumerie Turque, even Viktor & Rolf Spicebomb and Diptyque Volutes), Or du Sérail smelled too dense, even leaden (of course, one person's leaden is another person's profonde). What Or du Sérail needs, for me anyway, is some of what William Merritt Chase provides in the painting I chose to illustrate this post: some cockatoo "pink" (rose? carnation? lily? guava?) and air from its fluttering wings, a glint of gold cutting through the dark sweetness — some of the sparkle of the peeled, juicy orange in the little page's hand.
Naomi Goodsir Or du Sérail, for all its heft, produces sillage for only a short time, and fades away on my skin in less than four hours; it's unisex and currently available at Luckyscent, $187 for 50 ml Eau de Parfum.
Note: top image is The Turkish Page [cropped] by William Merritt Chase; via Wikimedia Commons.
Love this review.
Elisa, thanks!
I like sweet tobacco scents too, like Volutes and Chergui—or in very small doses, Back to Black and Fifi Chachnil—and I liked this one when I tried my sample, but I think “too dense” exactly describes why I haven’t worn it a second time. I also like Naomi Goodsir’s Cuir Velours, though, and the same description could easily apply to that one.
Janice, Goodsir seems to love hefty perfumes…still haven’t had the chance to try her leather scent.
I too like my perfumes with a little airiness! And, though I have a preference for strong perfumes I think I may have met my match with Tobacco Vanille, thats some seriously nuclear juice
Merlin: well I doubt you’d like this one! TV is “radiant”…more sillage…but Or du Serail is stronger overall.
That was brilliant of you to illustrate your review with an image of what the perfume could be, but isn’t. Great review.
Sajini: thanks! (I am a sucker for a cockatoo! HA!)
Oh, I’d trade my vintage Guerlains for that Per/Fume-Separator machine – that would be the ideal way to learn about perfume notes and composition, wouldn’t it!
Tobacco is really the new chypre – it’s the last complex, natural scent that remains strangely untouched (so far) by IFRA, which seems paradoxical, since other tobacco products are so hazardous.
Glad you reminded me of Volutes – this is the time of year to get it out.
Noz…so true. I was wondering about tobacco and IFRA since I looked it up to see if it was edible (as in: you can swallow it, not just chew it). When I smelled this perfume I imagined a coconut-tobacco cream inside a dark chocolate truffle. But no one advises eating tobacco. HA! And isn’t nicotine in growing tobacco plants harmful too…as in field workers being in contact with it?
Kevin, I actually had a tobacco vanilla flavored chocolate truffle recently. The chocolatier (from Atlanta) told me it was inspired by his mother’s Tom Ford Tobacco Vanille perfume (yet another tobacco scent). I asked how he got the tobacco flavoring, and he said that he had steeped pipe tobacco in the cream used to make the truffle filling. I suffered no ill effects, but it wasn’t my favorite flavor – needed fine-tuning. I love your idea of adding coconut!
He did a bourbon truffle that was divine – THAT was my fav. Which reminds me of a fav Duchaufour: Frapin “1697” absolu de parfum. It will be cold enough for that one before too long…
Noz: i know…I saw the first (gulp) leaves changing color today at the arboretum!
W. M. Chase is an old favorite of mine. I enjoyed the review, too.
J: Thanks! I never get to see his work in person “out West!” In Seattle for sure….
I have to comment on this review as it refers to my namesake and we have lots of noisy cockatoos in our neighborhood. Not the pink one in the picture but large, marauding white ones with yellow head quiffs. I associate them with the destruction of fragrance as they chew away at my roses and geraniums! My favorite tobacco scents are Hove Habanero which I bought in New Orleans and Slumberhouse Jeke.
Ouch! We have cockatoos galore but they rarely come into my garden. I love my roses, so I must be lucky. Never thought of their crests as ‘quiffs’. I love it when I find one of the yellow feathers on the ground. I bring them home and keep them.
Annemarie, Cockatoo…SO cool that you have cockatoos flying about your yards!
Cockatoo…I need to try some of the Hove scents…Habanera sounds good.
Oh my, yes: “we can’t trust note lists all that much anyway”. At this point I don’t trust them at all to give me a sense of whether I might like a perfume. Can’t tell whether I d not have a refined nose or whether perfume houses are just making notes up. Leaning to the latter…
AnnieA: it seems most ingredients lists are more fantasy than reality…agree. And you never really can tell what something will smell like from those lists…I used to get burned all the time in my early perfume days…buying unsniffed based on descriptions!
I loved everything about this scent except for the longevity and projection, which are poor and unacceptable to me in a scent of this price range. Too bad, as I found it otherwise very enjoyable.