Xinu OroNardo ~ fragrance review

Posted by Kevin on 29 March 2025 18 Comments

I fell in love with the scent of tuberose flowers in Los Angeles; every week, huge piles of tuberose stalks would be delivered to the big downtown flower market. A two-foot-long individual stalk was $3.50! (A laughable figure these days.) A work friend would go to the flower market every other Friday to pick up ten stalks — five for her home and five for the office. Weeks and weeks would pass when I’d smell fresh tuberose flowers almost every day. Heaven.

At the same time, Robert Piguet Fracas (the Pierre Negrin version) was a huge hit in Hollywood. Wherever I went — the museum, the movies, Grand Central Market, my dentist (the worst place to smell Fracas, believe me!) — I was knocked in the nostrils by the most powerful perfume version of tuberose. Hell…

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Trudon Versailles candle ~ home fragrance review

Posted by Kevin on 14 March 2025 21 Comments

After decades of scented candle experimentation — low, medium and high (we’re talking price points) — I’ve come to realize the aromas inside a jar don’t always match the price tags. Many expensive candles smell cheap or ordinary and some inexpensively priced candles smell heavenly and high end. (And smelling cold wax in a boutique display candle won’t tell you how it will smell once lit.) Buying candles gobbles up money and you can end up feeling blessed or cursed when the moment of truth arrives and match flame hits wick.

Over the years, trial and error has led me back to two candle-making fragrance houses — Astier de Villatte and Trudon. I realized this recently when looking at a gorilla rack in my basement that holds my vases all the candle jars I’ve saved to repurpose…

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Astier de Villatte Ambre Liquide ~ fragrance review

Posted by Kevin on 28 February 2025 21 Comments

Drawn straight from the fantastical Middle Ages and the legendary pomander – that perfume-jewel used to ensure good health for body and soul – Ambre Liquide, like a precious talisman, exhales a marvelous amber, vanilla and slightly sweet scent with mystical, comforting powers.

Reinterpreted today by Dominique Ropion from an incredible recipe dating from 1348, rich in fragrant ingredients to ward off the Black Death and the forces of evil, its intensely fragrant formula immediately transports us to another world. — Astier de Villatte

For many of us, a ‘pomander’ is a fresh orange studded with cloves (the dried unopened flower buds of the Syzygium aromaticum tree). To express my own opinion on pomanders, I’ll take the liberty of tweaking Greta Garbo’s first spoken line onscreen in the 1930 film Anna Christie — “Gimme a pomander, lots of cloves on the sides, and don’t be stingy, baby!”¹ In other words, if you’re going to go easy on the cloves, don’t bother making a pomander!

From the late 14^th century thru the 17^th century, a pomander (pomme d’ambre) could be a clove-studded orange, a spice-filled orange or cloth bag, an apple-shaped item formed from ground and heated resins mixed in rose water and coated in musks and spices, or a piece of jewelry that housed fragrant perfume materials…

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Astier de Villatte Trois Parfums Historiques: Le Dieu Bleu ~ fragrance review

Posted by Kevin on 13 April 2023 12 Comments

Coming from the depths of the Egyptian age, Le Dieu Bleu exhales its divine and mysterious perfume, as if extracted from a supernatural universe. Intended for the gods, rising up are heady scents of aromatic herbs, saps, roots, and bark, destined to induce a meditative state, with powers of the beyond…its wonderful lively, intoxicating scents of woody honeyed broom, mystical and heady myrrh, green and fresh lentisk, and fruity opoponax, carry us away to the colorful splendors of the temples and frescoes of…Ancient Egypt. — Astier de Villatte

Le Dieu Bleu (one of Astier de Villatte’s Trois Parfums Historiques; see Les Nuits and Artaban) was inspired by kyphi (which I’ve written about before on Now Smell This). Many recipes for this storied scent include: Cyperus longus (with a ginger odor), juniper berries, raisins, wine, honey, resin of the pistachio tree (mastic), Calamus odoratus, broom, rose-scented grass from Egypt, myrrh, henna and mint. To this list, Greeks added cinnamon, nard (spikenard), cardamom, sesame and saffron.

Kyphi, apart from ceremonial and personal use as incense, was ingested as a medicine and made into breath-freshening pastilles…

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Astier de Villatte Trois Parfums Historiques: Artaban ~ fragrance review

Posted by Kevin on 12 April 2023 15 Comments

Hailed for the incredible lavishness of its formula, no less than twenty-four herbs imported at great expense from the most distant lands, this “royal perfume” was the idol of the wealthy Romans. They enthusiastically soaked themselves with it at every opportunity, as was the fashion of the time. Reinterpreted by Dominique Ropion, Artaban is a pure concentrate of the wonders of the plant universe. Delight in its fragrant scents – bitter and sweet marjoram, cardamom with a spicy fruity taste, nard with earthy, resinous and woody accords, and green and herbaceous calamus with multiple fragrant facets. — Astier de Villatte

Artaban, one of three fragrances in Astier de Villatte’s Trois Parfums Historiques collection (the others are Les Nuits and Le Dieu Bleu), was inspired by a recipe recorded by Pliny the Elder of a lavish perfume created in Parthia (and used with gusto by ancient Romans). The perfume’s list of ingredients was long: ben nut juice and oil (extracted from the Moringa oleifera), wine, honey, costus, cinnamon, cardamom, mint, myrrh, cassia, styrax, labdanum (rockrose), balsam, aromatic reeds, fragrant rush from Syria, oenanthe (water parsley flower), henna, broom, opoponax, saffron, souchet (tiger nut), marjoram, lotos (the yellowish resin provided by a ferrule from Syria or the seed of the lotus from Egypt) and spikenard (also known as ‘nard’ or Indian lemongrass).

Ancient Romans went even further than today’s biggest buyer of perfume…

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