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Gucci Guilty Pour Homme ~ fragrance review

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Gucci Guilty Pour Homme + sleeping men

Gucci has just launched Gucci Guilty Pour Homme in the U.S. I always start my exploration of a new Gucci fragrance by reading Gucci PR news releases and interviews with Gucci execs; these mini-manifestos on perfume are guaranteed to prompt laughter (though they possess not a bit of wit) and a combo of shock and respect (all that Gucci cares about when it comes to a fragrance and its launch is making money…they don’t even try to convince us they regard perfume as an aesthetic creation). The pairing of Gucci with Procter & Gamble Co. over the last several years has produced some bland, inexpensive–smelling “luxury perfumes,” but the cash registers are humming. Gucci Guilty Pour Homme is expected to bring in $250 million in retail sales (globally) in its first year on shelves.1

Let’s start with humor. Discussing the success of the feminine Gucci Guilty launch last autumn, Tracy Van Heusden, senior beauty buyer, House of Fraser department stores, said, I…believe that the success of the launch is also due to the fragrance launching in [the fall]. We do see stronger results for fragrance launches in autumn and winter than in spring and summer, perhaps due to the desire for change that accompanies the change in the seasons.”2 Huh? There IS also an important change in the seasons from winter to spring…and an accompanying shift in “scent sensibilities” from dark, rich perfumes to lighter, brighter fragrances.

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Dans l’Atelier de Cezanne candle ~ home fragrance review

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Cezanne studio

Candles marketed to men usually smell of musk (“the animal in you”), wood (the untamed wilderness), musky-woods (hunting deer in the untamed wilderness), leather (baseball mitt!), vetiver (cut grass), even hamburgers (White Castle), but all those supposedly manly candle aromas smell like so many roses and chocolate-covered marshmallows compared to perfumer Olivia Giacobetti’s Dans l’Atelier de Cézanne candle; it’s the most “masculine,” austere-severe candle scent I’ve ever smelled. Dans l’Atelier de Cézanne is downright UNcomfortable; as I sniff it, I feel an ancient bottle of flammable fluid in a rusty tin bottle is on the verge of igniting, a storm of dust bunnies might suffocate me, or dry-rot could cause the floor under my feet to collapse.

Need I say…I love it?

The Dans l’Atelier de Cézanne aroma was created for the artist Vincent Beaurin and his Le Spectre installation at Paul Cézanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence last July and August. The PR materials say it all:

Nothing has changed in this ancient studio since Paul Cézanne passed away and his paintings were removed. Time has laid a veil of fine dust over it, as the Provençal heat has almost mineralized the wood of the furniture, of his easel and of the floorboards, long stained with colours, oil paints and turpentine.

Giacobetti has worked with Beaurin twice before* and was asked, this time, to concoct a perfume that captured the “essence” of Cézanne‘s workspace…

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Diptyque 34 Boulevard Saint Germain ~ fragrance review

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Diptyque 34 Boulevard Saint Germain

Happy Birthday, Diptyque! (50 is the new 40, and you still look and smell “fresh”!) How many Diptyque fragrances (not to mention soaps and candles and room sprays) have I bought in my perfume-addict years? Let’s see: L’Eau, L’Ombre dans l’Eau, Eau Lente, Olène, Ofrésia, Philosykos, Oyédo, Tam Dao, and the discontinued — why, Diptyque, WHY? —Virgilio and L’Eau Trois.

Amateur perfume detectives among you will notice I have not bought a new Diptyque fragrance since 2003’s Tam Dao. That’s a lot of years, eight, and fragrances, ditto, that have gone by without interesting me. It seems Diptyque’s current aesthetic is modern-mainstream; its perfume offerings of the last eight years stress smooth, rather linear, conservative (trying to appeal to the largest audience possible) aromas. The older Diptyque fragrances I love are bolder, weirder, niche affairs, and even when they were inspired by old-fashioned ideas or “antiquity” (L’Eau: 16th c. potpourri, Eau Lente and L’Eau Trois: ancient Greece), they are supremely wearable. I’m all for fragrance companies making money, especially companies like Diptyque with a wonderful collection of perfumes for sale, but really, can’t we get ONE daring, off-center, “wild” perfume from Diptyque once every, say, three years or so? (I’d even settle for a limited edition scent.)

To celebrate 50 years in business, Diptyque has just released 34 Boulevard Saint Germain…

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Serge Lutens Jeux de Peau ~ fragrance review

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Serge Lutens Jeux de Peau

Ah, bread! Oh, bakeries! Unless a doctor tells me I’ll start to disintegrate — quickly — if I don’t stop eating white flour, I shall munch my way through many more loaves, rolls, cakes, and cookies in my lifetime. When I was a little boy I had strange ideas about bread. Though my live-in grandmother made fresh breads once, or sometimes twice, a day, I felt “homemade” bread was no better than a homemade belt (Jethro Bodine, anyone?) or a homemade pair of shoes (the horror!) I was a clueless little snob. As the rest of my family (and neighbors and friends) devoured my grandmother’s biscuits, I insisted on store-bought bread for my meals: a soft/doughy, sweet mess/mass called Sunbeam.

Serge Lutens’ new Jeux de Peau (“skin games”) was supposedly inspired by childhood scent-memories of warm, crusty breads at little Serge’s local boulangerie. Though I’m a bit tired of food-y scents at the moment, and associate most of them with winter (please, no more cocoa or tonka bean for awhile, perfumers), my nose was “open” to the possibilities of a bread fragrance…

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Annick Goutal Le Mimosa ~ fragrance review

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Annick Goutal Le Mimosa

I love the smell of mimosa flowers (Acacia pravissima is blooming in my garden now). For me, the “perfume” that best captures the floral scent most of us associate with “mimosa” (Acacia dealbata) is Diptyque Mimosa room spray. I’ve loved many of the Annick Goutal floral fragrances, and I hoped Le Mimosa would provide a mimosa scent I could wear on my skin, not simply spray into the air.

Le Mimosa, developed by perfumer Isabelle Doyen, lists fragrance notes of peach, anise, iris, mimosa, sandalwood and white musk. Le Mimosa opens with a dry, flat note that smells like a combination of pencil shavings, cumin powder, and ‘hairy’ leather. This slightly “dirty” aroma marches thru the entire composition…only soap will remove it from skin. As Le Mimosa develops, I smell artificial “peach” and I detect, for a split second, a puff of iris, a speck of anise, and some vague “citrus.”

There’s plenty of white musk and the aforementioned “peach” in Le Mimosa’s base, but none of Le Mimosa’s notes produces a scent with the aroma of fresh mimosa blossoms (if that’s what you are looking for or expecting). What mimosa there is in Le Mimosa is faint…

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