“Animalic” is a buzzword floating around the industry, now that the minimalist, clean trend has given way (at least in high-fashion niche circles) to more feral fragrance clouds. Maybe it’s the desire of millennials to reclaim their beastly odors in an age of technological detachment, but fragrance buyers are newly excited to smell as if they come from an elegant zoo.
— Read more at We’re Animals, After All at the New York Times. Hat tip to Galbanumgal!
I like living with old things. I love my small collection of vintage dresses and jewelry, and when I buy new clothing and adornments, I gravitate towards vintage-inspired styles. My husband and I buy used books rather than new ones whenever we can. Most of the furniture in our home is older than we are. I spend my workdays thinking and talking about art history, with an emphasis on the “history” part. Many of my perfumes, not surprisingly, also tend towards the “retro.”
Indie line Dawn Spencer Hurwitz recently launched Rendezvous, a fragrance that’s a throwback to the animalic perfumes of the mid-twentieth century, and naturally I was curious…
Barbara Herman named her new perfume house Eris Parfums after the Greek goddess of war and strife. Herman draws our attention away from war and toward a story where Eris, banned from a party, tosses in a golden apple with the words on it, “Who’s the fairest”? As Herman says, “I love the idea of a party-crashing, trouble-making Greek goddess who inspires creativity and subversion!”
When asked about influences for Eris Parfums, she references the “emotional effect vintage animalic fragrances like Robert Piguet’s Baghari, Lanvin’s Rumeur and Chanel’s Cuir de Russie” had on her. “It was the voluptuous, sensuous, 3D and emotional aspect of these fragrances that compelled me,” she says. “They smelled good but their impact went beyond that. It was that extra impact of animalics I wanted to return to perfume.”
Perfumer Antoine Lie developed Eris Parfums’s first three fragrances…
Tabac Tabou is the latest from French niche line Parfum d’Empire. It’s sort of limited edition — the brand says it will be produced yearly in limited quantities, with the year of production listed on the label.
Tabac Tabou was high on my “can’t wait to sample” list, not least because I so loved the fairly recent Azemour Les Orangers and Corsica Furiosa (the fragrance released between those two, Musc Tonkin, I admittedly didn’t much care about either way). Plus: tobacco, narcissus, fresh hay, honey? That sounds most excellent, in fact, it sounded so excellent to me that I’ll repeat the description, originally from Luckyscent:
In Tabac Tabou, the tobacco leaf arrives folded in whiffs of fresh hay and wild landscape, rich and utterly untamed…
Today’s subject, skanky perfumes. From A Perfumista lexicon:
Skanky: a fragrance with animalic or other “sexy” notes. Skanky has pejorative connotations in “regular” slang, but among many perfumistas, it is meant as a compliment. The use of the term to apply to perfume was popularized by March at Perfume Posse.
We’d like to know…
1. What’s your favorite skanky perfume…