I like candy, but in general, I’m a chocolate kind of person. I love dark chocolate, the darker the better, but I’m not a snob about it: I also love Hot Fudge Pop-Tarts, and several other treats that might more properly be called “chocolate food product” than “chocolate”. Fruit candy doesn’t interest me at all — to eat or to wear as perfume — so the recently released Demeter Jelly Belly Collection didn’t seem like likely to wow me, and by and large, it didn’t. The fragrances are based on Jelly Belly recipes, which call for popping a specific group of flavored jelly beans into your mouth to produce the desired taste effect…
Serendipitous by Serendipity 3 ~ fragrance review
Many thanks to everyone who listed their favorite chocolates* in the comments to yesterday’s post about Sonoma Scent Studio’s Bois Épicés. I ate a lot of chocolate last night while reading the recommendations, and I figured I might as well do a chocolate perfume today. Chocolate is used as an accent note in any number of fragrances, but chocolate “soliflores” (solifoods?) are relatively scarce. There is Aquolina Chocolovers, also Aftelier Cacao, the Temperare Chocolate trio by Yosh, Comptoir Sud Pacifique Amour de Cacao, and a handful of others. Serendipitous by Serendipity 3 is today’s subject; it features notes of cocoa, Tahitian vanilla and blood orange.
The ice cream parlour Serendipity 3 is something of a New York institution…
Sonoma Scent Studio Bois Epices fragrance review, with a long tangent on comfort scents
We’ve featured an unusual number of mainstream designer fragrances here over the last month, so today we’re going all the way to the other end of the spectrum. Sonoma Scent Studio is the California-based indie perfume house of self-taught perfumer Laurie Erickson, and she is one of several small etailers who have gained a following on the fragrance forum at MakeupAlley. My favorite from the line is Bois Épicés, described as “soft, warm spices over a musk/wood base”, with notes of musk, sandalwood, nutmeg, cardamom, ginger, mandarin, cedar, cypress and coffee.
I suppose everyone has their own idea about what constitutes a comfort scent. There are fragrances that so extraordinarily soothing that they function almost like spray-on Valium (Diptyque Tam Dao, Comme des Garçons Kyoto) but that don’t quite qualify as comfort scents in my book. A comfort scent must be more than just soothing: it must be the perfume equivalent of putting on your favorite pair of beat-up jeans and a sweatshirt…
Annick Goutal Eau de Camille & Eau de Charlotte ~ fragrance reviews
The Annick Goutal line occupies a rather in-between place among perfume fans — the company probably qualifies as niche based on their size and their limited distribution; still, they are available in a number of mainstream stores (three department stores in my local mall carry them), and the line doesn’t feel niche. The feminine perfumes are emphatically pretty, romantic even; they don’t, like so many niche perfumes, challenge traditional notions of what a woman ought to smell like.
Eau de Camille and Eau de Charlotte are both very much in that mold. They were created by Annick Goutal for her daughters…
L’Artisan Poivre Piquant & Piment Brulant ~ fragrance review
L’Artisan introduced Les Epices de la Passion, a coffret with three spiced “love potions”, in 2002. I’ve been having an on-again, off-again love affair with Safran Troublant since I first smelled it (more about that tomorrow), but the other two fragrances, Piment Brûlant and Poivre Piquant, I pretty much ignored after trying them briefly on test strips some time ago. Both scents were created by perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour, and since he is seriously in the running for my own little parallel-universe award for Perfumer of the Year (and I’m sure he is quite excited about it too), I thought it would be worth giving them more serious attention.
Piment Brûlant was inspired by the Aztec drink xocolatl, a bitter mixture of chocolate and cornmeal spiked with chili peppers, cinnamon, achiote and other spices; the Aztec emperor Montezuma reputedly drank up to 50 cups every day from a golden goblet…