It’s Floriental Friday! (Also, Mole Day, and a few birthdays: Johnny Carson, Pelé, Anita Roddick.) Our community project for today: wear a floriental, if you have one.
What fragrance did you pick? As always, do chime in with your scent of the day even if you’re not participating in the community project.
I went with Serge Lutens Datura Noir.
Reminder: on 10/30, we’re doing Emotionally scented…
It has been the top-selling fragrance among multiple countries for three consecutive months. The launch is also their largest of it’s [sic] kind for the United States in 20 years. The initial sales projection for the fragrance has since been shattered, now corrected to reflect roughly $200 million in its first year.1
***
[Jose Manuel] Albesa [of Puig] said Good Girl is “breaking historical records.” The eau de parfum has doubled both sell-in and sell-out objectives in all markets and has been top selling female fragrance in several countries for three consecutive months, he added.
It’s unclear whether the success is due to the scent’s atypical packaging (it’s housed in a teetering stiletto bottle); a racier than usual marketing and advertising campaign with a tag line of “It’s So Good to Be Bad”; the juice itself (jasmine is a key accord, like many of the house’s fragrances that came before it), or a combination of the three — but it’s working.2
Who knew? It’s easy to forget how entirely unrepresentative our scent of the day polls are — best selling fragrances sometimes pass perfumistas right by…
I’m still happily working my way through a handful of sample vials from the independent perfumery 4160Tuesdays, and my latest crush from this house is Tart’s Knicker Drawer, a “floriental amber” with top notes of bergamot, orange, grapefruit and pink peppercorn; heart notes of raspberry, rose, jasmine, sandalwood, cedarwood, violet, tuberose and guiacwood; and basenotes of amber, musk, vanilla, benzoin and tobacco.
“Tart’s knicker drawer” is the phrase that 4160Tuesdays founder and perfumer Sarah McCartney’s grandmother used to describe women who wore too much perfume (and whose behavior was therefore questionable); McCartney created this fragrance after she’d spent a long day in her lab and was scented with the traces of six different perfumes-in-progress. When she tweeted, “I’m about to get in the E3 bus smelling like a tart’s boudoir,” she got so many enthusiastic responses (“Can I buy some?!”) that she decided to concoct a proper perfume inspired by the experience…
When Mandy Aftel announced her latest fragrance, Aftelier Amber Tapestry, she billed it as a “comfort scent.” I heard “amber” and “comfort,” and I anticipated a real snickerdoodle of a perfume — a thick, golden, spicy, chewy scent cookie. (Not that this is bad! Set me in front of a pile of snickerdoodles and watch me go.) Yes, Amber Tapestry is warm and resinous with a touch of cinnamon, but cookies don’t pack jasmine, and lots of it. This could be a floral perfume lover’s new favorite oriental fragrance.
Amber Tapestry’s notes include yellow mandarin, jasmine grandiflorum, jasmine sambac, pear, heliotropin, labdanum, ambreine, cinnamon, coumarin, maltol, benzoin, ambergris and castoreum. Just to head off concerns, the pear isn’t discernable as fruit salad, and the cinnamon, while faintly noticeable, doesn’t give Amber Tapestry a gourmand vibe…
Dawn Spencer Hurwitz recently launched several new fall fragrances, and my personal favorite of the bunch is Souvenir de Malmaison, “a new twist on a romantic classic: spicy carnation and rose meet in an ambery, wood fragrance.” Souvenir de la Malmaison is a floriental with notes of lemon, bergamot, black pepper, ylang ylang, rose, carnation, jasmine, cinnamon, clove, labdanum, ambergris, sandalwood, cedar, patchouli, tolu balsam and vanilla.
I have a weakness for good historical references in perfumery, and this scent has a few. First: Malmaison was the elegant residence of Napoleon Bonaparte and his consort Joséphine de Beauharnais, a château with a legendary rose garden overseen by Joséphine herself. Second: Souvenir de Malmaison is a rose cultivar created in 1843 and named in honor of the rose-loving Empress and her gardens. And in a related bit of recent perfume history, as perfume aficionados may wistfully recall, there used to be a carnation fragrance named Floris Malmaison…