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Browsing by tag: gorilla perfume

Top 10 Spring Fragrances 2013

Posted by Jessica on 5 April 2013 84 Comments

Springtime Landscape, Béla Iványi-Grünwald

I can’t believe it’s been five years since my last Top Ten Spring Fragrances list, but yes, a look back confirms that fact. My tastes haven’t shifted much since then, yet I can somehow come up with plenty of new favorites. Of course, there are the fragrances that I consider part of my springtime “hall of fame”: Guerlain Apres l’Ondée and Chamade, Frederic Malle En Passant. These come into rotation every March or April, come rain or come shine (and lately, it’s been mostly rain). But, beyond these classics, I’m easily able to compile a list of other fragrances I’ve been wearing or will be wearing over the next month or two.

What to wear when the calendar says Spring, but the weather is still chilly and damp and dreary? I love to don Frederic Malle L’Eau d’Hiver during that indecisive kind of weather, perhaps because it walks a fine line between warm and cool, soft and crisp…

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5 Perfumes: Ylang-ylang

Posted by Erin on 16 September 2011 47 Comments

ylang ylang bloom

Like many others who share my hobby, I believe, I was wary of florals when I started my perfume education. I was willing to countenance many a gourmand or woody amber barbarity, but I avoided flowers — and especially white flowers. I was going through a phase of sampling niche series perfumes — the Comme des Garçons incense fragrances, the Bois line of Serge Lutens — and I regarded white flowers as unsuitable material for such elaboration. Comme des Garçons White, purporting to be a more floral alternative to their original Eau de Parfum, instead smelled quite properly of sour spices and wood, and I viewed Lutens’ Un Lys and Tubéreuse Criminelle as singular and humorous experiments, fascinating to sniff on a blotter, I thought, but created with a kind of magisterial, Gallic indifference towards anybody wearing them. As a smell, white floral notes were heady, insistent and complex: in a word, “perfumey”. In perfume, didn’t that make them too, well… obvious?

But I couldn’t help noticing I was drawn to ylang-ylang. I had dried blotters all over my place at that time, and still do: I use them as bookmarks, clothing or car fresheners and post-its. Though I was doggedly wearing my modern roots and resins, my incense and tea scents, I was forced to admit that I stood transfixed when a lush tropical cloud of ylang breathed up out of my reference books, purse or underwear drawer. There were so many facets to the smell…

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5 Perfumes for: a Mint Refresher

Posted by Erin on 20 January 2011 131 Comments

mint leaves

Smell is the most associative sense. For years, they have dyed both men’s colognes and sports drinks like Gatorade the exact shade of blue of the absorbing liquid in maxi pad commercials and nobody seems bothered by this, except me — and, well, maybe now you as well. Something I never overhear: “I can’t listen to Bartók anymore, because John Bonham of Led Zeppelin has ruined me for timpani.” Yet every scent enthusiast is familiar with the type of scenario where you apply careful dabs of your most cherished new sample and you are snuffling away at the baptized spot on the back of your hand, squinting and considering every facet, when your spouse breezes in and announces casually: “It smells like Lifebuoy soap in here.” And you are NEVER ABLE TO WEAR IT AGAIN. The band-aid aspect of fragrances with black pepper, the ham in lily soliflores, a whiff of Creamsicle wherever and whenever it is found: once smelled, it haunts you forever.

Perhaps no note in perfumery has suffered more for its associations than mint. The cost of our modern obsession with smelling fresh has been that there are some of us who regularly wear fragrances that evoke the burnt dust of a blown computer CPU, but refuse to wear minty scents on the grounds that we are reminded of toothpaste, mouthwash and chewing gum…

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Things that make you feel differently about perfumes

Posted by Robin on 16 November 2010 3 Comments

Mark and Simon Constantine of Lush talk about the inspirations for the Gorilla Perfumes at Lush range. Includes video of the gallery opening in London over the summer (Jessica reported on the New York event here). Almost 10 minutes long (and unfortunately ends most suddenly in the middle of a sentence).

3 perfumes: Le Labo Another 13, Jo Malone English Pear & Freesia, Lust by Gorilla Perfume

Posted by Robin on 26 October 2010 84 Comments

Three perfumes — Le Labo Another 13, Jo Malone English Pear & Freesia and Lust by Gorilla Perfume at Lush — in search of a theme. Sorry folks, we have no theme.

Le Labo Another 13

Le Labo Another 13

Le Labo’s new Another 13, their limited edition fragrance with AnOther magazine, is one of several recent ambrox-heavy1 scents. Unlike Juliette Has A Gun’s Not A Perfume, this one is actually a perfume, that is, someone (in this case, perfumer Nathalie Lorson) took the time to mix the ambrox with other notes (in this case, apple, pear, green citrus and ambrette).

Anyone remember Escentric 02 by Escentric Molecules? That was another ambrox vehicle, and despite the completely different notes (it featured vetiver, muscone, orris, elderflower extract and hedione), they’re not as different as they sound. Maybe anything with lots of ambrox is going to end up smelling mostly like ambrox? Mind you, they’re far from identical…

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