Happy last Friday of the year! It’s also the fifth day of Christmas (five golden rings) and the fourth day of Kwanzaa (Ujamaa: cooperative economics). Our community project for today: wear a fragrance with myrrh, if you have one. Thanks go to Kanuka for the suggestion!
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 Hermès Myrrhe Églantine…
Isabelle Doyen and Camille Goutal were inspired by beauty rituals of the harem to create Annick Goutal Les Orientalistes — a trio of scents (Ambre Fétiche, Myrrhe Ardente and Encens Flamboyant) released at the end of 2007. I think it’s time to enact a moratorium on evoking the past in perfume advertising and promotion, since most ad executives and copywriters apparently skipped history classes. Perhaps the young women of the harem enjoyed their beauty rituals; I sincerely hope, in some small way, the costly items in their toiletry cases and incense boxes made up for the fact they had (most likely) been kidnapped, enslaved and separated from their families forever. Oh yes, there were also those pesky eunuchs and the sultan’s controlling mother to contend with, not to mention stress-inducing rivalries between concubines that sometimes led to murder — or banishment from the harem (which usually resulted in a life of poverty).
I’m wiping all thoughts of “the harem” from my mind and enjoying Les Orientalistes as fragrances that pay homage to the art of perfumery in the Middle East…
Myrrh is one of my favorite fragrance notes. I love the smell of myrrh and I burn the resin as incense. I always pay attention to fragrances containing myrrh (that is, when myrrh has a starring role in a composition) so when i Profumi di Firenze released Mirra (Myrrh), I expected myrrh to play a prominent role, but after smelling it I had to ask: “Mirra, where is the myrrh?”
Mirra’s notes are Ethiopian myrrh, incense, woods and vanilla…
L’Eau Trois, Diptyque’s third fragrance release, is one of my favorite colognes. It launched in 1975 and has notes of myrrh, myrtle, oregano, cistus, pine, laurel, thyme, and rosemary. L’Eau Trois is described by Diptyque as “the resinous scent of aromatic shrubs from the mountainous coastline of Northern Greece.”
I love the smell of myrrh and it is the main attraction in L’Eau Trois…