Say you adore Guerlain Shalimar’s feel of silk velvet amber and stained glass, but its lemon is too sharp or its civet turns your stomach. Or maybe Shalimar is too recognizably Shalimar, and you don’t want to be so easy to peg. It could be you simply crave a throwback oriental fragrance with more sophistication than the average department store amber. If so, try a sniff of Papillon Bengale Rouge…
A few weeks ago, I ambled down to Fumerie to see what’s new. Tracy pulled a tester of Jovoy Remember Me from the shelf behind her and said, “Have you smelled this one?” I hadn’t. “I barely finish spraying it on a strip,” she told me, “And customers say, ‘I’ll take it’.”
What kind of fragrance reels someone in so quickly and surely? I had to try it. She sent me home with a sample…
Aura is the latest pillar from Thierry Mugler (I know, I know, it’s Mugler now, not Thierry Mugler, but my brain is not quite ready to make the switch). I have an ambivalent relationship with the brand’s feminine pillar fragrances. Their debut fragrance, 1992’s Angel, was a masterpiece, but not one I want to wear. I really like a few of the flankers, though, and have almost bought Angel Liqueur de Parfum any number of times. I thought Angel Eau Sucrée was fun and I thought Angel Muse was fantastic, but I didn’t buy either of those either.
The success of Angel is often attributed to its unusual (at the time) overdose of patchouli and candy; Alien followed in Angel’s footsteps with an overdose of jasmine, vanilla and cashmeran. I did not love Alien but I didn’t really hate it either. If I had found it more appealing than I did, I probably would have tried more of the flankers…
Last week I swooned a bit over La Femme Bohème, one of three new fragrances from high-end cosmetics line Edward Bess; this week I’ve been wearing Spanish Veil. This is another oriental scent, also developed by perfumer Carlos Benaïm, with notes of sandalwood, tonka bean and guaic wood.
Spanish Veil was inspired by inspired by the artifice and mystery of facial veils worn like a “second skin”: “Scents of the outside world are trapped in the starched net, a magnet for the plumes of smoky incense wafting through ancient basilica walls that mix with the smells of savage animal hides in bullfighter rings and clouds of white dust native to the Latin land.” But once we get past that somewhat overwrought prose…
Has there ever been a fragrance that you’ve just had to smell because of its name? For me, any perfume named La Femme Bohème would have been tempting. The fact that this fragrance is also one of three developed by perfumer Carlos Benaïm for Edward Bess made it irresistible, so off I went to sample it.
Aficionados of luxury cosmetics who happened to be in New York City in 2007 were caught off-guard by Edward Bess’s initial appearance at Bergdorf Goodman. He seemed impossibly young as the founder of a cosmetics line, but there he was, debuting his first collection…