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…
UK-based indie line Papillon Perfumery will launch Bengale Rouge, a new unisex fragrance…
Soft, soft, soft. That’s how I’d describe Papillon Perfumery Dryad. When I was a kid, we used to pull cattails from the creek bed and twist their velvety tops open, releasing clouds of “fairies” into the breeze. Smelling Dryad is like chasing these seeds as they float in a meadow. It’s all about texture.
Papillon’s founder Liz Moores created Dryad, and its notes include narcissus, oakmoss, jonquil, costus, galbanum, clary sage, deer tongue, cedrat, benzoin, lavender, thyme and orris. When Moores describes Dryad, she talks about the aroma of the forest surrounding her home and mentions that Dryad will smell familiar to lovers of Miss Dior and vintage Vol de Nuit…
UK-based indie line Papillon Perfumery will launch Dryad, the brand’s fifth fragrance, in June…
To give you a thoughtful top ten for fall, I went to the experts: Tracy and André at Fumerie. Both of them used to work at Portland’s Perfume House and amassed years of experience with the classics. Then, seven months ago, Tracy opened Fumerie to focus on niche fragrances, and André joined her.
To give you an idea of their tastes in fragrance, Tracy has a tattoo on her forearm of her favorite perfume notes: patchouli, hay, tobacco, cocoa, and leather. When she thinks of fall, she thinks of comforting scents that remind her of riding her horse as a teenager through the leaves, and the smells of Oregon’s crisp autumn air, sweet alfalfa, saddle leather, grain and the horse itself.
André loves vintage fragrances and has a nose for classically constructed perfumes…