Mimosa fragrances must be tricky to pull off. There aren’t a lot of them out there. Besides Parfums de Nicolaï Mimosaique which I’m reviewing today, Caron Farnesiana, Guerlain Champs Elysées, and L’Artisan Parfumeur Mimosa Pour Moi seem to hold the field. (The jury seems to be still out on Annick Goutal’s limited edition Le Mimosa that Kevin reviewed last week.)
Or maybe mimosa just isn’t a very popular note…
In a recent post at Perfume Posse, Musette described her adolescent self as “Geek before Geek was cool”. During a week when I watched The Social Network and contemplated buying a Gregory Brothers / Auto-Tune the News t-shirt, her description was just another sign that we have lived to see the day my mother was always promising me would come: nerds have inherited the earth. We’ve come a long way since the 1980s and nerdom has evolved: gone are the high pants and the pocket protectors (as well as most of the pens), nerds of every gender and race are acknowledged, and globalization and the internet have opened up new, niche fields of nerd inquiry. No longer restricted to math, science, computing and Star Trek conventions, nerds are becoming foodies and bespectacled mixologists, pop musicians, graphic novelists and film bloggers, beekeepers, adventure travelers, market watchers, reality television competitors and whistle-blowing website activists. Nerds have money. They own the best home theatre equipment and make the coolest Halloween costumes. They know the only coffee place in town with a Clover. And, increasingly, some of them are smelling really good.
Perfume is a great hobby for geeks and systems wonks. It can involve hours and days and weeks of research into a secretive, trend-driven and detail-oriented industry. You end up collecting bottles and vials, ordering or swapping rarities through the mail and building storage units or furniture to organize your collection. You exhibit a lot of mavenish behavior, like checking currency conversion websites multiple times a day. Almost every perfumista of long-standing I know keeps a spreadsheet or electronic notepad full of data on sample testing count, fragrance notes, prices, perfumer names or vintage scent markers…
Parfums de Nicolaï’s new Kiss Me Tender was advertised as a fragrance that “takes you from vanilla to aniseed, via almonds and freshly-cut hay” — hard to resist, at least for me. That it was centered around heliotrope is something I kept in the back of my head as a warning, heliotrope not being a favorite note of mine, at least, not in heavy concentrations.
The opening is bright, sweet and spicy, and it’s strong. If you find it hard going, hang on: Kiss Me Tender is as soft and bashfully romantic as its name within 20 minutes. The ad copy mentions Jordan almonds, and if you picture them in mixed pastels you’ll get the idea, although the marshmallow hearts shown above are perhaps a better fit. This is a pale, fluffy gourmand-floral vanilla, very feminine, with mild green notes countering the sweetness in the early stages…
Violette in Love, by Parfums de Nicolaï, came out in 2009. I can’t remember when I first tried it, but I think it wasn’t until much later, possibly the following year. At any rate, I thought it was pretty but maybe too charming for my taste, and I set it aside.
Now, there was a time when I tried almost everything — everything I didn’t absolutely detest, anyway — at least a few times. Many fragrances I tried more than that. I might have worn the same fragrance, off and on, for a few weeks: lived with it awhile, in other words, before deciding what I thought of it.
Those days are long gone. It is not just that there are too many fragrances, practically speaking, to spend that much time on each one. It’s also a psychological effect, distantly related, perhaps, to the well-documented studies that show that more choice does not lead to more happiness: when there are so many fragrances, it seems less important (to me, anyway, slacker that I am) if I miss one or two gems. I know I can’t find them all, but surely I’ll find plenty of other gems…
Her own olfactory signature admits to certain genetic tendencies. "I am influenced by my family!" she admitted with rueful laugh. "Growing up Guerlain was always only nice perfumes, something you could recognize from afar, the sillage, and you would know it was Guerlain. I wanted to have the same approach."
— Perfumer Patricia de Nicolaï of Parfums de Nicolaï, quoted in Scent of a woman at the National Post.