L’Artisan Parfumeur is an old friend. I’ve owned bottles of Ananas Fizz (discontinued), Mûre et Musc (original version), L’Eau de L’Artisan, Passage d’Enfer, L’Eau d’Ambre, Dzongkha, Séville à l’Aube, Traversée du Bosphore, Dzing!, Timbuktu, Méchant Loup and Bois Farine, not to mention amber balls and candles. When I saw the ads for the new Bana Banana,* with their antique botanical illustrations of banana plants, I was primed to BUY…
Earlier this month, I dove into the new fragrance line Hermetica. This week I took a step back to revisit Memo, Hermetica’s older “sibling” brand, and I sampled two fragrances that I hadn’t tried before — one new, one old, both developed for Memo by perfumer Aliénor Massenet.
The new release is Winter Palace, summarized as “Tea and Fire.” Its composition includes notes of grapefruit, dry amber wood, bergamot, benzoin, cistus labdanum, orange, styrax, tolu, vanilla, red tea, musk, tonka bean, lemon, maté and Gurjum balsam. Winter Palace has joined Memo’s “Artland” collection…
Earlier this week, as Geri recovered from a hip replacement operation, walker at hand, she told me the story of her journey with perfume. We sat in her dining room. A vase held tight white roses with frilly pink edges that opened to blooms as big as a baby’s head. Behind us was a grand piano and a harpsichord. (Geri is an organist with gigs at churches and funeral parlors throughout town, and she occasionally hosts baroque musical ensembles at her house.)
She told me that the first fragrance she knew well was her mother’s Yardley Lavender. “It was the only perfume my dad liked,” she said. Her father didn’t wear fragrance, although he shaved with a mug of soap, and every once in a while he’d clean the family’s eyeglasses with his shaving brush…
My “Dirty” series is about taking classic, beautiful ingredients and putting a new spin on them – letting their hair down, smudging their lipstick and exploring new territory. I wanted to build a fragrance around the spontaneous and energetic aspects of lemons but wanted to bring something new and even a little naughty to lemons’ squeaky clean nature. — Douglas Little, Heretic Parfums.
Dirty Lemon (listed notes include lemon, bergamot, petitgrain, juniper, lime, sandalwood, pink and black pepper, ylang-ylang and patchouli)
Dirty Lemon opens with the aromas of bergamot oil and sliced lemons (heavily peppered), but its head notes are more dense than sprightly or fizzy…
Hermetica is a new niche fragrance line that launched in 2018; it offers “a collection of molecular fragrances inspired by the ancient practice of alchemy” and was founded by John and Clara Molloy (the duo behind Memo and Floraïku), who decided to “create a revolutionary collection by not choosing between natural ingredients or synthetic molecules but using a combination of the two.” Additionally, Hermetica seems to be claiming the fragrances’ alcohol-free base as another innovation.
I’m no chemist, but I’m raising my eyebrows for a few reasons…