Ride 'Em, Cowboy: Lonestar Memories by Andy Tauer

I don't know what came over me.

In mid-November I finally made a list of samples I wanted from The Perfumed Court and placed my order: a set of chypres, another set of leather scents, a bunch of Serge Lutens, and some odds and ends which you will no doubt be hearing about in the relatively near future. (They all arrived promptly and were nicely packaged, and I can't recommend the company too highly. I could have bought five or six times what I did, easy.)

Then last week--Wednesday, the day before American Thanksgiving, as it turns out, for reasons that will be minimally relevant in a minute--I got home from work very late (like 11:30 p.m.) and was tired but couldn't sleep, and I was at my computer as usual, and I thought, "Fuck it, I'm going to order Carnation from Luckyscent. High time." (I'd been living off a sample which I had finally used up, and I was in a perpetual state of anxiety that it would be discontinued and I'd never get to own a bottle. I figured if you've been wanting to own something for two whole years, if it's not just a momentary infatuation, you should buy it if you can.) So I ordered it, and a few samples, as well, because you can never have enough samples. (As the next day was Thanksgiving, and I guess not much work gets done on Friday or over the weekend, I had to wait until this past Monday before the order shipped.)

Unfortunately, I hadn't really been paying close attention (it was midnight, which is why credit cards and the Internet and exhaustion are such a toxic combination), and as a result, I ordered a few of the same samples from Luckyscent that I had already ordered from The Perfumed Court. What's more, I really hadn't been paying attention, because the leather sampler contained Andy Tauer's Lonestar Memories, which I had also ordered separately from TPC, and which I subsequently ordered from Luckyscent. So: three of the same thing.

Luckily, I can easily use up three, because it's fantastic. But more about that in a minute.

I don't own a whole lot of leather scents; it's something I like, but in moderation. I have Krizia Uomo and Chanel's Antaeus, and four Demeter leathers, which you can read about here and here.

Demeter fragrances are smells, as opposed to proper perfumery. There's nothing wrong with a scent being merely a smell; there mustn't be, or I wouldn't own so damned many Demeters. But sometimes you just want a simple unified note, and sometimes you want a perfume, with complexity and development and depth. Demeter doesn't provide that, but for a really big, rounded leather scent, Lonestar Memories does, in spades.

It opens, briefly, with piercing greenery (mostly the hay/vegetation smell of clary sage), but that's almost immediately overtaken by a huge whoop of leather, which is to say birch tar, which is what provides the aroma of most everything that smells like leather. There are other molecules hovering around, too; some wood (cedar, which provides a smoky-campfire feel) and distant plants and flowers, but mostly it's that sexy, irresistible, animalic leather. It's dry and a little stringent, just like real leather.

Over time, the dryness slowly warms and sweetens, as if you'd taken a piece of charred wood from yesterday's campfire, dipped it in vanilla honey, and tucked it into a leather glove to warm in your hand. (It's not really vanilla; it's tonka, which has a warm, spicy vanillic scent.) This cozy glow lasts for ages: it's still hovering around you twelve, fourteen hours later.

I liked Tauer's Incense Rosé and loved Vetiver Dance, but Lonestar Memories I really, really love.