Lots To Love: Une Rose Chyprée by Andy Tauer

Andy Tauer's Une Rose Chyprée ("a chypred rose") used to look like this little half-ounce bonbon

and now a whole ounce of it looks like this

(I think those tiny glass stones are meant to make up the difference between the 30-mL contents and the 50-mL bottle).

The first few times, I tried Une Rose Chyprée in tiny quantities, just tipped the mouth of the sample vial against my skin, and I flat-out didn't like it, despite the fact that I love chypres and I love roses, and that the perfumer is charming and talented and also adorable

(though that last is of course irrelevant). All I could smell was murky patchouli and roses, that murkiness that you sometimes find in natural perfumery (which could use a few synthetics to brighten and separate the other ingredients), and there are probably enough patchouli-and-rose scents on Earth already, I think. Some scents reveal unexpected facets of themselves when you smell just a tiny bit of them, and I guess that's true of this one, but in the wrong way: it seemed constricted and muddy, and I stupidly thought that was all there to it.

I thought I didn't like it, but finally I just sloshed some on, and oh my god, it opens up into this big luscious chypre, the kind they don't make any more: bright citrus top with a bitter-orange marmalade undertone, an armload of roses with patchouli leaves and vetiver tucked in for interest, oakmoss (real oakmoss!) swirling around the whole thing, and finally powdery vanilla in the base. It is consistently interesting and beautiful from start to finish, but the only way to find that out is to be generous with it. Don't just put on a tiny dab: you'll never experience its beauty unless you lavish it on.

Gutted: Eau d'Epices by Andy Tauer

I'm sure there are reviewers who are so confident in their mastery of their subject and so sure of their taste that they can unhesitatingly proclaim something to be excellent or dreadful, but I am not one of those people.

When something is undeniably good, or when I just plain love it despite any flaws, I'm fine: I can rave about it to the point of exhaustion. But here are a few of the questions I ask myself when I'm on the fence or I actively dislike something:

• Is it actually good and I just can't tell?
• Do I dislike this because I dislike one specific element of it?
• Have I just smelled this kind of thing so many times that I'm jaded?
• Is it me? Is it my nose or something?

I do have the courage of my convictions, but I also want to be fair.

Andy Tauer's Eau d'Epices has a gorgeous top: effusively spicy, mostly cinnamon and cardamom, brightened with a citrus sparkle; it makes you think of Christmas orange-and-clove pomanders and mulled wine. It also has a gorgeous base that calls to mind a Christmas tree, woody and resinous, but slightly sweetened with tonka bean. It's the middle that's the problem: a soapy orange blossom that yanks me right out of my cozy winter's reverie and plonks me down in a barber shop.

I am not a big fan of orange-flower, but even if I were, I think I would be bothered by the middle, because it just doesn't seem to go with the rest of the scent. There is nothing of Christmas or winter about the orange blossom, so why paste that in the middle of an undeniably wintry fragrance? If it's to have a floral core, why not a Christmassy "Es ist ein Ros entsprungen" rose, or a fantasy red-and-green floral accord meant to suggest poinsettias?

I honestly can't tell if it's the scent or just me, but to my mind and my nose the disconnect between the middle and its bookends is just too great. I wanted to like this — it has elements of the discontinued and lamented Aqua Allegoria Winter Delice — but I cannot get past that incongruous middle. Maybe it makes sense to the perfumer, but it doesn't to me.

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Speaking of Andy Tauer, there are still four days left to try to win something in his annual Advent giveaway. He has a lot of great things to choose from, should you win. Good luck!

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Speaking of orange flower, over on Perfume Shrine there's a list of the supposed top 10 fragrance notes for the coming year. They are:

1. Ginger Orchid
2. Orange Flower
3. Tart Guava
4. Gold Amber
5. Green Pear
6. Spicy Bergamot
7. Root Beer
8. Pink Pepper
9. Leather
10. Tomato Leaf

Awful lot of low cards in that hand if you're me. Pink pepper has been all over the place for quite a while now, I'm completely done with tomato leaf if I ever liked it to begin with, and there are at least a few things in there that can't be anything but cheap synthetics ("tart guava" and "green pear" do not sound very promising) which will be heavily ladled into everything.

I like the idea of root beer, mind you (though that complex smell can't really be called a "note", can it?). And I approve of leather: you can never have enough leather scents. If only the perfume houses would buck against the IFRA and start using buckets of oakmoss again: then we might see a revival of the classic leather chypre, one of the old mainstays of men's perfumery (and women's, too), and perhaps the inescapable and ever more horrible fresh-aquatic-ozonic category would die a fitting death.

I can dream.

History Lesson: Miriam by Tableau de Parfums

The Christmas season is rocketing towards us, but you still have eleven chances to win a present from perfumer Andy Tauer, whose annual Christmas giveaways make the season even brighter (or at least more bearable if you're not the Christmas type). It's an Advent calendar for grownups:  each of the first 24 days of December gives you a chance to win a sample set, a bottle of his newest Cologne du Magreb, or even the bottle of your choice from his oeuvre.

Naturally, I'm entering every day, because who doesn't love free scents? And I have already been a winner. The first year of the Advent calendar, I won a my choice of a full bottle: I was waffling, but Andy himself (he seems so friendly and chummy that nearly everyone seems to call him by his first name) said, "You should choose something you've already tried and know you like, rather than taking a chance on something you might not," so I got Lonestar Memories, which I adore.

Andy's recent Miriam is based on a short film of the same name, the first in a projected 10-year series called "Women's Picture". It's a slightly modernized aldehydic floral, the kind that dominated the first half of the twentieth century; it doesn't feel vintage, exactly, certainly not old-fashioned, but it clearly references vintage scents. It opens with a brilliant show of citrus, aldehydes, and that eighties standby violet leaf, making for an almost radioactively bright and expansive scent which calls to mind Chanel No. 5 (of course), but just underneath is a comfy rose-and-violet accord which is a dead ringer for the 2002 relaunch of Givenchy's L'Interdit, itself a much updated reference to the 1957 original. It's not a fusty floral, though, because there is also a very modern sugar-candy quality which provides a brittle edge. Later — much later, because this is a durable scent — Miriam relaxes into a haze of vanilla and sandalwood, all rounded surfaces and warmth.

Andy's the perfumer, but he doesn't sell the fragrance on his website: you can buy it here, though, or at Luckyscent, the source of my sample. It's $160 a bottle: not cheap, but not out of line for a niche scent, and absolutely worth checking out if you're one of those lucky people who can wear vintage clothing and not look as if you're wearing a costume.

Mystery Dance: Andy Tauer Unnamed Vetiver/Vetiver Dance

Last week I, along with ninety-nine other people, got a sample of Andy Tauer's new scent, an at that time unnamed vetiver. That, in fact, was what it was called; "Unnamed Vetiver". Apparently it's going to be called Vetiver Dance; I mean, there's the bottle down there and everything.

I liked, but did not madly love, his previous offering, Incense Rosé, and decided that I had to smell more of his stuff. Now that I have, I can make a couple of pronouncements. First, there seems to be an overriding aesthetic to his work; this new scent is recognizably the work of the person who made Incense Rosé. (I probably shouldn't make that judgement until I've smelled more of his work, but the two scents, though very different, have the same brushstrokes.) And second, Vetiver Dance is stunning.

I told myself I wasn't going to refer to the list of notes included with the sample, but I don't have one of those trained noses that can reliably fractionate out the elements of a scent, so after three days of wearing and deeply smelling the scent, I thought, The hell with this, and read the list: "Grapefruit, black pepper, green clary sage leaves, brilliant lily of the valley, dark vetiver from Java, crisp cedar wood and soft ambergris with a hint of cistus and Tonka beans." I didn't identify all those things, and there seem to be things in the scent that aren't listed, so you can take that however you like.

The first thing you smell is grapefruit, that volatile explosive, lightly spiced. Once it's gone, which takes less than a minute, the green of vetiver comes charging up at you, and it doesn't stop.

I swear that before I even knew the thing was going to be named Vetiver Dance, my notes for the scent included the fact that the middle of the scent is constantly in motion; not dancing, necessarily, but jostling around, as if its elements were jockeying for position. The scent isn't smooth and seamless; you can feel the pieces shifting around like a game of three-card monte--little stabs of green vetiver, chips of wood, and other, mysterious things. The list of notes doesn't, to my nose, bear any real connection to what I'm smelling; I can't say for sure that there's lily or clary sage, or even a specific floral or herbal note. What I can say is that the middle is fascinating in its complexity and restlessness.

Cedar sometimes has a wood-smoke aspect (I first noticed it years ago with the original Salvador Dali scent) which is present in the later stages of the scent, and perhaps it's the specific kind of vetiver Tauer has used, but there's a dark, leathery birch-tar element, too. Finally, the scent closes with a dark sweetness, a sort of honeyed wood. It lasts for hours and hours, but it stays very close to the skin; you won't be offending anyone with this.

Vetiver Dance is gorgeously made, thoroughly unisex, and irresistible. When my sample is gone, which it soon will be, I have to have more. It's due in October. I can't wait.

Heart of Darkness: Andy Tauer Incense Rosé

On Monday I got a sample of Andy Tauer's new scent, Incense Rosé, in the mail. All the way from Switzerland! From Herr Tauer himself! (I won a contest on his website.)

Trying to describe my first impressions of it to Jim, I called it "interesting", which is when he said, "Oh, interesting. Like when an ugly person has a nice personality." A pretty good point, but not quite fair, because Incense Rosé isn't ugly, to say the least. It just isn't exactly beautiful, either, and that is in no way a criticism.

After a startling blast of clementine, the titular rose comes sidling up, but it is accompanied by dark notes: it isn't a fresh red rose, but more like dried rose petals in a wooden box, or something more mysterious still. There is a veil over everything, a sort of crepuscular darkness: the bright clementine and the rose persist through the middle of the scent, but they're overlaid by smoke and wood and darker things, castoreum and patchouli and myrrh. There's nothing of churchy incense in it the way there is in some incense scents (such as Etro's Messe de Minuit, which is meant to evoke a Gothic cathedral); it's a very outdoorsy sort of incense, as if you were holding a ceremony in the middle of a cedar grove at twilight. (To my nose, there is a lot of gorgeous cedar; alongside the frankincense, it dominates the middle of the scent.)

I like it enough that I wish it were more me. I've enjoyed wearing Incense Rosé for the last week, but I think the problem is that incense scents just don't demand my adoration the way, say, chypres do. I've never focused on really incense-heavy scents: they've just never grabbed me by the throat. I did love Gap Om (now long out of production), and I own Winter Delice, Nu, Body Kouros, and a few other what you might call incense fragrances, all of which I liked well enough, but none of them would make my top-ten list, if I could actually narrow down my favourites that tightly. I've tried Passage d'Enfer by L'Artisan Parfumeur, Donna Karan Chaos, and Messe de Minuit, but I don't know them well (and didn't madly love any of them anyway). There's a whole set of five Comme des Garçons incenses that people rave about, and though with one exception I haven't had much success with CdG in the past, these sound like the sort of thing I have to at least sample.

After wearing Incense Rosé for a few days, I know it isn't something I'd own, but I clearly have to try more of Tauer's scents: this one is so gorgeously constructed that I'd love to know what else he has up his sleeve. The leather-based Lonestar Memories sounds like something that is me, and I bet the lavendery Rêverie au Jardin is nice. Clearly I'm going to have to order a bunch of samples from The Perfumed Court, a website which offers hand-made samples of countless fragrances for those who want to try before they commit themselves to a whole bottle of something. I've avoided ordering from them because that way lies madness (there are easily a hundred things I want to try), but it's time to take the plunge, I guess.