Taming the Dragon: Comptoir Sud Pacifique Vanille Pitahaya

Pitahaya, since you must have wondered if you didn't already know, is also called the dragon fruit, which is named for its looks, and if you had been the first to run across something that looks like this

you would probably name it after a dragon, too. In taste it is very mild; if I remember correctly it tastes something like a Chinese pear (though with a much softer texture), with the caveat that I would have tasted both of these fruit imported to Canada, which probably has a deleterious effect on their flavour. Perhaps they taste fantastic right off the tree.

2004's inoffensive Vanille Pitahaya is pleasant enough, but it consists only of a vague pearishness for a top note with a suggestion of floralcy joining it in the middle, and a dollop of that CSP vanilla for a base. There is quite literally nothing else. It's like one of those teenagery fruity florals with all of the flesh stripped off its bones. It's practically a test case in how minimal a fragrance can be and still be called a fragrance.

It may be churlish of me to criticize Vanille Pitahaya when I am a fan of so many other CSP scents which are no more intricate, but my justification is that the successful ones smell more complex than they are, or at least smell interesting. Amour de Cacao, for instance, while being little more than chocolate and vanilla, has an intriguing saltiness and the depth that cocoa can have, while Vanille Ambre benefits from the multifaceted quality of amber, including a pleasant briny note. Comptoir Sud Pacifique scents are generally so simple that they come down to a binary judgement: yes or no. Vanille Pitahaya is a no. 

Colour Copy: CSP Mora Bella

A few years back, CSP revamped their line with new packaging, new scents, and some reformulations. Mora Bella was one of the victims; it had been known as Fruits Sauvages, and savage it was, too.

The new version isn't drastically altered, though. I've smelled them side by side--I never owned the original, but I had a bunch of pochettes, those little packets containing a towelette soaked in scent, which CSP used to give out by the handful--and there are some differences: the original was brighter, sharper, more jagged, where the remake is more restrained and softer around the edges.

"Fruits Sauvages" means "wild fruit" in French, and fruit is the whole point of Mora Bella. If a scent can be said to have a colour, then Mora Bella is dark, dark red, almost maroon. It starts with a giddy whirl of citrus notes, lemon and bergamot, and then barreling up from underneath them comes a volcano of fruit; pomegranate, raspberry, and blackberry. It is intense and it is very, very red.

The floralcy of the scent comes from jasmine and Marvel of Peru, a flower also known as the four o'clock because that's when it opens to release its perfume. These notes aren't enough to make the scent floral, or, god forbid, fruity-floral, but they do two things: they enrich the scent, making it less linear, but they also take some of the signature sharpness away from the fruit notes, which start out fresh and later take on a warmer, almost cooked aspect.

Like a great many CSP scents, Mora Bella doesn't last particularly long; a couple of hours in, and the floral notes are gone, the fruit notes are attenuated (cooked and eaten, I guess), and most of what remains is a very soft, musky wood scent that lies very close to the skin. Mora Bella is somewhat less unisex than its predecessor, though I still wear it with pleasure.

+

Regarding my discussion of Baldessarini Ambré a while back, reader Steamy Vicks had this to say:

Good interpretation of this promising, but ultimately boring scent. However, I do think you have amber and ambergris confused.

I'm not really confused about them, or at least not any more than the perfumery industry would have me be. I tend to use the terms "ambergris" and "amber" more or less interchangeably. I know they aren't, exactly, but that's because it's complicated: there are five things that we could reasonably call "amber".

True amber or fossil amber, the solidified tree resin used in jewellery, has little if any scent (though some say it has an odour if you warm it against your skin) until you burn it, at which point it smells, of course, like burning tree sap. In fact, the German word for "amber" is "Bernstein", which means "burning stone"--the rock which you can ignite.

Ambergris itself is whale ejecta: it's something that whales produce in their intestines in reaction to indigestibles such as squid beaks, not altogether unlike the way an oyster produces a pearl. Raw, it smells like excrement: when aged, it smells warm, sweet, and animalic. The name comes from French "ambre gris", "grey amber", not because fossil amber and ambergris have anything in common, but because they're both rare and both found washed up on shore. The desirable qualities of ambergris and its extreme rarity led to the search for replacements, which is what the rest of the amber family is all about.

Third on the list is vegetable amber, which is to say various plant distillates that smell something like ambergris or can be combined with other things to provide the impression of ambergris. (Ambrette seeds have a musky-ambergris scent much used in perfumery.) Fourth is synthetic amber, such as Ambrox, which does the same thing.

Finally there's "amber", which in the perfume business is sometimes called "ambra" to distinguish it from fossil amber. Fragrances with an amber note are actually aiming to reproduce the scent of ambergris in various ways, some more accurately than others. Nowadays the term usually means, as you said, something sweet and soft and spicy. An "amber" scent almost always contains labdanum, styrax, and benzoin; there are other elements that can be used for various effects, such as tolu balsam, ambrette seed, Peru balsam, vanilla, and tonka bean, all of which contribute to the desired warmth and sweetness. An amber scent need not have any ambergris in it at all, and probably doesn't, but the important thing to note is that anything called "amber" in perfumery exists because it was originally meant to evoke or duplicate ambergris.

So. I'll concede that I shouldn't use the word "ambergris" quite so cavalierly, since the scent in question and others like it don't claim to have any in them. But since the original point of an amber scent was to imitate ambergris, I don't feel too guilty about using them more or less randomly. However, I think you're right that there shouldn't be any confusion, and I think I'll stick to the word "amber" from now on unless there actually is ambergris in the scent.

Scrubs: CSP Coco Extreme

Have you read about the to-do in FragranceBlogLand? You can read about it (and get a few other links to other writings about it) here, but the upshot is that a few fragrance bloggers were theoretically paid in money or free scents to write positive reviews.

My first, instantaneous thought was, "Well, hey, if someone wants to give me free stuff, I could do that!" But then I realized that I couldn't. It's not that it would ever come up: I'm a nobody, and there aren't any freebies coming my way except for the samples (rare and ever-rarer) that I can scrounge. But I wouldn't be able to write a positive review for something I hated, not even for money. I don't think I'm an inordinately moral person: I just couldn't misrepresent myself that way. I'm sure I have a price, but it's more than they'd be willing to pay, and it would have to be for something a lot more important.

If the lovely people at Comptoir Sud Pacifique sent me a carton of all their scents and asked for some positive reviews, I could do that, but only for the scents that I'd have given a thumbs-up to anyway (or already have--Amour de Cacao, Vanille Abricot, and Aqua Motu, for starters). If they asked for a positive review of Coco Extreme, I'd have to pass. They don't have enough money to get me to praise that.

I wrote about Vanille Coco a year ago, and I wasn't altogether impressed; it's boring. When I heard about Coco Extreme, which is supposed to be more complex and much more coconut-laden, I thought it sounded like just the thing.

The official notes are

Island flowers, coconut flesh: almond, creamy hot milk, powdered sweet coconut flakes: candied sugar, "gentle tropical breezes", black vanilla pod.

Doesn't that sound nice? Some people love it. But it's cloying; it's almost nauseating. The coconut note is stronger than the original Vanille Coco, all right: it's so strong and so perseverant that you feel as if you're surrounded by it and can't escape. The other elements--tiare flower, almond, and lots of sugary vanilla--only add to the suffocating nature of the scent.

Coco Extreme is an attack fragrance. It owns you. It jams itself into your nose and it will not go away. It's what they call a scrubber: something you want to scrub off your skin as quickly as possible. (Even that won't work: scrubbers are notoriously hard to get rid of.) Is it the worst thing CSP has ever produced? I don't know, because I haven't smelled all of them. But it's certainly the worst I've ever tried from their line.

Old Gold: CSP Vanille Amande

That's the new bottle. Couldn't find a picture of the old one. Sorry.

One more vanilla scent to finish off the month, and then we'll move on. Promise.

Comptoir Sud Pacifique's Vanille Amande was launched in 1994, discontinued, and then re-launched under a new formulation. Why do companies do this? I know that sometimes the original ingredients become unavailable due to shortages or health concerns, but there wouldn't seem to be anything in Vanille Amande that would demand a reconstructed, "improved" version. I have a feeling that the comapny was trying to muscle the scent into the endless parade of fresh scents: the new Vanille Amande contains "top notes of fresh tropical almond" which certainly aren't present in the original.

Having smelled fresh (green) almonds, I can say I don't want to smell like them, because yuck. I haven't tried the resuscitated version, but a lot of the reviews aren't so kind: "syrupy sweet", "artificial", "cloying", "synthetic". I'll take their word for it. The original, though. Mmmm. I have a big ol' bottle of the stuff. How big? I will never, ever run out, that's how big, which is a good thing, because I love it.

There's a chord of three notes: bitter almond (no sugary amaretto, no cherry-extract scent), voluptuous and slightly sweetened vanilla, and a dark, mocha-like scent which could well be mocha. That's it. It's a monolithic block of a scent. It's absolutely linear: there's no development whatever (except that the almond note fades before the others do). It's wonderful.

The lasting power is very good, at least on me; many people have noted that the new CSP scents don't last at all, but the old ones sure do. Of course, I find that's true of pretty much everything with vanilla in it.

If you've tried the newer version and didn't like it, it might be worth it to hunt down the original. Maybe it's available on eBay. Isn't everything?

Beyond the Sea: CSP Aqua Motu

A week and a half ago I got a sample of Comptoir Sud Pacifique's Aqua Motu. I hadn't ever tried it before and I wasn't particularly interested in the sample, because I knew what it was going to smell like: fresh, ozonic, aquatic, done-before, boring. This morning I was poking around in my cabinet looking for something I hadn't worn before and there it was, so I put on a couple of spritzes, and I am the first to admit when I've been wrong; it's gorgeous.

The first things that came to mind when I smelled it were Dior's Dune and Dune pour Homme, because they're all meant to evoke the same things: not water, but the beach itself. Neither of the Dior scents really works on me, though I love them both, or more accurately have a love/hate relationship with them both: Dune pour Homme is too sharp and cologney despite its felicities, and Dune has a sweetness that I find aggressive and out of place among the dry licheny sand.

Aqua Motu, though: that works on me, in spades. It's as if someone had taken the Dior scents and stripped them of everything extraneous, reduced them to the pure abstract idea of the seaside. It smells marine, but not that fraudulent ozonic-oceany smell that perfumers can't seem to get enough of nowadays; it smells instead of salt water and seaweed and the grasses and stunted little shrubs that grow above the waterline. There is a warmth to it--one of the notes listed is "warm sand"--and a bare suggestion of sweetness, but nothing cloying. It isn't a beach strewn with sun worshippers bathed in tanning oil: it's a brave, barren little Atlantic seacoast populated by mussels and seabirds. It suggests my childhood in Newfoundland, and now, dammit, I have to go and buy myself a bottle.

Shopping, Part 2: CSP Amour de Cacao

There's a Canadian chain of drugstores called Shoppers Drug Mart (I've talked about it before on this blog and on my other one) which is has really upgraded its image in the last few years; one of the new store designs puts a little self-contained fragrance department at the very front of the store, and it's like a really high-end boutique. I walked into such a store this morning and just inside the door was, to my astonishment, a display of Comptoir Sud Pacifique scents. I was completely flabbergasted, because it's just not a line you associate with drugstores. The lovely saleswoman said they'd had them for about a week, about a dozen or fifteen of the line's scents, including many of the newest ones, ones I hadn't even had a chance to try before: Bois de Filao, Vanille Peach, Vanille Pineapple, and Vanille Extreme, along with such standbys as Aqua Motu, Mora Bella (the new name for the old, wonderful Fruits Sauvages), and of course Amour de Cacao. I tried Bois de Filao and Vanille Pineapple--though not on my skin--and was delighted with both of them, and though I couldn't get samples of them, I did snag samples of Vanille Coco--I already had a tiny vial of it, but this is a nice big spray and I never turn down a sample--and Aqua Motu. I don't even want to think about the fact that I am going to be buying a whole bunch of these fragrances in the next six months.

As it happened, I'd put on Amour de Cacao after the gym this morning. Even though it's a hot summer day and AdC is a warm sweet scent, I felt secure that it wouldn't be too strong or too cloying, because, amazingly, it never is.

Officially, the notes in Amour de Cacao are orange peel, vanilla, and chocolate, which makes it sound like a Terry's Chocolate Orange, but the orange note escapes me altogether. (The new, updated version of AdC supposedly has a starfruit note as well; I haven't tried it, so I couldn't say.) All I smell when I first spray it on is vanilla-infused chocolate, though not a pure chocolate-bar scent nor the dust-dry cocoa powder of Cocoon but a mixture of the two, a lush chocolate combined with a very salty, slightly dusty note of cocoa powder. The salt note is amazingly strong at first. I know; salt oughtn't to have a smell at all. But I've worked around large quantities of the stuff, thousands of pounds at a time, and trust me; it has a smell, and that smell is in Amour de Cacao.

Over the next few hours, whatever development there is in this scent consists of the chocolate/cocoa receding and the vanilla coming to the fore, and that's it. But it's the most wonderful simplicity; it smells like someone's making chocolate-chip cookies somewhere in the vicinity, and that's such a cherished, almost universal childhood memory that Amour de Cacao can't help but bring a smile to your face. It's a sleek aluminum can full of lovingly hand-made bakery bliss.

Shopping, Part 1 is here.

Lactose Intolerance: Comptoir Sud Pacifique Matin Calin

I wish Comptoir Sud Pacifique hadn't had the bright idea of renaming all their existing scents. I'm not sure what the point was, but they did it anyway, and while I might have bought a bottle of the appealing Coeur de Raisin, I would just feel odd owning it now that it's called Princesse Muscat. I know: I shouldn't care what it's called, and yet in some strange way, I really do.

Matin Calin means some approximation of "morning hug" or "huggy morning" (ick); I'm not quite sure because ordinarily in French the adjective precedes the noun, and neither of those words has an ending or a preposition that would mark it as an adjective. (The French name for "Care Bears" is "Calinours", which more or less means "huggy bears".) Anyway: it was originally called Lait Sucré, which means "sugared milk" and sounds pleasant into the bargain, as opposed to the choppy, consonantal "Matin Calin".

"Lait Sucré" is, as it turns out, a pretty exact description of the scent. You can read all sorts of descriptions of what people think it smells like, and I can see some merit in most of them--maybe not "baby vomit", but most of them anyway.

It's a very linear scent; there isn't much if any development, as far as I can tell. It smells from the outset like warm sugared milk with vanilla stirred in and a pat of salted butter floating on top. Some think it smells of buttered popcorn, and I can see why--there's definitely a light salty tang to it. There's also a very slight soured-dairy note which must be what reminds some people of baby puke. But mostly it smells like what it's supposed to smell like; warm sweet milk. If you have fond childhood memories of condensed milk, or of a glass of hot milk at bedtime, this is going to bring them back in a rush.

Lasting power? Not much, on my skin, which usually hangs on to everything. The fleeting nature of the updated CSP line is legendary; I mostly have the older scents, and they stick around for quite a while on me, but this one doesn't have more than a couple of hours in it. It's pleasant enough, not enough to make me crave it. I think I would rather have the more straightforward Demeter Condensed Milk at half the price.

Coco Not: CSP Vanille Coco

Sometimes a coconut scent has a sharp, green, astringent note that I find unspeakable. Someone at a workplace used to wear The Body Shop's Coconut perfume oil, and I couldn't bear to be in the same room with her.

That may well be how a fresh coconut smells in the real world. Usually, though, when we think of coconut in fragrances and fragranced products, we think of a rich, creamy, tropical scent, and that's just what's in Comptoir Sud Pacifique's Vanille Coco. It's very pleasant, almost edible. The sad fact, though, is that there's nothing particularly special about it; it smells more or less like every other sweet coconut scent on the market. There isn't anything to set it apart, to make it a worthy addition to the CSP line, and to make it worth what they're charging.

Someone somewhere suggested mixing Vanille Banane and Vanille Coco, and it's true; they go together wonderfully, with the coconut taking the preposterous edge off the banana scent. The trouble with both scents and with the combination of them is that after an hour's gone by, there's nothing left but the standard CSP vanilla--nothing at all. It's a very pleasant vanilla, of course, but it shouldn't have been that hard to strap down the other scent notes with some longer-lived base notes (even with vanilla itself) so they'd have a bit more staying power. CSP did it with Vanille Orange, after all, and citrus notes are among the most evanescent in all of perfumery, so you'd think they'd have been able to manage it with banana and coconut.

Monkey's Uncle: CSP Vanille Banane

A while back I wrote about how Angel made me laugh out loud--in public! repeatedly!--and I said I'd only ever had that response once. And now it's happened again.

Last month I ordered some stuff from Luckyscent and got a bunch of samples: I bought a sample of CSP Vanille Coco, since I love coconut, and they sent me gratis a sample of Vanille Banane, which I never would have thought of even trying because it sounds so crazy on the surface; who wants to smell like a chimpanzee's fingers?

Yesterday I was in the mood for something new so I swiped on a little Vanille Banane and spontaneously burst into laughter, which I hadn't expected at all. The thing is ludicrous, and yet so delicious and inviting at the same time, that my brain was pulled in two directions at once: "This is stupid!" and "This is wonderful!" That taffylike stretching of the brain trigged the only response it was capable of; hilarity.

I put some more on just now, with the same result. The top note is simply a burst of amyl acetate, that instantly recognizable banana note. (Some people compare it to that artificially-flavoured banana candy you used to get at Hallowe'en; it doesn't, it's true, smell quite like a fresh banana--the complexity isn't there.) A hint of spicy clove and a little orange peel keep it from being cloying, but there's very little there except for that slightly synthetic banana-ness. A creamy-rich vanilla note soon wells up underneath it, and the overall effect is of a banana cream pie and nothing more. There's nothing wrong with smelling like a pie, of course: Demeter has proven that, and I'm surprised they don't market a Banana Cream Pie to go with Apple and Pumpkin.

I can't imagine ever buying this stuff, but the fact is that I'm glad it exists. The world could always use more unexpected laughter.

Creamsicle: Comptoir Sud Pacifique Vanille Orange

I'm one of those people who finds Comptoir Sud Pacifique scents just about irresistible. I have five of them and have tried eight or ten more: with the lone exception of Safranier, which takes the medicinal smell of saffron just a little too far, they've all been winners.

One of their limited-edition, now-discontinued scents, Vanille Orange, is one of my favourites: even though once it's gone I'll never have it again, I use it with some abandon. It opens with a radiant burst of orange peel. The brilliance, which I suspect is bolstered with aldehydes, vanishes fairly quickly, and what comes after is not orange peel or even orange juice, but the pulpy smell of an orange itself, pith and all, mixed with a trace of spice and--unfortunately--with a somewhat artificial scent that resembles orange Kool-Aid. (In recent years, many agree, the company's scents have changed somewhat; they once had a reputation for natural scents, but now some people complain of the synthetic nature of some of their fragrances.)

Tucked inside the bright halo of orange is the classic CSP vanilla, but less sweet and assertive than one ordinarily expects; the balance is skewed very much towards the orange notes. (Anyone who knows Vanille Amande, say, or the salty-chocolate Amour de Cacao knows how intense the vanilla usually is, which is why Vanille Orange is such a surprise.)

Even for a CSP scent, this has remarkable longevity; sixteen hours after applying it, I can still smell it clearly, and what's more amazing, it hasn't died down to a mere whiff of vanilla--the orange note, though dimmed, is still clearly evident, something extremely rare for a citrus scent. I'm amazed that this didn't make it into their line: it was released in a 50-mL spray as part of a Christmas set (I can't remember what the other two scents were, and Google is no help, but I'm pretty sure at least one of them went into regular production), and despite the artificiality of that Kool-Aid note, it makes a terrifically bright and fresh summer scent.

Come to think of it, maybe it's the childhood memory of Kool-Aid and Creamsicles that makes the scent so great for summer.

Warm and Soothing: CSP Vanille Abricot

Comptoir Sud Pacifique has been getting some bad ink among the cognoscenti these days; since they revamped their line, some people are unhappy with the complexity and the staying power of the scents, neither of which is, apparently, what it used to be. I haven't tried any of their really new scents, not since 2000 or so (though I have samples of Vanille Coco and Vanille Cannelle that I'm saving), but I have a bunch of older ones, all vanilla-based, that I love. (I don't love the company's new trend, mixing French and English in the names: why should they have stupidly named two of their most recent releases Vanille Peach and Vanille Pineapple when the French versions, Pêche and Ananas, would have served at least as well?)

It's hard to pick a favourite CSP, but if someone forced me into it, I'd have to say Vanille Abricot. It's sweet, no doubt about it, but something about that sweetness agrees with my skin: it isn't cloying or heavy. (It certainly isn't as sweet as, say, the original Lagerfeld.) The first impression is not of fresh apricots, but of dried apricots drizzled with honey and caramelized sugar--no, not just caramelized, but thoroughly cooked, almost burnt; it smells very dark and heady. (It's often referred to as feminine, but it doesn't read that way to my nose at all; either it's my chemistry or people tend to think that anything except citrus can't be masculine. Vanille Abricot is, at the least, unisex to me, though it's almost too assertive for that rather wishy-washy term. CSP's Fruits Sauvages is the same on my skin.) The scent is tenacious and very linear; four, five, six hours later, the cooked-sugar and dried-apricot notes are still there, but now obscured under a veil of warm patisserie vanilla.

I own scents that aren't attractive, exactly, but which I love because they make me think YSL's M7 is a good example): they're like difficult art or music, and M7 is for me the Lulu of men's perfumery. But it's hard not to unrestrainedly love a scent which is comforting and flat-out beautiful, which makes you smile every time you smell it, and Vanille Abricot has just that effect on me.