Pot Luck: Four Solid Perfumes by Pacifica

Five and one third years ago I talked about the Lush solid fragrance Potion, or more specifically my own tin of it, which said on the bottom

Made on 15 OCT 07

Use by 15 DEC 08

I promised to notify you all if something inexplicable or disastrous happened on 16 DEC 08, and I need hardly tell you that nothing did. Eventually something milder did occur: I mislaid my little tin of Potion.

Until yesterday, anyway, when, cleaning up, I discovered it again (it was in a box of papers, an object not in short supply in this household). I am pleased to report that it is exactly as I left it: powerfully fragrant, richly carnationy, and as unyielding in texture as a marble countertop.

I don’t love solid perfumes, but they do have their upsides: they’re portable with no chance of spillage and you can apply a very tiny amount without any risk of offence. The main downside is that they are as a rule uncomplicated things: the waxy matrix that holds the scent has a way of damping a lot of the notes, so a solid version of even a complex composed scent is going to be simpler than the alcohol-based version.

Still, maybe you want something uncomplicated, and you could do a lot worse than to check out the Pacifica line, which has at last count 23 solid fragrances. I tried out a bunch of them — maybe ten? — at Asakichi in San Francisco last month, and they were a mixed bag indeed: some of them were kind of awful (Mediterranean Fig) and some that I assumed would be naturals for me just didn’t work (Mexican Cocoa and Spanish Amber). I ended up buying four, three of which were exactly as their names imply and one of which was just a fraud, but this is what happens when you buy a perfume without putting it on your skin and letting it breathe for a while.

Island Vanilla is a warm rich patisserie vanilla; that’s just about all that can be said about it, and that’s plenty. Unless you demand that your vanilla be something besides gourmand, it's an excellent all-purpose vanilla scent.

Indian Coconut Nectar is coconut buttercream frosting and it smells just delicious. The tin says, “ A warm blend of sultry fresh Coconut, delicate Vanilla and creamy Vetiver,” which leads me to wonder if the copy-writer has actually ever smelled vetiver, which is the opposite of creamy in every possible way: if that was the list of adjectives they had at hand, surely they meant “ delicately sultry Coconut, creamy Vanilla, and fresh Vetiver.”

Persian Rose is very rosy, which means it has some of that contained fury, that thorniness, that roses proudly bear. The tin promises “notes of violet, myrrh, oakmoss and cardamom,” and there’s a spicy note so I’ll buy the cardamom, sure, but I don’t notice the other notes: this is all roses, all the time, and it works perfectly.

I bought the tins expecting to be able to mix the scents, and sure enough, the three of these worn simultaneously are very, very attractive, the vanilla trimming the thorns off the rose and the coconut adding a splash of heat-wave sunshine.

The fourth that I bought, Tuscan Blood Orange, is nothing like what you would expect, and the only explanation I have for having bought it is that my nose was completely fatigued at that point and I somehow didn’t notice that while it does have a cheery citrus top, it smells mostly of bright, synthetic raspberry, of the sort you encounter in candy aimed at the younger market. It’s actually rather horrible, to my nose, and I guess I’ll have to find someone to palm it off on.

Pacifica solids are somewhat creamy and nowhere near as stiff as the Lush solids, especially if you swirl your fingertip around on the surface a little and let your body heat melt the wax a little: they’re solid, but they’ll take a fingerprint with no pressure at all. (Lush is largely Japan wax, which comes from sumac trees and is used as a substitute for beeswax, which it strongly resembles: Pacifica uses coconut oil and soy wax.) As you can see from the pictures, they come in tiny metal tins (a third of an ounce per) with rolled edges (the top of the Lush tin has a surprisingly sharp and potentially dangerous unrolled edge) packed in nice little cardboard boxes with slide-out drawers, probably great for storing little objects in (although I jettisoned mine).

I paid $8 each and with the exception of the fake raspberry orange, I got my money’s worth. These go everywhere with me, and if I’m feeling a little underscented or under the weather, well, what did that advertising line say — “A little dab’ll do ya”?

Kaboom: Sugar Bomb by Tokyomilk

After our mind-bending trip to Tokyo last year, Jim and I decided that we were going to go back as soon as we could manage it: we thought about going this year, but that was beyond the reach of our time and money, so we're saving up both and planning to go in the spring of 2015, so we can experience the cherry blossoms and explore Tokyo more thoroughly, in addition to visiting Kyoto and Osaka. Consequently, I am trying to learn Japanese.

We tend to think of the ability to communicate as a single unified skill. As a child, you learn to speak and understand what's spoken to you more or less simultaneously, and you do it effortlessly, as if the brain had evolved for the express purpose of making that possible, which you could argue it has. Not too long after that, and with a little more struggle, you learn to read and to produce written text that others can read — speech made permanent. It all happens so close together in time that we just think those four elements of literacy and communication are the four faces of the same shiny object, the capstone of humanity.

But I have slammed into the fact that those four abilities are at best tenuously connected to one another. It's one thing to look at あ and learn that it stands for the letter "a", or more precisely the sound "ah": these things are not crushingly hard to memorize (although there are a lot of them — two different, barely related syllabaries, each representing the same seventy-odd sounds, plus a collection of thousands of Chinese characters which, perversely, represent the very same sounds singly or in combination). It's something else entirely to be asked to reproduce the character that stands for any given sound. Not more difficult, necessarily (although I think it is): just a different skill.

And it's far easier to understand a spoken language than it is to actually produce that language as speech. When listening, you have the luxury of ignoring certain elements, stripping an utterance down to its essentials, and using context to guess at meaning. When speaking, you have to juggle a thousand different things — grammar, syntax, vocabulary — that in your native language you handle without ever thinking about. I've had entire retail conversations with customers asking if we have a certain product and where it's located: they speak French, I speak English, and we get along just fine. I couldn't discuss philosophy, but I could tell them that we have four different kinds of watercolour paper, and which kind of brush they should use on it, because, as Laurie Anderson says, if you can't talk about it, point to it.

When in Japan last year, we got by with a lot of pointing to things (and much bowing, along with the words "sumimasen" — "excuse me" — and "arigatou", or "thank you").* We're hoping to go again in the spring of 2015, and I want that trip to be different. I won't be fluent, god knows, but I want to be able to read signage and have necessary basic conversations with people and understand what's said to me in response. I don't just want to be that tourist. So I am going to learn Japanese, dammit!

Wish me luck.

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In Toronto last month we found ourselves in an awe-inspiring little shop called Outer Layer on Queen Street West, and you should visit it if you're ever in the neighbourhood. They had a gazillion things, including what I think was the entire Tokyomilk Dark collection.

Now, I am unfortunately a lip-balm addict, and apply it, what? thirty times a day? At least. If I don't have some around me all the time I start to go into meltdown.** Therefore, I am always buying little sticks and tubs of the stuff, and leaving them around where I can get at them. One in a pocket of every jacket I own. One in the knapsack, one in the satchel. At least two at work. Four on my desk in front of me, I see.

Tokyomilk has two lines of products: one is light and fresh and bonbon, and the other, the Dark collection, is the opposite, often dark, always mysterious. The lip elixirs (as they call them) come in massive tubs, almost 20 grams, or about five standard tubes. And here is what they look like:

I smelled all eight, and then I bought three (a bargain at $8.95 per): Clove Cigarette (clove-carnation, basically), Coco Noir (cherry chocolates), and Salted Caramel (what it says on the tin). The texture is waxy and slightly sticky — Salted Caramel is a bit creamier than the others — but they don't have any shine at all and they're intensely scented, parfum concréte for your lips. They're so waxy, in fact, that if I put some on before I go to bed, it's still there in the morning, which isn't true of anything else I have ever tried.***

Tokyomilk also makes in their standard line, and Outer Layer also sells, little boxed sets of three scents, two eighth-ounce spray vials of each, that are meant to be worn alone or mixed together. All of the fragrances in all of the sets are at least nominally composed of two notes, although that's just marketing. Most of the scents are very girly and so none of them appealed to me except one: Sugar Bomb. I will always go out of my way to try a dark, sweet scent.

You don't expect that fragrances sold with the intention of being mixed will be complex, or even complete: the more elements that are in a scent, the more chances there are that something will clash with another scent. As a consequence, the Sugar Bomb scents aren't really scents at all, but smells, and not even that: they're really bases, the final chapter of a composed perfume.

113 is probably the closest that any in the set come to being a complete fragrance: described as "vanilla orchid and honeyed cocoa", it has a dark orchidaceous floral presence with fruity overtones, making it a fruity floral. It's a stripped-down version of Tom Ford Black Orchid, really, and not bad at all.

114 is a base and just a base: a fragrance with a description of "tonka bean and sweet amber" could hardly be anything else. Consequently, it's a bit cloying on its own.

115, the best of the lot, is described as "sugared crème and fennel", and I guess that will do. It does smell rich and creamy — fatty, in the best way — and wonderfully sweet, with a caramelized-sugar overtone, a slightly grassy anise quality, and a hint of coconut.

The packaging suggests the wearer combine these scents with one another, which doesn't strike me as a great idea: base plus base equals more base. (Also, these combos are supposed to provide "endless fragrance pairings", which suggests that someone can't do math.) 113+114 = "oh-so-sweet" (no argument from me), 114+115 = "tempting", 113+115 = "sinful", and all three added together = "irresistible". I would imagine it would = instant death, though I don't intend to perform the experiment. However, any of these three would serve as a good anchor for a light, evanescent fragrance. Test-drive the combination first.

*When we got there and were unpacking, I looked everywhere for the phrasebook we had bought, and couldn't find it, because in fact I had left it on the kitchen table.

**Speaking of which: I once and only once left a tube of lip balm in the pocket of a pair of pants, and laundered those pants. And ended up with grease stains all over, well, pretty much every article of clothing I owned. And had to get them all dry-cleaned. At least it was cheaper than buying all new clothing.

***The regular line of course also has a line of fortunately unshiny lip balms, and of course I also have two of those: Let Them Eat Cake, a coconut-vanilla concoction, and Rose Water, a sugared rose, both creamier and less waxy than the Dark elixirs and very nice indeed.

Beast: Kenzo Jungle L'Elephant

Isn't that a great bottle? The stylized elephant is charming, the name "Kenzo" is in tactile raised script in the lower right-hand corner, and there's hardly a straight line to be found, just lush swoops and curves. It's a bottle that wants you hold it, to run your hands over it and explore it.

I wish I could be as enthusiastic about the contents, which you would think would be right up my alley: Kenzo Jungle L'Elephant (to differentiate it from Jungle Le Tigre) is warm and spicy, with a dose of weirdness (always a plus), a rich gourmand oriental anchored by tropical flowers and laden with vanilla. (The official list: mandarin, cardamom, caraway, clove, heliotrope, ylang-ylang, mango, licorice, vanilla, patchouli, cashmeran. Make of that what you will.) But as it develops you discover it's more than just weird: there's something horrifying about it. It's too spicy, too sweet, assaultively so, and it just goes on and on. It's the Attack of the Killer Dessert, a thick, clumsy pot of heavily spiced pudding made by someone who has lost their sense of taste. A lot of people love this: every time I put it on, I just want to take it right back off again.

But the bottle's terrific!

Overload: Chopard Cašmir

I'm visiting my mom again, and so I'm once again pawing through her fragrance collection, most of which I gave her over the years, an armload of full-sized bottles plus countless miniatures and samples. She has dozens of tiny bottles stored away in a box, a time machine from the late eighties and early nineties, and sitting on her vanity is the squat little Middle Eastern object you see above: Chopard's dramatic fruity oriental, Cašmir. It probably bears repeating that scents get reformulated after a while on the market: since the scent was launched in 1991 and my mom's bottle is at least fifteen years old if not twenty, Cašmir has certainly been reformulated in the interim and might smell quite literally nothing like what I'm smelling as I write this.

Cašmir (pronounced, as far as I know, "cashmere") opens strong and stays that way: it's a statement scent, and the statement is, "I am going to suffocate you, honey." Cašmir is a hot sweet mango-peach jam with a slosh of coconut milk and plenty of thick creamy vanilla: a bit of amber appears later on, but the main base note is more vanilla. It sounds like a Serge Lutens fruit-fest, but Cašmir has a quality that Lutens never does: vulgarity. It's a huge, brassy thing, no subtlety or nuance, just a sledgehammer wallop of scent. It doesn't smell cheap, exactly, but it does smell excessive: nouveau riche. It's likeable, but it wears out its welcome very quickly, and woe be to the wearer who applies more than a single spritz.

The company lists the following notes:

Mango, coconut, bergamot, peach; Jasmine, geranium, lily of the valley; Amber, musk, vanilla, sandalwood, patchouli

but you shouldn't put too much stock in that. Whatever florals are supposedly in there are nominal, and whatever base notes might be present are mostly occluded by the vanilla amber. Cašmir is one of those fragrances with a large number of elements, twelve or twenty or fifty, arranged to smell like a single uniform thing with very little development, complexity masquerading as simplicity.

Melting: Vanille Ambre by Comptoir Sud Pacifique (eventually)

I would have posted more in the last few weeks — I was all ready to — but I spent a week and a half in Ontario with my mother, who is now a widow. Her husband of thirty-five years, my stepfather, Hans, died a few weeks after his 77th birthday, on October 29th, of various complications of lung cancer and cardiac disease. He emigrated to Canada from Germany at the age of 23, speaking literally no English; he learned quickly enough, mostly from television and wrestling matches, but kept an unmistakeable German accent until the day he died. He was quick-witted, unhesitatingly generous, personable, stubborn, charming. He adored my mother. He was an excellent man and the world is a smaller place without him in it.

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Over the last thirty years I have given my mother many, many scents: full bottles, many miniatures, uncountable samples. I guess she got others by herself along the way, but most of it was my fault. She has kept pretty well all of them, even if she doesn't wear them, and a good thing, too, because during my visit I reclaimed a few of them from her — borrowed them back for a while, though she knows she may never see them again and doesn't care. I now have a tiny bottle of vintage Montana Parfum de Peau, thank god, and an ounce of Lancôme Magie eau de cologne (she didn't get it from me and has never opened it) from what seems to be the seventies. Or maybe the sixties!

Another thing she had that I didn't take but did wear a couple of times for the memories was a mere few drops of vintage Trésor, and if you could smell it alongside what Lancôme is now marketing as Trésor your heart would break. It's baleful stuff now, thinned out, brightened and freshened in the modern style, where it used to be ravishing, a dreamy cloud of apricots and roses with just the barest hint of bite, honeyed, with that warm-skin smell that perfumer Sophia Grojsman calls "cleavage". (She used this in an even higher dosage in her astounding Spellbound two years later: I smelled it while out shopping with my mom and, I am delighted to report, smells just as it ought to, because nobody seems to resist reformulation of the classics quite like Lauder.)

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On returning from my mother's in Penetanguishene, I had an hour in Toronto between the bus and the airplane, so I checked my bags at the bus terminal and headed over to the Eaton Centre. I poked around in the fragrance department of Sears, not really expecting to buy anything but wanting to see the Christmas gift sets, and I was plagued by salespeople, despite wearing visible earphones and plainly minding my own business. (One of them continued to stand expectantly by my side after I said, "I'm fine," forcing me to elaborate: "I'm fine, I'm just browsing, thanks.") After about eight interruptions I gave up and left, so mission accomplished, Sears, if your mission was to drive a customer away.

I moseyed up to Sephora, where I was completely ignored, thank goodness, and where I discovered to my surprise that they carry Comptoir Sud Pacifique; I hadn't really paid any attention to the line since they stopped carrying it locally five years ago, and the couple of them that I had tried since then (including this one) hadn't impressed me. So what did Sephora have? Not much: Vanille Extreme (I have enough plain-vanillas already), Coco Extreme (yuck), Vanille Abricot (of course, the top seller), Coco Figue (new, and really yuck), and...what's this? Vanille Ambre? Gimme!


I sampled it. I bought it, of course. Vanilla plus amber? For me? I think so.


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When packing to head up to my mom's place I brought a bunch of little vials and decants of scents, some old favourites and some new things that I thought I'd have time to review. (I managed one.) Among the things I brought was a little decant of Vanille Abricot that I had made up a few years ago so I could have it with me all the time, but had forgotten about when other things moved in to fill its niche in my backpack. And an amazing thing had happened to it: exposed to a small amount of air in its bottle and left to its own devices, it had ripened into something glorious, a deep apricot-brandy scent, boozy and heady, underlined but no longer dominated by that cooked-vanilla-sugar scent that the fresh version still has (I checked). It is magical, alchemy, and I couldn't duplicate it if I tried, but I am going to enjoy that little decant for as long as it lasts.


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Once I got to the Toronto Island airport, I took the Vanille Ambre bottle out of its box and transferred it to the one-litre bag we have to fit all of our various liquids into: better that than risking it in checked luggage. Once in line for check-in, being a clumsy sort, I predictably dropped the bag. The Vanille Ambre bottle, being very heavy glass, survived the experience intact, but two of those dozen or so vials I'd brought didn't (because I suppose the CSP bottle landed on them), and one of the demolished vials was AB, which fortunately I had already written about but unfortunately I despise, meaning that everything in the bag now smells like that, and who knows how long it will take to fade away.


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You do not sample a Comptoir Sud Pacifique scent expecting classical constructions of depth and subtlety. They are without exception simple, often minimalist, expressing a single idea: chocolate-chip cookie, red fruit, briny seaside. I love them: they're mindlessly fun.


Vanille Ambre is more or less exactly what it says: that warm rich CSP vanilla drizzled all over a chunk of warm amber. There's a slug of patchouli, just enough to give the scent a pleasantly musty old-book smell from time to time. And that's it. It lasts twelve hours without flinching. Unless you have gingerbread fantasies at this time of year, it is hard to imagine a better winter scent than Vanille Ambre.

Sweet 16: Jean-Paul Gaultier Le Mâle

Some things, as they say, get better with age. Cheese, for example.

Since I embarked on the South Beach thing, I've been eating a lot of cheese. Too much, probably: after losing 30 pounds in three months, I've sort of stalled, which I guess is normal, but still frustrating. But cheese! Last week I bought a chunk of eight-year-old white cheddar for what I thought was a ridiculous price, but I needed to see if it was different from regular old cheddar. And it is. The texture, for one thing: the internal structure has changed into something vaguely crystalline, and it is very hard to cut into cubes because it just crumbles — shatters, almost. The flavour is deep and complex, salty and rich and slightly bitter, with a goodly dose of what James Joyce called "feety savour", not absolutely pleasant (in the way that, say, a smooth creamy-buttery Havarti might be) but still wonderful. And the taste stays in your mouth for literally hours after you've eaten it. There are a lot of cheeses that I like better, but it was pretty spectacular.

Fragrances, though. Two bad things can happen over time: they can spoil (many fragrances can last for years without spoilage — I have a bottle of Molyneux Fête from the mid-1960s which hasn't aged a day — but others just seem to rot in the bottle), or they can be reformulated so that what was marketed in 1980 or 2000 is not what is being marketed in 2011.

I received a bottle of Gaultier's Le Mâle in a swap when it was launched sixteen years ago. I loved the idea of it: the packaging seemed very cheeky and avant-garde to me, innocent that I was, and since I couldn't get it locally, it had an aura of rarity. I wore it a little, but it never took hold of my brain, and so I in turn swapped it away to someone else. I am sure it has been reconstructed since them; it can't always have been quite this single-minded.

Le Mâle, after its opening herbal freshness dies down, is disconcertingly monochromatic: a barber-shop fantasia of soapy lavender and orange blossom blanketed with sweet powdery vanilla, to the point of dullness. It is unexpectedly loud (you could easily overdose on this and choke everyone around you) and quite sweet and as persistent as you would think an oriental should be, lasting for twelve hours without breaking a sweat. But when something is so unchanging, so essentially uninteresting, do you want it to last twelve hours? Do you want to spend twelve hours in a barbershop? I don't.

Object Lessons: L'Artisan Parfumeur Havana Vanille

Lesson 1: Be organized.

I don't know why--maybe its name came up in one of the many and varied scent blogs I read--but a few days ago I was idly thinking about L'Artisan's Havana Vanille, which was launched in mid-2009 and which was pretty obviously the sort of thing that I would love: vanilla, of course, but also tobacco and rum and tonka and and spices and a great many other things that bring me pleasure. Even though I have vowed to not buy any scents this year (a vow which I am going to break in a couple of months, about more which anon), I put it on my list of samples to order on January 1st, 2012. Later that day I was digging through a shoebox full of samples looking for something interesting to write about, and to my shock--I think my jaw fell--there was a vial of Havana Vanille which I have had for certainly a year and didn't know I owned.

Lesson 2: Don't buy more of something than you can reasonably use.

I went through a phase where I was ordering lots of tempting samples from The Perfumed Court and Luckyscent. In fact, just last week I had to stop myself from buying the newest Luckyscent sample pack, eight vials from a line called SoOud, many of which sound gorgeous. But I have got at least a hundred vials that I haven't even tried yet (see Lesson 1), and there is no way I can justify spending a single cent on more fragrances, so I exhibited an uncharacteristic strength of will and closed the web page.

Lesson 3: Don't buy full bottles of scents unsniffed (unless they're really cheap and you can live with the possibility of making a mistake).

So I put a big healthy glug of Havana Vanille on my skin and kind of hated it. I gave it some time, and my dislike was not much diminished. Imagine if I had gone by the list of notes and bought the bottle online!

Havana Vanille--already renamed Vanille Absolument--smells, obviously, like vanilla, like blond tobacco crushed together with vanilla beans in spiced rum, and even though that is a peck of glorious scents right there, it's all too much, big and heavy and sweet in a damning, overbearing way. There is a floralcy to the middle and a dusky woodiness at the base, and when you've gotten to that point the sweetness has tapered off somewhat, but it really is far too late by then: the thing has outstayed its welcome for hours. I note that some other people find Havana Vanille relatively light, and fine, everybody's nose is different, but that to me is incomprehensible: I own some fairly heavy, strong, and/or sweet scents, and Havana Vanille is right up there with them in weight and texture.

Lesson 4: Nothing lasts forever.

Vanille Absolument is replacing Vanilia, which I own, have worn for at least 15 years, and still adore (I wore it just last week, and it has never palled over the years). That's vanilla done right: stylish, graceful, perfectly unisex, a luminous concoction of vanilla pod, vanilla orchid (officially ylang-ylang, but orchidaceous to my nose), and spice, wreathed in feathery smoke. Vanilia is discontinued and is no longer on the company's website, but some online retailers still have it (you may have to hunt around), as does The Perfume Shoppe. If you love Vanilia or you just adore amazing vanilla scents (and can ignore Lesson 3), I'd snap it up if I were you.

Regarding Lessons 2 and 3, I am taking a little trip to New York in June and I am determined that the latest Serge Lutens export, Jeux de Peau, will be mine; it's meant to smell like buttered toast, and the list of notes ("Bread note, spices, licorice, apricot, immortelle, sandalwood, woody notes, amber", says Luckyscent) suggests that I will not be able to live without it, since Lutens is my obsession of obsessions. I will smell it first, just in case. But I'll do so with my credit card in my hand.

Scentroulette Day 18: Vanille Sublime by Maison Berdoues

There is an opera website I visit pretty regularly, and sometimes--not always, but sometimes--there's so much ragging and complaining and insulting going on that I start to think these people don't actually like opera. They do, of course: they love it, and they have high standards, and so when they attend an (expensive!) opera, only to be insulted by bad singing or ridiculous staging, naturally they're angry.

I was starting to feel as I were coming across as someone who doesn't love scents, with all the complaining I've been doing recently. Usually when I'm writing about a scent it's something that I've given myself a fair bit of time to think about, but for the last few weeks I've just been writing about whatever randomly comes to hand, and as Theodore Sturgeon said, 90% of everything is crap, so of course I'm going to be less than complimentary a lot of the time.

So today I cheated a little. I fished around for a bag that I figured was sure to contain something I would like, which turned out to be once again a sampler set from The Perfumed Court, this one called Fabulous Vanilla. I love vanilla!

What I ended up with in my paw was something called Vanille Sublime by Maison Berdoues. The company still exists*, though the scent doesn't, and you can't even get it from TPC because their vanilla sampler has changed. I'd wouldn't be surprised, though, if there were still some of this out there somewhere. Even if there isn't, Maison Berdoues still has a number of vanilla scents available: in the Les Petits Plaisirs line there's Vanilla, and then vanilla coupled with Monoi (which is to say gardenia), Mango (I think--the punctuation is suspect), Cherry, Strawberry, Praline, Raspberry, Blackberry, and Amber. Also, there's a Toffee, and you just know that's got a big dose of vanilla in it. If you're determined to have a Maison Berdoues vanilla scent, they've got you covered.

Vanille Sublime starts off as a big, candy-coloured fruity vanilla with floral undertones; it is aggressive and very, very strong. It's a vanillabomb. It verges on the cloying, almost sickening in any quantity: if you are the sort of person who likes huge sweet fragrances, then this would be your sort of thing, though it would only be fair to use it with extreme discretion.

Or you could just wait an hour or so, because that is when the top and middle (they're pretty much the same thing) begin to peel off and reveal the base; a dark, luscious spiced vanilla, much subtler and more sophisticated than what came before. There is still a hint of fruitiness to it, but tempered with overtones of tobacco and chocolate. The base still isn't what you'd call demure or subtle, but it's lovely.

If you can find this stuff, and if you like vanilla scents, and if you can stand the attack mode of the first hour, then have at it. Vanille Sublime is unlikely to be the best vanilla you ever smelled in your life--there are hundreds of them out there!--but the core of it is beautiful.

*The website's intro contains a quote by Heinrich Heine: "Perfumes are the flower's feelings", which is the pathetic fallacy writ large but is also rather sweet.

Downmarket: CSP Caramel Sunset

Maybe ten years ago when we lived in Saint John, Jim and I used to rent a car--we've never owned one--and drive to Calais, Maine, at least once a month during the spring and summer. It was a reasonably beautiful drive, and it was fun to go to a completely different country by car (still a novel experience for me, who grew up on an island but hasn't lived there for half his life) and buy things we couldn't get in Canada. One of those things was Sathers Coconut Stacks

which were little droppings of slightly waxy cheapjack caramel (surely made with hydrogenated fat) and minced coconut.

To paraphrase Noel Coward, "Extraordinary how potent cheap candy is." They were positively addictive, and we would buy a few little bags with every trip and try not to wolf them all down before we got home. We would usually succeed, but they wouldn't last past the next day.

The last few times we went to Calais, we couldn't find them, and Jim figured they were withdrawn from sale as a way of protecting the public from acute fake-caramel intoxication, but no, they're still available: the company's website shows them, and you can mail-order them from various sites by the case (12 bags, surely a lethal dose). We don't dare.

How clever of Comptoir Sud Pacific to create Caramel Sunset, and in so doing exactly recreate the experience of being sold a bag of stale, dusty Coconut Stacks by a woman wearing gardenia perfume.

It's not all coconut, caramel, and tiare; there's plenty of that signature CSP vanilla in the base, for all the good that does.

As any perfume fanatic knows, the ones you dislike the most are generally the ones that stay on your skin the longest: they're the cat the makes a beeline for the one cat-hater in the room and won't leave him alone.* If it turns out that you like Caramel Sunset, you will have the pleasure of its company for a long, long time.

*The reason cats do this, in case you wondered, is that we humans tend to look at things we like, but in the most of the rest of the animal world, this prolonged adoration is called staring, and it's a threat. Cats will tend to gravitate to people who avoid their gaze, perverse though that seems. If you want to make a cat feel at home, don't meet its gaze, or blink obviously and repeatedly. If you want to drive it away, glare at it. This is not guaranteed to work, cats being what they are.

Critical Mass: Montale Chypre Vanillé (eventually)

A critic, a proper critic, has to have three things: a bottomless passion for his subject matter, a large accumulated body of knowledge about it, and the unshakeable conviction that he is correct.

This third is where I really fall down. I'm could never be a proper critic because, whatever my knowledge (could be greater) and passion (probably couldn't), I can never assert that I am absolutely right in my opinions and therefore dissenters are wrong. Even when I loathe something and decry it as absolutely valueless, I'll still cave when someone else says they like it.* If they say it's good, I might argue the opposite: but if they say they like it, who am I to dispute that? It comes down to taste. I like things that aren't good, that are perhaps indefensible, what are generally known as "guilty pleasures" (though I feel no guilt). If you like one of the various Britney Spears flankers or some cheap drugstore cologne, hey, enjoy. Don't let me stop you! (And maybe it works. A co-worker, a girl of 19, wears a discreet amount of the only scent she owns (I asked), Siren by Paris Hilton, and even though it's one of those standard-issue gourmand fruity floral things that we've seen about four million of in the last decade, she smells nice when you're working with her, so who am I to say she ought to shell out a hundred bucks for something better?)

I would like to stress that I am not saying there isn't any such thing as good and bad. There are great works of art and terrible ones, and all sorts in between, and the world would be a better place if people developed a sense of taste about artistic matters--including perfumery--and used it to discriminate between the worthy and the un. But if you refuse to watch subtitled movies ("I don't go to the movies to read!") and prefer those machine-made Hollywood blockbusters, if you hate all the classic perfumes and would rather wear the latest celebrity scent, have at it. I don't run your life.

A couple of quotes to illustrate the point:

Ethel Merman, after seeing Harvey Fierstein's "Torch Song Trilogy", said (as quoted by Fierstein himself), "I thought it was a piece of shit, but everyone else was laughing and crying, so what the fuck do I know?"

That's the classic non-critic response: "I hated it, but other people love it, so I could be wrong." It's my usual tack: my taste isn't everyone's taste, but even though I may think something is dreadful and without merit (and will always happily argue the point), maybe you like it, and who am I to say you're wrong? (Even though in writing I express my opinions as fact, I'm not as dogmatic as that.)

On the other side of the fence, expressing immovable certainty born of long consideration and the belief in one's own taste, is George Bernard Shaw: "With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his."

To compare yourself to Shakespeare and come out the victor? That takes a special kind of nerve. That takes a critic.



+

And this brings us to Chypre Vanillé by Montale.

I think it's utterly dreadful: a huge, perfumey opening, possibly aldehydes, certainly a big, vicious floral bouquet up front and centre and leading into the core, laced with a trickle of the promised vanilla contaminated by a huge helping of the same gagging powderiness that made Le Labo's Labdanum 18 such torment to be around. Surprisingly, there is a genuine chypre feeling to the base; even though oakmoss is a rarity in scents these days, and there doesn't appear to be any in Chypre Vanillé (the given notes are vanilla, rose, amber, incense, sandalwood, iris, vetiver, and tonka bean), it has that bit of snap and snarl--hard to define, but so obvious in classic chypres like Mitsouko and Paloma Picasso Mon Parfum--that make chypres so interesting. But it is so deeply lodged in the overwhelming powderiness that it just flails around helplessly; it can't assert itself, because nothing could.

I don't think I can exaggerate the sheer enormousness of the powder. It surrounds you like a cloud of gnats, and it will not leave you alone; it leaves trails when you move. It will not be washed off: three increasingly severe and desperate hand-washings (because I always apply to the backs of my hands) did nothing to dislodge it. The little vial on my desk reeks of it. I can't even imagine wearing this in public, because you would occupy all of the space you were in: an office, a subway car, the Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace.

But what the fuck do I know? Maybe it's great. Maybe everyone else is laughing and crying (in a good way). Nevertheless, into the garbage, wrapped in a couple of layers of plastic just in case, goes my sample: I won't be subjecting myself to its special brand of horribleness again. If you want to, it's going for $125 for a 50-mL bottle. Just don't wear it around me.

* Or even if they think they might like it: after tearing La Voce to shreds, I backed down as soon as a commenter expressed disappointment that it wasn't any good, and I immediately said, well now, don't take my word for it, try it anyway, you might love it. And she might. Who am I to remove a possible source of pleasure from her life?

Trick Question: Serge Lutens Un Bois Vanille

What's the simplest, most accessible thing Serge Lutens could make and still be true to his vision and his reputation as an offbeat, just-this-side-of-avant-garde niche perfumer?

My first impression of Un Bois Vanille was that Serge Lutens was playing some kind of joke on his devoted fans, because all I could smell was, in essence, Comptoir Sud Pacifique Vanille Coco. I thought that there couldn't possibly be coconut in the damned thing, because it doesn't seem like the sort of thing Lutens would do, so, given the choice between trusting my nose and trusting my assumptions about a brand, I chose to disbelieve my own senses.

There is coconut in there, as it turns out. A big blast of vanilla-infused coconut? How can this be? What saves the opening from being a retread of the CSP is a little static-electricity buzz of dry licorice. There isn't a lot of it, but it adds the necessary Lutens touch of slight oddness.

A few minutes in, there's a moment of LouLou, a Cacharel oriental from the late eighties composed of tropical flowers and lots of vanilla: the LouLou doesn't last long, but it suggests that tucked into Un Bois Vanille is a floral note, probably tiare, that (somehow) makes a brief appearance and then darts away again.

After that, Un Bois Vanille is straight-up vanilla. For something you'd think would be a wood scent--the name means "Vanilla Wood"--it isn't very woody. Guess what? It doesn't matter. Un Bois Vanille consists mostly of the second-most beautiful vanilla I've ever worn. (The winner is still the base of Tom Ford Black Orchid, and you are going to have to sit through a lot of other stuff, beautiful though it is, to get to that vanilla.) It lasts just about forever, too; ten hours later, it's still clearly evident, and not just in a nose-to-the-skin way; it still wafts and eddies around you. If you are in the market for a simple yet spectacularly beautiful vanilla scent, sweet and effusive and glorious, then trust me on this: you are going to want to get your hands on Un Bois Vanille.

And now I'm off to New York for a week, where I am going to manfully fight my urge to buy a bottle of this stuff and who knows what else. I'm trying very, very hard to declare a moratorium on scent-buying, but I have a feeling that if I should end up in Bergdorf Goodman and should somehow get a bottle of Un Bois Vanille in my hands, my moratorium, and my resolve, will collapse. Wish me luck.

The Unexpected: Montale Vanille Absolu

If you're trying out a scent with the word Vanille in its name, you probably have a few expectations, most of which Montale's Vanille Absolu manages to deftly subvert. I don't think it's a scent I need to own, but it kept me guessing, and that's an accomplishment of some sort.

The first weirdness about Vanille Absolu is that it doesn't seem to have any alcohol in it. An alcohol-based scent feels cool against your skin because your body heat evaporates the alcohol (which has a lower boiling point that water, so it evaporates more quickly), drawing a little heat from your skin and making it feel cooler. But Vanille Absolu feels like a silicone oil: it's smooth and just the tiniest bit greasy, and it's exactly the same temperature as your skin, making it feel as if you haven't put anything on at all. I don't know if this is true of all Montale scents or just this one, because I haven't tried any of the others: but it's a little jarring if you aren't expecting it.

The second weirdness is that all you get at first sniff is a huge dose of cotton candy, which is to say ethylmaltol, the modern way for a perfume to announce its yumminess. That's it. Vanilla? What vanilla? Nothing to see here, just cotton candy. If instead of Vanille Absolu they had called it Barbe a Papa, I wouldn't have been a bit surprised. (And since Montale has a scent called Chocolate Greedy, I wouldn't put anything past them.)

Luckily, the cotton candy calms down after a few minutes and blossoms into a full, rich vanilla. It's still very sweet: it has some of that darkly caramelized, cooked-almost-burnt sugar smell that Comptoir Sud Pacifique's Vanille Abricot uses to such great effect. It's very tasty and very pleasant.

And then, in fairly short order, the final surprise: the vanilla takes on a slightly sharp tinge (the word "acrid" comes to mind and I tried to ignore it but it will not leave) as a woody note emerges from underneath it, as if you'd spilled a bottle of double-strength vanilla on a teak end table.

That's it, really. The whole thing. Huge tuft of cotton candy, heavily sugared vanilla, a bit of wood. It lasts a long, long time on the skin, too, that final sweet-vanilla-wood accord. Quite nice, but, to be honest, not groundbreaking, and pretty expensive (currently $95 for a 50-mL spray) for what it is. I own a lot of vanilla scents, and unless something about Vanille Absolu grabs onto your heart and will not let go, I think you could do better. Many of the CSP vanilla scents and any of the Maison de la Vanille, for starters.

Duality: Bulgari Black

A few weeks ago I was in Winners, which is a clothing discounter that also carries home decor and stuff like that, a step up from it-fell-off-a-truck but still a real mixed bag. The only reason I go in there every couple of weeks is that they also carry brand-name fragrances; if you wait long enough for them to get marked down to clearance prices, you can get some real bargains.

I'd gone in after work to see what, if anything, was new. There wasn't anything, but two Bulgari scents, Black and Thé Rouge, had been reduced for clearance. I'd owned Black before, but hadn't even tried Thé Rouge, and since there was just the one bottle and the box was sealed, I went home to Google it before investing the money (even though I could have had the both of them for less than $40). Thé Rouge sounded like the kind of thing I would like, so I decided I should have them.

You know how this turns out: the next day on the way in to work I went in to buy them, and there were still three bottles of Black left, but the Thé Rouge was gone. The hell with it, I said. If I can't have both, I'll have neither. That'll show you, stupid store!

I naturally told my almost equally scent-obsessed co-worker about this, and then she went and bought a bottle of Black for me for my birthday! And this is why I can wear it today and tell you all about it.

I'd bought Black shortly after its launch: it was one of those strange, compelling things that I always seem to need to own as soon as I smell them. (Such things are generally in a strange, compelling bottle, too; this one is a glass disc wrapped in black rubber like a tire. That big metal cap isn't a cap at all; it's the sprayer, which you twist one way to unlock and spray, the other to lock.) And then, as so often happens, I got tired of it after a few years, swapped it away, and began wishing a while ago that I had some. I have really got to stop doing that: I swapped away Le Feu D'Issey and Donna Karan Fuel for Men in the same way.

Black consists of two disparate, one might say incompatible, ideas duking it out for supremacy. The first thing you smell is, if not quite burning tires, then something very close; smoked black tea and a bit of rubber. It's not unlike walking into Princess Auto or Canadian Tire. There's a spiciness to the smoke, too; it's aggressive and more than a little hostile.

Alongside the smoke and rubber is...pretty vanilla. It's soft and musky and creamy. It isn't blended with the smoky-tea-and-tires element; it seems to stand alongside it, and the two ideas wrestle to present themselves to you.

Black is confusing, which is delightful. People are still arguing about whether it's too rough for a woman, too sweet for a man, whether it's actually unisex (as Bulgari marketed it from the start). Is it masculine? Feminine? Aggressive? Comforting? Prickly? Velvety? The paradox is that it's all of these things, not simultaneously but in turns, and you can't tell which side of it you're going to be smelling at any given time.

When it was launched in 1998, it was baffling and enraging to a lot of people, because it wasn't like anything else on the market; they had no point of reference for it. In the interim, there have been plenty of scents that take inspiration from it to some degree or other, so people have gotten used to the strangeness. (Givenchy's 1999 Organza Indecence seems to borrow from it a little, L'Artisan Parfumeur's 2000 release Tea for Two very much.) It doesn't smell as avant-garde as it used to; that's the nature of the avant-garde, I guess, where yesterday's brazen new idea is tomorrow's commonplace.

Summer Loving: Guerlain Terracotta Voile D'Ete

At first, Terracotta Voile D'Ete seems like the result of a scientific experiment in human perception, designed to demonstrate how brief a top note can be and still be said to exist. Nerve impulses can travel at up to 120 metres per second. If we assume that the distance from the olfactory epithelium to the olfactory cortex is six inches, leaving room for the occasional detour around bones and hinges and whatnot, then we can calculate that twelve hundred and seventy microseconds is the minimum possible duration for a perfume's top note, which in this case appears to be bergamot and mint.

After this tiny shred of a second has passed and the minty top note has vanished into the ether, the middle of the scent shows up and is a stripped-down version of Old Spice, with the gasoliney herbed-geranium quality of the scent gone but the core intact. I'm not sure why someone would want to make a copy of Old Spice, since the original has been on the market since the 1930s and is available inexpensively just about everywhere, but if you want a costlier yet less complex duplicate, here it is. It smells primarily of carnations and vanilla, and sometimes the vanilla, intriguingly, will simply detach itself from its surroundings and wrap itself around you in an extremely ingratiating way. Since carnations and vanilla are close to being, in my estimation, the two best things that anybody or anything can smell like, this alone makes the scent a winner.

After a couple of hours of this luxury, Terracotta Voile D'Ete descends into a dark pool of langorous warmth, supposedly iris and ylang-ylang, where it remains for the next few hours before vanishing. It is very attractive.

If you expected a typical bright-fresh-clean summer scent--Voile D'Ete means "summer veil"--then you are of course in for a shock. This isn't a scent for summer; this is a scent that's an interpretation of summer, all sunshiny carnation and tropical heat. It isn't original, but it's charming from top to bottom, particularly in the way it expresses warmth without ever being cloying or overpowering. (It is, after all, a veil.) I should also mention for the trepidatious that Terracotta Voile D'Ete is entirely wearable by a man; despite the floral base, it's neither flowery nor florid, and thanks to Old Spice, the carnation-vanilla accord is unimpeachably well-established in masculine perfumery.

The bottle is simple but striking; a sort of torus (twin sister to Byzance, cousin to Paloma Picasso Mon Parfum, great-niece of Bijan) with a little gold dunce cap which can be removed and replaced with a sprayer (which does not, unfortunately, accommodate the dunce cap) . The sprayer has a very high output; it gives you a bath. Since the scent is (despite its ingredients) fairly lightweight, and since it comes in a 100-mL bottle, this is not a problem.

Although the scent was launched in 1999 and discontinued not too long afterwards, it's still widely available at many online discounters. I bought mine at Imagination Perfumery for $24.99. It was worth it.

30 Demeters in 30 Days: Day 13, Marshmallow

Homemade marshmallows don't seem too hard to make: the usual base for any candy, a boiled-sugar solution, is poured over gelatin and beaten until foamy, then allowed to set. I've made all kinds of candy, but never marshmallows: I've never even eaten any but the store-bought kind.

I have, however, walked past the marshmallow section in the supermarket a thousand times, and it's always the same reaction: a deep inhale, a blissful sigh. The smell of commercial marshmallows is a child's idea of heaven, a huge plume of thick sugary vanilla with a pleasantly dusty overtone (the smell, or at least the presence, of cornstarch, I guess).

That's not, unfortunately, what Demeter Marshmallow smells like. It has a generic cooked-sugar aroma and the barest hint of something slightly burnt, maybe a toasted marshmallow (but there's no campfire to it). I'm willing to concede that commercial marshmallows may not smell like the homemade version, and that Marshmallow is the homemade kind (as I said, I've never had them and therefore don't know what they smell like), but the smell is so blah that I would have preferred the store variety.

It's not terrible, and in fact is mild and pleasant; it's just not what I expected to be in the bottle, because it doesn't have any character, unlike its namesake. If you held a bag of the candy under someone's nose, they'd recognize it instantly--it's an extremely specific and well-defined scent--but if you sprayed the scent on your skin and offered that to them, I'm pretty certain they wouldn't be able to guess what it was. Nothing about it says "Marshmallow!"; it says "Um...candy?"

The website says, "Demeter has captured the essence of the Marshmallow in a scent so light it borders on transparent", and while I'm not too sure about the first half of the statement, I can heartily agree with the second. It has very little staying power; it begins to recede from view within five minutes, is a little drift of vanilla in fifteen, and is all but gone in half an hour.

I don't know if it's such a good idea to be printing the recipe on the bottle. It works fine with the cocktail Demeters, because you just have to throw those together, but the instructions for the recipe say "Boil it up, pour in pan, let stand for 12 hours, cut into squares." Nope. If you boil gelatin, bad things are going to happen, and if you don't beat the mixture, I don't know what you'll get, but it definitely isn't marshmallow. I'm sure it's tongue-in-cheek, but still; misleading and not a good idea.

Fraternal Twins: Thierry Mugler A*Men and B*Men

I feel fairly certain that the perfumer's brief for Thierry Mugler's B*Men read in full, "You remember A*Men? We want the same, only different."

A*Men is the men's version of Angel, and it's actually a better scent. Angel is extraordinarily potent: it calls to mind all those huge outsized 1980s scents that cleared elevators and led to fragrance bans in some public buildings. It slams you in the face. A*Men is still pretty strong, but it's been toned down somewhat.

A*Men starts with a bright melange of bergamot, lavender, and helional, a grassy-floral synthetic with a brilliant edge. (There is supposedly a peppermint note which I don't detect.) Almost immediately, though, a burgeoning sweetness overwhelms the brightness, and it makes for a strange, clangy opening. Angel's signature patchouli note is still there, and it's identical in A*Men, but now it's supplemented with dry cedar and a distinct sweet-coffee note. It's this sweetness which dominates the remainder of the scent as sugary styrax and vanillic tonka bean well up from the base notes. It lasts forever, so you'd better be sure you like it before you spray it on.

The official list of notes for B*Men has nothing in common with A*Men, so it's a real surprise that they seem so similar. They don't smell the same, but they feel similar; there's no question that they're members of the same family. B*Men starts brightly, of course, but it's an astringent brightness provided by rhubarb and citrus notes. The opening salvo isn't as jarring as in A*Men, but the freshness of the rhubarb soon takes on a cooked quality, like rhubarb pie, as the core sweetness begins to develop. Instead of coffee and cedar in the middle notes, we have sugared spices and sequoia, and the blaring quality of A*Men is absent because there isn't any of that dramatic patchouli. The sweet end notes have a touch of vanilla, I think, and a dose of ambergris.

I used to own a bottle of A*Men, but halfway through it I just couldn't take that concentrated sweetness any more. It's a well-made and fascinating scent, but my tastes changed, as they seem to do repeatedly, and I couldn't wear it any longer. I gave it to a female friend who'd already been wearing Angel for a couple of years, and she took to A*Men just as readily. (Both scents, in truth, are pretty unisex.)

The A*Men bottle is clearly based on the bottle for Angel, but where that was all sharp angles, this is a big sinuous curve of shiny chrome with a star-shaped cutout exposing the signature blue Angel juice. (An identical bottle clad in black rubber is also available.)

The B*Men bottle is the same shape, but the rubber is khaki this time and the cutout is a brazen red.

Hot Stuff: Dior Fahrenheit 32

The last Dior men's release, Dior Homme, got a very limited launch in a relatively small number of stores: clearly intended as a prestige fragrance, it still isn't widely available; you can't just walk into any old drugstore or department store and expect to find it. (It's available in only one location where I live, and that isn't a store, it's a little mall kiosk boutique that has one or two bottles of several hundred different scents.)

Dior is taking the opposite tack with their new Fahrenheit 32; they're launching it wide and hard, and they expect it to be a huge seller. Its name is riding on the coattails of its huge success of twenty years ago, Fahrenheit: but as the name suggests, where the older scent was warm, this one is chilly.

If you spray on Fahrenheit 32 with no preconceptions, you will be shocked. The top note is a cold, jazzy splash of aldehydes and a serious quantity of orange blossom. I've been wearing hardly anything but Fahrenheit 32 for a week now, and it's still striking. A few days ago, I caught a whiff of it and said (to myself), "That's exactly the same orange-blossom note as in Poison!" The day before that, the same thing happened, except that I realized it was the same note as in the ultra-feminine Le Classique by Gaultier.

But Fahrenheit 32 isn't feminine. The orange blossom is unexpected, yes, but it's not girly; this scent is, among other things, a lesson in how to make a floral scent for men. The aldehydes (and, I'm sure, other unnamed synthetics) give the flowers a fresh, crisp edge; they don't smell like a treeful of blooms but like something a little aggressive.

Once the aldehydes fly away, the middle note continues the orange-blossom theme, but now some masculine warmth begins to rise up in the form of vetiver and vanilla. The vetiver is angular and green, giving a little spine to the flowers, and the vanilla, warm but slightly dry, wraps around the rest of the scent, decisively masculine. The orange blossom lasts a long time, but it's this vanilla which outlasts all the rest, leaving a faint haze six or eight hours later.

The bottle is the same monument as the original Fahrenheit bottle, with two exceptions: instead of being gradations of orange, it's clear at the bottom, shading to a frosty white at the top, and the cap, no longer a tubular chunk of black, is a sleek bisected chrome cylinder. The box is a shiny chromed silver with an opalescent band near the top, mimicking the bottle. It's all very desirable, inside and out.

Shore Thing: L Lempicka

There's no doubt upon encountering a Lolita Lempicka fragrance that this is a woman who sees herself as a capital-r Romantic. Her bottles are dreamy and abstracted. The bottle for her first, eponymous women's fragrance looks like an apple, in lavender glass wrapped with ivy leaves and signed with her name in a loose, girly script. The men's follow-up, Au Masculin, is in that same lavender glass, and looks like a gnarled tree trunk with the name carved into it--you can easily imagine its bearing your initials instead, "SG + LL"--inside a heart.

The scents are equally romanticized, sweet and luscious gourmand scents, both based on ivy leaves, licorice, and vanilla. I find them both a little cloying, as well, but the men's version at least has some drier elements (rum and cedar) to thin out the sugariness.

There's no point in expecting anything shocking from Lempicka; she won't be doing a whip-cracking leather scent or a dry chypre any time soon. After a few of what the industry calls "flankers", new scents leveraged from older ones and capitalizing on their established name (even if they have nothing in common with the originals), she launched her second original women's scent last year, L.

One glance at the bottle would tell you it's another Lempicka scent. Instead of a forest motif, this one has an oceanic theme, to say the least. It's an aquamarine heart embossed with a starfish and draped with a bit of gold fishnet. Attached to this with wire are a tiny glass starfish, a pearly little teardrop of beach glass, and her initial done up in fake rhinestones, all tied to the sprayer cap (itself a triangular chunk of beach glass) with fine rope.

The scent itself isn't especially oceanic, mind you. It's flat-out romantic again, another gourmand oriental, and an extremely nice one at that. This time the star of the show isn't licorice but immortelle, a flower that has a peculiar but pleasant maple-syrup note to it. The scent opens with a brisk shot of orange peel and cinnamon, but it doesn't smell like potpourri or mulled wine, because immediately underneath it is a slosh of vanilla, which will be present throughout the entire scent. There's an element of the top notes that could, if you put your mind to it, suggest seawater, but it certainly isn't an important or dominant note.

The immortelle makes its appearance soon afterwards, and that maple smell--not strong, certainly not like a puddle of syrup--mixes with the vanilla and a very soft, indistinct floral note. It's charming: neither flowery nor cloying, but soothing and sweet. The middle notes begin to fade fairly quickly, in an hour or so, and from then on the scent is a slow gourmand progression towards the base notes of musky wood and still more vanilla.

I like L a lot. The bottle is girly, practically a parody of teen-girl arts-and-crafts romanticism, but the scent itself is unisex and charming.

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?

Wrapped Up: Vanille Sauvage du Madagascar

Of the five Toutes Les Vanilles Du Monde scents, my favourite by a considerable margin is Vanille Sauvage du Madagascar, a liquid version of a chenille blanket.

There's no chocolate listed in the notes (mandarin, bergamot, geranium, vanilla, lavender, coriander, thyme, incense, sandalwood, and vetiver), and it doesn't smell like chocolate, exactly, but there's an almost fudgy warmth in the top notes, a prelude to the the herbs and spices that dominate in the middle. Those herbs and spices have had all their edges taken off; no one note stands out, and none of them is harsh or edgy. The vanilla, and there's a lot of it, is somewhat sweetened but not sugary, and the scent is edible--lickable, almost. It's a marvelous composition, food-oriented without being cheap or obvious. There's not much complexity to it, though it develops with time, but it has depth and character.

Scents are hard to describe in general, but this one is particularly tough after I've been doing vanilla for the last two weeks. What it boils down to is that Vanille Sauvage du Madagascar is not a seduction nor a burst of joy. It's warm and relaxing, uncomplicated, cozy. It's comforting.