No No No Yes: Three More Fueguias (and a surprise)

Darwin's notes are listed as "cedar, grapefruit, vetiver", and in truth that just about sums it up. The grapefruit top is a bit toilety (in an interesting way, just a bare whiff of pee), the vetiver adds a bright-green sharpness, and the cedar dominates the whole composition. Simple and shallow, no depth at all, but very nice, though it's hard to see how it could be $150 worth of nice.

Ballena de la Pampa is said to be constructed around "musk, grass notes, ambergris": it starts off with a pleasant golden glow and then immediately turns into laundry musk, the exact smell of a big scoop of laundry detergent, sneezy and harsh. It is hard to conceive of this as anything but a huge waste of money, the manufacturer's for having created something so pared-down and wretched, yours if you should happen to buy it.*

Pampa Humeda supposedly smells of "leaf, eucalyptus and rosemary", but I can't tell because I didn't get a sample of it: to my considerable surprise I discovered that Luckyscent messed up my sample bag and accidentally sent me a vial of Etat Libre d'Orange's Jasmine et Cigarette instead. Let's pretend that Pampa Humeda is fantastic (it could happen) and move on to the ELdO, since I see I've mentioned it a few times but never actually written about it.

You wouldn't be out of line if you expected Jasmin et Cigarette to smell like a femme fatale: red lipstick, fur, whiskey-soaked voice, wreathed in dark jasmine perfume and cigarette smoke. But nothing of the sort! Instead, you get a big unfurling of bright jasmine coupled with the sunny peachfuzz smell of apricots, followed quickly by the sunwarmed-hay smell of tobacco. There is a faint trail of smoke underneath, but mostly it is cured but unburned tobacco, golden brown and glorious.

After the first bloom of the top notes, it sits reasonably close to the skin, the sort of scent that makes others lean in closer. It is heady, yes, but not femme fatale at all: the freshness of the fruity jasmine may skew it to the women's side of the aisle for some, but coupled with the outdoorsy, masculine tobacco, it's fascinatingly unisex. Despite the olfactory references to sunshine and peach orchards and tobacco fields, this is evening wear, I think: a bit too sultry for the office, a bit too mysterious for the daytime, it would sit well on someone with places to go after dark.

*I apologize, but just a little, for harping endlessly on the cost of these things: they seem so hideously overpriced for what they are, and I can't seem to get over it. The Etat scent is a third the price of the Fueguias, and yet it is so much better than either of them — and in fact with last week's exception, better than any Fueguia I've smelled yet — that the asking price for the latter seems almost criminal. You can get sixteen ten-mL bottles of Etat for the price of one small Fueguia. Manufacturers and vendors may of course charge what they like, but there is something very wrong with that equation.

Red Alert: Lust by Gorilla Perfume

One of the problems with a very stripped-down scent is that there's only so much you can say about it. A big constructed scent can make you think: it has multiple meanings that change and reverberate over time, because the more elements there are in a scent (within reason), the more they interact with one another, conjuring up associations and complexities. Simpler scents are more likely to have just a single idea in their heads: "fun", say, or "manly", or "pretty". The idea of Lust is "va-va-voom", or possibly "climb on top of me RIGHT NOW," as if the name didn't already tell you everything you need to know.

Lust is big fat sexy jasmine and that's just about it. It's fairly sweet, candied at the top with some vanilla in the bottom, and floral, with a slug of rose and ylang to keep it from being too monochromatic. But mostly it's jasmine, and huge, and really very nice for the price, as long as you understand that you don't wear it, it wears you: like all the Lush/Gorilla scents, it is minimalist perfumery on a large scale.

It is also dyed dramatically red: my sample leaked and stained the box that the sample set was packaged in. I expect it would do the same to any clothing it happened to touch, so beware.

Beauty and Brains: Serge Lutens A La Nuit

Oh, the crap you inadvertently see when you're on an elliptical machine at the gym in front of a bank of televisions.

Yesterday, the crap was The Marilyn Denis Show, which I take it is the Canadian version of whatever crap American housewives boredly half-watch at 10:00 on a weekday morning. (Tomorrow's episode features thoroughly debunked and shameless communicator-with-the-dead John Edward, which tells you everything you need to know.) On yesterday's show was some expert who was presenting a segment called "Busting Beauty Myths", myths on which the audience was invited to vote by means of little paddles with "True" on one side and "False" on the other. And the first proposition was that you should never, ever, EVER spray scent on your wrists and the rub them together, because you will bruise the scent. Everyone knows that!

Except that it isn't true. How can anyone even think that's a possibility? It's a liquid. You can't bruise it: it's already been processed and compounded and bottled and shipped and toted hither and yon and finally applied to your personage, so it's been banged around in uncountable ways before it arrives on your skin. You can't bruise it. If you really get some friction going with one wrist against the other, you'll heat it up and drive off the top notes more quickly, but you're not going to alter the scent in any olfactorily noticeable way: you won't somehow rearrange the notes or cause the scent to morph into something else. You spray on some Jovan Wild Musk or Byredo Pulp and it's going to smell like that whether your smush it around on your skin or not.

The expert goes on to say that you must spray the scent on and then leave it for eight minutes. Eight? Not six, not nine? Where did she come up with a number like that? And what are you supposed to do for those eight minutes, sit there rigid and unmoving for fear of damaging your freshly applied perfume? It's not nail polish. It's on your skin, and it's going to slowly evaporate, and nobody will ever be able to tell what you did in the eight minutes after you applied it, unless maybe you subsequently cleaned the toilet and didn't wash your hands.

I don't know where people come up with these stupid ideas, but it's high time this one was laid to rest. Do what you want with your scent. Spritz it, dab it, splash it: leave it there or rub it in, put clothing over it or don't. None of these things matter. Promise.

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Spring is here, really here (at least in my part of the world), and so it is time to think about boxing up the dark, sultry fall and winter scents for a spell and digging out the fresher, brighter things that herald the new season.

It is a pleasure for many of us to divide scents up into categories, and we don't all use the same ones, of course, but in addition to such groupings as men's/women's/unisex, spring/summer/fall/winter, and floral/oriental/chypre/fougere/whatever, I am fond of, for lack of better terms, intellectual versus emotional, or brains versus beauty. The two aren't mutually exclusive, of course, but often you can immediately say of a scent, This one is just flat-out gorgeous, or This one isn't the most beautiful thing I own, but it makes me think.

Some scents just seem brainier than others: they're the ones that aren't immediately accessible or beautiful, the ones that put your cerebral cortex into overdrive before engaging your amygdala.* Many classic chypres for me fit into the intellectual category, because thanks to the general strangeness of oakmoss, a lot of the time you can't be absolutely sure that they're even attractive. A couple of days ago I wore Serge Lutens' Santal Blanc and was struck yet again by its almost mathematically rigorous quality, the naked, bitter stringency of its sandalwood: it's like wearing algorithms on your skin. A lot of Lutens' scents have an intellectual cast to them, because there's almost always at least one element that seems strange or unexpected or out of place, and this may be why his line resonates so strongly with me: I tend to analyze and possibly overthink everything, so his oeuvre fits right in. Some of his scents, of course, consist mostly of strangeness, such as Miel de Bois, which is a linear, relentlessly analytic working through of the life cycle of honey; naturally, I love it.

A La Nuit aims for the "beauty" side of the divide and is jasmine, basically: a huge, lush bower of jasmine petals. There is greenery in the top, and not only that but, because there has to be an injection of Lutensian strangeness or intellectuality, what seems to me the peculiar, inimitable scent of a green banana. The massively floral top also seems to have an overtone of lilac to it, which is like adding corn syrup to sugar because the sugar wasn't sweet enough by itself: I might be imagining the lilac because I'm suffocating in jasmine, but if it's there--the official notes don't mention it--it's a nice touch. The base is mostly benzoin, and not much of that.

Other than that, though, jasmine unto death. I don't like it at all, because I can't handle that much jasmine, but if you like jasmine, or if you want to know what it smells like, then A La Nuit is just the ticket.

*The cerebral cortex is the seat of higher brain functions such as thought and language: the amygdala is responsible for emotional reactions.That was probably clear from the context, but hey, if you didn't know for sure, now you do.