Soldiering On: Three More by Fueguia 1833

Acacia ("mimosa, iris, acacia caven"): Genuinely weird floral, and not in a good way. Baffling cucumbery top, then too much iris. I am not a fan of iris but this one is particularly awful to my nose. 

Naranjo en Flor ("neroli, mimosa, petitgrain"): Angular green top, then cheap shampoo. I am not a fan of orange blossom (there are exceptions) but this one is particularly awful to my nose.

Humboldt ("bergamot, passionfruit, tangerine"): Synthetic fruit-scented air freshener.

My God, I can hear you saying, don't you like anything? Well, yeah, I liked Mbucuruya a whole lot, and if someone gave me a bottle I'd wear it all the time. But it is increasingly obvious that as a whole, the Fueguia 1833 collection is just not for me, at all. However many elements each scent actually does contain, the nucleus-plus-two-electrons focus makes most of them smell underdeveloped and thin, because there aren't enough other components to add complexity and draw attention away from anything that might not be quite working. And most of them just smell like knockoffs of established ideas: there's hardly anything that's new. (Of the 10 that I've tried so far, only El Mono de la Tinta smells novel to me. Even Mbucuruya calls to mind a vanilla-plus-fruit Comptoir Sud Pacifique scent — albeit a really sublimely good CSP.)

Only seven left to go. There's got to be at least one more winner in the bunch. I live in hope.

The Truth Dawns: L'Artisan Parfumer Seville à l'Aube

As I have said any number of times, orange blossom doesn't usually work for me: unless it is a minor player, unless it is kept in careful check by other ingredients, I nearly always find it noxious and oppressive. Like any perfumery note, it has its die-hard adherents, but with minor exceptions such as Dior's Fahrenheit 32, which adds enough vanilla to take the curse off it, the attraction of naked orange-flower has always evaded me, until now, because Seville à l'Aube — "Seville at dawn" — is ravishing. It took me a few wearings to really get it, to adjust my nose to this new experience, but once that had happened I found I couldn't get enough of it.

Seville à l'Aube is approximately a soliflore, but not a brutally single-minded one like Gorilla Perfumes' version: there is decoration and embellishment, but just enough to give it interest, to keep it from being boringly monochromatic. The top is spicy, with a splash of breezy lavender, and the base is a contrast of vanillic benzoin and dry incense, all notes that can and in this case do read as masculine (or at least unisex-trending-masculine): but they are bookends to the star of the show, an orange-blossom which seems to glint and shimmer like a diamond held up to the sun, now creamy and plush, now sharp and focused. It is the smell of pure happiness.

Seville à l'Aube is glorious, quite possibly perfect. How did I never know that orange blossom could smell like this?

There It Is: Orange Blossom by Gorilla Perfume (eventually)

Let's see how long it takes me to get to the point today. A while, I'm thinking.

James Jorden, who as his alter ego La Cieca (Italian for "the blind woman" and a character from the opera La Gioconda) heads up the splendidly bitchy opera blog Parterre Box, also writes reviews under his own name for the New York Post, among others. He recently wrote a review of the revival of Stephen Sondheim's "Follies", and if you aren't interested in reading it (you should), here is a divagation a few paragraphs long that resounded with me:

...When you start writing reviews, or, rather, when you start writing reviews that people actually read, very early on you run into the Siskel and Ebert Dilemma: The realization that potential audiences may be making the decision to see or not to see, to buy or not to buy, based on your published take on the entertainment in question.

Even when the reader feedback is very positive indeed (“I went to see Satyagraha based on your rave review, and it was amazing!”), there’s this little inside-the-head voice nagging at you: “Who the hell are you to be persuading this guy to be spending his money on a Philip Glass opera?” And, when a critic has an inflated sense of his influence, the voice amps up the volume to such absurdities as “Too bad the Met didn’t have you around the last time they did Billy Budd, because that show didn’t draw flies.”

But the real worry here for a reviewer (again, assuming anybody cares what he writes) is this: If I write a mixed review, with maybe a little more focus on the negatives, am I going to scare somebody away from what is, on the whole, a worthwhile experience, or anyway an experience that somebody might find worthwhile?

Luckily, I don't have that kind of influence, but it still nags at me. People are creating works of art — in this case, perfumes — and sending them out into the world, where they have an independent life of their own, and I and others get to experience them and judge them. Where does any reviewer's obligation lie: to be as fair as possible, or to express their opinions as truthfully as possible? This is why I forever find myself saying things like, "I hated it, but I'm not you, and maybe you'll love it."

We may be past the days when New York Times reviewers were able to shut down a restaurant or a play with a single scathing review, but that may only be because the Internet is replacing newspapers, so there are ever more opinions in print. Still, that kind of power is worrisome. It's good to be able to steer the public away from the truly awful, but not to be able to destroy people's honest livelihood with a few carefully honed words.

I think, or at least hope, that people are becoming more sophisticated when they read reviews: they know that what they're reading is still just an opinion, however educated and sophisticated it might be. It's a guideline rather than a diktat. The more you read a particular reviewer, the more you get to know their tastes: if theirs happen to coincide with yours, then you can place ever more faith in their opinions.

This is an easy task when it comes to book and movie critics, but I've never yet found a fragrance reviewer whose opinion I agree with more than half the time. Luca Turin, probably the most well-known, is opinionated to a degree that occasionally borders on the vendetta: his disdain for Mona di Orio seems positively unhinged, well beyond a mere disdain for her fragrances (none of which I have ever smelled), forcing one to wonder if there is some personal animus behind the professional drubbing he gives her. He is not as fond of Serge Lutens as I am (though we occasionally agree, as on the dreadful eighties men's-fragrance rehash Un Bois Sepia, which Turin called a "dim-witted sport fragrance"). His two-out-of-five review for Lutens' Rousse calls it "bizarre" and "one fine mess": would you like to know what I think?

When I wrote about Rousse last year, I noted that I was using a rollerball version that had a base of silicone oil rather than alcohol, and therefore would almost certainly smell different from the actually, commercially available scent (silicone usually means no top notes), and I was right. I got a proper sample earlier this month and I finally got around to trying it as it was meant to be worn. Today is the first properly cool day of the fall (well, the pre-fall, I guess), and Rousse is just the kind of thing you want to be wearing: a thrilling blast of mandarin and spices with all the familiarity of a men's fragrance but taken in a slightly strange and thoroughly Lutensian direction (this is not a clove-studded orange), the autumnal, spicy-woody angularity of cinnamon and cloves dominating the opening and middle, gradually modulating into a warm, dulcet ground bass of amber, sandalwood, and still more spice. I loved the rollerball version but I love the eau de parfum even more, and I strongly suspect that I am going to be owning this in the foreseeable future.

A few years ago, Bond No. 9 sent me an insanely huge press pack containing press releases and samples of all their current fragrances, about thirty in all. I was on their mailing list for a while, and got a few more press kits and samples (which I duly reviewed), and then the largesse stopped coming; I figured they had revised their press strategy and were downsizing the number of kits they sent out, though of course in the back of my head was the less charitable assumption that I wasn't playing by the rules — I was saying what I thought rather than just giving the sort of breathlessly uncritical coverage that fashion magazines are known for — and therefore had been banned. But I'm still on their e-mail list, because e-mails cost nothing to send out.

A few weeks ago I got a notice of a new upcoming line; the e-mail asked if I would like samples and a press pack for the three new scents. Yes, I said, I would. And I still don't have them. Will I? Don't know. In the spirit of fairness I provided an e-mail link to all my previous Bond No. 9 reviews, though of course they could have easily just looked them up. It may be the case that someone there read my reviews and figured they're not wasting the postage on me, or maybe the post office is slow these days. But just to prove that there are no hard feelings, here's a shot of one of their new holiday offerings:

Now just look at that! Ten perfect 5-mL miniatures in a gorgeous gift box. (The scents included are I presume their best sellers: Andy Warhol Union Square, Bleecker Street, Bond No. 9 Signature, Chelsea Flowers, Chinatown, Eau de New York, Hamptons, Nuits de Noho, The Scent of Peace, and Wall Street. For the record: hated Union Square, disdained Wall Street, liked Bleecker Street, loved Nuits de Noho, and haven't tried the rest.) I think the price, $250, is a little steep; $150 would have been closer to the mark. But that is still a terrific gift idea. They do really great seasonal merchandise.

Also in time for the Christmas insanity is a new version of Clinique's Aromatics Elixir called Perfumer's Reserve (stoppered perfume bottle, no sprayer, 25 mL, $75). The press release refers to the original's restrained savagery with such adjectives as "visceral", "intellectual", "unorthodox", "severe", "complex", "uncompromising", and "formidable", all perfectly accurate. And then it tells us that the new version will be "a fresher, smoother, modern interpretation," and that can only mean one thing: no oakmoss. You can tell without reading the ingredient list that it will be a "modern chypre", which means lighter, less assertive, bottom-loaded with clean molecularized patchouli but with none of the earthy-dirty oakmoss that makes true chypres compelling. as the press release says:

• Rose, jasmine, myrrh and patchouli notes are cleaner, lighter, with a contemporary transparency.
• The addition of orange flower absolute and peach lends a creamy luminosity.

I think it's inevitable that there are elements of perfumery that one just doesn't like: I can't stand large quantities of iris, straight-up patchouli is impossible on me, and as far as I can tell, lilac, ravishing though it is in the wild, never translates well into a composed scent. But then there are elements that one just doesn't get, and one of them for me is orange blossom. I don't hate it; I would just usually rather it not be there. Even when it indisputably works (as with Dior's Fahrenheit 32), it never translates into a really wearable, compelling scent for me. Adding orange blossom to Aromatics Elixir seems like it would be a step backwards, although I suppose that if you're already wrecking it by de-chyprifying it, orange blossom is not going to make the situation any worse.

Lush's Orange Blossom by Gorilla Perfume is hardly anything but its namesake, and as usual, I don't get it, but at least you can't accuse it of false advertising. If you like orange-flower, then you will like this; otherwise, you may safely steer clear and be missing nothing.

Death By Flowers: Gaultier Fleur du Mâle

When I wrote about Fahrenheit 32, I wondered what Gaultier's Fleur du Mâle smelled like, because both of them, released at about the same time, were men's scents built around orange blossom. Someone sent me a couple of spray vials in a swap, and now I have my answer: FdM is essentially Gaultier's Le Mâle tucked inside the hugely amplified orange-blossom note of his Le Classique.

The first thing you smell in FdM is a massive quantity of orange blossom, just as in Fahrenheit 32, but--and there's no way around this--in FdM the floral note smells as feminine as Fahrenheit 32's smells masculine. I'm not happy with the idea that we segregate smells by gender, but we do, and where the Dior masculinized the flowers with assertive aldehydes, the Gaultier makes them overwhelmingly flowery--creamy-sweet yet strident at the same time.

I used to wear Le Mâle, and though I know FdM isn't merely a copy of it with orange-flower added, it seems very much that way: the two scents seem to have a lot of the same elements: those aromatic barbershop notes, the crispness of lavender, vanilla in the base. The official list of notes for Le Mâle even mentions orange blossom, but if it's there, it's subtle. In Fleur du Mâle, it's front and centre, and it grabs you and never lets go.

I could never wear Fleur du Mâle, not because it smells like a stereotypical women's scent (I wear women's scents all the time), but because it really isn't very attractive. The orange blossom is assaultive; it possesses the scent like a demon, and it wears out its welcome very quickly. Fahrenheit 32 cuts through the orange-flower quickly with sharp vetiver and warm vanilla, whereas FdM is simply bogged down in a swamp of the flower.

The bottle for FdM is the same as for Le Mâle, a rather exaggerated male torso, but this time in shimmering white glass instead of sailor-striped aquamarine. Gorgeous, but not enough to make me want it.

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.