His and Hers: El Mono de la Tinta and La Cautiva by Fueguia 1833

There are 18 scents in the Fueguia 1833 collection, and I am not going to spin them out over 18 weeks, so after last week's starter we'll probably just have them in twos and threes instead.

El Mono de la Tinta, "The Ink Monkey", is named for a Borges story about a creature that haunts writers and drinks from their inkwells. It doesn't smell like ink: it smells like a Comme des Garçons scent, for better or worse. My initial reaction was, "Ugh — what the hell is that? It smells like urine. Worse. Fermented urine." Once the human-filth aspect has burned away — and it does, in a few minutes – a dark cedar-and-sandalwood quality is revealed and the whole thing settles down to a dry, austere, spicy wood scent, masculine and bafflingly sexy, a Cistercian monk with a close-cropped beard and bedroom eyes. I'd wear it: I'd just put a clothespin on my nose for ten minutes or so.

La Cautiva, "The Captive", knows how to make a good first impression: it starts off with an immensely cheerful blast of tart blackcurrant and sugary vanilla. It's basically a huge mass of fruity cotton candy. It is charming and bright and huge. But then it just keeps being this never-ending cloud of tart-sweet, almost a parody of modern drugstore perfumery for young women, and the pleasure starts to wear thin. There's no development at all: it just deflates, eventually. It's so single-minded and ultimately boring that I don't believe for an instant anyone could wear this repeatedly and not get tired of it, which is bad enough, but that it costs what it does ($150 for 30 mL, $240 for 100 mL) is borderline criminal.

Rerun: Serge Lutens Santal Majuscule

This won't take long.

A while back, I wrote about a trip to Tokyo during which I briefly sampled the then-new Santal Majuscule. I mentioned that it reminded me a lot of Santal de Mysore: a commenter noted a resemblance to Jeux de Peau, and I said I thought there was some of that, too (partly because Jeux de Peau has a sandalwood note that seems very, or completely, Santal Blanc).

I finally got a sample of Santal Majuscule, and after a week of wearing it I can report that it smells essentially like a combination of Santal de Mysore and Jeux de Peau, in approximately a 20/80 mix, which means that it is very nice indeed —warm and lush and slightly strange, pure Lutens — but completely unoriginal: if you already own either of these scents, it's entirely unnecessary, and if you've tried them both but were unimpressed, then this one isn't going to convince you, either.

Et Cetera: L'Artisan Parfumeur Santal

L'Artisan Parfumeur launched six fragrances in 1978 under perfumer Jean Laporte (who left ten years later to form Maître Parfumier et Gantier), if you can believe Wikipedia on the subject. One of them, Vanilia, is a magnificent essay on the floral genesis of vanilla, and therefore of course was discontinued in favour of the syrupy, inferior Havana Vanille. Another, Mure et Musc, remains one of their most popular scents, though I don't see the appeal. A third, L'Eau D'Ambre, I thought was an incompletely worked-out idea that Laporte brought, perhaps after a decade's maturity, to its full fruition in MPG's 1988 Ambre Précieux.

The remaining three are gone. I never smelled Tubereuse or Vetiver, but I do happen to have a vial of Santal (which is to say Sandalwood), and perhaps it hasn't aged well — though it doesn't smell damaged or "off" in any way — but it suggests that Laporte spent all his artistic capital on Vanilia.

When I smell a really good fragrance, I am torn between wanting to write about it immediately while still possessed by the thrill of the new and wanting to wear it repeatedly and think about it so I understand it. When I smell a really dreadful fragrance, my mind teems with wicked turns of phrase: it can be fun to write a truly scathing review. But a mediocre, neither-here-nor-there scent like Santal: that's just depressing. I've had this review, if I can even call it that, open in a browser window for five days now, and I just don't know what to say about Santal that's worth saying, except that I'm not sorry it was discontinued.

It starts with a burst of lime cologne, once a standby in men's toiletries, which is nice enough but not what you expect from a niche house like L'Artisan. And then it just stays men's cologne for quite a while, nothing of any real interest, nothing you couldn't find in a hundred other bottles. Eventually a little slab of thin, pale sandalwood bobs to the surface, that creamy-pudding sandalwood note that I found in Molecule 01, which consists entirely of the sandalwoody synthetic Iso E Super. A bit of amber rounds out the base. And that's it. Think of a run-of-the-mill late-seventies men's scent and you've got it.

I suppose Laporte felt he had to have a men's fragrance in his lineup, but did it have to be this one?

I'll Drink to That: Serge Lutens Santal de Mysore

Another year gone! Another thousand or so new scents have whirled past us, and even the most determined of us properly sampled — wore and re-wore and thought about — what, a couple dozen, half a hundred of them? (I didn't even manage that many, I think.) And still they multiply in mad profusion, a few worthy new releases lost in the sea of flankers and copies and reformulations, while all the thousands of old scents remain to be, if we and they are lucky, discovered or rediscovered.

Serge Lutens' Santal de Mysore turns 15 in 2012. It is an old, established scent that is certainly a reformulation (because true Mysore sandalwood is virtually unavailable in any quantity at any cost), probably in large part synthetic, possibly not worth the price being asked for it ($200 for a 50-mL bottle). But it is also pure unadulterated Lutens, as immediately identifiable as a Mozart symphony or a Francis Bacon painting.

It was almost exactly a year ago that I wrote about Lutens' other essay on sandalwood, Santal Blanc, which I loved at first sniff and still love, because it is as beautiful and as rigorous as a mathematical proof. But where Santal Blanc is meant to intrigue and maybe baffle, Santal de Mysore is simply out to gratify: it's much closer in spirit to the luscious, boozy Idole de Lubin, although Idole is a sweet sandalwood liqueur where Santal de Mysore is a slug of spiced rum in a sandalwood cup.

Most Lutens scents defiantly resist classification by gender. Some people consider Santal Blanc to be a women's scent, but it is so strict and austere that I fail to see how it could possibly be assigned a sex: it seems to exist in some rarefied space where gender simply doesn't exist. Santal de Mysore, though, really does seem like a men's scent: it is enormously suggestive of a men's club, all pipe tobacco and wood panelling and suit-and-ties sitting around a cozy fireplace with drinks in hand. There is plenty of spice in it (how Lutens), a little ribbon of caramel sweetness to take the edge off, and much less sandalwood than you might expect (not the only time Lutens has played this joke: Cèdre isn't a cedar scent but a tuberose with a shaving or two of wood at the bottom of it).

As usual — as ever — one of my New Year's resolutions is to not buy any new scents until I have reviewed every single one of the samples and bottles I own, and that is a preposterously large number of which I am both ashamed and pleased. There is, however, a small possibility that I will be going to France next fall, and if I find myself in Paris, and find myself at the Palais Royale, and find myself at the Serge Lutens store, then by god all bets are off, and one of the things I may find myself buying is a bottle of the gorgeous and infinitely wearable Santal de Mysore.

Complexity / Simplicity: Guerlain Samsara Eau de Toilette

Samsara was launched in 1989, and I don't know how I failed to include it in the list of things I was wearing that year, because I bought it very shortly after its debut in my part of the world, I liked it a whole lot, and I'm wearing it at this moment, so clearly it has some sort of grip on me.

Now, this is going to be very confusing, because Samsara has been changed, packaging and contents, so often that it's hard to keep track or to know exactly what you're smelling, but I'll try to lay it out as clearly as possible.

I was instantly seduced by the Samsara parfum bottle

which came in this little lacquer-look box

and is that not gorgeous? But for some reason — the cost, I suppose — I didn't buy it. I couldn't really warm up to the eau de parfum bottle

which was, let's face it, rather dreary compared to the parfum, however much I liked the contents. Instead I got the body cream

which seemed like a lot of bang for the buck, and emphasized, as creams will do, the potent base notes (or note, in this case, but I'm getting ahead of myself). The jar was approximately this shape but the lid didn't have that broad gold edge: the whole thing, not just the top, was that solid jewel red, a sort of a mutated version of the parfum box, and I liked it a lot.

When I used it up, I cleaned out the jar and set it atop my dresser to hold change and such. Then I broke down and bought an ounce of the EDP, boring though the bottle was. And I wore it and wore it and eventually got tired of it, like the fickle slut that I am, and traded it away to someone and lived without it for years.

Eventually, someone at the company took notice of the bottle's extreme and unsuitable boringness and reworked it in dark red glass with concave shoulders, essentially turning it into the larger version of the parfum that it should have been all along:

I think the EDP had the gold cap and the EDT had a red cap, as you see here:

But then a couple of weeks ago I noticed that the local hypermart was getting rid of their entire high-end fragrance section; there wasn't really a lot left to it by this point, as they hadn't been replenishing it for at least a year and probably more. They had marked most everything down to $9.94 or $19.94, and so there was not much left but the dregs, though by god there was an ounce of Samsara EDT for less than $10 (there was also a 50-mL of the EDP for $30, not worth it: the only other thing that interested me was a bottle of Eau de Star, Mugler's fascinating attempt to make Angel wearable in the summer by wetting it down with Calone and freshening it up with peppermint). I managed to resist for a few days, but then I thought, well, hell, I really used to like it (the EDP, anyway) and for $10 I can see if I like it again, and if I don't, no great loss, so I'll go see: if it's still there I'll buy it. And it was, and I did (and the Eau de Star as well). For someone who made a New Year's vow to buy nothing in 2011, I am not doing very well.

The Samsara EDT that I bought is in the updated bottle (the bottommost one), but it's in the old box (next one up), so I have absolutely no idea what the vintage might be. Not the very oldest, obviously, but also not the very newest, or it would be in the new box. Why is there not some sort of law dictating that fragrances have to have the year stamped on the bottle, like wines?

One more thing about the packaging: the EDP in both the above pictures has a removable cap, as you would expect, but the EDT has a cap that is also a sprayer, that rotates one way to lock it and another to permit it to dispense the contents. I am not sure why companies persist in doing this, but it's not a great idea, because the sprayer/cap invariably looks like a cap/cap, and so there are going to be people who try to pull it off. Most of them will succeed. (How many displays of Bulgari Black did you or I see that had the sprayer wrenched off by people doing the obvious, but unfortunately wrong, thing?) The bottle I bought had a little card-stock hang-tag around its neck showing how to rotate the cap 180° to use the sprayer: it seems to me that if you have to instruct users how to open the bottle, then the fault is not with the users but with the package design.

Now, you can go hunt down a list of the putative notes in Samsara, but it would be a waste of your time, because it won't be telling you the truth: it might be an old list from the origin of the scent, or it might be from one of the various reformulations over the years, but either way it will put ideas in your head that do not belong there. Samsara may have ten ingredients or fifty, but it smells of three things only: a trumpet-blare of bergamot, a load of slightly dirty jasmine, and a big chunk of sandalwood. That's it. These things have been tinkered with to make them surprisingly bright and radiant, but they're still pretty much the sum of Samsara. Oh, there may be some rose in there (there always seems to be rose when there's jasmine), there may be some vanilla or amber at the bottom (who could tell with all that sandalwood?), but really: bergamot jasmine sandalwood. It has always been this way; the proportions are different, as always, but the essential structure is the same. In my bottle, the bergamot is very strong, the jasmine is unpretty, and the sandalwood is potent and solid, so if someone told you that this was Samsara Pour Homme, you wouldn't see any reason in the world to disbelieve them. It's not masculine, specifically, but it's not feminine either: it's just Samsara.

At its inception, Samsara had enormous quantities of Mysore sandalwood, considered the best in the world and said to have comprised nearly a third of the perfume's formula, but these days Mysore is an endangered species — we used it all up by doing things like putting it at 30% concentration in Samsara — so the wood is certainly a cocktail of Australian sandalwood and various synthetics such as Polysantol and Ebanol. Nevertheless: bergamot jasmine sandalwood. If you like these things, then there is every chance you will like Samsara, of whatever vintage, in whatever incarnation. I suggest you go hunt some down.