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!

A New Angle: Breath of God by Gorilla Perfume

I was reading an article a couple of weeks ago about how men and women speak differently and what this means for transsexuals, who have to basically learn how to be a different sex:

...in a loud Starbucks, a man will just speak with greater volume—so he’ll speak louder—and a woman will tend to speak higher, tend to raise her pitch higher to be heard over the din.

This creates the arresting image of a pre-show Mary Kay seminar full of women pitching their voices up and up and up until they're all squeaking like bats, but regardless of the strategy people use in large groups to make themselves heard, the quotation made me think of the batch of Lush scents I was going to review (in alphabetical order, because I have to have some sort of structure).

Have you ever been in a Lush store, or just walked by one, or even been within twenty feet of one? Because it is loud, olfactorily speaking. A huge din of fragrances, not especially pleasant: I don't know how people work there without a lot of Imitrex. Creams and soaps and bath bombs and shampoos and such, all intensely scented and all competing for a shot at your nostrils. How could you possibly sell a perfume in such an environment? How would people be able to smell it among the racket?

There's only one way: you have to make the fragrances at least as loud as their surroundings, and the Gorilla line at Lush is every bit as loud as the store itself. I have a set of samples which, in case I needed a quick fix on the road, I was lugging around in my knitting bag (actually a MEC travel bag

which I use to lug around my current pair of socks or whatever I'm working on when I'm on the go: it's small enough to be unobtrusive but big enough to hold a small project plus the usual electronics — Kindle, phone, iPod — and a few other things as well, so it's perfect for travel), and the box itself was so radioactively fragrant that the project I started yesterday, and which was in a separate compartment from the scents, already smells like jasmine and patchouli.

You would think that a fragrance called Breath of God...well, what would you think of it, knowing nothing about it beforehand? I think of this exchange from The Simpsons:

Bart: So, Homer, you saw the big cheese? What'd he look like?
Homer: Perfect teeth, nice smell, a class act all the way.

And obviously something called Breath of God should evoke perfect teeth and a nice smell. The perfumer's intention was a scent that was neither masculine nor feminine, or both, something that combined a light freshness with a darker smoky wood-incense. It starts with a cucumbery-aquatic brightness but then the smoky-resin note starts to drift in, and I swear that for the next while, Breath of God strongly resembles this:

Yeah, smoked fish. We used to eat these all the time when I was a kid: I haven't had them in years, but I still remember the agreeable briny-smoky smell of them. It seems like an odd thing to put into a perfume, though, because among other things it calls to mind an exchange from the movie Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (I have it on DVD and I like it, and DON'T JUDGE):

Patty: Seems to me it's all this cheap little tart's fault.
Elvira: Cheap. Who are you callin' cheap? What's that perfume you're wearing, catch of the day?

It doesn't smell exactly or only like smoked fish (there's a sort of floralcy in the middle), but that is what I think of every time I smell it. If that's the breath of God, then God needs to find a better toothpaste.

Have Your Cake And Wear It Too: Jacomo Art Collection #02

As I mentioned, when I was at Bergdorf Goodman a few weeks ago, the nice saleswoman, when she discovered that I liked leather scents (or at least was interested in buying a specific leathery scent, which is not exactly the same thing, but she was on a mission), started plying me with all the leathers she could think of. The first was Jacomo Art Collection #02, which is meant to smell like leather and modelling clay and bubble gum, so I guess that means it has heliotrope in it, which a lot of people think smells like Play-Doh, and birch tar, which stands in for leather in fragrances, and possibly ethylmaltol or one of the other candy-note aromachemicals. But here is what it smells like:

A leather birthday cake. Tons of leather at first, lots of birch tar. Then cake. There are sprinkles on top, plenty of vanilla in the frosting. And birthday candles, smoky-waxy. Over a few hours, the sweetness of the cake gradually drowns out the leather, but it's never overpoweringly sweet, and the leather never quite goes away. Late in the game, there is a sprinkling of vanilla-laced baby powder over the whole thing, for some reason.

And really that's it. Not terrible, but too simple for what it's supposed to be, which is art.

Since this is a collection, there are several scents, all apparently gourmand — I didn't try either of the others — and packaged in arty boxes that I find sort of hideous, so I'm not going to show them to you (you can look them up yourself if you must; that's what the Internet is for), but the bottles are attractive:

If they add to the collection and do some blues and greens, and then sell the whole bunch of them as a set of half-ounce miniatures, it would make a nice little arrangement on your dresser, cluttery and charming.

Speaking of miniatures: maybe the bean-counters at the fragrance houses know something I don't, but why don't all scents come as minis? I personally love them. I would never have bought a full bottle of Ambre Narguile at $200 or whatever it's vending for these days, as much as I love it, but I did buy a set of four 15-mL bottles of the first four Hermessences for $135 or so; the company didn't lose money on the deal, because they got me to buy something I wouldn't have, even if they earned less money from the transaction. At Bergdorf Goodman, I would have laid out $85 or $90 for a 50-mL bottle of Je Suis Un Homme which I'll never see the bottom of, but instead I paid $150 for a batch of 16 10-mL bottles, so everybody wins. I could be wrong about the economics of it, but I am reasonably certain that if everything as a matter of course were launched in 15-mL sprays, or collections of miniatures once a year, a lot more scents would be sold. People who can't justify buying a full bottle will spring for a smaller one. People who just want to try a scent will buy the smallest size and maybe finish it and then spring for the big bottle. Completists will buy sets of minis just to have them. Addicts who have to have everything a particular house releases will clamour for them: I'm thinking specifically of Guerlain and Chanel here. And just think if Serge Lutens or Parfumerie Generale did sets of miniatures! Honestly, it's win-win all the way down.