Not Quite a Review: Amoureuse by Parfums Delrae

By Tom Today sucked. I had to trek to the bowels of LA to do an errand that was required of me by the great State of California that for some reason I decided not to drive to. Mostly because it was going to be hot here and the AC on my car isn't very good, while the ones on the buses usually are. Well, not on the #7 Santa Monica Blue Bus, which was packed to the gills, had no AC but did have someone who decided what life really needed was him singing at the top of his voice "Man in the Mirror" despite the fact the he didn't know the words and was off-key. I decided that rather than stabbing him in the temple with my ballpoint I would disembark early and just wait for the next bus. Needless to say the appointment was something that could have been easily been handled by fax or webchat but ended up sucking up the entire day. Your tax dollars at work. What kept me from just running amok? Amoureuse by Parfums Delrae. Marina wrote a review a few years ago that says is better than I could even when I wasn't a wrung-out exhausted mess craving a drink and a hot bath. The cardamom/orange/jasmine loveliness kept my zen through the Culver City, Los Angeles and Santa Monica buses that alternately ignored me by or just sucked up my day. Now I can sit here on the sofa with a generous spray of it and all is right in the world. The power of Perfume.. What perfumes enhance your calm? (ten points if you get the movie reference) $135 for 50ML at Luckyscent, where I purchased.

Rae of Light Part 2: Amoureuse, Eau Illuminée and Emotionelle

By Tom The last three of the six samples I bought from her website. Just throwing that out there in advance, so I won't be investigated. Amoureuse is tuberose. For those of you who were scared by Fracas as a child, fear not. This isn't a tigress like the Piguet or a post-modern bondage queen like Tubereuse Criminelle. This is a placid, shimmering scent that is primarily woody and quite chilly in the beginning. As Marina eventually came to a darker place with this one than I did. For her it became "thick, almost a little cloying". For me it stayed softly spicy, slightly honeyed and quite gorgeous. Eau Illuminée was inspired by "the beauty, light and physicality of San Francisco". I've been to The City (caps are theirs..) several times and love it; I don't know it this sparkling little number is the personification (scentification?) of that place, but it's the one that I think I would like to own most of the six. Marina writes that it's a citrus "that packs a punch", and what a punch! Basil, lime and lavender are seamlessly blended into chilly perfection. Orris, tonka and labdanum warm things up like that sun peeping through that SF fog, but like a summer day in the City by the Bay, the fog is never far off. Emotionelle opens with the most perfect melon you can imagine. If you squeezed a perfectly ripe and fulsome cantaloupe onto your forearm you still wouldn't get the melony perfection of this. I am rather averse to melon in scents, so I was trying to mentally distance myself from this stage, which is difficult, what with my forearm being in such close proximity to my face. Cedar, vetiver and spices go up against it, but that big, juicy melon just rolls over them. Soooo, not me. Maybe it's you? These are $135 for 50ML, at her website, where I bought the samples. Also at Luckyscent, Aedes and Barneys (not all of them at Barneys online)

Rae of Light: Parfums DelRae Début, Bois de Paradis and Mythique

By Tom First, the winner of the draw for the smell bent samples is Queen Cupcake. Please use the "contact us" button to provide your mailing address. Parfums DelRae is the brainchild of San Francisco-based DelRae Roth, who writes that her lifelong passion for fragrance was the impetus for her creation of her line. Début is her idea of a "sophisticated lily of the valley fragrance". I love lily of the valley, but wasn't sure that there was a deep-seated need for another one, what with Diorissimo being out there. That is until I smelled this one. An absolute delight of sparkling green lily underscored with lime; Marina writes of it as being "ladylike" and it is. But not so girly that I wouldn't spritz a bit on myself; I can see it being a bit of holy grail spring on a drab winter day. Bois de Paradis on me opens spicy, with clove and a touch of cinnamon. Before it starts making me hungry for pie it drops delicious blackberry touched by rose. Marina, like me loved the succulent blackberry note and the balance of spice, woods and fruit that lasts for hours. Mythique is iris with a capital "I". Orris butter, mandarin, peony and jasmine conspire to make a heady mix. Marina wrote of it as "totally suited for a courtesan" and it is, just not the way you'd think. A true courtesan beguiles all the senses: she entertains the mind as well as the body. The leathered drydown of Mythique reflects that depth. These are $135 for 50ML, at her website, where I bought the samples. Also at Luckyscent, Aedes and Barneys (not all of them at Barneys online)

Parfums Delrae Mythique: Perfume Review

In the last couple of years, iris perfumes have, in my humble opinion, over-saturated the market, turning the fairly precious ingredient into something ubiquitous and thus no longer exciting. Or maybe I simply never have been that much into iris, and after a couple (dozen) of releases I was done with the note. Mythique, Yann Vasnier's (not Michel Roudnitska's, thank you for correction!) new creation for DelRae revives my interest in all things orris. Inspired by the legendary courtesan Diane de Poitiers, the scent is a simultaneously playful and classic take on iris. If you wanted a raw, "natural"-smelling orris, this is probably not the scent for you. This is a perfumey iris, imaginatively adorned with other ingredients and gallantly stylized. Totally suited for a courtesan in a way that the earthy-streamlined-realistic Iris Pallida is not. I like the fresh, slightly sweet juiciness that citrus fruits in the top notes lend to iris, the note that fairly often tends to be quite dry. I love the rosy glow that peony puts on its ordinarily pale cheeks and the way jasmine highlights the sensual side of orris, a side not often enough brought up in iris perfumes. And I adore the way sandalwood, ambrette and patchouli create a leathery quality in the base of Mythique, giving its flirtaceous, vivaceous, girly femininity a dark, subversive depth. If Mythique had an ad campaign, it would be shot by Ellen Von Unwerth. If I had to compare Mythique to other iris scents, I would say that the rich, honeyed, again, perfumey way the note is interpreted here, made me think of the late and lameted L'Artisan Orchidee Blanche and Editions de Parfums Iris Poudre. Right now Mythique is available at First in Fragrance, €145.00, or Les Senteurs, £110.00 Image, obviously, is by Ellen Von Unwerth. Yes, I know that it is stylized for an epoch later than Poitiers's, but it fits my impression of the fragrance.

In Which I Am Hard to Please

It is difficult to please me with fruity scents, because, and I will freely admit it, my set of rules keeps changing. Ordinarily, I would maintain that the less fruit the better. So I feel bad saying what I am about to say regarding Parfums Delrae's new perfume, Emotionelle...It is too perfumey, and the "perfumey" part does not let me enjoy the delicious juiciness of melon in full. Don't get me wrong, I think, the scent is sublime. It is gracefully delicate and intense at the same time. The "perfumey" part is, I suppose, constituted of cedar, vetiver, labdanum and spices...I was tempted to write, cumin, but I might be making it up. Imagine Diorama, Diorella or Le Parfum de Therese, imagine that very specific, very recognizable something that most if not all Edmond Roudnitska's creations have. Something perfumey and dirty, and I mean both as a compliment. And add to that E. Roundnitska base a lot of melon. A LOT of melon. (Yes, the three scents I mentioned already have some anyway.) Basically, I would describe Michele Roudnitska's Emotionelle as equal parts melon and Edmond Roudnistka. And - it pains me to type this - in this particular instance, I wish there was less of the latter here. So much perfumey-ness just does not go with so much melon, in my humble opinion. SOME melon, as in Le Parfum de Therese, for example, is a perfect, playful, joie de vivre twist that puts a smile on a chic face of the maitre's compositions. But when there is a lot of both the fruit and the chic perfuminess, it just does not work for me. I guess, because I love melon so, if there is a lot of it in a fragrance, that is ALL I want to smell in a fragrance. Not so with peaches. Having gone on about how there is too much perfume in Emotionelle, I feel awkward criticizing MDCI's Peche Cardinal for not being perfumey enough. But there you have it. It is not. It is too peachy. Peachy is childish, too girly, invariably smells too chemical in such quantities, and it makes me uncomfortable. Especially when it is blended with coconut. I love the slight booziness of davana in Peche Cardinal and I enjoy the elegance of the musky-woody base. I am guessing, the creators were aiming for a modern take on a peachy chypre, trying to do a playful take on a classic. For me, they might need to do take two. Having said that, I was trying to come up with a single name of a peach fragrance I love, and failed. So it is actually unfair of me to critisize Peche Cardinal at all. When it comes to peach, I am not just hard but impossible to please. Both available at Luckyscent, Emotionelle for $135.00, Peche Cardinal for $235.00-$610.00.

Perfume Posse Visits (part of) Perfume Smellin' Things

By Tom March and Patty of Perfume Posse came to Los Angeles to visit and host an event at ScentBar this weekend and of course I could no more pass up the chance to meet them than I could give up, well, perfume! They actually came in slightly earlier than the day of the event, and since I love to show people the city who haven't been here before (as March hadn't) I volunteered to drive them around on Friday for shopping and hanging out. I will admit that there was a small amount of trepidation as there always is meeting someone that you have this Internets relationship with, electronically intimate enough that you feel like you have shared lives, but have never spent any time with in person. Would me mesh? Would they find me hopelessly boring? Would there be long periods of uncomfortable silences followed by furtive calls to friends to ask them to call back and pretend they're locked out of their place and being attacked by man-eating clams and need you to come get them? In short, would it be like Match.com? Of course, that didn't happen. After an initial comic mishap involving hotels on one street having changed names we piled into my microscopic Honda and it was old home week. We drove around the hills of Beverly looking at (and joyously dissing) real estate I can't afford, cruised Malibu, shopped Montana Avenue and ate Pinkberry before meeting the always delightful Robin (VioletNoir) for dinner and drinks in Century City. March and Patty are just as delightful in the flesh as the are on the internets; if only Colombina could have been there. Now that would have been perfection! The next day was ScentBar. The charming owners Adam Eastwood and Franco Wright were kind enough to open early to host a bunch of us; there were all the new things to sniff all the usual suspects including Robin and Iris. There were muffins and sugar cookies and Prosecco Bellinis. If I am very good Heaven will look like this, except it will just be me, a spa tub the size of a Fleetwood Brougham and perhaps, Hugh Jackman. If he doesn't take more than one muffin. I tried Mure et Musc Extrait, which is great in that "berries gone bad" way, and since you're getting a refill in the package justifies the price. The Party in Manhattan was wonderful; I don't find it the skank-fest that March and Patty do. They think I'm nuts. I think I'm part house-cat. Those were the yums; I have to say that the new Serge, Nuit de Cellophane, is a meh for me. Uncle Serge has done the definitive Fruity-Floral. Fruity-Floral has now been done in that way that "Gone With the Wind" has been done. The Genre has been officially been closed. No more should be produced and the pallid, anodyne scents that came before should retreat to some dark corner and as Colombina put it "smoke nervously". Would I wear it? Right after I appear at work in a red taffeta ball gown. Should you? Up to you. Parfums DelRae Emotionnelle is the perfect simulacrum of fresh cantaloupe that I have smelled outside of my breakfast table. I however ran from it and was glad that March, who is old and censorious friends with Patty asked her to please wash it off forthwith. The real surprise of the morning was a sample of Andy Tauer's new Une Rose Chyprée, a perfectly balanced rose/chypre where the rose is lifted by clementine and bay and grounded by labdanum, oakmoss and vanilla. I know there were a few rumbles of disappointment over Andy's last couple of releases, but this is going to be a runaway hit for him: the rose opening is immediately, captivatingly gorgeous and the drydown is sniff-your-arm-and-moan good. I'd have a giveaway for my sample but I am simply not that generous.. Andy, I think this should be your first perfume strength one. If you're reading. Tomorrow (Sunday) is March and Patty's last day in the City of the Fallen Angels and we are going to get together once more. I hope to drive them across Mulholland to have lunch at the Village Cafe on Beachwood Canyon under the Hollywood sign. It's been marvelous meeting them; could someone work on that Transporter thingy in "Star Trek" so that we could all get together easily in various places on a whim? Wouldn't that be lovely?

Citruses that pack a punch: Parfums Delrae Eau Illuminee and Jo Malone Grapefruit

This has been a cruel, cruel summer and not just because of the heat. It forced me to turn at night to hardcore comfort scents like Habanita, Fahrenheit, Tabac Blond, Coromandel and L'Ombre Fauve. To cope with the days, noli me tangere kinds of scents are required, cool, collected, poker-faced, the ones that would put an icy sort of armor around me. I needed very cold, very dry citruses, kick-ass citruses that would help me "walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer." I found them in Delrae's Eau Illuminee and Jo Malone's Grapefruit. Eau Illuminee was love born out of acute need for icy protection that I described above. Before this summer hit me like a ton of hot bricks, I actually found this sharp fragrance rather disagreeable. These days, I consider its blend of bergamot, basil and lavender to be my holy water. Very urbane, very sophisticated, very modern, Eau Illuminee is the most unlikely magical potion one can think of, but the fact remains that when I wear this chilly concoction, I feel protected, calm, confident and a little dangerous. I also want to note for the benefit of those who, like me, might have never given the scent enough time to develop on their skin, because they were put off by the aggressively fresh, uncompromisingly dry beginning, that the composition warms up somewhat, when the notes of tonka and vanilla appear in the base. Jo Malone's Grapefruit is another recent addition to my fragrance wardrobe. It is brisk, dry and cold. A citrus with attitude. The latter manifests in the form of slight spiciness that compliments very well the resolutely non-sweet, punch-packing tanginess of grapefruits. The earthy vetiver in the base plants the fragrance's feet, so to say, firmly on the ground, making Grapefruit a no-nonsense ally during dramatic times. When I feel, like Kissinger, that there cannot be a crisis next week because my schedule is already full, I turn to Grapefruit. Eau Illuminee can be found at luckyscent.com, $135.00. Grapefruit is available at jomalone.com, $50.00-$95.00. Image source, krasivoefoto.ru.