Carrot Top!

By Marla I’ve been on a carrot kick lately, and it started with my introduction to the American Slow Food movement. My family is now organic, and we have found so many new reasons to love food, I could write many articles…but this one is about carrots. Carrot perfumes, to be exact. Being a redhead, I’ve always had a soft spot for the orange root, but I’ve now found not one, but two perfumes to wear that express my affection for all things carroty…. My first discovery was thanks to Grain de Musc, who wrote some beautiful essays on Olivia Giacobetti’s Honore’ des Pres latest trio, featuring tuberose, coconut, and carrot (you are perfumistas, and you know their names). She had some nice things to say about redheads in her article on I Love Les Carottes, and, since redheads get very little love in the real world (my youthful nickname was “Coppertop”, and some of the time, it was meant affectionately, I think…), I had to try the perfume. But I was a good and frugal creature, and I waited for my moment to pounce…. Then Space NK had a sale, and I snagged a bottle for an incredible $24.50!! Squee!!!! I was worried. Had it turned? Would it be cooked on the long, hot trip to Florida? Would it be my carrot Holy Grail? It arrived this week, and I’ve been spritzing it constantly and driving my family nuts looking for the source of all this carrot. It is The Ultimate Carrot. If you want to smell carrots for hours, this is it. Total love. But it’s so much more! I also love iris, and orange, and benzoin, as my readers know. And I really like patch when it’s combined with orange. This one’s got them all. I am sorely tempted to call Space NK and buy out the rest of their stock. It rates 4 out of 5 on Makeup Alley, so I have some competition for those remaining bottles. If only I were an evil hedge fund manager with money to burn. But wait, seekers of the scent of carrot, there is another…. Bellyflowers Botanical Perfumes, an Indie natural studio, created Wild Chypre. Slow Nose Elise Pearlstine highlights the wild carrot flower, so it’s not the root, but wow, for those who love that pungent, refreshing floral, this perfume is truly addictive, and I believe, unique. I know I’ve never smelled anything like it before, and Elise says that it really took on a life of its own while she was composing it. Here is the composition: Top Notes: Wild Orange, wild lavender, ylang ylang I, peppermint Heart Notes: Jasmine sambac , Jasmine grandiflorum, organic silver fir, wild carrot Base notes: Balsam of peru , Haitian vetiver , oakmoss , myrrh, fossilized amber oil The notes blend into an unusual whole that evolves from a sharp opening, that evokes a real state of alertness, to a smooth, warm, yet wild heart, and soothing, sunbaked drydown. Fossilized amber oil is new on the market, and it is really made from amber, the gemstone. It is smoky and earthy and very grounding . It’s a gorgeous addition to the natural perfumer’s palette, and Wild Chypre is a perfect canvas for its nuances. So now I have both a Carrot HG, and a Carrot Flower HG. My question(s) of the day is (are): Which savory scents (like veggies) do you love to smell in perfumes, and which savory scent do you want to smell in a perfume? And would you wear it to work, or on a date???

Vamp a NY by Honore des Pres & a Prize Draw

In their description of Vamp à NY, Honoré des Prés call the scent, "futuristic". If so, it is back to the future for me. This tuberose rendition by Olivia Giacobetti smells like plombir, an ice cream from my Soviet childhood. Borrowed originally from the French Glace Plombières, the recipe of plombir calls for cream with high fat content, because as we know, all the best things in life are fattening. And the plombir I remember was certainly one of the best things in life. There are two kinds of plombir, "classic", with 12-13% of fat, and "fatty", with 15-20%. Vamp à NY falls into the "classic" category, and that is plenty. As far as tuberoses are concerned, that buttery feel is my favorite part. This is what I look for first of all, when I encounter a tuberose perfume, and if the creamy smoothness is lacking, I go no further. If it is there, I sniff for bonus qualities, which make a tuberose interesting: rubberiness, mentholated feel, earthiness. In other words, I want plombir with a twist. With its strangely raw, slightly verdant, subtly earthy feel, Vamp à NY is such a plombir. It has rum, and its molasses enhance both the sweet-creamy and the raw-chilly characteristics of the composition. For a lover of balms in perfume, the base of Vamp à NY is a delight, since it has several kinds, each displaying a vanillic aspect: an almost chocolatty vanilla for benzoin, a smoky one for Peru balsam and a vaguely floral one for Tolu. The balsamic drydown, again, ties in with both the dry-green-raw and the sweet-fatty-gourmand aspects of the blend, rounding up the composition in a very satisfying manner. Coming back to the earthy and raw feel of Vamp à NY...I find that the quality runs through all three scents in the We Love NY collection. I Love Les Carottes is staggeringly earthy, almost on the level of some CB I Hate Perfume creations, like Memory of Kindness (almost!). Love Coco has a very appealing raw quality too, which sets it apart from typical, overly sweet, obviously edible coconut fragrances. I can't mention the star ingredients, tuberose, carrot, coconut, and not ask the question, why? Why these particular notes for the NY themed collection? Christian David, the artistic director, of Honoré des Prés told me that for them the tuberose is "definitely a scent of NY City, you can smell it in a lot of lobbies of beautiful hotels there". For Les Carottes, Olivia Giacobetti found the inspiration "at the Organic Market in Harlem". As far as the coconut is concerned, "we love the new trends to drink Coconut water in the States, so Pure and Healthy" - said Christian. "We think that it's the perfect Chic detox Scent to remember the good time of hollidays in NYC ..." In the end, any note can be "New York". After all, as Stefon from SNL would say, New York has Everything. Personally, if I had to come up with an idea for a perfume with NY in the title, the title note of such perfume would have been coffee...If only somebody out there could bottle the smell of Starbucks for me...with coffee as the main ingredient, with a touch of pumpkin spice and cream...with a little bit of wood and leather... That brings me to the packaging of We Love NY collection. It is genius. Even if I did not like a single one of the three fragrance, I would have gotten one anyway, just for that coffee cup of a "box". As it happens, I love Vamp a NY. Created by a French perfumer and smelling of Soviet ice cream... How cosmopolitan and random. How, in fact, very New York. Courtesy of Honore des Pres, 30 commenters will be able try a scent from the NY collection. To participate, tell me what YOUR New-York-themed perfume would smell like and leave your email in the body of the comment for me to contact you for the mailing address. 10 commenters will be randomly chosen to receive a sample of Vamp à NY, Love Les Carottes and Love Coco. 20 more commenters will then be randomly chosen to receive a sample of Vamp à NY. Vamp à NY is available at Henri Bendel and Beauty Habit, $98.00 for 50 ml. Images © Perfume-Smellin' Things.

We Love NY? I Love Angkor Wat!

By Marla Olivia Giacobetti’s Vamp a NY, a new organic, all-natural perfume for Honore des Pres, is sadly mis-named. I suppose the HdP marketing team chose it to capitalize on what’s left of youth culture enthusiasm for the Twilight phenomenon. But this gorgeous creation conjures neither angst-ridden teen vampires nor urban dystopias. Instead, I find myself transported back in time to the 12th century Khmer Empire of Cambodia, and specifically, to the court dancers who performed their impossibly graceful ballets in royal palaces and temples. Lush and tropical, Vamp officially opens on a rum accord, but there’s nothing at all boozy here to my nose. Instead, I get about 10 minutes of a shimmering sharpness, like bright shafts of sunlight on a lotus pond. The heart of Vamp is a stunning melange of equatorial flowers cut from the Emperor’s garden. Tuberose, ylang ylang, and perhaps some frangipani grace this bouquet. Natural vanilla, both orchid and pod, with the lovely green banana facet found in the actual plant, weaves like the court dancers’ hands in and out of the flowers. Later, hints of smoked spice (turmeric, perhaps paired with a tiny bit of massoia bark?) emerge through warm drafts of tolu and Peru balsams. This is the deep, deep south. This is the Equator. The composite effect of Vamp is of sunlight, air, still dark waters, and shimmering heat. No vampire could survive in this radiant atmosphere. Longevity is excellent, especially considering that all-natural perfumes are notorious for their ephemerality. Sillage is good, neither too strong, nor cloying. And Vamp blooms beautifully in the summer heat. I’m delighted with this new trend toward all-natural perfumes, and thrilled that some of the best noses in the business are creating in this genre. My only complaint is that it should have been named, “Apsara”. Photos: French EFEO archeologist Charles Carpeaux in the ruins of Angkor, early 20th century, a Cambodian dancer at the Royal Palace, 1921, stone apsara. Disclosure: I received a sample of Vamp through the Blog Grain de Musc. I have no financial ties to any entity connected with this perfume.