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)