Fragrance Friday becomes Scented Saturday...

Bonjour, I hope everyone is having a lovely weekend as I welcome you to a scented Saturday on the blog. Usually my perfume posts appear on a Friday, but this week a combination of a hectic Friday and having lots of samples I wanted to get through meant I pushed my perfume post back a day but kept the alliteration.

Why so many samples; well, it's a combination of samples ordered from Les Senteurs which I've been trying one by one since they arrived at the start of the week and a charming, generous charity idea on the part pf my local department store. So, this week I ended up with a box of samples and decided to combine them into one post. 

Let us begin then with something rather stunning: Etat Libre d'Orange's Hermann A Mes Cotes. This sample was ordered after I saw The Candy Perfume Boy's recommendation on Facebook and his fabulous review (Candy Perfume Boy's Review). Oh, this perfume is so gorgeous! I'm not even really going to try to review it, I'll leave that to the maestro, what I am going to say is this: if you have not tried Hermann yet then do! It's the deepest red rose with a truffle heart and wonderful longevity. It's dark, mysterious and ideal for winter. I'd also like to add how much Etat Libre has impressed me lately. I have loved a number of their perfumes and I never thought that was going to happen back in the days when I started getting into perfume and their brand was known primarily for the scandalous and highly unsuitable as a Christmas gift, Secretions Magnifique (just an interesting note, I recently chatted with a lady who loves it by the way, described it so beautifully too). 

But let us move on, my second perfume sample was La Religieuse by Serge Lutens. If anything this perfume is the opposite of Hermann, whilst H warms you up, La Religieuse is the chill snowstorm raging outside with only the comforting scent of incense from a local church breaking through the ice to  remind you that the cold of winter will soon pass. Again, this one is beautiful. It captures the story it sets out to convey in a few divine notes of musk, incense and jasmine and lingers beautifully on skin (less so on a blotter but perfume was meant to be worn against the skin, against the pulse). I suppose it was always going to work for me as I adore incense perfumes. Comme des Garcon's intense and beautiful Avignon is one of my all time favourite perfumes, an acknowledged instant classic. 

 However, I think the time has come to explain my other samples of the week a little more. So, I popped into afore mentioned department store last weekend to have a sniff of Anais Anais by Cacharel and noticed they were selling bundles of four samples for £1.00 for breastcancernow.org I have no intention of going into detail here but it's a charity I have good reason to support and obviously I love perfume samples so perfect match. So, I bought £10.00 worth of samples and have found some real gems amongst them: Million by Paco Rabanne turns out to be far nicer than I had expected, Pop by Stella McCartney is a lovely heavy tuberose but my absolute favourite so far has to be: Givenchy's Gentlemen Only Absolute. 

I am a firm believer that there's no such thing as a gendered perfume so the fact that this is marketed as a men's perfume does not up me off in the slightest. Would Marlene Dietrich have walked away from such a perfume? Non.

Gentlemen Only Absolute is a heavy, spicy Oriental with a heart rich in cinnamon, saffron and nutmeg. The cinnamon comes through strongly on my skin entwined with the base notes of vanilla and sandalwood whilst the bergamot top note proves fleeting (fine with me, it's the spices I love most about this composition). It's certainly not a tweeds and brogues fragrance, more of a velvet tuxedo and brocade waistcoat perfume.

I've fallen in love with it! In fact I'm wearing it right now

Finally, my last perfume sample, La Fille De Berlin.

Simple, spicy, rose and pepper that conjures a snowy rose out of simplicity and presents it in a rose jam red juice. I think I may be as in love with the colour of this perfume as I am with it's smell! I'll be wearing this again at the close of the month when the chill of winter begins to bite and a sharp red rose is called for. 

Okay, I'm all perfume sampled out now! I shall be off to a cup of tea and my writing, have a wonderful weekend, a wonderful week and I'll see you all again on Wednesday for Writing Wednesday unless that becomes Literary Thursday? 

Fragrance Friday... Balenciaga's Quadrille.

It's no secret that I love 1950's fashion (well it may be if we have never met before and you are new to this blog and to my writing, in which case I shall let you in on my secret now). Wherever I go I go in swing skirts or pencil skirts, faux astrakhan jackets, little clip top handbags and tiny hats. Naturally, being a perfume lover as well I am always on the look out for a perfect perfume to compliment my clothing obsession. This is a harder quest than you might think now that the heady vintages of the mid 20th Century have been swept aside beneath a barrage of sweetly floral and fruity fragrances. The perfumes of the 1950's and 1960's like a roll on girdle or the perfect court shoe screamed maturity and responsibility along with femininity. Their successors in the late 1960's whispered of inviting exoticism and mysticism with wisps of patchouli and honey. Now, however, the emphasis is  firmly fixed on the ever youthful appeal of peaches and strawberries, spring flowers and spring showers. The plastic surgeons glossy leaflet as portable, spritzable promise. 

I'm afraid that strawberries are my limit, I don't want to smell like dessert any more than I want to wear nude lipstick and I really don't want to wear nude lipstick (not sure I own any shade paler than the classic Revlon: Cherries in the Snow).

Don't get me wrong, some of these fragrances are beautiful, I was rather impressed by Chanel No.5 L'eau even though I feared for it's staying power and know in my heart that, whilst classic No.5 has enough silage that fellow shoppers have chased after me to ask what that perfume is and where they too can obtain a bottle, L'eau may prove sadly fleeting. 

However, they are not quite what I would want in a perfume and so one sometimes has to turn to vintage juices for special occasions and when I'm feeling rather 50's (full outfit, black eyeliner wings, red lipstick) one perfume stands out head and shoulders above it's competition: Balenciaga's Quadrille.

Like Balenciaga's dresses of the 1950's this perfume has volume and quirkiness in abundance. It's a powerhouse of amber and musk where the heart and top notes are, fittingly enough for a perfume named after a 19th century square dance, like coy ballerinas just hovering round the edges. After the first dab, one is aware of a rich scent of plum, peach and the crispness of lemon before the cloves and cardamon jump up sharply from the heart and beckon you in to the real party going on deep down in the musk and amber heart of the composition. 

It may have been an invitation to a quadrille but those tame 19th century dances have no place down here in the depths. Someones dropped a jazz LP down on the record player, there's a hint of smokiness in the air and the bar is serving only whiskey and gin. You want to slip into a little black jumper with shoulder pads and a frilly tulle petticoat. The world is on the cusp of a new era, things will be bright up ahead, your rocket cocktail shaker promised you so. 

That's the beauty of Quadrille to me. It's all the things you want from a vintage perfume, depth, complexity, musk and smokiness. It elbows it's way in and demands to be smelt the same way a black high heel demands that you look. 

Bal a Versailles.

I was trying to decide which perfume to choose for my first review and then the answer came to me: with only one more sleep to the American premier of my adored "Versailles la Serie" it made sense to review the equally beautiful Bal a Versailles. So, this morning I grabbed my gorgeous vintage mini of the EDT from my dressing table and dabbed it on.

(The bottle poses atop one of my Paperblanks notebooks)

I know you may be thinking, 'but EDT's are so light, shouldn't you use something a little stronger for a review?' Well, not when it comes to vintage Bal a Versailles, a delightfully musky floral perfume first released in 1962. Eight hours after the first application and this juice is still going strong and projecting very nicely. I'm not sure I could handle anything stronger for fear of headaches and as the wonderful review on Perfume Posse suggests the pure perfume might be a little too umm...feral for my tastes.
Not that the EDT is low on animalic notes, no. As strongly as the fresh wafts of orange blossom, Jasmin, Neroli and Bergamot come through in the top notes, once we get down to the heart and base the leather, resin, musk and civet start to come through pretty strongly. Nothing wrong with that, if anything it helps to enhance that evocative "Versailles" feeling to the perfume because, lets be honest for all the silks and jewels at the court of The Sun King personal hygiene was a largely ignored idea and unwashed courtiers drowned their own body odours beneath layers of heady perfumes including, paradoxically, civet.
The perfect thing then to wear if you are going to indulge in "Versaille la Serie", making the series a full on sensory experience, or it would if the courtiers and royals in this T.V series were not suspiciously (if deliciously) well bathed and the perfume references were not so thin on the ground. A great shame given that Louis XIV's minister of finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert was a great supporter of the perfume industry and, until a later life aversion, Louis was a pretty heavy perfume user himself (for more details on this see Denyse Beaulieu's wonderful book, "The Perfume Lover").