Les Cocottes de Paris...

If I asked you to imagine Paris in the nineteenth century, I am sure that many things would spring to your mind; from the novels of Victor Hugo to the towering beauty of the Eiffel tower but I am sure that, eventually, your thoughts would turn to the Demi Monde.
A legend in it's own right, the world of the Moulin Rouge, of Toulous Lautrec paintings, of arias from La Traviata and, above all, a world of scandalous and inspiring courtesans.

This is the world and the women which Les Cocottes de Paris have tried, so beautifully, to capture in their range of perfumes. As far as I am concerned, the result is a delicious success,
La Castiglione, named for the famed lover of Emperor Napoleon III whose experiments with photography have given her an almost mythic status and whose rumored influence over the unification of Italy proves that she was a political force to be reckoned with. She graces the cover of the Penguin Classics edition of "Confessions of a child of the century", peeping out from the oval of a photo frame turned mask. She has become internet avatars and exhibition posters. Her legend is secured by the sheer beauty and daring of the image she created for herself. Her perfume, appropriately, is rich patchouli, anchored by depths of musk and ambergris. This is the perfume of Charles Baudelaries haunting poem, Le Flacon, the intense, memory stirring perfume, whose earthy scent cannot be contained by a mere glass flacon. This is a perfume of the evening certainly, but it could be worn all day long, especially in the Autumn and Winter when it's warmth would surround the wearer in a veritable velvet stole.

La Belle Otero, is a  decadently dirty violet scent. Otero claimed that she dished herself up, at a banquet in St. Petersburg, au natural. If so, she must have been nestled on a bed of Parma Violets.
The violet has always had something of a naughty reputation and their appeal is strengthened here by the headiness of Sandalwood in the base; the very scent which her friend, the writer Colette, claimed La Belle Otero perspired as she danced. Wild and delicious evenings of Spanish dances are conjured in a few notes of beguiling musk and neroli. It's a perfume of summer heat and the dazzle of warmth creeping like fingers on your skin.  It was Colette too who described La Belle as luxurious and that's certainly an impression which comes through with every note of this perfume.
A faint note of sadness runs through the joy of this composition; an appropriate note given the bittersweet nature of La Belle Otero's life whose details I shall not venture into here, but, as is common with a hint of sadness, it serves to make the sweetness all the more joyful.

The final perfume in Les Cocottes collection is as delectable at it's inspiration, the Ballet dancer Chloe Merode. This perfume is a light, floral bouquet with a heart of rose. It's coy and flirtatious, hiding behind a light veil of bergamot before the roses gather strength and come into their own sprawling on a base of fleshly laundered cotton sheets with just an edge of earthy lichen. This is a perfume that creeps up on you with the light whisper of silk ballet slippers but, like the ballet and it's beautiful dancers, it conceals hidden depths and inner strengths. A froth of tulle and a soul of steel. A perfume for the romantic heart if ever there was one.

I've adored testing all three of these perfumes; they are, without a doubt, a beautiful collection. They encapsulate a time with which I am utterly in love, whose art and literature are always in my heart, how could I not adore them.  If I have favourites, I would never even dare to whisper it, I would hate to offend any of these beautiful Mademoiselles, but certain notes do beckon to me from these compositions! One thing that I can assure you of, if you try this collection, you are certain to be seduced by at least one of these perfumes.

A Rose by any name... Part One.

With a single, poetic, flourish Shakespeare reminds us how beautiful the rose is, that was his talent.          The talent of all Roses it seems is to provide breathtaking beauty and romantic allegory. Yet the rose has many faces, many moods and every perfume which bears the name of rose reflects some different facet of the mythology of roses.

        “The Red rose breaths of passion 

          and the white rose breaths of love”

 As the poet John Boyle O’Reilly put it; although, in terms of perfumery that is a simplification too far.
       Because there are so many different facets of rose perfumery, I have decided to divide my post on rose perfumes into two and post the two halves over two weeks, In this, my first rose post, I want to review two of my current favourites of what one might call the romantic rose before exploring the genre of deliciously morbid rose scents next week.

     It may have something to do with the book I’m working on, whose title, taken from a poem by Robert Herrick, provides a constant reminder of the evocative nature of roses each time I open the document; or, it may simply be that Roses are hard to resist but I have been wearing a lot of rose perfumes lately. Especially the warm, evocative scents of summer roses in full bloom. Not the expensive, overly perfect roses piled high for Valentines day (I think, next weeks post might be a better place to delve into the symbolism of red roses on such a saints day) but the living, pulsating roses that still bear a trace of rain, sun and their own sharp thorns in their kisses.

                                                  Image via Wikimedia Commons.

    One of the most beautiful fragrances which I have discovered lately and which , for me, fits this genre is: Raw Silk and Red Roses from Sarah McCartney’s 4160 Tuesdays. On their site, the perfume is described as "A walk through a rose garden, with a touch of geranium, patchouli, musk and fruits." and that is just what the composition evokes for me; a garden on a late summer afternoon trailing, via an exquisite rose and gold sunset, into one of those perfect heavy blue evenings which only summer can paint. Cups of green tea, the rustle of a silk dress as it falls coolly around your skin, golden light in the sky and the roses shedding their scent are all evoked as notes of warm musk and sharp geranium unfold around an intense, perfect rose. At times it feels as if the rose is tearing it's way, dashingly, through it's wrapping of silk, ready to plant an intense kiss on ones lips. For me there's a little edge of promising, and very romantic, spiciness about the composition too,  I could bathe in this perfume quite happily and yet, fickle perfume lover that I am, I have been unfaithful to this rose with others.

     With my second romantic rose choice for instance. Lipstick Rose from Editions De Parfums Frederic Malle is a pure distillation of glamour. Naturally, it appealed to my love of vintage. Never without my own red lipstick I was enraptured by the soft, sweet scent of this perfume. Rose and violet top notes play beautifully together on a base that comes through deeply amber to my nose and keep the whole composition in tune with a delightful longevity. Inspired by the scent of perfumer Ralf Schweiger's mother's lipstick it weaves a familiar spell for anyone who has ever clicked open a powder compact or vanity case in a vintage shop (since the original smell fades with time, I have topped uo my vintage compacts interior with a light spritz of Lipstick Rose so that I can inhale it's beauty each time I refresh my make-up). It's a perfume which feel real and human because of it's cosmetic smell. It's never without the essence of the woman wearing the perfume, wearing the lipstick. Her smile bleeds through Cheshire cat like and makes the fragrance her own as surely as a lipstick signature on a mirror marks out her territory. I confess, when I wear Lipstick Rose on my skin, one spritz is never enough! If you love vintage, old movies, even satcks of brittle but still magnificent fashion magazines then Lipstick Rose may just be the perfume for you!
      Well, that my two favourite romantic roses reviewed; hopefully, I have put my passion for them across! Next week, there will be more from Malle and others as the rose grows a little gothic...

Perfume du jour: Zoologist's Beaver

The best way I can describe this post is to say that it is a perfume review and a small essay on writing rolled into one, hopefully harmonious piece.
Perfume has strange and wonderful powers, this week I un-stoppered a vial of perfume whose deep, sharp notes inspired me to write not only a review but a little literary musing. It just so happened that when I sniffed this particular perfume for the first time I was writing a historical short story and treading carefully to avoid that great pitfall in writing the past: failing to imagine how different the past really was. I do not mean only the physical difference between horse drawn carriages and motorized cars, washing your clothes in a creak or having a washing machine to hand. What I was thinking of was the mental landscape of living within the past. The opening lines of Hartley’s "The Go Between" may have become a cliche but a note of truth rings there:  the past is a strange place to imagine let alone to visit, It’s customs are not our own, it’s conventions are not our own and for every familiarity there lie in wait a thousand mysteries.
From our vantage point in the twenty first century, however, the behaviors of the past can seem baffling. Not only the broad sweeps of politics and policy but the tiny details. We now know that most people in Medieval times woke during the night. Very probably they woke due to the extreme cold but gradually they came to see safety in these nocturnal interruptions; the midnight hour was the witching hour and a wakeful household was also a vigilant household when witches danced.
These days, the fortunate majority of us sleep through the night, insulated from such biting cold by walls stronger than wattle and daub and witches have become just another Halloween costume slipped on to provide a vicarious thrill. However, if you want to write about the medieval world you need to take these facts into account just as you will need to give the fantastical figures on the margins of maps more than a cursory glance. Omnipods, sea serpents and wolf heads are more than mere decoration they were genuine fears lying just beyond the horizon. The skies were full of ships too, their inhabitants unable to breath earth’s rich air whilst their anchors occasionally caught against the impediments of barns and church towers.
Marina Warner points out in her book, ‘From the Beast to the Blond’ that 17th century fairy tales of wolves and bears were far more terrifying to their original audiences, no matter how regal, because they truly inhabited a world where one wrong turn in the woods could lead you into the jaws of a waiting wolf. Now, the wolves are long gone and so has the visceral fear of them. If we wish to recreate the fear, we often end up re-imagining what it means to encounter a “wolf”.
This is not to say that there was not amusement to be found in fairy tales from their first readings onward, but historical methods for mitigating the fear factor might prove unpalatable to a modern writer. At one court performance for Louis XIV scripted my Moliere, Warner tells how dancing bears from the court menagerie were used, a practice we shiver at now for it’s savage mistreatment of animals but which never gave those audiences a second thought.
The art of historical imagination can be just as difficult when one turns to perfumes.
When we think of the odours of the past we immediately conjour the odours we find most displeasing now, the fecal scents of open drains and unwashed bodies and we wonder how they could bear not only to be around these but how they could possibly hope to cover them with perfumes. How, we wonder, could they even smell the perfumes they wore?  Alas we imagine some light floral akin to the delicate fragrances that fill up our own well lit department stores forgetting how powerful and rich the perfumes of choice a few hundred years ago would have been.
There was as much of the animal on the dressing tables of histories great beauties as there was on their dining tables. Castoreum, civet and musk. The animal kingdoms scent glands of display and seduction were being put to use by Casanova’s and Du Barrys with similar results. Ambergris, the pungent sea washed product of Whales stomach discomforts was sprinkled liberally on bodies and into food (Charles II liked to use a little Ambergris as a breakfast garnish) There are certainly methods for olfactory archaeology  since so many of the great perfume houses (Floris, Penhaligons and Guerlain for instance) started in the nineteenth century. You could start with a few classics like Penhaligon’s Hammam Bouquet (used to such perfect effect in Essie Fox’s The Somnambulist) or Guerlain’s Jicky. However, reformulation has changed these perfumes a great deal over the intervening centuries. Oscar Wilde’s beloved Malmaison by Floris returned briefly a few years ago but is far removed from the volatile natural oriental he would have dabbed on in the mornings.
In any case, it was a powerful sensory experience of luxury that I was struggling to convey when I un-stoppered Zoologist perfumes beautiful, Beaver.
For a second after the first spritz, the scent of this perfume is arresting. It’s warm and bitter, animal and unashamed. However, after a few seconds of olfactory adjustment, a sniff of my wrist bought a smile to my lips.
This was the perfumed key I had been seeking into the boudoir of my protagonist. This is the bitter post hunt perfume, the scent wafting up from a courtiers jabot as you lean in to whisper a few words of gossip. It’s pungent but whilst that could prove overwhelming I found that I liked the smell.
It may not be for the faint hearted but who wants to be fainted hearted when it comes to perfume?
It’s sharp, clear notes of fresh air and citrus serve beautifully to strengthen and refine the powerful hits of musk and castoreum (what else in a perfume called Beaver?) whilst the smoke and undergrowth create a rich imagined backdrop to the perfume story playing out around them. The cold winter air has just been shut out of the party as the fire rises in the hearth and the seduction begins.
Everything I wanted to convey fell into place when I breathed in this perfume, it’s very style of perfume story telling as utterly modern as it’s notes were refreshingly historical. I recommend it, to those trying to recapture the past or find something a little different.

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?