I’m not one to care about the gender of my perfume. This is why I am such a big fan of the fragrance line from Odin New York. They seem to be creating their fragrances with a man as their target audience. This is why I was looking forward to trying the latest release 07 Tanoke.
There is that moment when a perfumer hits an inflection point and their creativity takes an exponential jump upward. In 2011, one perfumer I believe found herself on that upward trajectory is Charna Ethier of Providence Perfume Company. Thankfully she didn’t keep me waiting long as her first release of 2012, Hindu Honeysuckle, has been my companion for the last two days.
Calice Becker has been exploring oud through the Arabian Nights Collection for Kilian Henessy’s By Kilian perfume line. She has taken us from Pure Oud which is exactly as advertised, to Rose Oud which sets off the oud with a dewy rose, to last year’s oud accord or “oud without any oud” in Incense Oud. For the fourth exploration of oud Mme Becker has chosen amber as the dancing partner in Amber Oud.
I got the chance to try two of the new London Blooms collection, Peony & Moss and White Lilac & Rhubarb. Both of these are very different intersections as Peony & Moss is a green synergy and White Lilac & Rhubarb is a crossroads of floral and vegetal.
She reached into her purse and brought out a lab sample and asked me if this was what I was talking about. From the moment she placed a dab on my skin, I kept sniffing it; and realized this was exactly what I meant. Cologne architecture using bold heady notes. That day back in April this fragrance didn’t have a name. Today it is the brand-new seventh Atelier Cologne release Ambre Nue by perfumer Ralf Schweiger.
When I played twenty questions as a kid the first part of the game was to identify whether the object being described was Animal, Vegetable or Mineral. Gerald Ghislain has released a new three fragrance series under his Histoires de Parfums label called Edition Rare, Ambrarem, rosam, and Petroleum. In this game of fragrant twenty questions M Ghislain uses oud to interrogate three different compositions and come up with the appropriate answer.
