08.12.08
Posted in 2000s, Annick Goutal, Uncategorized, so-so
at 10:21 pm
by Annick Goutal, 2005
Mandragore is French for mandrake, a historical, Biblical, mythical plant, reputed to cure barrenness & poisoning, give visions, & preserve vigor & youth. Its root sometimes forks, giving it a homunculus-like appearance, which supposedly screams when pulled from the earth, the scream itself deadly if heard. So much a source of folklore & legend, this infamous plant’s nearest relative is… the tomato! Unlike the early tales about its cousin, the mandrake is actually poisonous if eaten.
The perfume starts out lemony-vinyly, quickly followed by plasticky ginseng. The lemonyfreshness soon starts fading and the ginsengy layer slowly loses its vinyl elements, receding into the naturally-occurring plastickyness of ginseng instead of the initial artificial plastic-vinyl elements. Wearing further, a savory black pepperlike note appears with some other background spices, adding itself to the ginseng center note. The lemon topnote very faintly persists, and the pepper & spices wander to the forefront then recede again with the ginseng a constant dying-ballast hum in the foreground. And that’s it. Ginseng obviously is supposed to stand in for the mandrake, but it was so aggressively GINSENG! just like the vials of extract from Chinese groceries, that I couldn’t recognize it for anything else. Since mandrake fruit looks like a tamarillo, which is another distant tomato relative, I expected anything of mandrake to taste/smell of tamarillo, at least a little.
That’s all folks. It’s essentially a 3-note composition, and a very light-airy one, too. It was barely there, and didn’t last more than half the day. I suspect the Annick Goutal empire is more concerned how it’ll play as a candle or air freshener than as perfume, despite calling itself a “High Perfumery House”. With a name like Mandragore you expect something more witchy, dark, mysterious, exotic, eeevviiillll! Not a sweet, ethereal, will-o-the-wisp. You expect Morgana le Fay, not Tinkerbell.
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07.31.07
Posted in 2000s, CB I Hate Perfume, Uncategorized, good
at 3:57 pm
by CB I Hate Perfume, 2006
Much has been said about this, or any other, Christopher Brosius scent. That they’re unusually evocative, that they don’t smell like perfume (duh!) but are more like olfactory art. Black March smells like dirt, specifically classier dirt, otherwise known as humus, and very specifically in the wet spring with green shoots of weeds growing out of it. What it specifically evokes to me is the Dirt flavor jellybeans from Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans. Its scents of humus and young greens makes other perfume bloggers go into flights of purple prose about “Springs From My Childhood”, but not me. Springtime where I’m from generally happens in April, the dirt isn’t humus, it’s clayey-sandy DIRT, and there’s a lot more harsh wet wood, more noxious smelling weeds, and at least one dead animal rotting in a ditch somewhere. Read the rest of this entry »
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07.25.07
Posted in 1980s, Hermès, Uncategorized, bad
at 11:59 am
By Hermès, 1986
Bel Ami by Hermès is a black hole cologne, you try to escape from its pull, but ultimately succumb to the stygian Pine-Sol Musk depths, its bug spray-like sillage is the electromagnetic transmission signalling a fresh victim.
This is from the ’80s, but smells as harsh as a cheap cologne from the ’70s (an old, very cheap one called Archie, whose bottle was a miniature plastic hard hat, comes to mind). When I tried it on my fiancé it reacted as the creators probably intended, his skin swallowed up the scent almost immediately, and curiously, released the faintest whiff of clove. In an hour the piney-bug spray scent appeared, but much weaker and less noxious, it was almost nonexistant in a few hours and disappeared before the end of the day.
Earlier “cologne” was a unisex scent, usually heavy on the citrus, maybe a little something piney but not much. No. 4711 being one of the originals Read the rest of this entry »
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