Parfum

Christmas Crush: CHANEL Extravaganza

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It’s that time of year again: Christmas, also known as the most wonderful time of year, in fact, and it’s the time to get that Christmas shopping underway. Instead of a Christmas gift guide this year, I’m switching out my regular Candy Crush posts for just as regular Christmas Crushes instead. In these posts over the coming weeks you’ll find some wonderfully scented gifts just in time for the holiday season, with products that I am crushing on. So get ready for some marvellous Christmas gift inspiration!

For the sake of today’s post I am pretending that the interlocking Cs in the CHANEL logo stand for ‘Christmas Crush’ because the very first of my Christmas gift posts is dedicated to none other than the famous french couturier. This Christmas CHANEL are promising us glitter and gifting extravaganza with two fragrance products that celebrate the beauty of their most iconic scent, in both its classic and modern interpretations. They are a practical and streamlined Twist & Spray for Nº5 L’Eau and a rather decadent, nay, shall we say excessive, gold, glittering body gel for Nº5. That’s right, folks, I’m kicking these Christmas Crush posts off with a big, shimmering, CHANEL bang.

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Olfactory Deconstruction: Vetiver

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We often talk about ‘notes’ or materials in fragrances and how they come together to create a multi-faceted composition. But these materials are incredibly nuanced themselves and each one brings not one, not two, but a multitude of different things to a fragrance, meaning that there is always a lot to learn when one goes back to the source materials. I always think that the best way to understand a perfume material is to break it down into facets and that’s exactly what these olfactory deconstruction pieces are for – to dissect each material into little parts so we can really understand what makes it tick, and what makes it smell so good.

Perfume is like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Each fragrance is made up of specifically shaped pieces that lock together. Perfumers match up the pieces, locking them together facet-to-facet, tessellating each nuance to either enhance or contrast them, or in some cases, to create something entirely new. The great thing is that, unlike jigsaw puzzles, where there is one way of piecing things together, perfumery is open-ended and the perfumer can tie things together in whichever way they see fit. This means that the picture at the end can be whatever they dream up. There are endless possibilities and to me, that’s pretty damn exciting.

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Speed Sniff: Paris-Izmir & Paris-Bangalore by Carven

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Speed Sniffs is a way to bring you ‘to-the-point’ fragrance reviews that are quick and easy to digest. They are perfume reviews without the faff.

Madame Carven loved to travel, so much so in fact, that the brand has launched Collection Carven, a selection of seven fragrances that celebrate Madame Carven’s journeys from Paris to a number of exotic cities. Collection Carven ties the spirit of the brand’s couture into themes of discovery and exoticism, resulting in seven distinct fragrances. I was sent two to try: Paris-Izmir (a trip to a field of roses in Turkey) and Paris-Bangalore (a voyage to delicate treats in India). Both are very different as well as completely unlike anything else the brand has done so far, so let’s put them to the speed sniff test!

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Perfume Review: Scherzo & Tender by Miller Harris

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What happens when you give two perfumers the same passage of text and ask them to make a fragrance with no olfactive brief? The answer is two fragrances that are as different as day and night and it’s an experiment undertaken by a surprising house: Miller Harris. Now, if you’ve not been sniffing the recent launches from Miller Harris you have been missing out. They’ve been very quietly doing some phenomenal work (I point your noses in the direction of Rose Silence and Le Cèdre, to name just two, but trust me when I say that there are many more exciting things to sniff) and it really seems that they are forging an identity for themselves, after years of muddled direction. Miller Harris now has a personality and a character, and I’m here for it.

For their latest project (launching in January 2018), Miller Harris is releasing two fragrances inspired by a passage of text from F.Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. The idea is that the brand handed this passage to two perfumers, Mathieu Nardin (the creator of lots of their recent works such as the aforementioned Rose Silence and Le Cèdre – check him out, you must) and Bertrand Duchaufour (y’all know who he is) and asked them to make a fragrance each inspired by the text. That’s it. No olfactive direction, no concept, just simple literary inspiration. The result is Scherzo (Mathieu) and Tender (Bertrand) and they really are quite surprising.

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Candy Crush: Serge Lutens’ New Look

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I’m always crushing on something scented or other. My nose knows no limits. Candy Crush is where I showcase the beautifully scented things I’m crushing on right now so you can hopefully develop a crush too.

Serge Lutens is a man of aesthetics, both visual and olfactive. In his career he has not only worked as an olfactory architect, he has also been a photographer and a make-up artist too. Each of the things that he lends his hand to has an incredibly distinct style, whether it be the sharp, elfin style of his photography and make-up work, or the hedonistic orientalism and deadly botany of his fragrances. Everything he does looks, feels and smells like it comes from Serge Lutens, especially the bottles for his perfumes, which in a strange way are a visual interpretation of his muse in glass.

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Perfume Review: Wonder Bouquet by MUGLER

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By now we all know my thoughts on the House of MUGLER. I am and always will be, a lifelong MUGLER fanboy. I am indoctrinated in their ideology. I am a card-carrying member of the Muglerati. If you ask me where I’m from, I will tell you that I was born from a star in the far reaches of the Muglerverse. The brand is my favourite and their fragrances are some of my most-beloved. I am MUGLER, smell me roar.

So it’s always exciting for me when MUGLER launch a new fragrance and this year hasn’t been short in terms of output from my favourite brand. So far we’ve had two Alien flankers (Musc Mysterieux and Eau Sublime), some delicious Angel-flavoured chocolates, oh we can’t forget the entirely brand new feminine pillar fragrance in the form of Aura. It’s been a busy year on Planet Mugler, for sure, and there’s no let up yet, because the brand has just added the ninth fragrance to their exclusive Les Exceptions range: the intriguingly named Wonder Bouquet.

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Perfume Review: Gold Knight By Kilian

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Doesn’t time fly? French niche brand By Kilian is celebrating their 10th anniversary already! It only feels like yesterday when they launched L’Oeuvre Noire, their debut collection of fragrances that contained such beauties as Love (Don’t be Shy) and Beyond Love (Prohibited), and many more. By Kilian has been on a massive journey since then, launching a veritable feast of fragrances, candles and even jewellery, not to mention the fact that the brand was acquired by Estée Lauder in 2016. It’s been an incredibly fragrant odyssey and to celebrate, Kilian has just launched two golden perfumes for their tenth anniversary in a new collection entitled ‘From Dusk Till dawn’.

Those two perfumes are Gold Knight and Woman in Gold, and they take inspiration from Gustav Klimt, coming housed within a (rather substantial) golden clutch that reinterprets the artist’s famous work ‘The Kiss’. The focus of this review is Gold Knight, the masculine scent in the pair and easily the stand out of the two. Gold Knight is inspired “the dashing, golden-armored chevalier in Klimt’s 1902 Beethoven Frieze” and is described by Kilian as being a woody oriental. It’s a perfume that lives up to its golden name, presenting something dazzling, bold, muscular, and undeniably ‘by Kilian’ in every way, shape and form.

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Perfume Trend Report 2017

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We’re officially in quarter four of 2017 and what a year it has been. By my count there has been at least 20 million fragrance launches this year, but I do have a tendency to exaggerate. In truth it has felt like a particularly busy year, with lots of behemoth launches from equally gigantic brands. I also think it has been a phenomenally good year for perfume and I’ve fallen in love with more than a handful of wonderful fragrances already. But this post is not a retrospective of the year – you can have that at the annual Candies (my fragrance awards) in December, no this is something a little bit different.

As we’re heading towards the end of this year I thought it would be a good idea to do a quick recap of the big perfume trends we’ve seen this year. I’ve certainly noticed a handful of key themes over the last 12 months and it’s kind of fascinating to look back at them at this point in the year. So in this post you will find four trends that have populated the perfume landscape in 2017. These are just my thoughts however, and I’d be more than happy to hear about any trends you’ve identified too!

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