Chairman Meow

Snowcake by LUSH vs Cuir Beluga by Guerlain

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Post by Chairman Meow

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Hi APJ,

Having read comments on akafkaesquelife that Lush’s Snowcake was longer lasting version of my beloved Cuir Beluga, to be had at a fraction of the price, I considered the gauntlet well and truly thrown, so off I duly trundled to find a sample. You heard it folks. Cuir Beluga and Snowcake are about go toe to toe for the title of World Champion Delicious Marzipan Fragrance, so LET’S GET RRRRRRRRRRRRRREADY TO RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRBUMBOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHL!!

Snowcake by LUSH vs Cuir Beluga by Guerlain THROWDOWN

Snowcake Lush Fragrantica

Fragrantica gives these featured accords in one line:
Marzipan, benzoin, rose, cassia and almond

Cuir Beluga Guerlain FragranticaFragrantica gives these featured accords:
Top: Aldehydes, tangerine
Heart: Immortelle, patchouli
Base: Vanilla, amber, suede, heliotrope

Bingbingbing! Snowcake sluggishly dances around Cuir Beluga with some evasive footwork while Beluga watches on with a bored expression… and BAM! Beluga uncorks a huge left hook out of nowhere, and Snowcake goes down like a lead balloon. Nothing more to see here, ladies and gentlemen.

These are mostly listed as essential oils in the ingredients list, with the implication that it’s a mostly “natural” perfume, as is Lush’s wont. Certainly natural is how it smells.

Snowcake, with its billing as a scent of marzipan, and name that promises a mouthwatering dessert in fact delivers, cruelly, sadistically, the scent green bananas. It goes on tart, grassy and replete with an uncomfortable urge to scrape the fuzz of unripe fruit off one’s teeth. What’s more, by the magic of whichever wacky esters are in this concoction, you even get the slightly ferrous whiff of bruised and oxidised banana peel moments later.

Snowcake vs Cuir Beluga Boxing_Ring WikiMediaPhoto Stolen WikiMedia

The almond is there I suppose, morosely mooning about in the wings, crapulent from the night before, and does make a reluctant showing once the banana finishes its strangled chorus. It plays a short olfactory set and then passes out on stage in its own banana scented vomit. The only resemblance to Cuir Beluga that I could detect is when Snowcake is at the very end of its pitifully short life, one that makes the notoriously ephemeral Cuir Beluga appear a veritable Methuselah of perfumes, when it’s just an enfeebled, barely perceptible almondy-vanilla powder.

This would all be tremendous if Snowcake wasn’t thus named and was instead called “The Smell Of ‘Nanas Turning”, but as it is, it’s just a bit of a letdown for this confused reviewer. Am I missing something? Did the Aussies get a beta version of the Snowcake that everyone else is in raptures about?

No, I suspect the problem lies with me. The truth is, I’m quite partial to synthetic scents, with their durability and ability to transport me to fantasy olfactive landscapes, which is much harder to accomplish with natural scents. Actually, I’d say I’m quite the fan of artificial things in general. I prefer my chicken and corn soup laden with MSG. I’m looking forward to meeting my future robot manservant. I want my drag queens to look like caricatures of women.

And I like smelling stuff that smells better than the stuff it’s meant to smell like.
Pass me those bolt-ons will you, there’s a dear.

Chairman Meow x

Absolue Pour Le Soir by Maison Francis Kurkdjian 2010

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Post by Chairman Meaow

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What do I know about Francis Kurkdjian and his work? Very little. I know that he’s a wiz with orange flower. That he is large on talent, not so much, perhaps, on affability towards perfumistas. I had ordered a set of samples from his house some time back, given each a cursory sniff, and decided that he was the creator of pretty and well constructed, if not entirely memorable perfumes. And with that, Francis Kurkdjian was relegated to the recycling heap of my olfactory landscape.

Absolue Pour Le Soir by Maison Francis Kurkdjian 2010

Absolue Pour le Soir Maison Francis Kurkdjian FragranticaPhoto Stolen Fragrantica

Maison Francis Kurkdjian lists the following accords on its website:
Benzoin from Siam, Bulgarian and Iranian rose, honey, incense absolute, ylang ylang, cumin, Atlas cedar and sandalwood

With the first huff, it was as if I had sat under the bodhi tree and received my perfumed awakening. All the references to rutting animals, bodily secretions, hind quarters and nether regions, things that I had read about but had yet not experienced to any meaningful degree, things that sounded repugnant and intriguing in equal measures, were all there, fleshed out in Absolue Pour Le Soir.

It started out innocently enough – some liquored rose, sandalwood, and soft, sweet honey. But wait, reader. It’s like that scene from that old comedy The Jerk where Steve Martin takes a long, slow swipe of Bernadette Peters’ cheek with his tongue. You just know that in a few moments, when the spittle starts to dry, things are going to start to get a bit smelly.

Absolue Pour le Soir Maison Francis Kurkdjian Bus Shelter WikiMediaPhoto Stolen WikiMedia

Sure enough, the honey soon ripened, and started to acquire the tang of a pee-stained bus shelter. Absolue Pour Le Soir then took a turn for the bestial, and I had flashbacks of my dear departed cat, back arched and derriere quivering, fanning the scent of her backside as she lovingly slapped my face about with her tail. I smelled camels, whose scent had always struck me as being a little earthy, a little salty, and a little chocolaty. And underpinning all of this was an erotically charged, sweaty-musky whiff. A little later came the quite smoulder of incense, dampening the growl a touch.

Gott-im-Himmel. It was stunning.
I turned to the hovering sales assistant.
“This one doesn’t sell very well, does it?”
“No. It’s not very nice.”

Absolue Pour le Soir Maison Francis Kurkdjian Homeless_man WikipediaePhoto Stolen Wikipedia

I meandered into another shop and found that I had to severely limit my arm movements, lest my fellow shoppers catch wind of the scent and gain the impression that I had been caressing the butt crack of my local friendly hobo. And I realised with a pang that I wouldn’t have the confidence to wear this beauty out and about, this anathema to the masses, with their penchant for sterile odours.
Perhaps I’ll just content myself with dabbing discreetly. It can be my dirty little secret.

Did you? Have you? Would you? I mean, really………..

Escada Magnetism by Pierre Bourdon and Steve Demercado 2003

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Post by Chairman Meow

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Hi APJ,

Recently, after combing through my local classifieds for an interesting scented bargain, I found myself in the thick of my old uni stomping grounds, knocking on a stranger’s door. It was answered by an ample bosomed young lady with a nuclear tan in Ugg boots.
“Come in, darl” she beamed, ushering me through the house. Her room, ascetically furnished, was redolent of a recently extinguished cigarette, masked by generous spritzes of Gucci Guilty. She waved an expansive hand at the half dozen or so fragrances sitting on her bookcase.
“I’m addicted to perfumes, babe. I keep buying them but I can’t use them all”. I politely agreed it was a splendid collection. Attempting to engage my young son in friendly banter, and receiving a churlish stare as her reward, she accepted my payment and I made a hasty exit to examine my prize.

Escada Magnetism by Pierre Bourdon and Steve Demercado 2003

Escada Magnetism Escada FragranticaPhoto Stolen Fragrantica

Fragrantica gives these featured accords:
Top: Pineapple, black currant, melon, red berries, cassia and litchi
Heart: Magnolia, iris, green leaves, freesia, basil, jasmine, caraway, heliotrope, lily-of-the-valley, rose and almond blossom
Base: Sandalwood, amber, patchouli, musk, benzoin, caramel, vetiver and vanilla

But if you want an indication of what Magnetism is about, you need look no further than the flacon, the berry candy stalactite with its tongue-grazing chiselled edges, portentous of the juice within.
And indeed, Magnetism is a high-octane, fruit-astic confection with the stones to comfortably take on and take out the best of its ilk in a foxy boxing match. Its opening is familiar enough, a concoction of toffeed berries and that generic citrus note that seems to cut, like industrial grade detergent, through the tallow of many a sugary composition. It is accompanied for the first few minutes by something verdant, making for a crisp, if not bracing salvo.

Escada Magnetism Escada Fruit Display FlickrPhoto Stolen Omar A.  Flickr

After this point many of its poorer cousins will then trail off into some sort of perfume mumble, and evanesce into a vague vanilla-[insert unidimensional accord of choice] concoction, like an olfactory half finished sentence. Magnetism, apparently with more thought given to it, holds its shape for longer with quite distinguishable benzoin, patchouli and amber into the dry down. Later in its long, long life, I can make out something a little seedy, the faint whiff of smoker’s breath, as if the perfume had been imprinted with the memory of its former mistress.

Escada Magnetism Escada smoker DeviantArtPhoto Stolen DeviantArt

Magnetism is aptly named, and evidently aimed at attracting the non-thinking sex symbol. Perhaps the most decisive indication of its common denominator appeal is the grunt of “nice” it got from Chairman Woof – high praise from one whose usual appraisals range from “non-specific” to “I don’ t like it”.

FragranceNet has $43/50ml before coupon
My Perfume Samples starts at $2/ml

One reviewer on Basenotes thought it would “be great as a stripper scent”, and whilst my limited stripping experience precludes comment, I will venture that it is a perfume for the extroverted, saucy even, for those liberal in their use of “darl” and “babe”. I’m saving mine to trot out when I need to get my slapper on.

Chairman Meow. X

Tihota by Francis Kurkdijan for Indult 2006

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Post by Chairman Meow

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Hey APJ,

By the time I tripped over my signature bottle of Narciso Rodriguez and plummeted headlong down the proverbial rabbit hole, Indult was already an extinct house, and Tihota had already joined the ranks of Bigfoot and Chupacabra in acquiring mythical status. It was blogged about in hushed, reverent tones, but blogged about infrequently (presumably because of said status) and I knew very little about it, aside from it being a Gold Standard Vanilla [Perfume Posse Best of Vanilla List].

Indult Tihota by Francis Kurkdijan 2006

Tihota Indult FragranticaPhoto Stolen Fragrantica

Fragrantica gives the following accords in one line:
Vanilla, musks

Indult themselves are no more helpful, their website providing us with the following enigma in Engrish that even Hello Kitty would be huppy with:
“When the skin is « sugar » under the Polynesian sun: it’s an exotic marriage of muscs in fusion and infusion with the sensual vanilla pods”

So when news came of Indult’s resurrection, what choice did I have other than to do the perfumista’s equivalent of pitching a tent and queuing all night for Bieber tickets? I signed up for a split of the first available bottle of Tihota. But before I tell you what Tihota is all about, please indulge me whilst I tell you what it is not:

It is not the sozzled, macerated fruit compote of Guerlain’s Spiritueuse Double Vanille.
It is not the incense smoked, clove studded orange pomander of Mona di Orio’s Vanille.
It is not the Cuban cigar laced with the fresh urine of herbivores, that is Tom Ford’s Tobacco Vanille.
It is not even the “straight up” vanilla touted by many.

Tihota Indult Vanilla Flower WikiMediaPhoto Stolen WikiMedia

Tihota is probably better described as a glamour shot of a vanilla, spray tanned in caramelised sugar and poised in front of a creme anglaise schmeared lens. From here, I wish I could offer you an intimate dissection of its various nuances, to describe, in licentious detail, the story of its top notes unfurling into a heart unfolding into a base, imploding into a crunchy tortilla shell, but it’s a pretty straightforward fragrance. The opening is the crack of the amber carapace of a creme brulee, with the first few seconds dominated a lightly burnt sugar, soon joined by a scrummy, velvety vanilla-flecked custard. And thus it remains, as immutable as an everlasting gobstopper, for hours.

Tihota Indult -Coral- FlickrPhoto Stolen -Coral- Flickr

I will be the first to admit that I had been expecting a scent that was less literal an interpretation of a desert trolley and something more, shall we say, highbrow. But then I found myself wanting to gnaw at my hand in a slightly troubling, auto-cannibalistic fashion. I noticed that strangers, lips curled asunder, would sniff lustfully in my direction at the shops.

And I noticed that my decant was very quickly running out, and that I was day dreaming of a full bottle.

Further reading: Perfume Shrine and Ca Fleure Bon
LuckyScent has $200/50ml
Surender To Chance starts at $6/.5ml

Have you tried Indult? Old or new? Are you interested?
Chairman Meow

Fils de Dieu du riz et des agrumes by Ralf Schwieger for Etat Libre D’Orange 2012

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Post by Chairman Meow

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I like me a good gourmand, and from my many readings about this scent, this was meant to be a good gourmand, so I went about sniffing Fils de Dieu with high hopes. Its billing as the New Skool Shalimar did nothing to lower expectations.

Fils de Dieu du riz et des agrumes

by Ralf Schwieger for Etat Libre D’Orange 2012

Fils de Dieu du riz et des agrumes Etat Libre d`Orange FragranticaPhoto Stolen Fragrantica

Fragrantica lists the following accords:
Top: Ginger, coriander, lime, shiso
Heart: Coconut, cardamom, jasmine, cinnamon, rose
Base: Tonka bean, vetiver, musk, amber, leather, castoreum

And indeed the first nanosecond of its performance, with that recognisable dusty vanillic citrus intro, is familiar. But thenceforth Shalimar and Fils de Dieu (FdD) set out on quite different trajectories. Shalimar, animalic and belching plumes of smoky opoponax, flounces off in one direction, loudly crying “dahling!” to all and sundry. FdD, on the other hand, has eased into a pair of Birkenstocks and has gone backpacking around Thailand, and before I could wheeze “for shaaaaaaame”, I died in ecstasy and face planted into a bowl of steaming coconut rice.

Fils de Dieu du riz et des agrumes Etat Libre d`Orange Cooked Rice WikipediaPhoto Stolen Wikipedia

From first huff to its expiration a lamentably short period later, FdD is an ode to the fluffy cooked grain. Its moniker is quite apt (Son of God, Rice and Citrus). The notes read like an ingredient list for a laksa, yet it remarkably it smells quite restrained, spartan almost, with the muted, powdery qualities of rice being showcased by the other elements. Bemusingly, rice itself not listed above, illustrating yet again what a load of twaddle this notes business is, and how we should all just make of things What We Will. Rather than being overtly tart or astringent, the lime lends a certain buoyancy, with much the same role as lemongrass or kaffir lime leaf in a dish, and with a little imagination I can just detect the soapy zing of coriander leaf/cilantro right at those first few seconds. Tonka is also evident, tinting everything with a little of its caramel hue.

Fils de Dieu du riz et des agrumes Etat Libre d`Orange Laksa Alpha FlickrPhoto Stolen Alpha  Flickr

But all this sounds too gourmand, too literal a take on cooking, which is it most assuredly not. It’s as if Heston Blumenthal has come along with his lab gear, extracted the qi or life force out of south east Asian cuisine and infused the distillate into a perfume for the global citizen. Just to remind you that you are perfumed, and have not just finished a double shift in the kitchen of your local Thai eatery, there is a soupcon of musk and castoreum, endowing the composition with that unctuous, slightly vomitous twang. With time, FdD remains rice-y, but becomes more rosy, and is the sweeter for it.

Further reading: Perfume Shrine and Candy Perfume Boy
Etat Libre d’Orange has €69/50ml with worldwide delivery
LuckyScent has $80/50ml with worldwide delivery
Surrender To Chance starts at $4.75/ml

It is a short ride (on me at least), requiring a top-up spritz or three ere I’d finished writing a paragraph of this review. Ordinarily, I would find this pretty irksome, but in this case I’m content to reapply because it is so terrifically evocative: sweat, gods, ruby-skinned tourists, anarchic markets, decay. It’s witty yet eminently accessible. Consider me a fan.

C M x

Missoni Women by Maurice Roucel and Trudi Loren for Missoni 2006

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Post by Chairman Meow

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Missoni Women by Maurice Roucel and Trudi Loren for Missoni 2006

Missoni for Women FragranticaPhoto Stolen Fragrantica

Fragrantica gives the following accords:
Top: bergamot, mandarin, orange
Heart: magnolia, peony, rose, Japanese apple
Base: pear tree, chocolate, hazelnuts, amber

What is immediately striking about Missoni is its dual temperament, with both fresh marine and toothsome dessert facets. You immediately start to mentally bandy around words such as “dichotomous” and “personality disorder”. The mind gently boggles as you inwardly spin that fragrance wheel and a struggle ensues to neatly taxonomise the thing. What is this? Is it a gourmand? Is it an aquatic? Is it an aquatic gourmand? Is the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything really 42?

The chocolate is cocoa rich, nutty and heavy, and sits uneasily atop a transparent, calone-laden scent (please do forgive me for dropping the C-bomb, I appreciate it’s a dirty word). It’s the oil in an unshaken salad dressing, queasily yawing and pitching but never quite melding (it probably didn’t help that I was in the throes of food poisoning when I was reviewing this). Citrus is present, but it’s done with a light hand. Its combination with chocolate invariably draws comparisons made with Jaffas, or other orange flavoured chocolates. Whilst it does contribute a slightly tart aspect to the scent, what is more striking to me is the somewhat exsanguinated pear accord, actually very reminiscent to me of a nashi pear. In fact, take Missoni, remove the Nutella accord, and I believe it would have made for a wonderful Pleats Please by Issey Miyake, in which the nashi pear is a central player.

DessertPhoto Stolen Charles Haynes  Flickr

Give Missoni just a few short minutes, however, and a sort olfactory alchemy starts to take place. Eat a chocolate dipped strawberry, and the initial sensation is akin to having two different dishes in your mouth, with the waxy chocolate bits jostling with the watery fruit blobs but not really coming together to form a particularly satisfying mouthfeel. Just as you start to wish you had picked off and eaten the chocolate first, the whole thing magically amalgamates into delicious choc-berry goop whose sum is inexplicably greater than its parts. And so it is with the Missoni. The chocolate mantle becomes softer, sweeter and less distinct, and the pear starts to take on a little colour to its cheeks, fleshed out with some flowers. Before long it all emulsifies, and makes much more sense. You can still pick out the warm and cool elements if you really thought about it, but by that time the olfactory lithium has kicked in and it all seems rather besides the point. It just smells… good. Somehow.

Missoni Women Mulan Loco Steve FlickrPhoto Stolen Loco Steve Flickr

In true Missoni style even the sillage is a little deranged, throwing itself off the skin in admirable fashion whilst still managing to smell polite. A non-tantrum-throwing diva, if you will. As it wheezes its death rattles at the end of its 4-5 hour life on my parched skin, its aquatic side is nowhere to be smelled, smouldering instead with the embers of a fruity-amber affair.
Missoni shouldn’t leave your colleagues diving for cover, just don’t be fooled by its demure demeanour and do apply with a lighter hand than expected.

Further reading: Another Perfume Blog and The Non Blonde
Beauty Encounter has a mini from $9.90
The Perfumed Court starts at $3/ml

Until next month,
Chairman Meow

Helmut Lang EDP

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Post by Chairman Meow

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There is often a lot of discordance between the image projected by a fashion house, and the perfumes they produce (Yairs, looking at you, Gucci. Balmain, I wasn’t looking at you until Christophe Decarnin came. And then went.) Not so the case with Helmut Lang, where the aesthetic of the fragrance and the clothes marry beautifully. Too bad for us, then, that a) Helmut Lang is now sculpting for a quid and b) his fragrances are no longer in production.

Helmut Lang EDP

Eau de Parfum Helmut Lang FragranticaPhoto Stolen Fragrantica

Fragrantica gives the following accords:
Top: rosemary, lavender, cotton candy
Heart: jasmine, heliotrope, lily-of-the-valley, rose
Base: sandalwood, patchouli, vanilla, cedar

Rosemary makes a cameo appearance at the outset, but confusingly has a tannic quality, giving the impression of suede or some form of cured animal skin. Whatever it is, it is short lived, and soon evanesces to leave a Turkish delight and musk concoction that hums along in a linear fashion but is utterly delicious to behold. I can pick out rose, lavender and heliotrope, but to my nose, the other floral elements are pretty amorphous. The overall effect is one of buttering yourself up with an almond croissant and taking a good ol’ grind around a musk stick pole. But don’t get me wrong – a scent with thigh high slits held together with novelty sized safety pins this ain’t. We’re doing it Helmut Lang styl-ee, which means we wear matter-of-fact expressions on our faces and our hands in our pockets. We start off low key and sotto voce throughout.

In an excellent interview on Cafleurbon, Maurice Roucel revealed that his brief for the cologne, which I am told is almost identical to the EDP, was to create “the jus to smell of his boyfriend’s secretions on clean sheets”. And he certainly succeeded in creating a scent that re-creates that slightly seedy morning-after smugness, when you’re walking doing that bed-headed, bear-footed walk of shame, and things are Your Little Secret for now. By the way, who on earth is this man-friend of Herr Lang, who would inspire such a scent? I really haven’t the foggiest, although I’d imagine he might look something like this:

Helmut Lang Eau de Parfum eli.mamaPhoto Stolen eli.mama

or

Helmut Lang Eau de Parfum Florin Gorgan FlickrPhoto Stolen Florin Gorgan Flickr

or

SONY DSCPhoto stolen Charles Roffey Flickr

If you’ve never tried the gastronomic wonder that is the musk stick, they are a chewy-chalky fluoro pink candy which I’m guessing is meant to approximate the taste of the idea of perfume. Fortunately for us, now having just licked my bottle of Helmut Lang, they don’t taste like actual perfume. But who would have thought that the secretions from the nether regions of a deer could make most excellent confectionary? In any case, should you ever encounter a pink extruded candy man in a suit, please tell him Meow says hi, and give him a nibble for me.

Is it fair of me to wax lyrical about an obsolete perfume? Probably not. But for those of us who own and love Helmut Lang, let us take a moment to draw closer to our bottles and croon appreciatively into the spot where its ear would be. “I less than three you, little Helmie!”

Helmut Lang Eau de Parfum TelegraphUKPhoto Stolen TelegraphUK

eBay has some Helmut Lang Eau De Parfum that starts at around $150/50ml
I could not find any samples in the sample/decant stores.

If you had to choose the next fashion designer to create a fragrance, who would it be? For me, it would have to be Rick Owens. I want a perfume inspired by his missus and in-house necromancer Michelle Lamy, the anti-Mitzah with her inky fingies and pointy teeth.

Until we next meet,
Chairman Meow

Jungle L’Elephant by Dominique Ropion for Kenzo 1996

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Post by Chairman Meow

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Jungle L’Elephant by Kenzo 1996

Jungle L'Elephant FragranticaPhoto Stolen Fragrantica

Fragrantica gives these featured accords:
Top: Mandarin, Cardamom, Cumin, Clove
Middle: Ylang-Ylang, Licorice, Mango, Heliotrope
Base: Patchouli, Vanilla, Amber, Cashmeran

You’ll notice that plum is not listed as a note, which is intriguing, because to me it is the overarching theme in this scent. And what a shape shifter of a plum it is, taking on various guises, some more pleasant than others.
Pernicious Plum

L’Elephant opens off as a melange of dried fruit peel and spices, of which clove is quite prominent. I often have difficulty with this little nail of a flower bud, and its fondness of hijacking whatever perfume it takes a ride in, though thankfully here it is more dulcet compared with the rugged variety you might encounter in, say, Noir Epices. I can detect cinnamon, the everyman, the spice equivalent of Bruce Willis, who offends no one. It took some convincing that I could smell any cardamom, so for sport’s sake I spent some time snuffling away on some bashed up cardamom seeds that I balanced on the scented part of my arm. It’s there! It works! A random but recommended activity. Sitting in the background of the peel and the spices, like some shady trench-coated nogoodnik, is a sinister almond-y waft redolent of cyanide from the pit of the plum, which I’m taking to be the heliotrope.

Jungle L'Elephant MorgueFilePhoto Stolen MorgueFile

A recurring theme that you’ll encounter in reading reviews about L’Elephant is that it is a “strong” perfume, ambiguous word such as it is. People could be referring to the sillage, which is certainly impressive for the first hour or so before settling to a much more sociable pitch. They may be speaking of the longevity, for indeed it does have the endurance of several oxen. Alternatively, they may be talking about the paint blistering gust of nail varnish remover that sears the nostrils on first spray. I call it The Curse of Sally Hansen, and it persists for quite some time. Sally does eventually pack up her nail file and shuffle off, albeit reluctantly and with furtive backwards glances, and that’s when L’Elephant is at its most enjoyable. Yum Plum

The sinophiles (lovers of Chinese culture) amongst us may be familiar with the salty-sweet dried plums that go by variety of different names. I know them by their Cantonese name of Wah Mui. Imagine something that Shrek might excavate from his nose and you get a pretty good idea of what they look like.

Jungle L'Elephant Dried Plums WantChinaTimesPicture Stolen WantChinaTimes

Wah Mui are coated with a liquorice infused powdered sugar which, as a 7 year old, I found to be the best bit, actually the only edible bit, which would be licked off before abandoning the actual plum. I am transported to this memory in the late dry down of L’Elephant, hours after application, when you can finally approach the thing without a hazmat suit, and can detect the soft purr of the vanilla and amber. Later still, as L’Elephant is in its death throes, I think I can smell something indefinably wood-like, and then it expires.

Jungle L'Elephant Kenzo Elephants MorgueFilePhoto Stolen MorgueFile

Further reading: Another Perfume Blog and Bois de Jasmin
Beauty Encounter have $45/50ml
Surrender To Chance starts at $3/ml

I haven’t found L’Elephant an easy love, but it does have legions of admirers. I suspect that had it been produced by a niche house, was double the price, had a slick ad copy and had listed as one of its notes an “accord of oriental desiccated plum snack”, it would have had the cogniscenti misty- eyed and lisping “JEEY-nius!”, and been awarded a swathe of Fifi’s.

See you next month,
Chairman Meow xxx