This week we will have 1 winner who will receive: 1 x Mystery Fragrance from Robert’s collection
P&H Anywhere in the world
HOUSEKEEPING
Entries Closed Thursday 5th January 2017 10pm Australian EdsT
Winners will be chosen by random.org
Gina
The winner will have till Sunday 15th January 2017 to get in touch (portia underscore turbo at yahoo dot com dot au) with their address or the prize will go to someone else.
No responsibility taken for lost or damaged goods in transit
Sometimes I look at my collection and the size is completely overwhelming, making it really hard to choose what fragrance to wear that day. Does this ever happen to you? Happens around here with monotonous regularity.
How Do You Decide What Perfume To Wear?
So, there are a few ways I use to combat the “Too Many Blues” like grabbing a random sample and spritzing away, using an old favourite like Guerlain Shalimar, Parfums DelRay Amoureuse or Cacharel Liberté. Other times I do what I did today, walked over to me desk and grabbed the fist thing my eyes rest on. It was
Le Jardin de Monsieur Li by Jean-Claude Ellena for Hermès 2015
Fragrantica gives these featured accords in one line:
Kumquat, jasmine, mint
It’s high summer here and raining so a perfect fit. All that gorgeous oily citrus offset with refreshing mint. Wears so easily in the hot or cold and though I’m hardly a One Bottle Guy, Monsieur Li could very easily fit the bill if I had to become one. I wore it to dinner the other night with a bunch of mates and got two random compliments. Very happy with that. especially because I feel it is such an under the radar scent.
Below is the last of us on that night, there were 10 more but this pic are the ones who stayed and drank Turkish Coffee. OMG! That was definitely a new experience. From left: Me, Jin, Jocelyn Fullerton of Cult Of Scent, TinaG, Craig, Scott, Paul.
From Hermès: “I remembered the smell of ponds, the smell of jasmine, the smell of wet stones, of plum trees, kumquats and giant bamboo. It was all there, and in the ponds there were even carp steadily working towards their hundredth birthday.” Jean-Claude Ellena
Le Jardin de Monsieur Li describes a Chinese garden somewhere between reality and imagination. A place for meditation where strolling is allied to thought, and every step sets the imagination free.
Back in 2015 when Monsieur Li was released I talked about it on Australian Perfume Junkies. You can get it at most department stores and even on the online discounters.
So what do you do when confronted by this conundrum?
How Do You Decide What Perfume To Wear?
Portia xx
I love the CHANEL videos. Though I am ambivalent about Coco the person I do love the video creations of propaganda that the company makes. They are slick and watchable, even if they are not always 100% fact accurate.
My mate Jocelyn is the perfumer at Cult of Scent. She is a fast talking, fun and passionate perfumer whose work is definitely Indie and really, really good. She was lauded by no less than Luca Turin in 2015 and we have written about others in the range here on APJ before. Here are links to those: Fire Amber Baby, Sweet Libertine, Something Beautiful and Hedonist.
So it was with real sadness that I read of the discontinuation of one of her best sellers Karavanserai……
From Jocelyn (edited): Just a heads-up folks. I am discontinuing Karavanserai. There is about 200mL left, then that’s it. I love it, but the Angelica root & Cedrat oils are hard to get good reliable stocks of, so it’s time to let it go. If you’ve been wanting to buy this dry herbaceous citrus cologne, now is your chance.
To sweeten the deal, I am extending the DISCOUNT CODE APJ10 till the end of this month.
Cult Of Scent gives these featured accords:
Cedrat, Vetiver, Angelica, Bulgarian rose otto, Frankincense, Cedarwood
So, how does Karavanserai smell? Imagine a cologne fragrance based around rose. I know, it’s simple but revolutionary. Well, it’s not merely rose. It’s mainly citrus with a lovely slightly salted dry grass that last and lasts. The rose seems to be more about the rosewood and sharp green rose flower than the usual fruity or honeyed variations of the theme.
Karavanserai is not a bit what I’d expect from something of that name. In my mind I expect a spicy frankincense blend full of hot wind and dry, straggly shrubbery. Maybe some camel or goat and the smell of horses and their tack. Interestingly the Persian word means the inn or stop where travellers could rest and recover from the day’s journey, not the caravan itself.
Lasting power is excellent with the first hour having big sillage that softens off considerably for the rest of the ride. By 5 hours I can still smell the remnants and they still have a woody citrus wash about them. Very, very nice.
We seem to have a bunch of people who are followers of the blog not getting their post updates via eMail. This has happened a few times through APJs lifespan and I have no idea why we are getting drop outs, or why peoples settings may have changed without their knowledge.
Please check that you haven’t been OPTED OUT of WordPress eMails. I just had to go readjust my own settings so I could get APJ back into my Inbox. After I got my settings back to eMails coming in then I had to resubscribe to APJ.
Sorry for any lack of eMails. Sorry for the bother.
Portia xx
So many oudhs on sale. I love Annick Goutal and wanted to see how the house would treat oudh. Luckily Surrender To Chance has samples because we can’t get these to look at in Australia. Here’s my experience.
Ouds? Well kind of. It’s clearly a synthetic rendering of the oudh experience. There is plenty of the band aid, rubber tyres and eucalyptus hiding inside but not so much of the barnyard. If you are an oudh aficionado then you may think 1001 Ouds is a poor cashgrab by Annick Goutal to add the middle Eastern market and jump on the oud bandwagon. Maybe that’s true BUT if you don’t really like oudh in its heavier incarnations this could very easily be a good gateway oudh. While showing some of the less confronting facets of the accord it is far less challenging. Here we have a warm, comforting fragrance that nods to the Middle East from a very comfy recliner with a large drink.
PDI
The opening does have a sweet dry grass accord nestling softly into the oudh and I like that the opening lasts long minutes before we see any sign of the rose making it’s appearance. When it does come rose is not treated in the modern Montale rose/oudh style. Here it is completely backup, a pretty filigree to add luster and I find it very difficult to even notice the pimento, which is a shame because I was interested.
The birch is clean in the beginning and doesn’t feel like it’s painting tar onto the back of your throat and sinuses until well into dry-down. It is happily offset by the myrrh but also smells to me like there might be some vanilla holding the bottom half of the fragrance together.
I think 1001 Ouds is definitely an oudh for people who don’t like oudh. Wearable even to work if you are lucky enough to be able to go fragranced. I think it’s also a very nice date frag and will try it out at the movies tonight with Jin…….
On the 30th December 2016 a small crew of fragrance/fragrant enthusiasts got together to troll the Sydney City department store David Jones. Then we headed down the road to extremely Ra Cha Cha hotel and watering hole QT Sydney at 49 Market St for nibbles and beverages. It was a fun, frolicsome crew with loads of smiles and laughs, spritzing, bitching and fabulous repartee. I thoroughly enjoyed every moment and got to spend some quality time with people I’d only ever spent skim time with.
Last Sydney Sniffy Get Together 2016
Normally we would fit in more than one fragrant store but on this particular day David Jones had enough to keep our noses and credit cards working hard for about 2 hours before we all catwalk down to drinks.
Here is a small snapshot of our afternoon.
Here are TinaG, Jocelyn Fullerton of Cult Of Scent and Angela.
With the handsome Simon
Kerri & Gina
Angela, Gina & Chairman Meow
Angela, Gina, TinaG, Chairman Meow, Kerri
At QT Sydney
Maybe you should get together with some like minded frag heads in 2017. It’s amazing how much fun we all have together.
Portia xx
Thank You for another year of amazing fragrance chatter and beyond. Last year I wrote that the world was in trouble. SHIT! Seems the world took that as a challenge. Brexit, Putin, Trump, the Middle East, Europe, Africa, almost everywhere there is backlash against saving our planet, it’s flora and fauna and people. Big business has us all hoodwinked and most governments are in the pockets of Pharmaceuticals (drugs), War (guns) and Oil. The big picture is bleak.
HAPPY NEW YEAR 2017
Around me though I see regular bright sparks of creative giving and helping that gives me hope for the small picture. Jin cut his beautiful hair for leukaemia fundraising this year and raised thousands. He did it on my Mum’s The gang at Hair by Phd Parramatta Store cut it for free so we could send it off to become a wig for children with leukaemia. Jin is a dead set hero in my eyes.
My friends Rita and Cathy (and a GF of theirs whose name I can’t bloody remember) are fundraising and cooking with the One Meal crew here in Sydney to provide one decent meal a week to families who are right on the edge of the poverty line and street people. We did a Turbo Trivia Fundraiser for them and raised nearly $22,000. In a year filled with fundraising this was a major highlight.
Another mate Matt Moore and his buddies Matt White and Ben Dunley have started the idea of using the Aussie men’s mates’ mantra ‘Grab a pie, Grab a mate, Have a chat’ helping men to talk about their feelings. From Matt’s own depression problems sprung this idea of doing something so regular, so common amongst Aussie mates and making it a moment to discuss life issues. In 2015, preliminary data showed a total of 3,027 deaths by suicide (12.7 per 100,000), 2,292 males (19.4 per 100,000) and 735 females (6.2 per 100,000). Aussie guys are 3x more likely suicide and at a rate of over 6 per day, from a population of just over 23 million. That’s bad, anything that can help is good. Go visit Guys & Pies and donate.
What do I do? Well, I give myself at a heavily discounted rate for fundraisers, help a few people who I know are struggling sometimes with food, time or cash, give regularly to charities that I feel the money is being spent on helping not admin and we rescue dogs. While none of these things are earth shattering they are game changing for the people that are helped. That’s all I can do.
So Happy New Year Australian Perfume Junkies. To everyone that’s contributed, commented, lurked and followed I wish you a peaceful & prosperous 2017. Fill it with fun & laughter, fragrance and stuff you enjoy. Make time to care for yourself, push yourself to be the best you can be and treat everyone you come in contact with as you’d hope to be treated.
There is usually a buzz around any Sarah Jessica Parker release. Her story told by Chandler Burr in his Frag-Umentary caused me to fall even more in love with the actress and now 4 of her fragrances are in my collection. Now if you’ve read the story you’ll know that SJP had a 3 fragrance layering daily routine that she really wanted to emulate in her first fragrance but Coty wouldn’t let her so they made Lovely.
To be perfectly honest I was not expecting much from this new release because over the last few scents I have noticed a definite diminution in the SJP brands artistic merit and presentation. This though is her first departure from the Coty brand and moving across to Ulta in the USA (info from Colgnoisseur). So it was with mildly nervous steps, even though it had been getting raves all round, I made my way to Chemist Warehouse in Parramatta to check it out.
Parfumo gives these featured accords:
Top: Grapefruit zest, Black pepper, Sage
Heart: Atlas cedar, Patchouli, Ginger lily, Pistachio
Base: Frankincense, Massoia wood, Vetiver, Musk
Straight into black pepper that has it’s dryness cut through with some sweetness that I place as mildly citrus and does not feel as outrageous as grapefruit, maybe the green sage and spicy ginger are giving it a broader appeal. Woods, yes plenty. Pistachio? Um nope, not yet. I have respritzed after 5 minutes and interestingly the sage is the most prominent top not before the pepper comes through and then we go smooth. The whole fragrance smooths out beautifully. Still very noticeable but calmer and a sweet, non hippy patchouli tangos with the ginger and the herbs.
Then I become anosmic to Stash, it disappears for me. I know I’m still fragrant because Jin says I still have a heavy perfume but I can smell almost nothing. A ghost of Stash, a faint woody nothing that lingers softly. BUM. OK, so that’s not 100% accurate, if I go do something like make a coffee or take the dogs for a walk I do get flashes of fragrance. Little huffs of something very nice, dry, a little bit like a dry sauna but not.
Stash smells like the woodsy, scratchy, peppered “niche” that annoys Val but softer and more lighthearted. It’s easier, quite masculine but will be gorgeous on the girls who are unafraid of scentorially standing out.
Interestingly, when I put my top back on to walk the dogs first thing in the morning all I can smell is an oily vetiver and incense. Really good.
Few niche houses have the success or longevity of Annick Goutal. Writing about Nuit Etoilee and wearing it over the Christmas season reminded me to grab out the rest of my Annick Goutal collection. I’ve whittled it down to the favourite few, maybe 6 FBs and some large decants. Here’s one of my oft worn faves.
Even though the citrus in Eau de Sud is a little sticky it still feels cooling in the heat of Sydney summer. I love it too as a summer reminder in the dead of winter so even if you Northern Hemisphere peeps feel like a spritz it will be perfect. So much citrus in the opening and there is a soft minty pop to keep it refreshing. Add to that a salty zing like eating oranges after swimming in salt water or a Margarita. My nose smells creaminess and I am unsure of the origin, maybe the jasmine adds a creamy note? Anyway, I get a balmy smoothness that equates to creamy in my brain, it’s really galbanum-esque. If I give myself a second spritz after about 20 minutes the basil is quite noticeable compared to the original application.
Eau de Sud reminds me of this hard lollies that used to come in a tin with loads of super fine white sugar powder around them, do you remember? They were deliciously sweet with recreations of fruits but had only the merest tenuous connection to fruit, more of a fruit allusion. Here the fruits are more nameable but still that sweetness and mild sharpness is completely here. We used to suck them on planes to stop our ears popping and Mum would use them to give us a sugar hit if we looked like we were flagging and needed to be alert. Especially useful before exams or after a footy game.
The body and dry down of Eau de Sud are still salty/creamy all the way through but the whole fragrance dries out considerably and leaves a dustiness over the citrus and adds a walking over summers-browned-grass brittleness. So easy to wear and longevity of around 4 hours maximum, the first hour sillage is moderate before dropping back to soft.
My bottle is old, apparently Annick Goutal have remade Eau de Sud in 2016 and its note list is bergamot, mandarin orange, grapefruit and resins.
