Eris Parfums: Ma Bete, Belle de Jour & Night Flower

Posted on June 28, 2016 by Kafkaesque

Eris Parfums’ Barbara Herman (right), and perfumer, Antoine Lie (left). Source: Fragrantica. com

Eris Parfums is a new brand, founded by Barbara Herman, a vintage perfume expert who wrote the book, Scent and Subversion: Decoding a Century of Provocative Perfume (2013) after many years of being a blogger on her site, Yesterday’s Perfume. (Book links provided at the end in the Details section.) When she decided to launch her own line, she turned to perfumer Antoine Lie whom she’d first met as an interview source for her book. As she explains in her biography section on Eris Parfums, she wanted to “create a collection of fragrances as daring and erotic as fragrances of the past.”

Eris Parfums trio. Source: erisparfums.com

The results were three eau de parfums launched earlier this year: Ma Bete, Belle de Jour, and Night Flower. I’ll look at each one in turn. As part of my new resolution of providing a more succinct analysis whenever the perfumes permit it, I’ll give a more generalized breakdown of a perfume’s development instead of my usual detail, and also skip discussing comparative reviews.

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The Average, The Banal, The Bad & The Ugly: Vol. 1

Posted on June 12, 2016 by Kafkaesque

MFK Baccarat Rouge via neimanmarcus.com

I’m introducing a new feature or section to the site focusing, as the title suggests, on The Average, The Banal, The Bad & The Ugly. The name is a play on Sergio Leone’s famous film, “The Good, The Bad & The Ugly,” but none of the fragrances covered here rise to the level of truly “good.” Not by my standards, or in my opinion. A handful of the fragrances may, at best, be deemed “Average” or decent, but they’re a small handful and, in some cases, the classification may be relative to the abysmal character of others in the line, to the price, or something else.

Whether it’s Roja Dove, LM Parfums, MFK, or a smaller brand, they’re all capable of putting out something that is simply not worth extensive discussion, so I’m going to do things very differently in this section as compared to my regular reviews. There won’t be note lists, official descriptions, links to Fragrantica, discussion of other people’s experiences as a comparison, photos of every bottle, a long list of retail links, or anything else. I’m going to take a page out of what Luca Turin and so many other people do, and simply give my opinion in the most general, synthesized fashion possible. In some cases, it may only be a single sentence. In others, I’ll lump five or six fragrances into one passing observation about their overall character. In both cases, it will probably be because they were scrubbers or bored me into a state of total apathy.

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Masque Milano L’Attesa

Posted on June 8, 2016 by Kafkaesque

Masque Milano‘s L’Attesa is the sort of fragrance that I could very much see Coco Chanel creating if she were alive today — and I mean that as a positive thing. Like Masque’s other release this year, Romanza, L’Attesa sometimes evokes flowering country meadows in Spring, but there is a sophisticated, urban elegance to L’Attesa that made me think of the couture and the streets of Paris even more frequently. In the most reductionist, simplistic description, one could sum it up as a “green floral,” but I think L’Attesa is a fragrance with deceptive simplicity; its surprisingly fluid profile slips from one genre to another in a very seamless fashion. While the end result is outside my personal tastes, I admire the sophistication, and I think it demonstrates Masque’s continued evolution as it moves from its earlier focus on heavy, dark orientals towards polished florals with romantic, almost nature driven, and streamlined elegance.

Photo: Annie Leibovitz for Vogue, June 2008. Source: Pinterest.

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Masque Milano Price and Size Changes

Posted on April 10, 2016 by Kafkaesque

Masque Milano will be changing its pricing structure in the months to come, in addition to offering its fragrances in a new bottle size.

Masque Milano’s upcoming L’Attesa. Source: Masque Milano’s FB page.

This morning, Alessandro Brun, one of Masque’s co-owners/co-founders shared that information on the blog’s Facebook page following yesterday’s review on the company’s upcoming release, Romanza. His comments were in response to a discussion in regarding the new Romanza bottle, its size, its price, and the difference as compared to Masque’s existing fragrances.

Romanza costs €138 for 35 ml of eau de parfum. (I don’t know its American price yet.) It will be released on or around April 26th, which is when I think Masque will be launching L’Attesa, a new iris eau de parfum, as well. It, too, will be in the new 35 ml bottle for €138.

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