Annick Goutal L’Ile au Thé & Hermès Le Jardin de Monsieur Li

Posted on May 31, 2015 by Kafkaesque

With summer underway, I thought it might be worth looking at two fresher, lighter fragrances that were recently released: Annick Goutal‘s L’Ile au Thé and Hermès‘ Le Jardin de Monsieur Li.

ANNICK GOUTAL L’ILE AU THÉ:

Source: annickgoutal.com

L’Ile au Thé is an eau de toilette created by Isabel Doyen. The fragrance comes in two different bottle designs, one for women and one for men, but they are the same scent. As a side note, Annick Goutal is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amore Pacific since 2011.

The women’s bottle. Source: Annickgoutal.com

The Goutal website describes L’Ile au Thé and its notes as follows:

L’Ile au Thé is an infusion of well-being, an invigorating and soothing perfume to be shared.

Between the sea and volcanoes, a stroll in the fields of mandarin trees and tea plantations, waving in the wind of an Asian island. The crystalline mandarin bursts into freshness, contrasting, in a soft and soothing breeze, with the tea, green and leathery, and the osmanthus, carnal and fruity, like a caress on the skin…

[Notes:] mandarin; tea absolute; osmanthus; and white musk.

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Tauer, Tom Ford, Euphorium Brooklyn, Morph & Elisire

Posted on May 12, 2015 by Kafkaesque

I’ve tried a number of fragrances that didn’t work for me over the last eight months, but not all of them were actually bad scents. Although I scrubbed all of them off, a few were things that I actually think some of you might like quite a bit. The problem in each case (for me) was that the fragrance had one or more elements which pushed one of my hot button issues, and did so in a way that not only felt imbalanced but, quite frequently, also made the scents physically difficult to test.

Perfume reviewing is a wholly subjective thing that is dependent on individual tastes, experiences, and skin chemistry, but it’s not easy to write about scrubbers in exhaustive detail, one after another. (And I’ve gone through a lot of scrubbers in the last 8 months that I haven’t talked about.) For many of the fragrances mentioned in this post, I lacked the heart and will to write thousands of words for one of my usual reviews, and didn’t want to cover them even in one of my short(er) Reviews en Bref because I wasn’t keen to relive the experience. Yet, as I said, some of you might like a few of the fragrances quite a bit — like the new Cilice from Euphorium Brooklyn which should appeal to lovers of dark, smoky, woody, and campfire fragrances. Two of the scents are things that I would sincerely recommend to people with a very particular taste set to try for themselves.

Cilice from Euphorium Brooklyn. Source: Twisted Lily.

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D.S. & Durga Debaser

Posted on May 7, 2015 by Kafkaesque

The River Cam. Photo: Nahid Sultana at journeyaroundtheglobe.com. (Direct website link embedded within.)

Put aside thoughts of punk rock and the Pixies‘ front man, Black Francis, wailing (or shrieking) “Debaser,” the group’s gritty 1989 song, and imagine instead an idyllic boat ride on the River Cam in Cambridge, England. Fig trees line the mossy riverbanks, hanging like weeping willows until their tips touch the water, lying heavy and burdened with their black fruits whose leathery, tannic smell wafts over the green waters. The river is filled with bamboo water, coconut milk, and the sap of green leaves and crushed pear stems. The last two combine to smell almost like the watercress sandwiches nibbled on daintily by punters whose boats glide gently over the serene waters on a quiet, sun-dappled, lazy Sunday afternoon. This picturesque scene is the real world of Debaser.

D.S. & Durga (hereinafter spelled without the periods as just “DS & Durga”) is a small perfume house founded in 2007 in Brooklyn, New York by David Seth Moltz (“D.S.”), a musician, and Kavi Ahuga (“Durga”), an architect. Their company website explains their artisanal approach and American inspirations:

D.S. & Durga make perfume and cologne in small batches using premium-sourced raw materials. All scents are created exclusively in-house. Some of their inspiration comes from outdated herbal wisdom, native ritual medicine, lore and legends, historical movements and Americana. The scents are the stories of prospectors, gentry, trailblazers, frontier women, drawing rooms, workbenches, cowboys – fragments of half remembered legends, movements, events, and foreign lands. […][¶]

David Seth Moltz & Kavi (“Durga”) Ahuja. Source: Vanityfair.com

[They started by] tincturing flowers, herbs, and spices to make aftershaves for friends. When they realized that none of their friends shaved (this was 2007, mind you), they started blending oils, resins, and plant extracts. The results were small batch perfumes and colognes, and friends loved them. Durga had an idea: she could distill her designs into the architecture of fragrances (and the packages they live in) and D.S. could write songs in scent.

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Review En Bref: Jardins d’Ecrivains Marlowe

Posted on April 15, 2015 by Kafkaesque

Portrait of Christopher Marlowe, anonymous painter, 1585. Source: Wikipedia

Poor Christopher Marlowe. He deserves so much better than Marlowe, the ostensible tribute created in his honour by Jardins d’Ecrivains. It is a new fragrance that is meant to encapsulate the complexity, sensuality, and theatrical richness of the Elizabethan era’s literary darling, a brilliant man who was a leading playwright and poet of the times, a handsome man who was a rake, lover, brawler, student of the occult and, allegedly, also a spy for Queen Elizabeth I. Some fringe scholars even think Marlowe is the one who wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare. That is highly unlikely, but there is no doubt that the flamboyant, brilliant Marlowe is a great choice of inspiration for a fragrance. Alas, not only does Jardins d’Ecrivains’ Marlowe fail to represent him in my eyes, I don’t think it would embody any historical legend of any era in any field, other than perhaps the men who founded Procter & Gamble.

Source: Parfumo.net

Jardins d’Ecrivains is a French perfume house founded by Anaïs Biguine. She creates all their fragrances, taking her inspiration from the twin threads of great literature and the beauty of gardens, like George from George Sand, or Orlando from Virginia Woolf. Marlowe is Ms. Biguine’s latest release and is an eau de parfum which Jardins d’Ecrivains describes as follows:

Christopher Marlowe was the bad boy of Elizabethan theatre. Handsome and good natured, Marlowe was also a spy and a student of the occult.

This scent is dense, heady, feral, and theatrical. The top notes feature the poisonous nectar of the tuberose blended with opulent osmanthus. The middle notes of dried flowers evoke tragic poetry. Hints of powdered leather with chypre make up the base notes.

Top notes : Tuberose – Osmanthus – Elemi
Middle notes : Myrrh – Dried flowers
Base notes : Cashmeran – Cedar – Javanese vetiver -Oakmoss – Labdanum – Tonkin musk – Leather.

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