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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Rania J. Ambre Loup: Sultry & Seductive

Posted on May 22, 2015 by Kafkaesque

Source: depositphotos.com

Names are suggestive things, whether in literature, art, or perfumery. In my experience, fragrances often fail to live up to the moniker bestowed on them but, sometimes, the good ones lead you elsewhere, evoking other images and worlds. With Ambre Loup, I never thought a golden wolf, but of dark, elemental, and wholly primal forces, encircling and bowing to a central core. Like dancers in an ancient ritual, they go round and round, faster and faster, until they turn into a mesmerizing blur, creating an intoxicating whole. That, in turn, brought to mind a perfumed version of Dances with Wolves, the famous film about Native-American Indians, or the ancient Navajo Fire Dance.

Close your eyes, and imagine the sun setting in a sky golden, hazy, and thick with heat. Blackness looms on the horizon, a drum beat rings out, and dancers begin to circle a giant totem made of tobacco. Ambergris, labdanum, vanilla, spices, aromatic cedar, the stickiest and blackest of resins — one by one they whoop and stomp, round and round, their feet beating up clouds of cinnamon and cloves, as the golden thickness of the dying sun hangs heavier and heavier atop their heads. The blackness crashes like a wave over the land, engulfing the dancers, merging with their aroma to create a blanket of rich, dark tobacco that is sweetened with vanilla, rendered musky with ambergris, and thick with labdanum. Village elders watch the dance from under the shade of giant cedar trees, puffing on tobacco pipes, and sipping rum or scotch. All of it swirls into one, all of it engulfs you, a cloud that is so thick and richly heady, you can feel it coating your skin, stroking you with heavy fingers of opulent darkness, caressing you, seducing you. This is the narcotic world of Ambre Loup from Rania J. Parfumeur.

“Navajo Fire Dance” by Leigh William Robinson, 1866-1955. Source: Pinterest & YouTube.

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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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