With the end of autumn and the advent of winter in the Western hemisphere, it seemed like a fitting time to cover seasonal fragrances from the American niche brand, Dasein. It is an artisanal perfume house founded by Samantha (or “Sam”) Rader in Los Angeles in 2014. According to her biography, she is “a self-taught mixed-media perfumer,” and all her fragrances are unisex, vegan eau de parfums that she hand-blends in small batches. There are four releases thus far, each named after a different season of the year. Today, I’ll take a brief look at Autumn and Winter.
Category Archives: Reviews En Bref
Reviews En Bref: Six from NISHANE Istanbul
NISHANE Istanbul is a fragrance brand that seeks to bottle Turkey’s ancient scent traditions along with Istanbul’s cosmopolitan style in a mix of the modern and the classical. Nishane was founded in 2012, which is probably why the company says it is Turkey’s very first niche brand. At that time, they put out colognes and scented candles, but they recently launched a 16-fragrance collection of extrait de parfums.
The Nishane Extrait Collection. Photo via Nishane’s Facebook page.
I’ve tried six of them: Duftbluten, Spice Bazaar, Patchuli Khoza, Tuberoza, Munegu, and Afrika Olifant. Unfortunately, none of the six worked for me and none of them had sufficient complexity to warrant spending several thousand words analysing each one individually. Perfume reviewing is a subjective thing that is dependent on individual tastes, experiences, and skin chemistry, but it’s not easy to write exhaustive, detailed reviews on things one dislikes all in a row. So I’ve chosen to write what essentially amounts to blurbs by my (admittedly skewed) standards rather than skipping reviewing the fragrances entirely. In each case, I’ll eschew quoting Nishane’s full description for the scent and all the background information. Instead, I’ll simply give the company’s general categorization, the notes, and a link to either Fragrantica, Basenotes, or a positive review where you can read different perspectives as a counterbalance.
Review En Bref: Amouage Opus IX
My Reviews En Bref are for perfumes that — for whatever reason — don’t seem to merit a full, exhaustive discussion. In the case of Opus IX, the newest Library scent from Amouage, the reason is dislike that is slowly replaced by boredom and disinterest.
Source: nezdeluxe.pl
Tauer, Tom Ford, Euphorium Brooklyn, Morph & Elisire
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.