Dior Vintage Miss Dior (EDT & EDC)

Vintage Miss Dior by Christian Dior is a fragrance loved by men and women alike. I finally understood why when I went back in time to try a 1950s/60s eau de toilette version. It was extremely different than the Miss Dior eau de toilettes that I’d tried in passing during the 1980s and 1990s. What an absolute stunner! It was a highly sophisticated, unisex, floral, smoky cuir de russie leather on me as much as a floral chypre

Oddly, however, when doing a comparative review with the same era cologne concentration, I had a dramatically different experience.

Vintage Miss Dior EDC, left, and Vintage Miss Dior EDT, right. Both from the same era.

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Cartier Vintage Le Baiser du Dragon

Let’s look at a unisex family favourite, Cartier‘s Le Baiser du Dragon, a chypre-ambery scent created by master perfumer Alberto Morillas and filled with amaretto and fresh almonds, lushly creamy gardenia, lovely vetiver, rose, ambery resins, and so much more.

Cartier Le Baiser du Dragon, 1st edition EDP. Photo: my own

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Areej Le Doré Agar de Noir (+ Santal Galore)

Hello everyone. I hope you have been well and, above all else, safe and healthy in this utterly wretched year. No, I am not back, but I have been inspired and impelled by the latest Areej Le Doré collection, Series 6, to do pretty lengthy reviews on Twitter. And since I typed everything out via screenshot for Twitter, I figured I might as well copy and paste it some of it here for those of you who aren’t Twitter fans. This may be the only review that I’ll end transforming into a blog post, or it may not. I did a pretty lengthy review for the new Santal Galore as well, but since I stupidly deleted the source document, I’m going to be lazy and just link to the Twitter thread at the end instead of re-typing everything from scratch.

None of this will be like what I’ve written and done in the past in terms of photos or all the rest. I pecked the reviews out on my phone, which comes with a whole series of likely auto-correct and typo issues, but I figured it’s better than nothing. For now. At least it tells you something about the fragrances if you don’t read me on Twitter. (And I strongly advise you not to follow me on Twitter if you’re not interested in politics.) Continue reading

St. Clair Scents Casablanca: Sultry Darkness & Vintage Beauty

Casablanca vintage movie poster via Pinterest.

For people of a certain generation, “Casablanca” is a name which instantly evokes passion, longing, and romance. The famous Oscar-winning film starring Humphrey Bogart as “Rick” and the beautiful Ingrid Bergman as “Ilsa” was, on the surface, a war-time drama involving spies and Nazi resistance figures in Casablanca, Morocco, but it was ultimately a heartbreaking romance involving star-crossed lovers. “We’ll always have Paris,” Rick’s quiet words as he said goodbye to the woman he loved, a farewell full of sacrifice, tenderness, and yearning as she boarded a plan to leave, have become one of the most famous lines in movie history.

Photo, left: Casablanca movie still. Photo, right: Oer-Wout Photography. Collage: my own.

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