Veleno Doré, part of LM Parfums‘ high-end Gold Label Collection, is lovely but also exceedingly familiar. It’s an oriental parfum which is initially centered around vanilla-infused, fruity pipe tobacco, laced with patchouli, enveloped in spices, then drenched in cognac booziness, syrupy sweetness, and caramel ambers. A tiny, early echo of Ambre Loup quickly gives way to major overlaps with Tom Ford‘s Tobacco Vanilla and Roja Dove‘s Enigma Pour Homme/Creation-E and a whisper of Kilian‘s Back to Black, except this is their heavily spiced, chili-flecked brother, and black cherry has been substituted for plums or plum pudding. Over time, woodier, drier, smokier, more leathery, and more woody-ambered elements replace the gourmand-skewing ones for a different twist on tobacco but this, too, feels familiar with echoes of other popular fragrances, like Black Oud and even Black Afgano.
Category Archives: Main Perfume Houses
Neela Vermeire Créations Niral
Niral, the new release from Neela Vermeire Créations (hereinafter “Neela Vermeire” or “NVC”), is a play on East and West, India and Europe, and the silken creations which ensued when they met as one with the creation of Tussar Silk. For me, however, Niral is about a very specific, concrete, olfactory interaction: a play on cedar, a play in multiple acts where a variety of other elements — rooty irises, sugared loukhoum/Turkish Delight roses slathered with jam, lipstick violets, sandalwood, spices, creamy magnolia, soft ambrette musk, and even wisps of jasmine green tea — all serve as supporting players in a constantly revolving game of musical chairs.
2017 In Review: Best New Releases & Personal Favourites
Welcome to the year in review, a look back at both the best new releases of 2017 and the noteworthy releases from prior years which I tried this year and enjoyed. Before I start, though, let me say first that I’m operating at a bit of a handicap because I took a long sabbatical for the first half of 2017. I spent the next six months after my return trying to catch up on, test, or review all the new fragrances that I had missed during my break as well as the ones released subsequently, but I’m sure I’ve missed a few great ones along the way. It’s not easy to put a dent in the tsunami of 2,300+ fragrances which are released each year even when one is reviewing nonstop, never mind when one takes a break from modern perfumery. Even so, I found a number of fragrances that either I loved immensely, that I thought were good representations of their genre, or that I thought were original and executed extremely well.
Tom Ford Fucking Fabulous: The Name, The Story, The Scent
There is an 800-pound scented gorilla in the room, and its name begins with an expletive. Fucking Fabulous is the latest release from Tom Ford, a limited-edition eau de parfum in the Private Collection that has people in a tizzy, half of them thinking it’s the coolest thing ever as they rush to buy the scent, half of them decrying the name as being too vulgar for their tastes. I’m not a prude and I don’t care enormously about the name, per se, but I am immensely annoyed by the blatant manipulation underlying it. I’m not keen on the insulting implication from Tom Ford himself (as well as from some fans) that you’ll only find the name to be offensive if you’re a prude, but what really sets me off is the sheer brazenness of their marketing manipulation and the underlying assumption that either you’re too stupid to see it or so “cool” that you don’t care. Amidst the dollar signs in Estee Lauder and Tom Ford’s eyes, layered between their own quoted words, there are loaded assumptions, cynical calculations, dismissals, glibness, generational differences and, worst of all, obnoxiously blatant disingenuousness.