Slumberhouse Kiste: Southern Melodies

Posted on March 20, 2015 by Kafkaesque

Gone with the Wind and Light in August, Kiste takes you straight into the heart of the American deep South. It’s the latest fragrance from Josh Lobb of Slumberhouse, released today without fanfare or advance press, and it is utterly beautiful. In fact, it is my favorite creation from Slumberhouse to date, and the first one that I would buy for myself.

Gone with the Wind image. Source: wildbell.com

Kiste is a deeply evocative fragrance, but I can’t make up my mind if it evokes Gone with the Wind or one of William Faulkner’s set pieces. The meticulously balanced composition has the genteel qualities of Tara, conjuring images of Scarlett O’Hara sipping sweet tea and eating a peach cobbler on the plantation veranda, as Rhett Butler smokes a honey-laden cheroot and takes a swig of bourbon under a honeysuckle tree.

1935 photo by Walker Evans, Library of Congress FSA/OWI Collection, via southernstudies.org

Yet, Kiste also has an underlying ruggedness, a pronounced muskiness, and a tiny streak of masculine rawness as well, even though the fragrance is far too perfectly balanced for it to ever verge on brutish strength. Something about the mix creates a sense of underlying earthy darkness, subtle though it may be. But it’s enough to create a parallel image that is far removed from the sun-dappled sweetness of Gone with the Wind.

This other side of Kiste evokes the darker, grittier world of William Faulkner’s South (or Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana) where things are less pristine, less simple, less a land of sweet tea and peach pie. Here, the muskiness and earthiness that were such a big part of Light in August abound. The more animalistic strains of honey, the sensuous muskiness of a fleshy peach, the rawness of tobacco spittoon juice, and spiced, dark earth all strain at the leash, threatening to spill over and darken Tara’s summer light like an eclipse. In the end, they don’t. What triumphs is a creamy sweetness and golden warmth that tame the musky darkness, as though the South’s gentler side had overcome. The result is so comforting, so delicious, I feel like saying, “Bless my stars,” and “Frankly, my dear, I do give a damn.”

Continue reading →

Téo Cabanel Lace Garden: Spring Rhapsody

Posted on March 19, 2015 by Kafkaesque

Gardini Giusti, Verona. Source: wild-about-travel.com

Close your eyes and imagine palatial, perfectly manicured, green gardens, perhaps in Verona’s Giusti Gardens or Rome’s Villa d’Este. An endless vista of green is covered by a powerful but translucent web of embroidered lace made from fresh white petals. Magnolia flowers drip a milky juice that smells like figs. Orange blossom buds have just started to unfurl and waft a delicate scent that is as green as the tuberose and jasmine that encircle the garden like tall statues. Ylang-ylang hovers in the shadows, while creamy white trees stand as sentries in the distance, shedding benzoin and a wisp of delicate, warm powder like their equivalent of pollen. The wind blows little puffs of vanilla over the gardens, but this is not a tale of sweetness. It is a rhapsody of spring, celebrating the marriage of the freshest white flowers with greenness, as a choir of soft woods surrounds them to sing their praises. It is the tale of Lace Garden from Téo Cabanel.

Source: Téo Cabanel.

I should disclose at the start that I have a huge soft spot for Téo Cabanel Parfums. Their scents are always solid and high quality for a really reasonable price. I admire that they work hard at putting out the best scents they can, one a year, instead of a deluge every few months. They aren’t driven by greed or commercialism, don’t put out flashy campaigns, or don’t try to be provocative for the sake of appearing “edgy.” Instead, they seem to care only about the actual scent and its quality. Plus, they’re so hugely under-appreciated that they seem like an underdog in the perfume world, which always brings out my protective side. All of this is separate from the fact that this small, relatively unknown perfume house makes one of my favorite modern fragrances (Alahine). When you add in the house’s fascinating history — complete with the notorious style icon, the Duchess of Windsor, as its most ardent fan — and the fact that I’m a history fanatic, then Teo Cabanel becomes a brand that I always root for.

Continue reading →

Puredistance White

Posted on March 17, 2015 by Kafkaesque

A “dream of white and gold” is the tagline for White, the latest release from the luxury brand, Puredistance. The company makes one of my favorite fragrances, the glorious M, so I always look forward to their releases. I also appreciate that they don’t release an avalanche of fragrances each year, settling instead on one scent that they work hard to perfect, and I greatly admire the luxuriousness elegance of their packaging. There is just something about Puredistance that I really like, even when one of their fragrances leaves me cold, like their Black.

Source: Puredistance website.

Thankfully, White (or “WHITE” in all-caps as it is officially spelt) isn’t the disappointment of that last scent, though it is no M, or even Opardu with its head-turning opening phase. White is elegantly done, has a gorgeous drydown, clearly uses some very expensive ingredients, and certainly creates the visions of white and gold (or yellow) that were intended. That said, it is also a simple fragrance that is very safe in my opinion and, for much of its opening stage, also excessively commercial in profile as well. Its beauty lies in its drydown, due primarily to the superb quality of the expensive ingredients (real Mysore sandalwood!) that dominate at that point, but the rest of the scent didn’t feel distinctive or special to me. It’s a testament to just how warm, friendly, and nice the people behind Puredistance are that I feel like an utter cad saying that, but I can’t help it.

White was created by Antoine Lie who spent over a year on the scent. At one point, when the outcome didn’t match the vision that Puredistance’s founder, Jan Ewoud Vos had for the scent, everything was scratched and Mr. Lie started all over again. Mr. Vos wanted something pure, sunny, bright and evocative of happiness, and he wouldn’t settle for anything less. The final version is meant to “enhance your mood through intense, but comforting beauty” with “shades of serene white and warm gold” created through “the best and most expensive ingredients in the world.” White will debut at the Milan Esxence show at the end of March, but will be officially released around April 20th. Like its siblings, it is an extrait de parfum, but White exceeds the levels of prior scents by clocking in at a whopping 38% fragrance oil.

Continue reading →

Grab Bag Round-Up – March 2015

Posted on March 14, 2015 by Kafkaesque

One of my favorite things that my friend, The Non-Blonde, does on her website is a monthly series called “Currently” in which she does a brief round-up of various personal things in the area of books, music, television shows, cooking, or random thoughts. I look forward to each month’s entry, particularly to see what she’s reading or listening to (’80s music forever!) or because I’ll know that I’ll smile at one of her random thoughts. (“Why are there gummy bears in the soda of Candy Crush soda?” or “Please tell me that the Oscars are a Kanye-free zone.”)

So, with full credit to her for her wonderful idea, I’d like to do something similar, though with a few differences. First, because it’s me, I’ll never manage to have any entries that are just one sentence long. Second, I don’t have time to read books any more, alas, but I do read a lot of things around the web, so I would like to share instead articles or sites that have caught my interest lately. So, here’s March’s Grab Bag.

General Perfume News:

From The New York Times: “Designing a Bespoke Perfume” and the general cost thereof. Interesting tidbit: in the 1970s, roughly 90 fragrances were launched a year. Today, according to Michael Edwards in other work, more than 1,600 fragrances are released each year.
From The Smithsonian Magazine: two allegedly fake pheromones submitted by a perfume company for study back in 1991 caused scientists decades of wasted research into human pheromones.
From UPI: A Nielsen report states that American Latinos have become a key consumer in beauty (and fragrance) sales, showing a “staggering” difference in their purchases as compared to how low sales are in those areas for other demographic groups. One quote: “The Nielsen report also indicated Latino men take their beauty and appearance very seriously. Compared to non-Hispanic men, sales on shaving cream, hair spray, mustache dyes and after-shave all grew significantly, especially when it comes to fragrance as sales increased by 15.5 percent.“

Continue reading →