Fragrance Junkie Central

[Mochapj]

I know there are a few of us on BT that are fragrance addicts, so I thought it would be nice to have a dedicated place where we can share our thoughts.

This is not to take away from the lovely What Are You Wearing Today, Fragrance Edition thread, but more a place to post longer reviews, chat about new brands or releases, and just shoot the breeze on anything good and smelly 🙂

For me, I recently acquired 2 new decants that I've been anxiously awaiting.  Ever since Lachaton mentioned that MMM was releasing a new scent called By The Fireplace I've been itching to get my hands on it.  My decant arrived yesterday, so I'm looking forward to marinating in it this weekend.  Secondly, I recently picked up a tiny sample of Shiseido Nombre Noir.  Supposedly it is one of the most expensive failures in perfume history - made by Serge Lutens for Shiseido back in the 80s.  Of course, with a backstory like that, I was dying to get a sniff 😄

What's new on your scent radar?  Do tell!

 

[pocketvenus]

@ZombieMetroAntthanks for sharing this! Very amused by the idea of Elvis branded CBD pet products 😄

[pocketvenus]

This Lancome release, Idole, sounds interesting. For a moment, I thought the name was INDOLE and I would love an indolic perfume get a huge, splashy release but Idole still sounds good. From NST Perfume:

A new musky chypre floral fragrance, created by three female perfumers: Shyamala Maisondieu, Adriana Medina and Nadège Le Garlantezec. A sustainably sourced Isparta Rose Petal Essence from Turkey exclusively made for Lancôme, along with a Centifolia Rose grown in France, shine among notes of bergamot, accords of pear, India Jasmine Grandiflorum, and a new 'clean and glow' accord that is set to re-write the white page on which every woman starts her story.

Verdant and tender, fresh and voluptuous, Idôle is a fragrance which speaks volumes, and sparkles in light.

Crystallizing a new out-of-the-box vision of success – one that unites and transcends rather than separates beyond convention – the Idôle bottle, designed by architect and industrial designer, Chafik Gasmi, is the fitting tribute to the industry technical advances and innovations. The Idôle bottle being arguably one of the slimmest in the world at just 15mm thick.

[pocketvenus]

It's been public for awhile now, but I forgot to post about it here. Christopher Chong resigns from Amouage after 12 years, from Muscat Daily

Christopher Chong, creative director of Amouage has announced that he will be leaving the company. Chong resigned on May 1. 

His triumphant debut was in creating Jubilation 25 for women and Jubilation XXV for men in 2007 despite no formal training in the luxury fragrance industry. This set the tone for all future launches and today, Chong has become a highly respected protagonist who is known for defying convention and for pushing artistic boundaries. Over the past 12 years, he has steered Amouage on a creative path to global success and he achieved this by entirely reshaping the olfactive identity of the brand. Classically trained as a lyric baritone, Chong has often described his career as unorthodox and his role at Amouage as pre-ordained, ‘singing’ various song cycles by bottling art and emotions. During his tenure at Amouage, he approached his work from a personal perspective, adding layers of myriad contradictions and nuances.

“I would like to thank Amouage for giving me so many opportunities to develop my perfumery skills. My 12-year journey at Amouage has been nothing short of epic and it has been an honour to meet and work with so many wonderful people along the way.” He added, “I leave with enormous and enduring gratitude. I am grateful to everyone who believed in me, even when I was being challenging at times with my creativity. Your trust gave me tremendous courage and confidence to take Amouage from a relatively unknown Omani brand to the international recognition that it has today.”

Chong added, “This is not a swan song but rather, a short interlude to enable me to focus on new projects and new challenges, so watch this space. This is only the end of the beginning.”

[Mochapj]

More details on TF Metallique

WILLFUL. FEARLESS. ADDICTIVE.

FORGED WITH ELEGANT BRILLIANCE, TOM FORD METALLIQUE MESMERIZES ITS ADMIRERS WITH A PULSATING FLASH OF MODERN, RESOLUTE FEMININITY, WILLFUL, LUMINOUS AND IN FULL BLOOM. A HIGH-SHINE ARMOR OF ADDICTIVE ALDEHYDES ENVELOP ITS REVERBERATING CORE OF SENSUOUS WHITE FLOWERS, LIKE A METAL VENUS IN FLEURS.

LIKE AN ARMORED EMBROIDERED DRESS, THE METALLIC SHEATH OF LIGHTER-THAN-AIR ALDEHYDES OPENS THE SCENT LIKE A SECOND SKIN, THE COLLISION OF CRISP VERT DE BERGAMOTE AND PINK PEPPERCORN FURTHER STEELING THE INSATIABILITY OF THE FIRST IMPRESSION.

BENEATH ITS COOL VENEER, METALLIQUE'S FLORAL HEART IS AMPLIFIED BY JUXTAPOSING DELICATE WHITE BLOSSOMS OF AUBEPINE AND MUGUET WITH THE NARCOTIC-LIKE NECTAR OF HELIOTROPE.

AN AURA OF AMBRETTE SEED IMPARTS WARMTH WITH WOODY INFLECTIONS OF PERU BALSAM. THE SOFT SCENT OF VANILLA AND CREAMY SANDALWOOD LAYER AN ADDICTIVE, CONTRASTING FINISH THAT FURTHER DRIVES THE METALLIC SUITING OF THE OPEN.

[ChristalM]

Has anyone tried this yet?

[Mochapj]

@ChristalM an acquaintance of mine on IG messaged me on the weekend to say she'd tried it. She said the main thing she got out of it was vanilla. AFAIK I don't think it's launched yet in Canada, though.

[ChristalM]

@Mochapj  Ok thanks. Hummm it sounds right up my ally. I see it is listed on Sephora as coming soon...

[pocketvenus]

@MochapjThanks for sharing! The ALL CAPS is amazing ha ha. So basically it's crunchy on the outside with a creamy center. I actually want to try this 😄

[Mochapj]

@pocketvenus  I very much would like to meet someone who writes fragrance marketing because it’s always the most ridiculously over the top prose 🤣

[pocketvenus]

@MochapjI enjoy reading them even when the perfumes are meh ha ha. Definitely some would be poets in there trying to pay the bills 😄

[RoseCharlie]

I am having such a crazy perfume buying moment right now and I’m picking up all kinds of different things - Sephora roller balls, indie perfumes and sample sets, niche decants and even BBW body sprays (I ordered some from the US site because they seemed to have some LE ones there and I couldn’t get down to the store but if they had the same thing for much cheaper in Canadian i am going to be annoyed + I hope to find a few of them wearable but my expectations are sort of low so we shall see). I was supposed to get Burberry Her yesterday but it’s late - still - it was described to me as an airy summer friendly strawberry milkshake scent so I had to have it! Anyways - one things I’m generally finding is that although price generally heightens the odds of a quality fragrance that’s not really always the case and there are some really interesting outliers. Some small batch perfumers who charge less than more popular indie perfumers use a lot more expensive quality ingredients. Without wanting to sound pretentious I would say that I can sometimes (not always) recognize natural essential oils and absolutes because that’s how I first got interested in perfumery - by making my own products with natural essences and there are certain EOs and absolutes that I’ve smelled in the raw from different parts of the world and different crops and years. All of that to say that I just received an order from Kyse perfumes and they are less expensive than other indie perfumers but unlike many other indie purchases I’ve made lately I can smell abundant amounts of expensive absolutes in these fragrances - vanilla absolute (insanely expensive at the moment), cocoa absolute, beeswax absolute and butter CO2, lavender essential oil... nom nom nom. I’ll post a more detailed review if anyone is interested but I just vial sniffed my order and I was impressed! $4.5 USD for 3ml sample vials and $6 flat fee shipping to Canada and I get real absolutes - I’m a fan! They specialize in ultra-gourmands btw but they have some heavier leather/fruity tobacco vanilla scents as well. Right now I’m wearing Velvet Vanille by Mancera - I have a decant that just came. It’s beautiful and I’m happy to report that the note that stabbed me in the brain with Roses Greedy is not present in this one. It’s a beautiful bubblegum tuberose scent with fresher while florals that is made smooth by vanilla but it’s not heavy, insanely indolic or narcotic or musky. I would say it’s one of the most “fresh” tuberose scents I’ve come across. Vanilla isn’t as prominent as I would have liked but it becomes more prominent with the drydown. Last night I wore the following combo to bed: Temptation by Alkemia (Parma violets and ganache), irresistible by Alkemia (French macaroons and sweet almond) and 2 sprays of Calgon marshmallow body spray (LOL) which I actually find not too bad for a cheap body spray. Temptation by Alkemia was a bit too straight up violet with very little sweetness for my liking so I felt the need to sweeten it up.

[pocketvenus]

@RoseCharlieI love it!!! I totally agree that smaller houses are worth looking into as they can use more expensive ingredients and charge less because their overhead is low. By the way, if you love fun gourmands, 4160 Tuesdays has some quirky and adorable ones.

[RoseCharlie]

@pocketvenus : ) that’s totally true - bigger houses spend so much money on advertising, TV ads, spokesmodels etc. I read an article that said the fragrance industry spends something like $800 million per year on advertising! I have been wanting to try my hand at perfumery for a long time though and I have to say I feel like it’s difficult to get into on one’s own because it’s such an expensive hobby. Getting small amounts of all the natural EOs, essences, absolutes and CO2 extracts + a variety of aromachemicals molecules that I would need + other blending materials would cost me thousands of dollars just to play around a bit... I think it may also be difficult and less cost effective to be supplied in small quantities and I think the bigger fragrance producers have more options like buying natural products directly from producers and farmers rather than from a middleman. Something I find interesting from posts of people who are really into buying indie fragrances is that the culture is sort of different - people seem to try as many things as they can and they mostly buy 1ml sample sets and then go on to buy 2.5mls or 5mls of the ones they love but for people who buy loads of indie fragrances 5mls is a lot and it seems like they wear a very large variety of perfumes as opposed to a few favourites. I thought that was interesting because it’s almost the polar opposite of what the public at large does - like not people like us who love to try perfumes but according to this report I was reading the average (non perfume obsessed) person just wants to find something they like and stick with it. Apparently the top 10 fragrances are very hard to unseat for that reason- they have fairly loyal following of people who are not very likely to try a bunch of other stuff until they find something they like better. I think that’s NUTS! I mean I have a signature scent but it blows my mind that people wouldn’t want to try everything! : )

[pocketvenus]

@RoseCharlieyes, you are right in that the large houses have the ability to leverage economies of scale to access better ingredients, though I'm also guessing they are under far more pressure to maintain very high profit margins.

That is so cool you've been thinking about perfumery!!!! 🙂 I've read some of the aromachemicals like ISO-E super are pretty cheap but again, I'm guessing there is a minimum amount to purchase and that this is rather high! And I think you're right about the perfume obsessed and smaller sizes. 10-30 ml is the ideal for me. I have far too many perfumes to justify 100 ml or even 50. I would never use it up.

[RoseCharlie]

@pocketvenus oh absolutely! Sorry I wasn’t intending that to be a counter-argument in any way I was just generally discouraged that all of the things i wanted to get started were generally adding up to so much but you’re totally 500% right most of the aromachems or designer molecules (like it’s weird there’s really only a few companies that design all of the molecules perfumers use and they do a lot of the fragrances that’s go into everything from household cleaning products to designer perfumes - Giveaudan and Firmenich are the ones I see most often)... but sorry that was a terrible digression - yes - the individuals aromachemicas are super cheap!!! That’s why it blows my mind that perfumes like Not a Perfume sell so well it’s maybe 10 cents worth of product and that’s mainly the cost of them or perfumer’s alcohol I think lol. It’s true that I would be buying from a reseller so it’s a bit more expensive but my shopping cart is adding up to a lot because I’ve also placed a lot ignored natural materials in there. My interest in perfumery came from experimenting with natural materials when making my own bath and body stuff and I love the way LUSH makes its fragrances for bath and body’s products (I’m not as much of a fan of their actual fragrance line) but in their non-perfume product line I find that the natural scents are often (not always but often) recognizable and that the synthetic components play more of a supporting role or add interest or sweetness but I can often smell real lavender or neroli or rosewood or rose absolute or lemon or lime or jasmine essential oil. I like that it creates this sort of connection to real things and what those things smell like. I would love to make something like that.  I’ve been buying and smelling and experimenting with natural materials - essential oils, absolutes, oleoresins, CO2 extracts etc. for years but ive yet to try anything with synthetics. I don’t know how much demand there is for that kind ignorant thins though - like LUSH’s fragrance called « LUST » is exactly exactly precisely the smell of jasmine absolute with maybe just the smallest hint of sandalwood but otherwise it’s precisely exactly what jasmine absolute smells like.  At higher concentrations jasmine absolute has a sort of gasoline note almost - but when people think of jasmine in perfumery I think they are often thinking about a sort of conceptual flower like a clean white floral - not this heavily indolic crazy smelling floral with a hint of gasoline. So I have seen a lot of people saying they hate that fragrance and that it smells nothing like jasmine when really I almost 100% sure that it must be the fragrance with the highest concentration of real jasmine absolute on the market. I  try to read a lot of reviews to get a sense of what people think and I also see so many people commenting on perfume lines like Pacifica and saying how much of a difference it makes to wear all natural scents when really the only think in their fragrances that I can recognize as having some sort of relationship to nature is the grain alcohol lol. So I would like to make things with that blend natural and synthetic products but where the natural essences are the star of the show but I don’t know if people would value that enough to pay additional money for it. I live in Toronto and ive been a bit surprised not to be able to find a real perfumery course I could take locally.  I think no one is really keen on this notion because it’s so out of left field I have a whole other job but I keep coming back to it and thinking about it.  Another weird thing that I found a bit earlier on when i started making my own bathband body products was that almost every single vendor on Etsy (not alll but most) uses incredibly cheap fragrance oils to make their products.  Fragrance oils can be purchased from craft shops for soap makers and candle makers - I bought so many different fragrances oils to test out when I first started and I never ended up using a single one because I thought they were all god awful. Price-point wise they can’t even possess designer scent molecules baby Giveaudan or firemenich because they are so so so cheap so I’m guessing they must Veblen made with the cheapest of the cheapest aromachems... So I am surprised at how well these products sell because to me they smell kind of terrible but there are eveb people making money by adding oil to the and selling these cheap fragrance oils as customized perfumes. I guess I’m looking at demand on the lower price point end of the market though and there must also Be demand at higher price points since there aren’t many companies putting out perfumes that are very costly as well...

[pocketvenus]

@RoseCharlieNo worries!!!! I didn't take your post as an argument at all, just read it as adding more info and insight to the conversation <333

Eccentric Molecules is another great example of what you're talking about with Not a Perfume - it's one aromachemical in alcohol ha ha ha. I get there's minimalism in perfume and I like ISO-E Super but come on!

Yes, sometimes people like the cleaned up scents/lower concentrations better. Jasmine can smell plasticky, like moth balls, like banana peels, not exactly what I want to smell like!!!

As for Pacifica... I don't believe the term "natural" is regulated so it really does make me wonder what they mean by natural. At least with the Clean seal at Sephora we know the fragrances have passed some kind of standard.

I live in Toronto as well and I agree - we don't even have a dedicate perfume boutique now that Niche Essence closed!

[Mochapj]

Tom Ford Private Blend Reserve Tuscan Leather Intense

https://m.sephora.com/ca/en/product/tuscan-leather-intense-P447140

[pocketvenus]

Heard this was less fruity and more smoky. Have not tried it yet! Thanks for the link @Mochapj !

[Mochapj]

Looks like ELDO is coming out with some candles

[Mochapj]

New Serge Lutens La Couche du Diable - an oud with Smoke, cistus and rose

[michelleshops]

I had to google cistus but this sounds really nice! too bad I'm poor @Mochapj  😄