Chocolate Natural Perfume - Roxana Illuminated Perfumes

Softly chocolate solid perfumes, perfect for Valentine’s Day, come in six “flavors” made of essential oils, extracts and absolutes with high cacao content.

A deep chocolate base is combined with a variety of classic perfume and flavoring notes that may be layered or combined with each other or related Illuminated Perfumes. Noir has a deep and mysterious musk note, Cerise a central tart cherry tone, La Foret, a conifer forest, Le Orangerie, citrus, Bois, a smoky wood, L’epice, vanilla and spices. They are all unusual in the clarity and specificity of the notes in combination with chocolate, a highly refined form of the gourmand style in perfume. They all, as is the nature of such purely natural ingredients, hold close to the body and are quite subtle. This along with the wholesome nature of the components aid in quieting the busy mind and focusing the sense of smell, while evoking the precise memories associated with these familiar, practically archetypal elements. The chocolate notes impart a grounding, calming and comforting yet luxurious tone to them all.

As always with Roxana Illuminated Perfumes, the presentation is part of the enjoyment as these are individually cradled in bon-bon ruffles and sealed with honeybee stamped wax seals. The organic beeswax carrier medium of the solid perfume is a tactile pleasure. I like the ritual of solid perfume, which is bringing out a pretty object and opening it, and taking a silky touch of perfume that is moisturizing and applying it to the skin like a form of olfactory cosmetics. There is an inherent grace to the sequence of events that result in a perfumed patch of skin that does not overpower the atmosphere with rapid evaporation.

Such solid perfumes resembling fine aromatic handmade chocolates, composed of elegantly presented elements, would make an artful personal gift, either as a selection or individually. I imagine a Fragonard courtier presenting a box of such solid chocolate perfumes to a lady in her dishabille, and both of them trying them out on each other. A scenario bound to end in the kisses that celebrate the lover’s holiday best.

See www.IlluminatedPerfume.com and www.IlluminatedPerfume.Etsy.com 

Balsamo Della Mecca- La Via de Profumo

A long lasting, intense, almost masculine combination of labdanum and frankincense, this is a union between the traditional ambiance of sacred interior spaces and an intoxicating great-outdoors atmosphere of aromatic resins and balsams exuded by mountainside plants.  Softening subtle notes of Tonka, tobacco, damask rose, and tuberose round out its strength.  Hand-made in Italy with natural ingredients, this is a cross of traditional Arabian perfume aesthetics, with its strong sense of the sacred, and the deeply wild quality of natural ingredients which seem to have been used in a more unadulterated, unfiltered and powerful form than what we usually experience. 

Above photo from Abdes Salam Attar, Perfume Composer  Profumo "Scents of the Soul"

The Different Company de Charmes & Feuilles

Olfactory kick of marjoram, jasmine, peppermint, grapefruit and patchouli:  a wake up call that is both cold and warm, herbal and earthy, invigorating and calm.

Opposites Attract - Enfleurage - Part 2

After leaving in a  buzz from the Malle store uptown, we walked it off a bit in the nearby Ralph Lauren retail mansion, stepping it down by passing close by their gigantic floral displays. Then it was back out into the cold air again, to the train downtown, to Bleecker Street near Christopher, where Enfleurage is found. 

The Malle store is where you go when you want to try the finished productions of masters of the art. Enfleurage is where you go to experiment for yourself, and to try exotic materials first hand.  I am lucky to have a store relatively close by, where the frankincense of Oman and the essential oils of plants particular to Southeast Asia can be tried on the spot.  The owner, Trygve Harris, is an aromatherapist who travels extensively to bring products directly from foreign farms and suppliers to NYC.  Her staff is a tight-knit little group who are all highly informed as to the lore and origin and uses of their wares.  There are many elements of perfumes also, which still keep their natural medicinal edge in these less refined forms.  There are carrier oils, incenses,  essences, absolutes and hydosols, teas, books, and a lot of information available in the form of books and conversation with the staff.

They have, for example, oils from Zanzibar such as clove, basil and  cinnamon leaf, and unusual oils such as Amla, an ayurvedic oil for scalp and hair, or Marula from South Africa for the skin, and organic virgin Argan oil from Morocco.  They have an extensive list of essences like fresh evening primrose, arnica and calendula, Italian and African bergamot, and are known as specialists of frankincense and agarwood and other Arabian aromatics from Oman.  Trygve Harris lives there part time and enthusiastically invites us all to visit the country for an aromatic tour of the flowering frankincense trees.  She has an entertaining and informative blog on her personal quests for aromatic materials around the world and her interactions with the various cultures.  She has been importing from Southeast Asia too, and brought essential oils back from Vietnam, like tumeric, vervaine, a very fresh ginger essential oil, and shiso leaf (sold out immediately).  She has brought in agarwood from Laos  and even natural Arabian ambergris.

I came away with a pure jojoba oil of much higher quality than available more generally, and an organic Moroccan Argan oil.  I have the jasmine butter, which is dark, grainy and very strong, like fragrant tar.  The place has a rare combination of enthusiasm and integrity, because the selection is curated by people who have both a hunger for natural beauty and a sense for quality and enough respect for nature to leave what is well enough alone.  There is so much here, it requires more than one visit to get to know the riches on offer.  I want to go back and try the Columbian rose oils, the neroli butter,  the vanilla absolute from Madagascar, and the chamomile distilled in England.   If I can't go to these places myself right now, I can get close to the nature of them by trying the absolutes and essences of their distinctive fragrance plants and woods on the shelves of this small place in the West Village.  They are open every day!

Opposites Attract - Frederic Malle Store - Part One of Two

This past weekend, I had the experience of meeting a fellow perfume enthusiast (originally through Twitter, believe it or not) who writes about vintage perfumes,  on an outing with another friend, where we all had both the quintessential uptown and the downtown perfume experience.   It was an experience of almost complete opposites.  The brutal cold of this winter Saturday, heightened the sense of interior welcome at each place.  The first was at 72nd and Madison, the Frederic Malle store.  The cool beauty and elegant, thoughtful design of the interior is like an invitation to be intellectually engaged while being sensually seduced.  There is a lot to try here, but because of my current enthusiasm for Carnal Flower, I took the opportunity to focus on and try each of the Dominique Ropion fragrances  produced for the Malle line.  This was, to say the least, an experience of one extremely refined beauty after another.  There is an emphasis on technical innovation, where head space technology is used to refine the effect of the reality of actual materials and flowers at their peak, pushing and drawing back various elements and  components of materials subtly so as to direct sensual awareness toward  a more refined version of the flower or material itself.  These methods present a very personal interpretation of the soul of the flower or material, and then a composition that speaks to memory or an archetypal form of experience.  There is also the  use of a much higher percentage of material itself in the perfume, heightening its power while still keeping it from jumping over the edge of too much.

Being able to try all of them is quite the experience.  The First of May (1er Mai), for example, is the lily of the valley bouquet of idealized youth, when that scent was the essence of early spring and you recall the green of the vegetation around the flowers shading and cooling the floral sweetness into a liquid freshness and energy.  I loved Vetiver Extraordinare.  Wearing it, while it is a typical masculine material, would be like having a handsome man on your arm, who smells like a field of new mown hay laid on the embers of a fireplace with smoldering aromatic woods.  Une Fleur de Cassie was an urban, modern, sophisticated version of the ultra luxurious and intense materials of the older classics, with mimosa, jasmine and cassie absolutes balanced by clarified dark base of vanilla and sandalwood,  of an elegance so refined it is  no longer gender specific.   Un Gardenia, la nuit is as close as possible to a very fragrant night blooming gardenia as science and skill can make it;  Ropion proves his reputation as a specialist in the aesthetic of white flowers.  Geranium pour Monsieur is built on the idea of the leaves of the geranium plant, an astringent freshness that is mellowed by the exotic resin and benzoin substances mixed with spices like close and cinnamon with musks, it gives the impression of alert intelligence, because the balanced composition of unusual ingredients.  Santal Cardamon is in candle form, a version of sandalwood that was found during experimentation with cardamon, the combination of the two a spiced wood.  It recalls the Indian custom of building and carving with sandalwood to aid interior contemplation, with the cardamon recalling the sense of taste to bring it back to the present. The gardenia and the lily of the valley are also in candle form.

The very polished interior of the store has three enclosed columns of rapidly refreshed air in cabinets that are used to test the fragrances.  I would imagine that otherwise such dense perfumes would never dissipate if sprayed into the room or on the people in it.   The glass door is opened and the ventilators waft the perfume within the column of air,  and you can reach in and try it that way to see how it will be when it evaporates around you in sillage. 

There is also a couple of unusual forms of perfume diffusion for the home available, one a decorative rubber sheet that is impregnated with the perfume and which they call rubber incense. It is not to be burned, but pieces of it can be placed in places like handbags or drawers or closets to fragrance enclosed spaces very thoroughly.  A diffuser called a Fleur Mechanique,  slowly and silently throws fragrance into a room as it it were an untiring and unfading flower itself, in the trademark FM bright red and black box that looks like a large camera.

The staff fulfills your expectations that they be sophisticated and highly knowledgeable about perfume, the perfumers intentions and body of work, and are very generous and gracious with their knowledge.  We presented ourselves not as customers, but as perfumistas/bloggers and the store manager went through a thorough an amazing demonstration and talk about each of the Ropion perfumes one after the other (and a few others, huge topics in themselves, about which more another time).   It may have been helpful too that we came in so awe of Carnal Flower, and because she knew we were making a special pilgrimage, and partly because we were kind of lucky that it was so incredibly cold that everyone was staying inside and it was not all that busy when we first came in.  Though by the time we left, it had started to fill up and I can imagine people bringing these wonderful things into their own personal worlds, and I am very happy they are diffusing this artistry around NYC.

 Above:  The Store:  Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle, 898 Madison Avenue; (212) 249-7941, and a portrait of Mr. Ropion from their fascinating site.

 The next perfume stop we made that day will be the subject of my next post, on the very different NYC downtown experience of  Enfleurage -- a raw materials source.

Cire Trudon - scented atmospheres

In keeping with my current predilection for tuberose, I am in the midst of enjoying Mademoiselle de la Valliere, a scented candle from Cire Trudon (a thoughtful holiday gift).  This candle has the romance of being created for a mistress of Louis XIV, to envelop herself in the intensity of tuberose, which was and is still considered a deeply sensual scent that keeps its exotic connotations.  The flower was imported to France from Mexico in the early 1600s, and its intoxicating qualities flamed into such success that it was planted by the thousands in Louis XIV's gardens.  I have mentioned before what a perfume addict he was, until this passion was ended through overexposure toward the end of his life.

Even though they are expensive items as candles go, they are still, like other forms of perfumes, an  affordable luxury of the highest standard.  Trudon is one of the true old luxury French brands, still manufacturing the finest wax candles in its traditional ways, but has now branched out to commission new scents attuned to modernity, such as the scent of the moon's soil, or the Havana of Fidel, or the spirit of Dada.  I am deeply appreciative that they help to keep the legend of Mademoiselle de Valliere alive through the sensual reality of her taste in ambient perfume.   She was seen as the first of Louis XIV three great romances (there were many minor ones) and as tragic muse of passion because she  cultivated a poetic romantic love for the king while her self awareness required that she live in a melancholy that understood such illicit romance, such idolatry, was a danger to her immortal soul.  Once she was released from the affair and his attention she spent the rest of her life in spiritual repentance.  She had four children with him, but in respect to the queen she attempted to conceal her state, to pretend that nothing was happening, so complained of the scent of the tuberose flowers as being the cause of her shaky state when the queen noticed signs of her  pregnancy.

It was believed that young girls would be inflamed to a romantic, passionate frame of mind by exposure to the scent.  It takes a disciplined artistry  to keep it away from the edge of becoming cloying and overwhelming, but just freely seductive enough to reach out and incite the desire to inhale more deeply.

The candles burn very cleanly, and the scent thrown is subtle, but definitely and softly there.  The soft light and scent are especially good for the long dark winter nights.