Neil Morris Fragrances – Spirit of Water, Drifting, Rainflower, Intimate Lily

This is further to my last, as correspondents used to like to say in the days of real paper and ink:

Dear Reader,

Greetings from Swamplandia.  We now have days when the weather is so bad for so long that I wonder if perfume can be worn at all.  The city is a furnace, and still heavy air full of dampness blankets everything with heaviness.  This is week a bit less bad than last, but I understand from the news I hear every day this may be the new normal.  They say we are in for extreme weather going forward each and every season.  I have to adjust the rhythms of my perfume wardrobe, activity schedule and style of life in general if this turns out to be the case.  

Perfumes that are refreshing, graceful, and soothing are calling to me now.  This is a complete switch. I am coming out of a long period of looking for the perfume version of dark glamor, in the land of the dramatic, rich and strange.  Of course I still love those things but right now I want the perfume equivalent of a swim in natural sweet water, like a lake or creek shaded by big old trees with ferns on the shore.  I've been walking from one patch of shade to another, or along the sundial effect of the side streets casting their shadows according to the time of day, trying to learn to move more slowly.

When perusing his site, I was looking for samples of Neil Morris Fragrances that would I know have his signature liveliness and opening strength but still express the abstract more transparent forces of  better weather's softer moods.  Winds, atmospheres, water in all its forms; a flower's exhaled scent-breath.

I am grateful to find the descriptions of perfumes on his site are accurate.  He is precise in listing the inspiring sense memory, the mood he looks to evoke and the predominating notes.  It's not all a story or a fan dance, or crazy perfume ad-copy prose.  


Spirit of Water has water lily and freesia  notes completely submerged in white musk, and a hint of tonka.  Jasmine and poppy are a far cry of notes in the background, but they may be what gives the lively effect of moving through water to the surface of fresh air, keeping that refreshing breath in the forefront of sensation.

This scent does indeed evoke a swim in a special pond in the New England woods.  I don't know how NM does it, but I recognize the sense of breathing in fresh water vapor fragrant with the wild bits of nature steeped in it, rising up off the skin just before you rub yourself down with a clean towel.   These woods have more exotic and fragrant flowers than the typical Northeastern woods do, but they are soft and mixed enough not to be specifically recognizable.  Their fragrance represents the emanations coming from the complicated world of plants, birds and breezes embracing skin cooled by full immersion in free water. 

All the Neil Morris Fragrances have good staying power, and this one is perfect for wearing light/white clothing while running your errands in the morning before it gets even hotter.

Drifting is by contrast to Spirit of Water, less bracing and a more meditatively calm and relaxation inducing perfume.  This is primarily a clean musk that lives within the realm of subtlety yet translates the sensation of heat into something decorative and ornamental. 

I get nervous and a little edgy when I am uncomfortable in the heat of full sun, so this perfume with its clean calming beauty soothes me by evoking a more benevolent sunshine.  The freshest part of a mandarin rind is enveloped in water lily, mediated by fig and azalea (or what I  think azalea would be if it had a fragrance; exactly that).

Creamier than Spirit of Water, it's like getting inside the interior of a flower that has a warm air within its freshness. There is "solar musk", also light amber, myrtle wood and maltol.  Maltol is an organic flavor enhancer, like malt, hence the name, found in the bark of larch trees and in pine needles, used to give an ethereal sweetness to fragrances. 

I would love to have a FB of both perfumes, subtle though they are within the same white musk family. The more I use them, the more I find in them and the mood of activity in one contrasts with the relaxation and stillness of the other.

Rainflower is distinctly floral but the bouquet is mixed and one is not more important than any other, in a symphonic chorus of floral fragrances after they've been well soaked and mixed together by rainy air.  Freesia, jasmine, gardenia, hyacinth, lilac, tulip, are all well cloaked in a musk that is submerged in soft rain water with the sun breaking out, a little warmth misting the florals together.  Even though this is a floral musk, the combination and balance of everything together results in a green/floral tone overall.

Increasing in floral intensity is Intimate Lily, a warm transparent depiction made up of water lily, Casablanca Lily and lily of the valley in aldehyde over a sandalwood, vanilla and musk base. The allusion to intimacy is accomplished through the warmth of a clean skin tone combined with what vanilla and sandalwood do in a musk base.  The base notes are sheer and gentle screens for the usually fierce strength of the while lily family.  I may be imagining it but this seems like something Madame Bovary would wear, both feather light yet intoxicating within a floral, delicious undertone.


Above - Georgia O'Keefe, Flower
middle photo is a New England waterfall on the site for Blake Garden and Design, landscape architects.   Third is a scene from the Brooklyn Flea, in the outdoor market section.
Bottom right: Louis Icart - Madame Bovary, 1929, etching.

Neil Morris Fragrances – A Rose is a Rose, Storm, Midnight Star

It is now high time to revisit the Neil Morris Perfume Vault, where he keeps his extra special ones, that go far to push the limits of what perfume is about and can do. I am also delving further into his Signature Collection.

I was introduced to this line by the inimitable Ida, aka Chayaruchama, the arch-perfumista, and it has been a true gift because his style speaks to me in ways that hit many of my favorite inner memory and fragrance chords. His poetic sensibility is a treasure and as an independent perfumer he freely expresses a full range of moods and types of beauty without worrying about anything but his own vision of aromatic beauty.

I think it could be that perfume like this that speaks to such a deep and pure level of sense memory is a meditative benefit to the mind, too. Such olfactory experiences refresh and call up the beauties of experience to the forefront of awareness.

They are a modern interpretation of the archetypal beauties of this material world. In this post we have the perfume equivalents of the freshness of roses, the softness and soothing air rain falls through, the interplay of dark and light scents rising from rich loamy earth under an clear night sky.

I have an immediate sense of excitement on first application. The allusions the perfumes emanate with their strikingly beautiful opening notes are familiar in that you recognize the themes of these olfactory poems immediately by their classical references. They are further shaped with a sense of contemporary modernity in a style that has an air of almost distanced elegance, coolness, abstraction. It’s not so much an imitation of  beautiful aromatic things themselves, as much as the mood and atmospheric feel those things give you, in that moment when you notice how happy you are, where you are.

A Rose is a Rose is a modern fresh green rose, a precise delicate and firm hit of velvet petals floating over a cool, lightly mentholated wood like cedar. It tends to take over my attention completely when taking it in directly from my skin, but still without a wide sillage. There is an almost head-space realism, and like the real thing the fragrance extends perhaps about a foot and a half away. This is one for intimate personal space, and therefore perfect for the day-to-day realities of my life, when I need perfumes that don’t invade other people’s personal spaces.

The green is of leaves and stems in a bowl of cold water, and I get a light powdery smoothness over all, which grows stronger as time goes on. This is a clean rose, strongly rosy without any sweetness whatsoever, yet deeply rose while keeping that air of refreshment on a long stem. The dry down is relatively quick, while holding close to the skin, with staying power  close to the skin itself,  drying down to a powdery softness. It lingers with the powder holding a tint of the after-thought of a rose, and the light trace of a cedar-like wood persists. This is a must for those who are rose lovers. I have no note list but am describing personal impressions.

Storm uses a musk that relates to your own skin scent and marries it to a sense of impending violet- tinged moist clouds that  hold a sense of  air warming up from the cold. This scent cloud holds the subtle, almost musical notes of early blooming flowers. There is ozone, and heavy moisture leaving the atmosphere more highly charged with refreshed fragrance. The top notes are listed as papaya and lime, leading down to hyacinth and delphinium, then tonka bean, earth and musk notes. Even though the note list includes sweet ones, somehow the sweetness registers more as cloudy, maybe because the musk and tonka hold them down to the earth notes and the ozone quality is predominant. The  musk imparts a quality of deepening beautified skin scent heightening towards the area where the perfume is applied, like the ombre shading of color on the end of petal.

Midnight Star is the third in a series of midnight fragrances. The sea, the moon, a forest and a tryst are the others in the series. This begins as an abstract, almost cold, salty ozonic musk, giving the impression of spacious distance and fullness. This is one for those who are aldehyde fans. For me personally, more than a little aldehyde has a physical effect, I get a bit lightheaded.  Even so the fragrance itself has a pure, ethereal watery beauty that dries down into a whisper of mimosa (a favorite note of mine just now) pale shades of honeysuckle, pakalana blossom (a tropical grassy-woody Chinese green violet) and linden, on a clean and white musk and sandalwood base. It ends primarily as a white musk with very soft  soprano floral tones.

I chose six samples to try ones new to me based on the site descriptions that spoke to my mood (Neil threw in the Rose, which I asked about, not seeing it on the site). This is a process I recommend, because the samples will indeed fulfill the succinct descriptions. Samples are $4 and $5 each, so if you get six you have enough for at least a month of varying olfactory pleasures and I bet a wide enough range to definitely hit the perfume-love jackpot big time. I will also mention that there is a current discount of 15% on the full sizes going on until August 19th (discount code “sizzle”), This is a major temptation, because there are a number I know I want in full size.

Rose is a Rose is available though not listed on the site, just ask for it by name on the order form. There’s not much focus on the website or marketing or self-promotion, and the packaging is kept quite simple. It’s the perfume itself which is strikingly beautiful.

The Vault fragrances are deemed to be esoteric and more for the true perfume fanatic (though I think public taste is catching up). The perfumes are now carried in some retail locations in the Boston area and in NYC at Henri Bendels and in California. I must say, if perfume is one of your pleasures and you have not yet tried these, go straight to his site online and order samples. This is perfume with a strong personality, sophistication and balance, well-married to an acutely poetic sensibility.

Visit the Neil Morris site for more information, and please visit my prior posts on Neil Morris Vault perfumes, Part 1 and Part 2.

Above red rose from Thundafunda;
Storm at Sea by Turner on Artnet;
The Pleiades Star Cluster, NASA

To BEE by Roxana Illuminated Perfume - The Honey Collection

A perfume in liquid form, a solid, a sample for a giveaway, the base chords of leather and "Aumbre", and a sample of raw organic feral honey arrived on my doorstep from Roxana's California state of mind recently.  This perfume To BEE has been woven together from honey, amber and leather accords, and includes an infusion of comb, and a tincture in the liquid, from various bee rescues in the environs of Los Angeles. 

To BEE is Roxana's new perfume and what appears to be the culmination of many months of growing involvement in beekeeping, rescuing bee hives, developing a relationship to and learning to work as cooperatively and sensitively as possible with bees. 

This perfume is made up of precious substances distilled from the labor of many many creatures, and further shaped by the hands of a poetic and romantic artist, who thinks in perfume as others do to build a beautiful house or sculpture.  Each component is built with meditative careful attention and then fitted together to effect a quiet beauty that still honors the wild side of the bees and of ourselves.

This perfume is stronger and lasts longer than others from this line I have known, and I am glad of it; I think it softly breathes of the vitality of these partly feral creatures.  Bees are in somewhat domesticated but we don't understand them completely. They are an entirely different flavor of the earth's life force, wilder than our own, but we do know that what they make is inherently good for us.  We benefit by their honey, their wax, their royal jelly, and now we have the intimacy of their fragrance.  It feels like an honor to have the opportunity to wear the liqueur of such precious substances on your own skin.

I personally don't know what a bee-hive smells like, but this perfume exhales sweetness grounded by leather and amber accords which all together approximate an atmosphere of raw purity and mysterious opulence. 

We are at the palace of the queen bee, and her rooms are infused with the nectar of thousands of flowers, distilled down to tangible form and polished into something like  the reflection of a highlight on gold leaf.



Roxana's illustrated site with much more information on this and other unique  botanical perfumes, is a pleasure to browse.  The Honey Bee print is available on the Etsy site too; I think it's an accurate depiction of the bee's decorative fearsomeness.

A  small sample of the solid perfume will go to the first person who comments they would like one.  Please send your address at lraubertasatgmaildotcom in a separate email too, and I will mail it on.
An affordable sampler is available on Etsy, and the full size perfume.

For more of my posts about Roxana Illuminated Perfumes, see here, and here, and here.  These is but a partial list; I suppose you can tell I am a fan (for more, try the search feature in the right column).

A White Musk Moment: Il Profumo Musc Bleu

Sometimes I go from one perfume extreme to the other. I have been immersed in natural patchouli perfumes for the past month. Now my Jungian shadow self is reaching out to tug at me, tripping a craving by repeatedly and insistently saying, hey, what about this stuff? This silhouette portrait of myself is now pointing straight at something like the opposite of patchouli, which is white musk.

On one hand white musk as a scent relates to a “grounded” sense of body and self, but on the other there is no denying that white musk is a purely chemical confection that has removed the animal aspects of original musk itself, while keeping its quality of enhancing and beautifying the scent of your own skin.

How do other people travel/navigate the olfactory map? To whip around from one scent family or style to another – I know for me even though I’ve been smelling a lot of perfume for the past five years it’s still a voyage of discovery, there is so much out there. There are so many beautiful materials, each one contains worlds and cultural connotations, as vast as continents and populated by many fragrance inhabitants to visit and enjoy. Why not continue to follow my predilections wherever they may take me since going far and wide will only serve to expand my experience and horizons. So now I find myself in the midst of exploring the land of the white musk.

The extremes of NYC summer heat can be difficult for perfume. Sometimes when it's over 90 degrees it burns out too quickly or seems too much even to yourself, let alone those around you, and yet I have been craving white musk lately. The refreshing clean skin quality and its associations with comfort like cotton sheets drying on a line outside in the summer extend an olfactory lifeline to something like the breezes tossing the top-most tree branches around on the less traffic-ed side-streets.

Luckily white musk does indeed enhance the sense of freshness and air movement and general mood uplift like wearing white does. As in any other scent family, there are certain perfumes that step forward immediately to demonstrate a personal affinity.

The one I have been enjoying the most lately is Il Profumo Musc Bleu. It has just enough going on within the white musk to keep it interesting without showing any sweetness or getting overtly floral. It’s like cool shadow and shade protecting your skin from the hot sun, with enough abstract elegance to give it body and depth.

The other musk that truly hits the spot for me, but is stronger and deeper than the Il Profumo is the Bruno Acampora Musc, which I have written about before. (Layer with Acampora Jasmine T for a taste of heaven on earth).

I have been trying the Serge Lutens Clair de Musc, and though it rises to a pure elegance, the subtle florals shine through up into a prettiness that seems too insistent to me right now, because my own mood wants something more skin centered and quite neutral. Montale's White Musk is mild in the way I am looking for too, but also shows Montale's signature distinctive house undertone of a fragrant Middle Eastern ambiance. These are both very pleasing white musks and among the ones I would want to take with me on a desert island should I be called on to do so, but, they are not exactly what I want right now. The Musc Bleu is my perfect white musk, altogether beautiful, smooth, neutral in the senese that certain colors are considered to be neutral, such as white, black, grey and beige.  Refreshing, while hitting my olfactory nerve in exactly the right spot. Not sure what this says about me, or my mood exactly, but it is what it is, and I just count myself lucky I hit this rewarding sensual jackpot fairly soon along in my search.

I understand that white musk is a term that covers all the chemical musks, which were bred to be more like clean young skin, leaving aside the animal wildness of the true musk model. As it turns out, the earlier versions of white musks were very appealing but may build up in the system to be in fact unhealthy to wear. These types have lingered in the environment and our bodies to an alarming degree. They’ve been replaced by new molecules, which by their very shape and structure will not cause the bodily problems of the early versions. (See the wiki site for a relatively short and clear explanation about synthetic musks).

Some people want to be careful not to go too close to the tone of the white musks that are added into all the mass produced detergents and fabric softeners. That said I know I am not put off by such in-exclusivity; if it smells good I’m there, whether it be some common fragrant fruit you can bite into or an enjoyable scent that escapes the fabric as you fold and put away the laundry. There are basic musks that are very pleasant and good to have around for layering too.

I find the relatively inexpensive Body Shop White Musk will gently amplify all the best qualities of anything you put beside it, because as we know, that is what musk does and the reason why it is the base of most perfumes. It’s a good one to have around for layering and smoothing.

I do wonder how other people travel around the scent map, so if you have any stories you’d care to tell, please do, either here or at indieperfumesatgmaildotcom. I will put together a few samples to reward one of you.

The way I see white musk is as a form of shade from the hot sun in aromatic form, a simple pleasure. I’m glad to have found these, especially the Musc Bleu, exactly when I need them the most.

Above photo by me, the simple pleasure of a shaded sidewalk on a hot day.

Patchouli Part 4 -Mysteries, Answers & the Winners Are

This Summer of Patchouli Love project has opened many doors to the mysteries of natural perfume creation by some of its most skilled and inspired perfumers.  Some of the participants have started to share their creative process in detail, and I find it fascinating.  I highly recommend you open the highlighted links below, because these are the three perfumers who made the patchouli perfumes that I picked as my favorite three from 13; completely blind-tested.  What I like best is this information expands my pleasure in their perfume all the more by highly personalizing their creative scent inspirations.  Each one ends up describing a way of life and thinking devoted to creating beauty through perfume.

For example, Liz Zorn tells about her inspiration, the notes, the melding of the perfume concepts into the concerns of her daily life and scent memories and creative practices.  She recalls patchouli rubbed into her wet hair and the scent of the river by her home, and these olfactory influences on her, in River Walk (#2)

Shelley Waddington's interview/talk with Ambrosia Jones on the Perfume Pharmer site, discussing among other things bio-friendly musks and the pairing of orange blossom enfleurage from extrait and mimosa notes (mimosa has been ringing my bells since discovering it recently in Le Mimosa by Goutal).  She made Go Ask Alice (#3)

Rodney Hughes based his perfume on the time he spent in Greece, the morning sun glowing on lavender walls, with lavender and patchouli in balance with citrus, coriander and jasmine, for Royal Water (#14).  He says that "my idea for this fragrance was to capture the experience of the Greek Isles. In particular Santorini and Mykonos sunlit lavender stucco walls, the cool crisp morning air  turning into blazing sun that cooks the hills and sets alight the Aegean Sea. It's really a poem in liquid form. Laying nude all day on Paradise Isle and dancing into the morning above the Aegean at Cavo Paradiso. I tried to create a perfume that would serve as a sense memory for those days long past in Greek Mythology".   Sounds like the undercurrent of wildness in patchouli could influence a fragrant celebratory return to pagan sensuality. There will be more on Rodney's Therapeutate Parfums at a later posting as part of my Brooklyn perfumer series.

This is the Peace, Love and Patchouli / Summer of Patchouli LOVE project perfumers / perfumes lineup, with matched number to perfumer and named perfume.  All of which are available in a coffret of the sample sizes at Perfume Pharmer, in a limited edition.  The answers to the mystery of who made what has made this patch test bunny's experience even more interesting.  Some are available directly on the perfumer's sites too:


1 Dupetit, Indienne
2 Liz Zorn, River Walk
3 Shelley Waddington, Go Ask Alice
4 Jane Cate, Haight and Ashbury
5 April Aromatics,  Bohemian Spice
6 Happiness, Perfume by Nature/Ambrosia Jones
7 Providence Perfume Company, Rose Boheme
8  Lyn Ayre, Patchouli Paisley
9  no one, to save confusion with 6
10 JoAnne Bassett, Tetu
11 DSH, Bodhi Sativa
12 Amanda Feeley, Queen of Punk
13 Opus Oils, Wild Child
14 Therapeutate, Rodney Hughes, Royal Water

In addition, I am sending the three flacons to the winners of the give-away, Happiness (#6) by Ambrosia Jones, -- see her interview of Shelley Waddington above - and (#8) by Lyn Ayre, Patchouli Paisley (I love that pattern, as you can tell from the prior patch posts) and River Walk (#2) as follows:

(#2) to Taffy4aday, for her lovely Margaret Mead/patchouli story:

I wore the Patch quite a bit when I was a young woman in the 70's. I was studying for my degree in Anthropology and attended a conference in Toronto. Quite a few of us students were invited to a party and lo and behold, a quick visitor to the party was Margaret Mead! Of course I was wearing patchouli (for the life of me, I don't know if I was wearing oil or a little solid perfume compact at the time), and Margaret Mead herself said I smelled nice.

(#8) to Laura , for her adventurous spirit towards perfume:

I used to be one of those patchouli haters. The first time I made a
patchouli soap I was sick for three days. But that was because I
overexposed myself, and because I didn't know, back then, how much the
different grades of patchouli differ.

Now I love some patch-heavy perfumes: Mandy Aftel's Shiso, Illuminated
Perfume's Cimbalom, Providence Perfume's Gypsy, VireoPerfume's Lover's
Patchouli I'm guessing that, like you, I'd swoon over #2. But I do
like tobacco, and I'm intrigued by chypres, so I'm sure my nose
wouldn't think there's a bad patch in the bunch.

and #6 to Andrine, for sharing her archetypal scarey 60s & 70s patchouli experience, and especially because #6 couldn't be more the opposite of all that:

I first smelled patchouli in the 60s when I was very little and didn't know what it was, but always loved the scent and would go happy whenever I smelled it. I'd heard the word but didn't associate it with what I smelled.

Then in high school in the 70s, a girl in my grade used to smell very strongly and not pleasant. She said it was patchouli, and the kids would turn up their noses and comment on how overbearing and awful it was. It was truly pervasive and terrible to my sensitive nose, and I could always tell when she was in the building. I did my best to steer clear of her. So I had this idea that patchouli was rank and powerful and horrid. I now know that whatever she was wearing, it was not pure patchouli, but some foul stuff likely full of synthetics and goodness only knows what else.

In the late 80s with the nouveau hippie movement, I started smelling something wonderful and it reminded me of my childhood. I learned that this was patchouli, and I fell in love. Deeply in love. The deep, rich, carnal earthiness of it has enchanted and entranced me ever after. Since then, I've collected many different patchoulis from many sources and love most of them dearly and abidingly. I use patchouli in many of my fragrances, and it shares an exalted space in my heart with frankincense and cardamom, both of which I also collect from as many sources as possible. 

So now I would say Patchouli as a strong ingredient in perfume has come a long way, and further that this project has helped rehabilitate its reputation among a wide number of perfumistas.  Congratulations to the winners.  The little silver flacons will be on their way to you once I get a mailing  address.  (We can communicate at the gmail address again.)

Above first photo "Magical Creatures" from Monica Miller, and the psychedelic bunny (referencing our patch test selves) from her too, on the Perfumer Pharmer site, where you can access much more on every one of the above 13 perfumes and the myriad of brave perfume testers who gave their noses over to the blind test.  The paisley fractal pattern antique black glass button image is from Bower Bird, fascinating for those of us who like vintage buttons.