I Am Trash by Etat Libre D’Orange

It’s odd how good memories attach themselves to bad smells. For me, years of trashy holidays to trashy holiday resorts have indelibly linked the smell of sub-standard drainage infrastructure to top-notch fun. So when Summer rolls round and I get a whiff of sewage, I get a little bump of nostalgia. Sick, but true.

I remember, when I was about 8, I’d go and stay with my cousins in France in the Summer holidays. Oddly, the scent I recall from those times is a very specific French-cheese, overripe fruit smell – not unpleasant. Bruised peaches – sticky, homely and comforting.

With its aesthetic roots in decomposition and wriggling worminess, I expected to get something similar from Les Fleurs du Dechet  / I Am Trash – an overripe, fruity, earthy scent, deep and interesting. I was ready for it.

But what’s grown out of the months of anticipation is something more unexpected.

On first spray there’s a spray of fresh green apple peel, as if the fruit’s being cut up right in front of you. Within seconds, the apple turns to a vibrant, dripping juicy mango. And while you’re getting your head around that, it changes again to a supersweet pineapple. It’s quite the ride around the fruit salad.

Over the next half hour, things calm down a bit, and we take a slower, more measured step – floral notes begin to appear, blending smoothly with soft strawberry tones. This perfume’s nice. It’s EASY. It might even be a crowd-pleaser.

But then, like a weed pushing up, Les Fleurs du Dechet / I Am Trash grows out of the benign and becomes something wilder and untamed. To call it a dry-down feels wrong, because it gets richer and riper; the fruit turns, growing ever-sweeter, greener and fermenting. It takes time, but it rots as it blossoms.

And then, just as things were getting interesting, it fades into a pretty skin scent.

I’m confused. I don’t know if I’m disappointed or enchanted.

There’s incredible artistry in the opening. How can a scent be designed to spin through so many distinctive fruits in seconds? And the way that freshness gives way so fast to more luscious, mulchy tones is remarkable; just as in Ogilvy’s time-lapse video, we experience decay in hyper-speed.

And then it all just…disappears.

Maybe that’s the point.

You can try and buy I Am Trash / Les Fleurs du Dechet at Bloom Perfumery in Covent Garden. 50ml EDP for £82, 100ml for £115. 

Upcycled and zero-waste notes:

Akigalawood  

Apple  

Atlas Cedar 

Iso-E-Super  

Rose Absolute 

Sandalore

It’s a monster! – Tyrannosaurus Rex from Zoologist

T-Rex on Bloom’s go-to NEW shelf

It’s in the trees…it’s coming 

T-Rex bursts into the clearing meaning business. There’s a crash of deep dark woods, along with a cloying sweetness; a rich, meaty opening, dripping with the metallic edge of blood. And then the fire starts. It crackles and spits; burnt fruits caramelising with charred BBQ. There are flowers here – champaca and ylang ylang, along with fresh green saplings – but they’re crushed underfoot as the fire takes over.

The fruitiness holds, but it’s overwhelmed with smoke, underpinned by a menacing, animalic leather. This is the T-Rex as the asteroid hits, the volcanoes erupt and it all goes to shit. Things are getting quite exciting.

Then suddenly….all is calm. T-Rex makes a bold entrance, but after crashing onto the scene, things start to level out swiftly. After just minutes, it melds into a super-smoky, multi-faceted fragrance.

And as the drydown progresses, it becomes almost warm and cuddly – with charred sandalwood, beauty emerges alongside the beast. The monster turns into a gentle giant, soft but testosterone-heavy, sweet with just the undertone of menace.

THE NOTES

Top:  Bergamot, Black Pepper, Fir balsam, Laurel Leaf, Neroli, Nutmeg

Heart: Champaca, Geranium, Jasmine, Osmanthus, Rose, Ylang ylang

Base: Resins, Cade, Cedar, Civet, Frankincense, Leather, Patchouli, Sandalwood, Vanilla

Cretaceous imaginings aside, this is the scent of journeying home after a festival; the scuzzy scent of last night’s rum oozing from your pores into your leather jacket, your hair reeking of campfire.

T-Rex is everything I expected. I wish it had been everything I’d hoped, too. It was always going to be challenging, but I SO wanted to be able to wear it – how cool would it be, when asked, to say you’re wearing T-Rex?

I can’t pull this off. Others could. When it comes to Zoologist, I’m definitely a hummingbird kind of person. Or maybe moth. No, hummingbird. Moth. Dammit, will someone please just buy me both?!

You can try and buy T-Rex at T-Rex at Bloom in Covent Garden, £175 for 60ml extrait de parfum.

 

Over the Chocolate Shop by 4160 Tuesdays – review

Over the Chocolate Shop from 4160 Tuesdays

Another new 4160 Tuesdays fragrance. Another blind buy. I told myself that I could always pass it on. I don’t NEED a chocolate scent.

I don’t NEED to eat a whole chocolate orange, either. But as I’m polishing off that delicious flakey core (and it is the most delicious part), I know what I need doesn’t really matter. Chocolate is desire and impulse and excess, and all of that’s bottled in this scent.

Over the Chocolate Shop is indie perfumer Sarah McCartney’s latest incarnation of one of her earliest fragrances, made for her goddaughter who lived in a house on top of a chocolate shop. It’s a reworking with superior ingredients including cocoa extract, hazelnut CO2 extract, vanilla absolute and coffee extract. She says she’s ‘happy with it now’. I’m glad. It makes me happy too. 

Although it’s so cocoa-supercharged it’ll have Augustus Gloop pulling his trunks on, this chocolate experience is no guilt-inducing Dairy-milk binge. Over the Chocolate Shop is grown-up, quality stuff. A proper gourmand, and like White Queen, indulgent without the sweetness.

Like an 85% cocoa solids bar from Rabot Estate, you only need a little bit to feel satisfied.

Zero calories. No regrets.

Batch number 1 sold out in under 24 hours. Batch number 2 is macerating right now, from £35 for 30ml. Be quick – it’ll go like hot chocolate. 

What to wear in Summer – top scents for the beach and beyond

ONE TO WEAR IN A HEATWAVE You Or Someone Like You by Etat Libre D’Orange

When the mercury’s rising, this scent is like taking a dip in a mojito. It bursts with freshness – lovely ripped mint leaves mixed up with citrussy zest and stirred together with ice. After a few minutes the frosty edge melts off and a beautiful pinky rose starts to emerge. For such a top-note-dominant fragrance this has (at the risk of sounding like a Colgate commercial) freshness that lasts and lasts. And I love its deviation from the heaviness – both in formulation and connotation – that so many of ELDO’s scents are burdened with. Effortlessly cool.

£82 for 50ml, £115 for 100ml from Bloom

ONE TO WEAR HOLDING A BUCKET AND SPADE What I Did On My Holidays by 4160 Tuesdays

This is a message in a bottle straight from the British seaside. Every sniff rockets me back to sticky 1980s summers, mostly spent buried up to my neck on a Lyme Regis beach. I’ve never experienced a perfume that evokes such a true sense of nostalgia. This is the scent of the seaside shop where you go sandy-footed to buy your crabbing nets and your lilo. Mint rock, vanilla ice cream, coconut suntan lotion and fresh salty air…it’s sweet in every way.

£15 for 9ml – £90 for 100ml from 4160 Tuesdays

ONE TO WEAR WITH A BIKINI  Soleil Blanc by Tom Ford

This is a super-sexy scent, perfectly mimicking the sultriness of sunkissed skin. It’s suntan lotion on overdrive; beautiful coconut oil blended with blooming white flowers, radiating melanin-production and fun. A slightly cheap (sadly not in price) but glamorous scent, designed to pair perfectly with red lipstick on the beach – in Saint Tropez, not St Ives. Save it for sundown.

£139 for 50ml, £207 for 100ml from AllBeauty (amongst others)

ONE TO WEAR AL FRESCO Pure Azure by Phaedon

I’m desperately after a full bottle of Pure Azure. It’s so delicious – a big, beautiful, complex fig fragrance, full of lovely warm orange blossom and sun-drenched florals. According to the lovely guys at Bloom, the neroli at its heart is ‘derived through steam distillation of orange tree blossom as opposed to much spicier and honeyed absolute obtained through CO2 extraction’. However, they’ve done it, the result is gorgeously and truly Mediterranean. This is one to be savoured under grape vines and warm dark skies, at a table of mouth-watering mezze that keeps coming until you say stop. A real wrist-snuffler.

£112 for 100ml from Bloom

Fathom V from Beaufort London

 

“Full fathom five thy father lies
Of his bones are coral made
Those are pearls that were his eyes
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange”

Beaufort’s Come Hell or High Water collection is dark, moody and fuelled by testosterone. Inspired by Britain’s seafaring history, the fragrances – 1805 Tonnerre, Couer de Noir, Vi et Armis and Lignum Vitae – are full of adventure and high treason, wth a yo ho ho (and dare I say it, a bottle of rum) thrown in for good measure.

But then there’s a fifth – Fathom V – a siren that sucked me in from the moment its top came off in Bloom in Covent Garden.

It boasts an overwhelming notes list – blackcurrant, green leaves, juniper, tangerine, cumin, ginger, mimosa, jasmine, thyme, black pepper, ylang ylang, lily, amber, patchouli, atlas cedar, vetiver, moss, frankincense, sea salt – this is a shrieking chord of weirdness that just….sings. Maybe it’s the olfactory equivalent of jazz. I’ve never understood jazz.

And don’t for a second think the spices or amber bring warmth to this fragrance. This is an icy cold scent; a frosty white lily swirling down, down into the depths.

Although you’d expect this to be a defined marine fragrance, Fathom V is super-green; it’s freshly-cut stems from a flower shop and the most accurate representation of lilies I’ve ever experienced in a perfume.

And despite the long list of ingredients, Fathom V is surprisingly linear. Where you might anticipate a rollicking voyage from opening to drydown, the promised ‘sea-change’ doesn’t occur. Instead, every moment is constant, but deep and weird and impossible to explain.

I appreciate the grammatical aberration in describing this as totally unique. But it is. Totally unique. And I don’t want anyone else to wear this, ever.

This one’s mine.

White Queen from 4160 Tuesdays with CaFleureBon

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”

Created by 4160 Tuesdays to celebrate CaFleureBon’s 8th anniversary, White Queen is also one quarter of 4160T’s Spring Scents collection – a set of limited editions, crowd-funded by fans of the fragrance house.

I ordered 9mls of each, and eagerly testing the four, I wrinkled my nose a little on first sniff of White Queen. Odd. Spicy incense with bagfuls of fruit. Not for me.

Still, three out of four ain’t bad, and I’d read enough enthusings to know someone’d be up for a swap. I could tell it was special. Shame it wasn’t my type.

AND THEN I KEPT COMING BACK TO IT. Ah, here we go.

Having initially written it off as deep and interesting but not for me, just a couple of wears later, it’d taken off its glasses and shaken its hair out. I was hooked.

Thing is, White Queen is one of the finest examples of a non-linear scent I’ve experienced, with three distinct stages of development. And that intriguing complexity is what rocketed it out of the friend-zone and into my heart.

It starts off boozy and woody, like a rum cocktail spilt on an old bar-top. There’s something faintly medicinal there too.

As the booze develops, the fruitiness comes in, along with warming spices. This is no light and breezy spring scent – this is a Dickensian Christmas in a bottle. There’s a marshmallowy-ness there too. This must be how my nose understands the Methyl Laitone, which others have picked up as a creamy note.

Some hours later, it all of a sudden turns very wet and earthy (this must be down to the vetiver and maybe the veramoss), just like sticking your nose down a rabbit hole. How topsy-turvy. How clever.

Actually, I think it’s one of Sarah McCartney’s masterpieces. Well worth a try.

And then another one, just in case.

 

Truth and Beauty in Eden’s Garden from 4160 Tuesdays

Join the 4160 Tuesdays News group on facebook, and you step into a world of temptation.

Populated by true passionistas for all things Sarah McCartney (the house’s Nose), their enthusings have turned my handful-sized collection of 4160T scents into a fragrant drawerload.

So it’s apt that Sarah’s latest venture, fan-funded via Indiegogo, is called Truth and Beauty in Eden’s Garden; a collection of four Spring scents. And the hum on the 4160T facebook group has been building for weeks.

Silk scarf to complement the range, designed by James Skinner of Dalliance & Noble. Image from 4160 Tuesday’s Indiegogo page.

That hum turned into a buzz I couldn’t resist. Four 9ml spring scents plucked from the tree and eagerly awaited.

Will report back.