REVIEW Replica Memory Set from Maison Margiela

The Memory Box by Replica, Maison Margiela

UNDER THE LEMON TREE

A strong, rindy lemon with pith against a green verbena background and a buzz of lavender honey. Soapy too, which gives it a not-unpleasant sprinkle of Fairy-magic. As the lemon softens and sweetens, a lush, herby middle notes grows, sunny and joyous. As it dries down, the labdanum honey lavender note gets a little spicy, resting on a woody, white musk base.

Sense of place – 6

WHISPERS IN THE LIBRARY

Fruity beeswax polish with the faint haze of fly spray above shiny, dark woods. The rich, woody accord gradually fades to something more aged and dusty, translating to a dry, humming vanilla note which lingers nostalgically. Like sticking your nose in the spine of a battered hymn book.

Sense of place – 9

FLOWER MARKET

As generic a floral as it gets. Less of a visit to a flower market and more of a visit to the M&S ‘smellies’ department. No fresh-cut green stems, no riot of colour, just your standard rose and white flower mix for mum.

Sense of place – 2

JAZZ CLUB

A cosy, woody tobacco-vanilla scent with a good few fingers of rum. This opens citrussy with a well-rounded leather note, which is warm and welcoming, like a battered, studded highback armchair. The tobacco is very wearable – it’s fragrant and fresh from the pouch with no hint of ashtray, and the rum is the kind that warms rather than intoxicates. But there are none of the unsettling chord changes you might expect from a jazz club. Linear and easy-wearing…nice.

Sense of place – 7

AT THE BARBERS 

The squeaky-clean scent of freshly-scrubbed man. This is a blended medley of laundry musks with a big dollop of ‘blue’ shower gel. It’s not a modern scent – there’s a nostalgically nineties note which adds a bit of a Lynx effect (minus the hormones). After the initial soapy hit, it dries down to reveal a soft lavender with a gently spicy edge. Inherently masculine, but universally wearable.

 Sense of place – 8

SAILING DAY

A classic marine, with no sunny or sandy notes to beach it. Blue, fresh and outdoorsy. Like many sea scents, there’s a synthetic edge which gives a hint of swimming pool as much as seawater. And although this a clean, fresh air fragrance, it includes a big clump of seaweed; briney and sharp. As it dries down, a light musky base emerges from the waves while the bracing sharpness sails on.

Sense of place – 7

LAZY SUNDAY MORNING. 

Fresh-linen musks and rose. Fabric conditioner. Pear. Aldehydes. Not worth staying bed for.

Sense of place – 5

BY THE FIRESIDE

Roasty and cosy, this is the scent of toasted marshmallows and fragrant woodsmoke. This has none of the firey danger of smokey scents like Zoologist’s T-Rex or anything from Beaufort. Rather, it’s a place next to a pub fire; the kind with horsebrasses over the mantle (without the stale hoppy smell). This opens sweeter than expected (there’s that vanilla again), and becomes more so, with a nice spicy edge of pepper and cloves. Then it gets sweeter. And sweeter. And you’re wishing they’d chucked a few more logs on the hearth to give it the woodiness it needs to balance. Then, pooff! The fire’s out and you’re left with a vanilla and ISO E Super skin scent.

Sense of place – 7

SPRINGTIME IN A PARK

Fresh pear and fresh air. This is a squeaky-clean shampoo fruity-floral with little more to it. A light pink scent (visually and olfactorily), it’s definitely a spring floral rather than a summer one. Perfectly pleasant and disappointing for it. Smells like Superdrug.

Sense of place – 3

BEACH WALK

 This is not the scent of a beach, but a scent for the beach. Blooming on warm skin, it’s indulgently floral; waves of heliotrope and jasmine breezing over coconut sunscreen. There’s no fresh salty air to place this beside the seaside. But it’s warm and sunny and wafts little puffs of happy holiday vibes. A poor woman’s Tom Ford’s Soleil Blanc.

Sense of place – 5

A stellar performance – Experimentum Crucis from Etat Libre D’Orange

ELDO’s latest release – and limited edition – is billed as a scent that transcends the laws of physics, because “love and the trail of a scent are stronger than gravity and time”. Add a sexy trailer with a rousing soundtrack, and it all looks very exciting.

But does it smell as exciting?

Spoiler alert – no, it doesn’t.

Ok, so the bottle is special…

As for the juice? Here are the notes:

Apple, Cumin, Lychee; Honey, Jasmine Absolute, Rose NeoAbsolute, Akigalawood, Musk, Patchouli.

The space odyssey opens with rose rose rose. Lychee? Maybe. I don’t pick it up as an individual note, but there’s something very ‘Thai’ about this rose which is where the lychee may be hiding. Its pairing with the apple makes it rather pretty and very pink. This is a light and flighty kind of rose, not a rich and sexy red.

People have described the rose as being animalic, perhaps thanks to the cumin and honey notes in supporting roles.  But as it dries down, you realise it doesn’t have a ‘living quality’. Instead, it’s dry and thin – a pretty facsimile – a silk rose gathering dust.

Much has been said about its incredible sillage and staying power, and that much is true. For something so delicate, it’s impressively pervasive. I squirted mine once, then could smell the sample coming a mile off. Props to the creator, it’s a technical feat.

But then, so’s the 3rd Lord of the Rings film. And like that, Experimentium Crucis goes on forever, but doesn’t really do anything. It’s too linear to justify its longevity, hanging around like a just-tolerable smell.

Some of the guys at Bloom reckon this is a better version of I Am Trash. I disagree. Les Fleurs du Dechet had a cool development, brief as it was.

Experimentium Crucis is extraordinarily good value if you want the Ariston of roses. But it’s too dry and acrid to be a five-star fragrance. Not sticky or jammy or deep or dark or surprising; just clinical and cold.

It’ll stay with me a long time. But only literally.

 

 

 

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. 

Joy by Dior – review

So dull, Dior couldn’t be arsed to come up with a name for it

They say:

“Constructed with multiple nuances, a myriad of facets that lead to an expression that is clear and self-evident…”

I say:

“Yeah, I have nothing to say about it either”.

A new concept in fragrance? – Floral Street scents review

Making my way through Covent Garden after a sneaky trip to Bloom, I passed by ‘a new concept in fragrance’ – Floral Street.

Ok, ok, so I went in cynical.

The ‘new concept’ is eight eau de parfums, ranging from London Poppy at the light and breezy end to Black Lotus at the ‘dark and challenging’ end, all of which can be tried at ‘experience stations’ – platforms with testers laid out. They’ve got shower gels too. And floral lino.

But the staff were warm and welcoming. And on request for samples, were quick to offer me whatever I fancied, as 1.5ml tester sprays. Nice service.

I picked a couple I thought would be most interesting – Ylang ylang Espresso, from the middle of the range, and Black Lotus from the far end.

Ylang Ylang Espresso

Ylang Ylang Espresso has the perfume world’s worst name (I’d rather boast of wearing Zoologist’s ‘Beaver’). But its mix of tangerine, sichuan Pepper, rose, jasmine, tiramisu accord, patchouli, ylang ylang, espresso beans, cocoa beans and guaicwood ain’t all bad. The coffee is rich, creamy and chocolatey, without being too sweet. It’s got a rough edge that occasionally stops it going into pudding territory, and longevity is excellent. It’s best during drydown when an extra soft muskiness emerges every now and then. It’s a nice one to catch a whiff off, if too poorly-blended to wear.

Black Lotus

Onto Black Lotus. This one has an ok first-spritz appeal – a quick blast of spicy fruit. But things go wrong almost immediately. It does a quick pass through generic blokes’ aftershave territory, then heads straight to Horriblesville. It’s musky, peppery rose with a hint of saffron. But above all – ashtray.

Jeez, this stuff is rank. It’s palatable on a strip, but spray it on your skin for the full horrorshow. This reeks like a Friday night in Bromley Firkin pre smoking ban – sickly sweet Impulse body spray mixed with 10 ex-Marlboro lights. ‘Narcotic flowers’ my arse. This perfume’s like going twos on a fag with a cheerleader and stubbing it out in a cherry jelly.

No competition for the challenge of the indies, the decadance of the luxuries, or the pure choice of the High Street, I’m not really sure what Floral Street’s USP is. Fun lino can only get you so far.

Ylang Ylang Espresso and Black Lotus are available for £55 for 50ml eau du parfums from floralstreet.com. Or from the Floral Street store in Covent Garden, which is on King Street. Not Floral Street (SMH).

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.