The Nose Plays Funny Tricks

My love of the not-quite-feminine woody fragrance has been growing exponentially this winter. It's not that I'm not rocking some powdery vanilla scents or ambery roses, but some days it's all about bark, resinous sap and evergreen treetops.

Heeley's Cardinal isn't supposed to be in the evergreen category. The notes as listed on Luckyscents are incense, cistus, grey amber, patchouli, vetiver. Reviews all over the net talk about darkness and church. Being Jewish, I'm not exactly the biggest authority on such matters, but I swear, on my skin it was just pine. My skin has eaten every note and all the depth and left me with nothing but the memory of pine-scented liquid soap from my childhood (to which I developed a terrible itchy allergy). It wasn't so bad once I layered it with my beloved Anat Fritz, though. It added a much needed dimension.

Woody fragrances are perfumes that I try to share with my husband. Sometimes with interesting results. The first time I tried Anat Fritz he quite liked it on me. What's not to like? Lavender, cedar, sandalwood and a few other dry woody notes. I've talked about it here and have gotten a full bottle that I enjoy very much. I still need to decant it into a spray bottle, so I can use it on my sweaters and coats, but in the meantime I enjoy wearing it. A few weeks ago, I asked my husband to wear it. I figured that he'd enjoy it just as much as his beloved Gris Clair.

The results were quite surprising. To my nose it was stunning. Lavender loves him. However, The Blond hated it. With a passion. He grew up on a dairy farm and has spent way too much time unloading wood shaving to line the ground for the cows, which was exactly what this fragrance made him think about. This is the farm boy who didn't flinch when smelling Ferme Tes Yeux. He just couldn't stand the cage lining note here.

It is no wonder that the first time I tried Diptyque's L'Eau Trois he had a similar reaction. So much so, that I washed it off immediately, not letting it go past the opening, which is very cedary in its most woody interpretation. But I had to try it again. I put it on one day when The Blond was still at work. The wood chips were quickly gone, replaced with this gorgeous aroma of sun-soaked Mediterranean shrubs and herbs. I could smell the dusty green quality of the green, the crispness of the twigs, and the feeling of a long sunny afternoons.

The beauty of this drydown was not lost on my husband. He approves a full bottle. Maybe I'll even share it with him.

(A big thank you to March from Perfume Posse for the sample and this new love)

On a Bad Note

I've mostly given up on trying to predict a reaction to a scent based on a single note (or notes) that I supposedly like or dislike. At this point, the only fragrance element that has never let me down is fig, and I was really hesitant in writing this sentence. Just watch how the next celeb to come out with a fragrance would be someone of a Kimberly Stewart caliber and the scent would be as comparable to great fig scents as Kim is to Stella McCartney.

But this isn't about figs. It's about oranges. Orange in its many incarnations appear as a note in many perfumes and defies classification. It can be a heady bloom or a rich fruit. It can smell sharp and spicy or comforting and sweet, candied or fresh. The options are many and there's an orange for everyone.

Apparently, it can also be cloyingly sweet. Lately, I've been coming across way too many of those. It began with Tocca's Stella. I've written about it here (scroll down a little to get to the part about Tocca). Stella's middle notes were of the orange creamsicle variety. It wasn't bad, just boring.


Next came Diptyque's Eau d'Elide. From the first whiff until the scent disintegrates and disappears completely (20-30 minutes later), the note I'm getting is of the candied orange peels my mother used to make. The listed note is of bitter orange combined with wild lavender and aromatic shrubs. On my skin, it moves from the very candied and sweet with a tinge of the bitterness of the peel to the soapy and cleaner lavender, but the sweetness is always there in the background. I don't hate it, but I don't like smelling like a candied anything.

The worst of the bunch to my nose is Dulcis in Fundo by Profumum. The listed notes are citrus fruits and Mexican Vanilla, and I'm willing to believe that this is all there is to this heavy, cloying pudding-like concoction. It smells completely edible, like an orange dessert, maybe a rich ice cream, until the vanilla cream drydown takes over (it lasts, close to the skin, for several hours).

I like vanilla in many fragrances and there are several rich gourmand scents that I enjoy. This isn't one of them. Smelling like a pastry shop isn't my idea of a good personal fragrance. I want something that blends several elements, that flirts with my personality as well as with my skin. Marshmallow simply doesn't make me feel sophisticated.