Posts filed under 'Guest Blogger'
Please welcome my other contributing writer all the way from Sweden, Tove Solander! She will cover the much neglected Smell-alikes section of Aromascope.
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I’m taking up on Ina’s great idea of spotting “Smell-alikes”, and for my first post the smell-alikes chosen are Robert Piguet’s Bandit and Cabochard by Grès. It’s no wonder they’re scent siblings. Here are the notes I’ve found for each, with common notes in bold:
Bandit: bergamot, gardenia, aldehyde, jasmine, clove, rose, iris, musk, castoreum, patchouli, vetiver, ambergris, leather, woody notes.
Cabochard: bergamot, mandarin, galbanum, ylang ylang, jasmine, rose, clove, oakmoss, tobacco, musk, iris, sandalwood, vetiver, leather, castoreum, patchouli, labdanum.
Reviewers on Basenotes seem to agree that Cabochard is like a lighter and more wearable Bandit. For me, it’s more like the other way around. This may be because I have the “real deal”, i.e. the vintage version, of Cabochard (at least I think my sample is vintage), while Bandit is the contemporary eau de parfum, which is supposed to be softer and more floral (with the pure parfum being the softest and prettiest) than the sharper and harsher eau de toilette (which I’d love to try).
I remember when I first smelled Bandit eau de parfum, I thought it was unbearably sour and sharp and musty and herbal, a real old-fashioned scent. When I revisited it this year I fell in love, wrote a rave review in my blog, and changed my Basenotes rating from one star to five! In the company of Cabochard, Bandit is the feminine and pretty one, yet I don’t find Cabochard unwearable or old-fashioned at all, that’s how much my taste has changed – or developed, if you like. They are definitely sisters: dry, green, bad girl scents with leather undertones and light floral overtones. Bandit is softer and more powdery, while Cabochard is sharper and drier. They share a sort of juicy sourness, without being citrusy, but the sourness of Cabochard is more pungent, more like fresh-cut grass, while Bandit is almost sweet-and-sour. Speaking in colours, I envision Bandit as a bright yet creamy light green/yellow, and Cabochard as more of an acid green/yellow with specks of brown.
Bandit smells like it could give you hay fever, but don’t envision old, yellow hay, envision still green straw. Straw and pollen in the air and perhaps a hint of florals but very green florals, like dandelions. After about half an hour it develops this amazing warmness, like warm skin. I’m guessing this is the leather. It does not smell like a horse or a cow, but it feels like one, the body heat radiating from a large animal, indicating its presence. Or, if you’d like to get down and dirty: a tumble in the hay – or in the meadow - the sweetish smell of sunburnt skin and fresh sweat mingling with crushed stems.
When I first smelled my Cabochard sample I thought it was a dead ringer for Bandit, only denser and more hardcore, but smelling them side by side I discern some differences. Cabochard is the greenness of Bandit without the hay fever and animals, it’s a field or a forest (deciduous) rather than a farm. In the opening I get the vintage-style bitterness of oakmoss, but not very strongly, not a monster chypre (then again, considering my first reaction to Bandit, it might just be that my bittersweet meter has gone bananas, perfumista style). It’s cooler than Bandit, the level of coolness you could expect from a green scent. It’s also drier, the way lichen is dry, or wood, that’s where the brown hues come into the picture. It does have some amount of soft, powdery sweetness though, especially in the drydown, it’s nowhere near, say, a hardcore masculine vetiver in bitter greenness.
I conducted this experiment by putting one scent on each wrist, then swapping wrists and doing it all over again. One thing this taught me is that I prefer the scent I smell first, and/or the scent on my left wrist. When I smelled Bandit first I found Cabochard too sharp and thin, and when I smelled Cabochard first I found Bandit overly sweet, almost like dandelion-flavoured candy, if that’s fathomable. Whichever I smelled first had the perfect “Bandit scent” as it is in my mind. In the end, however, Bandit is the winner because of the wonderful animal warmth it radiates, while Cabochard is a little flatter and fades faster. Now I only wonder what outcome this experiment would have had if I had compared Bandit eau de toilette or vintage Bandit to the reformulated Cabochard?
March 13th, 2007
Marina and I decided to bring in some testosterone to our blogs, once again, for some hormonal balance. We recruited our dear husbands to undertake yet another project. This time - blind testing of 5 well known scents. They pretty much knew nothing about them - names, houses, notes. I must also add it took mine quite a bit of effort (which I publicly praise him for), and I got quite a few looks of utter despair and frustration but he made it! *Vigorous applause* Here you go, folks! I hereby present to you the olfactory ramblings of Mr. Aromascope.
Scent No 1. After this dies down a bit it smells distinctly like some sweaty old guy on the train who hasn’t washed in weeks. The kind whose fragrance has a significant and undeniable radius which prevents anyone from sitting nearby. I’m also picking up a hint of weak bladder. It doesn’t seem to improve and the old sweat smell lingers, leading me to wonder who would want to wear this other than people dressing up as bums for Halloween.
My comments: funny how he goes right to the drydown. Smart man. Um, I wear it, darling (and not for Halloween)! The scent in question is none other than the infamous Muscs Koublai Khan by Serge Lutens.
Scent No 2. My first impression of this was that it smelled like a shower, which drew a puzzled look from Ina, and understandably, because what does a shower smell like? Giving it more thought, it reminded me of those deodorants with names like Shower Fresh, Fresh Aire, or Spring Fresh that bear little resemblance to anything in nature. People who like Ivory Soap would probably love this. A second spray hit me with “baby wipes” at first, but after that it was back to post-shower products.
My comments: ahem. How shall I say this in order to make it least offensive (for Mr. Aromascope, you just undermined the entire foundation of perfumery). Forgive the poor man, folks. This is Chanel No 5 he’s talking about. Oy.
Scent No 3. This struck me as unpleasantly medicinal at first, then indistinctly stinky for a short time, and finally a settling into a burnt wood smell that I kind of like. At one point I thought it reminded me a little of a musty cellar, but that passed. The longer this one sits, the more I like it.
My comments: now we’re talking! I knew he’d fall for this one. After all, it’s “the dark balm for Marina’s Mongolian soul”. Caron Yatagan.
Scent No 4. This is some kind of fresh melon on steroids. I almost licked it to see what it tastes like, but thought better of it. There’s more to it, I’m sure, but my olfactory brain cells are still rather undeveloped. Is there a smelling course available for husbands of perfume fanatics?
My comments: he’s making progress! Melon it is not but delicious it is - Donna Karan Be Delicious for women. As a side note, pumpkin, do not lick perfume. Ever.
Scent No 5. Okay, I think I’m allergic to this one. Either that or I’m just smelled out. It made me sneeze and every time I breath it in, my head feels funny. To avoid a perfume-induced stroke I won’t spend much time on this one, but it smells something like baby powder and something else I can’t identify.
Okay, do I get my Metrosexual merit badge yet?
My comments: huh? Baby powder? Sneezing? Oh, so when I’ve worn it many times before, you never got such allergic reaction? If anybody is about to have a stroke that’d be me for my all time favorite perfume just got majorly bashed by my own husband. Hrmph. For the record, that “something else you can’t identify” is musk (animalic musk, to be precise) for the perfume is Musc Ravageur by Frederic Malle. As for the Metrosexual merit badge, let the readers be the judge, honey.
Image source: www.corbis.com
August 11th, 2006
Ina’s nose is completely out of commission, so congested by this nasty bug that she didn’t know how she could write a post tonight. Of her five senses, the one she needs most to run this blog has betrayed her, leaving her in a sad, fragrance-free world, where perfumes have lost their essence, and rich, dark chocolate tastes like mush.
Enter the husband! Who better to chivalrously save his wife’s perfume blog than the guy who thinks every scent smells like watermelon or raspberries? If smell were one of the senses upon which we depended to make our way safely through the world — like sight or hearing — my helping Ina and her impaired olfactory system along would amount to the blind leading the blind. You perfumaniacs seem like nice people, but I haven’t the faintest clue what you — or my wife — are talking about half the time. I’ve taken a stab at reading some of the perfume blogs, before and after Aromascope came on the scene, and it never takes long before I get the same feeling as when I’m caught in the middle of a rapid-fire conversation between Ina and her family. In case you weren’t aware, they’re Russian. I’m just an American kid from the suburbs who doesn’t remember any high school Spanish.
All of that aside, I will do my best to review the fragrance Ina would have tonight, had she not lost her senses (or one of them, anyway): Kolnisch Juchten by Parfums Regence. A common phrase heard when Ina has me smell something is “That reminds me of something,” but I can rarely place what it is. This one clearly puts me in the North Woods of Minnesota, sitting in front of a birch-wood fire as I did on many a cool evening in the summers of my childhood. Others without a similar connection might not get this, but it’s a very comforting smell for me, and fitting since we’re heading up there this weekend. I’ve been told it also has leather notes, which I’m picking up. It seems old to me, and something about it brings to mind my grandfather’s den, full of leather-bound books left dusty and unused for years after his death. As I remember it — and it has been over twenty years — it was a shadowy room with lots of dark wood, what seemed like a giant, monolithic desk, and all the trappings of an intellectual masculinity that is rare in today’s world.
I just read Marina’s post on Kolnisch Juchten and am gratified to see I wasn’t completely off the mark in my perceptions. Interesting that it is a very old fragrance. We may differ on my last observation, though. It could just be the cabin on my mind, but the drydown really does give me the distinct impression of lake water, with just a slight hint of fish!
Image source: www.galen-frysinger.com
July 10th, 2006
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