L’Artisan Parfumeur Vanilia

Still on the look out for another lovely vanilla. Preferably one that can replace Spiritueuse Double Vanille because I refuse to be shackled to a limited edition fragrance–even if it’s awesome. This time, it’s Vanilia by L’Artisan Parfumeur, a pretty green vanilla plant of a thing. Vanilia

In Bottle: Sweet, green vanilla with a floral mixture and a nice white woodsy scent. Nothing at all what I was hoping but still very pleasant.

Applied: Sweet vanilla with a topper that reminds me of sweet powder and fruits. Not too sweet, in fact the sweetness is really subdued and appropriately used and the fruits are a pleasant blend that recedes into the background rather quickly. You won’t get a toothache from this. As Vanilia settles down, it releases a pleasant waft of green floral and spice mixed with a pleasant smoky floral. Very strange mix but it works out really well. Vanilia is a fantastic morpher as it’s one of the nicest smelling vanillas with a rich and complex composition. It is not your run-of-the-mill gourmand vanilla with the fruity, bubbly, candy personality. This is a sophisticated vanilla. The airy greenness mixed with the very pleasant ambery powder vanilla adds a great dimension to this fragrance.

Extra: L’Artisan Parfumeur is a niche house established in 1976s and based in Paris. Vanilia was released in 1978.

Design: Vanilia is bottled in L’Artisan Parfumeur’s now iconic seven sided glass bottle. It has a nice weight to it, looks pleasant–if somewhat sparse to me–but the real show stopper is truly the juice inside.

Fragrance Family: Spicy Fresh

Notes: Fruit, rose, jasmine, amber, patchouli, vanilla, sandalwood.

For some reason, Vanilia is a very difficult to find fragrance for me. No stores carry L’Artisan Parfumeur in my general area and my usual haunts online don’t have this fragrance represented.

Reviewed in This Post: Vanilia, 2007, Eau de Toilette.


Montale White Musk

When people think “musk” their thoughts tend to gravitate toward the animalistic musks like civet then they wrinkle their noses thinking about intrepid perfumers chasing down civet cats in the jungles of the world. Very few fragrances still use naturally derived musks. Most of them are synthetics these days and hardly smell anything near animalistic. Montale White Musk

In Bottle: Bright, pure and clean. White Musk smells like lightly perfumed water. It’s airy, translucent and fleeting like the molecules of some fabulous fragrance is carried by the wind to you. With that having been said White Musk, due to its nature, is extremely light and fleeting. Even in the vial, after a couple of sniffs, it becomes hard to detect.

Applied: Very, very, very light. I would have to bathe in this stuff to get anywhere close to the average strength that other fragrances enjoy. White Musk is a blank (in a good way), refreshing, powdery scent. Sort of reminiscent of baby powder but a great deal prettier with hints of sweet florals in it. Think luxury powder in a gilded silver case. It’s also soapy and very clean. I don’t feel like this fragrance is meant to be an entity of its own. Rather it’s a natural scent enhancer and the fragrance is just so happy, light, perky and soft.

Extra: Montale is a French niche perfume house headed by Pierre Montale. The house focuses on agar wood (oud) fragrances. They also have a line of regular perfume from which White Musk is a part of.

Design: Montale’s fragrances come in a metal bottle with a signature look. I have yet to actually hold one in my hand but the design itself is iconic for Montale fragrances and it looks attractive enough. At least it’s a step beyond the standard rectangle glass bottle affair that most niche houses would swear by.

Fragrance Family: Fresh

Notes: White musk, violet, ylang-ylang, geranium.

Probably one of the more common misconceptions about perfumes is the discussion on musk. A lot of people associate the word “musk” with dirty, sweaty, or stinky smells. Musk is often used as a scent fixative in many perfumes. These days there are thousands of synthetic musks in use that don’t smell at all sweaty, stinky or animalistic. Synthetic musks are great examples. With their usually clean, almost invisible sheerness, that makes them great fixatives for fresher, cleaner, modern fragrances.

Reviewed in This Post: White Musk, 2010, Eau de Parfum.


Annick Goutal Gardenia Passion

I suppose spring is coming to my nose, that means breaking out the florals and readying the fresh for summer. Gardenia has a sweet fragrance with that similar greenness to it that I notice in a lot of flowers. To me, it’s a crisp, young reminder of warming temperatures and budding leaves. Then you have Annick Goutal’s Gardenia Passion, the fragrance with the deceptive name. Gardenia Passion

In Bottle: Gardenia Passion is tuberose. Predominantly tuberose. So tuberose, in fact, that in the bottle I smell nothing but tuberose. Tuberose, tuberose, tuberose. This is so tuberose in the bottle that it beats out By Kilian’s Beyond Love. Though it lacks the finesse and gentle greenness of Beyond Love.

Applied: Strange sour, almost vinegar-like, note upon spray that lingers for a few minutes after application. That sour note is mixing with the sweetness in this fragrance and the powerful hit of tuberose. This makes for a pretty wickedly strange blend of sweet and sour florals. The sourness does go away eventually, letting tuberose shine through. I’m searching the murky waters of Gardenia Passion for its namesake but aside from that sweetness–which could be from the tuberose too–there’s not a whole lot of it to be had. I feel a little cheesed, honestly, because a fragrance named for gardenia should either have gardenia in it or at least have notes that illustrate the concept of gardenia. With the way this is going, it should have been called Tuberose Passion. Or Tuberose to Eternity. Nothing wrong with tuberose, just, where’s the gardenia? I get no mention of that elusive gardenia on dry down either. It’s just lighter tuberose with a vegetal background.

Extra: Now, I like tuberose. I think it’s an interesting blend of screech and whisper. Tuberose is a sweet, almost tropical scent. Sometimes, people mispronounce its name saying, “toober-rose“. It is actually, “toob-rose“. As for Annick Goutal, the company was started in 1980 by Annick Goutal and had a skin cream line prior to branching off into fragrances.

Design: Placed in a beautifully textured bottle with a ribbon tied to the neck. From that ribbon dangles a paper label with the name of the fragrance and house on it. The cap is colored gold, very lightweight, but comes off the sprayer nozzle very smoothly. The sprayer works just fine.

Fragrance Family: Soliflore

Notes: Orange blossom, tuberose, jasmine, gardenia, herbs.

It’s almost funny that this should be a soliflore, given the fact that its focus is on the wrong flower. But maybe that was the point. Maybe I’m just smell blind to whatever gardenia was used in this fragrance. Maybe I’m just nuts about tuberose and it is the only flower I will ever smell again.

Reviewed in This Post: Gardenia Passion, 2010, Eau de Parfum.