Guest Reviewer Of The Day: Claire Vukcevic aka ClaireV.

Claire Vukcevic is a part-time blogger on the blog Fragrancedaily.com and member of Basenotes (ClaireV). She spends money she doesn’t have on perfumes and then writes novel-length reviews of them. But she can’t help it. 

For other reviews by Claire Vukcevic you might want to check Basenotes or Fragrance Daily

Chypre Palatin by Parfums MDCI - Palatial Chypre

I am a big Henry James fan. Or at least I used to be until one day at school, my fifth form English Lit teacher pulled a copy of The Golden Bowl out of my school bag and gasped, “You’re reading this? Oh dear me, no – this is far too difficult for you. It will put you off James for life.” But I had already read The Golden Bowl. In fact, I had waltzed through it, not realizing that it was supposed to be difficult. But do you know what? From that day forward, I have struggled with Henry James. Once someone points out that something is difficult or complex, it becomes so. Like someone flipping that switch in your brain between unthinking enjoyment and sudden, painful self-awareness.

I love Chypre Palatin with my unthinking part of my brain. I know, on a purely intellectual level, that it is a Henry James type of scent – grand, complex, full of moving parts clicking into place. The notes list on Basenotes alone contains twenty separate notes, about two thirds of which I can’t pick up at all. It doesn’t matter. I slip into Chypre Palatin with a shiver of unadulterated pleasure every time, just as easily as my unthinking brain once slid into Henry James. 

Chypres are not usually so easy for me – there is something about them that require me to switch the analysis part of my brain on. Something about the bristling bergamot beginning and the bitter backbone of mosses has always called to mind that scene in Titantic where Rose sees a mother is tapping her six-year old daughter on the spine to get her to straighten up. I admire the formality of chypres, and their immensely ordered, complex structure, but I find it difficult to breathe easily within their confines. 

But Chypre Palatin, I am beginning to understand, is one of those strange hybrids between

chypre and oriental that manage to combine the grandeur of the former with the comfortable, sweet, oozing sensuality of the latter. A soft landing for the bitter Chypre DNA, so to speak. Chypre Palatin belongs, therefore, to a special group of perfumes that includes Puredistance M, Jubilation 25, Une Rose Chypree, and even Guerlain’s masterpiece, Vol de Nuit. What these perfumes have in common is a chypre-like dressing of moss and bergamot, and maybe some other green, bitter, or herbal accents (usually up top), but combined with a base that feels utterly oriental, so that the fragrance starts its journey in an upright position and ends it in a supine position on a soft divan covered with furs and minks in a Sultan’s harem. These chypre-oriental hybrids are massively built, bristling with ambition, and big enough feet to stand in (and tower over) several genres at once – chypre, oriental, leather, animalics, and so on. They are not so much unisex as they are omni-sex. 

Chypre Palatin, for example, has a brief bergamot beginning, like a blush of first light over

the horizon at dawn, and a heart of authentic oakmoss that goes on forever, but these accents are married to a lush vanilla and a warmly animalic castoreum in the base, ensuring that the whole thing feels comfortably sensual. It is very masculine in feel, like Puredistance M, but the vanilla and castoreum in the base make it so cozy and sensual that I really can’t imagine its testosterone-fueled heart would put any woman off. It feels grand, dusty, old-school, reassuringly masculine, and solid. 

Chypre Palatin strikes me as a modern-day Vol de Nuit, in a way. Not in terms of smell, but for the fact that they are both grand, baroque-scaled perfumes recalling a more romantic past than the time in which they were created. Also, despite all of that ambitious scale and reach, they both feel perfectly intimate and suitable for quiet, homebound pleasures. Chypre Palatin might be the Golden Bowl of its genre, but I enjoy it in that simple, instinctive way I used to enjoy Henry James before the thinking part of my brain was switched on. Just don’t listen to anyone who tells you it is a difficult or complex thing.

Rating: 9/10

   

Guest Reviewer Of The Day: Freddie Jones aka Hilaire.

Driven into the life of a perfume obsessive by the discontinuation of his favourite perfume (Le Feu d'Issey if you're wondering), Freddie Jones is an artist, creative, fashion blogger and youtube perfume reviewer with a unique take on the aesthetics of scent who takes time out of his busy schedule of sniffing things and judging what people are wearing to also work as a consultant in Dublin's only niche perfumery.

Freddie runs a fragrance-related YouTube Channel. Check it out at - http://www.youtube.com/user/fyhilaire

...and a fashion blog http://fyhilaire.tumblr.com/

Parfums MDCI Cuir Garamante - A Cuir by Any Other Name.

If you have ever been to Tunis you'll know what I'm about to say is true. If you haven't been, then go! It's amazing. It combines the charm of an ancient Islamic Casbah with totally authentic souks and bazaars, wonderful mosques, plenty of princely and mercantile palaces from various eras, with a slightly shabby late twentieth century attempt at modernity which is delightful. Around it are rather plush suburbs too, especially around the ruins of Carthage which are essentially like a neighbourhood park to the large and expensive family homes around it. Tunisia is akin to Libya and Algeria in having both a Mediterranean aspect, an Arabic cultural milieu, and a distinctly African flavour. They are all three a mix of the relict influences of their ancestral indigenous culture and the waves of influences which have broken over them. Egypt and Morocco at either end have more distinct and discrete cultures. They act as bookends. Tunis and Tripoli in Libya share an inheritance of Andalusian culture. The expelled Moors of Spain brought back their hybrid culture to North Africa with them and it flourished in these already heterogeneous coastal entrepot.

Among other things Cuisine, Leather working (an Andalusian Moorish speciality) and Perfumery (brought to a high degree of sophistication in early medieval Spain by Muslim rulers who found themselves in a comparatively lush country capable of producing large harvests of fragrant flowers unlike their Sahel Urheimat) were all given new vigor in North Africa by this population reabsorption from Iberia.

A visit to Tunis, as I imagine is the case with Tripoli or Benghazi cannot be complete without

a thorough wandering through its perfume markets. Among the myriads of ugly fakes and cheap knockoffs you do still find pockets of more traditional authenticity. We came upon a shop where they made rosewater and orangeflower water out back in large stills and where decent quality attars could be obtained if you had the patience to haggle for extended periods of time. The smell of the place itself was intoxicating. It was hot ( I mean Sahara hot) so the stones of the medieval buildings were giving off their terracotta/adobe smell that hot rocks sometimes do, and dust and parchedness undercut everything. Huge bales the size of cars full of rose buds and orangeflowers gave off waves of thrumming sweetness and the smells of leather being worked in nearby artisanal workshops added to the melange. In fact so cheek by jowl are these kinds of establishment that leather products from the one and perfumery from the other smell of one another inextricably. The satchel I bought in Tunis smells of roses and hot dust almost more than it does of leather. 

Its a smell I will never forget. And it's exactly what Cuir Garamante smells like. Yes there are hints of plum and dates (doubtless a side effect of one or other rose synthetic) and there is incense too, mostly supplied by Labdanum (another Iberian echo), and there is even a goodly dollop of sweaty funkiness in there too which adds authenticity since wandering the souks of Tunis can mean being crammed together with lots of people in tunnel-like covered streets in high temperatures even at night. But above all this is the recreated alchemy of a complete amalgam of dried Roses and supple tanned hides. There's also more than a nod to Oud Ispahan about this composition though thankfully I don't expect it to be quite so isotopic in its half-life.

Rating: 8.5/10