Angeliques Sous La Pluie (2000)
by Editions de Parfums Frederic Malle

It's nice and all.... a lightly peppered cedar. Otherwise I don't feel like writing a story about it.

Love it love it love it! But does not last 2 minutes. Don't tell me I don't have a good nose because this is in only a 4% concentree.

It opens with a very strong cedar mixed with Covonia cough syrup. Once the cough syrup vanishes, this develops into a scent that you would have in your hair after rolling around on a forest floor in the summer, with freshly fallen young branches covered in sap, some earth and dry leaves and some grass. It's an interesting study in green and I like it. It would probably smell very sexy on just the right guy. I will probably wear it on days that are not right for sweet and girly scents. Bravo.

This year (2008) it has been made evident to me that I'm attracted to green scents, and the top notes of ASLP are among the dearest. After sampling ASLP a few times, its elements came into focus, and while I'm delighted with my new-found abilities to suss out these notes, a certain degree of ASLP's charm and high-end luxury got tarnished in the process. Aside from the fleeting, dewy top notes, I now see this scent in this way: It smells like an angelica plant raised hydroponically on a diet of Iso E Super by a woodworker building sweetheart cedar chests. Iso E Super--the chassis of Calvin Klein's Eternity. Sure enough, in a side-by-side sniff, I now sense ASLP as a slice of Eternity. Ah, well. At least Guerlain's Angelique Noire still retains that magical quality of fantasy angelica and Parisian vanilla.

Angeliques Sous La Pluie is one of the two scents (the other one is Bigarade Concentree) recommended and sent sample of to me from the Frédéric Malle website, based on the online questionnaire.
It was a revelation to me at the time; since I was a complete newbie to perfume I had never encountered anything similar. It was very very light and seemed to disappear almost immediately; but as long as it lasted, it was very beautiful and intriguing. It was much more expensive than anything I had acquired until then and that stopped me from ordering a bottle at that time.

Last week, I ordered a new sample to see if it is still as wonderful as I remembered, and indeed it is! After smelling hundreds of other scents, it is still as original and beautiful to my nose as the first time. As other have mentioned, it smells like wet earth with green stuff and flowers - real flowers, none of that artificial "flower" smell so often encountered in perfumes.

My wife, now a bit tired of me putting my wrist under her nose and asking for comment and comparison any time I receive a new sample, was also very moved by the beauty of this. She claims that it smells much better than anything in my current wardrobe, including her previous favourite L'Eau par Kenzo pour Homme.

I will order a full bottle as soon as my next pay-check arrives.

I'm not entirely sure about this one. Although I love the peppery green opening, it is too short lived -after an hour and a half, it is gone. And in between, it stays very close to the skin. I am a big fan of the transparency that seems to be Jean-Claude Ellena's trademark, but I can't stop wondering about the possibility of an 'Angeliques Concentree' -in the vein of Ellena's Bigarade C.-.