Fragrance Reviews by Myspunge

Dazzling citrus/bergamot/spice start, brilliantly exciting like an Ormond Jayne with black hemlock in it or like an unusually successful visit to a Paris sauna in the early eighties. There’s heavy patchouli within all this but it has such sparkle and no hippy-dankness, it's winking with frankincense. Loses some of its character (it has worn itself out, poor thing, with all that jumping) as it fades down to a dust of myrrh. Terrific, not church-y at all and actually not very rose-y either. The notes are clementine, bergamot, castor, Bulgarian rose absolute, orris, Texas cedarwood, frankincense, labdanum, myrrh, patchouli and ambergris.

A jazzy upper orange note starts this one out as a good-time scent but not undignified, you understand. It has a supremely elegant dry-down with a sherry/muscat/rose ? sheen on it that is perhaps what the company itself describes as rhubarb wood and musk, ingredients out of which I plan one day to make the world’s best crumble. Along with Rose Poivrée, this is the most inventive and fascinating of the four JCE TDC scents.

Not even having often read it about it prepares you for the initial menthylated vapour rub. When you smell it you remember that Lutens thinks Genet is a great writer, and how wrong he is to think that - like Genet, it's punishingly overstated and has less to say than you would think from all the fuss it makes. The odour of incinerated alkie takes a long while to die back. You keep hoping something sweeter will come of it, like good out of a wasted life, and, with great reluctance, like most addicts, it slowly blossoms but the menthol barracuda is always there just beneath the surface lush. It’s more an Aesop’s fable than a scent, it dies down very mild and sweet as if ideally rehabilitated. Notes: tuberose, orange blossom, hyacinth, jasmine, musk, vanilla, styrax, nutmeg, clove – which only goes to show how little ‘notes’ tell a lay-person because nothing in that list would lead you to guess remotely what the opening is like.

Oh thank you Lord. This scent is perfectly named, it presents the root as a comet, the earth as the moon, paramours orbiting each other, both silvery and warm. It is transfigured celery or turnip. I wonder if it could do with one more glinting note amid this intoxicating soup of earth (cuts off the hand that wrote those impious words). A comparison with CB I Hate Perfume Black March would be in order. But this is way out there beyond that - stratospherically good.

Rousse’s bigger brother; thinks it’s tough but is no more than Chief Constable of midWales [ for US readers = sheriff of a suburb of Seattle]. You can still detect the Lutens sweet accord at the root of it all and the freckles are just as visible as in Rousse though it has coconut and cumin matting on its chest in a frail attempt at bristles; it has less of a story to tell than Rousse and once it’s got started it just stands in the corner, sweating a bit at the armpits, talking about leather and how the freemasons do excellent charity work.