Fragrance Reviews by groovergreen

This interesting oriental floral owes something to the 1980s craze for wearing essential oils as perfume. That rose and rosewood concoction gives the nose a full-on wallop and can at times make my eyes water -- but that is Rose Cardin's charm. This is no timid little petal. It is spicy and intoxicating; it almost tries too hard to be sexy. I enjoyed wearing it in my 20s (when I, too, was trying to be sexy) but these days I don't think I could wear something that was, you know, like, SO OBVIOUS. If I were hankering for a perfume with a very vigorous rose note, though, I would probably come back to this.

This is not my favourite scent, but I admire it for being so friendly and sociable. Every time I wear it, men and women alike swoon before me in rapture! It is a very smart, fresh yet slightly odd daytime fragrance. The initial tea notes are delicious but I find my slightly oily skin makes the white flowers "blossom" very quickly. Perhaps one reason for its popularity is that it's a crisp, enlivening scent. In an era when a lot of women wear overpowering florals such as Poeme or weak, watery colognes such as CKOne, Eau Parfumee au The Verte Extreme smiles brightly and stands its ground!

Dolce Vita is a contemporary rarity. Few nez-artistes seem to be interested in creating chypre-oakmoss varietals these days, but in 1995 Bourdon made a masterpiece that enraptured us tough chicks who were running from the sickly new florals as if from a gas cloud. Almost 12 years after I helped myself to this delicious woody scent, whose top notes hit the front of my brain like a narcotic, I am still in love with it. A warning: wear this in the heat of summer and you may feel ill. Dolce Vita is for winter, to keep you warm and cosy, and it will never smell stale and sickly on your woollens.

This sparkly, lemon-laden scent has such an exhilarating effect on me. The first time I "road-tested" it, I was bouncing around joyfully for hours and not surprisingly was back in the shop the next day to buy some. Diorella smells deliciously fresh when just out of the bottle and on my slightly oily skin matures to a sweet woodiness after a few hours. One thing I have noticed, though, is that I NEVER get compliments about this perfume; in fact, one person with whom my freshly sprayed self was in an office lift said "Oh my god, what's that terrible smell of gas?" But I still love this swingin', groovy scent, and for practical reasons too --- all that lemon keeps the flies and mosquitoes away.

The first time I came across Une Fleur de Cassie, I almost burst into tears. It was the perfume I had been searching for all my life --- an aromatic evocation of my childhood in Hong Kong, of cassias, gordonias and spicy lantanas, of morning mist on the Peak and damselflies skimming over sparkling pools, of banyans and balsams, mossy tracks into thickets, sweetly rotting leaves and cool, moist earth. The first air I ever breathed smelled like that; it gave me life, and Une Fleur de Cassie is an intense distillation of it. I had to find out if I were just wilfully tricking myself, so two months ago I went back to HK and walked through the forests of the Peak all the way to Black's Link for six hours ... and yes, Cassie is as close as any perfume will ever come to being my version of "a la recherche du temps perdu". It is a cool, elegant, aloof scent. It is not pretty, like a bunch of fresh flowers waved in one's face; it's alluring, like a forest full of well-concealed beauties waiting quietly for the solitary walker to notice them. I wear Cassie when I'm feeling a bit vulnerable and need to restore my self-possession by reminding myself where I come from.