Review by sherapop
Sonoma Scent Studio VINTAGE ROSE was not at all what I was expecting: something along the lines of Jean-Charles Brosseau L'OMBRE ROSE with a light dusting of, well, dust atop the rose petals. Instead, VINTAGE ROSE has a very strong burnt wood scent, what I have been describing in my SSS reviews as beefy burnt cedar. Not a particularly harmonious mix, IMNSO. The dark, charred wood quality dominates the rose and doesn't complement it very well even while the rose is still stronger, in the opening. I greatly prefer ROSE MUSC to VINTAGE ROSE though I'm generally more of a vintage than a musky gal. It's just that ROSE MUSC is not very musky, and VINTAGE ROSE does not mesh with my concept of VINTAGE at all. Désolée. I should add, however, that wearing VINTAGE ROSE reminded me of a topic of great interest to me: modular perfuming, which seems to be all the rage at niche houses these days. It's simple, really. Put together a vocabulary of high-quality but simple notes, and then mix and match them in every possible permutation to produce your library of scents. That's really the only way that houses such as Keiko Mecheri, Bond no. 9, Boadicea the Victorious et al. can come up with literally dozens of perfumes in only a short period of time. This a new world, the world of twittered perfumes, not the days of lore when a perfumer could easily spend years on a single creation. Those were the days... back when perfume was perfume and nearly everything being put out today would have qualified at best as cologne or body spray. Most niche houses do not produce complex, multilayered perfumes that unfurl over time in fascinating ways, à la ARPEGE or MITSOUKO. Instead, everything is flat, as though perfumers were all taking SSRIs and just don't give a damn anymore. And perhaps they are, and perhaps they don't.
