What female scents are even deadlier on the male? - Page 4

It's just after midnight London. The lines are closed. Voting is over.

Today, Saturday 5th January 2013, by an ultimately comfortable margin, I will be wearing:

Estée Lauder Cinnabar

What will I wear Monday 7th January 2013? Choose from the following 10:


Dolce&Gabbana D&G Light Blue

Prada Prada (Amber)

Estée Lauder Azuree Pure

Lalique Lalique Le Parfum

Estée Lauder Aliage

Estée Lauder Private Collection

Chanel Coco

Elizabeth Arden Green Tea

Estée Lauder Youth-Dew

Or the newcomer...

Serge Lutens Sarrasins


Remember all previous votes count towards a fragrance's running total and every participant gets a new vote every day!

You have well over forty eight hours and two votes ... starting now.

The third review of 2013 will appear well before then.

I can now empathise fully with you and my family southerngardens as the bug has bitten with a vengeance.

Oh well, plenty of rest - and gratitude because I still have some sense of smell and taste remaining!!

- - - Updated - - -

Apologies all - once again this went up on the perfume's page but not the thread - excuse me I'm slightly indisposed.

Perhaps I could do with something pharmaceutical, or chemical at least...

CoSTUME NATIONAL Scent Intense

Plastic is fantastic. Cellophane sublime.

This is a perfume, metaphorically at least, from the electric age.

It is a straight, severe, speed-limitless autobahn of a scent, possessing an industrial imperiousness that reduces the natural notes it slices through to an abstract blur.

This streamlined, black-bottled, motor-like beast is a futurist fragrance.

With an opening as sleek and smooth as a Mercedes' nought to sixty, our nylon-stockinged, vermilion be-lipsticked, peroxided and permed lady driver, a study in sexuality by an art deco artist, steers us swiftly in our hermetically sealed sedan.

Perhaps there is an ocean shore outside, certainly there are fields and forests, but their smell remains at a distance kept back by the tang of vibrant vinyl seats and an oh-so-beautiful bakelite dashboard.

Once we reach our high-pitched optimum velocity, there will be no breaks, no rest for rooms or restaurants. Our only refreshments petroleum and bitter tea served from vacuum flasks.

Maximum speed again achieved, there is no relenting from the pace: this is a flat out race to no final destination.

***

Scent Intense is an uncompromising industrial perfume that seems intent to take the artifice of the truly synthetic scent into the realms of artistry.

In so doing it seems to make a virtue out of making things smell like highly polished replicas of themselves.

The amber note is as newly-minted as a freshly bought pair of nylons, the tea has a too-shiny almost aluminium quality and the patchouli is as transparent and flawless as cellophane.

As an exercise in engineering this fragrance too is almost flaw free.

Unswervingly linear like a wind tunnel test bed, with the projection of a radio broadcast and the longevity of a transatlantic ocean liner it is a perfume to inspire admiration. Though whether it could ever engender affection or adoration is a moot point.

This archaic aroma is not that of the Paris of the Jazz Age, but a hard-edged, sharp-lined, Ayn Rand heroine's sort of a scent. Chic, modern, calculated but brittle and ultimately unsympathetic.

Sexual? Yes. Sensual? No.

And is it man or woman? Neither. This is pure machine.

- - - Updated - - -

It's one thirty in the morning London. The lines are closed. Voting is over.

Today, Tuesday 8th January 2013, I will be wearing:

Lalique Lalique Le Parfum

What will I wear tomorrow Tuesday 8th January? Choose from the following 10:


Dolce&Gabbana D&G Light Blue

Prada Prada (Amber)

Estée Lauder Azuree Pure

Estée Lauder Aliage

Estée Lauder Private Collection

Elizabeth Arden Green Tea

Estée Lauder Youth-Dew

Serge Lutens Sarrasins

Dior Diorella

Or the newcomer....

Bvlgari Eau Parfumee au The Rouge

Remember all previous votes count towards a fragrance's running total and every participant gets a new vote every day!

You have just over twenty two hours ... starting now.

The next, much awaited, review of

Pierre Balmain Balmain de Balmain

Is on its way in the next twenty four hours too!

teardrop you're quite right, Alien hasn't appeared yet as I've now built a few days delay in between the vote and the review.

This means I've actually got a few reviews up my sleeve at any one time, so that I can make sure that I'm able to post something at least five times a week, even if on a particular day I'm to busy or called away or fall sick.

Hope that makes sense!!

Just so everyone is in the loop.... that means I've tried..

Balmain de Balmain
Alien
Cinnabar
Coco
Lalique le Parfum

and my thoughts are developing and are on their way.

In the meantime...

I've been holding off to release this one at the appointed hour (at least that is in GMT)...

Dior Midnight Poison

As an adult, never arrive at a children's tea party until it's all over.

She had said, 'Come around about seven. They'll have worn themselves out and the 'grown ups' can have fun.'.

Why oh why didn't I listen? Why did I think it would be generous, amusing even, to arrive when the ankle biters were still going tooth and claw at the table groaning with juvenile junk food?

So, my evening starts with too cheap, too strong and too sweet orange soda. Made fizzy at home with alarming novetly machine that keeps threatening to explode.

Then it's a game of 'hunt the jewel'. Somewhere in a giant bowl of half set mandarin jelly there's a prize. It must be removed with the mouth: no hands, no spoon - just head in said jelly. Full immersion.

'Please, please' they yell, a youthful chorus 'join in, JOIN IN!!!'. And so, ever the sport, my petrified visage plunges into a whirling, swirling tepid pool of luminous gunk.

I emerge, eventually, face, neck, collar covered in the most revolting fake fruit sweet slime that money can buy and mummy can make.

A roar from the crowd - clenched between my suddenly yellowed teeth an amber pendant, it's silver chain resting wet on my chin. I pass it dutifully to the birthday girl and another cheer goes up.

The final festive climax reached, the kids scatter and ready for the off as I skulk upstairs to reclaim my face and give any help possible to my poor hair.

Returning to the scene of my triumphant undoing, the children have departed. Mother is about to take celebratory daughter upstairs for a bath and bed. I am to watch the door.

Gradually the later, older guests arrive wrapped in their all surrounding adult smells. One wears patchouli as she has done since we were young, another rose to remember her mother by, a third antique vanilla with a touch of fragranced powder.

Our host returns, daughter settled fast asleep. She has wrested the amber amulet from her and dabbed a little of its namesake's scent on the nape of her neck.

As the evening floats onwards to the blue hour, the room glows with warm conversation, time-earnt friendships and the notes of perfumes too personal and familiar to need introduction.

Even the congealed jelly on my collar has dried to an almost semi-precious crystal, though now and again emits a saccharine citrus to remind me of my mistake.

If only I'd have arrived late.

***

Midnight Poison by Dior is a fragrance of enormous contrasts.

Sadly, in this reformulation at least, these are far from complimentary.

The opening is quite simply catastrophic. A syrupy, synthetic and supremely nauseating fruit cocktail: it is an assault on the senses.

And like lurid pineapple chunks skewered next fluorescent plastic cheese on cocktail sticks this hors d'ouevres can't fail to out stay its welcome.

What happens very gradually after is, however, something quite remarkable: this raucous, rancorous, childish affair yields to an accomplished, mature, enigmatic and enticing composition whose apparent complexity belies a breathtakingly simple palette.

Rose, amber, patchouli, vanilla.

It is, in many ways, a work of dark mysteries. Of day and night, with midnight being by far the best hour.

If only that opening just wasn't.

- - - Updated - - -

It's coming up to one in the morning London. The lines are closed. Voting is over.

Today, Wednesday 9th January 2013, after streaking through the field (the perfume, not me), I will be wearing:

Serge Lutens Sarrasins


What will I wear tomorrow Thursday 10th January? Choose from the following 10:


Dolce&Gabbana D&G Light Blue

Prada Prada (Amber)

Estée Lauder Azuree Pure

Estée Lauder Aliage

Estée Lauder Private Collection

Elizabeth Arden Green Tea

Estée Lauder Youth-Dew

Dior Diorella

Bvlgari Eau Parfumee au The Rouge

Or the newcomer....

Yves Saint Laurent Nu


Remember all previous votes count towards a fragrance's running total and every participant gets a new vote every day!

You have just over twenty three hours ... starting now.

The next, much awaited, review of

Pierre Balmain Balmain de Balmain

Is definitely on its way in the next twenty four hours too!

Thank you to all fellow basenoters, and others, who led me to this hidden treasure...

Pierre Balmain Balmain de Balmain

She is the undiscovered royalty of the fragrance laboratory.

The Marie Curie of the sweetly scented branch of industrial chemistry.

She is the best of all Balmain ball gowns: her beauty by habit remains customarily hidden beneath a white coat and horrid blue hairnet.

She spends her sterilized days, so people imagine, enrapt in endless games of molecular quadrille.

In truth, she runs wild.

Her mind will not have its horizons trimmed by test tubes, its considerations cut short by condensing pipes, its brilliance scorched back by bunsen burners.

Where others perceive formulae she drinks in blackcurrant bush leaves broken by urgent brutish hands.

The colourless liquids frothing up into clouds in conical flasks are putative rains for dark, lichen-mapped forests as yet unleashed.

She will see measuring cylinders stuffed with irises and glass beakers fulled to the brim with green galbanum before day ends.

Her chemist's kitchen thus transformed to wooded wonderland, she will imagine herself a savanna to surround her magic kingdom.

This sorceress is sovereign over the sense who's memories last longest.

She needs no acts of exuberant appreciation, no audience to adulate her.

Her majesty is the air around her.

***

Balmain de Balmain is not so much a forgotten masterpiece as a triumph never known to the crowd at all.

In Parfum form, this brave latter day chypre, immediately errects an expansive architecture of oakmoss, vetiver, blackcurrant leaf and black pepper.

Between these great steal vaults of scent creep slow swathes of green glass galbanum: filtering the sun's light and lending a slight bitter hue to fleshy iris, feint rose and just visible jasmine.

It is a structure built to last.

The overall effect at once luxurious and imperiously restrained.

A youthful, mournful, beautiful dowager lamenting her dead and gone beloved.

The King is dead.

Long live the lost Queen.

cello, southerngardens thank you both for your persistencee in getting this one to the top. Just to be 100% clear I didn't just like Balmain de Balmian - I loved it. I can't believe that it's had such a short life - born 1998 and already officially deceased.

Oh well, I wonder how long before another wonder comes my way....

It's just after midnight, London. The lines are closed. Voting is over.

Today, Thursday 10th January 2013, after the longest time in the top ten without a victory, the veteran I'll be wearing is...

Dolce&Gabbana D&G Light Blue


What will I wear tomorrow Friday 11th January? Choose from the following 10:

Prada Prada (Amber)

Estée Lauder Azuree Pure

Estée Lauder Aliage

Estée Lauder Private Collection

Elizabeth Arden Green Tea

Estée Lauder Youth-Dew

Dior Diorella

Bvlgari Eau Parfumee au The Rouge

Yves Saint Laurent Nu


Or the newcomer....

Dior Dune




Remember all previous votes count towards a fragrance's running total and every participant gets a new vote every day!

You have just over twenty three and a half hours ... starting now.

The next review of

Thierry Mugler Alien

Is definitely on its way in the next twenty four hours too!

A little later than expected, but worth the wait.

I have little hesitation in recommending to any gentleman who has ever toyed with the 70's and 80's oriental explosion....

Estée Lauder Cinnabar

She wasn't a grade school teacher always. This woman has a past.

Breaking from marking books of summer holiday reminiscences rendered in schoolboy scrawl, she decides to look again at the photographs.

Just five years after Nixon, she too went to China. It was '78 and the next year an embassy would open in what we still called Peeking then. Someone had to ready it for the arrivals. Who better than the wife of the man who would be first cultural attache to the land of the Cultural Revolution?

In a spirit of diplomatic decor, it was decided to break from American tradition: to forgo a little piece of the Uncle Sam overseas. Local sensitivities relating to cultural imperialism were judged to preclude the parochial neo-classicism of a White House away from home.

So the the style would be Sino- American, through and through.

In the photographs, honeyed polaroids sweetened almost sepia by age, she peers now at rooms she would never return to.

A jade green vestibule with minature orange trees standing guard at every entrance, each bright fruit wired for sound when entertaining.

The blue and white willow pattern reception room, where concealed cinnamon and clove spiced incense burned, to purify the guests before they meet the Ambassador.

A second function room in saffron yellow, with great imitation Ming vases filled with jasmine, ylang ylang, and lilies next shameless shaker pots stuffed full of American imported roses.

A pause to shake the great man's hand then onwards to the piece de resistence.

The vermilion laquered box made dining room. This jeweled chamber of glistening red walls. Its centre a rosewood oval table bearing solid amber places surrounded by two dozen chairs polished in resins that smell purposely of vanilla.

Inviting you to sit with a hand that slices thick air, tempered here too with smoked bezoin and more cloves, the Ambassador, carnation in buttonhole, prepares to speak.

But she never took her seat at the Ambassador's table, never dined in her dining room. Her cultural attache came from a culture of casual violence and even more casual sex it turned out.

A divorce. All settled six months before the dust sheets could come off the jade, willow pattern blue, saffron and vermilion rooms.

A return home and a career to support her new daughter.

Nothing could be more respectable than a small town grade school teacher with an uncommonly beautifully decorated home.

With manicured, painted hands, she closes the black gloss, hard covered photographic album and returns it to its own red lacquered box.

She reads from the exercise book before her, scribbled in childish hand:

'This summer I went to China....'

***

Cinnabar is the common ore of mercury. Beautiful and toxic. Perhaps this is why at Estee Lauder counters they keep this object of a certain striking beauty hidden from sight.

For there seems no logical reason to conceal this warm, generous and welcoming pseudo-oriental scent.

Yes it is a version of China about as real as the model factories and swarms of smiling children Pat Nixon met in 1973, but this perfume knows that it is half way to being propaganda and for that reason never takes itself too seriously.

A bright and cheery, flag waving entrance of citrus leads swiftly to an hallway of the people with a determined spicy architecture. Structural elements of near sanitary cloves and almost strident cinnamon ensure that other softer elements do not sag.

So, when incense and vanilla and florals and bezoin come wafting through their route is defined and direct maintaining a brisk and clear order to the whole assembly as though some benign school ma'am were keeping a watchful eye over the proceedings.

Perhaps this is where it all went wrong for Cinnabar: where other perfumes of this genre let it all, and then more, far much too much more, hang out, it kept its nerve and retained its composure.

At the time that might have felt a little too tight lipped, severe even.

Looking back it seems, just like Cinnabar itself: an act of unwaivering poise and impeccable judgement.

- - - Updated - - -

It's just after three, London (hell I have a social life, sometimes). The lines are closed. Voting is over.

Today, Friday 11th January 2013, the perennially divisive perfume I'll be wearing is...

Estée Lauder Youth-Dew


What will I wear tomorrow Saturday 12th January? Choose from the following 10:

Prada Prada (Amber)

Estée Lauder Azuree Pure

Estée Lauder Aliage

Estée Lauder Private Collection

Elizabeth Arden Green Tea

Dior Diorella

Bvlgari Eau Parfumee au The Rouge

Yves Saint Laurent Nu

Dior Dune

Or the newcomer....

Thierry Mugler Womanity



Remember all previous votes count towards a fragrance's running total and every participant gets a new vote every day!

You have just under twenty one hours ... starting now.

The next review of

Thierry Mugler Alien

Is on its way in the next twenty four hours too!

So, the most out there try out so far...

Thierry Mugler Alien

I'm always unnerved by the prospect of meeting extra terrestrials

In this case my cautious Kevin impulses were well founded.

This is no beautiful bug-eyed friend of Elliot.

This is a metal Mickey who wants to shoot you dead and eat your head.

Once inside this man from Mars you can expect to eat cars... Mercuries and Subarus, Cadillacs and Lincolns too.

Then go out at night to eat up bars where people meet.

Dancing slow, cheek to cheek, toe to toe. Man to man.

He blows each away with his jasmine ray gun.

The dancefloor carnage, he's through with bars and eatin' cars now he's time only for guitars.

Plastic plectrum attached aluminium arm he plays stratocaster, Travis Bean and then some Deans. He eats the crowd up with laser beams

Installed on rock star plinth its time to introduce some synth. His perspex paws pick out peerless pitch, he plays Moog, Korg, Casio and Yamaha. And all the floor screams for one note more.

Let them clamber! He knocks them out for good and proper, here comes his blast of metal amber.

And so with all dead or in thrall the man from Mars is through with cars and beat up bars, he'll take no prisoners or even guitars.

He's on his way back to the stars.

***

Alien is en exercise in peerless artificiality.

A plastic jasmine plant in the perspex hand of a seventeen foot high cybernetic son of a bitch.

An unending singular neo-industrial note of almost entirely synthetic strangeness.

You have no option but to offer it grovelling and unending worship.

But wear it? I suspect it probably wears you.

Man or woman? Totally irrelevant.

These days we're all electric.

But while I'm human and there's blood not volts coursing through these veins I'm not ready for this robot's secret Rapture.

- - - Updated - - -

It's just coming up to midnight, London. The lines are closed. Voting is over.

Tomorrow, Saturday 12th January 2013, it's Estee's day again as I'll be wearing...

Estée Lauder Azuree Pure


What will I wear next on Monday 14th January? Choose from the following 10:

Prada Prada (Amber)

Estée Lauder Aliage

Estée Lauder Private Collection

Elizabeth Arden Green Tea

Dior Diorella

Bvlgari Eau Parfumee au The Rouge

Yves Saint Laurent Nu

Dior Dune

Thierry Mugler Womanity

Or the newcomer....

Dior La Collection Couturier Parfumeur Mitzah


Remember all previous votes count towards a fragrance's running total and every participant gets a new vote every day! That's two votes this weekend!!

You have just over forty eight hours ... starting now.

The next review of

Chanel Coco

is on its way soon!

You can check out my thoughts on

Thierry Mugler Alien now!

Absolutely.

I've worn Opium. Obsession. Coco and even No.5 in public. But never before have I felt so ostentatiously fragranced - this is a sheer wall of unrestrained and powerful feminine sexuality!

It's a breathtaking piece of work though.

- - - Updated - - -


Thank you teardrop.

Wearing Alien, I thought what kind of woman could wear this and not even bat an eyelid?

An Atomic one, of course.

This is Deborah Harry's snarl made scent.

- - - Updated - - -

Dear All

When I started this thread last November I really had no idea of the response it would elicit.

To date I've had just short of 500 suggestions.

That means that just over 5% of all the fragrances in the Fragrantica database are, in your collective view, marketed at women, but just as good for men to wear.

In a spirit of sharing the joy, and in response to a clutch of requests by personal message, on Saturdays from now on I'm going to be running through 20 of the recommendations in the order you suggested them.

These don't include any that have already made the top 10, or won the poll on the sister thread

What women's fragrance should this man wear tomorrow? You decide!

You can check these out on there or in my review history.

I hope the list will inspire you to try some of your fellow Fragranticans' favourites, bring some fresh inspiration for some new must try fragrances and encourage you to support some that have been put forward but haven't quite made it onto the top 10 list.

So here goes.

In order of appearance:

Cartier Le Baiser Du Dragon

Moschino Moschino

Montana Parfum de Peau

Donna Karan DKNY

Chantecaille Vetyver

Lancome O de Lancome

Guerlain Samsara

Gucci Gucci Guilty Intense

Cacharel Eden

Lolita Lempicka Coral Flower

Fendi Fendi Theorema

Banana Republic Rosewood

Hermes Rouge Hermes Eau Delicate

Bvlgari BLV Eau de Parfum II

Jessica Simpson Fancy Nights

Ralph Lauren Safari

L`Occitane en Provence Eau d'Iparie

Roger & Gallet Cedrat

Pierre Balmain MissBalmain

Givenchy Givenchy III

Here's to a great smelling weekend.

Splendid perfume - and a great pair of reasons for voting for it - I'm sure it will make the top 100 this week and who knows from there...

- - - Updated - - -


Ah. Tabu. My goodness it seems so long ago now....

Yes, I can quite imagine this being wholly offensive. There is something of my organic floor cleaner about it for example. But detergent or not, it had something for me.

Thank you for the Lapidus suggestions and I think I may know somewhere that keeps them.

- - - Updated - - -


Great. Some new suggestions to add to the ever-expanding list.

Finally though, we move on to another day...

It's just coming up to one am, London. The lines are closed. Voting is over.

Today, Monday 14th January 2013, it's Estee's day again as the lady does the hat-trick and I'll be wearing...

Estée Lauder Private Collection


What will I wear next on Tuesday 15th January? Choose from the following 10:

Prada Prada (Amber)

Estée Lauder Aliage

Elizabeth Arden Green Tea

Dior Diorella

Bvlgari Eau Parfumee au The Rouge

Yves Saint Laurent Nu

Dior Dune

Thierry Mugler Womanity

Dior La Collection Couturier Parfumeur Mitzah

Or the newcomer....

Givenchy Givenchy III

Remember all previous votes count towards a fragrance's running total and every participant gets a new vote every day!

You have just under twenty four hours... starting now.

The next review is on its way, in the meantime...

You can still check out my thoughts on

Thierry Mugler Alien

It's just coming up to one am, London. The lines are closed. Voting is over.

Today, Tuesday 15th January 2013, finally unseating Estee from her throne and winning by a country mile it's...

Yves Saint Laurent Nu

What will I wear next on Wednesday 16th January? Choose from the following 10:

Prada Prada (Amber)

Estée Lauder Aliage

Elizabeth Arden Green Tea

Dior Diorella

Bvlgari Eau Parfumee au The Rouge

Dior Dune

Thierry Mugler Womanity

Dior La Collection Couturier Parfumeur Mitzah

Givenchy Givenchy III

Or the newcomer....

Cartier Le Baiser Du Dragon

Remember all previous votes count towards a fragrance's running total and every participant gets a new vote every day!

You have just under twenty four hours... starting now.

The next review is on its way...

- - - Updated - - -

Coco Chanel

Big. Blousy. Really rather beautiful.

There were two 1980s.

The one where women wore military cut pencil skirt suits with NFL shoulder pads and went to work on Wall Street.

Where the females of the species needed bigger balls than all the males and shorter fuses than fourth of July fireworks just to get ahead.

Then there was a world of femmes fatales with huge soft perms and wardrobes of endless satin negligees that slipped effortlessly to shag pile bathroom floors permitting pedicured feet to slip into 36 inch deep baths of milky eau and sky high bubbles.

This was the world of Coco.

A world of interiors of unabashed retro-romantic re-imaginings.

Enter now the faux Roman Spa bathroom and grasp an incautious glimpse of our deshabille heroine.

First inhale the rich pot pouri of orange, peach, pomegranate and rose petal.

Then catch an unawares hostess' perfume: a textbook floriental of rose again, and jasmine and orange blossom cut through with clove.

Finally a resinous wave of bath oils as you approach reaching out to the alabaster skin... you pause... amber, sandalwood, labandum and the animal sexuality of the Diana of the sunken corner bath suite.

No, no. You retreat. You must not touch what you cannot afford.

And this is a rich beauty priced high above rubies.

Less is less. More is More.

Excess is best.

***

More than a dozen years after the death of Gabrielle and a decade after the launch of Cristalle, it was time to ring the changes at Chanel: to herald the dawn of a brave new world.

The world of cool as ice creations such as No19 was long gone, their sparse feminism to be replaced with an enormous outpouring of fin de siecle flouncing femininity.

No perfume encapsulates these gestural sexual politics better than Coco.

So these new attitudes divided, so does the perfume.

Some encounter classic rose and sandalwood. Others an almost fruity almost sweet vanilla that betrays much of what was to follow within a decade. Another house holds that this is a grand floral, while still others cry animalic wood.

In truth this apparent confusion belies the truth: Coco is complex.

A perfume that sought to be everything to every man, just as it could be argued women everywhere found themselves having to do just that at just the same time.

And yet, and yet, the overall effect is not of confusion but of a confident coherence that brings contentment to all who encounter it.

This scent maybe identity crisis underneath, but on the surface it's a mini-series superstar.

Oh yes and my goodness did it, for better or for worse, change the game.

The cry went up:

'Madame Chanel is most definitely dead. Long live Coco.'

Oh, and today, can a man wear it?

Hell why not if he's got the hotel room to go with it!

Well. Aromatics Elixir is one I haven't tried out yet, it's on the cusp of the top 10 - so I'm guessing will be around in the next few days!

Ah, the South of France...

Lalique Lalique Le Parfum

The best brand new sports car kind of a smell.

Not your floor-slung, sci-fi alien-angular, luminescent yellow 'babe wagon', beloved by a hip hop superstars and their goatee-bearded devotees this though.

Think metallic sky blue beautifully curvaceous body and soft too-pampered-to-smell-of-animal cream leather interior. Think walnut and chrome dash. Think Grace Kelly at the wheel in an equally creamy crisp yet billowing silk halter neck just-so blouse.

Think unashamed neat as a pin girl next door then more glamour.

Think unassuming elegance.

In fact don't think, let yourself be taken for the drive of your life.

Grace slips you through the gears without skipping a beat or clipping a corner; a ride as smooth as almond creme brulee vanilla.

At cruising speed the roadside fields are an heliotropic blur of bay, patchouli and sweet peppercorns.

Grace herself is grace itself, a gentle jasmine, bergamot and sandalwood cloud of loveliness surrounding her.

You take the coast road all cliffs seem slopes and curves the curls at the corner of a smile.

Please, please don't let the journey end the way it did.

Let the drive go on forever.

***

If a finely tuned retro auto fresh from the showroom were a scent it would le Parfum by Lalique.

This rich vanilla eases out all the creases in the day like a gloriously smooth suspension.

Vanilla maybe the start, beginning and the end here, but whilst it's all about the pod there are enough landmarks on the journey to make sure this is more scenic route than highway slog.

Bergamot lends a citrus shine to the opening, whilst heliotrope (analogue) and jasmine add a degree of floral complexity to the middle and patchouli an element of darkness to the slightly dusky dry down.

Some may think this scent straightforward and predictable, anemic even.

No: the beauty lies not only in the design here but in the subtlety of engineering that delivers an effortless experience and makes the drive an unadulterated pleasure.

Oh, and in this car Grace and her male companion would have been safe the whole day through.

- - - Updated - - -

- - - Updated - - -

It's just coming up to midnight(ish), London. The lines are closed. Voting is over.

Tomorrow, Wednesday 16th January 2013, following a three way tie, the longest serving entry on the top ten gets its turn in the limelight...

Prada Prada (Amber)

What will I wear next on Thursday 17th January? Choose from the following 10:


Estée Lauder Aliage

Elizabeth Arden Green Tea

Dior Diorella

Bvlgari Eau Parfumee au The Rouge

Dior Dune

Thierry Mugler Womanity

Dior La Collection Couturier Parfumeur Mitzah

Givenchy Givenchy III

Cartier Le Baiser Du Dragon

Or the newcomer....

Kenzo Kenzo Jungle L'Elephant

Remember all previous votes count towards a fragrance's running total and every participant gets a new vote every day!

You have just under twenty four hours... starting now.

The next review is on its way...

It's just past 2am, London. The lines are closed. Voting is over.

Today, Thursday 17th January 2013, he gasps in trepidation, it's....

Thierry Mugler Womanity

What will I wear next on Friday 18th January? Choose from the following 10:

Estée Lauder Aliage

Elizabeth Arden Green Tea

Dior Diorella

Bvlgari Eau Parfumee au The Rouge

Dior Dune

Dior La Collection Couturier Parfumeur Mitzah

Givenchy Givenchy III

Cartier Le Baiser Du Dragon

Kenzo Kenzo Jungle L'Elephant

Or the newcomer...

Robert Piguet Fracas

Remember all previous votes count towards a fragrance's running total and every participant gets a new vote every day!

You have just under twenty two hours... starting now.

The next review is on its way, in the meantime...

You can check out my thoughts on

Dolce&Gabbana D&G Light Blue

Well after tomorrow's 'treat' I may well be needing something of industrial strength to hose down with.

Perhaps I'll consider...

Dolce&Gabbana D&G Light Blue

What starts as spry tarte au citron becomes, sadly and all too swiftly, lacklustre lemon bathroom cleaner.

An opening burst of freshly squeezed Sicilian citrus is exhilarating. Paired with a subtle puff pastry-like wood oven smell it promises so much. A light dusting of icing sugar lifting the whole to the status of a truly sublime pie.

But blink and it's gone, for by way of cloying lemon curd, in short minutes all is turned to sunken souffle first then gee-wizz generic ceramic and enamel miracle clean creme.

Florals so unspecific that they are undeserving of names fly by before everything settles down to a silly sweetness that smells more of good sanitation than fine fragrance.

The overall effect is strangely, suffocatingly comforting. An exercise in apparent inoffensiveness.

Classy, like a well kept water closet in a just short of luxury hotel.


***

To compose a scent so completely of a single note is an act of bravery, or in the case of D&G Light Blue something that seems more akin to bloody-minded bravado.

The best minimalist perfumes, like the music and the architecture of the same name, deceive with their hidden complexities and depth.

They modulate where they appear not to change. Have acres of back story and back stairs behind false walls.

Structurally they are engineered to perfection.

That is this scent's failing. It lacks both the complexity required to retain our interest and the structural supports to sustain the first high, clear note that is all it ever had to say.

These key components missing nothing remains but gradual dissipation, dilapidation and mostly disappointment.

Ultimately everything falls away to the very edge of being merely functional fragrance.

A technicolor temptress to start our triple bill from the studios of Estee Lauder...

Estée Lauder Youth-Dew

This is the star perfume, so it appears, that has the power to divide opinion as no other does.

And why? Because she is so much, so unapologetically, so unmistakably herself.

And of what does this nigh on sixty year old smell? Well, of herself of course: unapologetically, unmistakably herself.

Wherever she goes, whenever she goes she is recognised in an instant: the greatest star of yesteryear that she truly is.

And whether we remember her fondly or not? Well that depends on which of her roles we call to mind when her entirely distinct scent comes to meet our olfactory senses.

To some she is the fresh young face of a blossoming, even burgeoning teenage sexuality that her double entendre of name suggests. All sparkling aldehydes and citric sense of fun at the start of screen career.

To others she will always be that oh-so-confident-and-pretty and not-so-goody-two-shoes-as-they-think-she-is best (not really) girlfriend who borrows your beautiful frock only to return it after that date has gone by. In this role she was spicy and knowing but with a muskiness that hinted at an animal within, and goings on in your dress you'd rather not have known about.

Or is she that painful woman, who gripes about everyone else in the office to you and about you to everyone else in the office? Passing her days playing politics and not getting a stitch done. Eminently dislikable in a floral maxi dress, she got the Oscar for this, her most difficult part.

Or, finally, is she that game, generously giving maiden aunt she played in her comeback flick? All sweetness and light, dispensing love, sound advice and sweet vanilla candy that also serves to disguise the swift cigarette she sneaked just before you arrived.

In truth she is all of the above, but also always herself. And therein lies the problem: this scent is the real deal film star who steals every scene.

She always gets the attention, is always the one that everyone remembers, gets mixed up with her characters, good and bad. Ultimately she leaves everyone else, including you, in the shade.

And who wants to be the bit part player all the time?



***

In 1953 when looking to create a star, Estee Lauder threw everything it had, and then some, at Youth Dew.

The result was a sensation.

But like all great screen legends, beneath that sixteen feet high persona there was a very complicated being.

To talk of notes seems almost superfluous, there are just so many strands to this scent's bow. And the result? Well it smells like Youth Dew.

Like perhaps just a hand full of fragrances this has some to smell distinctly of itself and to attach itself distinctly to the person wearing it, filtering our perception of both person and perfume.

Scent brings with it the most emotional baggage of any sense and a perfume as perfectly recognisable as this is very heavily weighed down. In our minds it is our teenage years, our love/hate friend next door, our co-worker or aunt and it has to work hard to escape these serial stereotypes.

And does it succeed? Well, yes.

For ultimately Youth Dew is a star for the very reason we remember it all too well: it has those two most bankable of qualities, staying power and pulling power.

Wear the perfume and the people will come.

- - - Updated - - -

It's just past midnight thirty, London. The lines are closed. Voting is over.

Today, Friday 18th January 2013, I hope it breathes some fire to bring warmth in a freezing London, I'll be wearing....

Cartier Le Baiser Du Dragon

What will I wear next on Saturday 19th January? Choose from the following 10:

Estée Lauder Aliage

Elizabeth Arden Green Tea

Dior Diorella

Bvlgari Eau Parfumee au The Rouge

Dior Dune

Dior La Collection Couturier Parfumeur Mitzah

Givenchy Givenchy III

Kenzo Kenzo Jungle L'Elephant

Robert Piguet Fracas

Or (and I'm embarrassed to say this) the newcomer...

Guerlain Jicky


Remember all previous votes count towards a fragrance's running total and every participant gets a new vote every day!

You have just under twenty two hours... starting now.

The next review is on its way.

- - - Updated - - -

And here it is...

Part two of the Estee Lauder Trilogy.

Thank you everyone who voted for this. It's been a pleasure...

Estée Lauder Azuree Pure

Pop the champagne corks people the prima donna power woman has been promoted to the top job.

She enters as always in graphite pencil skirt sharpened to a point and black wool jersey jacket on top: tucked at the nearly-not-there waist then out to fill full broad shoulders.

One significant piece of jewellery.

She snaps a greeting to the crowd then an invitation to the few: her office, vintage fizz on ice, now.

This crazy citrus aldhyde rush her only concession to her elevation.

Yes it has been hard work. There were others in the field. Too right, they fell by the wayside. Not the women they used to be.

She's twice the woman she's ever been.

The party over before it begins. She throws her Barda bag onto a glass and chrome coffee table where today as every day a fresh bunch of red carnations dressed with green grey moss buys time in a clear cube.

A feeble nod to a futile idea of femininity in a room that is a temple to the tanner's art.

In the vestibule cringeing would-be colleagues cower on Barcelona chairs awaiting an audience with this new crowned empress of commerce.

Ushered in they sit on le Corbusier couches, sipping too hot, too strong herb tea from constructivist espresso cups while waiting to explain themselves.

It turns out their copy is, well, just not good enough.

The men leave. They are, if not fired, not hired either.

Appointments continue throughout the day, no let up in her manner no diminution of her power.

She departs in private elevator to chauffeur driven car to private elevator and finally top floor apartment.

Only the cheap take Penthouses, and then only for the articles.

At home and undressed, alone except for powder, she is poise and self possession personified.

An ornament of amber glows warmth across her expansive inner space.

Do they like her? She laughs. Does she care?

She doesn't want love, affection, gratitude, infatuation, respect or even adoration.

She simply demands that they worship and obey her.

***

Azuree is to the power chypre what the Apollo moon rocket is to long haul air travel.

In these days of reductive reformulation she is a monument to quality, silage and longevity - in every sense of that word.

Opening in a vertical trajectory, fueled by aldehyde and super charged bergamot, this scent is heading for the stars.

The interior of USS Azuree is pure leather - no PVC and hard plastics here.

In order to retain a sense of space age decorum, the more animalic elements are banished by a good strong bunch of synthesized herbs and a modest bouquet of boiled up blooms.

The pace is maintained a million miles or more, then, arriving at it's destination our spacecraft scent slows almost to a stop, allows the softest of amber landings.

Mission accomplished.

Can a man wear it?

Azuree could be in a crowd of super heavyweight boxing champions and still be the butchest one in the room.

- - - Updated - - -

It's just coming up to 1 in the morining, London. The lines are closed. Voting is over.

Today, Saturday 19th January 2013, after a very close battle and a tie, on countback, a Dior perfume... I'll be wearing....

Dior Dune

What will I wear next on Monday 21st January? Choose from the following 10:

Estée Lauder Aliage

Elizabeth Arden Green Tea

Dior Diorella

Bvlgari Eau Parfumee au The Rouge

Dior La Collection Couturier Parfumeur Mitzah

Givenchy Givenchy III

Kenzo Kenzo Jungle L'Elephant

Robert Piguet Fracas

Guerlain Jicky

Or the newcomer...

Guerlain Samsara


Remember all previous votes count towards a fragrance's running total and every participant gets a new vote every day!

That's two votes at the weekend!!

You have just under forty eight hours... starting now.

The next review will be along presently.

It's just after 10pm Sunday, London. The lines are closed. Voting is over.

Tomorrow, Monday 21st January 2013, proving that if not patience then persistence is rewarded, I'll be wearing....

Dior La Collection Couturier Parfumeur Mitzah


What will I wear next on Tuesday 22nd January? Choose from the following 10:

Estée Lauder Aliage

Elizabeth Arden Green Tea

Dior Diorella

Bvlgari Eau Parfumee au The Rouge

Givenchy Givenchy III

Kenzo Kenzo Jungle L'Elephant

Robert Piguet Fracas

Guerlain Jicky

Guerlain Samsara

Or the newcomer...

Dior Miss Dior


Remember all previous votes count towards a fragrance's running total and every participant gets a new vote every day!

You have just over 24 hours... starting now.

The next review will be along before polls close.

Undoubtedly one of the most challenging fragrances to make an appearance thus far, a work of profound qualities

Estée Lauder Private Collection

This is the fragrance of an unforgotten lost friendship. Of an affair left unfinished.

Some think her distant, cold, uncaring.

You see on that sad day she failed to make any public declaration of her despair, would not permit sugar sweet eulogies to eviscerate the general agony.

She held and holds herself with dignity and finds herself in turn held in contempt by those who require outpourings of overdone emotion.

They should regard her now, trimming back nettles that have overgrown the grave where her husband lies.

She visits him regularly but infrequently, scared, not of the nettles' stings, which are sharp and sudden and suddenly gone, but of the lasting unbalmable burn of loss, as keenly felt now as when he died.

From their cellophane sheath she pulls forth flowers. Mainly chrysanthemums. He adored chrysanthemums. His father grew them in his garden and they reminded him of him. She wishes it were otherwise, but they remind her only of death. His death.

Where she has unsettled the soil with her effort to hold back nature, the Earth gives forth a bitter scent of itself: of moss and old decaying wood.

The smell mingles unhappily with the hue of hyacinths and roses, feeble concessions amongst the bouquet to future pleasures indefinitely postponed.

She has started to cry as she knew she would, as she always does.

Gathering together the effects of mourning she returns to the car. Here in salty slightly sweet air that holds gentle sandalwood in it she looks across at his resting place.

Her tears continue to fall and rain starts from the heavens.

***

A scent of solitary sorrow, Estee Lauder's Private Collection is perfume of private grief and almost immeasurable melancholy.

It takes a green note and makes of it a chord of pure blue. Marrying nettles and lawn grass with oak moss and earth to achieve a cool, reserved opening of remarkable detached intensity.

What follows is a wall of floral sound. Most distinct within it the voice of the greenest flower: chrysanthemum. And whilst this is mellowed in time with roses and hyacinth and perhaps a little jasmine, one is never too far away from stalks and leaves and thorns.

As though the scent senses that all might be about to topple over into melodrama, it seems quite suddenly to steady itself. Well into dry down it dabs the tears from its eyes and composes a dignified departure of wood, spice and a little musk that feels like dust.

A forbidding but inevitable and immense journey that will ultimately be taken by men and women alike.

- - - Updated - - -

It's just after midnight, London. The lines are closed. Voting is over.

Today, Tuesday 22nd January, the oldest show in town just keeps running, I'll be wearing....

Guerlain Jicky

What will I wear next on Wednesday 23rd January? Choose from the following 10:

Estée Lauder Aliage

Elizabeth Arden Green Tea

Dior Diorella

Bvlgari Eau Parfumee au The Rouge

Givenchy Givenchy III

Kenzo Kenzo Jungle L'Elephant

Robert Piguet Fracas

Guerlain Samsara

Dior Miss Dior

Or the newcomer...

Clinique Aromatics Elixir


Remember all previous votes count towards a fragrance's running total and every participant gets a new vote every day!

You have just under 22 hours... starting now.

The next review will be along shortly.

In the meantime you can catch the last part of the Lauder Trilogy:

Estée Lauder Private Collection