Perfumes the Guide 2018 by Luca Turin

Author:Luca Turin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: perfumes
Publisher: Perfüümista OÜ
Published: 2018-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

New York Intense (Nicolaï) ★★★★★ powdery biscuit

I discovered Nicolaï perfumes in 1989 soon after the opening of their first shop on Avenue Victor Hugo, and fell in love with the original New York, which I wore for a decade. Then spineless IFRA and obtuse Danish dermatologists began their noble crusade to lay waste to perfumery. Oakmoss and various citrus materials were restricted, and New York lost its mojo. Patricia de Nicolaï was kind enough to help me through the lean years with a sample of the old stuff, for which I am forever grateful. Now, owing to who knows what brilliant alchemy, New York has circumvented all the pettifogging and comes roaring back in full glory, with its unique combination of bracing bitter orange, cosseting petit-beurre, and dreamy lavender. I doubt very much that there is at this point a better masculine fragrance out there. The closest marvel might be Guerlain’s Mouchoir de Monsieur—recall that Patricia de Nicolaï’s grandfather was a Guerlain—but unlike MdM, NYI has no trace of languid foppishness about it, merely a contemplative, steady composure. LT

Night Flower (Eris Parfums) ★★★ cardamom animalic

This close reinterpretation of Maurice Roucel’s Musc Ravageur is, like its inspiration, an excessively rich, sweet, and animalic floral oriental that belongs nowhere near anyplace people are eating or trying to think, but which accomplishes an unsubtle va-va-voom effect like few others. I would still choose Ubar (Amouage) or the long-gone Shocking (Schiaparelli) over either, as I find there is something in this heavy, dense sweetness that brings to mind the word “sickly.” TS

Nightingale (Zoologist) ★★★★ woody floral

The dominant impression one gets from Zoologist perfumes is of a consistent, creative, single-minded art direction, that elusive and often neglected ingredient that alone enables a brand to be more than the sum of its products. The details (superb bottles, wonderful label engravings, exquisite typography and printing, wry humor as in calling the sample box “natural selection set”) all work in the same direction, an object lesson in coherence to most niche firms—and some big ones. Nightingale, composed by Japanese fragrance writer and self-taught perfumer Tomoo Inaba, apparently draws its inspiration from a thirteenth century poem written to the empress of Japan by her younger sister. The empress was about to become a nun, and her sister read the poem and gave her a wood rosary and a sprig of plum blossom as a parting gift.

Tomoo Inaba is clearly a natural talent. For once the inspiration comes through clear as a bell and undiminished in the fragrance, as opposed to being some sort of PR guff unconnected with the juice. Nightingale belongs to that small band of perfumes that do something so interesting that you feel the need to rewind the video several times to understand what is going on. I ended up with six smelling strips in front of me. I realize what I say will come perilously close to orientalist nonsense, but it seems to me that one of the aesthetic strengths of Japan is the poetic

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