Insense

This is evocative of a prehistoric male hunter, always alert while away from home, in search of aliments for his family and fighting all the elements. Maybe from the time that man discovered how to make fire? Smoky vetiver, even better than, say, Encre Noire, so popular these days - how may I dare to write this??
(from a decant of B Never Too Busy To Be Beautiful, not in database, and not Lush)

This fragrance is being launched by Surrender To Chance in collaboration with Abdes Salaam/Dominique Dubrana, from La Via del Profumo.
The title of my review is inspired by the notes sent to me with the vial.
It is a pure natural jasmine, very real and close to the one I smelled some years ago in the gardens of a hotel in Tunisia, at night, drinking some mint tea.
Moderate sillage, lasting about 3-4 hours.
I am planning a trip to California this year or next, and now will certainly check the scent at night in the hills surrounding L.A.!

So, a fragrance from my beloved house of cognac, Frapin! I received this sample as a gift and immediately had to sniff it, and the day after I had an important meeting and I chose this one to wear. It made me feel confident, somehow as the guy who knows there are moments for cognac to be drunk and other moments for cognac to be in your wrists and neck and be felt by the people around you...
Lightly spicy, lightly sweet. Different, no doubt! Exquisite, as a cognac should be. And I enjoyed the coffee note. But not too long lasting...It reminded me definitely of french country in september and the french touch of life and "savoir vivre"!

Is there a path to one’s holy grail in perfumery? And why did I feel incense notes would drive me closer?

Perfumes with that incense related notes have awaken inside me lost memories: with Comme Des Garçons’s Kyoto I revisited images of playing when a kid alone in the company of cypresses, some smoke being felt in the distance coming from my family home, in an ending winter wet sunday. Or got me to an altered state of mind: L’Artisan’s Timbuktu transported me to the future - my place of desire, the mythic Timbuktu, where I want to be one day. So, past and future can appear in my present just by picking my scent of the day.

But, the ultimate incensed experience came with Etro’s Messe de Minuit. The name "Messe de Minuit" had all to be a devastating crush in the longing and missing memories of my childhood: family in christmas excursion to church at midnight. Our church always was presenting that time the sculpted Machado de Castro*’s Nativity Scene…And when I sprayed the first drops on my neck and wrists, I was not prepared to the overwhelm I fell afterwards. It was the first time I felt closer to perfection in perfumery, this meaning in a rush being in the past, meditation break, traveling to a place of interior regrets, and nostalgia of the forever lost innocence.

Just perfumes, but not only perfumes. Memories that we carry with us, most of the time sleeping inside our sub-conscient, should be awakened or should be left in quiet peace and forgotten?

Patchouli perfection. Nothing more to say now.

*Machado de castro was a portuguese sculptor in the 18th century.

I am having that experience!
I was the secret lover of Marie Antoinette and entered her room last night.
Now, the next day, it is the day she died.
And I am after that sad hour and all I can remember in my horror is her smell.
Or, saying better, our smell, hers and mine, mixed in my body odor, the geranium and the orris root mixing molecules will be my memory of the night I said goodbye to Marie Antoinette.

(this is the only perfume I have tested that I believe allows me to know how perfumery was once; it induced my museum delirium described above)