04/07/2021
BrianBuchanan
355 Reviews
BrianBuchanan
2
Soit de la peau
Peau de Soie is not an easy scent. It’s a floral - but venomous, bitter, and abstract.
And like modern art or avante-garde classical music, you have to work at it. There’s little you can name here : peach maybe, mandarin at the start?, dry - like iris, musky... There’s a feeling like rough silk, but that’s more of a texture than a smell.
Eventually, it resolves into something vaguely like hyacinth and mimosa, but that’s about as figurative as it gets. And then, over time, it loses some edge and gets drier and more textured – in the conventional way of things.
But this is not conventional perfume.
It is like a modern feminine; synthetic slices of fruit, flowers and woods etc. but here the synthetic route isn’t pursued for cheapness, it’s done for aesthetic reasons - and it's taken to extremes.
There are actually no fruits or flowers in Peau de Soie, just abstractions; which makes it difficult to get your head around. The nearest thing might be a hair salon product, pleasant but neutral. But Peau de Soie is anything but neutral. As I said, a little sweet and fruity at the start but venomous and bitter most of the time.
It seems to be more than just modern; not exactly postmodern but hypermodern, ahead of its time. And like all things ahead of their time it’s easily misunderstood, which would explain why I found it for small money in a discount store. Peau de Soie must be too difficult for the casual wearer and it seems to have been a flop. Which is suprising because it's quite similar to Narciso for Her but the quality is much much better, and the theme much more engaging. Maybe the problem with Peau de Soie was, it was ahead of it's time - by minus 13 years.
And like modern art or avante-garde classical music, you have to work at it. There’s little you can name here : peach maybe, mandarin at the start?, dry - like iris, musky... There’s a feeling like rough silk, but that’s more of a texture than a smell.
Eventually, it resolves into something vaguely like hyacinth and mimosa, but that’s about as figurative as it gets. And then, over time, it loses some edge and gets drier and more textured – in the conventional way of things.
But this is not conventional perfume.
It is like a modern feminine; synthetic slices of fruit, flowers and woods etc. but here the synthetic route isn’t pursued for cheapness, it’s done for aesthetic reasons - and it's taken to extremes.
There are actually no fruits or flowers in Peau de Soie, just abstractions; which makes it difficult to get your head around. The nearest thing might be a hair salon product, pleasant but neutral. But Peau de Soie is anything but neutral. As I said, a little sweet and fruity at the start but venomous and bitter most of the time.
It seems to be more than just modern; not exactly postmodern but hypermodern, ahead of its time. And like all things ahead of their time it’s easily misunderstood, which would explain why I found it for small money in a discount store. Peau de Soie must be too difficult for the casual wearer and it seems to have been a flop. Which is suprising because it's quite similar to Narciso for Her but the quality is much much better, and the theme much more engaging. Maybe the problem with Peau de Soie was, it was ahead of it's time - by minus 13 years.
