MemoryOScent
Reviews
Filter & sort
MemoryOScent
How reformulation works.
The first scent that got me stuck in niche perfumes was Maitre Parfumeur et Gantier, Route du Vetiver. But it was more of a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde experience… I was still only sampling when the name caught my eye: the root of vetiver… “Quite promising!” I thought. So I ordered my sample and when it arrived…. It was heaven! Or should I say Underworld…? A dark, earthy scent that smelled exactly as the name promised, the smell of dirt hanging from the roots of a plant just pulled out of the earth! I have never smelled a vetiver plant, but these dirty roots I was smelling were definitely vetiver roots. It was love at first smell. I knew I had to have a bottle of this so I ordered it from the same online shop that I ordered the sample from.
The days of waiting just heightened the anticipation. My first niche buy, the best fragrance I had ever smelled up to then (and probably until today), I just couldn’t wait. And then the bottle came in the post. And it was so…. different. I must admit that I tried to convince myself, day after day, wearing after wearing that what was coming out of the bottle appealed to me as much as the scent that was coming out of the sample vial. I really tried hard to convince myself that it was the same smell. You see I hadn’t started reading Basenotes’ forums yet and the term “reformulation” sounded like a science experiment at the time. But there comes a time where one has to face denial and come to terms with it. I started searching around, read every thread on vetiver on Basenotes and finally came to terms with the simple fact that RdV was not what it used to be. It wasn’t my idea. The juice didn’t smell the same any more. Most of MP&G fragrances had been reformulated, got a new bottle and carried the names of their ancestors, others proudly, but from what I was reading RdV was the apple that had fallen furthest from the tree.
I felt like someone was playing with my mind. I had found my Holly Grail and they decided to melt it down and sell it for good luck charms. I wrote an angry e-mail to the online shop and let them know what I was thinking about someone who gives out a little taste of something they cannot deliver. Of course I offered to buy the rest of their tester since it wouldn’t make any sense selling samples from a tester that was different from the actual bottles it was supposed to promote. To my astonishment the extremely professional people of the online shop apologized and offered to send me the tester, free of charge. At the end of the day, I had my first love in my hands as well as the her botox-ed little sister. A happy ending.
Side by side
Vintage: Sharp, metallic, diluent. Ink, much like the ink in Encre Noire, only more upfront, more confident, in your face. As the fragrance warms up on the skin the harsh, cool, almost minty top disappears. Berries start adding some thickness. The vetiver starts to become prominent. It is green with a cold, detached earthiness. The vetiver is always underlined by this cold diluent note but now the earthiness starts to grow stronger. It is now the smell of soil after the rain, the smell of a dump basement. You can smell the wet walls but you can also hear the chains rattle. Gothic, dark shiny metal. The earthiness doesn’t bring nature to mind but a man-made situation. A cell, a dungeon in a castle. Not a prison but a hideaway for the owner of the castle. Nothing involuntary in his presence in this cell. On the contrary it is his favorite place in the castle, where he comes to be free of conventions. Woody notes start anchoring the scent in more comfortable domains. It sits on the skin like shiny black panther fur.
Current: White flowers against green background. The white flowers start to subside and a berry note adds sweetness. Now the flowers smell almost like tuberose. The diluent note appears pulling the leash on the white flowers. The flowers keep coming down. A creamy dimension kicks in. The vetiver starts becoming more obvious at long last. Musk forms the base. It sits on the skin like an aqua colored velvet glove, definitely more feminine than the vintage version. A flamboyant elegance of an effeminate dandy.
After about half an hour the two versions come so close that it seems like a magician’s trick. The current juice still boasts a creamy sweetness and a stronger jasmine that forces one to categorize it as a floral vetiver. The vintage version however is somewhere in a land of its own: a mineral vetiver? A metallic vetiver? No sweetness at all, not a hint of musk.
All in all the vintage version is a masterpiece. No other vetiver has managed to put wet earth in the forefront but still keeping the fragrance “clean”, metallic, distilled. The new version is humbled by the comparison but in fact if it had been released as “Fleur du Vetiver” (Vetiver Flower) it might now be considered a classic. Well this is a story we have seen many times: it’s not good enough to be good, you have to be good enough to fill the shoes you are given.
The days of waiting just heightened the anticipation. My first niche buy, the best fragrance I had ever smelled up to then (and probably until today), I just couldn’t wait. And then the bottle came in the post. And it was so…. different. I must admit that I tried to convince myself, day after day, wearing after wearing that what was coming out of the bottle appealed to me as much as the scent that was coming out of the sample vial. I really tried hard to convince myself that it was the same smell. You see I hadn’t started reading Basenotes’ forums yet and the term “reformulation” sounded like a science experiment at the time. But there comes a time where one has to face denial and come to terms with it. I started searching around, read every thread on vetiver on Basenotes and finally came to terms with the simple fact that RdV was not what it used to be. It wasn’t my idea. The juice didn’t smell the same any more. Most of MP&G fragrances had been reformulated, got a new bottle and carried the names of their ancestors, others proudly, but from what I was reading RdV was the apple that had fallen furthest from the tree.
I felt like someone was playing with my mind. I had found my Holly Grail and they decided to melt it down and sell it for good luck charms. I wrote an angry e-mail to the online shop and let them know what I was thinking about someone who gives out a little taste of something they cannot deliver. Of course I offered to buy the rest of their tester since it wouldn’t make any sense selling samples from a tester that was different from the actual bottles it was supposed to promote. To my astonishment the extremely professional people of the online shop apologized and offered to send me the tester, free of charge. At the end of the day, I had my first love in my hands as well as the her botox-ed little sister. A happy ending.
Side by side
Vintage: Sharp, metallic, diluent. Ink, much like the ink in Encre Noire, only more upfront, more confident, in your face. As the fragrance warms up on the skin the harsh, cool, almost minty top disappears. Berries start adding some thickness. The vetiver starts to become prominent. It is green with a cold, detached earthiness. The vetiver is always underlined by this cold diluent note but now the earthiness starts to grow stronger. It is now the smell of soil after the rain, the smell of a dump basement. You can smell the wet walls but you can also hear the chains rattle. Gothic, dark shiny metal. The earthiness doesn’t bring nature to mind but a man-made situation. A cell, a dungeon in a castle. Not a prison but a hideaway for the owner of the castle. Nothing involuntary in his presence in this cell. On the contrary it is his favorite place in the castle, where he comes to be free of conventions. Woody notes start anchoring the scent in more comfortable domains. It sits on the skin like shiny black panther fur.
Current: White flowers against green background. The white flowers start to subside and a berry note adds sweetness. Now the flowers smell almost like tuberose. The diluent note appears pulling the leash on the white flowers. The flowers keep coming down. A creamy dimension kicks in. The vetiver starts becoming more obvious at long last. Musk forms the base. It sits on the skin like an aqua colored velvet glove, definitely more feminine than the vintage version. A flamboyant elegance of an effeminate dandy.
After about half an hour the two versions come so close that it seems like a magician’s trick. The current juice still boasts a creamy sweetness and a stronger jasmine that forces one to categorize it as a floral vetiver. The vintage version however is somewhere in a land of its own: a mineral vetiver? A metallic vetiver? No sweetness at all, not a hint of musk.
All in all the vintage version is a masterpiece. No other vetiver has managed to put wet earth in the forefront but still keeping the fragrance “clean”, metallic, distilled. The new version is humbled by the comparison but in fact if it had been released as “Fleur du Vetiver” (Vetiver Flower) it might now be considered a classic. Well this is a story we have seen many times: it’s not good enough to be good, you have to be good enough to fill the shoes you are given.
2 Comments
Sarrasins – A nightscape
Every perfume junkie has an opinion on this: to buy blind or to test? I admit I am a thrill seeker so buying blind is a one way street for me. I have done it profusely, eBay being the ideal place for cheap thrill. But there is one perfume house that drags me by the nose when it comes to buying blind and buying expensive: Les Salons du Palais Royal Serge Lutens. There is something about that house, that man (Serge Lutens) that simply knocks down my common sense. It is true, he is a shrewd marketer. He has come up with the “Paris Exclusive” line, sold only in the house boutique. He bottles these fragrances in what I believe is the most beautiful perfume flacon ever devised. There are no samples available but anyone can have for free all of them in wax sample form, which are nothing but teasers since you only get to smell the basenotes in these. And to top everything up they are cheaper in a per ml ratio than the fragrances exported all over the world by the same house! Can you blame me for giving in so often?
My blind buys have often been success stories. After all deciding to buy a perfume unsniffed is an educated guess. I do a lot of research, read all the reviews and blogs and pretty much know what I am getting into. But buying Sarrasins was a tale of perfection. A climax of ticklish anxiety that started with pushing the “add to basket” button and exploded with the opening of the bottle. First of all, the name: Sarrasins. A reference to the mythology of the Syrian desert, already hinting hot humid nights, exotic landscapes and a dose of danger… The impeccable bell shaped bottle, balancing between nostalgia and technical austerity… And then the juice inside the bottle, in a unique blue, purple, almost black hue… Do you notice the echo of the imagery produced by the name in the optical qualities of the fragrance? You would have to be blind not to! Let’s not forget the man is a photographer. So I took the plunge, became 110 euros poorer and ordered the bottled mystery which was reported to deliver jasmine, in a dark sense. Anticipation only heightened the excitement. And a few days later the courier service delivered the goods at my doorstep. The mat, off-black carton box, matching the box with the delicate beige lines forming the house logo and name on it. With sweaty hands I opened the box to hold the almost black flacon with the spherical stopper that catches the light. Now here comes the difficult part: the bottle comes with a stopper that fits snugly into the bottle. Transport makes the fit even tighter. Trying to open the bottle is only some extra pressure away from breaking it. And once I got over that hurdle, it was pure heaven.
Jasmine is there, from top to base of the scent. If one is familiar with this note in perfumes then they have learned to expect a thick, sweet, animalic flower vibe that to many is associated to the smell of an old lady. Coquette but old. The jasmine in Sarrasins tells a different story. If white flowers to you are synonymous to feminine scents you have to try this one. No hint of sweetness whatsoever. The white flower is laced with the most unexpected topnote that is so familiar yet so difficult to name. Why is this difficult? Because you would never dare to associate it with a flower scent: it is car exhaust, petrol fumes! A touch of camphor in there too, like one would expect from a car exhaust pipe. A bit of black pepper adds to the dryness of the composition. As the wearing progresses jasmine seems to take a step back. Not that it becomes less noticeable. It’s like saying that King Kong took one step back. You will always be able to see him. But it feels like you are smelling the jasmine through the mist of its accompanying notes. The fumes, the pepper and the musk that slowly emerges giving an animalic note to the composition. Not the usual animalic note that comes from the jasmine’s indoles. What comes to mind is the smell of a cat’s fur. Something velvety, pleasing in a strange way, always flirting with aversion but remaining familiar and comforting.
While usually jasmine perfumes echo the smell of old, pricked, dead, stale, almost rotting jasmines, Sarrasins manages to capture the ethereal fragrance of a jasmine garden in full bloom in a hot summer night. I would imagine that Serge Lutens traveled to a hidden oasis in the middle of the desert and commissioned the local artisans to distil the oils of jasmine not from the harvested flowers but from the desert air. I imagine old men unwrapping their turbans in the night air, letting them fly in the desert breeze. Collecting them again in the morning and extracting the spirit of jasmines, not the fragrance. In a sense, Sarrasins is the platonic ideal of jasmine in a bottle. Every time I open the bottle I can’t help but feeling like walking by a rough brick wall. Suddenly the smell of the jasmine garden hidden behind the wall hits me and I have to tilt my head back filling my lungs with the flower infused night air. And opening my eyes again I now face the star studded night sky which has the exact same color as the magical fragrance inside the bell shaped Sarrasins bottle.
My blind buys have often been success stories. After all deciding to buy a perfume unsniffed is an educated guess. I do a lot of research, read all the reviews and blogs and pretty much know what I am getting into. But buying Sarrasins was a tale of perfection. A climax of ticklish anxiety that started with pushing the “add to basket” button and exploded with the opening of the bottle. First of all, the name: Sarrasins. A reference to the mythology of the Syrian desert, already hinting hot humid nights, exotic landscapes and a dose of danger… The impeccable bell shaped bottle, balancing between nostalgia and technical austerity… And then the juice inside the bottle, in a unique blue, purple, almost black hue… Do you notice the echo of the imagery produced by the name in the optical qualities of the fragrance? You would have to be blind not to! Let’s not forget the man is a photographer. So I took the plunge, became 110 euros poorer and ordered the bottled mystery which was reported to deliver jasmine, in a dark sense. Anticipation only heightened the excitement. And a few days later the courier service delivered the goods at my doorstep. The mat, off-black carton box, matching the box with the delicate beige lines forming the house logo and name on it. With sweaty hands I opened the box to hold the almost black flacon with the spherical stopper that catches the light. Now here comes the difficult part: the bottle comes with a stopper that fits snugly into the bottle. Transport makes the fit even tighter. Trying to open the bottle is only some extra pressure away from breaking it. And once I got over that hurdle, it was pure heaven.
Jasmine is there, from top to base of the scent. If one is familiar with this note in perfumes then they have learned to expect a thick, sweet, animalic flower vibe that to many is associated to the smell of an old lady. Coquette but old. The jasmine in Sarrasins tells a different story. If white flowers to you are synonymous to feminine scents you have to try this one. No hint of sweetness whatsoever. The white flower is laced with the most unexpected topnote that is so familiar yet so difficult to name. Why is this difficult? Because you would never dare to associate it with a flower scent: it is car exhaust, petrol fumes! A touch of camphor in there too, like one would expect from a car exhaust pipe. A bit of black pepper adds to the dryness of the composition. As the wearing progresses jasmine seems to take a step back. Not that it becomes less noticeable. It’s like saying that King Kong took one step back. You will always be able to see him. But it feels like you are smelling the jasmine through the mist of its accompanying notes. The fumes, the pepper and the musk that slowly emerges giving an animalic note to the composition. Not the usual animalic note that comes from the jasmine’s indoles. What comes to mind is the smell of a cat’s fur. Something velvety, pleasing in a strange way, always flirting with aversion but remaining familiar and comforting.
While usually jasmine perfumes echo the smell of old, pricked, dead, stale, almost rotting jasmines, Sarrasins manages to capture the ethereal fragrance of a jasmine garden in full bloom in a hot summer night. I would imagine that Serge Lutens traveled to a hidden oasis in the middle of the desert and commissioned the local artisans to distil the oils of jasmine not from the harvested flowers but from the desert air. I imagine old men unwrapping their turbans in the night air, letting them fly in the desert breeze. Collecting them again in the morning and extracting the spirit of jasmines, not the fragrance. In a sense, Sarrasins is the platonic ideal of jasmine in a bottle. Every time I open the bottle I can’t help but feeling like walking by a rough brick wall. Suddenly the smell of the jasmine garden hidden behind the wall hits me and I have to tilt my head back filling my lungs with the flower infused night air. And opening my eyes again I now face the star studded night sky which has the exact same color as the magical fragrance inside the bell shaped Sarrasins bottle.
3 Comments
