SOTD: L'Artisan Parfumeur Navegar

They say that it's got spices and rum and incense. All I smell is cedar shavings. And I approve.

Image: By Alexander Kink

Perfume Rambling: Delicious Blandness

I miss Szechuan Garden.

Szechuan Garden was a Chinese restaurant a ten-minute walk from our house. It had a lot of good food, but my very favorite dish was the sesame chicken. This wasn't the usual version of the dish, the kind with a thick batter dotted with an occasional sesame seed and dipped in sticky sauce. Instead, it was just thin, wide, planks of chicken breast coated in a thick layer of sesame seeds (presumably glued on with egg) and fried to golden brown, served crisp and dry, and begging for the eater to sprinkle on plenty of salt. I don't think that there was any dipping sauce, or if there was, I ignored it.

It was plain. Bland. Distinctly boring-looking. And to me, delicious. The subtle variation in flavor and texture between chicken that was a couple of millimeters thicker or thinner, or seeds that were fried a little more or less brown, was fascinating. I preferred thinner chicken and browner seeds, but much of the pleasure in that variation came from the contrast with the areas that were thicker and less brown. I want some right now, and I can't have any; Szechuan Garden is gone. I need to order some more bags of sesame seeds and continue my effort to duplicate the dish.

There are perfumes that have a similar delicious blandness, an apparently plain flavor that I can't quite put my finger on, but one that makes me want to gobble, chasing the taste.

Strange Invisible Perfumes Fire and Cream is the first fragrance that comes to mind. It doesn't offer obvious flavors - no obvious sweet, or bitter, or green, or "fresh". Instead, it's a mix of notes that disguise and change each other. I can't get a grip on the patchouli or tuberose; the lavender and sandalwood freshen them into unrecognizability. But I can't quite smell those; the barely-there orange sweetens them out of character. And the frankincense and orange blossom add an odd, dueling fog over the whole mix.

The same way that I used to crunch across a piece of sesame chicken, seeking out browner seeds or crunchier bits, I keep sniffing Fire and Cream, chasing after the orange, then the lavender, then the tuberose, and never quite catching any of them.

L'Artisan Navegar has a similar quiet complexity, mostly cedar, but it's a faint ghostly cedar mixed with hints of other notes - maybe cucumber, maybe spices, and something a little watery. The now-sweet, now-bitter powdery and milky scent of Serge Lutens Douce Amere is another entry in the category. And Hugo Boss Boss Woman, of all things, has some of the same appeal - it's terribly bland, but I keep sniffing at it.

I'm hungry now.

Image: Sanjay ach. Wikimedia Commons.

SOTD: Jo Malone Sweet Lime & Cedar

Pulling on my sweater this morning, I got a lovely whiff of cedar from yesterday's Navegar. Rather than fighting it, I decided to continue the cedar theme with Jo Malone Sweet Lime & Cedar.

There's a note in Jo Malone fragrances that I can't identify, but find very satisfying. It's like the olfactory equivalent of being comfortably fed after waiting a little too long to have a meal. That note, whatever it is, gives these otherwise light and fluttery fragrances some weight, something that makes them worth sniffing after one might otherwise get bored with the lighter notes.

As for describing this fragrance, it describes itself pretty well. There's cedar, a somewhat sharper cedar than Navegar, without the slightest hint of floral in it. And a surprisingly long-lasting lime note, so much longer-lasting than your usual citrus note that I wonder if it's something other than lime. (I see from the reviews that it's kaffir lime leaves; maybe that explains it.) There's said to be coconut and other things, but my nose isn't educated enough to find them.

I read that this fragrance is inspired by the flavors of Thai food, and I see that the reviews tend to regard it as a summer cologne. None of that is true for me - I don't perceive it as at all foody or even food-garnishy, I use it as an autumn fragrance, and it's stronger and longer-lasting than a cologne. (In fact, it seems to be getting stronger, not weaker, as I go into the second hour; I'll have to spray on a little less next time.)

But none of that is a criticism; I like this one, and I should wear it more often.

Update: Six hours later, it's still growing! Don't overspray this one, no matter how vanishingly light it seems at the beginning. Really. Don't.

Review Roundup: Now Smell This and Perfume-Smellin' Things and SmellyBlog.

Photo: Sarah Katzenell. Wikimedia Commons; click for details.

SOTD: L'Artisan Parfumeur Navegar

Navegar always smells to me like cedar. Period. So this time I wanted to keep a nose on it and try to catch those other notes that other people always seem to smell.

I sniffed industriously from the moment I sprayed and there were brief ghostly hints of other things. (Is that the cucumber they're talking about? Is that the black pepper? They're talking aquatic, I'm not getting the aquatic, unless it's the cucumber? Wait, he says he's getting _lime_?) Very brief. I'm ten minutes in, and it's cedar. Just cedar.

That's not to say that cedar is insufficient. I love cedar. Cedar is why I wear Navegar. But few people like... OK, what do you call a soliflore if it's not about a flower, but about wood? Solibois?

Anyway, as I was saying, few people like single-note perfumes. And in fact, Luckyscent declares that this perfume contains "red pepper, ginger, lime, absolute rum, black pepper, incense, star anise, juniper, cedar wood, guaiac wood". I get, again, cedar. So there's got to be more in here, but perhaps I just can't smell it.

"Can't smell it" is a problem that I and apparently many people have with some L'Artisan perfumes. And it doesn't seem to be the same perfumes for everyone - for example, scanning the Review Roundup, I see one reviewer who can only briefly smell L'Artisan Dzing! and dislikes Piment Brulant (which suggests that he can smell it), while I have no difficulty smelling Dzing!, and can't smell Piment Brulant for more than a second or two.

So: Cedar. A lovely light cedar, not too aggressive or resinous. There might be the faintest possible floral note, because it sometimes smells the way I'd imagine a cedar flower to smell, if cedar produced sheaves of little white flowers. Except floral notes are the one thing that _isn't_ listed in that notes list.

Navegar is lovely, to my nose. If you have my nose, I recommend it. But it would probably be safest to smell it first, to make sure that you can, well, smell it.

Review Roundup: Bois de Jasmin and Fragrantica and Basenotes.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons