SOTD: Fracas Parfum

I've been establishing a foothold in some of the classics that are still considered worth owning. A high-quality but small foothold, which to me means a minimum-sized bottle of parfum. Or extrait. You know, that strong stuff. In a stopper bottle, because spraying parfum just seems wrong. And sometimes suicidal.

For a past birthday, Himself gifted me with three-quarters of an ounce of No. 19 parfum--a glorious excess above "minimum-sized." Some months ago, I acquired half an ounce of No. 5 parfum. I'm looking for the smallest possible Shalimar parfum--irritatingly, the only source that I've found selling a small stopper bottle online is out of stock, and another source only had those refill sprayer things. And I just received a quarter ounce of Fracas.  (That tiiiiny little bottle is so dang cute! (Did I say cute? No, of course not.))

I wore it today, and was a bit surprised--not disappointed, just surprised. I expected something stronger, dirtier, and less well behaved. What I got was distinctly...well, pretty. Certainly not a weak and watery kind of pretty, but it wasn't the indole bomb that I expected. I remember, somewhere, discussing whether some people's skins amplify weird notes while others mask them; I suspect that mine masks them. I'm going to have to try that Secretions thing and that Koublai Khan thing and see if they turn all prim and giggly.

Also, it had very little projection and it didn't really last long--or I quickly go anosmic to it. I realize that sometimes parfums blow up a room, and sometimes they are indeed quieter and closer to the skin, but it shouldn't fade so fast, should it? I'm confident in the source that I bought it from, so...well, puzzlement. I'll apply more next time, to see if that amps it up. Maybe I'm just parfum-phobic from my Shalimar trauma.

But it's beautiful. No whining from me there. Better-groomed and sleeker than I expected, but that's just fine.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

SOTD: Robert Piguet Bandit

I know that I'm back into perfume blogging when my scent of the day is based on whether I'm interested in blogging about it. Today, I didn't have time on the way out to lunch to choose a sample, so I grabbed Robert Piguet Bandit; it's been months since I wore it and I'm having trouble making up my mind about my bottle. I wanted another wearing, and of course a blog post.

I bought Bandit based on a sample. The sample was leathery and a little furry-sweaty, a note that I described as being like a clean cat sleeping in the sun. Today's wearing confirmed that that note is altogether gone from the bottle--the bottle is leather and something spicy that reminds me of Chanel Coco, of all things. It's ladylike with good posture, not contentedly lounging.

I'll give it a few more tries, but I suspect that I'll have decluttered the bottle within a year--it no longer does anything at all that Cuir de Russie doesn't do a lot better.

Image: By Tomascastelazo. Wikimedia Commons.

SOTD: Robert Piguet Bandit

I may be officially Disappointed.

I got a sample of what I thought was the current Bandit, a few months ago. I loved it. I finally broke down and bought myself a small bottle. And now I don't like it so much. There's a lot of spice and very little of the clean sun-warmed cat that I got before.

Hrmph.

Maybe I just need to wait for winter.

Review Roundup: Is here.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

SOTD: Robert Piguet Cravache, and an orange roundup

I've been on a quest for the right orange perfume. And I'll eliminate any suspense - Cravache is not it, but I do like it for what it is.

But to discuss the other "not it" oranges - Bois de Copaiba was too challenging for me.  Fendi Theorema was a very nice gingery-spices perfume, but didn't smell of orange (to me), plus it's discontinued.  Hermes Eau d'Orange Verte is too cologne-like - I'm looking for more richness.

Pacifica's Tuscan Blood Orange, which I must review someday, is a lovely orange with some richness and enough but not too much sugar. The solid version is close to my ideal, but the spray version is too light and sprightly. I want to be able to spray my orange perfume, marinate myself in it on a miserable cold winter day.

Caron Alpona is discontinued - though now that I remember it, I'm sending off for a decant, just to give me another perfume to grieve. Dawn Spencer Hurwitz's The Color Orange may be The One, but it didn't announce itself as such at first sniff. I want to own some, but I think that again it's a little too fresh and cheerful.

And all of the orange blossoms are out - I'm looking for the fruit.

So. Cravache. Cravache is another reformulated Robert Piguet classic. It was originally introduced in 1963, and reformulated (by Aurelian Guichard) and re-introduced in 2007. I understood that the original had a base of leather and other rich, un-sparkly things, so I was excited. Sadly, the remake seems to have lost that richness.

Given that the other Piguet perfumes were so different when dabbed versus sprayed, I tried Cravache dabbed for an hour or two. It smelled very much like Eau d'Orange Verte - disappointing, but no great surprise, given that they're both orange men's colognes. Light, refreshing, pleasant, fresh-orangey, and not what I'm after.

So I sprayed. It started out like the dabbed version, but within minutes it was light, refreshing, pleasant, and lavender. Eh? Where'd the orange go?

Okay, yes, this one isn't named after an orange, so no promises were made. From the reviews, I read that it was named after a riding crop, but with the leather removed, the name no longer fits. So the hope of a rich orange was entirely my expectation, imposed on an innocent cologne.

So it's not going to be my orange. Let's move on. It is a nice, light, dry lavender scent, with enough traces of orange to blunt the bitterness of the lavender and keep it from being Old Lady's Sachet, but not enough to make it sweet. If I ever go on a lavender quest, it will be on the top of the list.

Review Roundup: Perfume-Smellin' Things and Basenotes and 1000 Fragrances.

Orange Roundup Review Roundup: Outside reviews or mentions of Theorema and Tuscan Blood Orange and Alpona and The Color Orange.

SOTD: Robert Piguet Fracas, or, The aliens are among us

Huh.

Fracas is the queen of tuberose perfumes. In-your-face, unsubtle tuberose.

I don't like tuberose. I've mentioned this before. It annoys me. It reminds me of people that annoy me. It's indolic. Tuberose bad. No tuberose for me.

I like Fracas.

Did aliens swap out my nose while I wasn't looking?

Now, I was able to understand why I liked Parfumerie Generale Tubereuse Couture. That perfume soaks the tuberose with fruit and citrus and green jasmine and sugar cane and, y'know, stuff. It changes the tuberose into something else, into not-tuberose. Ex-tuberose. That explains my substantial fondness for Tubereuse Couture.

None of that is true of Fracas. Fracas is tuberose. It's practically the definition of the stuff. Sweet and, well, more sweet, and a smothering creaminess, and the orange blossom...

OK, I pause here to say that I also dislike orange blossom.

... and the orange blossom just adds more sweetness, and makes the combination even more floral, because tuberose is a little too creamy to have quite that sharp edge of floral'ness that makes me often dislike florals.

So, to summarize: I dislike tuberose. I dislike orange blossom. I dislike florals. I dislike indolic notes.

Fracas is packed to the rafters with all of these things, and I like it very much.

If you see the aliens, please send them to me. I want an explanation.

Review Roundup: Now Smell This and Bois de Jasmin and Perfume-Smellin' Things and Perfume-Smellin' Things again and Perfum-Smellin' Things a third time and Sweet Diva and Yesterday's Perfume and Feminine Things and Chandler Burr and Scentsate.

Link Roundup: WAFT and Boomtown Boudoir.

Edited to add to the Review Roundup and add a Link Roundup.

Image: By Lordoftheloch, Wikimedia Commons.

SOTE: Parfumerie Generale Cuir Venenum

Since sampling Bandit a few days ago, I've been wanting more leather. I knew that I had Daim Blond, but that's sweet friendly clean suede. It's different. And today's Visa has a wonderful leather note in it, but it's mostly about fruit. So I figured that to get a serious take-no-prisoners leather perfume, I'd need to buy Bandit.

Then, picking something to wear this evening, I sprayed from the bottle of Cuir Venenum that I hadn't used since last winter.

Yow. Leather.

I remembered Cuir Venenum as being a nice quiet little orange blossom with a hint of leather. My memory needs some work. The leather in this perfume announces itself loud and clear, accepting musk as a supporting player, and just barely tolerating the presence of the orange blossom and other notes, listed as myrrh, citrus, cedar, and coconut.

This will fulfill my leather craving quite nicely, thank you.

Though none of this is to say that I don't also want Bandit someday. I have at least six greens; surely I can have two leathers?

Review Roundup: Bois de Jasmin and Perfume-Smellin' Things and Aromascope and Fragrantica and Victoria's Own and Perfume Patter and ScentSate.

Edited to add a post on the original Visa at Shoes Cake & Perfume.

Photo: By FoeNyx. Wikimedia Commons. Click for details.

SOTD: Robert Piguet Visa

This is another Germaine Cellier classic - except, no, Bois de Jasmin tells me that the Osmetheque credits Jean Carles. Hmm. Well, I'm glad that my hunt through Cellier's perfumes led me to this one, even if it's not one of hers.

Originally released in 1945, it was reissued in 2007, formulated by Aurelien Guichard, who was the creator of the much-praised Bond No. 9 fragrance Chinatown. I can't speak to the original Visa, though I may send off for a decant one of these days, but I like the reissue.

Remember how Robert Piguet Bandit's leather was unexpectedly shy when dabbed? That's not a problem with Visa. After decanting my vial into a sprayer, I found myself with damp fingers and a damp vial, so I applied those traces to my skin and waited a while before spraying any on. That minimal application produced a distinctive cloud of rich, rather sharp leather, with just an edge of fruit.

Sprayed, the proportions flip - the leather is still evident, but the fruit is dominant. This isn't the usual sweet summery-fresh sort of fruity - it's autumn fruit, slightly overripe and starting to ferment. I'm very familiar with this scent right now, because much of our summer pear harvest is still lurking in the refrigerator, determinedly ripening despite our best efforts to slow it down. It's really a glorious scent, though the pleasure of being enveloped in it every time I open the refrigerator door is somewhat marred by worry over whether we'll ever eat it all.

So I'm enjoying Visa's guilt-free version of the same experience. It reminds me of descriptions of the "boozy" fruit notes of some Serge Lutens fragrances. But while I never seem to like the fruitier Lutens creations, I like this very much. The fruit is rich and thick, and so is the leather. Neither of them drown you with honey or syrup - this fragrance is sweet, but it doesn't quite cross over into too sweet.

The only problem is my strong suspicion that I won't like it at all in the summer. But I'm disregarding that; this is definitely now on the "want a bottle" list.

Review Roundup: Bois de Jasmin and For The Love Of Perfume and The Non-Blonde and Perfume-Smellin' Things and Shoes Cake & Perfume (about the vintage) and Yesterday's Perfume (about the vintage) and PereDePierre and WAFT and The Scented Salamander and Fragrantica and Eiderdown Press and Grain de Musc (vintage and new) and ThinkingShift and My Perfume and WouldSmellAsSweet.

Edited to add to the Review Roundup.

Image: A Garland Of Fruit, Cornelis de Heem. Wikimedia Commons.

SOTD: Robert Piguet Bandit

The classics continue.

When I read that Robert Piguet was very kind about sending out free samples, I left a blatantly-begging message on their website, and quite promptly received vials of Bandit, Cravache, Fracas, Baghari, and Visa. Woohoo!

So, Bandit. Bandit was created in 1944 by Germaine Cellier, the creator of Vent Vert. It was re-introduced in 1999 after a long absence, reformulated by Delphine Lebeau. If I understand my perfume history correctly, it's the leather perfume of leather perfumes, the originator of a leather dynasty just as Vent Vert is the originator of a green floral dynasty. This is a, the, big classic leather.

While is why, when I first dabbed this on from a sample vial I was startled with how very mild it was. This is what all the fuss is about? Maybe the excitement is in the development.

Three and a half hours of development later and, no, it's even milder. So I came to my senses and decanted the vial into a sprayer, spritzed it on, and, yowza! There's Bandit.

Leather, indeed. Serious, intense, no-fooling-around leather. And while I can't tease out the galbanum, I was enjoying something bitter and sharp in the opening, and few things make bitter and sharp that I enjoy more than galbanum.

That faded, and we're back to just leather - no doubt with other things to wrap and direct it, but all I get is leather. And that is certainly not a complaint.

I mentioned before that someone, somewhere said that leather fragrances smell more like the substances used to treat leather, than like leather - because those substances are what we think that leather smells like.

There's certainly a lot of that in Bandit, but there's also a very strong undercurrent of animal here. There's contented cow, clean stable, clean-cat-sleeping-in-the-sun. I've always thought of the circus-horses smell of Dzing! as some avant-garde innovation, but here's that same idea, from way back in 1944.

Freakishly, that warm-cat vibe means that after it dries and settles for a while, this isn't the shocker fragrance that it's reputed to be, at least for me. It's almost a comfort scent. An adult's scent, without a doubt, but there's something comfortable about that big cat.

Review Roundup: Bois de Jasmin and Perfume-Smellin' Things and Perfume-Smellin' Things again and Now Smell This and The Non-Blonde and PeredePierre and Perfume Posse and Aromascope and Yesterday's Perfume and Nathan Branch (on the parfum) and Polish, Platforms, Perfume and Left Coast Nose and Perfume Nerd and Perfume Patter and Perfume-Smellin' Things yet again.

Edited to add to the Review Roundup.

Photo: Art G. Wikimedia Commons, click for details