Posted by Jessica
on
13 August 2011
Perfumes cling closely to your flesh
As incense to a censer; bright
And dusky nymph, you are all Night,
Secret and passionate and fresh!
— Charles Baudelaire (trans. Jacques LeClercq)
This is the end / beautiful friend
— Jim Morrison
I’m sorry, but I couldn’t stop myself from using those images and quotations. What else can one do, when faced with promotional copy stating that a fragrance is “inspired on one hand by Baudelaire’s homage to sweet and deep fragrances, yet on the other hand by the dark and mysterious poetry of Jim Morrison as he seemingly forebode his own demise”? The fragrance in question is Sweet Redemption (The End), the tenth and final release in By Kilian’s L’Oeuvre Noire series. It was developed by perfumer Calice Becker and the notes for this sweet powdery woods fragrance include orange blossom, vanilla, myrrh, opopanax, benzoin and incense.
Overwrought prose aside, what do we have here? Sweet Redemption opens with a top note of orange blossom cocooned in spun sugar. It’s feminine and quite pretty, and I thought for a moment that this would turn out to be one of the simpler By Kilian compositions…
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Posted by Robin
on
26 July 2011
Marc Jacobs’ new Oh, Lola! flanker launched fairly recently, and has already ended its brief exclusive-to-Bloomingdales period and is available nearly everywhere. The original Lola fragrance (2009), if you remember, was meant to be Daisy’s (2007) older sister. Oh, Lola! is supposed to be “lively and playful”, and sweeter than Lola, so I’m assuming it’s the middle sister, perhaps? It’s fronted by Dakota Fanning (see above), who is around 17, if that helps you place Oh, Lola! on the target market time line.
Oh, Lola! is exactly as advertised. They’ve toned down the floral notes in the heart and amped up the fruit notes in the opening; the base is a slightly paler version of Lola’s woody-musky trail…
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Posted by Robin
on
23 May 2011
Marc Jacobs will launch Oh, Lola!, a new flanker to 2009′s Lola fragrance for women, in July. Oh, Lola! is described as lively and playful…
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Posted by Robin
on
3 February 2011
It is a testament to the ongoing deluge of new perfumes, niche and not niche, that Love and Tears (Surrender) launched last year and I promptly forgot all about it, even though it’s a jasmine soliflore, a category of perfumes that I have some interest in, and even though I apparently got a sample shortly after it launched. Love and Tears is by perfumer Calice Becker, an obvious bonus, and it’s from By Kilian, which might or might not be a bonus depending on your point of view (By Kilian makes me a little cranky, as I’ve mentioned before).1
The back story, according to Mr. Kilian Hennessy:
Only the jasmine flower, with its endless spectrum of facets — citrus, green, floral and animalistic — was able to express the profusion of emotions that I wanted to communicate with this scent: the beginning of love marked with excitement, the fear of the unknown, and, ultimately, the surrender to love!
Mostly, though, they left out the animalistic part, and arguably even the “surrender to love”, and certainly the tears. Love and Tears is, perhaps, too richly floral to be the early, innocent days of love, but it’s too easygoing to be anything like surrender…
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Posted by Robin
on
9 December 2010
It’s beginning to dawn on me that I will not clear out my sample backlog by the end of the year, in fact, I’m thinking maybe I will never clear my sample backlog. All the same, it doesn’t hurt to try, right? Here are a few more unrelated quickie perfume reviews.
Ed Hardy Born Wild
Ed Hardy’s fourth fragrance for women, Born Wild, is just what you’d expect — a sweet-ish, middle-of-the-road fruity floral in their signature tattoo-inspired packaging. The fruit du jour: peach. Born Wild is light (think spring/summer rather than winter/fall), clean and inoffensive, and the lasting power is reasonable enough…
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