Posted by Robin
on
8 December 2011
Azemour Les Orangers is the latest from French niche line Parfum d’Empire. It’s meant as a tribute to the city of Azemmour in Morocco and the surrounding region, where founder Marc-Antoine Corticchiato reportedly spent time at his family’s orange groves as a child. As a back-story, that’s relatively tame for a brand that has already brought us scents inspired by the Ottoman empire and Napoléon Bonaparte, among others, but with the never-ending onslaught of new niche brands with ever more obscure (and pretentious) inspirations, I’m tired of back-story anyway.
Azemour Les Orangers is a fresh chypre, a real, honest-to-goodness fresh chypre, with plenty of citrus and that mossy, nearly-musty undertone that you either adore or detest.1 If, like me, you adore it, then Azemour will be like greeting an old friend that you haven’t seen in some time and feared you might never meet again…
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Posted by Angela
on
10 January 2011
I first smelled Nina Ricci Fille d’Eve on a business trip to Seattle about 10 years ago. Before we left town, a colleague and I stopped by Parfumerie Nasreen and sampled perfumes, none of which I remember at all now. The owner of the shop stopped us as we left. She pulled a small, apple-shaped bottle from a high shelf behind the cash register and asked if I’d like to try it. “This is very special. Fille d’Eve,” she said and held the bottle as if she were presenting it at a game show.
Eve’s daughter. How could I resist trying a fragrance with a name like that? She dabbed a bit on my wrist, and I asked the price. It was something exorbitant, so I left without giving it more than a cursory sniff. Half an hour out of town I sniffed my wrist again. It smelled not quite clean. Not dirty as in body odor, but like an accumulation of skin oil. Not pretty, really, but intriguing.
Over the years I’d thought about Fille d’Eve and wished I could smell it again…
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Posted by Angela
on
12 February 2008
Sometimes the designation of a perfume as a “chypre” can feel mysterious. Guerlain Mitsouko, Carven Ma Griffe, and Paloma Picasso Mon Parfum are all chypres, for instance, but each smells so different. If you are stumped as to how a chypre really smells and need an olfactory benchmark — and a gorgeous one, at that — try Aedes de Venustas Histoire de Chypre.
“Chypre” is French for Cyprus and was linked with perfume in 1917 when Coty released a fragrance called Chypre. Coty Chypre was one of the first scents to move away from replicating something recognizable, like the smell of citrus or flowers…
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Posted by Angela
on
23 October 2007
When people talk about big, knock-‘em-out scents, they often mean white florals like Robert Piguet Fracas or Annick Goutal Passion or heady 1980s orientals like Yves Saint Laurent Opium and Chanel Coco. I’d like to add another category of perfume to this list: the fierce green chypre. I’m not talking about a moody green chypre like Jacomo Silences or a modulated green chypre like Estée Lauder Private Collection. I mean a no-apologies, cuts-like-a-knife, love-it-or-loathe-it green chypre. At the top of the list of fierce green chypres are Sisley Eau du Soir, Parfumerie Générale Corps et Ames, and Niki de Saint Phalle.
A fierce green chypre isn’t easy to wear. It’s a diva, and it will be bigger than you are if you give it an inch. Before you spray on a fierce green chypre, you’d better be ready to be fabulous. Make sure you have the energy for snappy comebacks, unleashed hilarity, or wanton passion — whatever the occasion calls for…
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