Perfume Review & Musings Archives

Brutalist or Mainstrream, Depending on Where You're Coming From Beyond Rose by Clinique is the latest unexpected perfume creation by a household beauty and fragrance brand Made in the USA......

A Reverie rather than an Intense Dream  California Rêverie is the latest opus in the Collection Extrardinaire by Van Cleef & Arpels, the upper-echelon fragrance library more on the side of perfumery intransigeance and beautiful smells than adaptation to fashion and enhancement of...

Exploring the Dark Side of Lavender Water  Eau de Lavande by Diptyque opens on an impressively musky and pungent top note riding on the animalic back of lavender. The spicy note of nutmeg amps up all that is potentially excessive in the...

  Grabbing the Spotlight, for Once in a Few Centuries   Just a few whiffs in and the new Geranium Odorata by Diptyque provokes a muted, inner laughter in you as if you had just read a funny joke, well...

A Love Pean to Sicily, Mostly “The nobility of the soul, the elegance of every day gestures, the joy of sharing from generation to generation, and the effortless perfection of a single white flower. This is the picture of Sicily that...

Stylish Tropics Your very first impression of the new Eau Tropicale by Sisley joining the ranks of Eau de Campagne (1974) and the Eaux de Sisley (2009) is that the perfume was obviously designed to smell oh-so-good by espousing the contours...

  A Whiplash of White Florals Good Not Just For the Mass-Market Far Away Gold by Avon (2014) is the latest flanker to Far Away (1994) a mid-90s oriental which has proven to be so popular it is now the giant...

The first impression conveyed by new, upcoming Carven L'Eau de Toilette to debut in April 2014 is how incredibly lush the perfume is while being at the same time much fresher than the original.From the get-go, you are smacked in...

Like each year, Paco Rabanne release an annual limited-edition duo of revisited Black XS perfumes for Valentine's Day. Last year, they were the Black XS L'Aphrodisiaque duo. In 2014, they are Black XS Potion for Her and Him.  The fragrances...

 The relationship between fashion and perfume has been an ambivalent one at times yet an economic and creative necessity once it came to light that both industries could benefit symbiotically from the partnership.Since the days of Worth, Poiret and...

The newly launched Cerisier Rouge Eau Intense by l'Occitane en Provence smells at first like a fruity-floral version of a cherry tree. It has been made to feel denser and slightly more opaque than is usual for this genre of...

Jo Malone are preparing to launch a new limited-edition library of perfumes this spring. Like each year, it is devoted to a different storied thematic. Last year, you could almost taste a Sugar and Spice Collection reminding you of the...

My initial impression of Tory Burch Eau de Parfum was that it reflects American aesthetic values in perfumery as we usually imagine them to be across the pond: clean and fresh. You conveniently set aside Obsession by Calvin Klein...

Wrappings by Clinique was launched in 1990 at the cusp of a decade which has come to be seen as characterized by the dominance of clean fragrances. It was indeed the new sensation in town, right after the aggressive,...

 Noire et Blanche by Man Ray, 1926 Bois des Îles is the Chanel perfume which has inherited of the most Baudelairian of names in their catalogue. Just by reading the phrase, a French speaker, especially one who has studied within...