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Posted by Dain, Thursday, February 21, 2008 4:00 AM (Eastern)
I've never had a sweet tooth. Given the choice, I'll readily choose 70% over milk chocolate. This has absolutely nothing to do with a rarefied palate making maneuvers into the exotic and all that. In my personal Room 101, they'd choke me with tubes of frosting, and I'd declare my undying love to Big Brother just to get away from the vile and saccharine paste. I like a little sugar (honey is far more preferable), but only if it is to sweeten, i.e. combined with very bitter or very salty or very sour things. Lemonade needs sugar. Soy sauce and sugar in equal proportion with a little ginger makes an excellent marinade. But sugar, itself, in huge quantities, makes my stomach clench involuntarily in disgust. Bacardi, however, is OK. ; ) Consequently, I dislike sweet scents with equal intensity, in spite of my early indoctrination into fragrance with Organza Indécence. Sweet is technically a taste, not a smell, and the fault is with a hypersensitivity in the taste buds, but one builds up very strong associations with certain aromas, over time. Not everyone is a supertaster, but this is the main reason why I avoid testing contemporary mainstream perfumes, which can be aggressively sweet, while I only grow increasingly sugar-shy. So, here I am, slogging through a spate of intellectualized gourmands: Shalimar, POTL, and the upcoming Farnesiana. It's perfume purgatory. They are worthy creations all, but I don't particularly like any of them. So I've made a very slight detour, still gourmand, for something I do like, but somewhat more commercial in feel, the gorgeous and earthy Fifi Chachnil (Ava Gardner, above), which, had it the corporate backing of Chanel, would fly off the shelves. Since it is niche, it only claims a cult following. It wears more or less as a powdery confection, nevertheless it is more sturdily built than the fragile and strange POTL. There is a fairly exotic melange of opposites—light (a searing flash of lemon) and dark (the smoldering, incensey remains), feminine (lots of vanilla-and-rose-scented powder) and masculine (a hint of tobacco on the gentleman caller)—and yet the juice as a whole runs very smoothly, powered by the slightly odd pairing of amber and coriander. Dry and wonderfully herbaceous coriander does great work here, its presence is the perfect note of restraint on a rather heady, rambunctious bunch. There's a lot of sex to Fifi Chachnil, a demure and quiet perfume it decidedly is not, and yet it never says so out loud.
Labels: beauty notes, fifi chachnil, perfume reviews
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