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Posted by Dain, Monday, April 21, 2008 4:16 AM (Eastern)
John Singer Sargent, Lady Macbeth (1889)
It is certainly with good reason that florals run foremost in perfumery, but so many reinventions tend to blur into each other. Though my experience is woefully limited, I do try to review perfumes that add something new to the discussion. For example, the four facets of jasmine: candy-sweet fizz, white flower delicate OR creamy (never both), that hint of piss. Each flower has its own character, some richer than others. The rose, for example, which smells like nothing else on earth—a high-strung, salty, floral soprano—can take on so many different hues: Caron Parfum Sacré is golden, L'Artisan Parfumer Voleur de Roses is purple and chocolate, Chanel No. 19 is white shot through with green, the Montales are red, red, red as blood, and YSL Paris is bright pink.
Orange blossom, I think, is somewhat less complicated. Of the white florals, it is the sweetest, and lacks the flesh-like heaviness of jasmine or tuberose, and consequently, its presence can be fleeting. Its virtue in a composition is how it adds a flash of light, like the distillation of sunlight that it is, to otherwise murkier, inertia-bound accords, such as the blend of clean-but-rich, slinky, clingy musks in Narciso Rodriguez. The other samples I reviewed, and subsequently deleted, capitalized on the sweet (with gourmands) and fresh (with soap) characteristics of neroli, but the flower really lacks the depth to sustain such treatment; it is much better as an accent than base material. It is the strategy employed in Narciso Rodriguez, where it lends breezy movement to diaphanous, pale pink chiffon, and it is the strategy employed in the more decorous, far darker Narcisse Noir, where it is the glint of gold embroidery running over black velvet. And Narcisse Noir is really dark, not the stunning, evening dark of party-girl Shalimar, but the lonely black of midnight, dense and unsmiling, the scent of corruption and decay of what was once powerful and fair. Gloria Swanson immortalized Narcisse Noir in Sunset Boulevard, and the association is absolutely ideal, though I don't think Lady Macbeth fares too poorly either.
It opens with a burst of neroli, more bergamot fresh and aldehydic in the EDT, while the parfum highlights orange blossom's candied and slightly indolic characteristics (similar to jasmine), buoyed by the citrusy-floral petit grain. Soon enough, a gentle powderiness (with hints of jasmine and rose) ushers in jonquil and narcissus, which lend Narcisse Noir its name and its venomous darkness. The powder turns into a high, sharp soapy note, and begins to pick up the incense-like moodiness of sandalwood and raunchy civet of the drydown, if anything becoming even more wicked and narcotic. In comparing the EDT and the parfum, the parfum displays its components more fully, but given Narcisse Noir's exotic, Art-Deco old-fashionedness, bound to alienate those who expect a perfume to be fresh and pretty, I'd recommend trying the EDT first.
Labels: beauty notes, caron, perfume reviews
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