Tolu Ormonde Jayne

Desirability: Full Bottle

Source: pinterest.com

Full-bodied. Smooth. Comforting. Regal.

A gorgeous medley of citrus and light florals on a warm and sweet vanilla-amber base,that casts a rich glowing caramel colour and shares DNA with Queen Shalimar. 

Smoothly blended with no rough edges to jar the senses but brimming with ingredients to the point it feels dense and inviting as compared to, let's say Amber Mystique by Estée Lauder which was a super expensive mistake on my part ( I got carried away by the deep red of the bottle only to be disappointed by the pastel contents, kudos to those who found it matched their expectations).

It's not unique nor is it particularly interesting and therefore in view of my limited perfume-designated funds I won't be hankering after a bottle (of course if gifted a bottle I certainly won't turn it down). However with its richness and superb quality, I still think it's full bottle worthy. Sillage is good and longevity is excellent, I went to bed with Tolu and woke up to this resinous beauty wafting smokily from my clothes. 

La Fumée Ottoman Miller Harris

Desirability: Sample

Source: Fragrantica

This house makes decent fragrances but I haven't been bowled over by another Miller Harris scent since L'Air de Rien. Judging by the notes for La Fumée Ottoman I had high hopes that it would rock my world the way LdR did. 

It starts off with a bright bang of bergamot before taking you into the kitchen where the spices of the Orient exist. The cardamom and cloves are seriously amped up in the beginning and I wish the scent stayed that way, I dig smelling like an aromatic sweaty pig and I mean that in the nicest way possible. However the spices drift away too quickly and the scent evolves into a warm spicy rose backed with sweet incenseand woody notes. The drydown is lovely, the spices are faint shadows of their former selves but still giving an edge to the sweet blushing rose with amber and incense to complete the oriental vibe but it is muted in comparison to the opening and after about two hours it is a skin scent on me. 

The longevity is average but the sillage for La Fumée Ottoman needs to be improved in a major way to make sense of the price tag. A decently made and pleasant fragrance but it's not coming home with me. 

Daimiris Laboratorio Olfattivo

Desirability: Full bottle

Source: Fragrantica

March 2015 is my month for "Eat, Pray, Love". I can't remember the last time I was off for a whole month. Since I'm between jobs I decided to run away from my tropical home to the other side of the world with little stops on the way. Packing for a month especially when one is going to experience all four seasons through that month is no joke and in order to keep my luggage weight reasonable, I obviously had to tone down on the perfume bottles. The problem is when one has so much choice and favourites it gets difficult to choose ONE, I know, first world problems right? Anyway in the end my scent of the moment Daimiris got to come on my soul searching trip. My arguments for choosing Daimiris were as follows.

Spicy and warm, the smell of cardamom and saffron is unmistakeable in the dusty and earthy opening of Daimiris. Beneath the spices you have a blast of heady booze and rich leather, all perfectly proportioned with no rough edges. When I first tried Daimiris while in a hurry a few months back, I could not make out the candy note and vowed to go back for a more leisurely second try and voila! The "daim candy" note is so yummy and true to the taste of the crunchy chocolate almond candy but despite the candy note, Daimiris is not all that sweet and I would say it is more of a spicy oriental than a gourmand. Iris which gave the dusty and earthy/rooty effect of the opening is very much present in the drydown showing its buttery side, saffron prevailing till the end with a subtly sweet amber and an animalic musk contributing to the happy coziness that is Daimiris. Despite all its richness, I find Daimiris to be more of an alluring reddish-gold silk than a thick blanket of spicy warmth.

So gourmand + musky + oriental. It has a few of my favourite things, good projection and longevity and is one of those well-rounded and charming fragrances that you can wear anywhere, even on long haul flights without invading the personal space of the person in the seat next to you. Into my bag it went, wrapped in my wool scarf for insurance against baggage handlers using my luggage for discus practice. 

Alahine Teo Cabanel

An Oriental sprite, Alahine opens with a quick burst of citrus notes which is their only part in the story. I smell the florals but am unable to tell them apart, together they are a full-bodied and intoxicating bouquet. As delightful as Alahine has proven to be so far, my real pleasure lies in the later hours, where the scent throws off its cloak of flowers and revels in its voluptuous beauty, all spiced smoke and amber glow, sweet honeyed resins and woody musk.

 As a lover of Oriental perfumes and biased in favor of Serge Lutens, what makes Alahine different from Lutens' stable of winners is that Alahine feels like a classic French perfume using oriental notes, just like Rosine's A-Z of roses, all with a French style no matter the ingredients. Lutens' don't fly a flag, they stay true to their ingredients, name and story and are a wild and headstrong bunch, whereas Alahine comports herself in a more graceful manner with a twinkle in her eye. She isn't old but she has matured in the ways of the world and I can't see this being worn by adolescents somehow.

After an initial potency, Alahine slowly slips into a skin scent by about the sixth hour. Not groundbreaking but an elegant, well-made perfume that Oriental fans should sample. 

Ambre Sultan, Serge Lutens

Feeling nostalgic tonight and decided to hang out with the one that started it all. Or the last few millilitres of my first bottle of niche perfume, my first Serge Lutens, my first Amber. Quite a few firsts. 

Up till now, Ambre Sultan is still the watermark when it comes to amber scents. It's like Goldilocks would say, it's just right. Some ambers tend to turn powdery like Calypso's Ambre, although that is a very good amber patchouli for its inexpensive price-tag. Some are too sweet and sedate for my taste like L'Artisan's Ambre Extreme which is anything but extreme, it's soft, polite and a tad boring. 

Ambre Sultan smells like ages past in a land that no longer exists or all that remains is a decrepit pile of rubble of past grandeur and a civilised life...its dryness makes me think of hostile, arid deserts that stretch as far as the eye can see, its spices transport me to multiple places at once, following my mother when I was about the height of her knees, to the market and watching the seller selecting various spices of burnished ambers, a myriad of reds and mounds of yellows, pouring the eye-watering blend into a cone fashioned out of old newspaper.

Or travelling in the Middle East and North Africa, experiencing multitudes of foreign smells and flavours that I never came across before and falling in love with newfound exoticism. The balmy coziness of Ambre Sultan that calms and reassures...it takes me back to around the time we first met, using the scent on rare, precious free evenings spent with friends or just chilling alone by a water's edge, watching the sun in it's last dazzling performance before it goes to say hello to another part of the world. 

This is the potent power that Lutens' have on me, that trigger a slew of memories and create dreams where I surf the olfactory waves to different lands. There's something pleasurable yet poignant about each Lutens' scent that I meet and Ambre Sultan is no different. Yes it is a French interpretation of the Orient but by someone who is not just familiar with it but understands it as well. 

“Some of my old memories feel trapped in amber in my brain, lucid and burning, while others are like the wing beat of a hummingbird, an intangible, ephemeral blur.” 

― Mira Bartok