Perfume Review: Comme des Garçons Incense Avignon and Jaisalmer.
Folks who have had the misfortune to meet me in person will realize that I dress like a hobo with a surprising amount of indifference to actual fashion trends. That's mostly because I spend so much time being a studio artist that there really isn't much of a point dressing pretty.
When you're handling clay, charcoal, wood glue, turpentine, paper pulp and so forth your clothing really needs to be wash-and-wear and no-fuss. That leads to me looking very much like a hobo.
I don't wear much makeup either for similar reasons - I'm constantly scrubbing up after studio work.
The only real signifier I have of being dressed up, and of intentionally dressing like this is the fact that I go around perfumed. I'm not a huge aspirational perfume person. I don't wear perfume to look like the woman in the advertisement. For me it's more of a theme song thing. I like the image painted by a collection of smells in a bottle, so I wear it.
This is probably why I'm a huge sucker for Comme des Garçons.
I usually wear CdG Original, which has ridiculous sillage on me and the lasting power is ridiculous. Probably my body chemistry. However, my current bottle is the huge 100ml one (from the original production run in France) and I don't look forward to having it confiscated by TSA on my trip to Portland, so I went and bought a tiny 1/4oz atomizer from an online decanting outlet.
I took the opportunity to get a sampler set of the CdG Incense series and a separate sampler of CdG 2MAN, and right now I've had the chance to try Avignon and Jaisalmer, and my notes on them are below.
Avignon
My first thoughts on the opening notes were "Good Lord, this smells like being stabbed to death in a confessional. Very Assassin's Creed 2." There was an immediate association with the infamous Borgia popes and the Renaissance sections of my Art History classes (as well as the Papal schism in my Medieval History class.)
The frankincense and myrrh were immediately, pleasingly apparent, and there was a sort of dusty-book scent that I associate with book archival somewhere in there - not the acid-pulp paper smell, but a more drowsy, sunlight-through-dust-motes smell that you get in the reference section of a large university library. There was a hint of vanilla over it, I think, and something that smelled a wee bit like chamomile tea. Further reading confirmed the presence of Roman chamomile in the mix.
I didn't find the sillage as immediate and attention-grabbing as CdG Original - while Original announces my presence spicly and immediately Avignon slips in between moments of perception. It's as though it isn't there, and then it is, strong but not unpleasantly so, announcing itself with its ethereal frankincense note. (Which brings me back to my Assassin's Creed 2 comparison.) Longevity was pretty good, but then this is also a body chemistry thing, and I could smell it about 18 hours after I'd first put it on, after a change of clothes and after a night's sleep. Not bad.
What seals this for me though? Morrissey wears it. Oh fuck yes.
Jaisalmer
Jaisalmer struck me as an eccentric, slightly flighty English woman who wears sari and sandals in Dover, and wears men's colognes. She sips cardamom-laced chai and reads V.S Naipaul while nibbling on a cucumber sandwich.
A far cry from my own associations with India, which tend to be Southern Indian as opposed to the Northern Indian cuisine more frequently seen in the US - When I think of India I generally I think of Serangoon Road back in Singapore and the spicemongers who would grind your spices to order, the garland-sellers and reams of brilliant sari silk.
The spicy notes were initially overshadowed by the incense notes - a pity in my estimation, as I smelled more generic incense than spice until the drydown happened. After that I got a whiff of tincture of benzoin with cinnamon and cardamom. The bases are a sharp hardwood ebony note, like sanding dust, not unpleasant, and a more fragrant sort of wood that the scent notes inform me is guaic wood.
Jaisalmer did not have much sillage at all - Sean commented about getting a whiff of it, and that it was more of a cologne scent than Original, but I had to sniff my own camisole to get a trace of it by the evening's end. It also didn't have the lasting power that Avignon had on me. It's not an unpleasant scent and I can see it working on someone else with another body chemistry, perhaps, but given the choice I'd probably give this one a pass when I buy the full-sized bottles.
Next on the list, whenever I get a chance: Kyoto and Ouarzazate, and then Zagorsk and 2MAN.
- Mel
When you're handling clay, charcoal, wood glue, turpentine, paper pulp and so forth your clothing really needs to be wash-and-wear and no-fuss. That leads to me looking very much like a hobo.
I don't wear much makeup either for similar reasons - I'm constantly scrubbing up after studio work.
The only real signifier I have of being dressed up, and of intentionally dressing like this is the fact that I go around perfumed. I'm not a huge aspirational perfume person. I don't wear perfume to look like the woman in the advertisement. For me it's more of a theme song thing. I like the image painted by a collection of smells in a bottle, so I wear it.
This is probably why I'm a huge sucker for Comme des Garçons.
I usually wear CdG Original, which has ridiculous sillage on me and the lasting power is ridiculous. Probably my body chemistry. However, my current bottle is the huge 100ml one (from the original production run in France) and I don't look forward to having it confiscated by TSA on my trip to Portland, so I went and bought a tiny 1/4oz atomizer from an online decanting outlet.
I took the opportunity to get a sampler set of the CdG Incense series and a separate sampler of CdG 2MAN, and right now I've had the chance to try Avignon and Jaisalmer, and my notes on them are below.
Avignon
My first thoughts on the opening notes were "Good Lord, this smells like being stabbed to death in a confessional. Very Assassin's Creed 2." There was an immediate association with the infamous Borgia popes and the Renaissance sections of my Art History classes (as well as the Papal schism in my Medieval History class.)
The frankincense and myrrh were immediately, pleasingly apparent, and there was a sort of dusty-book scent that I associate with book archival somewhere in there - not the acid-pulp paper smell, but a more drowsy, sunlight-through-dust-motes smell that you get in the reference section of a large university library. There was a hint of vanilla over it, I think, and something that smelled a wee bit like chamomile tea. Further reading confirmed the presence of Roman chamomile in the mix.
I didn't find the sillage as immediate and attention-grabbing as CdG Original - while Original announces my presence spicly and immediately Avignon slips in between moments of perception. It's as though it isn't there, and then it is, strong but not unpleasantly so, announcing itself with its ethereal frankincense note. (Which brings me back to my Assassin's Creed 2 comparison.) Longevity was pretty good, but then this is also a body chemistry thing, and I could smell it about 18 hours after I'd first put it on, after a change of clothes and after a night's sleep. Not bad.
What seals this for me though? Morrissey wears it. Oh fuck yes.
Jaisalmer
Jaisalmer struck me as an eccentric, slightly flighty English woman who wears sari and sandals in Dover, and wears men's colognes. She sips cardamom-laced chai and reads V.S Naipaul while nibbling on a cucumber sandwich.
A far cry from my own associations with India, which tend to be Southern Indian as opposed to the Northern Indian cuisine more frequently seen in the US - When I think of India I generally I think of Serangoon Road back in Singapore and the spicemongers who would grind your spices to order, the garland-sellers and reams of brilliant sari silk.
The spicy notes were initially overshadowed by the incense notes - a pity in my estimation, as I smelled more generic incense than spice until the drydown happened. After that I got a whiff of tincture of benzoin with cinnamon and cardamom. The bases are a sharp hardwood ebony note, like sanding dust, not unpleasant, and a more fragrant sort of wood that the scent notes inform me is guaic wood.
Jaisalmer did not have much sillage at all - Sean commented about getting a whiff of it, and that it was more of a cologne scent than Original, but I had to sniff my own camisole to get a trace of it by the evening's end. It also didn't have the lasting power that Avignon had on me. It's not an unpleasant scent and I can see it working on someone else with another body chemistry, perhaps, but given the choice I'd probably give this one a pass when I buy the full-sized bottles.
Next on the list, whenever I get a chance: Kyoto and Ouarzazate, and then Zagorsk and 2MAN.
- Mel