Hidden gem, aka a corundum conundrum: Puredistance RUBIKONA review (eventually!)

Source: Puredistance

Ever since I was a little girl, I have loved secret things. I don't mean secrets as such, though goodness knows I have kept a few of those down the years(!), but things in secret places...usually, but not always small things. The miniaturisation aspect contributes greatly to the objects' sweetness, it always seemed to me. But I also mean something observed from afar, so it appears mysterious or elusive. Take the puppets you watch longways in a shoebox theatre, for instance. Then on childhood holidays in Ireland on the way to our seaside caravan, we would pass a house at the end of a long drive. It had a wrought iron gate which was overgrown with creeper, and the drive itself was more like a tunnel due to the intertwined branches of trees on either side. You could just about spy a glimpse of the house itself in the distance, which massively piqued my brother's and my curiosity...A good everyday example of 'small secret things' might be an advent calendar. (It's nearly that time!) I haven't had one since I was a kid, but I can imagine I'd still get the same frisson of excitement on opening each little door and viewing the picture behind. Or finding the piece of chocolate, to which the secret may well have upgraded these days. Not forgetting nests of Russian dolls - the littlest one in the set was impossibly sweet! - and roos in kangaroo's pouches.

Source: Amazon

One of the most memorable illustrations of this principle was a plastic souvenir altar my father brought back from his travels to Spain or Italy, which stood on the mantlepiece of his study. Despite its being unashamedly cheap and kitsch, I derived endless fun from opening the little door in the centre of the altar to reveal a tiny gold chalice - in my memory it is against a red background and backlit, but that is perhaps the embellishment of my imagination. I may be getting muddled with this votive candle I lit in St Therese's basilica in Lisieux last year. The candles in the photo are actually a bit blurry, but that serves my purpose in fact, as will become clear. But you can tell a red theme is at least forming, with a side of religious imagery that may also prove significant in these meandering musings. I thought I might be able to play on the perfume's namesake of the Rubicon river and its wandering course, but having consulted a map I see that the river believed to have been the ancient waterway so famously and irreversibly crossed by Julius Caesar is in fact shortish and disappointingly straight.

Here is the altar, or one just like it, which does indeed have a red back panel. This is from a Worthpoint auction site, so it may have been worth a bob or two, had we known!

And lastly there is the miniature cargo that came with one of my favourite childhood boardgames, Buccaneer. How adorable are those gemstones and little ingots and barrels of rum! How many attractive combinations there are to play around with of boat colour and pirate swag. ;) These little plastic replicas still thrill and excite me, like the chalice in its niche. Check out those tiny rubies...

Source: Shpock

And now - rather circuitously - we have at last come to the gemstone itself which inspired the creation of Puredistance's latest release, RUBIKONA.

I do actually have some professional experience of the jewellery business, having worked all over America for De Beers on a project mapping the supply pipeline for diamonds. Coloured stones were mentioned in passing, but diamonds were the main focus. A quick google of industry websites has confirmed that the market for rubies, like diamonds, is every bit as arcane and insiderish, with its own impenetrable jargon. ;) Here are a couple of fun facts I gleaned:

1) Burmese rubies are the most prized of all. The Prince of Burma weighs in in its raw state at 950 carats. If it were cut, it would produce a stone of 300 carats, which the jeweller from whose website I learnt this staggering nugget, wrily observed is: 'possibly not realistic for a stud earring'.

2) The most desirable colour for rubies is 'pigeon blood red', which is a very deep shade, though I have not dissected a frog in biology class, never mind a pigeon. Interestingly, if you google 'pigeon blood red' you get a whole slew of pictures of rubies - loose and set in rings etc - and absolutely nary a one of pigeons, wounded or otherwise. Oddly, there are pictures of fish, which appear to have annexed the name. Then some rubies have their colour enhanced through heat treatment, which arguably involves the same cheat factor as acquiring your sunkissed look in a tanning salon.

The 25.59 carat Sunrise Ruby, via Wikiwand

And now on to some specialist terms from minerals.net and the GIA website, which are every bit as eclectic as in the diamond world, and which I see include the term 'inclusions', meaning anything naturally occurring which gets trapped inside a mineral as it forms:

3) Rubies and sapphires are the same mineral, known as 'corundum' - they just differ in colour. And there's more...

"Typical ruby clarity characteristics include thin mineral inclusions called needles. When the mineral is rutile and needles are present in intersecting groups, it is called silk...Some inclusions can actually contribute positively to a gem’s appearance. The presence of rutile silk causes light to scatter across facets that might otherwise be too dark. This adds softness to the color and spreads the color more evenly across the ruby’s crown."

I will spare you asterisms, cabochon cuts and pleochroism(!), about which the article goes on talk, or we really would be here all day.

But hey, 'rutile silk' - wasn't the detour worth it for that gem of a term!?

There is much more on this mineral phenomenon here, in which the author - amongst other gloriously offbeat revelations about the formation of silk inclusions - quotes Joni Mitchell, and also likens these 'daggers of rutile' to a 'beguiling silk lattice'; meanwhile The Natural Ruby Company speaks of the 'sleepy transparency' conferred to rubies by the little needles. 

Source: Lotus Gemology

EDITOR'S NOTE: REVIEW PROPER STARTS HERE!

I apologise for that monster preamble before getting down to the nitty gritty of what RUBIKONA is like. But I would make a case for all the foregoing being relevant, for one of the key powers of scent is to trigger memories, and as you can see, that has happened to me in spades here! And there is also the alchemy of how RUBIKONA conjures the impression of this red jewel in olfactory terms. Where is it in the composition, when does it emerge? As the fragrance unfolds, there is a secret, hidden, trompe-nez of a gem, glimpsed from afar - and occasionally close up - which teases and fascinates my nose in equal measure.

The first thing to clear up is the actual inspiration for RUBIKONA, as oppposed to my own gemological and other riffings. 

"The creation of this perfume started with the word RUBIKONA that combines the deep and warm colour red of a RUBY with the timeless beauty of an ICON...RUBIKONA is 'Chic inside Out'".

The word 'icon' is meant here in a couture sense, rather than my religious take on it, but Jan Ewoud Vos, Puredistance's founder, is not the sort to mind where the mind takes the wearer of one of their fragrances. Though this post may test him to the max(!).

Source: Puredistance

I say, does this dress look like rutile silk to you? ;)

The perfumer behind RUBIKONA is Cecile Zarokian, who created SHEIDUNA for Puredistance.  As ever, the fragrance is extrait strength, at 28%.

Notes

Top notes: Grapefruit, bergamot, mandarin

Middle notes: Rose, iris, ylang, clove, orange blossom, creamy notes

Base notes: Patchouli, cedarwood, vanilla, solar notes, musk

When I heard the name of the new scent, I wondered if it might be diva-esque like Vero Kern's Rubj, with its vampish teaming of narcotic white flowers and an exotic fruit bowl. It isn't, and doesn't smell remotely like Rubj, which I do like, but which is quite full on. I note that Vero Kern's scent also has bergamot, mandarin, orange flower, cedar and musk, which information I will park for now and possibly feed into my 'ruby detection matrix' by and by.

A perfume I thought of fleetingly when I first sniffed RUBIKONA was Guerlain Shalimar Parfum Initial. Here there are seven crossover notes: bergamot, orange, rose, iris, patchouli, vanilla and musk. The only similarity that struck me though was its patchouli-forwardness, notwithstanding the many notes in common. The vetiver and green notes - and possibly what Robin of NST cleverly identifies as its "flat" feel and "ever so slightly almond-y" facet - take Parfum Initial in a dull, vegetal and relentlessly patchouli-driven direction. I am so with Robin when she says: "It's something else entirely, and whatever that something else is, I don't find it all that compelling."

No, I think the stylistic register to compare RUBIKONA to might be Penhaligon's Iris Prima, which I included in my 'Careful Whispers' series. It has the same 'diffusive, indistinct' quality, which makes it so hard to parse. Funnily enough, I originally thought of dropping RUBIKONA into that series, before I even spotted the atmospheric likeness between the two scents, but what a waste of a good title that would have been...! ;)

Source: Puredistance

It is hard to parse, as I say, but here goes anyway...RUBIKONA opens with a noticeable showing of patchouli, but the earthy salvo is held in check by a wistful posse of powdery iris, sensual florals, and a creamy musky trail that persists throughout. It is not chilly or austere as some iris-containing scents can be, and strikes me as neither vintage nor especially modern. This is despite the mention of 'solar notes', which I first came across as a term in Guerlain's Lys Soleia, and which I associate with contemporary scents, even though I gather they have been used in perfumery in one guise or another for a long time. Here I am guessing they infuse the composition with a sunny radiance that helps connote the idea of a ruby catching the light. I am not really aware of any overt citrus element at any point in the fragrance's development, but I expect the rose (betcha they were red!) - and the various orange notes (as in Rubj) - together suggest the warmth and depth of a ruby. Of the requisite pigeon blood shade no less. Now RUBIKONA is not a dark scent, for it is of course refracted by our rutile silk inclusions(!), but it is 'darker' and more grown up than Iris Prima, while remaining resolutely subtle and staying close to the skin. Over time, RUBIKONA becomes a gentle, attenuated version of the aforementioned wistful posse, their having by now wrangled the patchouli into submission in fairly short order, not that it was ever loud to begin with.

So did I find the ruby in the composition? I am going with a combination of patchouli, orange, rose and solar note facets (see what I did there?)...final answer!

To sum up, I am a big fan of Puredistance 1, and BLACK, and GOLD in particular. Puredistance 1 reminds me nostalgically of the early days of my perfume hobby, coming out just a year before I fell down the rabbit hole; BLACK I associate with happy times touring with the band; GOLD makes me think of my work trips abroad, which once even took me to the HQ of Puredistance itself.

 And now the understated, hidden gem in the Puredistance stable that is RUBIKONA is definitely up in my top two or three of the eleven releases so far. It reminds me of so many things as you can see! Which may go a long way to explaining why I feel such a visceral connection to the Puredistance brand. Their scents are elegant, singular, wearable, and made from high quality materials, with exquisite packaging. And to be fair, prices to match - though as Undina points out in her post (see link below), considering the perfumes are extrait the price per ml is in fact very reasonable. And crucially they are also evocative - and as I said above in mitigation for my meandering memories - for me that is what the best perfumery is all about...

The Graff ring via truefacet.com

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Source: Wikipedia

NB Note the Rubicon river above - a lot less wiggly than my review, as you can see - but if you have got this far, it is TOO LATE NOW! The die is cast, and the post is read...

er...not quite!

The forgotten anniversary

For it is only now that it has suddenly occurred to me that it might be my 11th blogging anniversary around about this time of year, and it turns out that it is in fact today. ;) Well, there is no point writing a separate post to mark that milestone, but I can think of no more fitting brand to devote this post to instead. I will celebrate with a virtual Ruby Red Buttercream cake. (Photo via Liggys Cake Co.)

JUST ADD 11 CANDLES!