Carner Barcelona Rima XI Review: Misty Over You - With Both Rhyme And Good Reason

Carner Barcelona is a perfume house that first came to my attention thanks to its brooding, spicy iris scent, D600, reviewed here. Well, I'd say it manages to be brooding and upbeat if that is possible, and the Carner website does describe it as inspired by "the urban lifestyle and the Mediterranean spirit of Barcelona", with an added "touch of mystery". Now that I have walked up and down the bustling thoroughfare of La Rambla for myself, I can relate to the tie-in between D600 and the rhythm of Barcelona's daily life, with its kaleidoscope of sights, sounds and scents.

I have also tested the other perfumes in the Carner stable, namely Tardes, Cuirs and Rima XI. Tardes was a bit heavy on the almond for my (admittedly almond- and heliotrope-averse) tastes and reminded me a bit of Miller Harris Fleur Oriental, with which I never got on; Cuirs was too leather-forward, though it can hardly be blamed for that, while Rima XI - a sample of which has just arrived from the Carner press office in response to my request - is Another Matter Entirely. I tried it briefly on skin during my recent trip to Spain, and have been giving it my undivided attention today.

Rima XI was created by Sara Carner in collaboration with Sonia Constant, the perfumer behind Cuirs. In my opinion, Rima XI tops D600 for mystery. It is much lighter and more attenuated. Woody orientals are my favourite category of oriental, and this may turn out to be my favourite of them all, because it has been given that wan, wistful treatment I so admire in a scent, which is a pretty nifty stunt to pull on a fragrance with a fair few spices in it.

Top notes:
Guatemalan Cardamom, Madagascan Black Pepper, Moroccan Nanah Mint, Saffron

Mid notes:
Ceylon Cinnamon, Indonesian Nutmeg, Indian Jasmine Sambac, Coriander

Base notes:
Virginian Cedar Wood, Australian Sandal Wood, Madagascan Vanilla Absolute, Benzoin from Laos, Soft Amber, Musk

If you like DKNY Black Cashmere, but wish it could be more vanillic and less austere, if you like Penhaligon's Elixir but find it a wee bit arid and dusty, or Kenzo's Flower Oriental but you are not always in the mood for such an in-your-face whallop of patchouli, this could be the spicy oriental for you.

Rima XI is a gauzy web of spices backlit by a soft, sheer glow. It is pale and interesting, with a warm hum from its amber and vanilla base. It should be worn by heroines of romantic novels draped languidly on chaises longues, though never in a dead faint. I am so affected by the wan yet robust beauty of Rima XI that I feel myself most uncharacteristically waxing lyrical, turning purple and generally coming over all Mills & Boon.

Which is my cue to introduce the background to the perfume, a much finer work of literature by one Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, a postromantic writer most famous for his anthology of poems and stories called the Rimas & Leyendas (Rhymes & Legends). The scent takes its name from poem No XI. So just in case you were asking yourself: "Does it go up to eleven?", the collection most certainly does, and well beyond in fact. But we won't go there, not least because No XII appears to be a bit rude (in a Georgia O'Keeffe kind of a way, if you know what I mean...)!

And it is a single verse of Rima XI the rhyme which Carner cites as the inspiration behind Rima XI the perfume. I shan't include the original Spanish, but it is readily google-able for any Hispanic speakers reading who would prefer to appreciate the original text. That said, even my fairly remedial Spanish can confirm that it is a pretty literal rendering, with little if any of the atmosphere or emotional charge lost in translation.

"I am a dream, an impossible
vain ghost of mist and light
I am bodiless, I am untouchable
I cannot love you.
Oh come, you come?!"

On its website Carner also provides a summary of the ethos of the perfume - it could relate equally to the will-o-the-wisp scent itself or the siren-like charm of its wearer:

"Mysterious and sensual, with a hidden power of destruction under her radiant innocence, captivating and unforgettable, impossible to conquer..."

So as with D600, Rima XI is intended to be a double-edged fragrance, with a darker side to its beauty, presumably because the woman in question - though feel free to subsitute a Lorelei-type man if you prefer (I'm sure we all have one in our cupboard of crushes, even if it is only the ghost of David Cassidy, and I've got him as well : - ) ) - is emotionally unavailable. Hey, those are some of the best relationships - you don't stand to get hurt if the unrequited goalposts are clearly established at the outset!

Now to be honest I don't really get this undercurrent in Rima XI - it is just plain beautiful to me, with no kind of "iron fist in a velvet glove" vibe going on. D600 is more edgy in that way in my view. At the end of the day, Rima XI is a delicately nuanced, barely there, warm caress of spices on my skin. Yep, it's the Bonkers-friendly Woody Oriental scent from Central Casting, and my latest heartbreaker of a lemming...


Photo of Rima XI from pinterest.com, photo of male siren from mangaslife.centerblog.net, photo of G A Bécquer from Wikipedia, "The Ghost Of A Skeleton" photo of Brighton West Pier from Wikimedia Commons via Robin Webster

Bonkers Does Barca: A Bijou Perfume Museum, Eight & Bob At Perfumeria Regia, And The Carner Barcelona Trail

Last month I spent three nights in Barcelona on a mini-break of such spectacular cost-effectiveness that I shall undoubtedly go again, just to feel smug about my holiday bargain, never mind the fact that the city is awash with visitor attractions. These include broad, tree-lined boulevards such as the famous La Rambla, Parc Güell with its "kimono dragon" standing sentry at the entrance, numerous other quirky and satisfyingly wavy structures by Gaudí, a dazzling palm-lined marina, the spiky, brooding squares of the Gothic quarter, not forgetting the curious Christmas log novelties that reminded me compellingly of Thomas the Tank Engine in a Santa hat. If I am totally honest, you could actually spend an entire weekend in Barcelona just browsing in the many branches of Zara, but I valiantly resisted the urge.

APPARENTLY YOU TAP THEM AND PRESENTS SPILL OUT - I REMAIN SCEPTICAL

For Barcelona is also a prime destination for the travelling perfumista, not least on account of its small but perfectly formed perfume museum, or MUSEU DEL PERFUM in Catalan. Housed at the back of one of a chain of niche perfumeries called Perfumeries Regia, you have to ask one of the sales assistants for the key and pay an entrance fee of 5 euros. I usually go out of my way to avoid fee-charging museums, but decided to bite the bullet and enjoy having this one all to myself for what was by no means an excessive entrance charge.

RARE EVIDENCE OF BONKERS SPENDING ON CULTURAL PURSUITS

And am I glad I did! The place was a veritable Aladdin's cave of vintage perfume bottles and other artefacts charting the evolution of perfume vessels - nearly 5000 of them all told - from the very beginnings of fragrance. As regards the exhibition of industrialised perfumery, the scent bottles were arranged (very loosely) by brand and chronology, or so it seemed to me - and to fully appreciate this arcane and somewhat bizarre collection you really needed to press your nose right up against the glass. As no one was looking, I did just that.

I noticed a couple of sub-themes (not all intentional) to the exhibits, eg PERFUMES WITH PROVOCATIVE BOTTLES OR NAMES. In this category fell the now controversial series of Golliwog perfume bottles, and a handful of scents with the amusingly unsettling names of ORGIA, SNUFF, GONG, COCAINA & ECHO TROUBLANT.

HERE TODAY, GONG TOMORROW

MORE SHOCKING THAN SHOCKING!

There was also a cabinet devoted to perfumes from different countries, one devoted to puffer bottles, and here and there, examples of arrestingly beautiful packaging whose inventor had truly thought outside the box.

Another thing that struck me forcibly about the collection was the sheer number of vintage brands of which I hadn't heard - these may even have outweighed the ones I did know, though it was a close call. I noted down a small sample of perfume house names that were unknown to me including:

CORYSE SALOME
COLGATE(!)
G DANFRE
CIRO
MISTINGUETT
MADELEINE DE RANCH
ZOFALY (not a high end wallpaper brand, as you could be forgiven for thinking)
MORABITO (not to be confused with an inner city district in Berlin)
MURY
LEGRAIN
JEAN BOUVAIST

After the sensory overload of the museum, where I must have spent a good three quarters of an hour gaping in wonder, I emerged into the body of the Regia perfumery, with its fine collection of contemporary niche scents.

I had rather shot my bolt, however, in terms of absorbing any kind of information - olfactory or otherwise. So rather than sniff any of the testers that were new to me (of which there were a goodly number), my eye was drawn to the curiously named scent, EIGHT & BOB. A pamphlet explaining the charming story behind this cologne - which involves the son of a French aristocrat turned amateur perfumer, Albert Fouquet, his trusty butler Philippe and a young J F Kennedy - was placed on the display and the full text is also reproduced here.

Sadly, the scent itself was not to my liking - a rather soapy cologne that put me in mind of Maison Kurkdjian's Cologne pour le Matin - but it gets huge props for the off the wall nature - and origins - of its name. I do urge you to read the full story!

EIGHT & BOB - ONE SAMPLE WOULD BE QUITE ENOUGH FOR ME, THANKS

Apart from visiting as many tourist sights as I could cram in in the time, there were two other things I had hoped to do during my stay in Barcelona: identify the statue in this painting of mine, which inspired my review of Carner Barcelona's scent D600, and visit the headquarters of the Carner perfume house itself.

Well, I kind of failed on both counts! I did visit some gorgeous parks, and scrutinised the feet of the many female statues contained within, but failed to locate THE ONE.

SIMILARLY SVELTE, BUT NOT WEARING ENOUGH CLOTHES, BASICALLY

Aborting the statue quest, I turned my attention to the Carner Barcelona trail, but though I spied my first Carner nameplate pretty smartly at the bottom of La Rambla, it was a red herring.

So I got out my map and pinpointed the offices of Carner on 600 Avenida Diagonal (the clue in the name D600, hello??), and hotfooted there by metro and bus, only to find them shut. Doh! Well, it was a Saturday, after all. Turns out that this address is the administrative office of the company, but there is no associated perfumery, like that time I went to the wrong address of L'Artisan Parfumeur for the launch of Séville à l'aube.

Not to worry, I thought to myself, and repaired round the corner for the crepe of my life and a cup of tea. Not even a crepe so much as a farinaceous mixed media food collage.

And finally, here are a couple of snaps of OTHER people posing with the "kimono dragon" at the Parc Güell. It was impossible to get near the poor creature, he was in such demand!

Oh, and one last snap of someone I met in the street...

Photo of Eight & Bob from roullierwhite.com, other photos my own

Düsseldorf Sniffathon: Schnitzler, Beauty Affair, & An Olfactory Tardis

My post on Kate Middleton's wedding scent is still attracting a phenomenal amount of interest - over 1500 new visitors since Saturday, and counting... It has popped up in the forum of the Czech equivalent of Basenotes, been translated into Romanian, and syndicated as far away as Florida and India. The vast majority of people who found their way to Bonkers over the weekend did so with predictable permutations of keywords such as "Kate Middleton perfume" or "What scent did Kate Middleton wear on her wedding day?", though intriguingly two new visitors were routed here by putting in the search terms: "slime" and "Diane Kruger naked". The buzz around the royal nuptials rather eclipsed the account of my Berlin sniffathon - though interestingly, there is a district in central Berlin called "Wedding"... But the precise identity of Kate's wedding fragrance was a matter of such public interest that I was more than happy to disrupt the flow of my German sniffing reports with coverage of this important news item!

So to resume where I left off, after my stay in Berlin and a brief stopover in Hamburg, I met up with fellow blogger mybeautyblog.de in her home town of Lüneburg, about an hour's train ride north of Hannover. I met her fiancé and her fiancé's best man elect(!), and we sat in a shady courtyard sipping long drinks before installing ourselves at an Italian restaurant in a prime riverside spot (see photo). We whiled away the afternoon enjoying a long, lazy lunch, to which my friend kindly treated me. I must say the pumpkin ravioli with sage was the finest I had ever tasted!

Now it so happened that the day we met up was Good Friday, so we could only press our noses against the windows of the small perfumeries in mybeautyblog.de's town. This was probably a good thing, however, as the boys in our party had "normal" levels of interest in men's fragrance, and as it was, mybeautyblog.de and I couldn't stop ourselves from nattering away at least 40% of the time about recent fragrance launches, our current lemmings, respective approaches to blogging, and of course the all-important question of what scent my friend was thinking of wearing on HER big day.

This will be in December, so there is still plenty of time to wrist test scent candidates. The current front runner is Parfum d'Empire Eau Suave, in case anyone is curious: a green rose scent with fruity and spicy notes. And in amongst our snatched conversations about perfume, mybeautyblog.de recommended that I take advantage of the shops being open on Easter Saturday to visit Beauty Affair and Schnitzler in Düsseldorf, which she said had a particularly fine selection of niche brands...and so it proved.

I made it to the Königsallee, Düsseldorf's main shopping artery, at about 4pm on that hot spring afternoon (it was at least 25 C!). On my way to Beauty Affair I came across a different - and smaller - branch of Schnitzler than the one for which I had an address (Breidenbacher Hof, at Königsallee 11 instead of 56), but I didn't notice my error at the time! No 11 still carried a large selection of beauty brands and niche fragrances (including a mini-Guerlain concession with the L'Art et la Matière range and other limited distribution scents such as La Petite Robe Noire, plus lines such as Maison Kurkdjian, Juliette Has A Gun, Piguet, Lalique, Ligne St Barth, Bond No 9, Parfumerie Générale, Keiko Mecheri, Etro, Bois 1920, Sisley, Caron, E Coudray, M Micallef, Montale, Czech & Speake, Amouage, Annick Goutal, Nasomatto, and a whole clatter of brands with "Profum-" in their name: Il Profvmo, Profumi del Forte, Profumo die Firenze...and so on!

I sniffed my way through a few JHAGs, and reconfirmed my preference for Lady Vengeance: Calamity Jane was well done, but too lavender-y, while Citizen Queen was too full-on and gourmand - what the Germans might refer to as "üppig", as in a "lush" or "big bosomy" style of scent. I also sampled Maison Kurkdjian's Lumière Noire pour Femme, which was a rather sultry rose-patch number, even on card. I am writing this 10 days after the event and the card still smells unmistakably of the scent in question; I feel moved to mention this as it is so rarely the case, especially after the smelling strips have all mulched down in my handbag. Now I am sure I sampled Lumière Noire pour Femme on skin once and was not especially taken with it, but maybe it is one of those fragrances that takes a bit of a run up. I couldn't top Denyse's description of this one on Grain de Musc, so here are some choice highlights:

"...a courtesan trussed in velvet the colour of drying blood trimmed with jet beads, hair tumbling down her back as she downs a flute of champagne. Her shawl carries the smell of the patchouli leaves it was packed with to repel the moths on its way from India. A bunch of jasmine exhales its dying breath between her breasts. A sweaty tendril of cumin rises from her corset…"

What else? I had a sniff of Kimono Rose by Bois 1920, which was a powdery rose with a pretty name, and that is about as much as I can recall about it. I also tried in vain to blag some more Lalique samples. I was seriously contemplating a purchase of White at the time, and would definitely have copped for a 50ml bottle of Piguet Calypso, but they didn't have it in; from the dismissive way in which the male sales assistant - who had the haughty bearing of a flamenco dancer - informed me of this fact, you would think I had been asking for Britney Spears' Midnight Fantasy.

So I hotfooted it out of there and was soon in the oasis of customer care that is Beauty Affair, a tiny jewel of a store set back from the Königsallee in a courtyard area within an exclusive mall. I spent a good 40 minutes shooting the breeze with the assistant manager, Marita Berchem - in between customers, I hasten to add - she did a brisk trade during my visit. The store is hands down the best stocked niche perfumery I have ever set foot in.

It was neither as happily higgledy-piggledy as Fascination in Lytham nor as stylishly sparse as Les Senteurs. It was rather the merchandising equivalent of high rise living in Hong Kong or Tokyo. It was a Tardis, a Sprite towing caravan with every inch of living space cunnily maximised. I could have spent an hour looking at two square feet of fixture, there was so much going on in such a compact area. Other high end perfumeries with average numbers of niche brands, averagely merchandised, will now forever look to me as though they are having a closing down sale...! I wish to goodness I had remembered to bring my camera on this trip, so I could offer photographic proof - but sadly I forgot.

Now I could not do justice to Beauty Affair by attempting to reconstruct a definitive list of the brands it carried, so I will just list some of the highlights:

Frédéric Malle! (in a cute little fridge like a supermarket ice cream cabinet), Puredistance!, Atelier Colognes!, Huitième Art Parfums!, Yosh, Heeley, By Kilian, Parfums 06130, L'Etat Libre d'Orange, Les Parfums MDCI, Miller & Bertaux, Frapin, Ineke, Biehl.parfumkunstwerke and gazillions more...

I was also astonished to see the Designer Shaik range: a musician friend of Mr Bonkers owns Opulent Shaik No. 77 and I have marvelled at the wacky hard shell case in a vivid shade of cobalt blue when he has come to stay, but never encountered the range in store. Now he won't need to go all the way to Dubai when his (admittedly humungous) bottle eventually runs out.

Realising that with such a wealth of options before me, option anxiety - or "die Qual der Wahl" as the Germans so charmingly term it - was rapidly setting in, I decided to focus my sniffing on the Huitième Art Parfums range, and tried all of them on card. I knew a little bit about the creative background to these scents, thanks to an interview by Michelyn Camen with Pierre Guillaume here. They are, for example, minimalist fragrances, which depart from the traditional pyramid structure, as PG explains:

"...in terms of their different structure I want to simplify the analytical approach… these fragrances are created on the basis of two or three accords or original materials; they need to be experienced in their entirety."

I have not bottomed out the ins and outs of "phyto-perfumery", and PG's methods of creating odorant molecules from plants, but I gather that the whole idea is to get even closer to the authentic scent of materials, some of which - like pear tree wood - are quite new in perfumery.

So...Sucre d'Ebène, Fareb and Ambre Céruléen all got the thumbs down (too gourmand, or resinous or spicy or leathery - or some unhappy combination of the foregoing), however, I was very favourably struck by Aube Pashmina, Naїviris, Vohina, Ciel d'Airan and Manguier Métisse. With the exception of Manguier Métisse, which I liked because of its Dolby surround sound ripe mango note - something I have never smelt in a perfume before - the others are all delicate, airy, pared back compositions that are very much in the subtle vein I favour. Frau Berchem broadly shared my preferences, though she said she also liked Fareb in cooler weather.

Unfortunately, the scent strips of all the ones I liked don't smell of anything anymore(!), and I am blowed if I can remember much about them individually. I did remark to Frau Berchem that Aube Pashmina reminded me of Diptyque's L'Ombre dans L'Eau, whereupon she promptly nipped out back and returned with a tester of the Diptyque so we could conduct a side-by-side comparison. She could see where I was going with the sappy green note they shared, but pointed out that L'Ombre dans L'Eau had more rose in it - and so it did!

I think I will have to get hold of a sample set of these and retest them at my leisure, preferably on skin. Meanwhile, I will direct you to this press release on Now Smell This, where there is a blurb about each scent. Even having read these back, I can't truthfully say that any of the descriptions of the scents I liked rings a bell with me, except for the mango one, which was particularly distinctive.

Woolly and feeble as that "review" may have been, I did come away with samples of three other scents, which I have been able to test in a leisurely manner on skin since my return. These were two unisex fragrances from the Barcelona fragrance house Carner - D600 and TARDES - plus Truly Madly Deeply by Stephen Burlingham for Tiffany. Two of the three were so impressive that they warrant separate reviews.

Special mention also goes to Frau Berchem for the generous and no-nonsense manner in which she decanted a sample of Truly Madly Deeply into a plastic atomiser for me - of the very sort I carry around with me on spec but am usually too shy to deploy!


To be continued...


Photos of the Kö and Lüneburg from tripadvisor, photo of Guerlain corner from Schnitzler's website, other store photo of Schnitzler from kaestner-consulting.de, photos of the Beauty Affair store, Huitième Art range and Frau Berchem from the Beauty Affair website, photo of caravan from outandaboutlive.co.uk, photo of Opulent Shaik No 77 from cafleurebon.com