Beyond Hate: By Kilian Beyond Love, Prohibited, and my Love and Tears Janus moment!

Source: Hayley Armagost on Pinterest

Hate...it's a strong word. There are very few people in the world, if any, whom I would say I have ever hated. Oh, maybe the former colleague who slammed the door in my face after I had pulled an all-nighter at the office. I'd been editing a report that was chock full of someone else's typos, for which I took the rap, even though the person in question was knocking on thirty at the time and perfectly capable of proofing his own work. So yes, I probably wouldn't rush to meet her again.

As for my reaction to the By Kilian line, every blogger who has ever posted about their perfumes has probably had a comment from yours truly bemoaning the headache-inducing 'house fug acccord' that killed this range for me. Liaisons Dangereuses - which I would liken to Poison for the Noughties - was the worst offender, but I remember having 'fug issues' during my brief encounters with Love, Beyond Love and one or two others. Interestingly, I have experienced no such problem with later releases, such as Love and Tears or Sweet Redemption, to name but two, so I can only assume it is a stylistic hallmark of the early years. By a similar token, the early Mona di Orios were all kinds of wrong on  me - I still shudder at the memory of my Nuit Noire 'necklacing' incident - but I went on to love several of the Nombres d'Or collection.

The other slightly annoying thing about this brand - apart from the price and the preposterous promo shots of a snake-draped Kilian Hennessey - is the opaque packaging. Very unhelpful for anyone attempting to sell a partial bottle at a later date. Though props to the brand for its tassles. Yet overall I have largely tuned out to By Kilian, and though I was recently in Augsburg, where the niche perfumery Naegele has a whole wall devoted to the line, I didn't make any effort to go there this time - and didn't even point it out to Val, though we passed close by. 'Friends before perfume'...? Well, before By Kilian perfume, for sure.

NO, IT ISN'T!!!!

But two things happened recently to prompt me to revisit this brand. Firstly, not so long ago, Tara was sending me some bits and bobs, and enclosed a packet of my own By Kilian samples which I vaguely remembered having given to someone. Not to Tara, as it transpired, but to Holly Cranmer at the time of her visit in August, and now she was giving them back, having presumably also had a poor hit rate with the line. So for a while the little bag of vials, with their distinctive calligraphic script, sat on my desk, awaiting transferral to long term storage / purgatory. But before I got round to doing that, a chance reference to the tuberose note in Carnal Flower during the German tour - which was greeted by a chorus of 'Oh, tuberose, that's a nice scent' - made me think to tentatively retry the (to me, still) very scary tuberose perfume in the By Kilian stable, Beyond Love, Prohibited.

Source: havenessence.com

And guess what? It wasn't scary. There was no discernable fug. No headache ensued. But rather, I fell hard for this heady, coconut-tinged, almost gourmand tuberose soliflore, which Luca Turin dubbed 'tuberose tuberose' in Perfumes The Guide, citing it as the greatest example of the note.

"Calice Becker has composed a straight-up tuberose using the best absolute from India, with touches of other notes (magnolia iris) used only to narrow the gap between the extract and the fresh flower. The result is the best tuberose soliflore on earth."

Notes: coconut accord, Egyptian jasmine absolute, tuberose concrete, tuberose absolute, green tuberose, tuberose petals accord, ambergris, tonkin musk.

Um...would you like a side of tuberose with that? ;)

Source: vroma.org

Yes, it was creamy, in an oozing patisserie kind of a way. I pictured a cream slice, but with white custard. To my mind's eye, this is a very white, yet warm and enveloping scent. Evocative of a tropical beach holiday, so arguably not the best fit for a rainswept night in Bristol, which is where I decided to give my sample its first ever public outing.

Then I remembered that Caryne had asked me to wear Love and Tears, its jasmine-foward counterpart, at a gig some time, so she could gauge whether that was the intensity of jasmine she was looking for on her own, vegan jasmine perfume quest. (Ongoing, and a bit of a tall order it seems.) So anyway, Janus-like, I decided to wear Love and Tears on the back of my neck, and Beyond Love everywhere else. I sense that there may be a piquant psychological metaphor in the near juxtaposition of these two scents, but I can't quite put my finger on it. It certainly made for some comedy moments in the pre-gig milling as I proffered both the front and nape of my neck for interested parties to sniff. Both perfumes got the thumbs up, with Beyond Love deemed more suitable for evening wear.

Mazzie and Simon

I resniffed the same fans who had attended one of the Berlin gigs wearing Chanel pour Monsieur and Aromatics Elixir respectively. This time Simon was in Clinique Chemistry - which I thought was a wind up, but it turns out to be its real name! - while Mazzie was in a peppery poppy perfume from the Body Shop, which smelt delightful on her. Caryne herself was wearing a sample of a patchouli scent from L'Erbolario, purchased at the same time as my bottle of Méharées.

The next day, on a whim, I morphed into a reverse Janus, wearing Beyond Love on the back of my neck and Love and Tears everywhere else. ;) Oh, after further reading on the Interwebs I have just realised that these two are part a collection of love themed perfumes, which comprises: Prelude to Love, Invitation, Love, Don't be shy, Beyond Love, Prohibited, and Love and Tears, Surrender. Me being me, I appear to have skipped the preamble and jumped into this series just as it gets interesting...;)

So yes, beyond hate lay a surprise love for this tuberose beauty. I don't anticipate that there will be a 'beyond Beyond Love' phase, but I will soon have finished my sample at this rate, so - given the prices and general hoo-hah surrounding this brand - there will imminently be a 'Beyond Wearing' phase.  And possibly a few tears about that...

Source: fragrantica

Bonus tassle pic specially for Tara!

Strange Lickable Perfumes: Interview With By Kilian Founder Kilian Hennessy In The Independent

You know you are getting old when someone describes Jo Malone's Lime, Basil & Mandarin Cologne as a "classic" fragrance - turns out it has been around for 21 years, so that's fair comment really.  And what, you may ask, does Jo Malone have to to do with a post on Kilian Hennessy, the personable, oversized lapel-ed founder of the By Kilian range of perfumes?  Well, in a brief lull in my search for wallpaper - I am suffering at the moment from a bad case of obsessive compulsive online swatch scrolling - I whiled away a few moments with the magazine from last Saturday's Independent newspaper (16.6), which my neighbour had thoughtfully brought round because it had "a thing on perfume" in it. 

Indeed it did: a feature on classic and new beauty products, some top perfume picks for Father's Day, and best of all, an interview with Kilian Hennessy by Susannah Frankel.

Now By Kilian is not a range with which I particularly get on.  Several of the original releases seemed to share an intense, fuggy accord of some kind which triggered an instant headache. I had the same experience with Mona di Orio’s early launches, yet came to revise my view of the brand once she introduced the relatively pared down Nombres d’Or Collection. And by the same token, there are now By Kilian scents which I can enjoy like any other, which don’t seem to have this fug problem, Sweet Redemption and Love & Tears being my current favourites.

So now that I have come to appreciate the By Kilian line, in part at least, I read this interview with interest - the full article is well worth checking out here.

Highlights for me include Kilian Hennessy's views on the IFRA guidelines, on the state of mainstream perfumery, and on his favourite perfume eras and individual scents from the past.  One of these was Dior Poison, which made my ears prick up, because I see Liaisons Dangereuses as a kind of Poison-Lite for the Noughties. Not that it is all that “lite” of course to my nose…

The reference to "lickable" in the title of this post relates to an incident involving - rather aptly - the By Kilian fragrance, Straight to Heaven.   I couldn't help but be reminded of Pierre Guillaume's Coze-licking stunt at the Les Senteurs event in February... : - )

The most thought-provoking part of the interview for me concerns the issue of price points: Hennessy clearly feels that £145 is not excessive for perfumes of this quality and draws a parallel with the success of Apple: “...at one point Steve Jobs said it is not that Apple has become mass market, it’s that the market has now reached Apple’s level.”



Apple iPhone quarterly worldwide unit sales (millions) - click on the image to enlarge 

There seem to me to be two distinct points here: the rise of niche fragrance brands - which may not be as meteoric as that of iPhone sales, but which is a clear trend - and the question of whether expensive perfumes offer value for money.  Personally, I think there are fragrances which lean more to the fur coat and no knickers end of the spectrum, while others warrant their premium price. I don’t, however, feel qualified to judge which are which, though I have a hunch that there is probably a luxuriantly healthy margin in the likes of Clive Christian’s perfumes. 

And then at the opposite end of the scale are scents which I call “yellow limes” – ie which don’t look too promising because the packaging is ugly or cheap, and yet which turn out to be surprisingly good. You see, I am visually drawn to nicely nobbly, dark green limes in the supermarket, but I have read - and found in practice - that it is the more yellow-y looking ones that are the juiciest.  (It doesn't work the other way round, mind, in case anyone is wondering, ie green lemons don't appear to be any more juicy as far as I can tell, and look less like an epitome of a lemon if they are not uniformly yellow.  For where fruit and veg are concerned, I do try to buy epitomes wherever possible - you won't catch me settling for any of that mutant organic produce, unless it is overtly humorous.) 

But enough of the gratuitous fruit musings, and back to the matter in hand.  I feel this interview begs a number of questions (see my answers below and do let me know your thoughts on any of these points in the comments!):

Do you think the £145 price tag for a 50ml By Kilian fragrance is justified? 

If I really, really loved one of them, then maybe, but objectively speaking I am on the fence on this one, maybe even half slipping off...  :- ) Though there again, that packaging would have been super expensive to make, is drop dead gorgeous, and could easily double up as a sumptuous coffin for a deceased pet of the requisite size - a hamster or a budgie, say.

Do you own any scents from the line yourself? 

Not in terms of full bottles, but I am grateful for the samples I have managed to squirrel away in swaps or thanks to the generosity of sales assistants and fellow fumeheads.   (I know Birgit of Olfactorias Travels owns a refill bottle of Amber Oud - her March Bottle of The Month - travel sprays of Rose Oud and Back to Black, plus Sweet Redemption in the magnificent black box version. Ogle her collection here!)

If not, do you have a top By Kilian lemming?

No, but a 10ml decant of my two favourites would be nice.  Below is a photo of my friend Qwendy in a state of Love & Tears-induced euphoria at Scent Bar in LA, when we tried the scent for the first time.

Does anyone else experience this fug problem with certain scents in the line?  If so, which ones?

My top offendors were Liaisons Dangereuses, Love and Beyond Love - at least I think so - I have tended to avoid smelling them since.

Has anyone (known to you or otherwise) ever attempted to lick you while you were wearing a By Kilian fragrance?  If so, which?

Are you kidding?  I am patiently waiting for the day when someone attempts to lick me wearing ANY fragrance.  Or while not wearing any fragrance.  I am ludicrously happy just to receive a compliment about my SOTD, as that is such a rare occurrence.  As for how I would feel if it was someone I didn't know doing the honours...well, it would depend on the stranger, but probably not...

Now, notwithstanding the high price tag of the bottles themselves, I must say that in my experience By Kilian is pretty good about posting samples in response to ad hoc requests.  Plus there has been that fantastic Facebook campaign, whereby if you liked their page you could register to be sent a full sample set of the L’Oeuvre Noire Collection – an offer which passed me by completely at the time, but which does sound like a very generous and effective way of spreading the word about their range.

And d'you know, I am going to check out that thing about green lemons not being juicier, and report back.

One last question: What is your stance on "epitome produce" - or stylish perfume packaging - and do looks really matter?

To take the perfume question, on a scale of 1-10, where one is a plain tester box and 10 a Swarowski-studded Baccarat bottle - okay, that's rather a silly example, but something pretty darn snazzy, say - I probably hover between a 3 and a 6.  By Kilian would be a shade over the 6 on my scale, but don't press me to a number - decimal points may be involved!

UPDATE: I found this tip on choosing lemons from http://www.whfoods.com/:

"They should be fully yellow in color as those that have green tinges will be more acidic due to the fact that they have not fully ripened." 


Photo of Kilian Hennessy from womenweb.de, photo of Poison from Ebay UK, photo of mutant lemon from Flickr CC via Meggle, graph of iPhone sales from Wikimedia Commons via Myschizobuddy, other photo my own.

California Dreaming: Another Bonkers Road Trip - The Scented Bit: Part 3

I was very tempted to call this post: "Visit To The* Scent Bar - 'I Should Be So Lucky / Lucky, Lucky, Lucky'...!", but editorial consistency prevailed, and this last instalment has defaulted to Part 3 of The Scented Bit instead. I know what, I will create a sub-heading instead...

Visit To The* Scent Bar: "I Should Be So Lucky..."

I believe I left off the saga at the point where I returned to my hotel in Venice from the Strange Invisible Perfumes store to select an outfit for my sniffing session that afternoon at the Scent Bar in West Hollywood. I had taken advice in advance from Qwendy/Wendy about dress code, because I was aware of that general neck of the Hollywoods being the affluent epicentre of LA. I didn't want to look too much of a hobo, though at the same time I knew I had zero hope of competing with the top-to-toe designer-clad "ladies who feebly push their lunch around their plate with a fork" brigade. You see them striding purposefully down Beverly Boulevard, long golden locks bouncing over razor-sharp clavicles like those flappy streamer things that smear rather than dry your windscreen in a car wash. They are invariably clutching six rope carrier bags in each hand - or five bags in each hand and one beribboned Yorkie - a pink I-phone cupped to one ear in the crook of a surprisingly supple elbow.

So anyway, Qwendy said the uniform at such events was pretty much de rigueur skinny jeans and T-shirts, adding - to put me at my ease - that she routinely flouted the trouser convention. Now I don't own any skinny jeans as such, but instead donned my least bootleggy Gap jeans, which are called "Real Straight" - see photo (legs not my own).

I teamed this with chocolate brown suede high heels, a chocolate brown lace trimmed cardigan and this T-shirt: perfume-themed, accented with a bit of bling, and a steal at £12 in New Look! Then I did my best to style my hair in the artfully mussed way to which I so often find myself referring on this blog, and jumped on the I-10 freeway, heading for the Scent Bar and the worldwide HQ of Lucky Scent...

Regular readers may have inferred from my many posts about road trips that I am not averse to a bit of driving. I do, however, suffer from parking phobia, and allowed an extra half an hour to scope the vicinity of the store looking for a legitimate parking spot. It took me 20 minutes of cruising round and round the block to spot a free parking meter associated with a space into which I felt comfortable manoeuvring my sub-compact - yet to my mind still rather large and boxy - car. And though I lacked the requisite quorum of quarters to pay for my projected stay, I was ecstatic to find that the parking meter accepted foreign credit cards!

I arrived at the Scent Bar a little ahead of schedule, and was surprised at how tiny and bijou it was! But they had maximised the available space all right: each wall was shelved from floor to ceiling, and on each shelf sat dozens of bottles of niche scents - all jumbled up together for the most part - though a few houses were grouped by collection eg Xerjoff from memory.

Qwendy was unavoidably held up and arrived fashionably late and full of apologies - or rather the couture version of "fashionably late" - which is slightly later. But it is a measure of how welcoming the staff were and how un-conspicuous I was made to feel, that I was perfectly happy to browse the rich layers of stock on my own until Qwendy was able to join me. I also had sporadic chats with Rachel and Steve, the two sales assistants, when they were in between serving the serious punters, who came not just to sip champagne (just one small flute in my own case, obviously) and "sniff till they dropped", but to...yes, strange to tell...actually conduct themselves like proper consumers and buy stuff...

And then Qwendy arrived, and there were rapturous greetings, as though we had known each other much longer than one phone call's worth and a mutual trip to the Post Office with our respective swap parcels way back whenever. As I expected, she was wearing a distinctive and stylish skirt-based ensemble, but we needn't have worried about our outfits, for there was one lady there in red Wellingtons.

So what did we smell? Oh dear, I was worried you might ask that... May I fall back again on my "Witnesses sought to a fatal car crash" excuse in trying to reconstruct a list of what we smelled, never mind an impression of said scents. As I recall, the majority of perfumes I tested fell into the "okay" category, with "possibly worth a retrial" in one tapering section of the bell curve, and "meh" in the other. There were only a couple of outright scrubbers in the "very thin bell end", so to speak(!) - as noted below - and only a couple I really liked, or which otherwise impressed me in some way.

HUMIECKI & GRAEF

(Rachel kindly fetched these out for me from under the counter? And that is a good tip in The Scent Bar - given that this is the shop front of Lucky Scent, you can ask for pretty much any perfume you want to try and they should have a tester tucked away somewhere...)

Askew
Skarb
Eau Radieuse
Multiple Rouge

GROSSMITH

Hasu-no-Hana (retro sneezy scrubber! Grossmith by name...)

XERJOFF

Modoc
Lua (tested on skin)

Notes: bergamot, orange, lemon, melon, Bulgarian rose, Florentine iris, pink pepper, lily, cedar wood, vanilla, musk

This was a very pretty floral woody musk, with many of my favourite notes in it, though I would probably lose the melon and swap the cedar for sandalwood. It is almost certainly not worth the money, mind you. I didn't even bother to inquire! Update - I just peeked at the Lucky Scent website - I was right not to bother to inquire!

BRUNO ACAMPORA

Musc
Jasmin (very full-on indolic jasmine, squarely and headache-inducingly in the A La Nuit, Jasmin de Nuit tradition. I would have to call this a scrubber, which in no way diminishes its authentic jasmine-ness. If it did, I might actually like it...)

NEZ à NEZ

Figues et Garçons

LE NEZ

L'Antimatière (cousin of SIP L'Invisible - in name only!)

KEIKO MECHERI

(Smelt on another lady's skin who was deciding which of these two to buy. The in-store consensus - we were all getting quite pally by this stage and sniffing one another uninhibitedly - was Peau de Pêche, which was deemed (relatively) more intense and interesting, on her arm, anyway.)

Peau de Pêche
Bois de Santal

L'ARTISAN PARFUMEUR

Traversée du Bosphore (tested on skin)

I could not better Boisdejasmin's summary of this one as a "take on violet-orris in a gourmand oriental manner". She goes on to say: "It is opulent and voluptuous, and yet the signature dry amber touch of Duchaufour lends it a surprisingly diaphanous effect." It was possibly too opulent and voluptuous and even a little scratchy to appeal to me on that warm, sunny afternoon, but the drydown was smoother and quieter, and I would try this again. Stylistically I was reminded a bit of DelRae Bois de Paradis, though it is a long time since I last tried that one - the L'Artisan strikes me as more wearable on the basis of this cursory trial.

BY KILIAN

Love and Tears (tested on skin)

Notes: bergamot, petit grain, cypress, jasmine, orange blossom, ylang-ylang and cistus. Lucky Scent also detects lily-of-the-valley and gardenia.

A completely OTT feminine white floral in the style of Fracas or Joy or Roja Dove Scandal, but even more so. Even more what? Even more everything. It has that molten perfumey quality conjured up by soft porn ads for motor oil. I liked it and thought it very well done, but couldn't quite see myself wearing it.

Qwendy, who is currently morphing from my evil scent twin and lover of darkly robust compositions to someone unexpectedly gravitating towards feminine florals, gave Love and Tears the thumbs up. We also had major new crossover territory in APOM pour Femme by Maison Kurkdjian, which may conceivably be the bottle producing Qwendy's blissed out state in the shot above. : - )

ANDY TAUER

Orange Star - no discernible Tauerade!
Rose Vermeille - Tauerade alert!
Carillon d'un Ange - as above!

So, after spending an incredible 1hr 40 mins in this small store, without feeling the least bit in the way, and given unlimited licence to take photographs, I said goodbye to the helpful staff and the charming Qwendy and drove back in the dark to Venice, navigating (rather well, I thought) by my rough sense of direction alone, as my GPS blacked out somewhere on Wilshire.

Visit To Ajne, Carmel: "The Road Not Taken"

My final scented stop on this trip was Ajne in Carmel, if you discount a fairly low key visit to a branch of Marshall's, where I copped for a bargain bottle of Juicy Couture Dirty English and promptly regretted the purchase (as you do).

I had a couple of morning meetings in Santa Barbara one day during the second week, and after doing some quick calculations, figured that if I really put my foot down on the 240 mile journey north I might just make it to the store before they closed at 6pm. To this end I opted to take the inland route, which is more direct but considerably less scenic than the famous coast road (Route 1).

Accordingly, on the afternoon in question I drove like a bat out of the proverbial hot place, parked up, and was outside the Ajne boutique in its pretty courtyard by 5.45pm, only to find the place in darkness and clearly shut. I have since made contact with the company, and found out that they had closed early because it was the night of their staff Christmas dinner at a location just down the street!

As I peered in the windows at the Louis XIV furniture within, I couldn't help but feel a sense of anti-climax, yet it was just one of those unfortunate things... If only I hadn't needed petrol and a comfort station at Kingsburg, pausing fatefully to examine the (to me curious) display of beef jerky, and choose a bar of confectionery with what now seems, looking back, to have been unnecessary care. Yes, if only I had shaved those vital 5-10 minutes off the journey, I would have bumped into the Ajne team in the act of shutting shop, and stayed their hand long enough to sample their latest releases and purchase a parfum petite of Printemps.

There again, knowing my track record with Ajne purchases, my "buy the smallest retail format available" resolve might have crumbled and I could have walked out with the half oz black heart flacon @ $200 instead of my intended mini, a fraction of that size. Though ml for ml, the larger sizes represent significantly better value. See - I clearly wasn't meant to be let loose inside that store!

That concludes the report on the Californian Road Trip - I am still trying to figure out if I am a closet travel writer who likes perfume or a perfumista who travels. You decide...


*NB The name of the store is "Scent Bar", but "I am going to Scent Bar" sounds so peculiar I can't bring myself to forgo the definite article.


All photos are my own except the perfume bottle shots which are taken (most fittingly) from Lucky Scent's website, the exterior of the Scent Bar (from Osmoz) and the photo of jeans from Gap's website.