A Tattoo Named Desire: Vero Profumo Rozy edp review, and musings on perfumer bias

The Rose Tattoo House in Key West, Florida

I would have written this post earlier in the week, and blame Birgit of Olfactoria's Travels for the delay. Yes, I have been devouring one of her book recommendations, Louise Doughty's Apple Tree Yard, and much of my free time this week has been lost to that.  It was a chilling, truly electrifying read, and I heartily endorse her selection.

Then, thanks to Tara of OT, I have had a sample of Vero Profumo's Rozy edp for a little while now, and have tested it a number of times.  At least six in fact, toggling between wrists to preclude 'wrist bias'.  And I am going to spell it 'Rozy' rather than '.rozy.' as per the bottle, if you don't mind, because of the risk of grammatical confusion - and the fact that I am too lazy to 'dot my full stops', as it were.

Source: Bloom Perfumery

So...the leviathan that is mainstream perfumery trundles on apace with its unseemly number of launches every season, but as readers may have noticed I mostly tune out to that.  Instead, my ears are at least half-cocked to the latest niche launches.  The blogo-planets seems to be moving through the house of Vero Profumo at the moment, with numerous reviews appearing - notably of all the Rozy variants, but also Mito, Rubj and Onda.  Less so Kiki, though I do like that one.  We also seem to be in a bit of an En Voyage Perfumes phase, and one of Liz Moores for that matter, though I have yet to try her line.  Not so long ago Perfume Land was reverberating with reviews of Neela Vermeire's original trio, followed by a delightful aftershock of acclaim for Ashoka, while Puredistance has also caused a few spikes of interest, most recently with its launch of BLACK.

The Vero Profumo range I spied at Mussler Beauty, Stuttgart

But right now, if I had to 'call the market', I would say that Vero Kern's work is riding particularly high and capturing people's imagination, not least because Vero herself is such a vibrant, original and down to earth character by all accounts.  I would venture to say that she is the perfumer equivalent of Vivienne Westwood crossed with Germaine Greer.  A number of my blogger friends have met Vero in person - several times even, properly hanging out with her, indeed! - I am thinking of Freddie of Smellythoughts, for example, and Val the Cookie Queen of (mostly) Australian Perfume Junkies.  And then of course at the recent workshop in London hosted by Bloom Perfumery, a number of other perfumistas and bloggers had the opportunity to meet Vero and learn more about the inspiration behind her work, including Tara herself and Sabine of Iridescents.

Tennessee Williams and Anna Magnani ~ Source: swide.com

So the collective reports of meet-ups with Vero Kern have predisposed me to like her even more, which is what I mean in the title by 'perfumer bias'.  I really, really want to like all of Vero Kern's work, because I admire and am drawn to what I know of the woman.  And I am conscious that I have probably tried harder with her fragrances than I would if they had been the latest release by Parfums d'Empire or Parfums de Nicolai, say. I will also admit to having been nervous about testing Rozy. As I wrote to Val via Facebook: 'What is Rozy like?  Sounds a bit massive / 'out there' from the notes?', to which she replied: 'Not massive, just gorgeous.'

Notes: Rose d'Orient, lilac, peaches, passionfruit, honey and sandalwood

But whilst I have instantly taken to scents like Kiki edp, Rubj edp and Mito Extrait and Voile d'Extrait - the opening of Mito edp remains a little acerbic for my tastes - Rozy has proved a bit more of a challenge.

Determined to keep this pink theme going ~ Source: Wikipedia

The inspiration for Rozy has been well documented in other reviews, namely that Vero Kern's muse was the Italian actress Anna Magnani, especially in her role as the lusty, headstrong and hot-tempered Serafina Delle Rose in the Tennessee Williams play, 'The Rose Tattoo'. According to one rather sparse plot summary I found online, it 'tells the story of an Italian-American widow in Louisiana who has allowed herself to withdraw from the world after her husband's death and expects her daughter to do the same.'  To be fair, Rosario the husband isn't dead all the way through, and the play also involves dressmaking, smuggling, long distance lorry driving, adultery and betrayal, together with rose tattoos on the person of practically everybody except Serafina herself, though she does experience a sort of 'rose tattoo stigmata' early on in the story on learning that she is pregnant. The film was mostly shot in Key West, and the house where much of the action is set is still known as Rose Tattoo House.

Source: findyourtattoo.net

Google the name 'Rozy', however, as I did in an idle moment, and in that well known resource of Urban Dictionary you will find a much less rumbustious kind of a gal:

'A cute and very sweet little girl living in Connecticut who likes to sleep with cuddly gray sweatshirts on, sleep with her chubby and very soft bunny, stay up all night working on English essays...' and more in that vein.

So banish that image of a Rozy 'perzona' from your mind right off the bat, though lilac could be thought of as a bit of a demure, cutesie note I guess (FM En Passant springs to mind.)  But not here....

Anna Magnani ~ Source: Wikipedia

Okay, so I have written down my impressions each time I have tried Rozy edp...The opening is a bit of a shock, and not the sort of thing I usually like - powdery in a musky, intense way. Texturally I am reminded of PdN Sacrebleu, which hits you with an opaque 'wall of stuff' that I am at a loss to describe in more detail. Sometimes, but not on every test, I detected a slightly sharp, angular quality to the opening that quickly subsided.  On one such occasion my thoughts also drifted to some unidentified boozy-fruity-woody scent by Frapin - or maybe Ginestet's Botrytis.  The fruitiness morphed into more of a distinctively winey, woody, almost menthol-y scent.  I have written 'corked claret' to evoke the woody undertow, and also 'cough syrup'.  For what Rozy most resembled after about twenty minutes or so was Halls Soothers in blackcurrant flavour - possibly cherry, but a dark, deep fruity one for sure.  But as I say, sometimes Rozy skipped this very brief Soothers stage and segued from the musky opening straight into 'broadly beaming fruit'.

For up next is a phase that was uniformly present and much more winsome and accessible - more in the style of Rubj (which I like a lot), but Rubj oozing with honey, and with different flowers.  It is a radiant phase, bright and upbeat, and still noticeably fruity. I get more of the peach at this point - the passionfruit may in fact have been what my nose read as blackcurrant earlier? - and the rose and lilac are pushing through, drenched in honey.  Now honey is a tricky note for me at the best of times - Viktoria Minya's Hedonist was all kinds of wrong on my skin, for example, as Freddie is my witness! - but the honey here is one of the highlights.

A bolt of silk fabric, doing a good impression of a rose ~ Source: ebay.com

As Rozy wears on and becomes generally more attenuated, predictably I like it even more.  Images of Greek yoghurt laced with honey float into my mind, or a shower creme based around honey and milk.  This is the most beautiful part - a silken, honeyed, milky lava, flowing at an almost imperceptibly slow speed.

And then, in the far drydown - on most occasions, but not all - Rozy bites back again, when the honey note turns ever so slightly urinous - what Elena of Perfumeshrine once described as 'honeyed piss' in connection with Absolue pour le Soir by Maison Francis Kurkdjian.  This is phenylacetic acid, apparently - or something behaving very much like it on my wrist.  I can tolerate it these days, as my threshold for animalic notes has greatly come on since I first developed an interest in perfume.  It made me smile, if anything.  There was still a trace of it on my skin this morning after yet another wearing last night.  I should give Schiaparelli's Shocking another go, as I may be ready to meet that same animalic note there again...

So, believe me, I tried to love this, but a diva fruity scent like this was always going to struggle to reel me in. Even Plum by Mary Greenwell, one of the few 'big fruity chypres' to get under my radar, can be a mistake on some days.  But apart from the fuggy wallop of the opening, and despite Rozy being fruitier than I normally go for, I do genuinely like it, and just wish I liked it even more!

And I remain as keen as ever to meet Vero Kern some day. And her dog.  And I don't even like dogs - or most dogs, certainly!  That's perfumer bias for you.

Source: Facebook

PS I would be interested to hear whether you are prone to 'perfumer bias' in relation to any particular fragrance line or collection of that perfumer's work, and how this plays out in your sniffing experience?

A fishy fumehead encounter, featuring Val the Cookie Queen and Portia Turbot-Gear

Val and Thomas at Bloom, with Michael and half of Nigel in the background

Readers may well have been following the adventures of irrepressible Antipodean drag queen Portia of APJ and her urbane fellow contributor Michael as they have been on a bit of a world tour in recent weeks. This has taken in Austria, Germany and France, to name just the countries I have clocked in blog posts and Facebook updates.  In the final leg of her travels, Portia blew into London the other day, as did another member of the APJ crew, Val the Cookie Queen, accompanied by her daughter.  Portia and Michael had already visited Val and family in Austria, as well as hooking up with Birgit and Sandra of Olfactoria's Travels in Vienna for - amongst other things - that all-important tea towel handover. Yesterday, a group of about ten perfumistas (mostly bloggers, in the event) foregathered in the Spitalfields district of London for a mini-perfumery crawl and hearty fish and chip lunch.  Which doesn't have quite the same ring to it as 'fish and chip supper', but there you go.

I say 'blew in', not just because both Portia and Val are live wires, which they are in spades (do spades have wires? Of course they do!), but because it was unfeasibly windy that day.  Umbrella-thrapingly so, if I had had the foresight to bring one with me, topped off with a side order of cold lashing rain.  Now we have had gales all last week where I live, but I don't expect such dismal weather when I come down to London. Why, London is practically in the tropics as far as I am concerned, and I expect my full thermal value - I had even doffed my winter vest in anticipation! - but it was signally lacking yesterday.

Spillover clothing crisis in the office

I don't know if the weather had anything to do with it, but I nearly missed my train in the morning, owing to a clothing crisis of unprecedented proportions that lasted a full hour and laid waste to several rooms (by no means all of them bedrooms).   It seemed impossible to pick out a single outfit that went even some way towards a harmonious union of colour, shoe comfort, fabric type (including any day/night connotations), trouser length, weatherproofing, warmth, and flexibility of warmth.Trying to add a fashionable element into the mix would have tipped me into complete meltdown, if indeed I had owned garments that nodded in that direction. But eventually, reason prevailed and I settled on a tunic top and suit trousers, flat shoes - and no vest!

Epicentre of the clothing carnage

When the train reached Milton Keynes, I hooked up with Thomas, The Candy Perfume Boy, and his soon-to-be-husband Nigel, though not before I had sewn up not one but two knitted hats!  Nothing like a wifi coldspot for prompting the completion of an abandoned crafting project.  The three of us made our way to Aldgate East tube station, where we had arranged to meet Tara.  There we spent the obligatory ten minutes being royally flummoxed by 'multiple exit syndrome', before fortuitously popping up at Exit 3, where Tara was waiting for us, looking serene and lovely as ever - and not the least bit buffeted or rainswept.

We struck out intially in the wrong direction, but Thomas quickly google mapped us back on track, and we wove our way deftly through the narrow streets around Brick Lane.  I stuck closely to him, not least because he was emitting beguiling whiffs of Tom Ford Shanghai Lily, which I had briefly sampled in Paris in June, yet somehow its spicy floral glory had failed to woo me till now.  I may have offered to marry Thomas at one point, possibly within earshot of Nigel.

My new scent squeeze ~ Source: harveynichols.com

When we arrived at Bloom in Spitalfields, it was already packed out with a lively throng of fumeheads in full sniffing mode, including Val and Portia, Michael, Nick Gilbert (Fragrant Reviews) and Joshua Ang (The Smelly Vagabond). Freddie Albrighton (Smellythoughts), whose train had been delayed, joined us shortly afterwards.)  Introductions over, a small flurry of mutual present giving ensued.  I gave Val a poster of The Monochrome Set and a purse for keeping samples in; she gave me cookies of her own manufacture (yay!) and an antique silver button hook, which belonged to her grandmother.  Tara copped for a hat(!) - my hat knitting compulsion having lately escalated to the point where I have exhausted the pool of potential recipients in Stafford - while Portia took custody of a pair of minuscule notebooks and a slightly broached box of fudge that was briefly pre-owned - or at the very least funded - by Tom Cruise. Thereby hangs a tale which will feature in Bonkers in due course, along with its Portia-enabled sequel...

Nick in classic raised forearm pose, with mischievous grin (not pictured)

Oh, and I did remember to do a bit of sniffing, but only a couple of things.  For example, I finally caught up with the new rose release from Parfumerie Generale - No 26 Isparta.  When Pierre Guillaume kissed me(!) after the talk at Les Senteurs in 2012, he also whispered in my ear that he was working on a rose scent. Well, all I can say is that it's been a long time coming, and as Nick pointed out, it does smell somewhat similar to Portrait of a Lady - you might be forgiven for thinking that in the space of two years PG might have taken his composition in a more original direction, but apparently not.  So no new lemming there, thankfully.

The lovely Tara, pictured with her 'To Sniff' list?

Soon it was time to repair next door to Poppies, a retro diner famous for its prize-winning fish and chips. The table assigned to us wasn't quite big enough, but by sheer force of numbers and a bit of strategic staring we quickly saw off the two couples at adjacent tables, and suddenly had ample room to accommodate our own substantial party.

Nick, Freddie, Portia Turbot-Gear (sic!) and Michael

Inevitably, we couldn't stop passing round bottles and samples for one another to sniff, and I got to try the new Dita Von Teese Erotique - which was exactly the 'teesingly' spicy, sandalwoody number Thomas had described in his review - also Vero Profumo Mito Voile d'Extrait, which is less acerbic and more floral than the original EDP, thanks to the addition of tuberose.  I sprayed it liberally on my front, then later wiped the overspray from my Zelda bottle (from when I was making samples for other people) on the back of my neck.  I felt like a scented version of Janus!

Tara, Joshua and Nigel

Our food came pretty quickly, so we had to clear away some of our perfume tackle to make way for huge plates of fish and bottles of condiments.  Not only was its flesh as white as a Hollywood smile, but my haddock was intriguingly upended on its side, though I had to knock it over in order to set about eating it. Sarah, another perfumista who joined us at the restaurant, also had vertical fish, which is not a style of presentation I had previously encountered.

Sarah's fish standing to attention

Replete from our big meals, our slightly bedraggled gaggle braved the weather again to make our way to - no, not Angela Flounders as you might very well imagine, with it being in the immediate vicinity - but Les Senteurs in Seymour Place. As we walked I chatted to Portia a bit about his time in London some 20 years ago, and mentioned that I had also been to Sydney and owned a koala called Mosman.  Only a toy, obviously, but the real things are, after all, not markedly more lively.  Or not the ones living in Canberra Zoo in late 1993.  Portia endeared himself to me by guessing that he was the eldest in our group, when he is fact nine years my - and Val's - junior.  Also by describing me as 'glamorous', which I mistakenly heard as 'cadaverous', to people's amusement.

The By Kilian invasion

Since my last visit, Les Senteurs had been rather taken over by By Kilian, to which an entire wall had been devoted. I ignored the whole fixture and instead made a beeline for the opposite, more diversely stocked wall, where I tried Atelier Cologne's Silver Iris.  It was every bit as likable as the reviews had suggested, and - like The Monochrome Set's penultimate album - its shiny silver surface could have doubled up in a pinch as an emergency compact mirror, however, I think I have enough irises in my collection.

Val, 'valiantly' keeping the FM red lippie theme going

I also tried Sybarite by Cloon Keen Atelier - the Ateliers were out in force yesterday, as you can tell - but couldn't place the scent and it registered as neither overtly pleasant or otherwise.  A little bit like YSL Nu EDT, if I had to think of any remote point of comparison.  Major props for the name though - I love the word 'sybarite' in all its variants. Maybe I should have tried it on skin, as the composition sounds much more congenial than I remember it smelling.  The top notes of incense and bergamot may not have worked for me, though.

Michael and Freddie at Les Senteurs

Then Freddie drew my attention to Mona di Orio's Eau Absolue, an unusual citrus and honey scent with an animalic base.  It grabbed my attention much more, even on card, and we both agreed that this was a treatment of honey that was more to our liking than Viktoria Minya's Hedonist.  Portia had meanwhile ensconced herself at the back of the shop, looking rather grandee-like amongst the rococo furniture and gilt mirrors.  As well as describing me as glamorous, he told Tara she had great legs, prompting me to call him a 'caution', prompting me in turn to explain what this peculiarly British term means.  I just looked it up and it is classified as 'informal' and 'dated', with a meaning of 'amusing' and 'surprising'.  Well, Portia's sense of humour is certainly both of those! ;-)

Portia striking a pose, possibly involving the sniffing of a mobile phone

All too soon it was time to make tracks and catch my train back.  Thomas and Nigel set off for Euston with me, but we had to part company at the tube station when Nigel got his ticket stuck in the lining of his jacket. ;-)  Before I knew it I was speeding north and back to normal life - the excitement of the day's events had assumed an almost dreamlike quality.  Though the two cookies Val had given me - which didn't make it past Watford Junction - said otherwise...