Vial bodies*: how I seem to diss scent samples in sprayers with white tops

70s Go-Go boots ~ Source: eBay

This week on A Bottled Rose, Tara posted some mini-reviews of the new range by Art de Parfum. She had a better strike rate than me - I liked one quite a bit once it dried down (Sensual Oud - I know, it has Oud in the title, but it was really rather nice!). Then another one I found 'interesting' (Signature Wild), though by rights I shouldn't have liked it because it has the dreaded davana note in it - hey, Jasper Conran Mister, that I ordered by mistake instead of Mistress and ended up giving to my brother, who is using it as an air freshener, here's looking at you! And does anyone even remember Jasper Conran Mistress or Mister, such is the evanescent nature of the perfume scene...?

But the other new releases in the Art de Parfum range seemed more like oddball mainstream rather than niche scents to my nose, and I even thought one or two smelt overtly aromachemically, if you know what I mean, such that the overall composition failed to engage / mesh, let alone wow. Tara and I chatted about this afterwards because she has a much superior nose to mine and did not get a synthetic vibe from this range, something I know she would normally pick up on straight away. So I vowed to try the quintet of scents again, because I was disappointed by my own lacklustre reaction to them.

But there's more...!

I remembered that I had a similarly mixed reaction to the ROADS collection of fragrances, a number of which I featured in a post here. I quite liked several, but the rest sadly left me cold. I couldn't imagine buying a bottle of any of them. Why am I not surprised that piece didn't make the Jasmine shortlists this year? Well,for starters it is more of a travelogue than a set of perfume reviews, never mind its less than reverent tone...;)

And then there was another coffret of samples I was kindly sent by Jeffrey Dame of Hypoluxe - a capsule collection of scents under the aegis of Thorsten Biehl's Kunstwerke, by perfumers Geza Schoen, Mark Buxton and Patricia Choux. I featured a Mark Buxton composition (mb01) that particularly caught my fancy in this German-themed post from 2014, but again I was underwhelmed by the set as a whole, notwithstanding the pedigree of the perfumers whose work it showcased. I remember one perfume reminding me forcefully of  Dior's J'adore L'eau cologne florale, for example, a resolutely mainstream flanker of the ever popular J'adore.

It was the same script - only more so - with a range called Aura Soma, the least said about which the better.

And yesterday it dawned on me that the common thread between all four sets of samples is the fact that they have WHITE TOPS. It seems that at some subliminal level, my brain does not equate white tops with 'niche' / 'luxury' / 'high end' scents, regardless of their actual quality and how they may or may not smell.

A quick delve into my 'samples in progress'  boxes and bowls reveals that the scents I do regard highly mostly have black tops, or little stoppers. One range (not pictured and yet to be featured) even has classy blue apothecary-style vials!

In the bowl above are samples from the following brands:

Ormonde Jayne
Mona di Orio
4160 Tuesdays
Papillon Perfumery
Hermes - translucent!
Reek
Grossmith
Aftelier Perfumes
Ex Idolo
Acqua di Parma - a sort of mother of pearl finish, but definitely not your bog standard white!

So then I scurried off to find my presentation box of Puredistance samples, which - whether I like each and every one of their range or not - is a house which resoundingly epitomises quality ingredients for me. I was reassured to see the serried ranks of black tops, giving further weight to my theory.  Yes, I know M is missing - I gave it to a friend who gave it to her colleague.

And to put the lid on my research, I opened a big box of atomiser samples that I had collected at the start of my perfume hobby. Verdict: of the seven white plastic-topped sprayers that came to hand, six were mainstream designer scents, including a couple of 'regular' Chanels. The only high end brand that had gone for white was By Kilian (Forbidden Games), and I am now racking my memory as to whether they may actually use black tops on their other collections?

Well, what a turn up! I am not saying that I have never loved a perfume in a sample sprayer with a white top, or never disliked one in a black top, but I can say that in the main my perception of perfume in quality terms really does seem to be a black and white issue. ;)

Finally, here is Serge Lutens, taking absolutely no chances with an opaque brown number, similar to the (black?) vials of Keiko Mecheri. Which is all very well, but these come with their own issues, namely that you have no clue about fill levels. Until they finally stop working. An annoying phenomenon which I have addressed in this Scent Crimes post - from six and a half years ago, no less!

So I have to ask - is it just me whose perception is influenced by sample top colour, or can anyone else relate?

It sounds a pretty preposterous theory on the face of it, but I toss it out there notwithstanding. Maybe top colour is in fact some kind of  unspoken 'code' in the perfume industry that I have only now tumbled to?!

And yes, I did own a pair of boots like that in the 70s - white patent, which I teamed with my pink (you heard right!) wet look coat. Personally, I am not sure that white boots - or white atomiser tops - or white shoes on men, even on a golf course - were ever a good thing...

*With apologies to  Evelyn Waugh. (It shouldn't really be 'bodies', come to think of it, being more about the tops, but I shall push the envelope of poetic licence.)

Actually, in the case of that Art de Parfum sample pictured above, we are also talking a bit of the body as well as top... Maybe it was the additional - and substantial - plastic 'shoulder' that tipped me over the edge?!

Sillage in the sky: road testing ROADS Fragrances on Ryanair routes

Photo courtesy of Jim Fogarty

If someone were to ask me what I consider to be my greatest achievements, I would probably say...um...correctly predicting meteoric growth in the curved shower door market (back in 1995!), and co-developing apple & mango juice with my old boss at St Ivel - in a lab in Walthamstow some ten years previously. We did also launch apple & pear and apple & banana at the same time, but while apple & mango stuck to the wall and is a steady seller in supermarkets to this day, the other two variants promptly dribbled down it into oblivion. Then the third thing would have to be extracting compensation out of Ryanair for repeated cancellations to a flight from Gothenburg to Stansted in 2006. I successfully invoked the 'passenger rights in the event of denied boarding' enshrined in EC No 261 / 2004 at a time before these had been widely publicised in the media. It wasn't as easy as it may sound though, taking the combined forces of my own pretty dogged badgering and the intervention of a champion within the Air Transport Users Council at the CAA, to a) winkle out a senior, named individual within Ryanair Customer Services to complain to, and b) to get them to cough up. This was the winning paragraph from the AUTC's letter on my behalf:

"In accordance with the Regulation, we ask that Ryanair reimburse Ms Musson those expenses incurred only because of Ryanair's failure to comply with its obligations. The total to be reimbursed for this would be the equivalent of SEK 900.00. We won't ask you to pay for Ms Musson's no doubt stress-busting beer!"

A nice reliable tram in Gothenburg ~ Source: Wikimedia Commons

In the end I received the 900.00 SEK to cover the costs of staying on in Sweden an extra night (minus the beer!), plus a further entirely discretionary 253.93 euros to cover my flight with a different airline which I ended up buying in desperation, due to Ryanair's serial inability to mend planes. Result.

Fast forward to last year, when Tara (formerly of Olfactoria's Travels) kindly loaned me a sample set of a new collection of perfumes created by Danielle Ryan. Danielle is the founder of a prestigious drama academy in Dublin - and intriguingly, also the granddaughter of Tony Ryan, founder of Ryanair. ROADS struck me as an amusingly ironic brand name for a scion of an airline dynasty to light upon. And to be fair, it would have been amusingly ironic even if it had referenced air travel, which is of course famously hostile to the transport of perfume.

Source: thelir.ie

For it is because of the - to my mind, bonkers and unnecessarily draconian - new postal regulations that we can no longer send perfume overseas without a fair degree of subterfuge and moral turpitude, and even shipments within the UK (travelling by ROADS presumably!) are heavily flagged as 'hazardous' thanks to the requirement to affix an ID8000 label.

And even when personally accompanying your perfume on its plane trip, it must of course be either safely stowed in the hold or taken on as hand luggage in a transparent Zip-loc bag. Well, for bottles up to 100ml. If you are planning to take one of those stonking 450ml bottles of a Dior Collection Privée scent, think again. Or make a particular point of coshing the X-ray machine operative over the head with it on your way through security. Yep, as my friend David observed, it's very much a case of a 'Cologne No Fly Zone' where the airlines are concerned. Hmm...remarkably, Ryanair do actually fly to Cologne-Bonn. Eerily close to civilisation for them, you would have thought.

And then when you think of the notion of a fragrance range linked to the budget airline we all love to joke about, you can't help but wonder if you might have to pay extra for the box to go with your perfume bottle, never mind the carrier bag it comes in.

All joking aside, I actually fly Ryanair a lot even now, as they go all over the shop, including to countless places you have never heard of, plus they are pretty darn cheap and do mostly land on time. So when I sat down to test this set of ten perfumes, I thought that it might be fun to pick out scents to talk about which I associated with a particular Ryanair destination (not all from personal experience!), kicking off each mini-review with extracts from the descriptions accompanying the collection.

Harmattan - OUDJA

"The scent of the wind as it crosses the Sahara desert..."

Notes: lavender, vetiver, oud, saffron, black pepper, tuberose, rose, ylang-ylang, sandalwood, bourbon, tonka bean, frankincense, patchouli and myrrh

Hmm...it was a bit of a challenge finding a Ryanair airport in the flight path of the Harmattan wind, which is apparently a 'cold-dry and dusty trade wind, blowing over the West African subcontinent'. So I came up with Oudja, near the Moroccan / Algerian border. To be honest, it's a fair bit north of the windy action, but my guess is that there would be some sand within striking distance at least, even if it is not notably breezy.

Now I read somewhere that Harmattan is the bestseller of the line; it certainly chimes with the oud-y, 'wind wafting curtains of a hotel room overlooking a souk' Zeitgeist, which famously inspired Andy Tauer's L'Air du Désert Marocain. Between the pepper, oud and incense, Harmattan comes off as a somewhat masculine-leaning, arid and austere scent to my nose, making it a good fit for my choice of Oudja - which doesn't seem to go out of its way to attract visitors, though I note that a techno-pole is under construction near the airport. Going back to our trade wind, Harmattan definitely has an overall vibe of 'dusty' and 'cold-dry'. It's not particularly original, but the oud with its medicinal facet nicely scratches that 'English Patient' itch.

Oudja ~ Source: Wikipedia

Graduate 1954 - PARIS

"This represents the woman who, as a result of the limited freedoms offered to her, had to use her femininity and elegance to achieve her goals. Strength through femininity..."

Notes: tuberose, frangipani, old rose, heliotrope, mandarin, muguet, clove, green moss, cedarwood, Virginian sandalwood and patchouli

I am not quite sure why a woman who went to university as long ago as 1954 should still need to use feminine wiles to get anywhere, but assuming that she does, she can start by hitching a lift from Beauvais to actual Paris, a journey of an hour and a half by bus apparently. I chose Paris to be twinned with this pretty scent, because it is a wistful, old-fashioned floral with a feel of Bourjois Soir de Paris about it: watery, sweet and unashamedly girlish - though if one were to cast it in ladies' hosiery terms, it would be more of an 'Ambre' or 'Beige Doré' I sense, rather than fishnets or the implicit bluestocking of the fragrance name.

My vintage mini, since jettisoned due to chronic black gunge issues

Neon - KAVOS

"Fluorescent and alive. This fragrance bursts with fun and style. For the things that make us smile..."

Notes: nutmeg, cinnamon, heliotrope, wild iris, vanilla, and a reassuring woody base

Trust me, there is nothing about this perfume that is 'reassuring'. The clue lies in the name and the description(!), hence my choice of Kavos. For Neon is a brash, vibrant, bubblegum kind of scent, that smacks you over the head with a double whammy of heliotrope and vanilla, not unlike the sort of sickly cocktails being downed by the pitcherful in the pulsating nightspots of this Greek party resort, leading to a general divesting of inhibitions and clothes, and a hangover the size of Colossus (sorry, that's Rhodes, not Corfu) in the morning.

Kavos ~ Source: Wikimedia Commons (they must have been up early!)

White Noise - KRAKOW

"The static calm of white noise inspires a sense of stillness and reflection..."

Notes: green apple, lemon balm, mandarin, grapefruit, iris, violet leaf, heliotrope, tuberose, jasmine blossom, old rose, cedarwood, sandalwood, leather, amber and vanilla

My first thought about White Noise is that it might be the very thing you need a CD of in order to sleep in Kavos, assuming you are not one of the revellers. My second thought was that the perfumer must have a jolly big tub of heliotrope on the go, as this is the third perfume to feature it in a row. But I am going to go with Krakow, which I visited in January 1996, when it was buried under drifts upon drifts of pillowy snow. Sleep does come into this recollection, for I was training a young colleague on that trip, and shortly after setting off for Kielce, some 75 miles away, to conduct her first solo interview, she fainted on the train, kiboshing my lie in and day off in one fell, hypoglycaemic swoop. As with actual white noise, I couldn't pick out any individual notes in this perfume - or even have a stab at describing it - but it is similar in style to Olfactive Studio's Lumière Blanche - a creamy, woody, numinous mantra-type fragrance, and one of my favourites of the bunch.

Krakow ~ Source: Wikimedia Commons

Bitter End - KNOCK

Bitter End is 'inspired by the west of Ireland, a beautiful barren place of isolation...'

Notes: wild grasses, cooling mints and wet bracken, fig leaf, olive, wild thyme, oakmoss, violet leaf, vetiver

Well, though I grew up in the North, I have holidayed extensively in the West of Ireland, and have vivid memories of its wild grasses and wet bracken, not to mention soggy socks, permeable kagoules, and the sharp tingle of relentless drizzle on your cheeks. I picture craggy landscapes shrouded in low cloud, sheep hunkered down by dry stone walls bordering fields of peat, and endless vistas of sludgy grey and brown. The sort of area that is so remote that it pays to trail bread vans so you get a loaf that has a best before date later than yesterday.

Bitter End (is the name some kind of veiled political comment, hehe?) I wouldn't class as bitter. To my nose it smells more of damp violets and some vaguely muddy greenery, shot through with the faintest hint of mint, though your air miles may vary and I don't wish to 'Knock' it.

Connemara ~ courtesy of Clare Chick

Which brings me neatly to the last scent in my virtual olfactory recce of Ryanair routes, namely Cloud 9, which needs no destination...

Cloud 9 - UP IN THE AIR

"A clean, calm scent. A feeling of floating happiness. Clean air, hot milk, comfort and lightness..."

Notes: chamomile, geranium, jasmine, vanilla, amber, musk and sandalwood

I have nothing much to say about Cloud 9, except that it is very pleasant rather than transcendental, though none the worse for that. I am not sure you would find hot milk on a Ryanair flight come to think of it, and the floating happiness only kicks in once they have got that scratch card routine out of the way - not to mention the push on duty free deals. Which do of course include perfume. ;) Hmm, somehow I doubt that the ROADS range - imaginative and amusingly quirky though it is - will displace the designer bellwethers in Ryanair's in-flight magazine any time soon...