Fountains and firemen's hoses: En Voyage Perfumes Rainmaker review

Source: wweek.com

The other day I entrusted a king size mattress protector to the genial proprietor of my local launderette, which offers service washes for bulky items. He quoted me £15 before adding gnomically: "We pray for rain." "Well, you can stop now", I thought to myself, for it had absolutely chucked it down not twenty minutes previously.

How odd that a man in Posh Wash in Stafford should try to conjure up rain, just like those Native Americans whose shower-charming ritual is referenced by the name of the perfume I was about to review - Rainmaker, the upcoming release from En Voyage Perfumes. Then in modern parlance, a rainmaker is also someone who drums up business with rabbit out of a hat aplomb, or who is the 'creator of something valued'. As Shelley Waddington, En Voyage's founder, elaborates:

"In expanding my creative work, I wanted to provide a fragrance of beauty and attraction that would in turn become a 'Rainmaker' for the wearer."

And then Rainmaker the perfume also gives a humorous nod to the clouds hanging over Shelley's adopted home town of Portland, which she wryly describes as "some of the best rainmakers in the world".  ;)

Ha! I can relate to that here all right. For when I sat down later in the week to gather my thoughts about Rainmaker, in a fine show of pathetic fallacy the weather promptly obliged with another downpour. Which, like the Portland clouds, it often does with or without the supplications of the faithful.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

On to the perfume itself, a "woody-amber chypre for men and women".

Top notes: Rose leaf, Silver Pine Tips, Wild Citrus
Heart notes: Incense, Patchouli, Iris, Rhododendron
Base notes: Mossy Rain Forest Notes of Cedar, Fir, Redwood Needles, Petrichor, Oak Moss and Amber

As regular readers know, I am the world's worst deconstructor of perfumes, able only to articulate the vaguest of impressions - which reminds me, I still have to do that set of "tiny 'unreviews' of unprecedented vacuousness" that I promised Portia in my review of Papillon's Salome.

But eyeballing those notes, it is not hard to imagine that Rainmaker was inspired by the "forested terroir" of the Pacific Northwest, as well as its "Bohemian lifestyle". 'Imagine' is the operative word, mind you, for despite having spent a week in the state (on a mission to do with a fairly niche kind of plastic), I didn't encounter any Bohemians, and the terroir I stayed in - a suburb of Portland called Beaverton - was forested largely by the signs of nail bars, used car lots, and branches of Taco Bell. That was where I first came across the fast food chain's  masterly slogan  of "Think outside the bun", a mantra I have been trying to live up to ever since.

Source: yelp.com

So what do I make of Rainmaker? Well, I was drawn to it right off the bat: it felt obviously 'niche' in quality terms, and seamlessly blended. I note that Rainmaker has a "high percentage of pure extraits, natural materials, and proprietary blends", which are perfectly well behaved here, the epitome of suave urbanity indeed. In truth, the scent doesn't feel particularly Bohemian or 'indie' in the sense of quirky to me. I could picture the wearer as a go-getting professional, who likes to kick back at the weekends, don some high end walking gear by The North Face or its Pacific Northwest equivalent (Trew?, Poler?, Holden?), and get amongst nature.

Which is not to say that I don't feel I could wear Rainmaker too, even though I don't exactly fit that profile(!) - I like the scent for its own sake and because of my own memories of that region - and further down the Pacific coast (of which more anon). The dominant aspect is fairly full-on woodiness,  as you would expect from that quintet of tree species, but as its creator intended, to my nose Rainmaker stays bang on the gender divide, This is no Marc Jacobs Bang or whichever Comme des Garcons scents are particularly woody - you know the ones I mean(!). Its glowing amber core and rich earthy/patchouli base lend a warmth and softness to Rainmaker that tone down the woodiness, and also ensure that the delicate inflection of damp forest foliage never tips into anything remotely resembling strident janitorial pine.

Mount Hood ~ Source: pinterest

Also, foresty scents can sometimes skew plangent and austere - arguably Ormonde Jayne Man and Woman lean that way, ditto FM Angeliques sous la Pluie. Of the latter I once wrote that it reminded me of "rolling fog in Northern California on a November morning". But I'd say Rainmaker captures the spirit of this general neck of the woods more comprehensively - and without being at all bleak!

And Shelley Waddington has also pulled off quite a coup in making Rainmaker authentically foresty, whilst incorporating more feminine facets, thanks to the iris and rose leaf. Carner Barcelona's D600 walks a similar line with its inclusion of jasmine and iris in an otherwise resolutely woody composition, so if you like that scent, I'm willing to bet you will like Rainmaker too. They are very much in the same vein / 'register', albeit D600 is possibly a little sweeter.

So would I wear Rainmaker? Sure! Would I like to smell it on a man? Oh, yes.... Has it displaced my current top three from the En Voyage Perfumes stable - Zelda (review here), Captured in Amber and Fiore di Bellagio? Well, noooo, but that is because genre-wise I happen to be more drawn to florals and orientals - I do think Rainmaker is very well done. It is polished, smooth and naturalistic, and thanks to the addition of incense, verging on meditative and cosy too. Not so much your well worn 'cashmere wrap' kind of cosy, as that afforded by donning a bolero of sphagnum moss maybe - a short garment which obviously I can't resist shortening further to 'sphag bol'.

Ron and Nina's house! Source ~ zillow.com

So yes, back to memories of the region... First off, when I see redwood trees mentioned anywhere I am immediately transported back to my childhood, to afternoons spent reading Look & Learn magazine and gawping at images of (what would now be vintage!) cars driving through the lofty pines' humongously thick trunks. I also remember more recent visits to my Swiss cabinet maker friend Ron and his wife Nina, who lived in the middle of a redwood forest in a Hansel & Gretel-style house they built themselves(!) out of local timber (see above). Strictly speaking, this was NorCal rather than the Pacific Northwest, but I imagine that the general ambience - and scent - of the forest might have been similar to the more northerly 'terroir' Shelley had in mind.

California again, but it's down the road (and through the tree!) ~ Source: Pinterest

Going back to my trip to Oregon, I based myself in Beaverton as it was closest to the headquarters of a well known sports brand, which incorporated the plastic in question in some of its running shoes. I stayed at the Shilo Inn and Suites, noted for its gardens - and fountains. I would lie in my room at night listening to the soothing plishing sound - not of rain, admittedly, but falling water for sure. And of course some other people who are in the business of 'falling water' would be the fire service. Thus it was that I also drove south to Medford to interview a group of fire fighters about the performance of this plastic in their hoses. (No, really!)

Shilo Inn and Suites ~ Source: booking.com

Then on my way to the airport, I chatted with the shuttle bus driver who took me from the rental car lot to the terminal. He asked how long I had been in the area. "A week!" I answered brightly. 'So did you go to the Crater Lake National Park? The Columbia River Gorge? You must have seen Mount Hood?' Dismayed to learn I had missed all these 'must see' sights in the state, he tentatively inquired where I had been. "Um...mainly Beaverton?" He shook his head in disbelief, at what clearly struck him as an epic tourist fail.

But though I didn't manage to breathe in the scent of the forest floor in the actual Pacific Northwest, or hang out in the boho cafes of downtown Portland - famous for their coffee I believe, if that is your thing - and though I don't remember it raining the whole time I was in Oregon, or even being noticeably overcast, I did at least have a brush with the wet stuff in my own bonkers way....plus the road that Ron's house was on is called Bohemian Highway...

Hoses stowed ~ Source: Wikimedia Commons

PS It is a further testament to this perfume's instant appeal that I felt moved to write about it so promptly after receiving the sample from En Voyage. As anyone who follows the blog will have noticed, I might take weeks or months to review a new release - if I ever do at all, even if I like it - but once in a while the muse is pretty much perched on the postman's shoulder.

PPS My elderly friend's verdict in a blind testing of Rainmaker: "It's a strange smell. It's quite strong to start with, though it's softer after a while. And it's not as...as scented as Fleur de Shanghai."

PPPS I did also buy this woody pen out there...

En Voyage Perfumes Zelda: a Southern belle does (the) Charleston

My old colour print snaps, re-photographed on my iPhone!

I've said it many times, but it bears repeating - I love America.  I have visited over 30 states, and one of my favourite spots in the whole country - nay, world! - is Charleston.  Who could not love a chain of fried chicken restaurants with the slogan: 'Born and breaded in South Carolina'. Well, actually, that wasn't in Charleston itself, for the town is more genteel than that - it has graceful Georgian terraces and palatial ante-bellum houses, and its broad avenues are lined by old oak trees swathed in Spanish moss. The soundtrack to any stroll in Charleston is the intermittent clipclop of hooves, as horse-drawn carriages make their sedate way through the main arteries of the town.  There are piles of cannon balls, saw palmetto trees and pineapple motifs at every turn.  Secret gardens with plishing fountains beckon behind wrought iron gates. The air is fresh with a salty tang, as the town is on an isthmus shaped like a fat thumb of ginger, and the sea is never far away. And most of all Charleston is hot, hot hot - and humid, humid, humid.

I came to the area about ten years ago for a meeting at a chemical plant located in a swamp a little way out of town.  It was so very hot and sticky that week that the man I was meeting urged me to ditch my customary business attire and come along in something 'loose fitting and cool'.  Which was the first time in my professional life that I have been asked to 'slip into something more comfortable'.  So I wore a summer dress with a little cardigan - or rather without a little cardigan, most of the time.

Two odd things happened during my time in Charleston: firstly I met a man in a fish restaurant who was a peripatetic trainer of staff at Michelin tyre plants.  As someone who has carried out studies into rubber chemicals, I instantly bonded with this chap during an animated chat about rolling resistance, drag coefficients and tackifiers. The other odd thing that happened is that the landlady of my B & B snuck into my bedroom in the dead of night, which in hindsight I found distinctly creepy.  I know for a fact that she came right up to my bed, because there was a plate of fresh-baked cookies on the nightstand in the morning...

My historic B & B, with unsolicited nocturnal room service - and a curious list!

So Charleston - and some other southern towns and cities like Savannah, Georgia (home of the incomparable El Cheapo gas station chain!) and New Orleans - made a deep and lasting impression on me, and I dream of the chance to go back and spend longer than a weekend.  But what has that got to do with Zelda the perfume, other than the fact that Zelda Fitzgerald, the inspiration for the scent, was born in Alabama, also in the Deep South?  And who was the poster girl for the Jazz Age - the era of flapper girls and the Charleston, of course?  Is this post just a gratuitous vehicle for my travel memoirs, you might well ask?

The white blob is not one of those ghostly orbs, just a flash malfunction!

Well, not quite...Zelda the perfume also contains a prominent magnolia note, which is strongly evocative of this part of America.  The sensual, lemony, almost fleshy quality of the petals is synonymous with southern states for me. Then there's the film 'Steel Magnolias' set in Louisiana, and Magazine Street, Strange Invisible Perfumes' magnolia-forward scent inspired by New Orleans.   'Gone with the Wind' was filmed at the Magnolia Plantation, while 'Moonlight and Magnolias' is a stage play about the making of the film.  So, not just pineapples and cannonballs and saw palmetto trees - magnolias also abound in this particular part of the union...

I have described Zelda the perfume in my 2013 Top Sniffs post (where it won one of my top three spots for best releases of the year!) as "a sumptuous floral oriental with a sultry magnolia heart in a crisp galbanum shell.  Zelda is a Southern belle in a pencil skirt, Vivien Leigh in geek glasses, and other images of optimally constrained flounce and sensuality."

I have been doing some digging about the life of Zelda Fitzgerald, which seems to have begun to unravel once she turned 30 and suffered some kind of nervous breakdown.  From then on she spent years in a succcession of mental institutions in Europe and America, before meeting an untimely end in a fire at a hospital facility in Asheville, NC.  By a spooky coincidence, I happened to be in Asheville on the day my father died, and spent a strange evening in a restaurant being urged by a series of wait staff to 'have a great night'.

Zelda Fitzgerald's biographer summed up her troubled persona rather well:

"Recently myth has likened Zelda to those other twentieth-century icons, Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana. With each she shares a defiance of convention, intense vulnerability, doomed beauty, unceasing struggle for a serious identity, a short tragic life and quite impossible nature."

Source: chicvintagebrides.com

And Zelda the perfume exerts a haunting appeal precisely because - as perfume Shelley Waddington set out to do - it captures in scent these different facets of sense and sensuality, intellectual rigour and carefree kicking back, light and dark, and happiness and heartbreak.  On the En Voyage Perfumes website we read:

"Inspired by Zelda Fitzgerald, America's first flapper and the wife of F Scott Fitzgeral, ZELDA's bright beginning, full heart, and dark base evoke the story of Zelda's bright life and tragic descent into a final heart of darkness.  Jazzy and contemporary, ZELDA's Art Deco signature exalts the precious naturals, resins and tinctures found in famous vintage perfumes of the '20's."

The Fitzgerald family practising their flapper footwork - Source: npr.org

(NB The capitalisation of the perfume name in this description is not replicated elsewhere on the En Voyage website, so I have not reproduced it generally!)

Described as a 'neo-Oriental perfume' for women, the notes of Zelda are:

Top notes: Spiced Italian Bergamot, Spices, and Iranian Galbanum

Heart notes: Creamy Magnolia Blossom and Garden Florals

Base notes: Smoky Amber, Vintage Musks, Vanilla, Balsams, Sandalwood and Vetiver, Cedarwood,and Mousse de Chene.

Now, much is talked about perfumes with a sense of place - or 'scents of place', if you will.  There are some with a clue in the name: Jardin sur le Nil, Bombay Bling, SE1, Traversée du Bosphore.  Others you personally associate with a specific place because you happened to be wearing them at the time, and that location and your scent memories are irrevocably intertwined - so-called 'grandmother's rose garden syndrome' (okay, I did just make that up!).  

But I was in Charleston many years before I cared a monkey's fig about perfume, so for me this is a retrospective - and asynchronous - association, a fabricated scent memory in a sense, yet it gives me pleasure nonetheless to wear Zelda now and imagine myself back in Charleston in 2003.  So, given that I also pick perfumes out carefully with a view to imprinting them with happy memories to come, it seems I am game to indulge in a spot of future AND past time-travelling where forging scent memories is concerned. But as I was only struck by sudden onset perfume mania in 2008, I have a lot of time to make up for, you see...;)

Then I have two other things to say about Charleston and Zelda.  The first is the fact that I once created my own perfume as part of a The Perfume Studio 'experience', and I named it Charleston.  It was a green floral, meant to conjure up the scent of those walled gardens mentioned - and pictured - earlier.  It had notes of sweet pea and freesia, green tea and lemon, sandalwood and vanilla.  Oh, and a ton of other stuff - but trust me, it was nothing like Zelda.  The blends I had at my disposal didn't run to magnolia, though there was a bit of gardenia in there, so a nod in the direction of sultry big white florals at least.  However, it wasn't very good, I don't think now - the green accord rather overwhelmed it, and I - rather cynically - suspect that the hostess who steered me towards using it in my final 'mod' may have had rather a lot of it left over.  The aldehydic accord, which I so nearly sprung for, would have been a safer bet.

The other thing to say about Zelda is that it started life in Carmel, California, scene of my doomed attempt to visit the store and HO of Ajne Perfumes.  That was in 2010, and I hadn't heard of the En Voyage brand back then. When I had drained the sample that Natalie of Another Perfume Blog had kindly given me, I decided I had to own a full bottle, and called upon the courier services of the very obliging Undina of Undina's Looking Glass.  I paid online but had the bottle shipped to Undina's house, where it lived for a while until a business associate of hers was ready to make another trip to England.  So he popped it into his suitcase and posted it from Sussex shortly after his arrival.  It pleases me to think that this very bottle has spent some time in Undina's possession, so this is another scent association I have - of Zelda the perfume in Northern California, being carefully looked after by Undina, and occasionally toyed with by Rusty...

So many reasons to love this perfume, as well as its glorious scent.

Photo courtesy of Undina, and the unbeatably biddable Rusty!

Manufacturers' samples - the long and the short(age) of it

Over the five years of my interest in perfume, I have noticed a gradual decline in the availability of manufacturers' perfume samples - more so in the mainstream segment of the market, but to a degree also in niche.  It used to be the case that you would ask a sales assistant in a department store or the duty free section of an airport if she had a sample of the latest release, and she would open the bottom drawer of the fixture to reveal serried ranks of little carded samples of the scent in question - and of many other, older scents displayed.

These days I am more likely to be greeted with a blank look when I inquire about the availability of a sample, or the news that: 'We had some right after (insert name of perfume) came out, but they are all gone now'.  Boots - that stalwart of the designer perfume retailing scene - stopped stocking samples some time ago.  Whether this can be correlated with Nick Gilbert's departure to pastures new and more deserving I cannot say... ;-)  And when I popped into a large M & S in Preston last March, keen to try the new line created for the store chain by Lyn Harris, they only had a 'scratch and sniff' card for one of the three female scents, and none for the men's range.  The staff there couldn't have been more helpful, however, hastily fashioning decanting receptacles for me out of tester pots for face cream which they sealed with sticky tape.

Then in Paris in June, the Frédéric Malle stand in Printemps had no samples of Denise Van Outen (sorry - Dries Van Noten) - had never had them I think - but didn't bat an eyelid when I asked to make my own using one of my snap-on ink pots Freddie of Smellythoughts got me into.  Ormonde Jayne once made me up a sample of Tiare after I sent them my own vial in an SAE, ditto Fortnum & Mason's when I was after ones of the Comtessa di Castiglione scent I spied in Sidmouth this summer. Actually that isn't strictly true - they mislaid my envelope with the empty vials in it and decanted a bit into two screw top Dior pots that may also have been destined for make up samples by the looks of them.

Manufacturers' carded samples - an endangered species?

Which reminds me that Dior - in Selfridges, and possibly generally - have now stopped giving out those generous 4ml pots of their Privée range that a certain perfumista friend of mine used to routinely snaffle for me every time she was passing... ;-)  And the Chanel Exclusifs 5ml ones are of course as rare as hens' teeth. You would probably have to queue up the night before the launch with a sleeping bag to score one of those coveted 5ml bottles now.  I missed the 1932 mini in Glasgow, for example, which was gone in a blink of an eye apparently.  And don't get me started on Le Labo - let's just say that when I think of them in this particular connection, the words 'blood' and 'stone' spring to mind...;-)

So you get the picture...a general backing off from the provision of samples for in-home trial, a general fobbing off with bits of card - sometimes enormous oversized square bits of card!  Or ribbon, or some other scrap of silky cloth if you are lucky, which in fairness do retain the scent quite well, though it is not the same thing at all as being able to apply it on skin.  Or we are invited to sniff scrumpled bits of tissue squashed into votive glasses, or stick our noses down metal trumpets, or inside perspex tuboid things - it's all rather strange...And on the basis of this we are meant to know if we wish to spring for a full bottle or not.

But....at the other end of the scale there are still some houses which are generous - perhaps too generous - with their samples.  Take Hermès, for example, who give out 4ml samples in long glass-stoppered vials slipped into those distinctive orange card cases.  Hermès has to be the most forthcoming with samples of all the luxury brands I know, and I am borderline ashamed of the times I have sauntered in (invariably wearing my good, sample scoring coat or its summer frock equivalent, depending on the season), spun some line about a friend / husband / relative with an upcoming birthday / wedding / anniversary, and walked out with not one but two of the 4ml vials.  For two fit better into the card case than one - one just rattles around, quite frankly - so the SA usually cracks and sticks two in there, one for me and one for my imaginary friend.  In my defence, I have genuinely given away a number of the Hermès samples I have procured using various ruses - my old English teacher did wear Vetiver Tonka at her wedding (er...the sample, not a full bottle) - but I cannot pretend not to have squirrelled away a few vials for my own nefarious use.  Though some of the ones pictured above were gifts to me by friends and relations on similar morally questionable foraging missions.

How 'grand' is my Grand Bal sample?!

Then there was my super tall grande(!) Dior sample of Grand Bal, which should have been a gift with purchase, but which the SA in a branch of Dior in Paris gave me for no good reason at all, other than that I complimented her on her Swarovski crystal-encrusted lips.  And this despite the apparent clamp down on even the 4ml Dior pots.  Then in Germany once, in a small niche perfumery in Wasserburg, the assistant showered me with a fistful of carded samples, plus a large mini of Micallef Hiver, and that was just for shooting the breeze with her.  So there are still some great instances of unprovoked generosity, which as I say remains positively systemic within Hermès. ;-)

Micallef mini bag - you'll have to imagine the bottle!

But the problem with large samples is that you may never need to buy a bottle, for if you have a few of those 4ml-ers away they will quickly accumulate to nearly 15ml, the size many perfumistas agree is the ideal for a 'full bottle'.  I have just bought a bottle of En Voyage Perfumes' Zelda, for example, which is of that order I think.  So Hermès may be shooting themselves in the foot there, and Dior too, though they seem to have caught themselves on now pretty much.

So I would be interested to hear about your experiences in terms of sample scoring...specifically:

Are manufacturers' samples becoming more scarce generally?

Is a 4ml sample too generous for the brand's own good?

Are you also a wee bit sheepish about your own sample scoring forays?