Abusive caramel: Musings on Thierry Mugler Angel, and Angel Muse

It's taken me a while to psych myself up to writing this review, to whose imminence I alluded a few posts ago. This is because I was putting off the day when I would try Angel Muse again on skin, a preliminary step to even my own meandering and tenuously on-topic style of fragrance writing. I felt I needed to feel fairly robust before exposing myself to what I can best describe as 'abusive caramel'. This notion of 'toffee as terrorist', 'fudge as felon' etc is not as fanciful as you might imagine, for one of the only two occasions on which I remember my mother crying was when she was making caramel tarts. A tin of boiling condensed milk exploded on opening, splattering the entire kitchen with scalding streaks of toffee, and resulting in her being carted off to hospital with second degree burns to her face, neck and arms. I am a reluctant cook at the best of times, and have studiously avoided trying to replicate that particularly perilous recipe.

Fast forward to 1992, the year the original Angel came out. In a post from 2011 about my pre-perfumista perfume-wearing past, I included my purchase of Angel in the 'SA-driven impulse buys at airports' category, in this case Berlin Tegel in December of that year. I can remember the main thrust of the assistant's sales spiel, in which she set about reeling me in with talk of a novel chocolate note. Team that with a curious blue juice and sparkly festive star-shaped bottle, and in the homeward bound pre-Christmas hustle I must have been an easy sale.

Would you look at that list of notes? There is pretty much every flower, fruit and confectionery ingredient known to man in there, with the possible exception of Rice Crispies and nuts.

Top notes: melon, coconut, mandarin orange, cassia, jasmine, bergamot and cotton candy

Middle notes: honey, apricot, blackberry, plum, orchid, peach, jasmine, lily-of-the-valley, red berries and rose

Base notes: tonka bean, amber, patchouli, musk, vanilla, dark chocolate and caramel.

Now I don't intend to link every review I write of a perfume to memories of a past boyfriend(!), as I recently did in my account of Ruth Mastenbroek's Oxford and the medieval lutinist who forgot he actually was my boyfriend.  But I feel moved to mention that Angel is inextricably bound up in my mind with a tempestuous rollercoaster of a relationship in the early 90s. (Please excuse the 'r' word, but it really is most apt.) I felt intensely alive the entire time, but not always in a good way, and when a potted spider plant went flying across the room one morning, narrowly missing my head, I finally upped sticks and left. At one point I even developed an eating disorder, and recall episodes of binging on Thornton's toffees...and well, you can imagine the rest. But how odd that toffee should yet again show up in the context of 'abuse', however administered.

And years later, here I am trying the latest Angel flanker, and trying very hard to keep an open mind. I am grateful to Liz Moores of Papillon for the sample, which I was most eager to try, having heard that several of my fellow bloggers took an instant liking to it.

These are the notes I could find, which are decidedly sparse compared to original Angel!:

Grapefruit, pink peppercorn, hazelnut cream, vetiver, patchouli

Well, well, I wrote that comment about Angel only missing nuts before I found this list!

And despite having the most sensitive grapefruit radar of anyone I know, the opening salvo of Angel Muse is promptly drenched in a sickly nap of candy floss-cum-gooey Ferrero Rocher innards. It is syrupy, but in a hard, cruel way, like the confectionery equivalent of the lava tide that engulfed Pompeii. The vetiver, such as it is, is keeping its head down, but is horribly aware of its impending fate. There is no overtly chocolate note this time, though the patchouli vaguely hints at it. In this case, its purpose is to ground the goo and give it its malevolent heft.

As Angel Muse wears on, the brooding, discordant hostility lifts, and I am left with a wispy gourmand trail not unlike Dries Van Noten, but less nutty. It manages to be distinctive yet inoffensive, but I cannot bond with Angel Muse in its more benign phase, for the damage is done. So yes, Angel Muse 'speaks' to me, and it has indeed inspired this post, but the 'Angel' bit is if anything even more of a misnomer than it was in the case of the original.

Now with wings!

As a lover of most gourmand scents, I was frankly surprised at the capacity of Angel Muse to serve up such painful memories in this punch-packing poisoned patisserie of a perfume. As I was mulling over how much of these bad vibes to share with readers, I decided to take a quick scan of other reviews to see whether I was out on a limb with my more downbeat take on Angel Muse, and was heartened to read this assessment by Jtd of Scenthurdle, who also detected a jarring quality:

"Muse streamlines the flavors but not the dissonance. Forget Innocent, Angel EDT and the extrait. Muse is the true successor to Angel."

"Muse is different, creepier. It gives me the shapeless fear of sitting through a dogmatic, atonal modernist piano piece."

Yes to 'dogmatic'! The opening of Muse is arresting, in your face, provocative and intentionally annoying. I don't want to be badgered and bothered by my perfume, thank you very much, even if it does settle down later to something the right side of captivating.

Angel or Angel Muse? Better the devil you know? I think so, for the Angel I just met may be wanner than its gutsy gourmand antecedent, but is on balance worse.

And don't even get me started on that horrid shade of blue, an ill-assorted affront to the copper trim. So here instead is the Blue Copper butterfly, a much lovelier creation in the kingdom of winged things.

Source: bentler.us

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!