Stepping into niche scent Narnia: a tale of two friends and a beauteous be-tassled bottle of By Kilian Beyond Love

Source: Best Wallpapers

When I have been at a loose end lately due to the general lack of work, I have taken the opportunity to do a bit of 'enabling', as we perfumistas call the process of helping friends to discover new scents. In my case, I have specifically been helping local friends who are 'regular' perfume wearers but who were curious to widen their repertoire by exploring some of the niche brands they knew I had in my collection. I wouldn't call it perfume consultancy exactly, as that sounds rather too grand / pompous, but in each case it was certainly a guided sampling session, whereby the friend would say what style of fragrance or individual perfumes they were drawn to, and I would fetch out things that were in that vein or something related. We didn't always end up in the place we expected, mind: for example, one friend requested 'rose perfumes with amber', and her favourites turned out to be a mixture of 'markedly spicy rose with amber', 'rose, vanilla and patchouli', and one featuring dominant notes of iris and tobacco and no rose or amber whatsoever.

But it is the upshot of the latest sampling session that is the subject of this post - with two friends at once! That took some fancy toggling footwork, to ensure that they each had a constant pipeline of things to try. Also, I had a much clearer idea of the taste of one friend (whom I shall call 'B') than the other, 'J'. B is a lifelong perfume wearer, whose earliest - and rather atypical - fragrance purchase was of Arpege by Lanvin, and who later gravitated towards floral / floriental scents such as Dior J'Adore and D & G The One. In recent years B has been troubled by the fact that The One in particular seemed a pale shadow of its former self due to (presumed) covert reformulation, and she was keen to see what else was out there. J, meanwhile, was a diehard Mitsouko wearer, who had recently smelt and liked Byredo Gypsy Water on her son's girlfriend, and decided to track down a sample for herself, as well as hunting further afield for a new scent she could call her own. J had also recently come across Cartier Le Baiser du Dragon, with which she was also very taken. I couldn't really detect much of a pattern emerging here!

So one evening in January, B and J came over to my house - they also know each other, as luck would have it - and over a few glasses of Chardonnay we explored 'sultry white/tropical florals' for B, and 'orientals and chypres of every stripe, plus a few leather perfumes for good measure' for J. I told you J's taste was more diffuse and hard to pin down...;)

After a couple of hours the dining room looked like a bomb site, and we had emptied several bowls of rather eclectic nibbles (beetroot and goat's cheese crisps and strange extruded, 'penne'-shaped pea snacks in a Thai curry flavour). And done the bottle of Chardonnay, obviously.

Both B and J put a cluster of bottles / decants in the middle of the carpet, representing their top picks from the night's testing. It took me a few days to make up samples for them - partly for them to keep, partly to return afterwards where I either had very little left of the scent in question or where there were practical issues making decanting tricky (eg rollerballs). Finally I duly presented them both with little organza bags containing the following:

B's selection

Tom Ford Black Orchid Voile de Fleur
Van Cleef & Arpels Gardenia Petale
Van Cleef & Arpels Lys Carmin
En Voyages Perfumes Zelda
By Kilian Beyond Love
By Kilian Love and Tears
Belinda Brown Blessings
Dior Grand Bal
Byredo Flowerhead
Hiram Green Moonbloom
Illuminum White Gardenia Petals
The Party in Manhattan (surprise hit wild card)

J's selection

Ormonde Jayne Ta'if
Chanel Cuir de Russie
Dior Ambre Nuit
L'Artisan Parfumeur Safran Troublant
Serge Lutens Boxeuses
Sarah Jessica Parker Stash
Guerlain Apres L'Ondee
Biehl Parfumkunstwerke Mb 03
Bright Earth Parfums Eau de Earth

J's favourite on the night was Ta'if, a big love of mine, and I have yet to hear how the others went down after her systematic testing. For her part, B was extremely quick off the mark, having instantly and heavily fallen for Beyond Love, which Luca Turin famously called 'the greatest tuberose soliflore on earth'. Link to my own review of it here. B is working abroad at the moment and has already had compliments from colleagues about it (of either gender!). So smitten is B with her new fragrant squeeze that she wanted to move quickly on a full bottle purchase, so I said I would check out relative prices on the Net and suggest the best stockist.

Now I have never bought a By Kilian myself, though I was aware that the perfumes come in a very luxurious presentation bottle with the option of a plain refill at half the price for future topping up. B really liked the look of the presentation bottle @ £205, and I was able to reassure her that future purchases would be a fraction of her initial investment.

Source: Olfactoria's Travels ;)

Harvey Nichols and Les Senteurs had Beyond Love at similar prices once you factored in the shipping costs, but I figured Les Senteurs would include a couple of samples with that. And I do feel more drawn to Les Senteurs, because of Nick Gilbert having worked there, plus I know Claire the owner slightly, and their Seymour Place store (which sadly closed in December!) has been the setting for many a happy meet up of perfumistas - and its baroque sofa the backdrop for my avatar. ;) So I rang the Belgravia branch and the chap there confirmed that they do indeed offer samples. He organised for B to receive one of Carnal Flower (which she also wanted to test, but of which I had too little left to be able to share with her), together with a couple of others I steered B towards from the Parfum d'Empire line. So far, so satisfactory.

Not long afterwards, B texted me from Belgium to inquire whether the bottle she had bought was dab/splash only, which floored me rather. I knew it had to act like that in order to be refillable, but had assumed that there would be the option of a spray mechanism as well, especially at that price. My bottle of Un Lys from Serge Lutens came with a detachable spray mechanism, so I knew of at least one precedent for that type of dual system.

By Kilian tassles in the Naegele store, Augsburg!

To make sure, I rang one of the By Kilian boutiques in London, and spent the next ten minutes at complete cross purposes with the foreign lady in the store, possibly because I fatally used the word 'atomiser' to describe the nozzle-y bit at the top that does the actual spraying. So when I inquired: 'Does the bottle come with an atomiser?' I was told it didn't, and that the only way to get one was with the travel set, the cheapest version of which came in at £55. Which all seemed a bit steep and a bit mysterious. You spend £205, then you have to spend another £55 minimum to be able to squirt your new perfume directly on skin in the conventional way?? I kept reframing my question, but to no avail, so I rang Les Senteurs again and the lady I spoke to there - who was also foreign, but got what I meant immediately - assured me that there is a spray mechanism in the bottle already, but that it is unscrewable to permit refilling.

Phew! I was worried there for a moment...


Have you ever owned a By Kilian bottle - the full monty one, with tassle? (Undina...?)

If so, can you also confirm the presence of an integral spray mechanism? Just in case I misunderstood the lady in Les Senteurs...!


Editor's note: Not knowing at the time where it was all going to lead, namely to a significant purchase!, I completely failed to photograph any of our in-home sampling session, so am mostly improvising with a selection of photos from 'stock' of By Kilian and the esoteric pea snacks.

A paler shade of black: vintage Lancôme Magie Noire - my '80s cat's pyjamas scent, and other cat/perfume crossovers

My eBay purchase

It's over four years since I wrote a post about my lack of 'long term perfume loves', or what might perhaps better be called my decidedly chequered perfume wearing cv / career, before I was struck down by sudden onset perfume mania on 28th January, 2008 - ooh, it's my anniversary tomorrow!

I do commend that post to you if you weren't reading Bonkers back then, not least for the gallery of photos of a Greek national flag-themed T-shirt dress which becomes progressively more holey over time...Much like Greece's finances, for that matter.

In that piece I wrote about my 'fairly indifferent, casually monogamous relationship' with fragrance, and also drew up an inventory of the perfumes I had owned from my youth up until the date of my epiphany, grouping them by category - it really didn't take long as there were so few overall!:

- Unsolicited presents from boyfriends
- SA-driven impulse buys at airports
- Purchases prompted by a wish to be vaguely in tune with the Zeitgeist
- Purchase prompted by a wish to emulate my very cool lodger, Caroline

And finally, and most significantly...

- Purchase prompted by a wish to enhance my pulling powers during a decade of peak opportunity

Lancôme Magie Noire

As I mention in the post, the reason this is significant is because I somehow managed to light upon Magie Noire with no reference to outside influences as far as I can recall. And because I really thought I was the cat's pyjamas in this witchy oriental chypre. Given my aversion to civet, which was pretty entrenched until relatively recently, it is quite remarkable that I should have found such a forbidding animalic scent so bewitching.

But bewitching I found it, and to this day Magie Noire has haunted me - like one or two men from my past indeed! - as 'the one that got away'. I say 'got away' because the fragrance has predictably been reformulated on two occasions: 1986 and 2005. I think - though my memory is fuzzy - that I would have bought the 1986 version in the so-called 'mushroom top' bottle, quite possibly in the very year of its re-release. The fact that the perfume was created (in 1978) by a trio of perfumers (Gerard Goupy, Jean-Charles Niel and Yves Tanguy) and that it has a very long 'kitchen sink' kind of note list, brings to mind the scene in Macbeth with the three witches, lobbing yet another faintly disturbing ingredient into their bubbling cauldron.

'Sabbat' by Tony Grist via Wikimedia Commons

Notes: bergamot, hyacinth, mimosa, galbanum, blackcurrant buds, raspberry, iris, jasmine, lily of the valley, narcissus, rose, tuberose, ylang ylang, honey, patchouli, sandalwood, cedarwood, oakmoss, amber, labdanum, musk

Fast forward to last year, when I was given a cast off (mostly used) bottle of Magie Noire by a friend of my mother's. From the mid-90s, it hadn't aged quite as well as its owner, who is IN her 90s, but it was not off as such, and its rich, pungent, mossy, funky brew was unmistakable. I can't say I have worn it since - or not until the other day. Well, it would be nearer the mark to say it wore me, but I wasn't sure if this was because it had become so 'stewed', as it were. And the wearability of Magie Noire in my mind was almost by the by, for at this point in my perfume 'j***ney' the fragrance had taken on an iconic status in my mind, and was symbolic of my starting out on my own: first job presiding over a multi-million pound empire of coleslaw(!), first house, not first love exactly, but a major one.

The bottle I inherited from my mother's friend

And so it was that on a whim I started googling vintage bottles of Magie Noire on eBay - there were a few, one with a buy it now price of £89.99(!), albeit that was 100ml. However, it looked an even more evil colour than my 'stewed' bottle from the same era. My eye was soon caught by another bottle, the juice in which was the colour of pale straw, like the precise shade of pee we are encouraged to produce as a mark of optimum hydration. Its lack of excessive maceration looked too good to believe, and in a cynical moment I even wondered if the seller might have watered it down or even filled the bottle with 'modern' Magie Noire. Though you would have to be pretty determined to prise those black plastic shoulders off to do the swindling deed.

Source: Pinterest

Also, there was a photo of the label on the base, which matched the one on my mum's friend's bottle, bar the coding. A bit more googling led me to a blog post about carbon dating vintage Lancôme bottles, and I was able to verfiy that the bottle on eBay was from 1991. It had presumably just had a less rickety life than the one I owned, secreted in dark wardrobes and drawers perhaps, rather than living it large on bathroom windowsills or sun-drenched dressing tables. And obviously I made up the 'carbon' bit, but it does carry on our noire theme...;)

I was also amused by the byline in the eBay listing:

'Opened and spayed twice, so completely full'

Which reminded me that I need to book Truffle's op soon - once she has had the procedure, I doubt that she would want to go through it again, mind. And this unexpected cat imagery rather fits in with my cat's pyjamas scent of course. ;) Magie Noire does have the personality of a black cat to my mind - you know, a black, witch's familiar kind. It has that sensual feel of sleek fur, with an animalic underbelly - think muddy paws that have recently scattered cat litter, hehe...Then the green, sharper aspect (which is reportedly more pronounced in the edt that I have), conjures up cat claws nestling in between paw pads - retracted, but ready to be deployed at a moment's notice. The chypre facet also evokes that 'en garde' stance which cats adopt - with an arched back and fur standing on end - which phenomenon I have just learnt is called 'piloerection'.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Really and truly, Magie Noire is so far off anything I should like really - it's in the same vein as Cabochard (though lose the leather) or Ormonde Jayne Woman maybe, if you were to recast that as a vintage scent and added a civet-y base. I am puzzling over why I should have liked Magie Noire when I was so young, but of course our noses were more attuned to diva scents in the 80s - this was before the aquatic tsunami engulfed us and washed all our filth-forward scents clean off the stage. I mean I also wore Ysatis around the same time, which seems overtly animalic to me now. And the tuberose fright wig that is Giorgio Beverley Hills was also riding high, flanked by the fearsome spicy duo of Opium and Coco Chanel. So bombastic 'elevator clearers' were very much the thing in that era, just as we fell prey to a zillion frumpy fashion disasters and pottered round the house weighed down by a head full of Carmen heated rollers.

Anyway, if you are curious to read a real review, Victoria of Boisdejasmin has written a corker on Magie Noire, perfectly capturing its dark, brooding character and chypre-oriental duality.

Pukka pale straw plays (very) golden (shower?)

So I bid on the bottle, and won, and it arrived yesterday. The plastic is 'out of the box' shiny and new, and the juice as pale as advertised. The fill level is a good 25% lower, mind, and I assume the seller did not spot it under the shoulders. I am not going to make a big thing of that, because I have enough for my own needs and feel that it is still a bargain given its mint condition. The scent itself is lighter and fresher than my 'stewed' bottle, but unequivocably genuine. So I wrote to the seller to advise her about the fill level and also to inquire about the bottle's history. She offered me a box of Cerruti Image body lotion to make up for the missing perfume - which is kind of her, but I am as well stocked with body lotion as I am perfume! - and also told me more about how she came by the bottle:

"Yes the perfume is from my grandma's collection - she has over 60 perfumes that she has collected over the decades - really, very nice taste. Unfortunately due to age a lot of them are stale so we're only listing useable ones currently and going though her vast collection. Over 70% were completely unused - she had a habit of collecting and going though phases. She's still with us but we're slowly clearing out her house, as she will be moving into care in the next few months."

It's funny to think that I bought my original bottle of Magie Noire a number of years before this lady, who is someone's granny! I refuse to designate this as an old lady's scent, however, even if I am moving inexorably along that particular travelator, teetering non that delicate cusp between cougar and care home, as I like to think of it.

And finally, I will sign off with these cryptic lines from the Procul Harum classic track, a mangled nod to which features in the title of this post - there is arguably a small oblique commentary here about the acceptability of musks...

"If music be the food of love
Then laughter is its queen
And likewise if behind is in front
Then dirt in truth is clean"

1920s ad for Ipswich Hosiery Stockings Or IPSWITCH, should that be?!

A Tale Of Four Perfumes: The New, The Used!, The Irrevocably Altered, And The Product Of A Fevered Imagination

The New

One of my favourite new releases so far this year is the new Madonna scent, Truth or Dare. I am have written about it recently, and am indebted to Katie Puckrik and The Candy Perfume Boy for keeping me topped up with generous "smadges" of Madge's scent. In that post I expressed reservations about the bottle design, which to my mind comes off as a little plasticky, and reminds me of a white "toy" altar my father bought when I was little - for himself, I should point out. It was a bit like the one in the photo, but on a smaller scale. (The actual item from my childhood proved impossible to find in Google images, which I take to be a sign of the secular times we live in!)

Then, out of nowhere, I was looking at my cheap slip-on iPhone holder and it suddenly reminded me of something...(bell is borrowed from an as yet uneaten Easter bunny).

And here is a photo of the bell donor bunny himself.

The Used!

One of my earliest posts on Bonkers concerns the citrussy chypre that is the sadly discontinued Jasper Conran Woman. I described it as a "Four Star Sleeper", a reference to its rating in Perfumes: The Guide. Then yesterday I posted on Facebook:

"There is no gin, vodka or white wine left in the house, a sorry state of affairs that is completely unprecedented!"

Later that day, through another unprecedented conspiring of events, I finally finished a bottle of perfume for the very first time, and it happened to be Jasper Conran Woman. Given my 70+ strong full bottle collection, I never thought this day would come. Stacking the odds slightly in my favour is the fact that the bottle was only 30ml, plus I have liberally decanted samples from it and sent them off to fumehead friends far and wide. I may in fact only have used up 10 ml myself, if that. But it still feels strange and immensely satisfying to Throw Away An Empty Bottle at last. And if I see this scent in Asda again in a gift set for £9.99, I will of course have to buy it... ; - )

The Irrevocably Altered

When I was in Northern Ireland the other weekend, I spent a very pleasant interlude staying with friends in their cottage by the sea. Only one of them has even a fitful history of perfume wearing, the perfume in question being YSL Rive Gauche. My friend had noticed that the latest bottle she bought smelt nothing like the previous one (some considerable time had elapsed in between, I might add).

As luck would have it, she had carefully preserved the old canister and though it was completely empty, I could still get a slight whiff off the nozzle: the scent was softer, less rosy and somehow more cloudy, soapy? and abstract than the newer version. This could conceivably be the "weird, plasticky off notes" Luca Turin mentions in The Little Book Of Perfumes: The 100 Classics.

The new Rive Gauche is more defined and sharper - juicier somehow. I note that Luca Turin describes it as "lighter, brighter, fruitier" and I would definitely agree, though I couldn't detect the metal note of the original to which he makes reference. For a perfume whose modern incarnation is more defined, ironically, it feels less distinctive!

Below is a shot of Frances, my friends' frog (who is soooo much more than a stuffed toy, if you only knew...) holding both versions.

The Product Of A Fevered Imagination

Another thing that happened while I was in Ireland was that the son of another friend, Ruth, had a dream about his mother and me. Now I was not named or identified - this young man had not met me at that point - but he was aware that his mother had a friend who was seriously dotty about perfume, such that my role can readily be inferred.

So in the dream Ruth is given a bottle of perfume worth £10,000(!) by a rich woman in a fur coat. The bottle is in the shape of Lionel Richie's head, complete with fully functioning nozzle, and the scent is called: "Hello".

I wonder if Sean - though not a fumehead himself - had perhaps clocked the JPG Kokorico scent bottle in the Belfast branch of House of Fraser I visited with Donna and subliminally extrapolated from it...

And on that bonkers note, it is perhaps high time to draw a line under this post I think and say "Cheerio".

Goodness, I'd be hot in that coat on a day like this!

Photo of Mary Karantzou perfume bottle dresses from dsgnwrld.com, photo of altar from puebla-mexico.com, photo of Madonna Truth or Dare from allfashiontrends.net, photo of Lionel Richie perfume bottle by Ruth Graham, photo of woman in fur coat from digitalgallery.nypl.com, other photos my own