"Saddle up the mare of dreams": Papillon Perfumery Epona review

Last week marked the 10th anniversary of Papillon Perfumery, the artisanal brand founded by elegant epicurean earth mother Liz Moores - whose birthday is today in fact! In that time she has released eight perfumes, and the rectangular 3 x 3 display on her website is clearly crying out to fill the bottom right hand corner with No 9. So when she announced the latest addition to the Papillon stable, Epona, set to be launched on 1st August, I was delighted by the news, not least for reasons of geometrical equilibrium. Equine equilibrium indeed, as Liz explains:

"Epona embodies the cherished memories of my bond with my beloved horse amidst the beautiful English countryside. Inspired by our intimate connection, it captures the essence of long summer days, a warm leather saddle, and the sweet meadow breath of my horse."

When I heard the name of the new perfume, I must admit that I didn't immediately twig to the connection with Liz's horse: it was rather the Spanish town of Estepona that popped into my head, which has the name "Epona" nested within it. For any grammar or maths nerds, I believe this is an example of the somewhat abstruse phenomenon known as "recursion".

Screenshot of the Papillon website!

Further searches of the word quickly revealed that Epona is a Celtic goddess, patron of mares and foals, as well as a character in the Legend of Zelda Nintendo game, and a highly engineered type of horseshoe. ;) So all in all, a very apt choice of name for the new fragrance.

Notes

Leather, Violet, "Saddle Soap Accord", Labdanum, Vetiver, Oakmoss, Petitgrain, "Horse Skin Accord"

Right off the bat you can tell that this is a perfume best appreciated by horse lovers, who will be familiar with "the rich scent of a well-worn saddle", and the saddle soap that is part of the tack cleaning ritual.

I should come right out and say that I am not a horsey person, and if anything am a little afraid of them, along with cows, sheep, and dogs - or for that matter creatures of any size that are capable of launching a surprise attack. Why, even Truffle has become alarmingly bitey of late and I have had to dial back my petting intensity after she narrowly missed a big vein. My diffidence around dobbins, as you might say, goes back to the summer of 1974, when I went pony trekking in Wales on a Scripture Union holiday (of all unlikely auspices!). Within minutes of setting off, my feisty mount cantered down a steep field and promply threw me off. Luckily I was unharmed, but I have never had the urge since to "get back in the saddle".

Source ~ WorthPoint: a plate featuring a JohnTickner drawing (1968)

Now I may not be the ideal person to relate to Epona, but I do have surprising horsey connections. My first cousin-once removed-in-law(!), John Tickner, was the cartoonist for Horse & Hound for some 20 years, and also wrote many books on the themes of country life. In a surprising twist, it turns out that Liz remembers his cartoons from when she was growing up and already a hippophile.

Then there was the old flame who held senior marketing roles in food companies, before turning his back on the gravy train and taking up painting - of race horses. He eventually became a noted equine artist. I'd never have placed a bet on that career change! And there is also the ex-girlfriend of my actual first cousin, who is a sports coach and psychologist teaching NLP techniques to riders.

But despite my own lack of affinity with horses, I was most curious to try Epona, and jumped on the sample Liz sent me as soon as it arrived.

A black pen leaked in my handbag, sorry!

On first application I get a blast of freshly mown grass mixed with a strong leather scent - of the kind you find on the more rugged end of the Spanish handbag spectrum. A friend who sniffed it on me described the smell as "rubbery", which may have been his way of describing the leather note. The arresting opening soon becomes more attenuated: the bracing dart of green disappears, giving way to a softer leather scent mixed with soap. We are definitely in Camay territory now. I found a note to myself that reads: "creamy glowing soft leather and soap". Very beautiful it is too. In the same register as Cuir de Russie, though with more soap.

I must explain that the two other people I have tried Epona on so far - an actively horsey female friend and a chap who has sat on donkeys and elephants in India, which I figured might do as well - were quite different canvases for the scent: on both of them the bright green facet was more noticeable, with longer staying power. They both liked Epona a lot, and in the case of my female friend, it was an absolute epiphany for her. She had previously avoided ALL perfume, dismissing it as "chemically" and allergy-provoking, but the second Epona landed on her skin she knew she was in the presence of luxurious and benign greatness, and was won over. Her partner is now under instructions to buy her a bottle for her birthday - a volte-face the like of which I never thought I'd see. ;)

I did!

As for me, I have continued to bury my nose in my wrist in the hope of detecting the "summer meadows" salvo again, but it seems that my version of the horse has gone back into its stable, where the fresh sappy greenery has been supplanted by straw, and a sort of animalic woodiness that might be the oakmoss or the muddy tones of vetiver. Maybe that is the "horse skin accord" kicking in, which I am obviously not in a position to confirm, but I could well believe it is exactly that. Which reminds me that another waggish friend said he was surprised there was no dung in Epona, prompting me to point him in the direction of L'Artisan's Dzing!. That said, in the drydown there is an alluring stables-cum-barnyard vibe going on - no really, I mean that - which could encompass straw at least. In the far drydown the perfume recedes to a gently soapy whisper, though I thought I could smell a faint trace of vetiver on one wrist. Basically, I think Epona may prove to be another shapeshifter, and you may get a different combination of the leather / soap / fresh greenery / muddy greenery & animalic hints compared to me - or the same combination in a different order. However it reads on your skin, I am confident you will also enjoy the ride! 

In summary - and notwithstanding the fleeting nature of the juicy greenness on me - Epona has leapt to the top of my favourites list, nudging Bengale Rouge and Hera into second and third place on the winners' podium, though I still like them both as much as ever. Hera didn't go quietly as you might imagine, poking Epona's flank with her pomegranate-topped sceptre as she stepped down. As for Bengale Rouge, I guess if this were an actual race, a horse could outrun a cat after all. (Yep, 40mph to her 30mph, I have established, though Truffle may just beat her "species best" when she sees me coming at her with a worming tablet.)

Editor's note: "Saddle up the mare of dreams" is the opening line of a song by Scarlet's Well called "Mid-morning Lily Songs" (video here). I don't expect a single reader to have placed it. ;)

Miller Harris Fleurs de Sel, and a four star way to pre-empt 'post-perfume purchase cognitive dissonance'

Guerande salt marshes~ Source: definingfrance.com

I did the unthinkable the other day. I bought a nearly full bottle of perfume on the Facebook Fragrance/Sale/Swap/Split UK site. A woman was offloading her entire collection - or so it seemed - at very reasonable prices, and I quickly joined in the buying frenzy that ensued within a short while of her post going up. "MH Fleurs de Sel please if still available". My fingers tapped out the order as though with a life of their own. The very next day the bottle arrived, mine for £25 all in. Mint condition, with just 2ml or less missing.

I was very, very shocked at this impulsive behaviour. As regular readers know, I have absolutely no need of any more perfume, given my 60? strong bottle collection, countless decants, and innumerable samples. And while I do hanker after a few things: more/back ups of DSH Foxy and House of Cherry Bomb Immortal Beloved, for example, plus samples of Chanel 1957 and that new rose Hiram Green people are raving about - Lustre, that's the one - it is a big old leap from hankering to actually acquiring any of the stuff.

UPDATE: I have broken off writing this post to go and order samples of Lustre and Slowdive from the Hiram Green website! And was also bidding on eBay on a BNIB bottle of 1957 that is running at £75 at the moment, so I have accepted that while it is still a bargain at that price it is too much to pay, and way more juice than I need, so have bowed out of that particular fray...

Source: notino.co.uk

But back to my 48ml of Fleurs de Sel. I wasn't lemming after this scent - not remotely. I only have a dim recollection of how it smelt, though I do remember it as haunting in a flinty, grassy, salty way, as well as being splendidly evocative of the Brittany coastline with its wild, wind-whipped vegetation, spiky thistles underfoot as you tread on hot sand. Well, hot in the summer, maybe. You may recall how I am quietly obsessed with this particular hair gunk from Label M, which sadly makes my locks greasy, but has the most wonderful scent imaginable, far superior to many non-functional fragrances.

I blogged about the Label M mousse here, and note that I incorporated a mini-review of Fleurs de Sel into my post, along with one of The Different Company's Sel de Vetiver, of which the hair goo also reminded me:

"First up was MILLER HARRIS - FLEURS DE SEL:

Notes: rosemary, thyme, clary sage, angelica, iris, rose, narcissus, leather, amber, oakmoss and vetiver

This is very piquant and aromatic and an excellent rendition of the wild grasses in the sand dunes  and the beach. It is grainy in texture and a bit salty too, as though someone had gone for a swim and then rolled around immediately afterwards in a carpet of marram grass, sea rocket, holly and spurge. Maybe even the odd sprig of mouse ear hawkweed.

So notwithstanding its strongly vegetal focus, I think FdS is a very successful olfactory interpretation of the Breton coast which was its inspiration."

Well, well, I appear to have appreciated how Fleurs de Sel captures the Breton seascape way back then, even though this is the furthest thing from the style of scent I usually go for - vanilla-forward orientals and sultry white flower florals being my go-to genres for the most part.

Source: frenchfoodintheus.org

And in that split second when I perused the Facebook seller's list and typed my request to buy her bottle of Fleurs de Sel, a switch must have flicked in my brain and reconnected me to that beautiful rocky wilderness, even though I have never in fact been there. I have been to Brittany, mind, to interview a company that made cling film, but saw very little of the area. I just looked up where the factory was - in Pontivy - which is about as far inland as it is possible to go. Now that I have the house in France I am perhaps more drawn to perfumes inspired by anywhere in the 'hexagon', as the French refer to their country.

On a whim, I googled Batz-sur-Mer, the childhood home of perfumer Lyn Harris, which provided the inspiration for Fleurs de Sel. And lo and behold - it isn't in Brittany after all, but a bit south and round the coast in the Pays-de-la-Loire region, specifically the Loire-Atlantique department. Maybe there has been a deliberate spot of geographical fudging, as Brittany is so close, and more people would have heard of that area than its sister region. I have also pegged the salt marshes that provided the aromatic trigger to the scent's creation as those of the Guerande peninsula, also in the Loire-Atlantique (Pays-de-la-Loire). Frontier quibbler, moi? Oh, and I so wanted to put 'Quimper quibbler', but Quimper, being about as inland as Pontivy, doesn't come into it.;)

UPDATE: further research has uncovered the fact that the Loire-Atlantique department was spun off from Brittany in 1941, but was part of 'Old Brittany'. Apparently there is a big kerfuffle about it all that is still raging on, with many of the locals eager to be reintegrated into Brittany. More on the controversy here:

Batz-sur-Mer ~ Source: Tripadvisor

So anyway, the bottle arrived, and the perfume was just as I remembered it: bright, granular, herby, salty and earthy. I am pleased to be adding a bottle by Miller Harris to my collection - I have had one or two in the past - including Fleurs de Bois, for sure - but must have sold or lost them. Obviously I would not dream of suggesting I might have actually used them up!

Oh, just checked the notes of Fleurs de Bois - now discontinued - and it is classed as aromatic-citrus. I must be a closet herbal fan after all...For there's rosemary and grass in there!

Notes: galbanum, grass, Sicilian lemon, tangerine, rose, rosemary, iris, oakmoss, patchouli, sandalwood, vetiver

I have been wearing Fleurs de Sel for two days now, and it is as haunting as I remember - and as 'not-really-me-but-I-like-it'. Then, because it was so out of character for me to buy a whole bottle of something so vaguely remembered and so far from lemming status, I felt I needed extra validation for my - if not blind exactly, but definitely somewhat myopic - buy. I turned to Bois de Jasmin first of all, whose taste happens to be closely aligned with mine, such that many of my most loved perfumes historically have been ones she has awarded four or five stars. And blow me if she didn't give Fleurs de Sel four stars too...;)

In her review, Victoria writes:

"Fleurs de Sel is one of the best examples of Lyn Harris’s ability to marry a lush, nature-inspired quality with modern minimalism. The result is nuanced and elegant, with an interesting twist on the classical theme."

On a reviewer roll here, I dared to consult the original Perfumes The Guide book, and was delighted to see that Luca Turin gave Fleurs de Sel four stars as well! He calls it "this elegant, highly original herbaceous-marine composition", adding that it cannot have been easy to compose.

So I feel completely vindicated now.  I Did Not Need this perfume - and didn't even know I wanted it until a moment before I committed to buy - but it feels like a distinctive and special addition to my collection. Intimately bound up with my happy links to France. And as I have a friend in Nantes, the nearest city, maybe I will visit the Loire-Atlantique one day...

Source: ucipliban.org

BEX Londoner SE1 - A spicy tale of wharf-watching

I was introduced to the brand BEX Londoner in the summer of 2012 by Nick Gilbert, when he worked at Les Senteurs.  My first thought was 'Noooo, an opaque bottle!', that bane of MUA swappers and perfume lovers generally, because you can never tell how full or empty it is.  And my second thought was: 'Odd name.'  For BEX is (to my mind) a rather chavvy shorthand for Rebecca, along the same lines as Gazza is for Gary or Gascoigne, or Daz for Darrell. So, you know, an Essex girl kind of contraction is not what I would expect from a niche perfume house. Colour me snobby, but there it is.  And it is only now, in doing a bit of research about the brand for this post, that I have finally clocked that BEX is in fact the familiar name of the founder of the house, Rebecca Goswell, a brand design consultant who has worked for some notable agencies such as Design Bridge and Lewis Moberly.  For someone in the field of beauty product brand identity, BEX is perhaps a curious choice, albeit the suffix 'Londoner' detracts nicely from the first name part.  One never talks of Paul Gascoigne the footballer as 'Gazza Londoner', for example, not least because he is from Gateshead.

I read that Rebecca Goswell is a lifelong fan of London, and decided to enlist her friend, the perfumer Francois Robert, 'to capture the very essence of its most characterful and inspiring places'.  Together they set out to create a series of perfumes each named after a specific postcode, an approach to fragrance creation that brings to mind Jan Uprichard and Geza Schoen's Odourific Odyssey project in Belfast.

Butlers Wharf

I spent five summers working in London as a student, and am familiar with a number of different districts in the city. So I was eager to try these scented postcodes and see if they chimed with my own impressions of that particular area.  One scent particularly caught my imagination, namely SEI, which appealed to me on a number of levels.  The blurb on the BEX London site - note that the brand and collection itself seem to be called 'BEX Londoner', while the company is 'BEX London' - explains the background to SE1:

'Evoking the atmosphere and aroma of the old Thameside spice wharfs, Londoner SE1 is alive with bergamot, citrus, cardamom and pimento balanced with a deep woody base of amber, sea moss, driftwood and finest natural vetiver.'

Now that is a very enticing description, and of interest also for confirming the plural of 'wharf'.  Hold on, a cursory google suggests both 'wharfs' and 'wharves' are acceptable.

So how does it smell?

Well, all the BEX Londoner fragrances are positioned as 'androgynous', but this one leans to the masculine in my view, though I am drawn to it myself.  It opens with citrus, a wallop of mixed spice and a strong planky undertow, supported by the earthy facet of the vetiver.  The scent manages to be both airy yet full-on.  It completely evokes for me images of Long John Silver in Treasure Island, the sounds of creaking timbers and rocking bunks in Spanish galleons - and most crucially and nostalgically, the smell and feel of those dear little toy kegs of rum in the board game Buccaneer...

Source: vintagetoysgames.co.uk

SE1 doesn't really change and remains simultaneously bright, spicy, airy, woody and earthy(!) throughout.  It just gets softer and more blurry as it wears on.  I don't particularly detect amber, never mind the sea moss, though there is a background warmth to the scent that might well be the former. For a more nuanced description, I recommend Freddie of Smellythoughts' take on Londoner SE1 here.  What his nose reads as a 'marine accord' is possibly what I am struggling to connote with 'airy'.  I am pleased to note that SE1 was also his favourite of the bunch!

As it happens, I have a sneaking affection for wharves, and have visited a goodly number in places like Hamburg (which boasts the third biggest banana dock in the world, don't you know!) and New Bedford, MA (where I additionally took a tour of a plant that makes crushed ice for trawlers).  My interest was initially piqued by seafaring ancestors on my mother's side, including a distant great-great-something grandfather who was the captain of a clipper ship that regularly plied the waves between Australia and England.  In his spare time he kept detailed log books of his eventful voyages** and wrote and illustrated a comic strip magazine to entertain his crew during their long weeks at sea.  All of which my mum donated to the Greenwich Maritime Museum, where they may or may not still be on display today.

And thus it was that on a recent trip to London, I legged it down to the Shad Thames area by Tower Bridge to soak up the atmosphere of the SE1 postcode and generally get into the zone of the perfume it inspired. It was a blisteringly hot day and I had my luggage in tow, yet I managed to spend a happy couple of hours ambling through the rabbit warren of streets just behind the riverfront, clocking any vestigial bits of wharf I could discern, as well as the many buildings that have been named after spices and other traded commodities such as tea and wheat.

Yup, forget whales - wharf-watching is where it's at, preferably wearing SE1 for added verisimilitude, which I wasn't at the time. ;-)

And in a satisfying twist to this story, I recently did a perfume consultation for a friend who has never really worn men's aftershave of any kind.  I gave him half a dozen niche samples to try and SE1 came out as the clear winner.  The only perfume of the bunch with which he felt a 'visceral connection' (his words). And guess what...? He happens to live on a boat himself - albeit not one suited to plying the spice trade routes, but still.

**According to family lore, on one trip from Australia my ancestor spied a young boy who had got into difficulties swimming off the coast of Ceylon.  He leapt into the sea and saved the child from drowning.  Said child turned out to be an Indian prince(!), and my great-great etc was given a ruby ring by his father as a thank you for his prompt action.   I have seen the ring, but cannot confirm the rest of the story...

Disclosure: I was sent samples of all four BEX Londoner perfumes by BEX London's PR company, who also offered to send me a bottle of whichever scent proved to be my favourite (I obviously picked SE1). This offer was not contingent on my writing a review, but I wanted to do so anyway.