Ofrésia Diptyque 1999

Pepper? Where is the pepper? I have often had the impression that, as someone who enjoys spicy food, I occasionally miss the pepper notes or at least find them lackluster. Instead, I immediately smell very strange forms of flower.

Unfortunately, I can hardly be considered an expert on freesias. We don't have any in the garden, and the last time I smelled them in a bouquet was a long time ago. So I have to approach the topic from a neutral standpoint. And this approach is not very flattering. At first, I think of the smell of a few days old flower water from the vase. The habituation effect (a phenomenon unknown to me regarding the original aroma!) relativizes the yuck factor in hardly a minute, but what replaces it is not much better. A musty floral scent, in an unpleasantly antiquated sense, outdated. My grandmother smelled similar in her last years.

These are the impressions from close range. With some distance from the skin and a huge amount of goodwill, the scent appears serious, herbaceous, and cool-airy, but it still doesn’t come anywhere near being appealing for me. I rather face the truth: A good portion of mustiness remains.

An elderly, authoritarian piano teacher, who has gradually lost sight of the value of dabbling after decades of frustration with legions of less talented students, might smell like this. She holds a ruler over her students' fingers during the torture of etudes, which has been inflicted for what feels like 200 years through Czerny's 'School of Velocity', so that their little hands don’t hop around while playing. Meanwhile, she nostalgically thinks back to the times before the war - whichever one - when the ruler was a riding crop or a switch and could slip out during acoustically (or finger-hop) induced discomfort without possibly calling the prosecutor into action. She likes to stretch out the time, but after at most an hour and a half, it’s over, and the poor non-Chopin is left with only a vague, unpleasant echo of the smell after leaving the practice room.

Phew. In other words: The strictness of the scent reminds me after just five minutes of stinky spring flowers. However, those - stench or not - always simultaneously spread an aura of purity, freshness, and becoming. This is completely absent in the present scent. It smells bygone. I don’t like it at all. The peak: After returning to the office after about half an hour of absence, including not thinking about it anymore, that very mustiness lingers there. Great, just what I wanted.

Throughout the day, at some point, an acceptable skin cream quality emerges. It can then be tolerated. But overall, this is certainly disappointing. I have no choice but to pull out a pretty poor rating.

Nevertheless, I naturally thank Gerdi for this experience.