Passage d'Enfer L'Artisan Parfumeur 1999

When asked recently that old chestnut, “Whom would you invite to dinner if you could have any 10 guests from history?” I was mortified as usual by the pedestrian quality of my answer compared to the great wits and intellects around me. I'd love to think of myself as a rounded person, but my head must've been in my perfume closet, and my answers were quite narrow. Edmond Roudnitska, Germaine Cellier, Bernard Chant... I was happy with myself, though, for the living perfumer I included, Olivia Giacobetti.

I've actually only recently found my way to Giacobetti’s work, but I am fascinated. I still want to investigate her fig and flower perfumes, but having experienced Dzing! Passage d’Enfer and Fou d’Absinthe, I'm sold.

I love the scents of the perfumes that I've tried, but I am drawn to her for her artistic approach. Dzing! captures my desire for a considered use of abstraction toward specific ends. Abstraction isn’t throwing things at a wall and seeing what sticks. It is a specific and complex means of revealing attributes of an idea or thing, and has only as much randomness to it as any other means of composing work does. Passage d’Enfer shows that thoughtful juxtaposition highlights the frame of reference, and bends contexts to create new and unimagined possibilities. Juxtaposition is never simply about the two ideas placed next to each other. It’s about the space between them, the artist and the audience and what they together make of it all.

While there certainly is more to the composition, Passage d’Enfer combines incense and lily and comes up with something both interesting and unexpected. While I can still make out the two components, my attention is mostly drawn to a third, new quality. It is creamy, soapy, spectral. It suggests an atmosphere like fog, which cannot be experienced in inches, but must be taken in in yards, over terrain. It has a comfortable density to the touch that feels like it would absorb sound. It has a giving property and maybe even a forgiving nature.

I know I'm reading a lot into this perfume. But that's what I want to do with perfume. And in order to do so I choose well-considered perfumes, ones rich with ideas. I've always loved the T.S. Eliot expression, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” It tells me about subject, object, the things between them, and intent. By the same token a smart, qualified perfumer can show a willing and informed perfume wearer the world in a bottle.

from scent hurdle.com

My Mum gave me this out of her wardrobe. A delicate, unobtrusive incense that is far more nuanced and beguiling than CdG's monotonous Avignon. When I was young we used to travel to my parents' homeland in the Nile Valley for the summer. To celebrate our arrival, family members would prepare incense pots full of mastic, frankincense, sandalwood, and other spices whose combinations were said to have been handed down from pharaonic times. They would then drench and marinate the concoction in French perfumes - usually Fleurs D'Amour - before igniting it. Olivia Giacobetti distilled one of those pots in this bottle. Mystical and long-lasting.

... and a narrow road laid in wet stone, leading away from the cathedral just visited, incense and ash still lingering in the air. White lilys blooming late. I don't think this is a scent that will encourage females to charm men. I am on my own.

On a rainy day, when the world around me is asleep and I am by my own on a high balcony, my mind spins with this accomplice. All else is still. I see and get things I wasn't able too last night. Passage d'Enfer suits it's name, powerful and mighty, but not strong. It is translucent and delicate, but dark as only a passage to "Enfer" can be.

I was an altar girl as a child, rejecting Catholicism as a teenager, and fragrance reignited my appreciation for my faith. This to me, smells like the faint whisper of incense in a cold church. The pews hard, and uncomfortable, but inviting.

Dove soap, faint incense, church pews. It is like hugging a ghost, reminiscent of my Irish grandmother who kept a photo of the pope by her bed.

This is a delicate, shy perfume. I adore it for the brief time that this lasts, but sadly it has the most abysmal longevity. For those fleeting moments it is a beautiful smoky lily, but the incense is not as pronounced or complex as I prefer. It has no projection, which I'm not too fussed on but if you have to have your nose pressed to your wrist to smell it then it is just not worth it. This fades to a skin scent in astonishingly fast. For the price, it is not worth it. I am glad I did not purchase a full size immediately.