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07/17/2020
FvSpee
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FvSpee
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60
The Great Lord (three attempts)
The smell
Duchaufours Tycoon is perhaps one of the 30 most beautiful and one of the 5 most fascinating fragrances among the nearly 1000 I have tested
A prelude of brilliance and opulence: muted, lush, woodsy natural tones. Bitter and darkly alienated pomelo citrics; cool, powerful, deep green booming galbanum basses, the supposedly firm ground vibrates threateningly peppery. Perfect balance of nature and artificiality; highest unconventionality, but no trace of exaltation. Mastery and self-control. A wide opening to the outside world was alive and well: neither a landscape, nor just coldly intimidating architecture. Violence lurks. But tenderness also slumbers, or is it only hoped for?
Confusing hours: Attractive, creeping pungency of ginger and creeping spice of felt cardamom. Woody, heavy, strange and mysterious nut grass. Electrifying: mysterious magnetic attraction. Disturbing: Does not let itself be seen in the cards. Soon the highest danger (hot natural rubber, poisonous toads and insects), soon moderate harmlessness. The vegan dish in the contract killer canteen? Hand in front of your mouth: Who on earth is that ?
Infinite conclusion: Sixteen long hours of transformations, becoming calmer, but never quite calming. Warm flower bouquet (conditionally believable), soft flushes, leather sofas with tropical wood fittings (still deeply saturated). At the very end long dark-sweet finish: shaded Arsène Lupin.
The Edition
Master Duchaufour creates beautiful collections for private individuals. The dilettante (which originally meant lover and not pejoratively) can act as editor of a fragrance series without having to learn to be a perfumer himself. That is practical. The results are impressive. Neela Vermeire's India series, made entirely by BD, contains some mediocrity, but also Trayee, for whom the whole series has more than paid off. The "creative director" of this fragrance series here is Michael Donovan; I'm not sure what his direction was, apart from engaging the super nose, I don't know exactly.
The series consists of The Tycoon (The Tycoon, or The Oligarch for that matter) and the four other professional fragrances The Writer, The Stylist, The Mechanic and The Actress. The Actress, the actress, is also in English only female, the other four names have the charm in English to be grammatically as unisex as the fragrances are marketed, although I don't know any tycoons and the mechanics are still relatively rare. I do not know the other four fragrances. Also on Parfumo they are hardly exposed.
The entire series of five is still available, either in the online shop of St.-Giles / Michael Donvan (St Giles Fine Fragrances) or exclusively through Selfridges. The price is the same here and there, namely 130 pounds sterling for a 100 ml bottle. For "The Taikun", the fragrance with the force of a typhoon, certainly not too expensive.
I'm a little bit in love with the bottles, but I'm massively in love with the boxes. Art Deco at its best, I could hang it all over my walls. Just as beautiful as the boxes in the unisex series by Tuttotondo, which are more colourful and cheerful Art Deco. Maybe I'm crazy, but it's a selling point for me. An empty TT-carton is on the shelf in my office.
The name
Taikun (Great Lord) was the honorary title of the Japanese shoguns and is used today for super rich and super powerful captains of industry and finance. The word used to exist directly from Japanese: Taikun. F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel "The Love of the Last Tycoon" is still called "The Last Taikun" in the German edition (although the book is about an American business leader and not a Japanese shogun). Today, German is impoverished by this word, and we also write English "Tycoon".
In older texts about seafaring one could have read as well: The ship of the shipping company from Mexico City docked at the Cayman Islands and supplied itself with cashew nuts and other provisions. Today there would have been Cayman Islands, Mexico City (which is actually special nonsense, because if anything, then Ciudad de Mexico) and cashew nuts. A pity actually. By the way, on the Cayman Islands they would not put in food anymore, but for money laundering.
A cultural-historical investigation would be needed to find out why journalists tend to name the really big oligarchs (the small ones are also named after animals such as the building lion and the financial hyena) after titles of rulers from the East: Apart from tycoons, I can think of tycoons, moguls and tsars; also alliterative: media mogul, newspaper tsar and, well, steel magnate or oil magnate, but cereal magnate sounds better. As further variations I hereby suggest: Sock sultan, toast tenno and sausage vizier.
Duchaufours Tycoon is perhaps one of the 30 most beautiful and one of the 5 most fascinating fragrances among the nearly 1000 I have tested
A prelude of brilliance and opulence: muted, lush, woodsy natural tones. Bitter and darkly alienated pomelo citrics; cool, powerful, deep green booming galbanum basses, the supposedly firm ground vibrates threateningly peppery. Perfect balance of nature and artificiality; highest unconventionality, but no trace of exaltation. Mastery and self-control. A wide opening to the outside world was alive and well: neither a landscape, nor just coldly intimidating architecture. Violence lurks. But tenderness also slumbers, or is it only hoped for?
Confusing hours: Attractive, creeping pungency of ginger and creeping spice of felt cardamom. Woody, heavy, strange and mysterious nut grass. Electrifying: mysterious magnetic attraction. Disturbing: Does not let itself be seen in the cards. Soon the highest danger (hot natural rubber, poisonous toads and insects), soon moderate harmlessness. The vegan dish in the contract killer canteen? Hand in front of your mouth: Who on earth is that ?
Infinite conclusion: Sixteen long hours of transformations, becoming calmer, but never quite calming. Warm flower bouquet (conditionally believable), soft flushes, leather sofas with tropical wood fittings (still deeply saturated). At the very end long dark-sweet finish: shaded Arsène Lupin.
The Edition
Master Duchaufour creates beautiful collections for private individuals. The dilettante (which originally meant lover and not pejoratively) can act as editor of a fragrance series without having to learn to be a perfumer himself. That is practical. The results are impressive. Neela Vermeire's India series, made entirely by BD, contains some mediocrity, but also Trayee, for whom the whole series has more than paid off. The "creative director" of this fragrance series here is Michael Donovan; I'm not sure what his direction was, apart from engaging the super nose, I don't know exactly.
The series consists of The Tycoon (The Tycoon, or The Oligarch for that matter) and the four other professional fragrances The Writer, The Stylist, The Mechanic and The Actress. The Actress, the actress, is also in English only female, the other four names have the charm in English to be grammatically as unisex as the fragrances are marketed, although I don't know any tycoons and the mechanics are still relatively rare. I do not know the other four fragrances. Also on Parfumo they are hardly exposed.
The entire series of five is still available, either in the online shop of St.-Giles / Michael Donvan (St Giles Fine Fragrances) or exclusively through Selfridges. The price is the same here and there, namely 130 pounds sterling for a 100 ml bottle. For "The Taikun", the fragrance with the force of a typhoon, certainly not too expensive.
I'm a little bit in love with the bottles, but I'm massively in love with the boxes. Art Deco at its best, I could hang it all over my walls. Just as beautiful as the boxes in the unisex series by Tuttotondo, which are more colourful and cheerful Art Deco. Maybe I'm crazy, but it's a selling point for me. An empty TT-carton is on the shelf in my office.
The name
Taikun (Great Lord) was the honorary title of the Japanese shoguns and is used today for super rich and super powerful captains of industry and finance. The word used to exist directly from Japanese: Taikun. F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel "The Love of the Last Tycoon" is still called "The Last Taikun" in the German edition (although the book is about an American business leader and not a Japanese shogun). Today, German is impoverished by this word, and we also write English "Tycoon".
In older texts about seafaring one could have read as well: The ship of the shipping company from Mexico City docked at the Cayman Islands and supplied itself with cashew nuts and other provisions. Today there would have been Cayman Islands, Mexico City (which is actually special nonsense, because if anything, then Ciudad de Mexico) and cashew nuts. A pity actually. By the way, on the Cayman Islands they would not put in food anymore, but for money laundering.
A cultural-historical investigation would be needed to find out why journalists tend to name the really big oligarchs (the small ones are also named after animals such as the building lion and the financial hyena) after titles of rulers from the East: Apart from tycoons, I can think of tycoons, moguls and tsars; also alliterative: media mogul, newspaper tsar and, well, steel magnate or oil magnate, but cereal magnate sounds better. As further variations I hereby suggest: Sock sultan, toast tenno and sausage vizier.
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