Cryptic

I was really looking forward to this particular offering out of the entire Loant collection. The German reviews likened Lotree to a foundry in the middle of a dense forest and mentioned "singing woods." Could it be something along the lines...

Are you in the mood for a kooky perfume experience? If so, the Loant Collection might be just the thing to rattle your sabre. This new line consists of seven scents, each of which is meant to represent a different segment of an ant's body: Top notes...

Not being familiar with Rossy de Palma, the woman who inspired this fragrance, I went Googling to ascertain the nature of her celebrity. It turns out that she is a Spanish actress known for her work in the films of Pedro Almodóvar and (please...

Call me morbidly curious. When a close friend with an adventurous and tolerant nose tested Oud Ispahan and found it repellent, I had to see what the stink was all about. To cut straight to the chase, look no further than the oud, or pseudo oud (psoud?),...

Whether you will enjoy or dislike El Attarine will depend on how you feel about a certain sweaty spice finding its way into your perfume. I don't happen to find the cumin overpowering in this context, but there is no denying its presence....

Love in Black was created as a tribute to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, which is sort of amusing when you consider that she was known to favor civet bombs like Jicky and probably would have politely declined to wear LiB had she ever encountered it. Nonetheless,...

Back when I was a child, my mother often wore Zen EdC out of the splash bottle. It lingered on her hands and had a way of turning up on everything she touched, including her books. While she was in the middle of her Zen period, my mother...

I'm a little contrarian by nature, so a vitriolic review is guaranteed to grab my interest rather than turn me away. Moreover, I've discovered that perfumes which appeal to a broad spectrum of people are sometimes bland and uninspiring to my rebellious...

Clinique's Aromatics Elixir has been somewhat of an oddity since its launch in 1971. At the time, perfume houses were splashing out with big ad campaigns that featured either a celebrity or a supermodel. Chanel No.5 had Deneuve, Charlie had Shelley...

L'Heure Bleue in its current formulation never interested me much. It always struck me as the wallflower sister of the classic Guerlain family of Mitsouko, Shalimar, Jicky and Apres L'Ondee. Although LB seemed pleasant enough, it couldn't hold a candle...

Several years ago, oud fever began spreading like wildfire across the perfume blogs and boards, and like so many others, I was captivated. "Noble rot" they called it, and the tales of how it was harvested and the way it was used in the Middle...

How did we reach the point in perfume history where fragrance is being banned in the workplace? In an attempt to answer that question, I decided to revisit some of the "monster" perfumes of the 80s for some possible insight into the current...