Newsletter #3: Scented Diaries

a perfumed week in the life

Scented Diaries: A Week of Perfume

How do you keep your perfumed life together? I have a gigantic spreadsheet where I track every perfume that I smell complete with metadata, ratings, notes, and reviews. I have another tab where I track every scent that I wear for each day of the year. I find it valuable to track what you’re wearing and what you’re smelling, as they aren’t always the same things. For this week’s newsletter I thought I’d track a perfumed week in my life in depth.

Daily scents, wear tests, perfumes in the wild, sample orders and layering combinations - we’ll cover it all in the Scented Diaries below.

Monday

It’s the year of tuberoses and today we’re testing a highly anticipated white floral from my list: Moon Bloom (Hiram Green, 2013).

I’m working in office today and only have a few meetings, so it’s a great chance to wear test something new. Evaluating perfume is something that’s best done when you’re concentrating on other things - when your focus is elsewhere, I find that your nose will continue to work on its own and tell you whether something is interesting or not.

Hiram Green is an all natural Canadian perfumer working out of the Netherlands, and the perfume he creates will leave you breathless. Synthetic notes add lightness and space to perfumes, almost like inflating a balloon, and working without them means making perfume on hard mode as natural materials have an olfactory denseness that makes them difficult to master.

Balancing the intensity of natural perfumes is an ancient and difficult art. Do it well and you can create some of the most beautiful perfumes on the market; do it poorly and there’s a sense of suffocation, as if you are one of the poor creatures drowning in flowers in The Roses of Heliogabalus.

As some who prefers opulence to airiness, I know Moon Bloom is for me immediately on first spray. When I was a child my mum had a bottle of Tresor (Lancome, 1990) that both fascinated and repelled me: I thought its fizzy, floral opening smelled like hairspray, and there’s always a little part of me that still thinks of this whenever I smell a floral perfume. Scent memories are difficult to shake and I did think “ah, hairspray!” upon smelling Moon Bloom, but this quickly dissolved as I began to smell a truly beautiful tuberose and ylang-ylang accord in the dense, heavy wall of scent coming from my wrist.

Moon Bloom is a total onslaught of the senses from start to finish. This is a big haired, big hearted white floral - exactly the kind I’m looking for. The natural materials are distinct and not heavy but rather lush, as if Green has set them at a perfect simmer - without the use of synthetics like hedione, good old iso e, or even your typical white musks, this is truly a feat. Sometimes natural perfumes lack intent, like the materials are having their own way, but everything about Moon Bloom indicates that it is so large and so lush because the perfumer wants it to be.

Most flowers that bloom and release their smell at night are white so they can attract bees for pollination through the darkness. These flowers are like the bicycle helmets of the perfume world, and their narcotic smell is heady and a little bit sickening. I love wearing white florals on hot day, because I am deranged, and was pleasantly smothered by Moon Bloom in the humid summer morning as I made my way to work.

The beauty of a white floral is the thread of decay woven through the opulence. This is one of the most devastating and poetic weapons in a perfumer’s arsenal; the death at the heart of so much beauty. It’s this that Moon Bloom makes me think of more than anything else, and it’s this that makes me think of The Flesh and the Devil.

The 80’s were a time for excess in all things including perfume and, not unrelatedly, bodice rippers. 20th century romance books are not for the kind people of the world. They are rough, darkly hewn 800 page tomes in which nearly every terrible thing you can imagine happens, and yet through it all a thread of love perseveres even when it perhaps shouldn’t.

The Flesh and The Devil is one of two bodice rippers written by Teresa Denys and it is a gothic nightmare of a book that I love dearly. It’s set in 17th century Spain and is about a young woman who’s sent to a castle to marry a bad man and ends up falling for an even worse one. The setting is just small enough to be claustrophobic, and Denys writes with a lush and gruesome prose that makes everything feel vivid and brutal. Every time I read it I feel transported to this world that feels both overheated and cast in shadows, the characters restrained in their clothes but excess pouring out in lust and violence.

Moon Bloom smells exactly like that - beautiful; opulent; horrifying; suffocating; humid; fleshy. I like an antihero and I like an intense perfume, so this one’s a winner.

I listen to flamenco music all afternoon as I work, and Moon Bloom keeps me company deep into the night. What an incredible start to the week.

Tuesday

Tuesday is my bumper day where I’m in office and then head off to trivia at my local bowling club straight after, so I need a perfume that’s going to last for 12 hours plus.

I’ve played myself a bad turn - all I want to do is keep wearing Moon Bloom, but that wouldn’t make for a very interesting article. Gazing down at my collection, I’m tempted by For Her Forever (Narciso Rodriguez, 2023), which is a stealth white floral bomb that lasts, inoffensively, into the wee hours - I often wear it in office.

I consider Interlude Man (Amouage, 2009) for a moment before I remember the time I wore a single spray of it into work and caused a couple of allergic reactions, so that’s a no-go. I decide that I do feel like something complicated and ambery, though - maybe even something a bit dirty. A cigarette perfume it is.

I’m really tempted by my bottle of Habanita (Molinard, 1921), but also Jasmin et Cigarette (Etat Libre d’Orange, 2006) or even the tiny sample of Nightclubbing (Celine, 2019) that I’m still making the most out of. There’s just something about an ashy, smoky accord that does it for me, even at 7am in the morning.

Something people who have a perfume collection never say is that sometimes you pick a perfume and just sort of hope it’s the right choice and when it isn’t your day is off kilter, like you’re wearing your shoes on the wrong feet. Feeling on the cusp about it, I end up choosing Promise (Frederic Malle, 2017).

There is so much to say about Editions de Parfums that sometimes I don’t know where to begin. I call it The Big One, the article I’m always sort-of working on about Frederic Malle. My brain goes in to overdrive when I wear one of the scents from this line because to think about this brand is to consider the perfume industry as it was, as it is, as it will be - a scented microcosm of an entire world.

The enormity of this fills my mind for the entire bus trip in to work, leaving my book to languish in my bag.

Promise, for all that I love it, is a crassly made thing. In the typical Dominique Ropion style this is Clash of the Titans perfumery, where strong notes are thrown up against one another to fight for dominance. The clear winner is an ashy cypriol-labdanum accord that I assume is meant to evoke oud but in reality smells like a club where everyone’s smoking shisha. This effect is extended by a bizarre top note of sour apple that is stronger than maybe any other fruity perfume opening on the planet. It’s the apple that feels out of place in a perfume that is otherwise so luxurious - the bumper sticker on the Bentley.

The heart of the scent is a rose and incense combination that does feel like a riff on Ropion’s Portrait of a Lady (Frederic Malle, 2010) to the point where this could even be a flanker perfume, if only from back when flankers were completely new perfumes that sort of vaguely hovered around the concepts of their original (see Dior’s Poison line).

Promise is one of the perfumes that I loved on first sniff because I’m a person who likes the smell of cigarettes and wet paint and car exhausts and hot metal. I’ve never caved and bought a bottle and so eke out small samples vials, which works well because one spray is enough for the astronauts in the International Space Station to smell you. For today, it will see me well into the evening.

A delightful surprise when I get to trivia - one of my team members is wearing Red Tobacco (Mancera, 2017), another cigarette-adjacent perfume that I adore. There’s a hot cinnamon and fresh cigars thing going on with it that keeps me interested through the usual niche brand woody-amber drydown.

I wore Red Tobacco a lot during lockdown and am reminded vividly of this whenever I smell it. There was a day when one of my family members (used to my perfumed experiments but in no way happy about them) walked past me wearing Red Tobacco and said, “Are you meant to smell like that? Like, on purpose?”

I do not tell my friend this anecdote, and instead recommend he smells Red Tobacco Intense so he can compare the two.

I collapse into bed at midnight and leave Promise to permeate through my laundry hamper to the rest of my clothes.

Wednesday

I sleep in too long, as I often do after trivia, and in my rush to get out the door there’s no time for perusing the collection - we’re in grab-and-go mode. I don’t think, I just reach, and I reach for Incense Rosé (Tauer, 2008).

What Andy Tauer does with incense is what Paganini could do with a violin - in other words, he is a virtuoso. When I play the “which perfumes would you take in a fire” game in my head, my Tauers are always high on the list - these are perfumes that I feel privileged to own and to wear.

Perfumer reviewers, including myself, sometimes talk about the difficulty of finding “proper perfume” in the modern landscape. What anyone who has smelled a vintage perfume means by this is that before the 2000’s perfumes were huge things, full bodied and complex, that moved and developed throughout the day before slowly fading into the drydown. Modern mass market perfumes simply don’t do this - but independent perfumes do, and I know that when I spray Incense Rose I’m going to get a proper perfume that will last all day and then some.

Incense Rose opens with a fizzy cardamom and citrus accord that smells like how the bubbles in a soft drink feel on your palate. This is a similar technique that Tauer uses in Orange Star, making him the only perfumer I know of who can make me think of soft drink and orange cordial without also making the perfume overly sugared or saccharine.

This opening is paired with the usual Tauerade of incense and amber, which smells like nothing else on earth - warm and dry, resinous and chewy, multihued and complex. At the heart of the scent is the rose, steel edged and metallic but still full bodied and lush. All of this plays together in loud harmony, giving an effect that almost feels like a classic chypre in modern clothes.

Incense Rose is an incredible perfume and I’m almost always asked about it when I wear it, as I am today while waiting for the lift. I explain the whole thing and sum it up rather lamely, but accurately, by saying that it’s like wearing the best pot pourri you’ve ever smelled.

I get the lift up with a gentleman wearing a frankly stunning amount of Sauvage (Dior, 2015). I entertain myself wondering how many times he sprayed it - six, seven, ten? Men used to wear suits of armour into battle and now they wear Sauvage into the office. I hope the wall of ambroxan protects him against his day.

It’s nearly afternoon coffee time when a coworker walks up and asks my favourite question: ‘Can we have a sniff?’

Where I can, I try my best to encourage and enable all the scent curious people in my life. When one of them wanders up to my desk I have a 3D printed perfume sample holder that I ordered years ago from a Hungarian Etsy store stocked for this very occasion.

What follows is almost always the same conversation: I ask my coworker what they like; they say they don’t know; I ask them what perfume they wear; they tell me, but say they’re looking for something new; I ask them how they want their perfume to make them feel.

It seems to be this that unlocks the most in people - this is the question they can connect with. Sometimes they want something they can wear anywhere, including to the office, or something that makes them feel ‘put together’. Sometimes they want something for ‘special occasions’ - pretty much always an amber. And sometimes they want something ‘with the whale poop stuff - do you have that?’

This coworker is running out of Idole (Lancome, 2019) and likes the pear note but wants something fresher for her next buy.

I give her a blotter with Debaser (DS and Durga, 2015), a lovely and user-friendly fig scent. She’s unsure if she likes it - so I spray another blotter with Fille de Berlin (Serge Lutens, 2013). She immediately goes back to Debaser and says she likes it more. It’s fascinating to me, how people always seem to need a contrast to decide they like a perfume.

We chat a bit more - I recommend she smells Nomade (Chloe, 2018) and Pacific Rock Moss (Goldfield and Banks, 2016) - and then she waves the blotters half crumpled in her hand. ‘Er, what do I do with these?’

(Everyone always asks this.)

‘You keep them,’ I say, ‘and keep smelling them into the drydown.’

‘Oh, okay. Thanks?’

‘No, thank you - you’ve made my day,’ I say, and mean it.

Thursday

A busy week, this one - we’re having a farewell do for someone at work that involves lunch, an escape room activity, and then after hours drinks. I’ve never done an escape room before and can’t decide whether I’m going to be super calm and enjoy the experience or the person that has a meltdown and tries to throw a chair at the window. Something calm and reassuring is needed in case I start to get unhinged, which means a vetiver.

As an essential oil vetiver is often used to help with sleeplessness and relaxation, and there’s something about its loamy earthiness that always makes me feel at ease. I’ve got a fair few vetiver perfumes, but there’s nothing that is going to outclass Sycomore (Chanel, 2007) so that’s the scent of the day.

I’ve written about Sycomore before, but every time I smell it it’s like falling in love all over again. It is so heartbreakingly beautiful - this is certainly Chanel’s best perfume and might just be Chris Sheldrake’s best, too. Warm but not cloying, powdery but not dense, persistent but not overwhelming - Sycomore is balance in all things.

The escape room does not send me into panic mode but it is serial killer themed and not very pleasant, so once we get out of the handcuffs I mostly stand in the corner near the fake severed limbs and shine a torch so the others can work through the puzzles.

Afterwards at drinks I treat myself to a well earned amaretto sour. Surely this is one of the best smells (and tastes) in the world - sweetness enhancing the cherry-almond, the lemon giving a sharp acidity, the egg whites doing… something. It’s never occurred to me before that my favourite cocktail might be as close as you can get to drinking perfume, but I decide that this is good and proper.

I tell my coworkers about the magic of benzyaldehydes and how I would have been a total sucker in the medieval world and eaten cyanide because it smells of bitter almonds, which is categorically one of the best smells. They are good - and slightly tipsy - friends who indulge me in this.

When I get home it’s payday and there’s money in the sniffy fund, so I pull the trigger on one of the five thousand sample carts I’ve got going. We’re blessed to have had so many new decant stores crop up in Australia since COVID, so it’s a lot easier than it used to be to find new scents. My rule is that I don’t order anything I can reasonably travel to Sydney and smell for free, unless I’m planning to wear test it.

I grab some Kajals and Sarah Bakers, the new Papillion, a d’Annam, another Hiram Green, and some on theme cherry scents. I’m wearing Sycomore and there are samples coming in the mail - today is a good day.

Friday

There are some perfumes that are good for the office or running errands or for an evening out, and there are some perfumes that are best enjoyed in your own home where you can’t put anyone off their food. On Fridays I work from home and wear my unsmellables, and today that is Spellbound (Estee Lauder, 1991).

Nobody really likes Spellbound, because it’s a bad perfume, but it happens to be bad in a way that I enjoy so I own a bottle. The story of Estee Lauder perfume in the 1980’s is one of bottled frustration. They released Cinnabar (1978) essentially at the same time as Opium (YSL, 1977), which eclipsed it entirely, and then released their contribution to the post-Opium boom of huge, syrupy florals a few years too late with Spellbound in 1991.

Created by Sophia Grojsman, Spellbound is an “everything and the kitchen sink” sort of scent. There’s about a thousand listed notes and they all blend together into a thick, dense, chewy floral that has the olfactory viscosity of cough syrup. The reason I love Spellbound, besides the fact that I’m like a Baroque apothecarist who loves the smell of medicinal things, is that it is the most needlessly complicated carnation perfume on the planet.

I adore carnation as a note in perfumery. It’s out of fashion in the modern palette, which is a shame because I think it’s one of the loveliest scents on earth. Carnations are heavy on eugenol, that miraculous aromachemical that makes up the major component of cloves. It also has a strong presence in roses, and I love to hunt out its spicy-sweet scent on the blotter.

With its heavy dose of eugenol carnation is a little bit Christmas ham, a little bit carrot cake, a touch of the doctor’s waiting room and a smidge of a Get Well Soon floral arrangement. Carnation is the perfect bridge between floral and spice notes, and it’s a key feature of the big shouldered scents of the 80’s like Coco (Chanel, 1984), which build on carnation with every other floral and spice note imaginable along with some stewed fruits and amber thrown in for good measure.

Spellbound is basically an American Coco with a supermassive carnation at its heart.

It’s impossible to smell Spellbound and not think about the excess of female marketed perfumery in the 80’s, which everyone knows was followed by minimalism in the 90’s before the gourmands cometh in the 2000’s. But there’s something delightful about the excess of Spellbound in comparison to modern perfumes which are loud but not dense, not complex - why did we ever choose sugar over flowers? Or maybe what I want is a mix of both in a carnation gourmand. Now that would be something to sniff out.

I’m also self aware enough to know that my goth soul loves this perfume at least a little because of the Siouxsie and the Banshees song Spellbound. And there is a touch of the goth about this perfume: it is so gaudy, so ostentatious, so Phantom of the Opera that makes it me smile. This is a perfume for women who think that the height of fashion was the puffy dress from Labryinth.

If you’re interested in a Mardi Gras parade lead by carnations and followed by pretty much every other floral, spice, and amber note you can think of, seek out Spellbound immediately. I spend my Friday happily sniffing, playing my bespoke goth playlist, and enjoying the rain.

Saturday

It’s finally the day that I am going to see Conclave, which has been top of my watchlist for months. I’ve got my red bishop outfit on, so of course today’s perfume has got to be an incense. I’m an incense hound - it’s a strong contender for being my favourite note in perfumery, though I do love all my resins equally - and have plenty to choose from.

Incense Extreme (Tauer, 2007) tempts me, but it’s a three dimensional frankincense and today I want something airier, lighter - less of the tree and more of the thurible.

There’s Avignon (Comme des Garcons, 2002), Bertrand Duchaufour’s benchmark incense that’s in every churchy weirdo’s perfume collection (including mine), or Full Incense (Montale, 2010), which has an ambery heart that makes you think of small sunlit parishes and the well dressed people who fill their pews. But I can’t walk past Cardinal (Heeley, 2010), which I spray in sinful abundance.

Though not religious I am deeply interested in religion, to the point where I happily made theology a minor in my degree. There’s something about the beauty of faith juxtaposed with the historic brutality of organised religion that fascinates me, like the twin poles of humanity intertwined together, and if it’s scented with anything it has to be incense. Do we find this smell spiritual because it is so beautiful, because the whorls of smoke curl upwards towards heaven, because it is so strange and so lovely that only a god could have made it? Maybe all of these reasons; maybe none of them.

Faith and incense - the unending mysteries.

Cardinal is a minimalist frankincense perfume that is so airy and spacious that it feels like a cathedral full of light. James Heeley puts his great talent to use by using the many facets of frankincense as a pseudo-structure for the entire perfume, enhancing its lemon-pine facets with a slight, peppery opening, and reinforcing the resinous base with a gossamer, ambered drydown. The perfume is given levity with a cottony musk that doesn’t feel synthetic or cloying, but instead gives Cardinal a pallid beauty. It’s the perfect scent to keep me and my Maltesers company in the theatre.

After the film I can’t help myself and swing past a few stores for a quick sniff.

Devotion pour Homme is disappointing, as predicted. I stand in front of the Dolce and Gabbana stand for a few minutes mulling over whether this is the direction that traditional perfume is going, where classically trained perfumers open their own houses and release scents at the luxury price point before hawking watered down versions to the designer houses begging for a hit. I don’t know how I feel about this, and pour Homme’s sour that’s not me espresso note isn’t giving me any answers.

I swing by and give good old Amarige (Givenchy, 1991) a smell too. It’s the year of blousy white florals and I’ve been considering buying a bottle of this classic Dominique Ropion overblown scent. All Givenchy seem to do these days are sling out tedious Gentlemen and L’Inderdit flankers, so I’m glad to see old faithful still has a place on the stand.

I’m also still thinking about Moon Bloom, and can definitely smell the bones of it here in Amarige - though it is only the bones, as the dear Givenchy has definitely been through a reformulation or two.

Staying on the theme I also smell Tubereuse Astrale (Maison Crivelli, 2024). I’m not a Maison Crivelli fan as this brand raises my niche hackles - names too gimmicky, prices too high, scents too banal and derivative - but this perfume surprises me. It’s good - a lush, spicy tuberose and what feels like a beautifully leathery osmanthus - yes, it’s very nice indeed. I spray it on my arm to give it a wear test.

There’s something about Tubereuse Astrale that says Givaudan to me. I look it up when I get home and am thrilled to see it indeed is a Givaudan from Quentin Bisch - my nose is getting better at sniffing out the differences between the big houses.

We’re going to have to talk about Quentin Bisch sometime soon. I can only imagine from his recent output that he’s strutting around the halls of Givaudan like a rockstar. Is there any perfumer more synonymous with modern perfumery - is there any perfumer who so closely brushes against greatness before fleeing back to the safety of his employer’s captives?

I also smell the Tsu Lange Yor perfumes (TLY 5755, POOL, LUCA, 2023), which are interesting and weird, neither of which I expect from what is essentially a celebrity brand. They definitely need more exploration - one of them has a cucumber and tomato leaf accord that genuinely shocks me when I smell it. All in all, a good day of sniffing.

Sunday

A day entirely at home and thank goodness for that - there’s been so little time to write this week. Sunday is usually my experiment day, because I’m almost always home doing chores to prepare for the week ahead and can quickly scrub something off if it’s a stinker. My opening salvo is a gorgeous Laotian oud oil I ordered years ago on Etsy - I want to see if it can blend well with some more structured perfumes.

When you smell oud oil you can understand why there is a small, fanatical subset of the perfume world that is obsessed with this material. People talk about oud the way they talk about wine - the terroir and the aroma and the body all matter to the quality of the stuff. This oud has a distinct feeling of the barnyard - it throws me back, violently, to the sheep and cattle enclosure I visited at the Royal Easter Show as a child - but there’s a sharp, almost green facet here too, and of course a nice lovely slug of medicinal resin.

If I’m let loose in the pasture (my own home) I will cause chaos, and it’s not long before I’m wandering over to my sample storage and my full bottle collection, smelling and spraying, collecting a little pile of blotters and wear testing on my wrists, my elbows, my forearms, and then moving to my legs when I run out of room.

I spray Poison on a blotter and hold it up against the oud (good - dizzying). I spray H24 and do the same (bad - screaming in two different decibels). I spray Moon Bloom and leave the blotter in my room to test the sillage. I dab Confit de Rose next to the oud (very, very good), and then spray them both with Molecule 02.

On and on throughout the day, spraying and sniffing and writing. I break, occasionally, for food and coffee. I play jazz when I work and something about In A Silent Way by Miles Davis seems to match the oud’s mood as well.

The perfume washes over me, surrounds me, builds and builds like a cloud bank on the horizon. Each scent is like opening a book and putting its pages together with the others to form something stranger, less comprehensible, understandable only to the composer. The oud soil shimmers on my wrist. I can still smell traces of Spellbound on my rug.

Am I overstimulated, nose fatigued, and on the merge of a headache? Yes, I am.

Do I smell like I’ve fallen in a vat of aromachemicals? Yes, I do.

But is there anywhere else I’d rather be on a Sunday afternoon than in my scented heaven?

M ■