Does a high price tag signal a 'superior' scent? (No, of course it bloomin doesn't!) Here's an experiment...

Joy, once the most costly perfume in the world, 

now mere pennies in comparison to it's niche contemporaries.

I recently spent the 'whopping sum' of £18.95 on a brand new bottle of one of the most enjoyable scents that I have worn this year - Moschino's 80s classic, Moschino Femme. This bargainous whiff struck me as far more elegant, creative and wearable than many of the significantly more valuable vials competing for space in my sample boxes.

The fact is this, magnificent scents exist at both ends of the price spectrum. Equally, boring and unpleasant ones do too. A luxe name and a huge price tag does not necessarily equate to olfactory beauty or 'quality' ingredients (whatever that means).

I rant about this a lot.

So I decided to create an experiment to see if the tastes of other dedicated scent lovers detected a superior nature in more costly scents. I ensured that my panel had broad tastes (i.e. wore and appreciated several different genres) to encourage a fair outcome. I asked them to blind test an unmarked numbered sample, give it a rating out of five, and estimate the retail price of a 50 ml bottle.

I purposely selected four scents for the experiment that I personally appreciate, with the cheapest creation coming from Yves Rocher and the most costly from Grossmith. These are two of my favourite lesser known brands. There was no point including famous beauties from my Guerlain or Chanel collection as my panel would possibly be familiar with their wares and therefore be biased. A fifth scent was my own invention, included as a kind of decoy or placebo, to see how an unbranded personal creation would fair against commercial products.

Here are the results:

Scent No.1 Moschino - Moschino Femme EDT 
RRP £32 for 45 ml (actual price £18.95 recently from Allbeauty.com)

Clive: "Something here makes me go weak at the knees. I get beautiful white florals (frangipane) in the opening and an almost immediate strong sense of the past. A classical structure where exemplary balance, blending, and note separation make for a deeply enjoyable wear. I think this might be Centrepiece by 4160 Tuesdays, but I’m not sure!" 

Estimated cost per 50 ml £110, 5/5

Alice: "Pleasant enough creamy floral opening. This creaminess really thickened up and I thought it was going to become cloying but then it just disappeared! Very familiar, almost ubiquitous. Smooth with some quality but felt like it was trying to be more expensive than it probably is?"

Estimated cost per 50 ml £40, 2/5

Holly: "Fresh, not very floral, woody, quite smooth and subtle. Rather bland nondescript – destined to appeal to the high street masses and offend no one ?"

Estimated cost per 50 ml £100, 3/5

Claire: "A polite and thoroughly pleasant citrus opening, with white florals. Nicely constructed though to about 2 hours then it changed drastically to sweet caramel vanilla with a little musk. I felt like they ran out of money to do the scent they wanted."
Estimated cost per 50 ml £30, 3/5

Scent No. 2 Lubin - Nuit de Longchamp EDP

RRP £85 for 50ml 

Clive: "Soft fruits, juicy, complex and faceted, quite busy opening, lots going on, cough syrupy, resins, Iris, florals. Different notes grabbing attention in the first 5 minutes. On skin the fragrance has integrity, the green and floral notes come forward, polite and balanced on skin. Very different to Card"

Estimated cost per 50 ml £45, 2/5

Alice: "A plush fruity blast that made me think of green and purple. Slight medicinal note stopped it being too sweet. Very enjoyable, if I thought it had good sillage (need to spray) and wasn’t too expensive would probably buy this for fun!"

Estimated cost per 50 ml £35, 3/5

Holly: "More floral than No1. Brighter, Rose. Smells like Agent Provocateur which I like."

Estimated cost per 50 ml £80, 4/5

Claire: "Very soft spicy oriental,with some Iris? This felt like it didn't want to offend, maybe I didn't put enough on, it didn't lift off my skin. Again I found this changed to basically just give of musk after 3 ish hours. Not a cheap musk but not a perfume."
Estimated cost per 50 ml £25, 2/5
 

Scent No 3 Grossmith - Shem el Nessim EDP

RRP £170 for 50 ml

Clive: "Vintage, old school, heliotrope floral, summer hay note, Habanita without the dirtier aspects, reminded me of French perfumery, vanilla, maybe labdanum, bold aldehydes. Like a Piguet or a Caron."

Estimated cost per 50 ml £120, 5/5

Alice: "I got nothing from this at all, inoffensive with no development. There was a smell there but what it was or how it made me feel? Nothing! Maybe its my skin’s fault but this didn’t even really appear on me or affect me on any level."

Estimated cost per 50 ml £20, 1/5

Holly: "Has a classy vibe - something by Chanel? Powdery, iris/orris root."

Estimated cost per 50 ml £150, 3/5

Claire: "Suspect this has Guerlain DNA but it's one I don't have! I'm getting jasmine Ylang Ylang, peach Vanilla, darlings… anyway I like it. Drydown smells more consistent with the rest of the fragrance. This got a compliment from the husband too."
Estimated cost per 50ml £60, 4/5

Scent No. 4  Mine, no name This was my 'placebo'. It's a floral chypre that I created solely using essential oils. I estimate it would cost me about £50 to £60 to make 50ml (there is a lot of rose and jasmine absolute in here) but a professional perfumer would obviously pay a lot less when buying ingredients in bulk quantities.

Clive: "Big bold camphor note, unctuous rich and tear inducing. Patchouli on steroids with a beautiful mint note, quite linear. Leans eastward."

Estimated cost per 50 ml £90, 4/5

Alice: "Lush and layered like an underwater iris, this wouldn't necessarily be my thing but I appreciated it a lot. Was scared it was going to end up disappearing into powder but that didn't happen and I happily kept sniffing my arm. My family thought it smelt really nice!"

Estimated cost per 50 ml £50, 3/5

Holly: "Very Dubai? Masculine? A heavy hitter with a urinous note and oud in there. Herbal, Resins. Best part was the dry down with Patchouli coming through."

Estimated cost per 50 ml £150, 2/5

Claire: "A style of perfumery I have trouble wearing. High in essential oils this is either a skilled artisan (cheers Claire!) selling for peanuts or someone like Bogue. The camphoraceous patchouli hits you hard and I didn't enjoy wearing it until an hour had passed, amazing lovely dry down. Quality ingredients!"
Estimated cost per 50 ml  "Hmmm, £15 or £100 per 50ml?", 3/5

Scent No. 5 Yves Rocher - Secrets D' Essences Voile D' Ambre EDP

RRP for 50ml £52 (which is nonsense as they always sell all of their scents with at least 40% off RRP, todays mail order price is £26.)

Clive: "Citrus lavender  tonka and almond with a hint of something that resembles pear drops, banana note. Gourmand, edible.   Beautiful tonka, Amber whilst retaining a sweet  benzoin note right to the end. The drydown is stunning!!"

Estimated cost per 50 ml £80, 4/5

Alice: "The most familiar smell! Which is probably why it was my favourite out of the whole bunch. There was something moorish about it and I even got some compliments! Quite linear but there was a depth to it I loved. Can’t wait to find out what this one is so I can explore it further…"

Estimated cost per 50ml £60, 4/5

Holly: "Weak, little impact,dilute. Hard to detect any notes in this wan insipid floaty floral."

Estimated cost per 50ml £50, 1/5

Claire: "This felt like a classic perfume. Herby citrus top, with some flowery and animalic benzoin showing through so you know the journey, felt creamy and rich. this got the most compliments too. Sadly this one leaked so I only got to wear it once!"
Estimated cost per 50ml £60, 5/5

Our winner

 

Score summary

Yves Rocher - Secrets D' Essences Voile D'Ambre 14/20 Winner

Moschino - Moschino Femme 13/20

Grossmith - Shem el Nessim 13/20

My unnamed scent 12/20

Lubin - Nuit de Longchamp 11/20

So, with only 3 points separating the winner from the loser, I can summarise that my panel, in this instance, agree with me. Superb! It also highlights the extremities of taste, ultimately suggesting that there is no such thing as a universally appealing scent. I will also reveal that the winner cost me nothing, it was a free gift when I spent £15 on some foundation.

If you want to find out more about Yves Rocher, you may enjoy this post featuring another scent from the Secret D' Essences line - Neroli. 

Enormous thanks to my panel for both their time and their honest opinions. It was greatly entertaining to read your responses. 

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Yves Rocher - Yria, Another Killer Cheapy & A Reader's Giveaway

Once again I’m writing about an Yves Rocher scent in the context of ‘killer cheapy’. I really don’t know how this company continue to make a profit as they sell superb quality fragrances, full of natural botanical ingredients, all ethically sourced and produced without skanking anyone in a far off land.

And they smell great.

One of the 55 hectares of fields farmed by Yves Rocher in France

The curious thing is that when you sign up to their website and start ordering, you receive increasingly tempting emails with offers that you cannot ignore. The more you order, the better the offers become. A few days ago, I received an email telling me that I could have ANYTHING free if I spent £15 on other products. Predictably, I went straight on to the website and put one of my favourite Yves Rocher scents (the dry incense and resinous oriental - Voile D’ Ambre) into the web-basket (value £49) and then added £15 worth of toiletries to make up the order. I’m going to buy shower gel and body lotions anyway so this basically means I have a free bottle of very pleasing perfume. I already have a nearly full bottle so this one can live under the bed in the fume crèche until the inevitable discontinuation occurs as seems to happen frequently.

My mum has a kitchen cupboard that I call her ‘nuclear winter’ cupboard. This is stocked with an endless supply of cans of Ambrosia Devon Custard. The excessive amount of custard is due to the fact she bulk buys it when it’s on offer at Morrison’s. She consumes it with wild abandon. She is a custard tart.

Should a nuclear crisis occur in Manchester, I shall be perfuming the contaminated shower water supply with my abundant collection of Yves Rocher’s almond and lily of the valley scented delights until my limbs begin to drop off or I mutate into a zombie.

I’m waffling. It’s because I’m always a bit overwhelmed in the face of a massive scrimping bargain.

Yria is sumptuous oriental/chypre hybrid. Not, as Fragrantica have labeled it, a fruity floral. It has an eighties shoulder pad feeling in similarity to classics such as Dior’s Dune or Guerlain’s Samsara. 

Yria would suit Joan Collins, vamp queen of the shoulder pad

Most importantly for me, it has a defined structure that begins and ends with entirely different notes. As you will know by now, I’m a pyramid lover who grows terrifically bored of fragrances that smell the same all the way through their wear. This is how it journeys on my skin:

It opens with an opulent combination of coriander and bergamot. These notes usually read as sparkling, fresh and vibrant but in Yria they have an unusually ‘oozy’ quality with a surprising depth. Don’t expect to be enlivened by the first spray, this is the heady whiff of drowsily sensual perfumery. They sit upon a cushion of creamy white floral notes (particularly noticeable as a gardenia/jasmine duet). The rose and lily of the valley notes are however not really discernable. This white florality is balanced with yet more ooziness from a base of sandalwood, tonka bean, labdanum, patchouli and vanilla, which deliver a traditional heady oriental sensation. Towards the end of it’s (lengthy) wear it reduces to an authentic vanilla that thankfully doesn’t make your teeth ache with cloying sugar.

Grown up glamour

It’s a rather unique fragrance but it does share a slight similarity to both the original Dior Addict and to the much-missed Midnight Poison (minus the rosy aspect). Most certainly a ‘grown-up’ scent that is distinctly more adult vamp than flirtatious teenager.

I paid £15 for my 50 ml bottle, a reduction from the rrp of £30.

Yves Rocher shops abound in mainland Europe. Here in the UK, you’ll have to risk a blind buy to join in the perfume fun. Fortunately, if you take advantage of the offers, it doesn’t really matter if you don’t like it. And of course, there is always Ebay for the mistakes. Here are my recommendations:

I love:

• Secret D’ Essences Voile D’Ambre - dry, powdery, incense and resins, marketed as feminine but easily unisex.
• Cedre Bleu - now discontinued, fabulous fresh cedar cologne if you can find it online, vile plastic blue bottle.
• Secret D’ Essences Neroli – bargainous - read my review by clicking here
• Muguet En Fleurs (Lily of The Valley on the UK website) – more of an eau fraiche than a perfume, a striking resemblance to Diorissimo but with a much lighter touch. Short lived but very pretty and natural.

I’m less impressed by:

• Comme Une Evidence – a sharp chypre that sells in enormous quantities in France, I find it rather sour.

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I am giving away samples from my bottles of Yria and Voile D’ Ambre for a lucky reader to try. Sadly, only in the UK due to our daft postal laws. To enter, please leave a comment below or at the facebook page with your thoughts on ‘killer cheapies’. Closing date 30th June 2014.

A Humorous Look At The Trauma of Discontinuation And A Review Of Yves Rocher, Nature Millenaire

The writing of this post began on Sunday Evening..

We possessed years of shared experiences, moments of euphoric happiness; we ate chips from a paper wrap on the seafront in Whitby, danced all night with the trannies at legendary Leeds night club – Vague, we camped and hiked in the verdant hills of North Yorkshire, lost time together in the debauchery of the fields of Glastonbury, got drunk and sang along theatrically to Kate Bush records and cosied up close in the baltic cold of my tatty flat. Then you left me.. and I can’t even remember your name.

The melancholy of discontinuation (possibly) by Picasso 

I speak not of a man, but of the fragrant hole left behind by my favourite discontinued scent. The scent was a kind of aromatic body spritz by the French natural skincare company – Decleor. It smelt of licorice, spice and citrus, I‘ve spent years trying and failing to remember it’s name. This happened some 8 or 9 years ago and the only fragrance that has offered a ghost of the memory has been Caron’s Eau de Reglisse (which is extraordinarily beautiful in it’s own right). 

Which brings me to the frantic and emotional search that is the phenomena of ‘hunt my beloved discontinued scent’, a task undertaken by thousands of fume junkies across the world. Really, we should give up and accept the fact that it’s gone. After all, it’s not like having a limb blown off on a peacekeeping army mission or the sad demise of years amassed in a loving relationship. I did spend a few (hopeless) years talking to (clueless) Decleor ladies in department stores, I even wrote several times to Decleor directly. The trouble is that my bottle ran out about a year after it’s demise from the shop shelves, I was too late.

It’s perceivable that it didn’t sell very well given that it was a rather quirky product in a mass market line. I guess that’s why it disappeared. What is surprising though is the departure of scents such as Dior’s Midnight Poison without a subsequent resurrection. Take a peak at the prices that this scent draws on Ebay. People will pay a lot of money for even a half full bottle which might have gone off languishing in it’s own headspace for too many years. Dior must know of it’s hardcore of obsessive fans, so why don’t they bring it back?

Yesterday I arranged a swop with a fellow Fragrantica member. In return for my unloved Annick Goutal’s Vanille Exquise (an example of why I should never blind buy from a house that I’m not enamored by in the first place) she has promised me a slightly used bottle of Yves Rocher’s Nature Millenaire and a few other goodies. I’ve never smelt this iconic discontinued scent but the notes sound splendid, a highly natural exercise in the woody oriental genre. It was authored by Olivier Cresp, who ironically also created the long lost Midnight Poison, amongst other mainstream giants such as Angel and niche darlings Olfactive Studio’s Flash Back.

Whilst arranging our swop, I googled the scent and checked out it’s reviews on Fragrantica. I was amazed to find that there is a Facebook group dedicated to trying to tempt Yves Rocher to re-release it!  Additionally, it’s Fragrantica page revealed ardent fans bemoaning it’s departure and sharing tips on other perfumes that smell a little like it in a desperate attempt to recreate the sensation. It was well loved..  

As I write this post it’s Sunday. I’ll return when I receive the parcel. Oh the anticipation.!

Today (Wednesday):

It’s here.

I peg it home from work via the Royal Mail depot. Entering the flat, I abandon my usual routine of coat off, boots off, heating on, hands cleansed of teenage student effluence and kettle switched to ‘desperate for a brew’ mode. Instead, I grab my trusty Stanley knife and settle myself on the sofa in readiness to gouge at the mass of brown packing tape. Three perfumes are in the fortress like box, Nature Millenaire, Donna Karran’s Essence Labdanum and another Yves Rocher creation that I’ve owned before, Vanille Noire.

My new brown scent collection

Of course I grab Nature Millenaire first.

The bottle is in great condition, with only 1 or 2ml missing I am hopeful that it won’t have turned. After all, this thing could be between 8 to 13 years old and vintage fumes are decidedly risky.  With a significantly increased heart beat, I offer up my wrist and take a lengthy indulgent spray..

Crikey, this juice is strange! I immediately understand two things; firstly, why it was destined for discontinuation being clearly far too odd to sell to a mass market clientele on the high streets of Europe, secondly, I appreciate why it has a such a dedicated following of heart broken fans. It is utterly unique, like nothing I have ever smelt before.

I rather like the moulded glass bottle

As I write I am at the ‘four hours in’ point. The first two or three hours have been arduous because it reeks of benzoin. Although this would be a state of bliss for many oriental lovers, benzoin is a difficult note for me. I own a bottle of pure benzoin tincture which I have used in my perfumery experiments. Benzoin is a key ingredient in orientals, providing a stable, slightly spicy and warming base note in similarity to vanilla but less obviously sweet. It appears as an anchor in a great many perfumes and (playing a supporting role) you are unlikely to smell it with absolute clarity. Alike jasmine, it’s an Odiferess bogey man. I don’t mind either of them hovering in background far away from me, but if they get up close it’s an olfactory terror. Remember ‘Anusol’? This benzoin rich antiseptic pile ointment was coined by the beauty press as ‘the greatest cure for under eye bags’ in the nineties. At risk of sounding coarse, hell I’ll do it anyway, benzoin whiffs of bum cream..

Ignoring the fact that (for me) it borders on the vile, this is a startlingly original niche perfume. Behind the great wodge of dominant benzoin lies a slightly woody note, which I interpret as cedar. I sense a little cinnamon too but benzoin itself shares similarities with this note. As it progresses a dirty musk and a leathery labdanum note appear. At this point I’ve moved into Etat Libre D’ Orange territory, where I smell much too close to feral. As I write my last words of this review, what remains is a soft ghost of the above combined with a distinct tonka/coumarin note. I feel less disgusted now but I’m going to scrub hard before I write my conclusion.

It won’t wash off. To those Fragranticans who have stated that it has poor lasting poor, you are wrong! I won’t be keeping this bottle. I’ll be swopping or selling it to a new owner, hopefully someone who has spent the last 8 years trying to get hold of a bottle and will melt with pleasure at the delight of it’s skanky embrace. It could potentially appeal to those who enjoy Hermessence Ambre Narguile or PG’s Tonkamande. Although it doesn’t smell like either of them at the outset, it does project (slight) similarities to aspects of both towards the end.

My swop wasn’t a total disaster as the Donna Karan Essence Labadnum is a bonkers beast! A bottle of incense and leather as unsettlingly peculiar as it is magnificent. This will be an another story for Odiferess..

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