Unless you haven’t
read a perfume blog for a year, you’re aware that I’ve worked with Bertrand
Duchaufour, so obviously any review I write of his work must take that fact
into account. But since Paris under a thick coat of snow, I couldn’t resist
reaching for a tropical scent I hadn’t written up yet. So there you go. Calypso is like so...
Aurore Nomade is an oddball. The top note,
carambola (aka starfruit) spells out its whole program in French: carambole designates the fruit, but the
verb caramboler means “to carom” (cue Merriam-Webster: “a shot in billiards in which the cue ball strikes each of two
object balls”).
And that’s pretty much what happens in the notes: tropical
slammed into mineral, hot dunked into wet.The scent, launched as part of The
Different Company’s “Collection Excessive”, seems like a different take on the
idea sketched out in Mon Numéro 6 at
L’Artisan Parfumeur, which blended sulfur-tinged exotic fruit (mango, guava,
passion fruit) with white flowers (tuberose and jasmine sambac), indolic notes
amped up until they give off the smell of raindrops on heated tarmac, with
crackling ozone effects.
Aurore Nomade haunts the same tropical landscapes,
maintaining the tough mineral backdrop but toppling the ozonic note of N°6 over
into aquatic territory, with melony facets amping up the banana note in ylang.
It also caroms into Duchaufour’s boozier palette with rum, cinnamon and clove,
creating such contrast that the scent manages to convey both heat and coolness.
The result smells like an exotic
cocktail splashed on sun-heated asphalt: there’s something tough and playful
about it, teetering on the edge of olfactive disaster. An oddly compelling
hybrid of tropical, aquatic and spicy that could be Duchaufour’s badass
mercenary answer to another, distinctly tamer and more literal-minded tropical
cocktail that came out in 2010… Not that he’d tell.
Illustration: album
cover for Calypso
is like so, another tropical oddball by
another badass character, Robert Mitchum.
I like your idea of crossing seasons, which you also did for one of you quarterly posts last year. Manoumalia is another tropical scent that can stand up to cold weather, and I've enjoyed sleeping with Organza Jasmine 2007 recently.
RépondreSupprimerSorry for leaving off my name, that was nozknoz re Manoumalia. ~~nozknoz
RépondreSupprimerNozknoz, thanks for breaking the thunderous silence! ;-) I don't think Aurore Nomade made a lot of waves, I just found it to be a compelling weirdo but never got round to reviewing it until now (hence the counter-seasonal programming).
RépondreSupprimerI do agree Manoumalia, despite its tropical inspiration, is dark and hefty enough to withstand cold weather.
I'd like to try Aurore Nomade, but I'm not seeing it yet on LuckyScent or Surrender to Chance, my usual sample sources. We'll probably have tropical heat and humidity again by the time I get to try it.
RépondreSupprimerIt's our coldest weather in four years here in the Washington, DC, area, and zero humidity, so I'm enjoying some heavy-hitting 80s classics. ~~nozknoz
True, I haven't seen it on Luckyscent either... it's freezing cold in Paris as well (it snowed for three days non-stop last weekend, which is highly unusual). My top 10 of winter is coming out tomorrow, leaning hard on sandalwood. Hell on skin, isn't it? And that's from a Canadian!
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