Violette Eau de Toilette (Molinard)

Molinard is a house whose name echoes my own; I find the "Miller" of Italy to be quite the interesting fragrance house. Fragonard, Molinard, and Galimard are all Grasse firms whose lineage stretches back into the 18th and 19th centuries, with Molinard citing 1849 on the purple boxes of its "Les Fleurs" range. As a violet fan, I've always wanted to own the now-discontinued Violette EDT, and finally got a chance to purchase an unsprayed specimen in its "tombstone" bottle, brand-new old stock, still factory cello-wrapped. 

Les Fleurs Violette was first released in 1910, then re-released in 1994 as the fragrance reviewed here, alongside a handful of other floral reissues (a couple of which were released in 1993), including Rose, Mimosa, Muguet, Lavande, and Jasmin, with Fleur de Figuer arriving very late to the party in 1999. Looking at these, I really wonder what their angle was. The 1990s was largely about spiced fruitchouli/ambery things, yet Molinard reverted back to very spare and simple Victorian and Edwardian soliflores, eschewing the bombastic, Angel-fueled trends of the time for a demure sensibility more suited to lace-collared dowager duchesses than leather-chokered glam-rock ingénues. Violette is exactly that: demure. It's as shy as it gets, with little more than a bright and semisweet Parma violet note, the requisite sharpness of violet petrol, and a soft, subtle, and very powdery base of some understated white musk. The whole affair is direct, dry, and one-note. There isn't even violet leaf to add any aquatic or spicy tones. It's 100% chalky-petrol violet flower, with only the shadow of a hint of juicy sweetness in the first two minutes. 

I'm not gonna lie: I expected more. But then again, I didn't expect very much more, because I wanted a pure violet soliflore in this conservative style. I'm not even sure my expectation being crushed by reality is a bad thing; what more could this kind of fragrance do? Yes, my $10 bottle of Violetas Francesas cologne smells pretty much identical, at a lower concentration, but if I splash that on and follow it with a healthy spritzing of Molinard Violette, I'm about as violet as a violet-lover can be. Yardley's April Violets offers coy suggestions of stone fruits and watery violet leaf with a tingle of botanical pepper, and feels downright Rococo in comparison, but if I'm in the mood for that kind of violet non-soliflore, I know where to go, and it isn't here. Like Yardley, Molinard's material quality isn't mind-blowing, but it's very good, and maybe a little better. Its ionones and irones are delicately balanced upon their powdery undercarriage, which says "competent perfumer." Longevity is 12+ hours. You want a solid, no-games, no-frills violet? This is it. You can still find a few bottles on eBay for not insane prices if you apply yourself, so I recommend looking there first, and/or perusing the frag-forum swap boards. 

April Violets (Modern Classics Version, Yardley)

April Violets is getting reviewed in June. Sue me. 

I wanted the vintage version of this one, but Yardley is plagued by a downmarket vibe that makes spending $100 on a bottle feel wrong enough to not want to do it, so I shaved a zero off and grabbed the "Modern/Contemporary Classics" version instead. 

My bottle is the "90% Naturally Derived Ingredients" formula. On Yardley's website, the copy on the newest bottles reads "94% Natural" because I guess British regulators asked that the company push their claims to the absolute limits. Add "Vegan & Cruelty Free" on there, and you can hear Keir Starmer fart with every depress of the atomizer. 

It's no secret that I'm a lover of violets. The problem is, there's a dearth of violet fragrances on the market, and finding a daily-driver violet is no small task. My violet collection is sadly limited to Grey Flannel, Aoud Violet, Love in Black, Fahrenheit, Violetas Francesas, Royal Violets, Tres Nuit, and now April Violets, and of those, really only Grey Flannel, Fahrenheit, Violetas Francesas, and Love in Black are true dyed-in-the-wool violets. 

There's a reluctance among manufacturers to produce violet fragrances because ionones are notoriously difficult on the nose, sometimes overpowering the senses, but more often fading into anosmia-induced invisibility, which then deceives the wearer into believing the perfume is off. I can see this as a problem for April Violets, which smells sturdy enough after first spray (brisk violet leaf and apple, with hints of peach, mimosa, and green leaves), but after five minutes the ionones and natural violet leaf extract take over, and the composition flickers in and out of perceptibility. 

With that said, I can smell it if I focus on it, and it smells great. Delicate greens, pert fruits that aren't juvenilely sweet, and a tender, transparent violet bouquet against a dewy backdrop of aquatic violet leaf—a sanguine purple study in olfactory watercolors. I've seen reviewers bitch about it being "harsh," which raises the question: do you people also think deep tissue massages are harsh? A watery floral that lasts four hours with zero projection and fades into literally nothing is harsh?

If so, then Fahrenheit is obscenely abusive, and Grey Flannel is 60 grit sandpaper for the nose. I can't think of a gentler scent in my catalog, which says a lot, since I'm always seeking meditative green fragrances like this one. Bet it's a hit in Japan!

Cancelling GoDaddy, The Worst Blog Hosting Company in the World, & Starting From Scratch

I'll make this brief; I'm no longer using GoDaddy as my web hosting servicer, and am cancelling frompyrgos.com in that iteration. Rather than go on a long ramble about my problems with them, I'll make it as short and sweet as possible. The reason I'm cancelling my deal with them is simple: GoDaddy broke my trust. 

I spent months trying to configure their absolutely pathetic blog features to allow mobile and desktop users the smoothest experience. All I wanted was three pages: a home page (they couldn't even manage that), a "reviews by brand" page that was extensively linked to each individual review that I've written, and a blog page that simply linked directly to GoDaddy's awful-looking blog, which is only customizable three ways, none of which are user friendly. This was too difficult for GoDaddy, and after spending months creating links on the "reviews by brand" page, one day they just randomly erased all of those links, and erased my entire blog. Even on the dashboard, they simply said, "your blog hasn't been published yet," when it was published almost a year ago. Truly insane. 

One can argue that I should've called customer service to straighten it out, but no. I'm not straightening it out. If they can erase months of work with a technical glitch, a random screw-up, for no clear reason, straight out of the blue, then I see no point in continuing my work with their hosting service. I'm not going to spend another month toiling to make my blog functional (it shouldn't be that difficult), only to have another random glitch come up and erase everything again. With GoDaddy's virtually nonexistent blogging features, its non-intuitive creative dashboard that takes hours to figure out (sometimes for things as measly as simple links), and its incessant glitchiness, I see GoDaddy's expensive hosting service as a liability, and have no further interest in doing business with them. 

I'm done.

As I mentioned in earlier posts on this topic, my goal was to cobble together a modernized blog that at least got readers to my content without confusion or technical issues, after which I would eventually utilize GoDaddy's rather good merchant features to promote my own products. While I haven't ruled them out as a hosting service for my future commercial endeavors, attaching the blog to them has proven to be a complete and utter waste of time, and I strongly discourage anyone from using them as a writing platform. I can see now why Blogger and Wordpress are so highly regarded in this space—after 16 years, no problems with frompyrgos.blogspot.com, not even a single issue. Wordpress has just as good a reputation, if not even better, and I'm considering transferring my content over to them, but will weigh my options. 

Meanwhile, continue enjoying the content here uninterrupted, as I will continue posting, and will keep you updated as to Plan B for using a more 21st-century site, something attractive and user-friendly. Of chief interest to me is to find a site that is mobile friendly, and I suspect Wordpress will be the place for that . . .