Vetiver Extraordinaire (Editions de Parfums Frederic Malle)

Vetiver Extraordinaire is easily my favorite from Malle. Special education workers use the phrase "mainstreamed" when referring to youngsters who possess skills that allow them to function socially and productively in normal society. In VE, Ropion took the limitations of a very dry, rooty, "niche-like" vetiver, and mainstreamed them. From initial application to the far drydown, his clever combination of saffron, bergamot, neroli, pink pepper, cedar, and vetiver is a pleasure to wear, always easy on the nose, and quite fertile in quality and complexity. It is detailed, enough to yield variables in its balance between dominant and subordinate notes per wear. It is also dimensional; VE does not just sit on skin. Ropion managed to make his vetiver fizz, as if the dew between fronds was carbonated. The effect is "in your face" and alive.

Last summer I wrote about the term "soapy" as it applies to perfume, and described the effect in a few notable fragrances. Soapiness is a personal preference of mine when it comes to fragrances, especially masculines, as it's a sort of style that always smells at least somewhat clean and fresh. It doesn't matter what notes are used. If they're representative of something in nature, closely and smoothly blended, and evocative of cleanliness, they're going to come across as "soapy" to me. Vetiver Extraordinaire reads as being noticeably sudsy, with a brightness and freshness commonly found in any one of your better bar soaps. Still, its close blending of spicy-green notes is surprisingly legible. The smooth, almost transparent quality found in many soapy frags is absent here, with a finely textured woodiness (vetiver, saffron, cedar, myrrh) stealing the show instead. 

Perhaps the only thing I could cite as a possible flaw is also, ironically, the very thing that makes VE enjoyable - its easiness. There are no fun challenges to be had in deciphering VE, no unique "niche" characteristics beyond its obviously catering to worshippers of all things vetiver (and perhaps all things Safranal). Its pencil-shaving cedar note is reminiscent of a slew of woody designer scents, including Gucci PH, and yeah, I'd say this is another example of Iso E Super used brilliantly, but at its niche price, I could understand hesitating a little to put your good money down on this pearl. Ultimately though, VE is head and shoulders above many of the woody designer fragrances I've worn and owned over the years, and I definitely prefer it to Guerlain Vetiver, which is still a great scent, and the enduring standard for vetiver.

French Lover (Frederic Malle)

French Lover has been on my radar for one reason: it's by Pierre Bourdon. I happen to be a Bourdon fan, and expected this Malle perfume to smell amazing. Pretty much everything by Bourdon smells amazing, from his stoic Cool Water, to his variable Féminité du Bois, and with the exception of his relatively unknown work for Romea D'Ameor, Faberlic, and Ulric de Varens, French Lover marks an endpoint in his career, the last of his "blockbuster" fragrances. It's hard to say that anything niche could be blockbuster, but I was around and paying attention in 2007 and 2008, when this Malle scent was brand new. I'm here to remind everyone of just how excited they were when it hit the world stage. It wound up being one of Malle's most successful fragrances, something that put the brand on the map, and for a short time was a basenotes and blogosphere darling. People love this stuff. They should - it smells good.

I happen to like it, but not love it. It reads as a very minimalist composition on my rather dry skin, a simple combination of notes, namely bergamot, black pepper, angelica, vetiver, and cedar. It smells wispy and transparent - not what I expected - and focuses its energies on vetiver and cedar in the drydown, losing most of the astringent citrus and peppery angelica after an hour. For a good five or six hours, French Lover is a slightly grassy cedar, loosely resembling stale cigar smoke, and at the six hour mark it fades away. This tends to happen with popular niche scents that I try for myself - the expectations are high, in large part because of the hype. Then I wear the fragrance, and inevitably think to myself, "Okay, this is very nice, but if it were by Ralph Lauren and sold at Macy's, it would already be forgotten." Ditto for French Lover.

Une Rose (Editions de Parfums Frederic Malle)

Roses, it seems, are not red. They're lust, and not just any lust. They're neon lust. Or at least that's how they're supposed to smell, according to Edouard Fléchier. Une Rose, his 2003 entry into the esteemed catalog of Malle's Editions, boasts the lustiest rose accord I have ever encountered, second only to Tea Rose by The Perfumer's Workshop. 

Sniffing it off my hand, the second of two techniques is apparent here - there was no obvious headspace technology employed, but rather an enhanced impression of old-fashioned rose oil absolute. A similar tone is struck by Annick Goutal's beautiful Rose Absolue. This was how perfumers used to express roses in their works, blending precious concentrated distillations of thousands of flowers, enhanced only by complementary flower oils and aldehydes. Une Rose fits the general scent profile of an antediluvian rose perfume, but amping rose's natural rubber using phthalate-like synthetics loops the fragrance back into the twenty-first century.

Few rose perfumes defy the dreaded "soliflore" label, but Une Rose seems automatically transcendent. At first, everything is simple. The perfume hits skin in a dulcet pooling of pure rose, free of saccharine fruits and musks. A few minutes pass, and this semi-sweet essence unfolds its scented Pelargonium capitatum and synthetic rubber notes. 

The complexity of the floral components allows several olfactory illusions to come into play: first is a distinctly quaffable wine accord, with emphasis on drier Chianti grapes of the Sangiovese variety. Then the lush interplay of fruits and waxy roses elicits a self-effacing tension with the rubber enhancers employed by Fléchier. His goal with Une Rose was evidently to capitalize on the plastic aftertaste true rose oils leave behind, and here he's done a magnificent job of it. From the heart phase to the base's afterglow, the perfume deepens from lust, to fire brick, to burnt carmine, and beyond. 

I find myself imagining what peering into Une Rose would be like if it were an old house; someone beautiful and without her clothes would be beckoning from the shadows of an obscene room, somewhere south of indecently.

Une Rose is colorful but not sanguine, and has a certain je ne sais quoi about it that makes it both daring and darkly alluring. The plummy fruit notes, combined with a bitter green rose and what smells like a dusty record make for quite the treat. For a so-called soliflore, this has a lot of character. It's utterly unisex and works fine on a man, and on my skin the rubber accord really takes center stage. It makes me think of sex, and perhaps that's what Flechier was aiming for. Une Rose is en fuego!