Perfumes I've Loved - Part Two

 Continuing my trawl back through perfumes I've loved  - I flirted with various floral perfumes as well as my favourite chypres:  Diorissimo and Champs Elysees (my Guerlain habit again) to name a couple. Champs Elysees is, like so many lovely scents, hard to find now, but it used to be readily and not too expensively available in those cut price toiletry chains. 

Another Guerlain favourite, until they stopped producing it, was one of their Aqua Allegoria range (gorgeous bottles too!) - Ylang and Vanille - a lovely, light scent with something of the hippy sixties about it. 

For a while, I wore Lanvin's Arpege - first produced in 1927. I still love it but it has to be the vintage version: flowery, powdery, green, a very classy scent that sits well on my skin and that comes in a beautiful black bottle.

That's another thing you need to know about scents. Something that suits one person may not suit you at all. You need to wear it and give it time. Don't be in too much of a hurry.

More recently, Aldi's Jo Malone Dupes have given me a lot of fun. I have them, and sometimes wear them, but they're not my favourites, although their room fragrances are lovely. I love neroli and M & S did a number of genuine Italian orange blossom scents for a while, but they've cut back on their range. Very fortuitously I discovered that their Neroli Riviera - still available and not too expensive - not only smells lovely, but keeps the Scottish midgies away too! 

My current day to day favourite is Calandre by Paco Rabanne. Launched in 1969, it's like nothing else. Fragrantica , my go-to site for perfumes, describes it as a 'floral aldehyde'  and goes on to describe it:  'Top notes are Aldehydes, Green Notes and Bergamot; middle notes are Rose, Lily-of-the-Valley, Orris Root, Hyacinth, Geranium and Jasmine; base notes are Oakmoss, Vetiver, Musk, Sandalwood and Amber' which sounds like a complex mish mash but is, essentially, quite heavenly! 

It's an evocative scent for me because it was given to me many years ago by the mother of a lovely Catalan lad who stayed us for a couple of summers while he improved his English and learned about the family business. She send a parcel of gifts afterwards, among which was a bottle of Calandre - I recently rediscovered it and was taken right back to what was a very happy time. 

That's what scent does. It can take you back in time, or sometimes, magically, into somebody else's life. 

Useful for a writer.

Finally - my all-time favourite is Guerlain's L'Heure Bleue. The Blue Hour. 

I first smelled this at a concert when I was in my early 20s. An older woman, stylish, elegant, drifted past me on the arm of a famous conductor, and left behind a faint trace of the most wonderful, exotic perfume I had ever smelled. I had no idea what it was. Many years later, I found it. Guerlain's own website calls it the 'fragrance of suspended time' and so it is. Dating from 1912, it is evocative of 'that time of day when day embraces night and silence fully envelopes the world ... a moment of stillness and grace tinted with deep blue.'

If I could afford it, I'd wear it all the time. Instead, I hoard my vintage bottles and use it sparingly. We had a friend, no longer with us, who - whenever he visited us - would ask me to fetch down a bottle of this scent so that he could smell it! I love it so much that I wrote a poem about it. I've posted the poem online before, but I'll post it again. Watch this space.

 

                             

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