Claire Pettibone
I have been living in sunny Los Angeles for a couple of years now, and this city never ceases to surprise me with its hidden charms. There’s a curious building next door to Scent Bar that I’ve noticed every time I’ve been, and I’ve only just discovered its story today.
Hollywood is full of adorable character houses that make it seem as though a tornado scattered miniature castles, ranches, and even whole Dutch villas intact across the area, like Dorothy’s house into the crazy Oz that is Los Angeles. Apparently, according to Claire Pettibone, the bridal designer whose flagship storefront now inhabits the space, this tiny little castle was built in 1928 in the Late Gothic Revival and Romanesque style for the muralist Anthony Heinsbergen. The interior is really something! It’s worth checking out the gallery on their website. Her bridal designs are an absolute treasure as well.
Upon further inspection, I discovered a surprise inside the fountain pictured in the front.
Scent Bar
A quick note of praise for Scent Bar, where I spent a delightful Sunday afternoon today. If you didn’t know, Scent Bar is the storefront for Lucky Scent, a remarkable reso
urce for imported and niche line perfumes that you simply can’t find most places. They also sell samples on the online store. I always stop and smell the roses along the sidewalk before going in.
Every one of the staff is respectful of your solitude if you want to peruse the choices for an eon on your own, and just as happy to chat about fragrance for a half hour and show you everything in the shop. I always do both. Steve even sent me home today with a list of the stations they played on Pandora.
I could write a novel about each visit, but today I wanted to showcase one of the new lines they have in.
Oriza L. Legrand
Today I had the pleasure of checking out the Oriza L. Legrand line, new to Scent Bar this spring. According to the Lucky Scent website, this line has been around since 1720. I’ve never heard of it, and I’ve been a fragrance nerd for about fifteen years. At the risk of putting my foot in my mouth, I wonder if this is yet another line that erroneously claims an historic legacy that’s iffy at best. The fragrances are incredible and the bottles are exquisite, so I will forgive them if in fact their claim to legacy is embellished.
The olfactory commonality the perfumes in this line share is an impression of loads of real, natural raw materials and a bright quality that’s not muddled like most newer fragrance lines. These smell complex. If most modern fragrances are different smells blended into a smooth mousse, this line leaves its components intact with their raw, natural textures.
One of the things I enjoy about going to Scent Bar is trying fragrances without preconceived notions of their notes. That way my nose can work without competing with my imagination.
All of these reviews were written blind, before I read the official copy, with no idea of the prices or materials used.
Relique d’Amour
100 ml ($165)
Blind Sniff:
Relique d’Amour smells to me like fresh pond water. I smell absolutely none of the notes described in perfumery as “aquatic” or “ozonic,” which refer to synthetic materials responsible for “fresh” scents like Acqua Di Gio, Cool Water, and L’eau d’Issey, which smell nothing like water to me anyhow. No, this is the smell of ponds and slow streams in a lush, green wooded area, with subtle wafts of algae, wildflowers, and damp earth. This is a scent for a water nymph.
Listed notes:
Fresh Herbs, pine, powdery notes, white lily, pepper, oak, incense, myrrh, elemi, musk, moss, waxed wood, woody notes, pepper.
Reve d’Ossian
100 ml ($165)
Blind Sniff:
Frankincense often smells like fresh ginger to me, and I imagine that’s what gives this exhaltant fragrance a bright, spicy, hot-cold ginger kick. Not candied or medicinal, this reminds me of the warm scent that fills my home when I toss a big hunk of fresh ginger in a pan of boiling water (a great cold remedy), only more sparkling and alive. With its heat and its coolness, I think this would suit the dead heat of summer as well as chilly fall and winter nights. Less subtle and candied than Serge Lutens 5 O’Clock Gingembre, and far spicier than the cool Origins Ginger Essence, I think Reve d’Ossian would be my first choice for a ginger fragrance.
Listed Notes:
Frankincense, pine wood, cinnamon, benzoin, tonka bean, opopanax, tolu balm, sandalwood, leather, labdanum, amber, musks.
Oeillet Louis XV
100 ml ($165)
Blind Sniff:
I honestly didn’t know what to make of this oeillet, and if it didn’t have the French for carnation in its name I’m not sure I would have known that this was a carnation fragrance. Other carnations smell like a dark spicy rose with touches of cinnamon and greenish geranium and a slightly oily quality. This one is far lighter and more sparkling than that. I’m sure this has a very high concentration of natural materials. Most floral compounds take on a much more rooty, earthy quality than their cleaner, smoother synthetic counterparts, and this one is no exception, but its earthiness lifts, rather than grounds it. This smells natural enough to be something Louis XV might conceivably have worn, but not something I recognize as well with a nose acclimated to more synthetic perfumery.
Listed Notes:
Pink pepper, mandarin, white carnation, carnation absolute, white orchid, iris, rose, spicy clove, rice powder, white musk, white honey, woody notes.
Chypre Mousse
100 ml ($165)
Blind Sniff:
Heavy on the sandalwood! At first sniff, I could tell this has real, high quality sandalwood. My nose picks up on a very oily, nutty quality from sandalwood that’s very similar to freshly ground roasted peanuts, and I can tell immediately when a fragrance has it. After that, I get a bit of something like smooth hay and flour – maybe acacia, and then fennel, and then a rich smell of ink, which is a bit salty and deep, and otherwise very hard to describe if you’ve never filled a fountain pen or replaced a typewriter ribbon. But it’s an inky smell in keeping with the traditional mousse de saxe accords popular in the early half of the 20th century, and which is still present to a somewhat corrupted degree in Caron’s classic Nuit de Noël.
Listed Notes:
Wild mint, clary sage, wild fennel, green shoots, oakmoss, galbanum, angelica, fern, wild clover, violet leaves, vetiver, pine needles, oak moss, mushroom, humus, roasted chestnut leather, labdanum.
**After reading the notes, I wonder if what I thought was sandalwood is the roasted chestnut.
Deja le Printemps
100 ml ($165)
Blind Sniff:
Sigh. Late Spring in New England. I’m sure that much of France has the same flora as New England, because the French seem to be nostalgic about the same flowers as North Eastern Americans are. Lilac for one, is a May tradition in both regions, with lilac festivals celebrating hundreds of heirloom varieties cultivated over the centuries. But I digress. Deja Printemps has the same pond water smell as Relique d’Amour, but also an orchestra of spring blossoms that smell not like a bouquet of flowers, but like the lush air on a warm spring day in full bloom, carrying the pollen of thousands of flowers along with fresh water and new leaf buds. This really smells like the real thing, not like an artist’s interpretation of it. I was so carried away, I felt disoriented. Nothing in this desert climate smells like that, and it really took me back to my hometown in Massachusetts.
Listed Notes:
Mint, orange blossom, daisy, fig leaves, clover, grass cutting, lily of the valley, galbanum, musk, vetiver, cedar, moss.
Foin Fraichment Coupe
100 ml ($125)
Blind Sniff:
Wow. This is a pressed half lemon, rind and all, muddled with wintergreen leaves, freshly picked. If there was ever a natural, refreshing summer fragrance, this is it.
Listed Notes:
Angelique, star anise & wild mint, clover, sainfoin, new-mown-hay & clary sage, dry hay, white musk, cockle & ivy.
Horizon:
100 ml ($165)
Blind Sniff:
At first sniff, Horizon was very hard for me to comprehend. It’s a huge red bouquet, and I couldn’t tease the notes out. But as it settled, it became a warm, somewhat sweet cinnamon and clove oil scent that reminded me of old fashioned potpourri and the clove oil you would rub on your gums to numb a toothache. Of course it’s much more refined than that, but with my associations, I’m not sure this is one I could appreciate.
Listed Notes:
Bitter orange, tangerine, dried rose, cognac, aromatic tobacco leaves, cocoa roasted almonds, old oak, patchouli, benzoin, amber, tobacco, vanilla, honey, soft leather.
Muguet Fleuri
100 ml ($125)
Blind Sniff:
I’ve smelled quite a few lily-of-the-valley scents in my day, as it was my mother’s favorite when I was a little girl. Especially with the new restrictions in place, most lily of the valley scents come off with bitter, sharp, or ozonic qualities that make these scents really unpleasant to me. Muguet Fleuri’s interpretation is quite true to the flower, and has none of the offending qualities that turn me off to the note. This is actually quite charming, and if you love lily-of-the-valley and are unsatisfied with reformulations of fragrances that showcase the note, this is definitely one to try.
Listed Notes:
Green leaves, wild grass, wild muguet, galbanum, angelica, violet leaves, muguet des bois, lily of the valley, oakmoss.
Jardins d’Armide
100 ml ($165)
Blind Sniff:
This one is another bouquet that’s hard to tease apart, and that just has a character all its own. The most distinctive notes that I pick up in it are something like anise seed and maybe acacia, which gives it a slight floury almond scent. It’s a complex scent that I don’t think I could do justice to on first sniff, so this is just an impression. Like everything else in the line, the quality of materials makes this far more than the sum of its parts.
Listed Notes:
Rose, orange blossom, iris powder, florentine Iris, wild violet, wisteria, carnation from India, honey, almond, tonka bean, musk.
All listed notes from Lucky Scent
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