Tea for Two - l'Artisan Parfumeur

Tea just has to be one of the most comfortable and versatile scent notes around. It can be light and dainty, perfect with crustless cucumber sandwiches. Green tea goes from tasting like lightly toasted rice towards tasting like whole bales of hay, begging for something intensly sweet to cut through the astringency. And there is smoky tea, black tea, spicy tea, the list goes on and on. And, weirdly enough, most of them can, at some point, be detected while wearing Tea for Two.

First thing that happens when applying is a huge blast of smoky Lapsang Souchong. It's very intense and smoky but somewhere behind that smoke one can detect a balancing gormand note. To me it smells like biscuits. Dry, not very sweet, but with a smattering of vanilla added for flavour.

After an hour the smoke has faded and now we're having a very robust green tea. It tastes strongly of hay and unlit tobacco. The gormand note has also evolved, it's still sweet but it's also spicier now. Mabye there is gingerbread served with the tea?

Fast forward two more hours and most of the hay is gone. Now I get more of a regular, good quality black tea. It's served hot and a teaspoon of honey has slowly melted and been stirred into the cup.

At the extreme drydown all the tea and spices seem to meld together, forming a cup of nice, sweet Indian chai. The perfect warm, comfy ending of an intense day


I percieve Tea for Two more as a olfactorian recording of a series of nice moments than a classical perfume. It's amazing how it manages to morph from one cup of tea to the next. The notes seem to  swirl one around the other and I'm very intrigued how the sweetness first seem belong to the gourmand half of the scent, then in the tea. Same with the spices, first they go with the cake but thy end up in the chai. And its's not just an "interesting" scent, it smells very good indeed. I love it on cold winter days when you'd rather stay cuddled up under a blanket. And it's even better on days that I've anticipated as going to be rather bad. It's like carrying around a warm cuddly teddy bear, nudging you through any challenges out there that you'd rather not have known anything about.


Official notes from l'Artisan: ginger, smoked tea, honey

Notes from Fragrantica:
Top: bergamot, star anise, tea
Heart: cinnamon, ginger, spices
Base: honey, vanilla

Created by Olivia Giacobetti

Foto: http://old-photos.blogspot.com

Cucumbers and horses - "Celadon, a Velvet Green" from DSH Perfumes

It's nothing new that I've been seriously into vegetable notes this summer and the first time I saw DSHs website I was in awe. So many perfumes, so many with vegetable notes in them. Where to start? What do I want? I went for cucumber.

Now, most people that have perfumes as a hobby know that what you get is not always what you had expected. With "Celadon, a Velvet Green" I had zoomed in on the cucumber note and somehow managed to ignore all the others. I was expecting something light, aquatic, green and fresh but what I got was completely different. Look at the picture below, I got that! Well, everything except the horse, that is.

Celadon took me back in time to when I was maybe 8 years old. All my friends went to riding school and the conversation topics that mattered was gossip from the stable; what horse was the cutest one, who would get to ride what horse during the next couple of lessons, that type of stuff. I badly wanted to attend riding school, but no. My dad is a plastic surgeon and he had met more horseback riders than you'd like to know - on the operating table trying to reconstruct various parts of their bodies after being kicked or fallen off. So this was a very "No Discussion"-type of no. But a girl can dream... I read books about horses, read magazines about horses and watched horseback riding shows on tv, thinking, one day, I'd wear one of those stylish riding outfits, have a horse of my horse and we'd be best friends forever.

Celadon is the scent representation of my childhood dream of a horse. There are two sides of this scent, one is green, containing clover, grass and lots of hay, complete with that slightly sour note that it tends to get by laying around in damp environments. All the stuff I'd be happily feeding my little horsie, the two of us hanging out in the barnyard. The other side is soft vanilla/tonka. Sometimes it's a dreamy marshmallow cloud to dwell in. Sometimes I get fabric softener, like riding outfits smell in fantasy land where no one ever has to clean out the stables or get horse sweat all over you.

Now, me and vanilla "are in a relationship and it's complicated", as you see on Facebook sometimes. There are some scents in which I like it, but in this one it's brushing me the wrong way. The green side of Celadon I like though. And I admire how it brings up memories that I thought I'd forgotten all about. Who needs a shrink when you have a perfume blog?

And, did I ever get that horse? No, it was not meant to be. Some years later my parents actually encouraged me to try horseback riding. At that time they probably had realised that one of the most likely pastime I'd chose would involve beer and boys with motorcycles. By then, horses had lost their appeal.


For other reviews of "Celadon - a Velvet Green", see:
Olfactorias Travels
I Smell Therefore I am 


Composition:
Top notes: Clover Leaf, Cucumber, Lime Peel
Middle notes: Green Grass, Liatrix, Orris Root
Base notes:Balsam Fir, Hay absolute, Narcissus Absolute, Tonka Bean, Violet Leaf Absolute



Pic: pennydreadfulvintage.blogspot.com

This sample was sent to me.