Alkemia Green Carnation: Review

Sydney Long, Sadder than a Single Star that Sets at Twilight in a Land of Reeds

Behind the pines, the sky is turning blue-pink. You shiver as you wander, lost in thought. Suddenly music, distant, at the very edge of your hearing. It comes and goes but never enough for you to recognise the tune. Something green darts between the trees ahead of you...

You do not wear Alkemia Green Carnation (AGC); it haunts you. This fragrance is the best bunch of the eponymous flower you have ever encountered in spectral form. You can almost smell the velveteen nature of the petals.

The Moth Woman loves carnation very much. She has very pleasant memories of carnation. Sadly, carnation, as a perfume note, is wildly out of fashion, relegated to the increasing pile of things labelled old woman smells. IFRA has regulated the ingredients needed to make a decent carnation fragrance almost out of existence, so good renditions are getting rarer, furthering the note’s unpopularity. AGC is, therefore, a thing out of its time, so of course, this makes the Moth Woman love it more.

This is an uncomplicated fragrance verging on a soliflore; this is one of its charms. It opens with something sharply green and herbal, suggesting the freshly snapped stems of the blooms, accompanied by bay and carnation. Within ten minutes, carnation alone remains but what a carnation it is, super naturalistic, 3D vivid. At three hours, a nice soapy note creates a duet. The longevity runs to about twelve hours. In terms of featured notes, pretty much unchanged from the three-hour mark.

It is worth noting that this fragrance needs a far longer than usual rest period; a full month. It does not smell different in terms of notes before that time, it just lacks persistence and vigour. Rest, then enjoy.

In some ways, finding this scent was like opening a book and finding a letter from a long-dead lover. AGC plucks at the Moth Woman's heart strings. The pleasure in this scent is not just in its ability to evoke nostalgia. AGC is a highly wearable scent. The Moth Woman has bought a full bottle and recommends you do too.

AGC is available for purchase here.

The Importance of a Good Rest

Credit: Wanderloot

Since starting this blog, the Moth Woman has been on a steep learning curve regarding perfume oils.  One of the lessons she has learnt, one that has been repeatedly driven home by experience, is the importance of resting oils bought online before evaluating them.

She was introduced to this idea by the kind folks on the Fragrantica and Basenotes forums. Travel can cause resins and heavier elements to settle out of the mix as perfume oils are less stabilised than alcohol based scents. Furthermore, low oxygen environments and freezing temperatures in cargo holds of airplanes can badly effect oils, so if the scent has had international air travel between you and the sender, it is significantly more likely to need to rest.

Case in point: a fragrance called Efrum*. It was an extreme blind buy from a seller in Sweden. Few reviews of Efrum exist but those that do, hold it to be a medicinal, band aid style oud. As soon as the parcel arrived, the Moth Woman excitedly opened the bottle. Involuntary wincing ensued as it singed her nostril hairs. Oud based mixtures are often nicer on the skin than sniffed from the bottle, so she cautiously applied it to her wrist. The faux leather couch she was  sitting on began to melt and she could hear the neighbours down the back screaming about the terrible chemical smell. Eventually the Moth Woman’s eyelashes caught on fire... This is clearly hyperbole but you get it. She put the bottle away planning to pitch it when she could cope with going near the bottle again (serious this time).

Flash forward a month. The Moth Woman is ferreting around in her perfume stash and runs across into Efrum again. Remembering the repeated admonishments to rest oils, she thought she would risk retrying it before throwing the bottle away. This time, instead of being confronted with a chemical monster, what the Moth Woman got was a nice aftershavey thing with unusual floral aspects. It smells amazing on the Moth Man and he stole the bottle.

As a rule of thumb, two weeks resting is a minimum, a month average, more if there is a lot of resins in the mix. The Moth Woman has even heard of a couple that performed miraculous transformations, Efrum style, after six or seven months. A significant number though, will be perfectly fine, lovely and wearable right off the bat; the remainder will morph badly during transit. As a guide, if the fragrance smells nothing like it was described or is a lot weaker than expected on first meeting, it likely needs to be rested.

Floral scents are supposed to be exempted from the rule due to the nature of oils used to compose them. The Moth Woman has found this to be only partly true; about 85% will be fine. Based on a lot of universally excellent reviews, the Moth Woman bought a floral scent, Tisira*, She actually let this one sit a couple of days before testing this time. The first moments were pleasant, slightly rosy and then WHAMMO, an effect not entirely unlike being doused in a bucket of rotting lilies. A week on though, and Tisira is now a charming but somewhat conventional floral scent.

The moral of this story seems to be have patience. If you get perfume oil you do not like, rest it before disposal. It may well be a hidden gem.

*Names changed to protect the innocent perfumes.

Al Haramain Salma: Review

And she comes softly, veiled in pink, rukuku

Backstage unnerves you after closing, too echoing-empty. You only have a few minutes before the security guard comes back your way. The search for her dressing room is taking too long.  “Safa Singh, India's Girl Next Door in one show only…” all the posters say. You have been a fan since before anyone in the West had ever heard her name. Footsteps are coming from behind you. You locate the door. Luckily it is unlocked.

The dressing room is just as you would imagine a Victorian woman living in India would style her boudoir. As rumoured, it is pink but not the shade you were expecting—shocking fuschia—instead the kind of melancholy blue pink you see in lilacs, played out in a multiple of tones. A haze of strawberry vanilla incense smoke completes the sugary effect.

You flop down at Safa’s dressing table, read the names of her lipsticks and poke about in various boxes, trying on her jewellery. Then you notice it. A Louis Vuitton trunk, peeps out from under a settee, almost hidden by the dressing screen.  With a grunt, you drag it out. It takes a moment to figure out how to open the lid. Inside, there is a mass of black leather and brass. Eyes widening, you pull out a ball gag and cat o nine tails...

Al Haramain Salma (AHS) is something of a marvel. It is listed as being a tuberose fragrance. Other reviewers suggested this was a VERY different tuberose. They were correct. Against expectations, is not white flower scent. This thing is PINK and incense doused, sweet with rounded out edges, in a va, va, vhoom, May West feminine style.

As rumoured, AHS is also a very dirty girl. This is also the only perfume the Moth Woman can recall that includes four entirely different dirty/animalic notes. Miraculously, even with them, she is not in the least skanky.  

AHS opens with pink bubble gum, underneath it, a slight sour milk note and a dash of cumin. Once it warms, around the five-minute mark, truly massive sillage appear; it will fill the room. At this point, incense, night scented jessamine and a powdery aspect all emerge. Not a distinct element in itself, the powder creates the olfactory equivalent of viewing colours through a snowfall. Before the first hours ends, the duel between clean and dirty sweetness that is the hallmark of this fragrance commences with the arrival of a touch of soft indole. At about an hour, you get the sudden materialisation of what can only be described as a barbie head note. This evocative of childhood and Christmas for the Moth Woman, so she finds it nostalgic rather unpleasant. This is accompanied by a grape fanta accord. Two hours on and the bubble gum tuberose reappears, only hints of the incense linger. Three to four hours in and projection is only two inches from the skin now but the scent in still intense. The pure tuberose and incense dominate again but now haunted by a fourth animalic note, the somewhat infamous diaper pail/barnyard note. Do not be put off by this as it is subtle and just enhances the other elements. At the by 7-hour mark, it is very strong at skin level but no longer projecting. The animalic/dirty note is nearly equal to the tuberose and this remains unchanged till the scent vanishes, 12 to 24 hours later.

AHS is that big, bolshy and totally inappropriate friend you have, the one that tells dirty jokes at the wrong time and flirts with your grandfather, who is also it utterly dependable and blameless. It is nowhere as confronting as you would expect and quite cuddly in its own way. The one is a strong recommend.

Available on Ebay and here.