After
finishing my original piece on Shay & Blue I couldn’t stop thinking about
their Amber Rose perfume and just
went ahead and ordered it along with a 30ml bottle of Blood Oranges as well. I love a rose fragrance, it’s just something
that’s crept up on me over the years, a mixture of nostalgia, the deep
sensuality of the bloom itself, its ability to surround and lift the senses and
also strong emotional echoes of my childhood travelling in the Middle East, the
scent and taste of rose in halva, water, hair, clothes, pastries and skin.
To be
honest though, much as I love a rose, it was the mention of dulce de leche in the heart of Amber Rose that really enticed me. The
sweet caramelised cooked milk confiture
de lait that has become increasingly popular in recent years, flavouring
ice cream, biscuits, cupcakes, coffee and now it seems fragrance. I love the
stuff, it’s a jar and spoon thing for me, a fix from the fridge; yes it’s a
great flavouring, but nothing quite beats the indulgence of scooping it out and
licking the spoon clean. And like so much gorgeous sweet sexy stuff, you know
it’s bad for you. It tastes of melted demerara sugar, and creamy bubbling of
condensed milk about to burn. It has a great nutty aroma, toasty-sweet and
smooth. I always think of Matin Calin
by Comptoir Sud Pacifique when I open a jar, a huge blast of condensed milk memory,
student flats, boarding school childhood, night-munchies; it’s lacteal and a
little weird. I don’t think I have come across it yet in fragrance and
combining it with rose just grabs me.
Amber Rose uses Rose de Mai as its main note, it smells
so shimmering as to be almost transparent. When you first spray it on, it feels
like someone is whispering rose rose
rossssssse rossssssssss……sses in your ear ever so softly. The petals of
these roses are pale and translucent, floating and laying themselves down on
your skin with mannered beauty. White amber and woods are listed in the base
notes. There is so much light shot through this delicate skein of notes. The
woods are soft and creamy and the amber seems to glow like dawn. The melting
sugared heart is divine, not sweet as such, but a tempered pouring of toffee-ness,
lifted by the pistachio like quality of the milky rose. The deftness of touch
is admirable. Massé and De Vetta obviously felt the collection needed a strong
floral and what else but a portrait of Queen Rose. However their interpretation is playful and
deeply beautiful. Twenty minutes into the drydown my skin smelt extraordinary.
Polished, dusted with a delicate yet persistent scent of warm musky rose and a
lick of caramel.
The
clarity and couture application of the roses remind me of the Nagel rose constructions
for the Cologne Intense series at Jo Malone. Both Velvet Rose & Oud and Rose
Water & Vanilla share the same delicacy and sense of glittering
reverence for this most radiant of blooms. However Amber Rose does something a little different, it echoes the roses
of Chanel with reverence, but the nod is there in the fluttering powder, the
nacreous atmospherics. It will not convert those who consider roses
old-fashioned as there is something at work in Amber Rose that tugs at the memory of a thousand scents, however,
for those of you that truly love this most extraordinary of flowers, this is a
delightful and poignant addition to a collection.
Blood Oranges was quite a shock. It is the perfume from the
Shay & Blue Collection that is getting the most coverage and the one that
Dom de Vetta recently picked as a potential brand cult scent. I have never liked citrus fragrances; they
bore me and can often trigger severe migraines. Neroli and I have a very troubled
and conflicted relationship. But the
sheer drenched juiciness of Blood Oranges
is quite stunning, painterly and shouting with colour and fire, almost fauvist
in its intensity. Blood oranges are a pomelo/clementine hybrid and have a rich
and ruby taste, oozing sun and crimson juices.
Instead
of bolstering and potentially submerging this gorgeous orange feeling with other
citrus notes, Julie Massé has opted to wash over darker aspects of olfactory burnt
umber, using charred woods, leather and musks. The result is a landscape of
shifting effects, very cleverly arranged over the dominant sanguineous orange personality.
The perfume opens like a sunrise, dazzling and fresh, grabbing the senses and
then opens out into a warm generous embrace of, smoked woods and the occasional
zephyr of juice to remind you of how well the note has been painted. As the day
winds to an end, the sun drops and traces of sunshine linger in the leather and
musks. It is odd for me to like such a blatant citrus scent but the mimosa
cocktail charm of the orange is so perfectly married to the drifting scent of
charred woods. The leather lends mystery I think, a sense of something just off
scene, shadowed and deeply sensual.
I am
still being surprised by Blood Oranges
each time I wear it. The longevity of the orange note is very good indeed; even
three or four hours into the drydown I can still inhale oozing traces of juice.
It has tremendous warmth and a sense of renaissance gilt to it. I stand by my
previous mention of Velasquez’s court paintings in my other Shay & Blue
blog piece. There are shards of glitter and gold in the scent, varnished in age
and aloof beauty. Strangeness too, sensual detail buried in the interplay
between citrus, embers and tanned skins.
It makes
me smile inside, as if I have discovered a dark scented secret I will keep to
myself. I wore it yesterday layered with my beloved Vanille Absolument and the combination was amazing, a caramalised
dessert aroma with a strange salacious drydown. Skin-provoking and glorious.
To read the first part of this Shay & Blue post, please follow the link below:
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