Roja Dove likes his perfumes to be Perfumes: big, blowsy, luscious, full.
And who am I to disagree?
All three of these confident, and laughing, wide-brimmed divas have no fear of lighting up a room with their scent………full-bodied, sweet; panoramic.
And in these vicious, pent up, and mean-spirited times, I say BRING IT ON.
Tuberose, possibly the least inventive of the three but also my favourite, is, if not a carbon copy of Fracas, at the very least an obvious homage; peachy, cinnamon-pinched and wedded to a classicist sandalwood vanilla musk; creamy, sensual and delicious (in parfum especially) : quite the new/old tuberose on the block, with the Frenchness of Caron’s cold cream Tubereuse and even a short-lived remembrance in the head of Karl Lagerfeld’s seminal Chloe.
While obviously something of a throwback, this still does feel like an updated Fracas in many ways, with less of that tuberose classic’s blaring, perfumey base, (if you know what I mean.)
And if, like me, you know for a fact you like the classic tuberoses, you are virtually guaranteed to love it.
Lily, more contemporary and fresh, is a more complex and multilayered creature than Tuberose, something like a cross between Lauder’s Private Collection Tuberose Gardenia and Hermes’ Vanille Gallante, with all the lip-piqued Americana of the former – at ease in the formal and informal – and the Parisian vanillic salt lily sensuousness of the latter.
This is quite a luscious, tropical urban perfume, gorgeous in a way ( if teetering on the verge of overloaded artificiality), but I still know that come the hot summer months I will definitely be draining my small 7.8ml sample bottle – a dot here and there on work shirt collar surely making a pleasing, sunbeamed, beach-hazy backdrop.
Gardenia, like Lily, but unlike Tuberose, is also not a soliflore, but more a trompe l’oeil, marmoreal amalgam of a soap-white mythic, gardenia goddess; a creature of the Hollywood studios featuring very little relation to a living and breathing fungally breathtaking gardenia in the bushes.
While the overall impression of this grand creation has something almost gardenia-like, this perfume is ultimately more green-leafed, and white-smoothed, in the unimpeachable sud-soaped manner of Pure Distance’s Opardu – unblemished, feminine, subtly commanding – enveloping the wearer in an expensive, generous, dazzlingly faux-demure aura of come here, my darling.
I confess that I find it quite alluring.
The Black Narcissus 