Dear Chums
The Perfumed Dandy is now back in Old London Town after his briefest of trips to The Coast.
Thank you all for your wonderful suggestions as to which perfumes might go best with the places and personae pictured below.
For better or worse, with some tiny explanations, I humbly present my own picks…
Wild grass
There are so many wonderful hay and grass scents, but vetiver remains The Dandy‘s favourite.
Guerlain’s Pour Elle was always his most precious lawn aroma, but is now sadly gone.
Chanel’s Sycomore with its hint of pipe tobacco, herbs and a subtle twist of April violets is the next best thing to perfect.
It hints at long blades with a long history.
Wild horses (well ponies really)
From humble starts come great beasts.
These ponies may never grow up to be horses higher than men, but the elusive wild foals hiding just out of shot might.
When they do, racing across the sands they will give off that muscular and visceral scent that animals do.
La Nuit by Paco Rabanne will never be to everyone’s taste, but this big bold animalic with a rose heart has a irresistible sweet manure accord that makes it a true olfactory thoroughbred.
Mosses and lichens
A wildly diverse and rugged oakmoss scent that can appear scary, even foreboding, at first.
Getting to know this rocky and rugged fragrance undoubtedly reaps rewards.
The view from atop a cloud of Clinique’s Aromatics Elixir is rather grand.
Stone walls and sky
Even on the hottest Summer’s days, let alone in weak April sunshine, stone walls stay cold to the touch.
What better note could there be to replicate that natural froideur than the chalky chill of galbanum.
Nowhere is that cool resin rendered so beautifully as in Guerlain’s Chamade, a masterful composition often thought to difficult to play regularly.
A pilot’s cottage
As beautiful as this tiny island is, one imagines that nights for the pilots and light keepers who served their shifts in this small cottage must have been long and often lonely.
Perhaps, The Dandy thinks, they comforted themselves with the finest sweet tobacco scented with cloves, smoked through cedar pipes.
Illuminum’s Wild Tobacco as a photo realistic impression of the smell their gold leaf at the moment before it is ignition.
A monument
Something to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Britain’s longest serving Sovereign.
Jicky of course was just a child at this time, but Victoria turned like, as so many heads of state still do, to Creed and their Fleur de Bulgarie, an intense rose perfume that she had been wearing since they developed it for her in 1845.
A metal sculpture
Metallic notes in perfumery are an odd sort of thing, or so The Dandy finds.
In fact to my nose many herbs have a shine about them as sharp as polished steel. Rosemary has this, but particularly and peculiarly petitgrain.
So this might be an oddly personal choice but Bensimon’s Eau de Cologne 1993 seems to me to combine a high metallic timbre with an acute slightly salty amber and a host of resinous undertones against patchouli and leather.
An idiosyncratic scent that speaks as much of forge as sea shore.
The light house
Life in a lighthouse one imagines must be a pretty stark and startling affair.
The lashing waves, the wind, the pressure, especially before electricity, of keeping that paraffin powered lamp alight and the constant painting to ensure that the tower is a shining beacon of white.
What better perfume than the equally as arresting M/Mink by Byredo?
The opening note may strictly speaking be printer’s ink rather than paint but the effect is somewhat similar.
Below as well as something of the sea itself, there is a deeply animalic bees’ honey that verges on the petrochemical and yet the whole affair is, at least once one becomes accustomed, a great deal more homely than could ever have been expected.
The sea shore
The water looks just so inviting doesn’t it?
Well, I’m afraid not to the touch, not yet anyway… a month or two later in the year on a similarly sunny day and The Dandy might well have been tempted to take a dip.
And it’s that smell, the soft scent of skin after sea water swimming that Hermes Eau de Merveilles captures perfectly.
This is a quiet, personal and up close perfume, but absolutely none the worse, in fact all the better for it.
A pine forest
So far as pine forests are concerned, particularly those on the coast and subject to bracing sea air, only one perfume will do…
Estee Lauder’s Alliage is a green dream.
It is a conjured up summer’s day called forth by a determined sense of will.
And it is the scent The Perfumed Dandy found himself wearing most often while he was away. Genius.
If you’d like to read more, there’s a slightly off the wall review of this aroma on the site already.
So there we have it.
I do hope you like the seaside scents… and if you have other thoughts, do keep them coming in.
Here’s to another splendidly smelly week.
Yours ever
The Perfumed Dandy
The Perfumed Dandy. 
So happy to see two of my all time favorites…Aromatics Elixir and Aliage! Hope you had a wonderful trip!
Dearest Brie
These are two of The Dandy’s very favourite too… though I mourn what has happened to ‘Alliage’ (which has regained a second ‘l’ but lost a lot of its oomph) just recently.
I recently got my hands on some older flacons, measured out in grams, and the scent is divine.
As for Aromatics Elixir… a truly unique perfume, the work of a master.
Oh an The Dandy had a desperately fine time, thank you so much for asking!
Yours ever
The Perfumed Dandy
I have a tiny vial with a few precious drops left of the original Aliage….my mum adored that scent and we would share many a bottle when I was young….every time I sniff that vial I think of her.
Dear Brie
I am hoarding the oldest Alliage I can get my hands on… I just adore it a coniferous chypre with a wonderful indeterminate, elusive and seemingly endless green note… truly heavenly to The Dandy’s nose.
Yours ever
The Perfumed Dandy
What lovely selections! I don’t know all of those but I can easily imagine – through your vivid powers of description, Mr. Dandy – just how perfect they are for a wild and pristine sea coast. I almost wore Chamade today. Maybe tomorrow.
Dearest Lily
The Dandy absolutely adores Chamade… which may be a slight spoiler for the review which is coming up soon. In fact I’m something of a sucker for galbanum generally, it is the perfect way to keep cool, calm and collected no matter what the circumstances.
The one I think may divide is M/Mink… it’s not an easy fragrance and some people just can’t stand it, but it really is quite unique!
Yours ever
The Perfumed Dandy
M/Mink is one I don’t know. I’m a bit leery of “weird” perfumes, but often when I try one that has a *bad reputation* I end up wondering what all the fuss was about. I think it’s because I grew up around perfumes with animalics and all sorts of ingredients that are unacceptable to many noses today. Either that or I actually like “weird”. š
Dearest Lily
Maybe you are, like The Dandy, a secret scented weirdy!
Except often these scents don;t smell that strange to me… M/Mink smells of printing ink. Not the kind used by computers, but the stuff that one imagines was once used in industrial presses and is now the preserves of artists’ studios.
Working in inks myself now and again, I recognised the smell at once and it felt comforting and familiar… not alien or untoward at all.
Yours ever
The Perfumed Dandy
Lovely stuff Sir T.P.D. – looks like you had a perfect weekend! Interesting conversation with yourself and Lillybelle, I tend to seek unusual scents, but agree they’re often quite normal. I love Eau des Merveilles – although it’s a skin scent it has amazing longevity. And talking of weird, I’m going to have a sniff of La Nuit to see how it’s manure note compares to L’Air de Rien!
Dearest Rose
Isn’t Eau de Merveilles lovely!?!
And I’m at one with its longevity even on The Dandy’s skin, which is a veritable Oliver Twist, forever wanting more.
I find La Nuit quite beautiful and rather tender in the long dry down, but I know others who really can’t stand the stuff.
Hey ho, it would be a dull old world if we all liked the same.
Yours ever
The Perfumed Dandy
Sorry Dandy! I arrived late to the Beach party. My pick is on the other post. I will say that Aromatics Elixir is a staple for me, although I find it more wintery than springy. Maybe that’s because I always received it as a gift in the winter? Those associations are difficult to break.
Gripping
PS – hope you had fun!!
Hello again Gripping!!
I do know what you mean about Aromatics, there’s something quite tweedy and cold air about it… but I’ve been giving my chypres a run out this spring and finding them up to the task especially Alliage and AE.
Both excellent scents that are sometimes a little looked down upon because of residual snobbery regarding Estee Lauder.
Yours ever
The Perfumed Dandy
dear kind sir
a much needed beachfront property of a post with Scented Breezes.
delicious.
you have no idea how much we needed that.
*wavingfromlosangeles*
Dearest Gloria
Only to happy to have been of service to you and yours.
Yours ever
The Perfumed Dandy
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I was waiting for the Eau des Merveilles š
Beautiful trip, M. Dandy! Thank you for sharing!
Chamade is matched perfectly to the picture!
Thank you Undina
I do adore Chamade.
After the recent decision to ‘downgrade’ Jardins de Bagatelle, I fear that this often overlooked fragrance may be next for a trim… I do hope not.
Yours ever
The Perfumed Dandy
I’m pretty sure I commented with my suggestion but it’s not here. š¦
I’d say anything by Burren perfumery would fit. š
Hello again dearest Ines
Yes I saw this too… indeed I replied, with a comment on how near I was to the Emerald Isle!
Ahhh… was it perhaps on the other post with the same snaps but no perfumes, I think it might have been.
Yours ever
The Perfumed Dandy