FETISH: I don't really agree with the title, as there's nothing that strikes me all that fetishistic about Fetish, with its rather subtle and somewhat sweet nature. I suppose it was meant to be a dark, leathery experience (hence: "fetish!"), but there's too much restraint in the mix to take its stated feint at psycho-sexual obsession seriously.
I'm generally not much a fan of the often overly simplistic Neil Morris style, and I haven't even written about all the Neil Morris perfumes I've actually sampled, since a few of them were just too dull and/or awful to spend the time typing about (i.e. Hologram, Prowl, Dark Earth -- meh, meh and double meh), but Fetish works a little harder than, say, his Burnt Amber or Dark Season fragrances, and it wears close to the skin so that the warmth of the body eventually becomes the warmth of the fragrance, which is a nice touch.
There's some burnt sugar and smoke in the drydown, and maybe a bit of cigarette ash and fine saddle leather, which makes me think that perhaps this "fetish" is more Morris' personal fondness for the glam butchitude of classic Hollywood screen sirens like Marlene Dietrich and Barbara Stanwyck -- tough and preternaturally feminine -- than any contemporary fetish as explicated by the likes of Quentin Tarantino.
I take my positives where I can find them.
I'm not sure I'd recommend Fetish as a full bottle purchase (it's pleasantly attractive, though lacking in spark and drive), but if you gravitate to the more unisex side of the spectrum, you likely won't regret spending a day wearing a sample of it.
A clip of Barbara Stanwyck below:
WODE: I don't "get" this fragrance. I know I know, it's supposed to be very hip and British and wow, but it smells like . . . a bulb of fresh fennel, kind of green and celery stalk-ish, with anise seed mixed in.
And it never gets any better.
The EDT version of Wode apparently turns blue when you spray it on your skin, then vanishes like some kind of disappearing ink act, but I'm testing the EDP version so I don't have the luxury of irrelevant visual trickery to distract me from the fact that this is a piss-poor excuse for a perfume, no matter whose fartsy Trend Of The Moment designer name is slapped across the bottle.
Unless, of course, you actually enjoy smelling like you just rolled around in the salad bar at your nearest Pizza Hut. Obviously, I don't.
KRETEK: A cold clove cigarette stubbed out in a dirty ashtray. I spent a good portion of my early twenties smelling like this, but only because I was hopelessly mired in the idea that dark, filthy, smoke-filled bars full of drunk and depressed pseudo-hipsters was, like, really cool.
I have to wonder at what point the Ava Luxe people will stop tossing out half-baked scent memories like this and focus instead on producing and supporting a much smaller roster of viable, genuine perfumes that smell like they took longer than three weeks to cobble together.
I mean, have you been to the Ava Luxe website lately? As of today, they offer a total of 111 fragrances broken down into 28 florals, 6 fresh fragrances, 11 gourmands, 19 animalic/musks, 26 woods/resins, 26 orientals, 7 fruity/citrus types, 9 chypres and 6 green fragrances (there's some overlap). 111 different perfumes! Enough is enough.
Ava Luxe has produced a few decent individual scents (Incense Rose, Opopnax Intense), but as a whole, they're starting to remind me of those companies that manufacture truckloads of cheap, clinky jewelry for an easily distracted pre-teen market, a market that happily turns colorful magnet necklaces made of recycled bottle caps into a multi-million dollar industry.
'Nuff said.
In Summation: Neil Morris Fetish -- perhaps; Boudicca Wode -- I think not; Ava Luxe Kretek -- when hell freezes over.
13 Comments
My sample of Boudicca Wode was the edp as well, so no blue paint, however mine was literally explosive. I opened the vial and the stuff shot out all over my hands. I put my finger over it and turned it upside down and when I took my finger off, it exploded again! So now I have it all over me up to my elbows... and I could still barely smell much of anything other than an extremely underwhelming metallic iso-e super type thing... pass.
I concur on the Ava Luxe and will take your word on the Neil Morris... too many other fine scents out there to bother. Speaking of which, have you smelled Penhaligon's Elixir? Niiiiice... Olivia Giacobetti does it again. My bottle is on the way as we speak.
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Well, all I can say is, you're LUCKY that you couldn't smell Boudicca Wode. It was not a pleasant experience, and I spent a good five minutes with a soap dispenser and very hot water trying to scrub it off.
Funny enough, though -- I did have problems with my Wode vial, as well. It sprayed, but it also made a mess, leaked everywhere. I just assumed it was a tricky vial, but since you had the near same experience, maybe there's something up with the fragrance itself that makes it volatile.
I was reading the Penhaligon Elixir description on Lucky Scent just yesterday, then did some surfing around reading other reviews. It does sound really nice. I'll have to get a sample from TPC.
I love your enthusiasm regarding new fragrances. You have shelves of the stuff, yet it doesn't stop you from enjoying a fine new release. It's like people with large wine cellars who still go ga-ga over the latest vintage release.
Unfortunately for my wallet, my enthusiasm remains undiminished. :-) On the good side, after several years of bulimic buying all over the map, my tastes have been honed down to the point where I have a really good idea of what I will actually enjoy wearing, so that has cut down on the purchases. On the bad side, it seems I have champagne taste and niche releases keep getting more expensive per ml. But hey, I smell great and it's not illegal, immoral or fattening!
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"Bulimic buying" . . . LOL! That does explain a few of the bottles that stare back at me from the cupboard depths. I look at them and think, "What in THE h*ll was I smoking when I purchased THAT?"
Regarding champagne tastes, reading Chandler Burr's 'The Perfect Scent' kind of ruined me as far as mainstream scents are concerned. He went into great detail as to how cheap the corporate heads are and how they try to make the perfumes as inexpensively as possible, giving woefully low budgets to the subsequently horrified perfumers while still expecting them to accomplish the task.
I've pretty much avoided mainstream offerings since then, not out of any snob attitude, but because I know they're deliberately not working with the best tools available to them.
(Looking over comments...) Hey, you two are more fun than an exploding vial circus!
As for the reviews, I actually kind of liked the idea of smelling like you rolled around in a salad...that's an option I'd like to have on my shelf...but between the mechanics of the vials and the "meh" factor of the execution of the juice, I'll wait for somebody like Andy Tauer to serve me fennel in a perfume bottle.
Sorry to hear about the Ava Luxe; I have a couple "vintage" (relative to the age of the manufacturer), and they are fine. (Yes, Incense Rose is one of them; so is Vamp.) I hear what you are saying, though...I wonder what kind of pressure she feels to "diversify," or if that's just a habit that's akin to buying bulimia? ;) (If it is, maybe it will slow down, as has some of our buying manias...)
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Waiting for Andy Tauer to toss you a salad bowl is probably a good idea. I have no idea what's up with the Wode fragrance, but it does seem to have a tendency to explode from the bottle, and it was fairly messy to deal with.
While I appreciate some of the Ave Luxe scents, I do think the line would be better served if the perfumer wasn't in a complete rush to shove the latest fad-smell out into the market. Stepping back, taking a deep breath, and perhaps spending more time in the creation process might save us all from future Kreteks, and could only benefit the reputation of the line as a whole.
Like you Nathan, I have pretty much given up on dept store fragrances for the same reason. It's never going to be true love with a commercial release so I don't even bother.
As for Ava Luxe, I have an old bottle of Cafe Noir and a bottle of Red Tara (for obvious reasons) but I have neither the patience nor the energy to dig through umpteen scents trying to find the few gems in the lot.
BTW, is there a way to fix your Captcha letter recognition thing so that if you type the wrong letters it doesn't erase your whole entry and make you start all over again? The characters are actually rather hard to read and often I make a mistake and it wipes everything out.
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Agh! Sorry to hear about the captcha issue -- as far as I know, there isn't anything I can do about it. It's a Movable Type thing. What I can suggest is that, before typing the captcha, first copy your reply so that if it gets wiped out, you can just paste it back in before trying the captcha again.
Not much help, I know.
Yeah, that's what I've been resorting to doing. I just hoped there was an easier solution... the systems that Now Smell This and Andy Tauer's blog use are a bit more user friendly, but I'm not sure if you have the choice of a different system. Just thought I'd mention it, in case it was a question of adjusting a setting or something simple.
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Oh . . . OH! So, it's Thanksgiving, and THIS is what I get? Scorn heaped upon the inadequacies of the Movable Type format?
*cries buckets of tears into his turkey gravy*
Mmmmm, sorrow is oh so salty!
Now now, I wasn't THAT hard on you. And you know I appreciate you. :-)
Bless you... both for going meh on Neil Morris and for the phrase "double meh."
p.s. -- I kinda want to see the blue stuff. Just to see it.
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Oh, believe you me -- Dark Earth deserves its double meh designation!
I'm kind of afraid of the blue Wode edt. Have you seen the photo ads for it? They're kind of disturbing . . .
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