Photos: Mona di Orio Nuit Noire

The Non-Blonde recently answered the question that's been on everyone's mind (okay, it was only on mine, but my determined plunge into overweening narcissism requires that it be all about me) with her April 28th post, The Mysterious Case of Mona di Orio:

"There were some speculations that the house is going out of business, as the bottles were pulled off the shelves and no longer available . . . out of the three US retailers listed on the Mona di Orio website, two (Bergdorf and Aedes) have officially stopped carrying it . . . That, at least, got them (the di Orio reps) to admit that, indeed, Mona di Orio no longer has a US outlet. According to Jeroen Oude Sogtoen who corresponded with me, they are now searching for a good distributor."

I had gone searching the net last week for a bottle of Lux and was unable to find one in any of the usual haunts, and now I know why. The Mona di Orio brand (perfumer Mona di Orio is a once-protege of master perfumer Edmond Roudnitska) is a tough sell in even the best of times, with complex, multi-layered scents that reveal very little of their true nature at first sniff. Lux is a prime example of this, starting off as a bright sugary lemon before morphing into an alluring incense musk thirty minutes in -- something you'd never know if you were a consumer casually sniffing at bottles from a retail shelf

It probably also didn't help that Luca Turin used his Perfume: The Guide to savage practically every single Mona di Orio fragrance that managed to land within two hundred yards of his easily startled ego. There's a telling couple of pages well into Chandler Burr's "The Emperor of Scent" in which Burr switches into full confession mode and details how frustrating it was to follow and interview the intellectually brilliant (yet also insecure, paranoid and emotionally unstable -- Burr's description, not mine) Turin.

Once I read that, I gained a better understanding of why Turin will launch a seemingly unprovoked attack at an entire brand, clawing at every single one of its fragrances like a spurned food critic giving a one-star review to a restaurant whose chef he feels may have publicly snubbed him at the last social gala.

Well, whatever Mona di Orio did or didn't do/say to Turin, he served up his revenge with reviews like the one he spat out for Lux: "One Star: dire citrus -- the world's most expensive cheap lemon sorbet flavor." Not a peep about the smoke, the vetiver, the musk or the surprising and even artful way in which the scent evolves from lemon-sugar to incense-musk, as if he only smelled the thing off a strip of paper and ten minutes later threw the scent strip across the room in a fit of pique.

I have a feeling that the fragrance industry is high on drama and back stabbing.

Once I saw on the Non-Blonde's site that the Mona di Orio brand could very well be in danger of folding (though they could always start selling their fragrances on their own website -- hello!), I high-tailed it to the Aedes website and ordered their last bottle of Nuit Noire, an opulent hairpin bend of a scent that I took for a test drive last September:

"The list of notes reads like an old-world piece of French perfume art ... but Nuit Noire has been tweaked for the 21st century (i.e. it's more direct and efficient) and the longer it sits on your skin, the more intriguing and attractive it becomes. Or you become. Or you both become. Or maybe it's just the world whizzing and rearranging its pieces and parts around you while you sit, contemplating your own now marvelously fragrant, fuzzy navel."

BTW: Luca Turin describes Nuit Noire as "a hilariously bad fragrance . . . vividly cheap and unpleasant" -- which is the kind of condescending smackdown you'd only deliver to a protege of Edmond Roudnitska's if you had a personal axe to grind.

The bottle arrived yesterday. It's as beautiful, solid and carefully considered as the craftsmanship behind the fragrance itself. Photos below:

OFF TOPIC (yet totally relevant):

Speaking of luxury brands not doing so hot, I made my morning drive-by at the Perfume of Life forum and discovered that Chanel is now offering its formerly Boutique & Chanel Counter Only Les Exclusifs fragrance series online at Chanel.com.

No public announcement, no PR release, no promotional whiz-bang event to let anybody know about the change in policy, the fragrances just . . . appeared. Not all of them quite yet -- there are only three from the series that show on the site: Cuir de Russe (which I like a lot), Gardenia and No. 22 -- but it's incredible how such a small change can reveal a much broader shift in the Chanel attitude toward online sales.

Karl Lagerfeld has been quite vocal about his distaste for the Internet as a Chanel sales venue, insisting that an online retail presence cheapens the experience of true luxury and exclusivity, yet as more and more consumers are opting for the online experience (sans the increasing reality of sales staff who know less about the product than you do), and with Chanel transmogrifying into an expensive novelty line as much as anything resembling true luxury (case in point: the pistol-heel pump from Chanel's 2009 Resort collection), Lagerfeld's firm stance against an online sales venue can only be hurting the company more than it's helping.

I mean, really, who's more likely to purchase a pair of pistol pumps -- the ladies who lunch, or impulsive tech-friendly, pop-culture savvy Internet shoppers? Besides, I still remain set in my belief that Chanel's refusal to sell their handbags online created a quilted leather vacuum in which Marc Jacobs now happily thrives:

Chanel to the left, Jacobs to the right, and another Chanel sales-op missed.

UPDATE:

And what's the point of choosing a very young, kinda-trashy pop star as your new PR model if you're not selling your product online? Yes Karl, online, where every just-as-young-as-your-PR-model woman is comfortable shopping . . .