Molly: Autumn Perfume Diary

02 Nov, 2025

Package I thought was lost but showed up weeks later

This little box from the delightfully old-school website The Perfumed Court contained some real heavyweights (and a coffee caramel candy), and I also think I got one of the last portions of the old Apres L'ondee, so losing it was frustrating! But it showed up unceremoniously a few weeks later.

Apres L'Ondee discontinued EDT:

I have the current version of Apres L'Ondee, Guerlain's 1906 "watercolor" masterpiece. It's beautiful and impressionistic and longevitymaxxers need not apply. I love its brief and wistful presence, though, and I especially like spraying it in the afternoon and switching to L'heure Bleue at night and chuckling to myself about how this is "ombre." I probably won't ever get to smell the original EDP or something close to it unless I spend a lot of money or visit someone or somewhere that has it preserved. In a way every version of Apres L'Ondee most people encounter is an ekphrasis in service of the lost original. The Calumny of Apelles of perfumes. You only have to spend a few hundred dollars to get a full bottle of the discontinued EDT - something I am not willing to do at this time, but never say never. As lovely as the current version still is, I could tell the difference immediately. This vintage sample is more vivid, the anise especially appearing in sharper clarity.

🌂

L'heure Bleue vintage pure parfum:

L'heure Bleue, originally created in 1912, is easier to come by in even quite old formulations than Apres L'ondee. My tiny sample is from around the 1950s. I love wearing L'heure Bleue. It's a little less famous than Mitsouko* and a lot less famous than Shalimar, so I feel both unique and old when I dab or roll it on. The first time I tried it, I thought "this what people are rejecting when they say they want perfume 'that isn't perfumey.'" It makes you appreciate just how different perfume trends are from times past. I've grown to love every stage of it, not just the painterly floral or the guerlinade base, but the opening powder blast that I suspect smells very old lady to anyone around me. My samples before are of discontinued but relatively recent EDPs. Just smelling the open vial of this one was a whoa moment. Unlike Iris Silver Mist below, L'heure Bleue is not cold. Its eponymous hour is one I imagine taking place on an early autumn or late spring night. I don't have the frangrance expertise to intelligently spot and describe the differences between versions but my impression (the same goes for Apres L'Ondee) is that the older formulations are creamier and more decadent. A professional chef's version of a meal you're pretty good at making at home.

*I recently tried a pure parfum version of Mitsouko and I am proud to report marked safe from "not 'getting' Mitsouko."

⏰ 💙

Serge Lutens Iris Silver Mist:

Everything in this package is iris to some extent, but here we come to the big baddie of all irises, if many amateur and professional perfume critics are to be believed. What I found is that Iris Silver Mist is not like anything else I've ever tried, iris or not. A fragrantica review described it as "like a carrot is haunting you" and I couldn't put it better. The opening is a shocking, uncanny damp carrot being pulled from the cold ground. The carrot recedes but the iris still haunts, cold and earthy, until it slowly dissolves into a fine powder.

🥕

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Miller Harris

Poirier d'un Soir:

The weather in South Carolina is actually chilly and autumnal this week, so it's auspicious to have gotten my Miller Harris samples in the mail. Poirier d'un Soir is a true fall pear, warmly spiced. It does not smell like an overly sweet pear dessert, but rather like a middle step in baking a pie - macerating fruit to use as filling, maybe. I wore this to a barre class, and it continues to support my opinion that pear really flourishes with some sweat.

As I've mentioned, I tend to love pear notes, even in scents that a lot of people seem to find soapy or feeble. I think the Pear Problem is a little related to an issue discussed beautifully by Audrey Robinovitz in an essay on longevity in perfume. Pear is usually not a note that projects strongly or lasts all day (though let me know if Kerosene ever uses a pear note). The Longevity focus reminds of a complaint I used to hear about video games. Should a 10 hour game cost the same as a 50 hour game? And I think the answer is the same with games and perfume. If you're experiencing them as art, as creations with elements you seek out and enjoy, yes, you should honor the labor of the 10 hour game and the intimate sillage or fleeting beauty.

🍐

L'air de Rien:

The whole reason I got some Miller Harris samples is because I am in a phase of being deeply affected by the personage and life of Jane Birkin. Birkin collaborated to create L'air de Rien as her own signature scent. The copy on Miller Harris' site reads "Jane wanted something that represented an essence of quietude, hints of weary books, dust and loved skin, closeness and distance." L'air de Rien certainly delivers on that, but I was pathetically sad that, at least on first try, it didn't work on my skin. It did not smell bad to me per se, but rather that I couldn't get comfortable with it. I like musky scents and hate clean scents, so the idea of a skin scent that's more "human as animal" and less "fresh from the shower" was appealing to me. Notes-wise, part of the problem for me is that - sorry to be weak - I usually only do patchouli in bases.

There is something dirty about L'air de Rien, but that's not the right word. "Unwashed" but not as a insult. If Putain des Palaces is body odor covered by perfume and powder, L'air de Rien is the closeness of someone's unadorned body. I can't help but think of Birkin's own recountings of her relationship with Serge Gainsbourg and how he rarely bathed. Yet she wrote fondly about his scruffiness, his tiredness, and his "ugliness" in a way that made it clear he never left the Endeared Gaze for her. She left him after more than a decade, but was not shy about the fact that he was the love of her life. L'air de Rien came out 15 years after Serge's death, an event, coupled with the death of Jane's father, that devastated her.

2006 was also squarely still in the era where celebrity scents were a profitable business. Sarah Jessica Parker's Lovely came out only one year before, to much ado and money spent on publicity. It touches and charms me that Jane Birkin, already a icon, would make a scent so odd and private, so decidedly not for everyone. I'm sure I'll try wearing it again, and we'll see if my experience changes. But there's something beautiful about being put off by it - like it's the scent of someone else's romance, in all the unknowability the lives of others contains.

🚬

Etui Noir:

My first impression is that Etui Noir is like a more approachable Girl of the Year. If Girl of the Year is the girl who sings "yeah my boyfriend's pretty cool/but he's not as cool as me" in "Brooklyn Baby" then maybe Etui Noir is the less cool boyfriend she gifted the scent to. The bergamot and tangerine top notes give it a much friendlier vibe, and the orris butter/iris is warm and leathery, though there's something deep deep inside with a vegetal whisper, like if the carrot haunting Iris Silver Mist was put in the pocket of a leather jacket years ago. It's pleasant, a little sexy, and androgynous in a way I still enjoy.

I sometimes feel uncool for heavily preferring feminine or feminine-leaning perfumes to the exclusion of all else. Is this some kind of internalized misogyny? In my mind there is a hypothetical cool girl perfume enthusiast who proudly wears the harshest, most animalic, most offputting scents with no regard for gender and the more steps less brave you are than this girl the less cool you are. But that would be violating my code of chic (style + knowing that you know yourself). I COULDN'T HELP BUT WONDER can you be cool but not chic?

💼

Soufflot:

Miller Harris describes Soufflot as "The enchantment of Paris on a Spring morning, bewitching the wearer with the suns first rays on horse chestnut trees, which filter through to the garden pathways of white blossoms," but to me it's an exquisite holiday scent. Christmas-adjacent perfumes can hew close to Bath And Body Works, which I don't always dislike, but one craves something more sophisticated sometimes. Like many people with a lifetime of enjoying "The Christmas Song," the idea of chestnuts has been romantic and evocative for me moreso than their being a food I go out of my way to eat. It's like a much lower stakes version of the Turkish Delight thing where the "roasted chestnuts" sounds like the best thing ever and the real thing could hardly live up to the Currier and Ives fantasy. Last year, I roasted chestnuts for the first time myself at Thanksgiving. They were pretty good! Soufflot captures the glowy romance of chestnuts, with notes of hazelut and mandarin that don't make it un-Christmasy. It stays warm and just sweet enough until it moves into a woody, tobacco, ambery impression, like you're done with the eating part of a cocktail party and are sitting in a wood paneled den with a drink or pipe. A discerning adult's Christmas gourmand.

🌰

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L'Epoque Parfums

Dopamine Rose:

A few years ago my best friend gifted me a generous decant of Lubin's Black Jade, a spicy amber perfume that is allegedly a recreation of a scent created for Marie Antoinette. I really like it, and always eye the sleek glass bottle when I visit The Paris Market in Savannah. If you asked me what Marie Antoinette would be as a perfume, I wouldn't have guessed a warm, spice heavy, cold weather friendly scent. If you asked most people what Marie Antoinette would be as a flower, I bet about 90% would say rose. And there is rose in Black Jade, nestled between cardamom, cinnamon, amber, and even patchouli.

Maison Francis Kurkdjian's A La Rose might be closer to most visceral imaginings of the last queen of France's aroma: a powdery rose, heavier on the flower itself, with girlish notes like lychee. I just read an article about Marie Antoinette's perfume habits, many of them scented baths, gloves, and hair perfumes rather than a collection of bottles. Rose appears, but not as much as jasmine, orange blossom, tuberose, and other florals. It's as tantalizing as it is frustrating that we will never know what Versailles in the late 18th century truly smelled like. The same goes for the countless rumors of which royals and notorious people of history did which beauty rituals or wore which perfumes.*

This is a long preamble into my sample of Dopamine Rose from L'Epoque, one of the brand's two debut scents. It's an unlikely choice for my first dab of Halloween, but Halloween is also about candy and sugar is close to decay. The aptly named Dopamine Rose is a rose sugar candy melting in your mouth. It's probably nothing like what Marie Antoinette smelled like, but it's what Marie Antoinette 2006 smells like. It has the girlish fruit top notes used in so many of these coquettish rose fragrances - rhubarb, raspberry, and strawberry - but with a dusting of marshmallow sugar. The rose is fresh and airy. I have never tried Parfums de Marly's Delina and am generally uninterested in those niche brands I feel are trading on borrowed history and the memetic tiktok desire machine, but a few reviews compare Dopamine Rose to that ubiquitous powder pink bottle.

Is it good? Yes! For the right moment, and maybe that's just alone in your home surrounded by the things that bring you the most extra-utilitarian joy, Dopamine Rose is a sweet little indulgence.

*Fun connection for me: Atkinson's White Rose de Alix, based on Empress Alexandra's signature perfume, has the lychee top note, rose center, and musk base in common with A La Rose. The doomed empress was said to have kept a portrait of Marie Antoinette in her room. I've always found that rather touching, as if the reminder of another unpopular, foreign born queen brought her comfort.

🌹

Delusions of Grandeur:

I was looking forward to this one the most of the two and found that it made far less of an impression on me than Dopamine Rose. I honestly don't have a lot to say despite being so interested in the apricot and saffron notes. I experienced Delusions of Grandeur as a boozy tobacco, though inoffensive versions of both. That's not a complaint. I have trouble with strong boozy perfumes, like the overrated Angel's Share or some of ELDO's Orange Extraordinaire selections. The tobacco was pleasant and soft, like being on the other side of the room from the person with the pipe. But the scent faded into a sort of sweet body lotion creaminess that had a hint of synthetic vanilla to my nose even though vanilla isn't listed on the notes.

🥃

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Luckyscent haul

Sultan Pasha Irisoir:

just gorgeous, northern renaissance oil painting vividness of iris and vintage glamour

Hilde Soliani Ti Amo: Iris:

likewise a gorgeous iris, but painted in softer colors and more in tune with private rituals and beauty than glamour. Uchi if Irisoir is soto

Hilde Soliani Sweet Parmesan Violet:

yes, it does smell exactly like the chalky violet candies, and I love those things

Eris Night Flower:

When I wore this it was bugging me for hours that it smelled like something else I own. It hit me on my postprandial "walk or something" (as my toddler calls it) that it was Tokyo Milk's Savage Belle. I was surprised to find they have only one note in common: bergamot, yet Night Flower has that same smoky, metallic atmosphere. I definitely felt like some kind of mysterious, possibly dangerous woman, just not of the man-eating tuberose monster dangerous woman variety.

🌃💐

Hollywood Gifts Centerfold:

I can't separate my experience of Centerfold from reading reviews and press about it before ordering a sample. It's a winking, self-aware perfume. The description leads with a quote from former Dorothy Stratten, a former Playboy playmate: “It’s a fantasy. The girl in the centerfold doesn’t exist. She’s like a dream.” Is it sexy? Yes. Is it good? Yes. I enjoyed wearing it, and it happened to be a morning selection so I double enjoyed wearing it to barre, another nexus of feminine signaling and performance.

The notes inform the vibe: "heart-shaped box of milk chocolates", "amaretto-soaked cherries," and "Fancy Mixed Nuts." It's the line between tacky and beautiful, an adolescent idea of what's erotic, and spending your pocket money on drugstore Valentine's gifts. It made me think about a restaurant my family loves that used to have a case of chocolate truffles alongside the dessert offerings. They were dome shaped and whimsically decorated and I always longed for them even knowing that my kid palette preferred the blondie or oreo pie. I didn't like the dark chocolate amaretto truffle, but I thought it was so pretty and felt like I would be really mature if I could like it.

When frag reviews and the creator Maddie Phinney herself describe Centerfold as "what a girl should smell like" we know we're in on the joke of "should." My husband, who did not have all this background information, liked it on me. It's a clever and well-executed idea but the interesting question is what the cleverness means when you're out in the world. If others think you smell sexy and delectable, does it turn into a recursive "I wear makeup for me" kind of problem? Most people catching a whiff of Centerfold from me aren't aware of its tongue-in-cheekily sleezy ads, full of innuendo and fuzzy lighting*. Maybe the connotations of the word centerfold itself are even lost on porn's digital nomads. In any case, it's never a bad thing to see perfumes go so deep on a concept and spark the conversations.

*including an "if you wear it, they will come" instagram ad

🎥🎁

Rania J Musc Moschus:

I loved this deep vanilla, fall-winter musk I wore the other night as my final perfume of the day. It made me feel like a furry, burrowing animal. My husband got the vanilla but after asking "what else?" we had an interesting discussion of musk and how hard it is to define and describe.

🦌

D'annam Mooncake:

It's not that I dislike D'annam's fragrances, but having tried both the Vietnam and Japan discovery sets, I find that even some of my favorites (tokyo nights, through the forest, vietnamese coffee, strawberry mochi btw) tend to dry down to a sort of watery prettiness. Maybe others have had the same complaint, because Mooncake did not do this and it lasted about 11 hours. It's photo realistic enough that my husband guessed on the first try what delicacy it was honoring. IDK I just really love adding salt to things. That salted egg yolk comes through.

🥮

Hiram Green Moon Bloom:

I do not really care about "smelling expensive" but in the first moments of Moon Bloom, I thought this is the most expensive feeling tuberose I've tried. There's an essay in Natasha Stagg's Sleeveless about thongs. In a paragraph about how depending on context, they can be tacky or sensually luxurious:

A cheap thong looks like something that has washed ashore and dried out, but a nicer thong is sexy, suggestive, even endearing. The wearing of the thong can mean a multitude of deviant actions. It is strangely at once conservative and reactionary. Consider the conundrum of hiding panty lines by creating the illusion of underwearlessness.

Tuberose: the mistress of the night, the flower that to some evokes the female sex, can function in a similar way. Moon Bloom is smooth and faintly spicy, though not so loud as to jump out at you in any way. It's a La Perla or Kiki de Montparnasse thong for sure.

👠 🗡️*

Toouch Creamy Tide:

I got the discovery set from Toouch, a new Vietnamese brand with perfumer Sy Truong, in my Luckyscent order. I'm including two of the five here only because I want to try Deep Lullaby, Heritage Nuzzle, and Dreamy Nautica in a less autumnal mood. I tried Creamy Tide first as my bedtime perfume. The top notes are lychee and pear, with rice, milk, and apple blossom at the center, and a vanilly musky base. I got a lot of the rice on the opening, which I liked because I will try any rice scent and my nose has a radar for it. It's very aptly named, with the fruit notes being light and creamy rather than bright. Instead of a gourmand vibe, Creamy Tide almost reminded me of rice and rice milk as part of beauty rituals. A great nighttime scent and a worthy addition for rice lovers.

🌾

Toouch Smoky Graze:

The inspiration for Smoky Graze, according to Toouch, is a morning in a Saigon Cafe. As I'm typing this, the smoky, roasted coffee is starting to move into honey, almond, and rose. I've never been to Saigon, though I'd like to. I have been to Shanghai and various cities in Japan, which are not the same thing of course, but Smoky Graze still reminded me of mornings in beautifully ramshackle coffee shops, often taking a breath before a busy day. These dim refuges, from Showa era kissaten with their dark wood and stained glass to artsy cafes tucked in shikumen buildings in China, are enchanting in a way that's hard to find over here.

Honey can be a difficult note to love, even/especially when done well. It's so strong and sticky. One of my favorites is by another Vietnamese perfumer, d.grayi, whose Honey Bunny is an assault of hay and a vegetal feeling until fading into a very agreeable honey. Strong honeys from way across the price spectrum - Tokyo Milk's Honey & The Moon to Guerlain's Tobacco Honey - just knock me on my face too much. The honey in Smoky Graze is on the border for me, but overall this is a complex coffee gourmand that anyone into coffee scents wouldn't regret trying - especially if you like your coffee a little closer to Poesie's Whisper Your Bitter Things or Kerosene's your-entire-body-was-brewed-along-with-the-beans Followed than something like D'annam's Vietnamese Coffee or Hilde Soliani's Buonissimo.

☕

Carthusia Fiori di Capri:

Fiori di Capri was a recommendation from the aforementioned Black Jade giving best friend. One of my favorite things about her is that we both have very good, very different taste. I hear about things I never would have looked for because of her. She isn't into the gourmands like me, and her imperious roses and grande dame scents can be ill-fitting on me. That's not to say we don't overlap. Lately we've shared an enthusiasm for iris and talking about vintage scents. Fiori di Capri, from Italian brand Carthusia, has an iris in the middle of its elegant bouquet, but there's a lot more to it. Carthusia the brand was founded in 1948 but is said to base its formulas on the methods of 14th century Carthusian monks. The story, general vibe, and packaging is reminiscent of Santa Maria Novella in its esteemed apothecary grandeur. One imagines an impossibly self-possessed woman visiting one of its Italian boutiques* for another bottle of her signature scent.

Fiori di Capri has that unmistakable feeling of being a vintage scent when it opens, similar in aura to my beloved Guerlains if not in formula. This is an area where, again, I don't think my knowledge of perfumery and its history is sophisticated enough to adequately describe what's going on. If I had to grope in the dark it's that I feel like many contemporary perfumes really lead and market themselves with a unique or showy top note that becomes the draw for a lot of people to try the scent. "Vintage" isn't just about like...being smacked with your grandma's powder puff. I find that vintage or vintage recreations open with a blend, and that the craftsmanship of that blend is more important than picking out individual notes.

So I couldn't tell you, without looking at the notes, exactly what white florals and citruses are in the kakushi aji of Fiori di Capri's opening, just that it's heady and beautiful. The violet, iris, carnation, and gourmand additions of spices and fruit in the middle are likewise another lovely stage that is more than the sum of its parts. The base of musk, amber, labdanum, sandalwood et al. has a few notes in common with the legendary guerlinade if not as singular a recipe.

It's a sunny sort of fragrance though not so much so that I feel unseasonal on this mid-autumn day. It's looking out over the sea in the morning sun from a garden terrace, whether that's the summer or winter sun. The Isle of Capri, after all, gets Novembers too.

*It was interesting to see that the only boutiques outside of Italy were in Japan and HK. Fiori di Capri is the only Carthusia scent I've tried, but I can see its stately but subtle florals appealing to the Japanese market.

🧜🏻‍♀️

Kyse Frangipane al Pistacchio:

If you want to smell like a dessert (or the experience of going to the mall in the early 2000s), super sweet perfumes are something you can find in abundance without having to spend a lot of money. So there's something special about perfumers like Kyse's Terri Bozzo and Hilde Soliani that keep fans coming back to their expertly executed dessert and sweet beverage inspired scents. With Hilde Soliani, aside from the quality and "nailed exactly what it's supposed to be" every time effect, I'm drawn to the sense of place, tradition, and craftsmanship in the scents. "Photorealistic" is an overused word in perfume talk, though charmingly indicative of the futility of human language. A Hilde Soliani scent isn't just a perfect recreation of what it says on the bottle, but the feeling of being transported to the exact circumstances under which a drink was made, a flower was picked, violet candies were sold on which street, etc.

Kyse's magic is harder to describe. It's like a zeroing in on a sweet note or cranking the saturation of the perfume's concept to something impressively pure. Gardenia Sucre quickly became one of my favorites. The bestseller, Delizia di Marshmallow, is such a good version of itself you have to respect it. Glace a la Fleur d'Oranger kind of smells like floral fruit loops to me, in a totally complimentary way. ANYWAY. Frangipane a la Pistacchio didn't do it for me. It's a lovely creamy pistachio, lovelier than a guilty pleasure like Demeter's Pistachio Ice Cream or a B&BW pistachio body spray but not quite lovelier enough.

🟢🍦