Muscs Koublai Khan
"...As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover..."
--from Kubla Khan, by Coleridge
the original description of Muscs Koublai Khan on the Salons Shiseido site called it "a vegetal musk, animalistic, luminous and pedigreed..." yadda yadda, but even with the new and more circumspect description it still gives no notes whatsoever. i'm wondering if that's deliberate, as there's a note in MKK that just doesn't smell like anything i've smelled in a fragrance before. on me, that note is most definitely unpleasant.
i've been wearing the fragrance on and off for a few days, thinking that maybe, just maybe, it's my stage in monthly chemistry. but sadly, no. MKK is a very sweet musk as far as they go, but it's also very strongly physical. you can smell the male pheromones in there, and depending on your personal chemistry you can get anything from deep musk to manure out of that note. on me it smells like a friend of mine's body odor after he's worked out or done a lot of physical exertion - not nasty bacterial BO, but honest scent. it still makes me feel like someone will ask me to take a shower any minute.
the sweet note is very ambery, and there's a touch of leather and incense in it. however, it's a tease of a note, coming and going as time passes on your wrist. the smell waxes and wanes but never manages to overcome the deep physical scent to it. as it dries down there's a soapier note in there - it's the traditional drydown of many egyptian musk accords and i found that somewhat disappointing in a Serge composition. however, the "working man" smell stayed with me throughout the drydown, becoming more or less intense depending on where the amber note was in its moon-like phase changes.
i wouldn't wear MKK in public - this is the kind of perfume that can cause perfume bans in offices or in whole cities or, given enough time on my chemistry, start a civil war. i'm packing away the battle-axe and making sure this warrior stays at home.
Fifi Chachnil
to say that i'm shocked at the love the fragrance gets on MUA is a serious understatement. Fifi Chachnil is described as being "both insolent...and tender" and i suppose in a way that's true - it reminds me of the smell of nursing homes. there's a bleachy note somewhere in there that overwhelms the rose and amber altogether, and the tobacco note is just far too "old cheap cigar" rather than the warm type of pipe-tobacco scent you get in a fragrance like Fumerie Turque. finally, the lily of the valley is not the lovely whitesweet smell of the flower but the more strident smell of early synthetic muguets from the 60s.
other people have fallen deeply in love with this fragrance - why couldn't i?
sadly i couldn't even wait longer than an hour for the drydown; it smelled so awful on me as it dried down that i simply had to shower. i'm truly lucky i'm not a big pink lover - i'm enough of a bottle and glassware freak that i might have bought this for the adorable atomizer alone.
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