perfume write-ups: cirrus, part ii
twelve perfumes
Cirrus! Our first returning brand. Cirrus and Odette are my two big favorites from my time spent sampling perfumes, but Cirrus is slightly more budget friendly and a bit more unpredictable in its scent profiles, so while I’ve been letting new Odette releases stack up until it feels worth it to pay for shipping, I’ve found staying up on Cirrus’s releases pretty easy.
At this point, I think I have tried… all but two of the extant Cirrus perfumes.1 Per a recent promotional email, some more are forthcoming later this month, but we’ll get to em when we get to em:
I really like Cirrus and I’ve bought a number of their perfumes in larger sizes. “Snooze” (written about here) is probably my favorite sleep perfume, though I have to rotate it in and out with some others because one otherwise goes noseblind.2
Cirrus only ships to the continental United States, but if you live there and want to try them out with one of their “pick five” sample sets, the official BDM-recommended starter back is: “Bellano,” “Snooze,” “Sybarite,” “Antique Nouveau,” plus one wild card of your choice. Alternately, you can use their four most popular scents—“Bellano,” “Chamomile Cafe,” “Fall Creek,” “Snooze”—and one wild card of your choice. Obviously, if there’s one in there you just know you’ll hate, skip it, but otherwise I think my suggested list gives you a pretty good sense of the range.
What I Loved
burning wafts of church incense, labdanum, dusty ancient stone corridors, papyrus, and campari on your breath
When I think about perfumes that remind me of alcohol, I tend to look for gin. The reason for that is pretty straightforward: I miss drinking gin. But there are lots of alcohol notes out there: maybe the most popular boozy perfume right now is “Angel’s Share” (By Killian), which is supposed to smell like cognac. (I haven’t tried it.) I never would have thought of trying to smell like a campari and soda, though. Turns out it’s great.
I have to be in exactly the right mood to wear “Duomo,” and it’s got to be the right weather. But when I am in that mood, and it is the right weather, the incense and the bitterness hit just right. For me the scent association is maybe the reverse as the one Cirrus has: I think of the incense as lingering, the campari as present. Or maybe they’re both lingering: you’ve left the church, the glass is empty, but those sorts of smells, they just don’t go away.