perfume write-ups: eris parfums
eight perfumes (full line)
ERIS Parfums is run by a woman named Barbara Herman, and I am biased therefore in its favor. If you are a Barbara, you have to work to get me off your side. There aren’t that many of us and we have to stick together. Herman also wrote a very cool-looking book about vintage perfume, Scent and Subversion: Decoding a Century of Provocative Perfume, which is extremely out of print. (I almost scored a reasonably priced copy recently but was beaten to it by somebody faster on the draw.)1 You can also read an AMA she did here or read her old blog here.
As Herman indicates in the AMA, ERIS is not dedicated to duplicating vintage perfume. It’s dedicated to a certain type of glamour. You cannot tap into this glamour by going straight to the source for a couple reasons, one being that many of the ingredients used in vintage perfumes have been regulated out of normal usage, and the other being that what is chic or edgy in one generation is “grandma’s perfume” fifty years later.2 So the challenge that ERIS sets for itself is making perfumes that register the way vintage perfumes did… while avoiding actually smelling vintage to people who aren’t into older perfumes (or smelling like bad imitations to people who are). As is so often the case, one must repeat that line from The Leopard… for things to stay the same, everything has to change.3
I bought an ERIS sampler when I first started getting interested in perfumes last year, after trying “Ma Bête” (though I no longer remember why I decided to do that). I tried almost all of them at the time, and wrote down some notes, but felt reluctant to write about them here. My thoughts kind of felt underbaked. But now, a year later, I’m going through them again.
And… it’s pretty cool, because I can actually smell more than I did before.
What I Loved
Mxxx.
(Fragrantica / Parfumo / Basenotes)
Top: Madagascan Blue Ginger, Mace (CO2 extraction), Saffron, Ethiopian Olibanum, Pink Peppercorn
Heart: Trinidad Cacao (ultrasound extraction), Virginia Cedarwood, Sandalwood
Base: Haitian Vetiver, Indonesian Patchouli, Laotian Benzoin, Castoreum (synthetic), 7% Natural Ambergris, Pierre d'Afrique (Hyraceum), Madagascan Green Vanilla (ultrasound extraction)
Funny thing: before I spritzed this one on I was wishing I had a chocolate-y perfume to try (mostly because I wanted chocolate to eat). I was like man I wish I had a chocolate perfume, but not like, a perfume that smelled like fudge… more of that sophisticated dusty bitterness of chocolate drifting pleasantly around me… wouldn’t that be nice… and so on and so on. Then when this was about a minute in I thought I had somehow hallucinated a chocolate smell out of sheer desire for chocolate until I went to go look at the notes. Trinidad Cacao… welcome.
“Mxxx.” is an odd experience for sure—spicy and rich with that small kick of chocolate. It does really prickle your nose if you get up close! But it’s also got this smoother, velvet side if you keep your distance, and then the cacao smell blossoms out around you. Then it smells good so you want to get close, but what you actually have to do is keep your distance. Basically, if you resist the urge to bury your nose in your wrist you will have a different experience, and it’s interesting to smell the change as you bring your wrist closer and further away.
But also, it’s genuinely crazy how much this perfume is in fact the chocolate smell I was wishing I had. Like almost exactly. What’s up with that.
Night Flower
(Fragrantica / Parfumo / Basenotes)
Top: Italian Bergamot, Russian Birch Tar, Guatemalan Cardamom
Heart: Suede, Indian Tuberose, Laotian Cinnamon
Base: Indonesian Patchouli, Venezuelan Tonka Bean, Musk (synthetic)
From first sniff, “Night Flower” made me feel like I was Jane Greer in Out of the Past, aka, the greatest femme fatale of all time. I loved it. However, it is also so potent I’m sort of afraid to wear it. It’s not just that the perfume itself is strong but anything you touch while wearing it becomes supersaturated with “Night Flower.” Then if it goes into, say, a drawer, everything in that drawer becomes saturated with “Night Flower.” If you aspired to become somebody’s dead first wife, “Night Flower” would be a great pick for a signature scent. That home will smell like you forever.
As I mentioned above, “Night Flower,” along with the other ERIS perfumes, was actually one of the first perfumes I tried when I started getting into them. I really liked it but also found it overwhelming (I wrote a little bit about it here). So I’ve come back to it almost a year later, to wear it properly. It’s still huge, but more intelligible. I think I can pick out things in this that I couldn’t before—I was like “I think this is a little spice-y?” and then took a gander at the notes. There’s cardamom and cinnamon! That’s pretty cool. And I can pick out the suede.
Basically, I am enjoying this just as much as I did before, but I have more of an idea of why because I can smell different parts. And it’s just sort of cool to realize that in fact I am developing a better sense of smell.