🌶 Mood Scent 4 Spice It Up!🌶🌶
It’s is time for our monthly Mood Scent 4 post! Where Portia (on A Bottled Rose) , Samantha (I Scent You A Day), Megan (Megan In Sainte Maxime) and I write about a different subject linking perfume to mood or occasion.This time we chose to write about precious spices in perfumes like cardamon, black pepper, cinnamon, clove, ginger or anise seed. Warming, energizing, uplifting or ethereal spices are used to create an interesting contrast in a perfume or as part of the fragrance. Flowers like roses or lilacs can have a spicy note as well.
Spices in perfume (and in food too) can be challenging to me personally but this might be different for you, let me know in the comments how you feel about spicy perfumes. I chose some of my favorites starting with Réglisse Noir.
Réglisse Noir 1000 Flowers
Réglisse Noir was the first release from the perfume house 1000 Flowers. 1000 Flowers was founded by Canadian perfumer Jessica Buchanan in Grasse. Réglisse is liquorice in French. Liquorice was made from the glycyrrhiza glabra root (not sure if it still is!) and has a spicy anisidic scent. This root is not botanically related to anise or star anise. In The Netherlands these liquorice roots, also called sweet wood (zoethout) are sold in health food stores. Liquorice is a very popular sweet here and sold in salty, sweet and even sour varieties.
Ethereal star anise is the main player of Réglisse Noir for its soft liquorice like scent. Jessica Buchanans treatment of this fragrance is masterful in adding smooth vanilla. Creating a languid lazy mood of long sunny Summer afternoons sipping a glass of cold Pastis with water on a tranquil terrace in a peaceful quiet little village in Southern France. Pastis is a French aperitif traditionally made of star anise and liquorice. Réglisse Noir is adorned by pungent black pepper, refreshing mint and shiso adding an interesting modern touch. These spices are like flavoring a dish with some black pepper to making it far more interesting and uplift all its different flavors.
Maria Candida Gentile Cinabre
Cinabre smells of a blossoming grand red rose with large velvet petals. Maria Candida Gentile added elegant touches of pungent black and pink pepper creating a very special floral fragrance. The dry down feels like a warming blanket of vanilla powder and opoponax, a spicy warm resin used in incense blends as well as in perfumes. Cinabre is an incredibly energizing rose scent which I would not recommend using before going to sleep as you will probably stay up the whole night as I did once unless you want to. If you like spicy roses like Amouage Epic Woman and Majda Bekkali Mon Nom est Rouge give this spicy bright red rose a try.
The spiciness of the black and pink pepper in Cinabre is like adding a touch of the perfect red lipstick shade to a bare face completely changing your image. The black and pink pepper make this velvet red rose extraordinary.
Amouage Memoir For Women
Memoir smells of the once forbidden highly alcoholic anise flavored drink absinth. Imagine opening a large ancient black wooden box left in the corner of a very old attic in a very old deserted castle in a fantasy desert, the box is full of small glass medicine vials with mixed spices like lemony cardamon, black pepper, cloves. Little leather sachets with frankincense, dried roses, fragrant jasmine flowers, oakmoss and dried castoreum from the beaver gland are hidden and tucked away in a secret compartment of this box too.
Wearing Memoir feels like wearing something dark and forbidden maybe due to the anisidic wormwood herb found in absinth. A drink once very popular amongst French writers like Charles Baudelaire and featured in several paintings of Vincent van Gogh. Absinth is traditionally made from the herb wormwood, also one of the perfume notes in this fragrance.
Gallivant Perfumes and Colognes Amsterdam
Another spicy and warm fragrance I really like is Gallivant Perfumes and Colognes Amsterdam. It has the interesting spice note of chinese Szechuan pepper, which is not found in many other fragrances. The bottle on the photograph is on a tray with the arms of the city of Amsterdam. You can find my full review of Gallivant Amsterdam here.
These are the spicy fragrances I picked. Have a look on Samantha’s blog I Scent You A Day Megan’s blog Megan in St. Maxime and Portia on A Bottled Rose! I love to read their picks and see what they chose. Sometimes we choose the same fragrances which is great as we don’t know the scents we will pick.
Over to you: Do you like spicy perfumes? What are your favorite spicy perfumes ?
Disclosure: All fragrances mentioned in this article were bought by me or a gift with purchase. Bottles which are sold now, might be different from the ones shown on the photographs. All the photographs were made by me personally and are an artistic expression. The aim of the photographs is to portray personal impressions of the fragrances.