Witches in costume

Halloween is almost here, and in the grand tradition of Jersey which takes Halloween quite seriously, I am thinking about the very darkest fragrances and how well  they play with the public these days? Or whether, and I’d lay odds on this, they simply spook them?

Darkness was in once.  People wore extremely strong and heavy fragrances and no one thought twice about it, Cabochard for instance, or Guerlain’s old heavy hitter Djedi, or the original Ungaro which I recall had a very dark sillage, sort of like a black hole altering the time space continuum  as it came down the street, sucking in every other fragrance for yards around into its impossibly dense core.  Come to think of it, the original Must de Cartier did that too.  But then, once upon a time, it was the eighties and nineties.

You get a lot of perfumes called black or noir now, but the reality is often a tame backing off from animalic musks or woods, or Heaven preserve us! Oakmoss!! Continue reading →