Perfume Chat: Lalique, Etat Libre d'Orange and Aftelier

I took the opportunity to make a couple of videos this weekend whilst I had the house to myself. The first one that I want to share with you is mostly me rambling on about perfume. I'm not a natural at explaining the different layers in a fragrance (no, really!) but I wanted to share some of the things I have tried recently and enjoyed.

The video is quite an epic, so for those of you that prefer to read rather than view, here's the (slightly) abridged version.

Etienne de Swardt

I attended a fragrance event hosted by Escentual a couple of weeks ago and was privileged to hear Etienne De Swardt, President of Etat Libre d'Orange, talk about their perfumes and the ideas behind them. Etat Libre d'Orange are a very cheeky little scent house, if you're easily offended, don't look at the artwork too closely! Etienne was so wry and very French in his manner (although I believe he was born in South Africa) that it was easy to be charmed as well as understand how perfumes such as Putain de Palaces and Sécrétions Magnifiques came about. I love the idea of corrupting scent combination and adding challenging touches here and there. Having said that, I still haven't applied Sécrétions Magnifiques and my husband hasn't forgiven me for explaining exactly what the 3 S's were whilst he was eating his dinner......

Moving to a more traditional type of fragrance, something else I was introduced to and have discovered I really like is Lalique Fleur de Cristal. It's not typically the kind of scent I would pick out for myself, often these kind of sharp florals don't work on my skin but this has been very well blended. I won't attempt to describe the various notes but I find it to be a beautiful, feminine yet sophisticated and grown up fragrance. It mellows on my skin very quickly and I've found myself wearing it a lot. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised when I looked at the perfume pyramid on Fragrantica, that Fleur de Cristal actually shares a lot of similar notes to my signature scent, Cashmere Mist by Donna Karan.

In a total change of pace, I wanted to mention the natural perfumes from Aftelier Perfumes that I am working my way through. If you've not come across Aftelier Perfumes before, I urge you to take a look at their website. I spent a very enjoyable couple of hours reading through all of the scent combinations. You can order samples of the perfumes to try, which is a great way to work out which combinations you really like. There are 1ml samples of the oil based perfumes and you can also get small samples of the solids. I have liquid samples of Parfum de Maroc, Tango, Candide, Honey Blossom and Fig as well as samples of the solid perfumes, Orchid and Alchemy. So far, I think the solid fragrances are my favourite because they seem to work very well on my skin but I'm enjoying playing around with all of the scents.

I do very much like trying perfume in sample sizes. Pregnancy has done strange things to my sense of smell and I'm still trying to work out what suits me post children. Like Aftelier, Escentual have sample sets available to buy. There are discovery sets for both Etat Libre d'Orange and Lalique which I think are an excellent idea. I quite fancy the Lalique set myself as it contains Encre Noir, which me and my expensive taste have taken a little liking to!


Disclosure: The Etat Libre samples and Lalique were part of an event bag. The Aftelier samples were purchased by but Mandy was kind enough to include a couple of extra samples for me to try.