Today is going to be another scorcher with temps expected to be somewhere in the 90s and of course in Baltimore that means high humidity as well. When it gets stinky hot, my fragrance preferences tend to go towards something more salty and savory than flowery. For Memorial Day, I wore a salty iris fragrance, Santa Maria Novella's
Citta di Kyoto. Today, it's Hermes
Eau des Merveilles.
I first tried
Eau des Merveilles on a trip to NY with my Dad. He wanted to nose around through Saks' men's department, and I decided to wait for him in fragrances. I let a sales associate spray me with a wee bit of
EdM and spent most of the afternoon trying to figure out if I liked it or not. It had an intriguing salty quality, one not related to the nasty "marine" notes created by the aromachemical calone (which smells like rotting seaweed) but to a more natural element - ambergris. Ambergris mixed with pepper and woods and vetiver.
I decided I didn't like it enough to go back and purchase it. On a later occasion, I sniffed some
Elixir des Merveilles, which has a chocolate-orange thing going on and which does not, in my opinion, work at all. The gourmand sweetness added to the saltwater-on-skin quality of the original created something quite unpleasant, a scrubber. And this olfactory experience tainted the original.
A few years later, I decided to give
EdM another try. Once again I was intrigued, and this time I took the plunge. Now I find that it is a perfect scent to wear on hot days. It's refreshing somehow, and cooling, and not at all cloying (as I often find some floral or sweet fragrances in the heat). I'm loving it (even if I'm hating the heat).
Notes: elemi, bitter orange, Italian lemon, Indonesian pepper, pink pepper, ambergris accord, oak, cedar, vetiver, balsam of Peru, tears of Siam
