Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Rose Volupte by Sonoma Scent Studio

I’m a recent convert to the cult of perfume. I’ve always really enjoyed perfume, though because of my mom’s allergies, we didn’t really have it in the house. I had drugstore ‘fumes that I wore as a teenager—Anais Anais, Sand and Sable, Vanderbilt, Vanilla Fields-- and I got a little more sophisticated in college, falling in love with Calvin Klein’s Escape and Giorgio Beverly Hills’ Ocean Dream.

But last February, just into my 39th year, I started a quest to find a grown up every day scent and ended up tumbling head over heels in love with perfume. It’s amazing stuff, really. It always fits. It smells slightly different on each person. Scent is closely tied to memory, so a whiff of Obsession drags me right back to the ‘80s and I just know that someone in my life when I was a child wore Arpege.

I’ve developed a real love of sampling and thanks to a thriving online perfume community, have discovered some really great small perfumers. One of my favorites is Laurie Erickson of Sonoma Scent Studio in Healdsberg—so local! Laurie was nice enough to send me a sample of her most recent release, Rose Volupte, even though it hadn’t even been filtered yet! So I wanted to post my impressions of this beautiful scent for internet to see. Rose Volupte will be available for purchase on the SSS website very soon, hopefully this weekend.

The website lists the notes as rose, plum, amber, labdanum absolute, sandalwood, cedar, vetiver, heliotrope, clove, cinnamon, oakmoss, subtle aldehydes. The parfum is well blended, enough so that my fairly uneducated nose can’t really pick out too many individual notes. The first 20 minutes or so are a big, fruity rose. Then the spice kicks in a bit—still really, really rosy, but with warmth infusing it. There’s a touch of dryness that I’ve come to associate with cedar, not really a smell so much as a texture. I’m about four hours in and it has dried down to a beeswaxy, ambery rose that’s stays really close to my skin.

I have really dry skin that pretty much sucks in perfume like a milkshake. I have yet to find even a parfum strength scent (which all of Laurie’s are) that has much sillage on me after about two hours, if I’m dabbing it on. Spraying usually lasts a bit longer and has more oomph. Rose Volupte is no exception to that. But I wear perfume for me and sometimes, for the people who I’m intimate enough with to hug, so that doesn’t really bother me, especially when the scent is as gorgeous as this one.

Rose Volupte is appropriately named. Everything about it what J and I call ‘bosom-y” when we’re talking about wine—round, soft, smooth, and full. It is intensely feminine and a little vintage feeling. It is the perfect perfume to go with a wine red velvet cocktail dress and Bordeaux colored lipstick. It’s classy and sexy and a little formal in a way that appeals to me like all the flirty “young” fragrances available right now don’t. It is black stockings with seams, heels, and set hair.