A fresh take rose perfume - Cannabis Rose

[grace]

A fresh take rose perfume

 

03:56 PM CDT on Friday, June 20, 2008

BY CHANDLER BURR / Special to The Dallas Morning News

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dw...n1.2684cef.html

 

Rose is the ultimate perfume paradigm, but today, this is strangely more theory than reality. It is universally known within the industry that the smell of rose does quite poorly in focus groups and, to perfume buyers, reads "old lady."

 

This is why you read disproportionately more about rose in press materials (you like the idea of rose scent) than you actually smell rose in perfumes (the reality makes you think of your grandmother).

 

But a rose revolution has been going for a while.

 

One spectacularly good and novel approach to rose is Cannabis Rose by Fresh ($75 at Sephora, sephora.com and fresh.com). The label's Cannabis Santal, a 2006 creation by the brilliant young perfumer Caroline Sabas and Fresh creative director Lev Glazman, was a triumph. This was explicitly cannabis as pot, the ultra-rich, dirty, jungle-floor organic resin scent of the dried leaves. Sabas mixed it with sandalwood, and it remains a mesmerizing work of art.

 

In 2007, Glazman worked with perfumer Jerome Epinette to mate pot to rose, and the resulting perfume is insanely good, essentially perfect on every level: a darkly mesmerizing rose scent, aesthetically innovative, daring, striking, technically excellent, persistent on skin, expertly diffusive, beautifully structured.

 

Fresh has taken rose, utterly eliminated all trace of grandmother by viscerally transmogrifying the material, reinvented it entirely as a perfume concept, and aimed the resulting perfume straight at the reptilian brain. Cannabis Rose smolders and seduces. Its references are entirely from the natural world and yet it seems space age – it is both dirty and clean at once, which is a difficult trick. A perfume like this comes along rarely.