In the past few days, I have been wearing mostly Aromatics Elixir in the "Velvet Sheer" formulation (by the way, I find the name "Aromatics Elixir" odd enough grammatically, so adding the "Velvet Sheer" in the end takes away even from the little sense the name had to begin with). It has a consistency of a shower jel that melts into your skin. It is not alcohol free, but has only very little alcohol in it. And unlike Aromatics Elixir in the pure perfume spray - it has none of the aggressiveness and instead has a powerful but not forceful silage. Instead of being analytical, I would prefer to be descriptive now. Chypres are designed to not give away easily the notes they are composed of. And now this is precisely what I intend to do. In fact, perfumes were not intended to be perceived as individual notes chasing each other on a scent strip or one's skin. Perfume is meant to be greater than the sum of its parts; therefore analyzing perfumes and the notes contained within them could take away from the pleasure of experiencing the perfume as a whole.

Aromatics Elixir is indeed aromatic: herbaceously dry and at first even pungent. I will not attempt to compare it to the alcohol parfum formulation as I find that formulation to strong to bear and just never managed to keep it on my skin for long. It's that overwhelming. I think the fact that I've been wearing this slimy velvet sheer liquid for a few days in a row speaks for itself. The dryness of the first few hours does soften in the end and turns into a cozy ambery chypre with obvious vetiver underlining it all.

It may not be as polished or chic as the French perfumes of that genre - it is not as seamless as, say, Miss Dior - but I find its direct crudeness to be charming and reassuring in its lack of pretense. The notes do stand out on their own occasionally, as if they didn't have quite enough time to mingle with one another before being bottled, but that just suits me fine.



Bodegón copiado, originally uploaded by xuse_22.

P.s. I have been particularly enjoying wearing Aromatics Elixir while wearing my pendant filled with Ayalitta solid perfume. The two are not that similar, but their green/aromatic chypre character helps them get along.