Scentzilla!

L’air du Desert Marocain is a scent I am disinclined to pick apart and sort note by note. It’s a perfume that is best appreciated as a unified line, and I feel that if I break the whole into pieces I might break its spell. So instead, I would prefer to share some places and times it stirs loose from my memory.

This fragrance calls forth a coastal forest smell. Wind-shaped cedars and manzanitas jut out, but L’air is mathematically divided from the grey humidity and loam, leaving a remainder of the rarified clean air blowing in.

Moving south from the coastal rain forests, my mind flits to the Oregon Dunes, where the air is dry, the land is a sea of constantly swirling sand, and yet the trees and other plantlife surreally find their way inside.

And then I travel to a place in childhood. When I was around nine or ten, my brother’s godparents were running a summer camp resort in Spearfish Canyon in the Black Hills. That year the Hills suffered a terrible drought, and even the blue spruce looked autumnal in the dryness. We kids would play our games up along the steeply sloped sides of the hills, clambering over forest floors strewn with wild flowers, dry needles, and branches. With every footfall, the aromas of the forest detritus would release as it crushed underneath our little sneakered feet.

I am then reminded of when I was eleven. My friend Laura, who is half Lakota, taught me to pick the juniper berries off a certain species of spruce that grew in Yankton ditches*. We’d suck and then spit them out - one mustn’t eat them. The scent of this endeavor would always cling to my fingers for hours afterwards. For the curious, juniper berries do not taste of gin, though gin tastes of them. They are sour, bitter, fruity, and herbaceously floral.

As is my habit, I used my sister as a guinea pig with L’air. Sisters really are the best. Who else but a sister would think an evening of perfume sampling, tea drinking, and watching Donald Trump’s cotillion of crazies on TV sounds like fine way to spend a Thursday night? What startled me was how overwhelmingly lavender-fielded this fragrance was on her. A touch of something seeming like an explicit bitter orange even appreared on her. The end drydown was quite similar to the way it wore on me, but it differed vastly overall. Funny thing - we both preferred the way it unfolded on our own skin, as opposed to each others’.

L’air du Desert Marocain is not gender specific. This seems to be achieved not by manipulation of “unisex” notes, but rather through what seems like an effort to evoke sensations of a real place that does not precisely exist. Sort of like an Avalon, I suppose, but L’air is not some mist-curtained island. It’s a forest tucked away gently behind the clarified sunlight of a mountain’s summit in summer, and the strange night chill that falls over a desert in winter.

My apologies to those who were looking for a play-by-play of the individual notes. (It seemed a dishonorable way to fully describe what this scent conjured up emotionally for me.)

*I dimly remember Laura telling me that her auntie used these berries when people had tummy aches. I think she also mentioned something about a juniper berry tea, but my memory goes foggy after that. I can’t vouch for the validity of this treatment, nor do I know if it is even a widely common thing to do amongst the Lakota. I definitely remember that my parents freaked out completely when they realized we were doing this and forbade me from ever doing it again, out of fear I might damage my liver or something.

First photo taken of a lumber truck in the Coastal Range in Oregon. Second photo of the Oregon Sand Dunes, near Florence, Oregon, is from www.ohwy.com. Third photo is of Spearfish Canyon from BlackHills.com. Fourth image is from Artavatar. It is by Ashok K. Dey, entitled “Camp 2,” and is an original piece that can be purchased directly through Artavatar. For more info on all the excellent reasons to support Artavatar, please go directly to the site by clicking here

This entry was posted on Friday, October 21st, 2005 at 5:00 am and is filed under Perfume Reviews, Tauer Perfumes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.