Scentzilla!

Meet the unholy love child of Carolina Herrera and Rodney Dangerfield: K de Krizia.

K de Krizia is as a basic as Carolina’s iconic use of the white dress shirt. Her designs seem intended to make the woman who wears them feel elegant and tasteful within her own body, despite the naysaying of others that are unable to appreciate most women who aren’t fashion models have real hips (hi, Tom Ford, you banal misogynist*, you.) In that spirit, K de Krizia is a chypre aimed at making one feel delighted in his or her own skin.

And yet. Rodney Dangerfield. K de Krizia “don’t get no respect. No respect.” It’s only rarely mentioned on the various perfume boards/forums for perfume enthusiasts, and amongst those who only wear but a few fragrances in their lifetimes, it’s considered their “mother’s” scent. Pity, that.

K de Krizia eau de parfum opens with a singing lilt of bergamot and oakmoss. As it enters its middle phase, I can see the hot panting of tuberose from a distance, and but** I feel the sweet hand-squeeze of innocent lily of the valley: Lust from a distance only. Narcissus forms the floral core of K. It is a note that always reminds me of laquered jewelry boxes when paired with oakmoss. The base of K de Krizia does reveal green moss, but it tucked neatly to fit inside what seems like an unmistakable sandalwood. Lurking within the base, vanilla is employed not as a direct note, but to underpin the more prominent notes. Yet all remains unobtrusive, nothing jars or pushes itself forward where unwanted. The never-out-of-fashion crisp white shirt of the chypre genre is our K.

I do not care for the eau de toilette version of K de Krizia. I know how much perfume fans hate hearing this, I know, but it smells practically musty, like an old lady someone at the nursing home forgot to dust off. (I’ve already got a one-way ticket to Hell, why not bump up from coach to business class?) In short, it is an inferior concentration, and I would skip the edt entirely, and splurge the few extra bucks to obtain the edp.

I wonder if the design of the bottle is not somehow responsible for straightjacketing K’s popularity? It seems a dated design, sprung forth from the forehead of Pierre Dinand for the year 1982 alone. Yet the juice in the bottle is decidedly foward-thinking, a clean scent without the connotations of detergent that many scents currently populating the best-seller lists possess. Dinand has what is sometimes referred to as “an embarassment of talent,” but this bottle seems less timeless than his better ones. Adding to the mountain of neglect is Krizia’s choice against advertising this fragrance anymore. Sigh. Again, pity that.

*Honestly, I wish the NY Times kept their online articles available for free much longer than they do. Tom Ford opined in an article that Ms. Herrera was unnaturally focused on the hip area in her designs, and to that I can only say: someone who choses to frequently enough (and ridiculously, too) base his predilections upon people/things being nude ought to consider that many of us ladies are curvy and we do happen to consider the shape of our hips when choosing CLOTHING. Remember that? Y’know… clothes, those things that designers, like say for instance Tom Ford, supposedly make. Because, really, we wear clothing for the majority of the day. And asshats who forget many women have the child-bearing hips just come off sounding pompous and disconected with everyday life. (For those readers to whom English is a second language, please let me explain the term asshat: where would your head be if you were wearing your ass for a hat?)

**David Foster Wallace connived to use “and” and “but” smack dab together, and ever since I have been looking for an excuse to do so myself. Finally! Well, to be honest, neither he nor I were very successful, but the plus on his side is that he’s David Foster fricking Wallace. On my plus side, we have the fact that this is but a blog. Which is not much at all. DFW always wins language-wise against, like, everyone, including my ignorant self.

Images: Caroline Herrera from catwalks.sagafurs.com, and Rodney Dangerfield from deejayphoto.com.