First of all, meeting Francis Kurkdjian was a real treat. I’ll do my best to blog about him at greater length some time soon, but for now, I’ll share something rather amazing about Absolue Pour Le Soir… well, I thought it was amazing…
The reason why its civet note is so richly animalic is because… IT’S REAL CIVET! As you can imagine, when Monsieur Kurkdjian revealed this tasty bit of info, he received quite a few gasps of astonishment in response.
Cue: stereotypical Gallic shrug, raised eyebrows and a quiet assertion that “there is no law that says I can’t use real civet.”
He also made several other thought-provoking statements, but as I say, I’ll save them for another day.
Some of you may be interested to learn how the IFRA interview went. You’ll have to wait a little while for me to write it up and for Grant Osborne to publish it on Basenotes, but I’ll tantalise you with one ‘soundbite’: Lisa Hipgrave, the Director of IFRA UK, told me that she’s not aware of any perfumes that have had to be reformulated because of IFRA Standards. I’m taking her words slightly out of context here – you’ll have to wait for the final article to get the whole picture – but that is essentially what she said. Doubtless you’ll have a response to this, but sit on it for now: you may have an opportunity to express your feelings directly to IFRA. Just keep checking Basenotes…
Tonight I’m off to the FiFi UK awards, which should be very exciting indeed. Phone battery permitting, I’ll be tweeting live from the event, so please visit my Twitter page to find out who the night’s big winners are. The hashtag for the evening’s tweets is #fifiawards_uk and I believe several regular perfume loving tweeps are planning to incorporate my coverage of the event with the weekly #fumechat. The ball gets rolling at 1830 (UK time), but according to the schedule, the prizes won’t start being handed out until about 2130. Join us if you can!
And finally… drum roll please… the winner of the sample of MDCI’s La Belle Hélène is
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Congrats, Undina! Enjoy.
Ok, do you know how hard it is for me to sit on my thoughts about Lisa Hipgrave's stateement? I may explode! 😉 But, very well….
Real civet, huh? Well, that explains it. And yes, why not?
May I too say something a bit out of context, and shout the chorus of “The Ballad of John and Yoko“ in response to Ms. Lisa`s ignorant/coverup comment??
Wow, Undina is on a roll, she won my recent contest too! Congrats, Undina!
I enjoyed your live tweets from Fifi Awards tonight and was thrilled that Andy Tauer won for Orange Star. It makes all the other dubious nominations in other categories practically disappear. And somebody swiped his goodie bag? How low can you get. I hope he was able to get a replacement.
Tania, I thought you might have a thing or two to say. Hopefully, you won't have to wait much longer to air your views.
Linda, you can shout as much as you like 😉
Carrie, yes, Andy's win is just amazing, and I'm glad you liked the tweets. I'm not sure what happened with the goodie bag, though…
Persolaise,
I also wanted to mention that I enjoyed reading your tweets (it's a completely new experience for me, so it was entertaining).
Undina, thank you, that's really sweet. I'm not the world's most adept tweeter… but I'm getting better 😉