Miss De Rauch

An old school classic perfume with character. I imagine a lady wearing it, while being at the Royal Ascot horse racing, with her extravagant hat on and her sophisticated aura enchanting all around her, enhanced by her "Miss de Rauch's" invisible perfume cloud. Pure magic!

If this was reformulated in 1968 and 1998, then what I own would be either the original formula or the 1968 version. Over the last five to ten years I’ve come across two bottles in antique shops; two different shops along the same two blocks of a small Arkansas town’s Main St. All of these shops draw their inventory from the surrounding residents. Knowing this town as I do, I would say the chances are slim that these two bottles did not belong to the same individual; yet both bottles are partially used, and this town has been stagnant for decades. The population was far more travelled in the sixties and seventies: at that time, land developers came in and drew people from all over the country. That boom petered out in the early to mid eighties, which means that the bottles I own would have been brought in before then. How this perfume, which I’d never heard of, ended up in rural Arkansas remains a rich mystery to me, mainly because: the scent is exceptional, which means that whoever owned it must have been too. No one moved to this town in its formative years without an independent, adventurous spirit. I’ve described it as an aldehydic mimosa. It distinguishes itself that way—it’s by far the best mimosa-centered fragrance I’ve smelled—but also because a mimosa-centric fragrance is a rarity in itself. There are other things in the mix, and at times if you focus you can tease them out—something like carnation, for instance, keeps the scent profile anchored in a faintly spicy place—but it all works together in a way that for me emphasizes an idea of mimosa, dwelling in a place of abstraction and associations the way YSL Paris swims conceptually and romantically around “Rose”. I don’t sense oakmoss. The aldehydes are muted, and give texture and dimension to the fragrance, without hazing them through a veil of powder. Its backbone is firmly rooted in its era: though an exceptional take on mimosa, it bears many of the hallmarks of its contemporaries (like l’air du Temps, Dana’s Emir, and, say, Revlon’s Intimate), a kind of ambery floralcy, gently spiced and nuanced with animalic contributions. The longevity is good. Like Intimate and Emir, it evolves into a low golden hum with extended wear.

Really smooth and beautiful. The sandalwood is particularly clear, but I get all of the notes with the exception of the melon. High quality ingredients and a sophisticated blend. My bottle is old — ozone killing spray bottle old. It makes the most beautiful finely scattered mist.