Jarling

- Liquid happiness. This perfume transcends words, but I gotta pen down my feeling before I forgot. Intense heliotrope and almond blast at first, soft sweet mimosa waltzes in later. Then these notes dance on my skin for hours and hours. Before you know it, the waxy-soapy facet of the heliotrope creeps up, along with its almost "salty", fatty-creamy color, overshadowed the care-free sweetness at the beginning hour. At first, I suspect this perfume is a high-quality soliflore of heliotrope, or "heliotropin" (?) to be precise: Jarling has highlighted every little facet of this now-banned ingredients. Heliotropin used to be the centerpiece of, well, heliotrope note: this is a beautiful floral scent simultaneously smells creamy , sweet powdery and almond-y . If you wanna have a taste of a lighter, airy version, try L'eau D'hiver by Frederic Malle before it's been reformulated (or has it already?). I fell in love with it at first sight. However, if you had the unfortunate to smell this chemical itself in high concentration, you'll be immediately taken by its waxy-soapy-fatty backbone. By "soapy" I don't mean any of the harsh, sharp, modern "clean" scent registered in your mind, it's more like a viscous, thinckened scent somewhere in between raw cream , clean fat and old-fashioned bar soap . Then the more I smell it, the more I realize: every review here holds some truth. Take a sniff from the flask, the star anise will hit you right off the bat. Getting close to skin, the thick salty/fatty/soapy backbone caught you off-guard, along with a sweet vanilla undertone. Move further away, the heliotrope and mimosa open in the air. Perfume like this is a juxtaposition of a series of contradictory ideas: it’s linear, it’s complex; It’s clear, it’s opaque; It’s something you never experienced before, it causes you Deja Vu.

Jarling opens with bitter almond, not explicitely powdery, but with an almost aqueous quality. The focus then starts to shift gradually into a more floral tone, and after about 30 minutes, Jarling is now stucked in the no man's land between mimosa, lilac and linden blossom. An oily heliotrope/almond with aqueous violet leaf nuance and a subtle anise undertone, Jarling could well be either mimosa or lilac to my nose. But it lacks the weird vegetal oil quality of mimosa like Dame Mimosa perfume oil, nor does it retain the wheat/pollen like aroma of Frederic Malle En Passant. Its clean aqueous quality makes me think of several linden blossom fragrances, but Jarling is just too intense for this delicate beauty. Jarling changes incrementally. It's always clean musky and aqueous, but after about 6 hours, it also has a subtle hay/almond undertone with a tiny bit of cherry. Jarling has moderate sillage and becomes quite intense if sniffed close to skin. The longevity is easily 9 hours. As I'm getting more interested in lilac and mimosa perfumes, I was really excited to finally got to try Jarling on my skin. However, with its intense aqueous and clean tonality, I now realise that I actually prefer them being more delicate as a soliflore. Its relative linear structure also puts it on disadvantage compared to other more dramatic JAR perfumes. If you'd like an aqueous, clean, musky, mimosa/lilac/almond fragrance, and with an ample budget, Jarling might worths a try. Otherwise, there're other more accessible choices out there as well.

To me, this smells just like LUSH Snowcake. A more complex, expensive version for sure, but still unmistakably Snowcake. Had I not been aware of the price, I wonder how expensive I'd have guessed this was. While it is very complex and refined-you can smell the quality of the ingredients-it doesn't have that "expensive" smell to it. Rather than expensive perfume, it smells like the highest quality bath and body products you could possibly find. I don't mean that in a negative way, they'd be bath products fit for royalty, it just doesn't really smell like what you'd imagine a perfume to smell like. Maybe it's just because I associate this with actual bath products though. I think the reason Jarling doesn't smell like perfume is because most perfumes have a synthetic component to them, regardless of how beautiful, rarely does a perfume smell like anything you'd find in nature. And for this price, you'd expect such high quality ingredients that there is not a trace of anything synthetic. Unfortunately, expensive ingredients do not necessarily ensure an expensive smelling perfume. If you haven't tried Snowcake, it is a slightly flowery, bitter almond and sweet marzipan scent. That's what this is. It doesn't change much from the opening to the dry down, but the initial intense almond blast settles into something a little more floral, still heavily gourmand to my nose though. And, Snowcake notwithstanding , Jarling is very unique. It is nothing like other almond or heliotrope based fragrances. It certainly doesn't evoke L'heure Bleue in the least, nor is it similar to another floral-almond gourmand, Dior Hypnotic Poison. Perhaps this is because it-wow I feel redundant right now-it doesn't smell like perfume. Like Snowcake, I like this a lot. But I'd prefer it as a body lotion, and certainly not for $700+.

HOW is this over $700??? It smells like almondy soap. That's it. I don't think I'd wear this one even if it were free, let alone for that price tag. It just doesn't smell very good.

Those who are familiar with JAR know that this brand is to perfumery just like a 1936 Bugatti 57SC Atlantic is to cars. A completely out of the world experience that's far beyond pure luxury and pleasure as we know them. JAR fragrances have the ability to drive you, within a single wearing, from heaven to hell and back. An experience that will redefine the sense of smell and the usual evaluating paramenters with no turning back. Jarling makes no exception. What may sound as an average heliotrope soliflore, upon application delivers an extremely caleidoscopic blast of mimosa, almond, marzipan and star anise paired to challenging bitter undertones that bring to mind of cyanide and what I will call "vintage antibiotic syrup for children" (Baktrim anyone?). While all of the above sound disencouraging, Jarling is immediately ready to evolve into one of the most delicate almondy-mimosa-lilac centered fragrance ever created.Plush, sophisticated and, considering the price tag, extremely exclusive. By all means, a JAR. Lovers of Apres L'Ondeè, take note. This is the final frontier. Downside: Not as tenacious as one would expect from a JAR. Rating: 8.5/10