La Bague d'O

(gifted) while pouring over my newly aqcuired sample set, i hastened and chose to test out la bague d'o first, due to my intrigue in the metallic note, referred to as a steel chain on this fragrance's description. the top notes are interesting, not unpleasant, and the metallic note is conveyed in a manner i can only describe as cold. upon first spray, i did begin to picture a steel chain, though on my skin it veered near blood-like, which i have no complaints about! la bague d'o felt slightly eerie, like a forbidden love (or lust.) typically i am not fond of rose, though for me, i did not detect that familiar, cloying soapy scent rose usually creates. there was a sweet, slightly soapy floral aspect for sure, but more or less blanketed by the powerful animalic note which settled and soothed itself in the contrasting nature of flowers and metal, and i found that complimentary and refreshing in comparison to most floral-dominant fragrances. i would advise to sample first since animalic notes are not always enjoyable for everyone, and the best way i can describe it is musky & a little dirty in a good way. the base notes of patchouli, amber, and musk generate a lightly spicy, herbal, neat finish and while i wouldn't personally wear this everyday, it makes for an interesting, sensual scent. longetivity is agreeable as well – not eternal, but it will get you through an evening spent sharing a bottle of wine with someone you want but can't have, staring at merlot stained lips you'll never kiss. it's enrapturing; the more i smell it the more i appreciate it. la bague d'o paints a picture of a fantasized rendezvous and feels like deliciously agonizing cat-and-mouse foreplay; primal, playful, and hungry. tldr; hypnotic, sensual, best worn with not-so-guilty longing

💌 Within this round, this crimson hued, this frozen lake of thine with those three burning dancers treading amidst thy misty stillness, the dove’s blood perchance was shed upon me. Searing blades from mine ankles pend bound with burgundy satin ribands, sudden they twine round my limbs, constricting the vein, pillars of roseate lime my stature grows and a waxen bed, all afire, melting in the far- off gloam. Sudden I recall the art of whirl and ceaseless, in my solitude, the rime I begin to harvest poised betwixt the piercing of the deep or to be flung afar, a golden spindle, three burning dancers spin in dizzying haste around me cleaving the saltless plain, within their gaze the dove’s blood dwells, they cast their smiles upon me and they rive my frozen field asunder, rive my frozen field, rive my fro, rive my fro, rive, rive, rive, rive, rive, rive, rive, rv, rv, rv, rv, rv, rv, rv, rv, rv, rv, rv, rv, like unto three golden fire flies, by Aphrodite’s hand despatched to try me, if in very truth I have e'er been loved, with their flaming blades, the frost they do undo. (It’s 23:10 May 21st in Athens, Greece)

Please don’t let the reference to The Story of O put you off this exquisite rose scent. La Bague d’O is not a strident animalic S&M fragrance - look to something like Lust by Lush for that. Instead it’s a beautiful, juicy, alluring floriental - for me this is happy, passionate sex, not pain. The rose, orange and geranium are so well blended that it’s hard to tell which note is which, and that touch of metal adds a depth to the patchouli which feels romantic rather than overpowering. It reminds me of a warmer, more playful La Fille de Berlin by Serge Lutens, which has the same geranium/ metallic tang. (If you want to try a truly metallic/ blood soaked perfume then L’Artisan Parfumeur’s Deliria does the job, but it ain’t pretty). La Bague D’O has taken it’s place alongside Portrait of a Lady and Eau Capitale as one of my favourite rose fragrances. This is a brunette beauty, feasting on red wine and sweet meats and pomegranates, before seducing her lover in a moonlit garden. If anyone is in metal chains, it’s him. A sensual, vintage inspired scent that has the potential to become a modern classic.

I was pleasantly surprised with this, and it took me two wears to decide that I love this. Patchouli is never something I like to wear because I just don’t think it suits me, but in this it wears very vintage and reminds me a lot of Paloma Picasso’s perfume from the 80s (which my mom wore so very nostalgic to me) The patchouli is bright and strong in the opening, and then it softens a lot and yields to the rose. This is my favourite part as the rose is jammy but powdery at the same time, it just feels like a beautiful, strong, classic vintage perfume that is not overbearing or cloying. I love it, I feel sexy and feminine and multifaceted.

This is such a vintage smell, sprayed it and immediately went back to my mother’s old miniature collection, in the best way possible. It has a kind of old dame / Chanel feel to it, in a good way. It makes me want to wear my satin robe and call my lover from a land phone, feeling sorry already for his poor poor heart. At the same time I am contemplating on wearing it on my wedding day, avoiding obvious solutions like Dama Bianca or Blanche Bete. This is so classic, old Hollywood.

The metallic note at the top can be read as erotic/challenging, sure, but that's pretty fleeting. In the drydown, it's a subtle (i.e., skin scent), respectable, smooth rose with nary an animalic note to be found. Totally office safe if you apply an hour or more before going in, which I feel is probably not what they were going for. As something I sampled in order to smell the dirtiness that others were talking about, it's slightly disappointing, but as an actually wearable fragrance, it's a pleasant surprise. It might be too subtle to justify doing more than sample, but your mileage may vary in that respect. Edit: Okay, I finally got the skankiness on my fourth or fifth wearing - the phase doesn't last long and it's still not obtrusive, but yeah, I can smell the resemblance to uhhhh you know.

This isn’t a scent I’d want to wear personally, but it smells very 80’s-early 90’s nostalgic to me and evokes a childhood memory of my Mum. She’s backstage in a dressing room getting ready with the rest of the cast, to perform on stage in her amateur dramatic musical show. The scent for me is watching her and others as a child, as they transformed into movie stars. The smell of the dressing rooms, a mix of vintage perfumes, dusty make up compacts, glamorous costumes, lipstick and leather handbags. Everyone is excited, upbeat and rushing to get ready to present their character on stage. This is what I get from this scent and would only buy it for the purpose of taking me back to this moment.

This one doesn't quite work for me. On wear, I found it a little underwhelming, and this particular metallic/smoky mix under the rose accord is, in a word, "just okay." Histoire d'O is one of my favorite erotic novels of all time, and I struggle to connect the novel to this scent. I'm trying to disconnect my "what I wanted" from my "what it is" with this one, but even then, what it is is a powdery rose perfume that I find is safer than it may aspire to be. I smelled this along a few other "weird" roses in my collection and it just didn't stand up. Not every one can be a winner!

I was kindly gifted a sample set from Jouissance! Given my deep aversion to both metallic notes and patchouli, I thought immediately that La Bague d’O would not be my cup of tea and indeed, it proved to be my least favorite of the Jouissance trio. The combination of rose + metal + patchouli is not appealing or enticing to me. This smells mechanical, sterile, and melancholy and brings to mind the scent of vintage perfumes lying forgotten on dusty thrift store shelves, fragrances that seem tethered to lives that have faded. It also reminds me of black licorice candies, which to me taste like pen ink and despair. There is something incredibly dated about it, both in structure and spirit. This smells like something for a woman who has walked this earth for decades and is probably extremely depressed by both life and mortality. It definitely creates an atmosphere, it’s just not one that I want to be apart of, much too heavy and somber.

This is a gifted review and my own opinion. I received a sample set of three fragrances and out of those, this was my least favorite. I am a notorious hater of rose fragrances - they come off as wildly sickly to me - add in the patchouli and you have a combo that does a number on my stomach. Nauseating. This is a very strong, grown-woman rose - it's a little powdery and you can really smell the metallic notes come through here. I would not describe this as a fun and flirty juvenile scent. Not an office scent either. It will fill up and room and it will linger on your nose all day if you accidentally get some on there. Ask me how I know.

Worn by the fourth Margarethe, who was conceived beneath the ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’ rosebush in her grandmother’s garden. The story stretches easy belief when you hear her tell it, but falls into credibility when her mother’s acquaintance is made; the truth of the Margarethes strikes harder the further back you look. But it’s this Margarethe, the youngest, that carries that hereditary rose-crown for the bright new generation. The fragrance follows her wherever she goes: she says that when she dies she wants to be buried under a rose-seed, a new cultivar that shall be her body and her child and marker of a life ended in lieu of a tomb. Buried alone, she’ll be: she never will marry, she’ll never bear a daughter of her own. Or so she says. But how things change! Certain things, anyway: the Margarethes preceding her never mixed metals, never travelled by speedboat or lingered beneath a neon light. Her mother looked finest garlanded in verdancy: all her lovers breathed out their last hesitations when she reclined before them in the garden where this Margarethe began. And her grandmother Margarethe and great-aunt, the first Margarethe, her sister’s namesake, taken too young; they both fit the frame perfectly beneath the chandelier that once hung in the ballroom of the old manor-house; though only the second sister had the fortune to dance beneath it. Yet the roses were always there in these fragments of histories: arranged along the walls or beneath the hedges and before that cradleside and following upon the graves. The fourth Margarethe’s roses cannot be seen, but she carries them well. Wherever she goes, it’s true! Wherever that is, it’s hard to say for certain. She doesn’t reveal much except in confidence, and she’s never carried herself in a way that allows anyone to break her covenants. But passing stories persist: poolside at midnight in the reaches of the hills, at villas of ill repute; downtown in perfumed bathhouses, cutting sweat away with a blade she carries in her purse; taking the night train to the city where swans make bridges across the river from the Old Town to the New. There are no photographs to trace her movements, only little histories, scattered like lost earrings over a life that still extends far onward to an unseen horizon. Find her where you will, fortune permitting. Perhaps you may call her your love, your fancy, your friend, if only as long as she’ll allow it. She bites into an unpeeled orange, her heels above a pooled iridescence of rain and kerosene, a wolfhound’s lead in her hands. Or perhaps it only seems that way: the Margarethes have always carried a presence emblematic of all the legends of their time, not just their own. Her great-aunt’s cradle was wrought from silver; it wrapped the baby in wreaths of shining briars; her greatmother, I saw, had tattooed upon her feet two rose-stems, one white and one red, far before fashion followed, before even her own parterre was planted. The third Margarethe, the mother, still moves as royalty; on the weekends she wraps her head in silk chiffon and I take her through the arbor roads in her rusted Corniche. But although she never fails to pin a flower to the breast of her coat, her fragrance to me is that of layered histories, or at least that’s what it brings to mind. When she asks what I know of her daughter, fourth of her name, what can I tell her? I say that like those before her, she carries the essence of roses, lush and ever-efflorescent, but not just, and not just so soft as the blooms themselves. The thorns remain; silver and steel. I say that in truth there’s no real telling anything else. After all, her own history’s just beginning.

La Bague D’O is clearly presented as the crown jewel of Jouissance's collection, and does present perhaps the most novel appeal to the discerning perfume collector. Inspired by Anne Desclos’ fictitious chronicle of sexual servitude Story of O — La Bague is Damask rose in delicate chains. Drawing extreme similarities between Rossy de Palma’s well-loved signature fragrance for the far more problematic male provocateurs at Etat Libre d’Orange, La Bague D’O resonates a neat and feminine floral core with far-out metallic frequencies. The opening presents a single squeezed orange and a crackling of pepper, but quickly submits its spice to a strong and dense rose geranium similar to the hybrid blooms found in Middle Eastern attars. I don’t smell any other flowers here, but rather, the tinny taste of blood that accents the central accord like a promise. The perfume’s copy promises an animalic defilement of these florals, but to me, the castoreum base does not necessarily take center stage but rather fleshes out the accord of ‘steel chains’ written of in La Bague’s top notes. As it wears, it becomes more aggressive, yielding to a vaguely animalic base for a number of very sophisticated hours. Certainly the strongest wear of the three sisters, I can easily see this one garnering the most popularity. Wear La Bague D’O if you love an unconventional rose fragrance, or if you crawl FetLife looking for a full-time daddy dom like a bad habit you can’t quite scratch.

That rose note reminds me of sparkling champagne at the beginning. It’s just there for a few minutes and the patchouli creeps in. It’s a lovely perfume with some slight animal notes a few minutes in but it becomes a soft skin scent for three hours and then disappears for me. I think that is how it’s meant to be, something only meant to be smelt very close up!!! I really hope Jouissance comes out with some more scents, I prefer Les Cahiers Secrets as that has something that bit more different about it. But Jouissance are a really interesting brand with lots of promise.

Ok so here goes, Jouissance asked for creative writing descriptions and I can’t stop thinking of Bague D’O and where it brought me. Into a dark hall, into the unknown blindfolded and listening for echoes, the scents enveloping like an old fur coat. In darkness, led by Warm hands Wrapped inside a Fur coat, she’s Tied with bows Delivered into Silence Present like Never before, her Arms raised high Her shoulders ache and Time Is Slowing Down Now Blood roses Explode into Colour and the taste of metal fear and Her pleasure No matter She’ll be past that Where mine begins.

A beautifully melancholic rose. Like walking through a rose garden with a smattering of geraniums after the rain. A very distinctive metal note which I love - Paco Rabanne Metal is one of my favourites though this is not the same perfume. It's one of those ones that you could save to wear on a very special occasion that might never come. Dreamy, vintage smelling and serene. Longevity is strong and its been highly complimented on the few times I've worn it as I don't want to run the bottle down. A very promising new house and I hope to see more from them.

This smells of church. A midwestern housewife on the way to the library. A virgin lost in a metaphysical shop. Windswept hair and the philosophical entrapment of womanhood. This also smells like an affair... like short and cheap sin. There is a slight repulsiveness, like ejaculations and sweat an amalgamation of bodily fluids offering a saltiness that causes this to come across as even more enticing and intriguing.

The LA BAGUE D’O woman is a woman of contrasts. Romantic, with a hint of melancholy. Demure, yet deviant. Sensual, and a little shy. Even in her silence, in a mask of her own making, she has the power to seduce.

La Bague d'O smells like an anemic rose getting a transfusion from a fainting couch.

If someone is interesting in selling DM me. I’m in the USA