Dulce Solis

Stop what you are doing and check out this hot new fragrance from up-and-coming perfumer Jodie Tinker. Her self founded brand Opula Perfumes debut fragrance Dulce Solis, is a masterful work from this self taught perfumer. Her blending skills are superb, you smell notes you are familiar with but the smoothness of the way they are used is totally singular and worth chasing down to get your nose on. No other fragrance, niche or designer, truly smells like this and it does have a certain “x-factor” that will make it a landmark first work from the perfumer and a fragrance to leave an impression. Signature worthy, the violet is just gorgeous and the supporting notes all harmonize nicely. You can check it out on https://opulaperfumes.com/ I really recommend this fragrance

This is such a beautiful fragrance! It’s a lightly powdered, woodsy lilac (orris even), that floats into a more syrupy, but not overly sweet, honied apricot. Honey soaked apricots! It’s unlike anything else I own (over 600 bottles), and I’m totally obsessed. Gorgeous in cold temps, and it was a solid performer in humid Charleston last summer.

I somehow ended up with a sample of this, contained within an attractive velour pouch, and decided to sit down and apply it to my skin. From the first several seconds, I could tell that this was composed by a perfumer that is still finding her footing. The first three seconds reveal a lovely Choward's violet but is immediately scrambled by a strangely sour dissonance, perhaps due to whatever constituents coming from the apricot accords and strawberry accords used here. Ionones, lactones, and acidic facets conflicting, but just beyond, a sweetly resinous dimension slowly emerges. However, it seems to struggle in its emergence, and an acrid quality dominates. I am not so impressed by this first stage of the development at all, it's quite muddled and tangled. However, this resolves into a more measured opoponax and sandalwood, along with what smells to me like Sakura salicylate, but I could be entirely wrong. It's certainly not earth-shattering, but the base is competently executed. I just don't think it's worth having to endure the awkwardness that precedes it. I don't doubt that this perfumer can potentially create more cohesive and beautiful compositions in the future, but this reads more dilettante than someone with rooted experience.

I think it perfectly captures the heat of the sun on a dry wash, with desert flowers blooming, powdery blowing dust and thirsty desert shrubs, and that moment when the sun goes down and the flowers close and the shrubs stop emitting their leafy scent and it all turns to a cool, shadowed stone.