Casablanca

Casablanca is wonderfully voluptuous, complex, and spellbinding. It reminds me of an image of a painting I once saw of a woman lying in a lush forest on a bed of flowers. In the background, through a small hole in the forest scene, was a distant snowy, winter landscape. I can imagine myself lolling in that forest when I'm wearing this perfume, escaping for a time the manifestation of winter. Overall I would say Casablanca has the character of the finest vintage chypre, redolent with orange blossoms, a jasmine that is achingly lovely, and green forest earth touched with hints of leather. On me, Casablanca is exceptionally potent and long-lasting. I am being truthful when I say that with one spray, this perfume has transferred to my seatbelt strap, from which wafted a glorious aroma for more than a week, and in turn scented a shirt I was later wearing when residual perfume transferred from the seat belt strap onto the shirt! If vintage style florals and chypres are your thing, you've got to check out Casablanca and St. Clair Scents in general. I'm looking forward for her two latest perfumes, Song of Aubrac and Pharoah's Passion, to appear in the Fragrantica database. They are both just gorgeous.

I am still learning how to articulate my trip through a fragrance effectively, but Casablanca makes me want to try. Something barely contained. Is it a monstrous tropical floral with whispers of a traditional refined chypre just beneath the surface, working to gain control of the madness, or is this upstanding veneer barely containing an inner turmoil that wants to tear it to pieces? Oh, what a shimmering tension of opposites! The entanglement, naturally, leads to a powerful effluence of animalic afterglow that asserts itself between the two, slowly staunching the torrent until it finally burns itself to the ground. Whatever remains of the conflagration, transformed to something new. The tension is now gone, and maybe you feel a bit lonely, because you can't stop returning to the swirling tryst between the controlled and the unbound that resolved itself through your senses... so vivid, so compelling. Wonderful.

Sublimely enveloping floral fragrances are few and far between; I think of this as being a spiritual successor of Fracas. Languid, sweet and persistent, it creeps into your awareness like honey, slowly caressing your senses. There a a few perfumes that actually give me the feeling of frisson, and this is one of them. It is difficult to describe the feeling this gives: olfactory submersion, like a warm bath, a mild summer wind or a cashmere blanket. Civet belongs at the base of this, quite rightly. Luca Turin repeatedly trashed white florals and it's a valid derision; most of them are mere pretenders. A flower is nothing without context. If you're spraying the sexual organ juices of plants all over yourself, you might as well double down and add some animal ones as well. Superbly crafted. Buy this, Piguet's Fracas, Auphorie Mayura and Chris Rusak's Q.U.A. Your huge florals wardrobe is complete.

I often imagined finding a salacious, humid hothouse floral from some bold indie or artisan perfumer and whenever one was presented to me, there would be always something "off", whether it be a certain sour dissonance, a muddled melange where nothing has oxygen, or a claustrophobic cacophany of luxuriant ingredients with no true structure. Then came Casablanca, Diane St. Clair's ode to a warm weather paradise, replete with all the fauna that co-exists with flora. This potent potion has a gorgeous orange blossom, what seems to be a delicious dosage of jasmine grandiflorum absolue, and heady tuberose. These ripe, overflowing flowers are made more fleshy and feral with civet and hyraceum that would make even the most diehard skank lover blush. Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.

The audacity of this fragrance brings me pure joy. I'm not even sure what it is I'm smelling here. Tuberose? Musk? Don't rightly know. And I don't much care. It's art. And that's not a word I throw around lightly. Within 4 hours of wearing my sample I was placing an order. The reviews below also use the word voluptuous, and I have to agree. It's nuclear. In a vintage way, not so much a Mancera/Terenzi way. Which is not to say that I don't love modernity, I like and love a fair number of the molecular stuff too... But this! This is gorgeous. If you can pull off over-the-top girly/dandy fragrances (Boudoir, My Sin, Musc Tonkin, Daphne, etc., etc.), this is for you. Even if those base notes pictured above scare you, try it anyway. It's not at all what you'd expect.