I don’t go to the ballet very often, but when I do, I always have a terrific time. It’s such a humbling experience, though!! I often find that, more than being transported by the story, I just sit in awe at the physical perfection of the dancers: good genes, years of hard work, discipline, dieting. Rigid training, a gift for music, kinesthetic intelligence—all to make the impossible seem easy. And that’s just the chorus. Any back-bencher at the SF City Ballet is so many miles above me and how I experience my body.
Then: Enter the Swan. When la prima ballerina enters onto the stage, there is that intake breath of awe when you see the one who, through her unparalleled ability to convey meaning through movement, can conjure ineffable emotion in her audience.
“Reflection” is a prima ballerina. Saturated at about 4 from 1 to 10 out of the bottle, with no sillage to speak of, the scent notes say ylang-ylang, magnolia, and jasmine. And for a minute that is true, like the chorus opening on to the dance floor, linked hand in hand and moving in seamless unison. Then the individual notes recede, and the full body of “Reflection” steps out, an exquisite floral abstract, connoting the soft pink sheen of toe shoes. There are no flaws to this scent, no ragged edges, no notes that ever step out of line and distort the scent shape. No perfume I have ever encountered remains so true from the second it leaves the bottle, still wet on the skin, to 4-5 hours later when it finally fades away.If “Reflection” were just the floral element, it would be very, very good. But “Reflection” has one thing more that makes it astounding: an “aquatic” element. I do not know how they do this—this is some wizardy juice cooked up in a cauldron somewhere. But perfumers have found a way to extract and distill a quality in perfume that, when you press your nose up to it, “smells” like water. Like standing out on a pier right before dawn over a still, cool pond.
Actually, I think a more useful way to conceive it is an “aquatic” perfume conveys the sensation (not the smell) of breathing in fresh mint. (Not menthol—too strong.) That coolness that causes your nostrils to flare ever-so-slightly. Refreshing. And in “Reflection,” it is addictive. It is like cool satin powder on your skin. Somehow THAT manages to last for hours, too. It’s so good it makes my head spin.
The House of Amouage has a story that is super fantastic, but I won’t tell it today. (You can read about it on its website here.)
A final note on “Reflection”: Maria Tallchief (pictured above) was our first American prima ballerina. She is quoted as saying: “When you sleep, sleep like ballerina. Even on the street, waiting for the bus, stand like ballerina.”
I’d like to think of Maria Tallchief sleeping and waiting for the bus wearing “Reflection,” she who made the impossible seem effortless, remaining poised and cool in every moment of ordinary life. I am not that woman, and I’ll never know what it is to dance like Maria Tallchief. But “Reflection” gives me a little tiny slice of that to call my own, just for a time.
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So there’s a side note to “Reflection.” It created a new conundrum for LeftCoastNose, and that’s this: “Reflection” is so good, I just know I will never wear “Versace EDP” ever again. As in EVER. As in, once I tried “Reflection,” I went and dug up “Versace EDP” and put some on, one on one wrist, one on the other. It was like great fake boobs, versus the real fantastic things. Once a proud and fabulous three-star, “Versace EDP” is done: “Reflection” knocked it down to a two-star. (You can read my review of “Versace EDP” and witness its reduced-star shaming here.)Oh my goodness, now what to do? I’m rating these perfumes in order to explain to myself what I want to wear. I mean, objectively, “Versace EDP” is very good- I like it a lot. Had I never encountered “Reflection,” I might have gone along wearing it happily for years.
But now I have encountered an avatar of soft floral abstraction, and it has that “aquatic” quality to boot. (That’s putting even the great “David Yurman” at risk of being shelved forever, and I was considering that for a four-star.) In my mind, “Versace EDP” and “David Yurman” are “rich-lady” scents. Let it suffice to say that “Reflection” conveys more wealth and status than any other perfume I have ever experienced. It’s the scent of a woman with so much money, she has no need to carry any.
So I needed to come up with a new term for a perfume that is so good, it slaps other good scents down to two-star never-gonna-wear-again status. There’s a term in shuffleboard called “kitchening the disk.” (Which is awesome.) When you “kitchen a disk,” by colliding your disk into your opponent’s piece, you knock it out of a scoring area and into no-man’s land (the kitchen), thereby rendering it worthless. “Reflection” is a “kitchener”: a killer, a crusher, a queen.
(And maybe this is just karmic retribution for “Versace EDP,” because I’ve had the thought that had I encountered Marc Jacobs “Marc Jacobs” first (my notes say: “gardenia, lily-of-the-valley, and ginger ale—Yum!”), I might have made it my go-to rich-lady scent. But “Versace EDP” got its hooks into me first. So “Versace EDP” was a kitchener before I even had the concept. Payback can be a b***h.)
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