Perfume Review: Andy Tauer Orris

Orris is a scent created by Andy Tauer and distributed by him in July to a limited number of the readers of his blog. I understand that Andy is not sure yet what he is going to do with the fragrance, whether he will actually ever release it …If you have tried and liked Orris too, please join me in my appeal to Andy to start selling it as soon as possible. Orris is more or less what I wanted Ormonde Jayne’s Orris Noir to be, a rich, balsamic and spicy scent that is indeed dark enough to be called Noir. It is exotic, it is dramatic, it has va va voom. The beginning of Orris evokes a vision of a fiery flower, of a dark-red rose set ablaze by cinnamon and pepper. Soon a woody accord becomes apparent, and on my skin this accord has duality of velvety-sweet sandalwood and sharp, spicy, slightly medicinal woody note that makes me think of very strongly brewed black tea, and which I assume is agarwood. The sweetness of the former is emphasized by that honeyed, peppery rose; the forceful, piquant darkness of the “second woody note” is highlighted by a smoky leather accord. In fact, from the middle stage forward Orris becomes very leathery, in a meaty, birch-tarry, barbaric sort of way that pleases me immensely. The sweet, buttery, violet-like orris, which I smell especially strongly in the drydown, compliments this smoky note wonderfully and keeps it from going completely wild a la Kolnisch Juchten. Orris is so unmistakably a Tauer scent that I believe if I smelled it in a “blind test”, and then was asked who I thought the author was, I would have not hesitated to identify it as Andy’s creation. It has what L’Air du Desert Marocain and Lonestart Memories have (and to a lesser degree, Le Maroc Pour Elle too), a certain common streak running throughout the compositions, sweetly-ambery, spicy-herbal, slightly leathery, woody SOMETHING that I am going to call Tauerade. That leitmotif to me is what makes Tauer Perfumes so intriguing, so exotic, so full-bottle-worthy. As I said in the beginning, Orris is not available for sale, but perhaps if we beg and nag, it will be, at some point in the future… The image, Flower of Flame, is from treklens.com. * On Saturday Perfume-Smellin' Things will feature another review of Orris, from "a male point of view", by my guest poster, Kelley. Tomorrow I will finally post about Lorenzo Villoresi's Alamut.