3 reviews for La Fumee Alexandrie Miller Harris

1. 

   drupich – 2022-07-06:

   5 out of 5

   Lovely soft but dense wood and rose. I had some on my skin and thought I might buy a bottle but after 2 hours there was just stark Iso E Super left on my skin, if it faded to nothing I wouldn’t have minded.
2. 

   rdv591Negeltzex – 2022-07-06:

   4 out of 5

   A ubiquitous rose, creamy and close to how the Bulgarian variety smells with a fun smoky effect in the opening. Sadly smoke goes away in about 20 min leaving you with a generic rose water scent on some duty-free-shop-floor-ambiance-sweetish musks. There are hundreds of perfumes in the market with almost identical character but prices vary.
3. 

   music-lev – 2022-07-06:

   4 out of 5

   There is at once something wonderfully striking to the fulsome bitter and altered-leather-oud opening of La Fumée Alexandrie that emboldens the senses rather like the arrival Timothy Spall’s character, Eric Lyle, in Bertolucci’s last great epic film, the Sheltering Sky’ (1990).
   Larger than life: deeply flawed and injured like a morally incontinent yet friendly and ‘harmless’ drunk, this is an initially grubby, boozy, insalubrious perfume dressed in a lived-in, almost ruined, linen shirt and grim trousers, reeking of old smoke, the musty residues of sweat induced by the prevailing heat of Tangiers, and spilled sherry indelicately staining and besmirching the former glory of the expensive cloth from which the apparel was fashioned: its forthright yet obsequious nature keen to impress with sincerity before the reprimands from ‘mother’ arrive in the form of scorching slabs of disapprobation and disgust.
   Notably, La Fumée Alexandrie has a refreshingly ‘dirtier’ and harsher initial opening compared to the more sweet and succulent charms offered by its siblings from this intelligent range from Miller Harris. However, poised ignobly on the cusp of utter olfactory decay, being littered with copious sprays of tom-cat feral cumin, after a while it is as if the entire composition is ordered to clean itself up and obligingly assumes a suitably more polite character, shifting emphasis, and appears as if dressed for dinner in suit and bow tie: the result, a clearer veil of translucent aromatic oud not dissimilar (though superior) to Heeley’s Agarwoud, together with slightly mixed-in traces of ‘mother’s’ classical European rose-based perfume as if she with authority had overseen the transformation with stern deliverance in order to expunge sin.
   Indeed, Lyn Harris’s creation promises to expand and split like and overripe piece of old fruit on a bed of cheesy oud not unlike a template Aoud from Montale, gone-wrong, and outside of its La Fumée Collection family, sits closely with Zegna’s gloriously smooth ‘Indonesian Oud’ though is far coarser and S.T. Dupont’s brazen and muskier, Oud Oriental’ and, over time, achieves the enchanting weight of TF’s Noir de Noir as if its implied superficial bulk is intriguingly internally inflicted with a density lowering molecular osteoporosis of sorts.
   Fascinating, somehow easy to wear, and hugely long lasting, this is a most welcome if not an entirely original creation from Lyn Harris, appearing in some ways as if she had been asked to step-in for a one-off commission at Ormonde Jayne whilst Geza Schoen absconded and sequestered to deliver a contemporary oud although for this writer, alas, adhered to a degree of crowd-pleasing caution rather than let the composition descend in to a pit of ordure full of wanton decay and fetid disharmony: the latter I hope one day to smell, in-perfume, from this constantly exciting and hugely talented nose. 7.5 – 10