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exxxe – :
Postmodern & Modern art is where my heart’s at. Don’t get me wrong- I can view a Caravaggio and appreciate the artistic merits of it.. but it’s not something I’d want in my house. Similarly, the kind of film that win Academy Awards.. that get labeled ‘a legend’ or ‘masterpiece’ typically aren’t my thang. It’s the heist movies with solid action sequence and humor that get my interest – but they’re not the sort of thing that win awards.
Same thing with perfumery. Whenever reviews contain the words ‘masterpiece’, it’s typically not something I’d like to wear. (We’re looking at you, Opium, Joy, Mitsouko, Bal a Versaille, any pre-2005 Chanel.)
Given that so many knowledgeable reviewers (whom I admire) *raved* about Vero Profumo’s Mito, I figured it’ll be an “educational experience” more so than pleasure. Boy was I wrong!
The opening sequence is the BEST part of it all. You’ll find yourself *bathing* in this, just to get another hit. It’s made an _addict_ of me. Mito isn’t just high on artistic merits — it’s absolutely wearable! If you like galbanum, you owe it to yourself to give this a try.
Камина – :
Opens up harshly with that dusty dirt of a storing cartoon full of dusty books at the attic which was left for many years to fry up from the sun that peaks from the window throughout the year’s seasons.
As it calms down it turns slightly into soil, & mostly into a floral greenhouse where you can smell the greenish rare plants with that wet atmosphere that covers the protected environment. Quite greeny and naturalized.
The base goes quite charming as the citrus notes rises combined with doses of magnolia and Syrian jasmine as the Syrian jasmines is known for it’s soft tenderness rathar than the Thai & Indian ones. A very soft touch it turns into.
sobakadoma – :
MITO opens harsh and loud, but soon transforms and transports you to most delicate places.
Some hour in when wearing MITO I imagine myself in a sun soaked forest where I can feel the warm grass beneath my feet and the dry, sharp green moss. Oh and I can feel the almost bittersweet dirtyness of the trees and the little flowers everywhere.
MITO is peaceful, elegant and very pretty. The first hour could be difficult for some who are not used to galbanum, but if you get trough it – such a reward! And MITO lasts and lasts!
sokol120378 – :
Mito’s topnotes are pure Spring. It’s all white dresses, espadrilles and birds singing.
Yeah, right.
Don’t let the green breeze fool you. Look closely and Spring’s annual rebirth gets messy. The birth and life bit isn’t placid, it’s explosive. Green is to plants what blood is to us: vitality. And like blood, green can connote both life and violence. Mito Voile d’Extrait reads like a dramatic production. Think of Mito as Kern’s Right of Spring.
The acceleration of the perfume’s opening is almost overwhelming but the topnotes settle into a legible green that ranges from sharp citrus to peppery grassiness. A world of green grows up around you and becomes the mise en scène for the unfolding of the rest of the perfume. The brightness of the topnotes is balanced by mossiness and the white flowers of the heart complete the picture. Creamy magnolia, breathy jasmine. Where green connotes vitality and growth, the white flower’s allure is its decadence, its hint of decay. From the moment a flower opens, it moves slowly toward its death. The threshold between ripeness and rot is a fine one and Mito teeters on the line.
Over the course of the heartnotes Mito keeps the green backdrop but shifts the focus to the white flowers, magnolia in particular. Moss connects the top and heartnotes and lends a bit of saltiness to balance the floral sweetness. It gives the heart a rich, slightly rough texture and magnifies magnolia’s inherent sultriness. The heartnotes are intricate but hardy and seem to rise up from my wrists almost unpredictably.
I’ve made the point before that perfumer Vero Kern is more a classicist than a traditionalist and I’ll stick by that. But in the case of Mito she manages to be both. Here she works in the tradition of perfumers such as Edmond Roudnitska and Germaine Cellier referring to both Dior Diorella and Balmain Vent Vert. Like Diorella, Mito has a decadent heart and a louche tone but it also plays with a chilled floral contrast as Cellier did in Vent Vert. Roudnitska and Cellier shook the perfumery of their times by the shoulders. Their works were as subversive as they were sublime. Cellier put the coded language of butch/femme lesbianism into her perfumes. Roudnitska re-created the scent of a delicate little flower in his seminal Diorissimo and in doing so defied convention and rewrote the rules for composition.
So, Cellier was profane and Roudnitska was radical. Where does that leave Kern? It’s too early in her career as a perfumer to characterize her body of work, but Mito is a hybrid pinnacle of the green and floral chypre sub-genres, a field that includes works such as YSL Y, Guerlain Parure, Chanel 19 & Cristalle, Estée Lauder Private Collection and Parfum de Nicolai Odalisque. It is both meaningful and delectable and just as in Cellier’s Vent Vert and Roudnitska’s Diorissimo, art and desire go hand in hand.
The most satisfying artistic traditions step outside of their forms and their genres and Mito reaches outside perfumery. Kern has said that the inspiration for Mito was the sumptuous gardens at Villa d’Este, a 16-17th century fountain and garden extravaganza in Tivoli, Italy. Like the gardens, Mito is the result botany and artifice and feels like rococo drag next to the ‘just the topnotes, ma’am’ perfumery you’d find in fashion mag inserts. As Kern also demonstrates in Rubj and Rozy sumptuousness is not a sin
…
Mito is a perfume that I could wear forever and still be surprised by. Disposability is built into most contemporary perfumery by design. Even the idea of a signature fragrance means the perfume you might wear for a spell before you flush it in lieu of the next one. Mito reminds me why many people in the early and mid-20th-century had one perfume that they bonded to for life. I’ve said that I could wear Diorella forever, but reformulation has nixed that prospect. Thank god I’ve found Mito. Now I know which bottle to grab if the house is on fire.
from scenthurdle.com
1-1-6RUS – :
Octavian Coifan is right: perfumery is an art and all one has to do to completely understand that is to experience any one of Vero Kern’s compositions. I’m finally experiencing MITO for the first time after ordering a sample of the extrait from Lucky Scent and now she’s created a new scent called “Rozy” (sigh).
I found myself sniffing my wrist over and over again this morning before I could even write this. It has been that way for me with each scent Vero creates. I won’t even launch into notes in MITO as everyone else has pretty much articulated that in their impressions of the composition. And while many have compared it to Chanel’s Cristalle ( I can see that, kind of), what I’m getting is the same deeply haunting beauty that brings Le Parfum de Therese to mind as to my nose, MITO has that melancholy slightly decayed melon/flowers thing going on and I love it. Currently, I’m reading a book that’s a series of vignettes by the writer Andrei Codrescu called “New Orleans Mon Amour”, all done in the 20 years he lived in New Orleans (My favorite city in the U.S.). One of my favorite passages from the book:
“A scent of strawberries, verbena and warm chicken feathers lingers throughout the port. In the early afternoon on your very own balcony hugged by the generous magnolia, Tony Green’s Gypsy Trio sets up to play. Tony gives the world just what you’ve been too lazy to provide: rhythm, shape, energy, melancholy and longing.”
This is what all of Vero’s compositions do for me as they have the ability to evoke a strange state of reverie and moments of longing that leave me melancholy in my inability to put my finger on just what exactly it is that I’m longing for. But I’m okay with that because this is when I feel the most alive.
Even though Onda is still my favorite, I will wear MITO the next time I visit New Orleans. Vero Kern continues to amaze me.
UPDATE: This review was actually for Mito Voile D’Extrait.
Jun
12
2014
w00dman – :
If you’re fed-up with roses and amber, aoud and leather and high-powered perfumes that wear you instead of you wearing them, try something GREEN.
“Mito” is a mossy, cool fragrance which reminds me of “Cristalle” by Chanel, but which, of course, does not only symbolize a return to the classic chypre, but represents a wonderfully modern extension of the genre. Vero Kern loves her fragrances to smell slightly “dirty”, and you can feel this aspect in the drydown, where the mossy base as a central note persists for hours and hours.
“Mito” is gorgeous from top to toe: The galbanum in the topnotes gives a sharp dryness to the fragrance, it is a perfect counterpoint to the white flowers used in the middle and the moss, cedar and labdanum notes of the base. Here’s a new green floral chypre that I consider perfect. Funnily enough, there are other Vero Kern perfumes I really struggle with, particularly “Onda” and “Kiko”. I remember writing some rather unfavourable reviews about them, but now Vero Kern has created a perfume I really can connect to.
The “Voile d’extrait” is very tenacious and once it settles on the skin, it exudes its atmospherics of wood and green nature. “Mito” is probably a fragrance which will not appeal to people who like “pretty” scents, neither do I picture it on a typical Hollywood beauty like Marylin Monroe. It’s not a fragrance for frills and fuss, but probably something Marlene Dietrich would have worn in her heydays. Anyway, a masterpiece by a fantastic contemporary lady perfumer (born in 1940). Btw, “Mito Voile” only recently won a perfume award called “Prix d’enthousiasme”.