Sikkim

3 reseñas

Mostrando las más recientes primero.

• Josesan

  October 20, 2018

  

  Unique opportunity: a vintage from the 70s in perfect condition, something that doesn’t usually happen to me, but there’s always someone with treasures. SIKKIM, a small state in northern India at the foot of the Himalayas. An unknown fragrance for me, with ingredients that IFRA has already banned. SIKKIM BY LANCÔME: welcome to the world of classic aldehydic floral chypres; that’s something. This is how Joya, Chanel 5, Youth Dew, Miss Dior, Arpège, Cinnabar, Aliage… must have smelled in the dawn of time! Just pronouncing their names makes me fall flat on my face and ask for forgiveness! The beauty of an authentic seventies chypre: its potent, exultant greenery, its passionate and carnal flowers, its deep and intense resins, its leathery mosses, and its mossy leathers. The opening aldehydes are the ones I remember smelling when ladies came out of Sunday mass: brilliant aldehydes like fireworks. Aldehydes that made me feel respect and admiration, looking up from my short stature, knowing them to be unreachable. Aldehydes of rich ladies and sumptuous mansions. The green of the galbanum, like freshly cut grass, which can even evoke a turpentine pine, joined with the citrus bergamot, the spicy green of caraway, and the push of the aldehydes, achieves a brilliant summer accord, but of a luxurious summer in Tuscany, in a Renaissance villa accessible through a long road flanked by cypresses. And the floral heart. The dry floral of the gardenia, along with the carnality of sensual, not-too-sweet flowers, arising from a dark rose, a carnation, and a softly indolic jasmine, confer on SIKKIM that aura of green-floral majesty, of perfume belonging to the Ladies of the Forest. Its drydown is beautiful, deep, foresty, and earthy, with an oak moss that anchors its notes, dragging them into their fungal dampness, enveloping them in an intense leather and concentrated patchouli embrace that narcotizes the senses and faints the heart. SIKKIM BY LANCÔME: splendor in the grass and glory in the flowers.

• Casablanca77

  March 3, 2019

  

  Sikkim Lancome—what can I say about this masterpiece? The previous review by Josesan gives absolute clarity to its essence, its mystery, and its definitive march forever into the world of the living. This museum piece, this precious gift to humanity, reminds me so much of the merciful old Miss Dior if we look closely at each component; there are many they share, and in proportions we could say are quite exact. But no, Sikkim doesn’t go down the wrong path; it’s like the younger sister of a girl who wears Miss Dior but is estranged from the family, from their manor houses, their important parties, their luxuries… She, the youngest, decided to run away from home and live in the forest, trading luxury for the herbs she found in her own Gaia, brewing hair potions, and not combing her hair with exquisite combs but looking like a ragged witch wandering around, without past, family, or future… living in the present of the forest, hating people, and when she sees them, she slips between the branches to keep emulating that she’s already a legend, that girl of whom no one knows anything anymore and whom everyone thinks is dead. Sikkim has fused with the forest, with the deepest roots in the earth. It’s not like her sister, because Miss Dior still lives in luxury, in that patchouli background that only exists in those palaces where you’re opened doors with utmost reverence to move from room to room. The little sister who loves her sister every day and remembers her as the most beautiful preferred to sacrifice her love for her to sleep on a bed of damp galbanum and sometimes dry, crunchy vetiver. This Lady, who truly has undeniable blue blood, preferred to live by fusing with her beloved dark forest and surrendering to the solitude of the swamps, to the mist of dawn in the ponds, waiting patiently for the rays of May, smelling flowers as they shed their seeds, walking barefoot on autumn dry leaves, living in her cabin camouflaged in the forest to become today the legend she is. Sometimes we see her a bit hazy when we walk through a solitary foggy forest in the morning, but if we turn our gaze, she’s disappeared… we know she’s there because her scent always accompanies us.

• Espartaco

  November 1, 2019

  

  Oriental floral? Sikkim is a textbook green-floral chypre. Moss, galbanum, vetiver, aldehydes—it’s no trouble at all to grasp its scent. The green, metallic acidity of the moss, the raw herbal tone of the galbanum, the dampness of the vetiver, and the sharp, effervescent aldehydes at first, which later seem to revive when they mingle with the spiced tinkling of the carnation and narcissus, both very soft but unmistakable. I won’t forget the fresh leather reminiscent of Cabochard; here it’s executed just right, not to dominate but to lend a regal air to the other notes. The iris and flowers, already in their death throes, unify the whole genre like a blue mist. Sikkim opens strong—a machete blow of herbaceous vapors, similar to tearing a bunch of dried herbs with your hands and rubbing their juice into your lungs, then it calms down, settling into that range of seventies herbal, crunchy fragrances, almost masculine, for working women who no longer were seduced by anything evoking glamour or princess romance. Finally, it makes a beautiful transition, keeping green and winter-leather nuances, moving toward a talc of cool, velvety flowers and herbs, with almost no sweetness in a precious green-blue range. It wasn’t as sharp or dark as the herbal chypres like Eau de Soir or Scherrer, nor did it reach the narcotic, crisp, soapy flowers of Madame Rochas, nor did it have the adolescent, playful grace of a Caleche. Could it be a distant cousin of Aromatics Elixir, just greener and sportier? Could it even have that masterful combination of leather/vetiver/patchouli with hints of the wet jar from the original Cabochard in the Parfum version? It might recall these, but setting distances aside, Sikkim was a much more resolute, functional perfume, less historical and closer to Dioressence. Essential for lovers of completely unsweetened perfumes and essential for understanding perfume history in the seventies. One of the best from Lancome, a house that until the nineties knew how to adapt to trends without losing a shred of prestige along the way.