Iulia, L’Artiste du Diable

purchased and reviewed by ThoraSTooth

artwork by Julie Dillon for Black Phoenix

Scent of the Day:  Iulia, l'Artiste du Diable (Carnaval Diabolique 2015) --White tea, sugar cane, orange blossom, rockrose, lemon balm, white mint, and honey.

I fell for this new scent at the Bay Area Lunacy event at the end of August.  It's re-engineered from the previous Artiste du Diable scent ("Gennivre") which was named for a previous CD label illustrator.  (The current version is named for Julie Dillon.)  I've never tried Gennivre, so I don't know how this compares to the previous version.

On first sniff it's tea, honey, mint, and a beautiful floral.  Normally I don't like orange blossom, but if that's what this is, then I may have to change my mind.  Wet on my skin, it's everything I love about Embalming Fluid -- the tea, the herbal lemon, the perkiness - plus a really beautiful floral.  If the Lab description didn't say otherwise, I'd think this was white ginger lily instead of orange blossom.

As it matures I get more floral and honey.  But the lemon gets deeper and a bit more sugary, more like preserved lemon peel.  It keeps the floral from collapsing in an excess of indoles.  The result is a happy, sweet, but not too pungent floral with lemony-mint underpinnings.  This is probably the best orange blossom has ever smelled on my skin chemistry.

It's hard to reproduce the original testing ground for this scent -- a warm crowded shop, humid with many bodies -- but the scent still loves me in the relatively cool, dry, airy environs of my house.