Tyra Kleen (March 29, 1874 - 1951) was a Swedish artist, writer, Bohemian figure and well-traveled adventurer and ethnographer. She studied art at a half-dozen different Academies and art-schools in Karlsruhe, Munich and Paris in the 1890s. From 1897 she lived in Rome and kept a studio there for about a decade. During that time she published a novel, under the pseudonym of “Isis”, about Bohemian life in Rome.
Later she traveled extensively in the Orient and produced drawings and book illustrations inspired by the cultures she experienced, usually in a Symbolist, art nouveau style.
Here is Orientalisk Parfym, 1907 - drawing
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Happy Birthday, Mata Hari...
Today (August 7th) is the birthday of Margaretha Geertruida Zelle MacLeod-- the dancer, sex symbol, and spy better known as Mata Hari. What scent best suits the occasion? Perhaps the ghost of the guest of honor will guide my hand...
First, a bit about Margaretha. Forcibly transplanted to colonial Java by a philandering husband, this young Dutch-born mail-order bride found comfort in studying traditional Indonesian dance. A local dance troupe proved supportive-- as did one of her husband's fellow Army officers, with whom she absconded from her marital prison. In 1897, she renamed herself "The Eye of the Day" and freed herself from domestic bondage for once and for all.
Today, we remember Mata Hari as an infamous World War I double agent whose life ended in front of a firing squad. But in her heyday, she - alongside Isadora Duncan, Loïe Fuller, and Ruth Saint Denis - ushered in an era of "sacred dance", which incorporated tribal, ceremonial, and contemporary movement, fusing East and West.
In fact, it's this sense of emerging from one matrix to immerse oneself in another that makes Mata Hari and Guerlain's Elixir Charnel Oriental Brûlant a heavenly match. At once simple and sumptuous, Oriental Brûlant excels at bridging cultures through scent as deftly as its namesake did through dance.
It begins with a dense sweet top note that says "vanilla" in as many languages as it can. As it progresses, it becomes more transparent, ascending from deepest plum to the aforementioned misty mauve, where it seems to pause and hold its breath. There it remains for hours and hours-- comforting, reassuring, never cloying or annoying, a mystical scent meditation.
Inasmuch as Spanish jijona turrón, Italian torrone, French nougat, German marzipan, Czech turecký med, Israeli halvah, Turkish loukhoum, Indian halwa, Japanese yōkan, and American fudge all lie on the same confectionary spectrum, one can trace the path of a single idea spurred by common hunger across a hundred national boundaries in its quest for manifestation. And actually, candy isn't a bad metaphor for Oriental Brûlant, which smells like an imported sweet concocted from honey, orangeflower water, and almond paste layered between fragile sheets of rice paper. It's an uncommon dessert of the high-calorie variety. It may be an acquired taste for some, but not me-- I was charmed by it from the first.
A side note: Oriental Brûlant is tinted pale mauve, a hue historically associated with a number of contradictory social conventions. Invented in 1856 by Sir William Henry Perkin, "mauveine" dye became popular as a half-mourning color for women in transition from a state of bereavement. By the Gay Nineties -- dubbed the "Mauve Decade" by social essayist Thomas Beer -- the color had amassed a following among artists, poets, and mystics whose social and sexual mores ran counter to those of the establishment. Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Aleister Crowley… and of course Mata Hari.
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In my perfume travels, I have found to my dismay that all saffron perfumes smell alike in the end. What seemed extraordinarily novel the first time I encountered it (in Olivia Giacobetti's Safran Troublant, to which I remain imperishably hooked) now seems as uniform as if die-stamped by machine.
Time and again, saffron is paired off with the same old partners -- rose, cardamom, steamed milk, sandalwood -- only to end up carrying them all on her broad back. I'm certain she gets weary of these arrangements, but is too mild-mannered to say so. Like a superhero recruited not to some global justice league but the local PTA, she gamely offers to run the next bake sale, knowing full well she'll end up saving the world.
What if saffron took a holiday?
Histoires de Parfums' 1876 Mata Hari is one of the best saffron perfumes I've ever smelled... only it doesn't have a lick of saffron in it. All of her usual dance partners have gathered in one place to scratch their heads at the saffron-shaped vacancy in their midst. Where is she? they're thinking. Not me: I'm getting too big of a kick out of watching the gang sweat bullets at the prospect of doing all the heavy lifting.
Luckily, everyone pitches in and gets this baby off the ground. Rose and sandalwood know all the steps, and lychee provides the fresh perspective of a newcomer to the scene. Substitute cumin for cardamom? Yes, please-- it makes for a slightly more ballsy drydown in place of the usual oeufs à la neige. All together, 1876's components do such a good job of filling in for the missing piece that you'd swear she was present and accounted-for the whole time.
If Guerlain's Oriental Brûlant is our antiheroine all dressed up in her stage costume (beads dripping, headdress sparkling), I'd have to say that 1876 is Mata Hari in civilian clothes. To be sure, they are beautifully cut, perfectly proportioned, and wildly expensive as befits the wardrobe of a demimondaine-- but they are unobtrusive enough to allow her to pass through society without attracting too much attention. So skillful is 1876's air of olfactory misdirection that, applied with a light touch, it could make the wearer damn near invisible.
But perhaps that is exactly what you want. After all, a good spy does well to remain incognito.
Scent Elements: Tonka bean, almond, vanilla, styrax, clementine (Elixir Charnel Oriental Brûlant); bergamot, orange, lychee, rose, iris, violet, carnation, cumin, cinnamon, vetiver, guaiac, sandalwood (1876 Mata Hari)
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AZBAH Perfume
AZBAH Perfume Price in Pakistan
The Junaid Jamshed AZBAH Perfume is a fragrance that has been carefully crafted to bring out the best in you. This perfume is made with high-quality ingredients and is designed to provide a long-lasting scent that will keep you smelling fresh and clean all day long. In this article, we will take a closer look at what makes the Junaid Jamshed AZBAH perfume so special and why you should consider trying it out for yourself.
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