Perfume review: Bond No. 9 New York - Chinatown

You know how your teeth can suddenly hurt from sweets? Well before I became intoxicated with Chinatown, and the bottle it came in, I thought I was going to retch from its initial painfully sweet smell of almondy cake icing. Then, without really thinking about it, my mind wandered to a spring day in New York's Soho district when the sidewalk trees have just leafed out, and the blue skies and weather are perfect, and you can smell street vendor's new clothes, art galleries, and the city's metals - like the nearby subway stairs and fire escapes. It was that strange metallic tinge that led me to popping the cap once again, this time to figure out the source of the metallic smell. To my astonishment, I discovered it wasn't metal, but rather lemon and vanilla -- and I suddenly thought FORTUNE COOKIE!

I thought, "Aha! I have cracked the mystery of its name. I understand like no other person on earth, why it's called Chinatown." After all, other reviewers had decreed the stuff 'sweet cakey poison' (and other nauseating adjectives) -- but I, and ONLY I, had found its lemony-sweet, crisp vanilla fortune-cookie heart. And metal. Hmm. And an insane resemblance to Black Phoenix Alchemy Laboratories' perfume oil called Dragon's Milk.

Still mentally admiring a bright and colorful street in Soho, I continued to smell the bottle and my wrist, looking for the requisite cherry blossoms (or sakura, as they say), thinking there must be more to this perfume's name than a fortune cookie. Instead, I found peach blossoms, which I also love in Clive Christian's X for Women, another heady perfume that's hard to describe. But back to Chinatown: why the strong peach blossoms? Again my mind wandered and I found myself thinking of the bright orange poppies that are blooming in my front garden. They are blindingly bright studies in delicate silk, fluttering in the cool Spring breeze. I sniff my wrist again and I detect a slight powderiness, soft and delicate, a little like a Geisha's flawlessly made-up face. Could peach blossoms be considered oriental, or was synesthesia getting the best of me?

But wait, I know that smell. It's . . . it's peony! Those gigantic dinner-plate sized fluttery pink or white blossoms that bloom in the spring. Another heady flower and so amazingly blended with the peach blossom flowers. Cool, refreshing flowers, and a base earthiness that reminds me of a garden's earthiness, a bit of patchouli, which smells like fresh clover and moist loam. And there's an interesting spicy note reminiscent of Indian food: cardamom. It has given a tiny edginess, a burst of energy, to the flowers and earth.

Nose to wrist again. I find the lemony-peony-peach flowers, and earthiness, have combined with yet another aromatic accord that is brilliantly cheerful and luxurious. As time progresses, the powderiness identifies itself as a sultry woods, gardenia and tuberose accord that bloom together like white flowers in a dense, dark night. They are as bright as a full white moon on a black sea. I begin to think of antique wooden Chinese ships at sea, loaded with silks and fragrant with spices, heading into port. And Chinatown begins to take shape in my mind, not as a part of New York City, but rather as an impression of China, and luxury, and beauty.

I smell silks and wooden ships, big blousy peonies and delicate fruity-fresh peach blossoms, crisp lemony fortune cookies, and a busyness, a pure energy, waiting to be unleashed.

Long hours later, after the perfume and my senses have calmed down, I find the patchouli note, in its fresh and tender green earthiness, has risen to a balsamic finish and the perfume becomes very sophisticated, very "night out," and strangest of all, it becomes comforting. The scent of the toasty lemon-vanilla fortune cookie has returned to float just above this beautiful perfume, and so my own arm, finally, scents the air around me like a mouth-watering dessert.

Chinatown perfume is the impression of China on New York. The sophisticated artsy image of Soho fades and is replaced by bustling Chinatown. Not as a part of New York, like Elizabeth Street with all its wonderful restaurants, but more like those wooden Chinese ships gliding into The Port Authority and unloading their cargo into New York so we can admire it, and smell it, and wear it. I think Chinatown perfume is New York's ode and Thank You, to China.

What the perfumer says: Top notes of bursts of peach blossom (a mystic fruit in Chinese Mythology that Taoists consider the elixir of life. The midnotes are an intoxicating cross-cultural bouquet; Peony (known as Sho Yo, or Most Beautiful, the Chinese flower of love, luxury, and indulgence), blended with creamy-sweet gardenia (the flower Billie Holiday wore in her hair) and sultry tuberose (known in the Western World as the Mistress of the Night), and mouth-watering patchouli, which adds a spiky note to the other florals. The lingering basenotes are cardamom (an ancient spice from the East, long used as a condiment) and dark woods (recalling the scent of Chinese inlaid lacquered boxes).