Without Fifi Chachnil’s signature scent I wouldn’t be writing that blog, maybe also would not have started collecting luxury niche perfumes. What a world missing…
I always liked scent, no doubt, but second place compared to cosmetics and everything visual. I wore scent in addition to an elegant outfit or depending on mood, not giving it too much thought. It was an add-on.
I received my sample of “Fifi” years ago through „Le Club de Createurs de Beaute“, which is long gone now, unfortunately. It smelled – well, different. Really interesting. Extremely feminine, but difficult to fathom.
Still can’t say today what the main scent in the perfume is, it’s something prickling, insisting, even a little intrusive.
I bought it, got it, used it one day to work.
Entering the office, a trusted colleague, who never ever had commented on anything regarding my appearance looked up and said: What perfume are you wearing?
I was flabbergasted, how embarrassing, I had overdosed. I started like: Er, oh, I am sorry, should I open a window?
And he looked at me, really shocked, and said NO! NO!
This is THE scent. The best ever, this you cannot overdose, can I stand near to you, if possible, all day?
The perfume had totally hit him.
Now I was flabbergasted. I had never had myself – or seen in anybody else – such a reaction to a scent. Scent is incredibly powerful. And the colleague never wavered, to this day it is his favourite scent on me and when I know we meet, I wear it sometimes because I know that he loves it.
Fifi Chachnil writes on her homepage “Fifi” smells of citrus notes, coriander, rose, amber and tobacco.
I don’t smell citrus at all, sorry.
Amber, tobacco and both extremely sweet, yes. I can’t smell single notes in the perfume, it is very much a long-lasting silage of exact homogeneousness. To describe it is not easy.
Sweet tobacco is there in bunches, sweet amber, something artificial also. Very, very special and feminine, not to be compared with anything else. Not natural.
The sum is more than the single notes. It throws you off balance. When I think of French actresses it would be Anouk Aimee in her heyday between the 1960ies and 90ies. Overwhelming sensual and beautiful.
The homogeneousness is really unusual. You have no scent pyramid with “Fifi”. From the first minute you have the full perfume, no development. That gives it a feel of urgency. Like “Fifi” can’t wait.
It’s a little like the Don Papa Rum – a bit overtly sweet, you feel you can drink a lot and regret it later, if you still can remember what you’ve done!
The rose colour scheme of “Fifi” does not give it full credit – the scent for me is bright pink-red-brown!
If it were a city, it is Paris; Paris at night with a party going on and amour-fou.
I like the perfume a lot, and by now got very attached to it. I don’t love it. It is, for me, a bit strong in the unsubtle way. I can imagine very well to wear the scent to bed – and nothing else. Quite sure Fifi Chachnil would appreciate of this. For daytime – only at times. It’s so very feminine!
The perfume hits home, straight to the heart.
“Fifi” taught me what a powerful, powerful force perfume can be. Scent arrives directly in the autonomic nervous system, and in the heart, not stopping at the part of the brain that thinks.
Shot to kill, if the right scent hits the right person.
Smell gets you a direct reaction from deep within a human being, and without a filter. That blunt and raw reaction impressed me so much, I started to give much more attention to perfumes.
I started to test and to try and to learn – the world of scents opened suddenly up.
In the picture you see my current stock of “Fifi”. The beautiful bottle in the pictures is the original, but the plain one sprays much better. I noted that the playful rose puff that come with my bottle did not spray properly. It’s such a fine mist, you smell the scent for a second and its gone. We don’t want that, not with Fifi! I got used to filling “Fifi” to the other bottle. I do that since years and it works perfectly well. For very long I thought the name of the perfume is “Jardin de France”, because that is written on the back of the golden tag. But doing my recherche for this article I noted the name is only “Fifi”.
If you use Fifi Chachnil, let it be a statement of pure femininity!