Angelos Creations Olfactives Danse Lascive photo by Angelos for this review
Street’s like a jungle
So call the police
Following the herd
Down to Greece
On holiday
Love in the nineties
Is paranoid
On sunny beaches
Take your chances
Looking for
Girls who want boys
Who like boys to be girls
Who do boys like they’re girls
Who do girls like they’re boys
Always should be someone you really love- From Girls and Boys by Blur
via Getty Images
It’s all bathed in green. No blue. Lights are flashing. Now its magenta. Shadows heave and part under lights that glare and fade as the DJ spins and the music stutters and grooves. It’s hella hot; bodies sexing up the dance floor, dance beat pumping … a couple groping at the bar … Heat and mirrors, she’s … he’s … coming this way. DJ cranks the volume, music gets urgent, dark smells of black leather and cigarettes wrapped around heartache and perfume and weed and unkept promises fill the room. “I wanna sleep with common people, I wanna sleep with common people like you gonna make you sweat I know what I want and I want it now” … So, getcha flirt on, boys and girls, here we go!
via istock
Angelos Creations Olfactives Danse Lascive trips you back to 1990s partyland with a reworked version of his 2017 cigarettes, rose n’ leather chypre. Perfumer Angelos Balamis’ revision is essentially the same fragrance but with an amped-up dark, winy rose and a more disciplined and refined chypre structure. Balamis says “Mid- to late-90s after hours partying and clubbing, leather jackets and intense, bold, no- restrictions perfume, cigarettes, dancing nonstop, flirting … that was my inspiration.” The new iteration of Danse Lascive – dirty dancing in French – is half club diva, half Vespa boy, an all-out smoky bombshell in a leather bomber who probably lives in a mansion and has a dad who’s a viscount.
Angelos Balamis, photo Angelos
Danse-Lascive is an unapologetically big fragrance with a huge, multilayered rose right on the top. So, no gentle dabbing here – spray with abandon, I say, and let Danse Lascive do its badass thing. Straightaway, the fragrance jumps out of a barrel of roses soaked in red wine and straight into the arms of a biker boy with a Marlboro hanging from his mouth. There’s lots of satiny Bulgarian rose, and a minute or so later, another, more vinous smell, like red roses from old vines. A big puff of ash, smoke and saffron follows and hangs around long enough that I half-expect to see a hookah-smoking caterpillar blowing smoke rings in the corner of the room. It’s heady and sexy and gorgeous with the roses.
Leather jacket — that oily, shoe polish and hide smell – moves sinuously through the smoke and you know you’re gonna follow him even though you shouldn’t.
Then there’s a pause.
Key Club image via wallpaper flare
High-end dried rolling tobacco, the kind you get in a pouch from a specialty store, expands across the center of the fragrance. Its dried grass, mulchy aroma is homey and warm, like you just walked out of the club and found yourself in a stable mid-afternoon in summer. Tobacco’s effect on the fragrance is fascinating; it calms down the bigness of the leather, smoke and roses and adds a down-to-earth, even comforting quality. Birch, which can easily take over a fragrance, registers but stays nicely in check, augmenting the perfume’s smokiness without getting in the way of the less aggressive notes. All the while, the roses stay in the foreground but give way graciously to touches of oakmoss and labdanum that leave a vintage chypre calling card.
Danse Lascive shares some similarities with Rogue Perfumery’s Rostracto – a central, smoky rose and cedary base – but where Rostracto fractures and refracts its central notes, spinning them slowly like a disco ball, Danse Lascive whirls them around the dance floor, partnering its roses with sweat and hide, then oakmoss and suede, as the fragrance trips from naughty to nice. In the drydown, Danse Lascive remembers her breeding, slips on her elbow gloves and goes back to the 1950s – there’s a tinge of Rochas here in the way the civet and suede pop up at the end with the chypre notes of oakmoss and labdanum.
If you like your roses to party like its 1999 but dress in Dior, Danse Lascive is for you.
Notes: Rose damascena essential oil from Bulgaria, dark rose accord, bourbon geranium, Greek saffron tincture, white birch rectified oil, black leather jacket, rose damascena absolute from Turkey, animalic notes, suede, tobacco absolute from Bulgaria, after hours 90s night club, olibanum, atlas cedar, hyraceum absolute, civet (reco.), vetiver java, oakmoss absolute, labdanum absolute.
Disclaimer: Sample of Danse Lascive kindly sent to me by Angelos Creations Olfactives. My opinions, as always, are my own.
Lauryn Beer, Senior Editor
Bottle of Danse Lascive courtesy of Angelos
Thanks to the generosity of Angelos Balamis, we have a 30 ml bottle of Angelos Creations Olfactives Danse Lascive for one registered reader in Europe, the UK or the USA. To be eligible, please leave a comment saying what strikes you about Danse Lascive and where you live. Draw closes 5/22/2023.
Angelos Balamis was Michelyn’s Rising Star of 2020
Fougeriste was in Lauryn’s Top 10 of 2022 and co-recipient of Best Artisan of 2022
Please enjoy Lauryn’s review of Yloud Yloud
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