Rochas – Femme (Vintage Extrait)

© The Smelly Vagabond

“The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.”

– Rumi

I’d posted this on my own private Facebook page, but I thought I’d share it with everyone. This was one of my recent eBay treasures. I first opened it during an Econometrics class, because I had visited the post office just prior to class, and being the impatient, instant-gratification, self-mollifying silly-billy that I am, I couldn’t help but to pop it open the moment I grabbed my seat. All throughout the class, I couldn’t help but keep my nose pressed to my wrist. It didn’t help that I was sitting in the first row, in a class that was perhaps 30-odd people full. I wonder what my Professor thought of it.

Rochas Femme extrait is worlds apart from the EDT, which I also own. It’s not as peachy, nor does it have a truckload of cumin. Many people have an aversion to cumin, likening it to sweat (I still don’t get how), or to cooking (fair enough, I use it quite often), but I pretty much love cumin to death. Somehow, it adds ‘spice’ to any composition it’s in, pardon the pun. Even so, the extrait is breathtakingly beautiful in its own right. It is animalic and smoky (like being by a proper fireplace) and ohhhhhhh so divine. It’s the kind of perfume that transports you to a different place – not a specific one, such as a memory, or anything, but a place where there is nothing but you and your thoughts… and perfume. It’s very much like a Rumi quote.

The Death of Cleopatra

Femme is sensual and curvy, and harkens to Mitsouko, although in this form it is less piquant and a tad less radiant. I thought of Cleopatra as she lay in bed, preparing to take her own life with an asp… if she wore perfume at all, then she would have been wearing Femme, at once carnal and comforting, at once seductive and scary.

I could go on and on with paean after paean of adulation, but sometimes it’s the things you love that you find hard to describe, that you want to keep to yourself, because sharing it would mean that the intimacy is lost.

Suffice to say that Femme and I didn’t finally meet somewhere, but were in one another all along. It is love.

~ The Smelly Vagabond

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