![]() On the International Malle website, the prices are €100 for the travel trio, and €225 for the large 100 ml bottle. ![]() It seems as though the 50 ml size is available only from the US Malle website, as no other vendors, including even the French or International Malle website, carries that small bottle. website, Malle offers: 3 travel-sized sprays that are each 10 ml in size for $150 a 50 ml/1.7 oz bottle for $230 or a 100 ml/3.4 oz bottle for $340. DETAILS: Cost & Availability: Portrait of a Lady (PoaL) is an eau de parfum that comes in a variety of different forms and sizes. So, I shall put on my “Cone of Shame” (to borrow an apt, recent phrase from Lucas of Chemist in a Bottle), and slink to my corner. In truth, I am starting to think that Frederic Malle is a brand that simply doesn’t do much for me thus far, I haven’t been impressed by a single one that I’ve tried. Some even consider it to be a “naughty” rose, an impression or association that never once crossed my mind. The fragrance is much adored in fact, it is many people’s ideal, perfect rose. However, I’m hugely in the minority on my lack of enthusiasm for Portrait of a Lady. I certainly don’t think it’s worth the high Malle prices. It was also, however, unoriginal, linear, painfully purple and fruited, and wholly boring. Portrait of a Lady then took less than 4 hours to turn into a somewhat dry, very subdued, completely muted blur of simple patchouli and incense with an endlessly lingering, unpleasant hint of sourness before it finally died away. It’s a fragrance that lasted just over 9.25 hours on me, and that I found to be tolerably nice. I really dislike purple patchouli, and there is a hell of a lot of it here. ![]() The simple nutshell story is that, on me, Portrait of a Lady started as a conventional jammy rose with incense and endless heapings of purple, purple, purple, fruited patchouli. I’ll avoid getting into the details of just how much purple patchouli there is in Portrait of a Lady, how it becomes a skin scent on me less than 3.75 hours into the perfume’s development, how there are subtle elements of something synthetic in the base (perhaps thanks to the Ambroxan), or the way there is a weirdly soapy tinge to the fragrance for a few hours. Portrait of a Lady has been largely imitated by many similar, jammy, incense purple rose fragrances since then, but it really doesn’t knock my socks off. So, I’ll spare you the lengthy, moment-by-moment analysis of how minimal the clove is on my skin, how long the raspberry lasts in an additional surfeit of fruitedness that I did not enjoy, or how it ends up creating a sour note that lingers well into the perfume’s final moments. ![]() ![]() It’s a well-done triptych of notes that eventually turns into a bipartisan interplay of incense and patchouli, but that’s really about it. The notes may vary in prominence or strength, and the background elements certainly become less noticeable as time goes by, but Portrait of a Lady can really be summed up as nothing more than fruited, jammy, patchouli rose infused with dry incense. And it never really changes from that essential characteristic. Īt its core, Portrait of a Lady is a simple fragrance of rose supported by twin pillars of patchouli and smoke. Spirit of a Dying Rose by Vincent Knaus via. ![]()
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