Thutmose’s Nefertiti

[Atrous]

While we were at the Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung, I desperately wanted to see the Nefertiti bust and share the moment with Lilith. There’s a story behind why the bust is so important to me, but that’s for another time. Suffice to say, I was overwhelmed with awe and joy, and a kind docent told me that we could take a photograph from the doorway as long as we didn’t use flash. This blurry mess is my best attempt!

 

Myrrh steeped with cardamom, cinnamon, and sweet wine, streaked with lines of labdanum kohl, and gilded with crushed ambrette seed, a copper oxide musk, and accords of lime spar and iron oxide.



In the bottle I mostly get wine and, I guess, the lime spar because it has a mineral-like lime smell to it.

Once it's on the skin it morphs quite a bit.  The myrrh and spices come out while the wine note recedes and becomes a background note.

This scent is kinda hard to describe.  Myrrh is the base with the other notes sorta popping in and out.  One moment I smell lime, another moment Wine, and another moment Labdanum.

It's all in there spice, resins, mineral, stone, a bit of sweetness, musk, and metal.  It sounds like a mess but it's not.  These notes play really well together.  I really love this scent but more than that it's intriguing.  I have the feeling this will age beautifully.

[PurringPulsar]

In the bottle: heady gluhwein. I know it’s meant to be kyphi but it has a spiced mulled wine scent that fits with the whole Euro-Christmas theme of the series!

On the skin: fizzy? I know ‘lime spar’ is mineral lime, not fruity, but I swear I smell lime fruit here. It smells very effervescent. In fact it has a similar overtone to the Bears of Berlin scent. Maybe it’s the labdanum? At times it smells like white wine and then juniper and a scent that’s almost metallic, which I guess is the iron oxide or the copper. Underneath it, the scent of warm spiced red wine and aged resins-the myrrh is strongest. I get a sense of past and present, ancient Egypt meets modern Germany. Desert spices and embalming resins with overtones of metal and bright city lights and a steaming cup of mulled wine.  The beautiful queen has awoken after thousands of years in a strange new era, a strange new town.

Gradually the resin and spice comes to the fore. The myrrh and cinnamon are dominant, but then the labdanum really makes itself known. The fizzy metallic note from before has toned down a lot and now it’s all about the spicy myrrh with sticky sweet labdanum.

Verdict: this is gorgeous. I wasn’t sure what to think of the metal-mineral fizz at the beginning but then the myrrh and wine and spices turned this into a thing of beauty.

Backup? Most likely. I bet this will age like a dream.

[zankoku_zen]

Spiced mulled wine, myrrh, copper, and spices. This one is a very complex scent, that ends up coding as perfume to me with various shifting elements. Sometimes I  get the wine, other times the myrrh, sometimes its sort of metallic, and others I get different spices, and I swear at one point I did get the lime. Again, this one is a morpher.

[donkehpoo]

Wet: ... Okay, I'm not crazy. Let's start with that.

 

This smells like Dr. Pepper that's just about going flat. Like, there's a slight fizzyness to it.. but it smells like frickin' Dr. Pepper.  (It's been quite a while since I've smelled, or even tasted Dr. Pepper.. but it immediately triggered my scent memory when I sniffed this.)

 

Dry: Basically identical to the wet stage. Why are you Dr. Pepper on me!? 

[tinyvulture]

At first application this is sweet, fruity wine with a twist of lime. Cheerful, festive. Waiting to see if it becomes more complex. Nope, still pretty much a like sangria!

[starbrow]

This is so much myrrh and red wine, but in strong permutations when wet that don't sit perfectly with me. A very full-bodied bubble gum myrrh, with a bright red wine made from unripe grapes. But the spices beneath are rich and copious, with cinnamon being the most present of them for me. The cinnamon absolutely saves this early stage. It has a bit of mulled wine vibe, just smells like it needs to mull a lot longer. The primary color to me is maroon, with red and purple fighting for dominance.

 

As everything mellows down on skin, the metallic sides are given room to breathe. Mmm, the copper and iron are really lovely. They seem to sizzle in the wine. The brightness from before settles down, and a soothing Egyptian musk creeps in - thanks ambrette seed and cinnamon/cardamom. The myrrh also calms, and the labdanum is indeed dark and spicy but not cola-y. I love this stage. Every time I think of finding this bottle a new home, it is this stage that convinces me I actually need to keep it and wear this beauty.

 

Aging has done wonders for Thutmose's Nefertiti, and I think more years will only bring more richness and subtlety to the wine and presence to the resins in it. Happy to see where this goes.

 

I would wear this while: rereading Mara, Daughter of the Nile for the 9000th time