Violette Market recently relaunched their site with a new design and new lineup of scents! While I was excited to see the new site and new catalog, I was also disappointed because the price jumped from around $15/bottle to a whopping $25/bottle. Still, I'm a longtime fan of Violette Market and I really wanted to see how the new scents were, so I ordered a few decants from a decant circle and I'm sharing my thoughts on one of them today: The Magician.
Price: $25 for a 6 mL clear glass rollerball bottle of perfume oil.
Samples: You can purchase a full set of 10 samples from the Autumn collection for $40.
(More details about price and shipping can be found in our Company Overview post about Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab.)
Description from the website: "With notes of Vanilla, Mexican lime, Sicilian cedrat, oak wood, coriander, jasmine absolute, Spanish white tree moss, vanilla orchid, and white amber shrouded in a cloak of aged black vetiver in a base of Organic jojoba oil."
The Magician is part of the Victorian Magic 1897, Autumn traveling general collection, containing ten perfumes. I assume that the "Autumn traveling general collection" means that these are seasonal general catalog scents that will reappear every fall, but I'm not really clear on that.
Violette Market's description of the collection: "These perfumes are inspired by images from a massive late 19th century tome entitled simply: Magic, subtitled: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, including Trick Photography, compiled and edited by Albert A. Hopkins. The perfumes, like the book they are inspired from, take the reader on a sensory and visual tour of the popular magic tricks and illusions of the Victorians, including along the way many delightfully surreal diagrams and illustrations inspired by the era but not part of the original book."
I think the theme is charming--it reminds me of 2006, when The Prestige and The Illusionist both came out in movie theaters and I got to enjoy my fill of dark Victorian magician movies for a brief and glorious time.
On first sniff, my impression is that this smells like a lime creamsicle! Or perhaps a key lime pie minus the crust. I really like this lime note, which reminds me of VM's old scent Tupai (a surprisingly assertive tropical coconut-lime perfume) but feels a bit lighter and airier than how it came across in Tupai. It's a lime peel type of aroma, more bitter and floral than just tart lime juice. And since it incorporates cedrat (citron) as well, the citrus note is actually more complex than it appears at first, especially as it blooms on the skin.
The scent becomes sweeter as the topnotes fade away a bit, with a creamy vanilla that reminds me of ice cream pushing its way to the forefront. It feels like a deep, smooth scent, though, more complex than it might appear upon first sniff. I think the moss/oak/vetiver/amber notes give it a slightly dry, rich base and complexity that a pure vanilla-lime combination wouldn't have on its own.
If you're afraid of scents containing jasmine, rest assured that this smells very little like jasmine to me--it's something buried in the sillage as the perfume warms on the skin, but it's very subtle and mostly blends in with the floral aspects of the citrus notes.
It eventually settles into something less overtly creamsicle-like--a soft, fluffy, marshmallowy vanilla made slightly sharp by a bare remaining hint of citrus.
It's a lovely perfume, and while I'm not happy about the price increase for their perfumes, I think that at least this particular scent carries the sophistication and quality to justify a higher price. The rollerball packaging is a nice touch, but I would have liked to have seen fancier artwork and an colored glass bottle to protect the perfume from being damaged by light.
Have you tried any of Violette Market's new perfumes? What do you think of their new site and rebranding?
Note: Although I don't see any possible animal ingredients in the notes list, I don't know for sure if this perfume is vegan/cruelty-free--couldn't find info about it on the site.
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