Sugar and Spice: Demeter Honey, Caramel, and Black Pepper

Demeter is proof that a good scent doesn't have to be complex or expensive: it just has to have a solid idea and masterful execution.

Not all the Demeters are good, of course: there are a couple hundred scents in the line, minimum, and they couldn't all be winners--it just isn't statistically possible (regression to the mean and all that). But there are some gems out there if you're willing to wade through the entire pool of them.

A few days after I tried, and immediately adored, Serge Lutens Miel de Bois, I tried Demeter Honey, having sampled it (briefly) a few of years before and dismissed it: it wasn't to my taste at the time, and it didn't smell like what I thought honey ought to smell like. But years go by, your nose changes, you've smelled more things, you become a little more knowledgeable and sophisticated, and suddenly things to which you wouldn't give the time of day smell very desirable. The Demeter scent is unexpectedly good, a sort of stripped-down version of the Lutens scent, because rather than smelling like a spoonful (or a plastic bearful) of honey, it smells like raw honey, with suggestions of honeycomb, pollen, and wood. It isn't as complex or as magical or as difficult (yes, that's a good thing) as Miel de Bols, but for that price (about $20 an ounce, versus $110 for 1.7 ounces of the Lutens), who cares? It's delicious.

Demeter Caramel isn't as good: it does smell of caramel, but not quite the fresh milky caramel I had been hoping for--there's a slight synthetic edge to it. It isn't as intense as I would want it to be, and it doesn't last as long, either, which is not a surprise in the generally evanescent Demeter line but still a disappointment.

Demeter Black Pepper is also not everything I could have hoped for: it isn't really biting enough. What I wanted was the exact smell of freshly ground black pepper, and it isn't that, because it doesn't smell ground--it's more like peppercorns themselves, without the intoxicating fierceness that's released when they're crushed.

But.

On an instinct, I thought, "You know, Caramel plus Black Pepper would probably be smashing", and even though I hardly ever combine commercial scents, I threw on a splash of each, and it's true: together, they're much more than the sum of their parts. They have a synergy: the pepper carves through the synthetic sweetness of the caramel, which bestows a richness on the pepper, and there's a strange and mesmerizing glimpse of pipe tobacco amidst it all. Where did that come from? I don't know, but I love it. I mixed the two half-and-half in an atomizer, and I wear it all the time, because it's cheerful and just a little strange.

There are three lessons here:

1) Cheap is not bad.
2) Sample everything repeatedly, just in case.
3) Mix and match, because you never know.