From Olympic Orchids website: "Every year in late winter New Orleans puts on a grand party like no other. It’s a rainbow-hued, glittering, skanky, riotous, celebration of everything there is to celebrate, flowing in and out like a shiny snake amidst the flower-strewn, humidity-drenched, decaying streets of the French Quarter. Mardi Gras may present a polite, rich veneer of real orange blossom and vanilla, like a southern belle delicately munching on a beignet dusted with powdered sugar, but behind the pretty, festive costume are dark undercurrents of voodoo and hoodoo, midnight rituals and outrageous secrets that can only be unleashed under the protective camouflage of the innocent-looking mask."
This gorgeously skanky fragrance features notes of orange blossom, neroli, cistus, benzoin, vanilla, civet and a special musk blend. It is an eau de parfum, edp.
Olympic Orchids Mardi Gras Reviews
An excerpt from cafleurebon: Mardi Gras is a bewitching and bold scent that offers up everything you’d want to remember and may choose to forget on an olfactory trip down to the Big Easy. It is both sweet and sweaty, and has enough sinful sillage and power to keep you up all night carousing in the streets.
I’ve learned that when done well feral perfumes can be absolutely irresistible. They speak to the whole of human nature – musky scents make us aware of the masks we wear in polite society and how urgently we need to let go when the right opportunity arises. The opening of Mardi Gras is disarmingly sensual– soft powdery orange blossom, and a clean, airy vanilla doing their best to distract from a fat, musty, warmed-up flesh civet note. Even though the top notes are sweet and light, don’t fall for their innocence. Because immediately afterwards, a sweet, low, smoky cistus (labdanum) and benzoin accord blends down to a “special musk blend”. The effect this composition has is immediate, direct and unstoppable. Mardi Gras is a growling and sultry scent, and it’s perfectly named – this is a perfume demanding to run wild and if you wear it, you won’t be home before dawn.
Mardi Gras is not a timid or demure floral citrus for the vanity table – its total flirtation fuel, and the scent will definitely shadow you the next day, no matter what transpired the night before. It knows your secrets, and worse – it makes you suddenly crave them, in a lip-chewing, damp forehead, “Oh my – I feel a little lightheaded now” kind of way. The orange blossom and vanilla are there for you to think you will politely say to your friends, “I dunno – I don’t really want to meet anyone tonight, think I’ll stay in and read.” But then the cistus and benzoin jump in and you notice how fierce your friends are in their leathers, and you say to yourself, “Okay – just one drink.” And finally, the drydown arrives, and its “special musk blend” combines with all that smoky resin, and soon you’re sweating out every fantasy you can come up with out in the hot summer night of New Orleans. Mardi Gras is a take-no-prisoners, deceiving and delicious perfume. Mardi Gras is without question one of the sexiest perfumes I’ve ever smelled, with a power and presence that can stop anyone you want in their tracks for you to do with as you will. Let the good times roll.
