Roxana Illuminated Perfume Chaparral review

'They're setting fire to the cornfields
As you're taking me home.
The smell of burning fields
Will now mean you and here.' *

Chaparral is smoky, smoky, smoky. It's one of the series of Illuminated Perfumes celebrating the aromatic landscape of California, but it reminds me personally of the smell of stubble being burnt in fields at the end of summer (this practice was mostly stopped in England in the 1990s). The first sniff of Chaparral immediately took me back to the smell of fields full of flame in late August evenings.

The fragrance is a smoke/sage/frankincense blend, with the smoke (solid) or sage (liquid) taking immediate centre stage on my skin, before frankincense comes through as a dry incense/woodiness. I find the smokiness softens through the day although it still lingers, and a salty skin note appears which develops more as the day wears on. The herbal bay/sage notes linger gently, although they don't shout.

I like the solid and liquid forms layered, which I wear most often at the moment with Haus of Gloi Snow Wolf Pumpkin Butter body cream underneath. I bought this primarily to use as a winter scent, but I think it'd work well as a fragrance for autumn and summer evenings (the solid layers beautifully with Green Witch liquid). It would also be a good fragrance choice for a man, and a good choice for a work fragrance as it is a drier incense scent rather than a heavy or oily one.

There is a sibling liquid fragrance called Tangent (also pictured) which does not have the smoke of Chaparral. It has more of the clear herbal tones, and an almost eucalyptus note to my nose (possibly from the use of more sage and bay in the formulation). It is also somewhat sweeter in tone than Chaparral.

*Kate Bush 'Never Be Mine', with apologies to my parents for playing this continuously as a moody teenager.