Anu Essentials reviews Durango by EnVoyage

Ask me where I want to go in the world and rarely do I think of the desert or being in the mountains.  My preference is the ocean and since being in the mountainous desert region is at the other end of that spectrum, it’s typically a reluctant consideration on my part until recently, until Durango.

I’ve had brief and colorful encounters with desert/mountain regions via Georgia O Keefe’s south-western paintings.  And I’ll never forget the story my sister shared with me of sitting atop a mountain in Arizona watching a sunset that was so magnificent that it beacon

the sacred and ushered in the desire to meditate on the spot.

But now I’ve had my very own very visceral desert/mountain experience via Shelly Waddington’s perfume Durango.  It has my imagination reeling.   I immediately thought, how did my spirit forget that the desert too has its share of treasures? From the first whiff I was completely transported to what Shelly had coined her perfume as being the ‘Desert Twilight in the Old West’.  Shelly is an award winning perfumer of En Voyage Perfumes.

What pulls at me in this perfume is salt of the earth, with a twist of grit, musk and a tart sweetness that could only come from digging deeper. Just as all in nature has spirit, imagine that anything you see in nature regardless of how dry and thorny also has its secret sweet spot, if you dig deep enough to seek it out.  And that is what Shelly has done here.  It smells as though she dug deep to get to the sap.

With obscure notes like sage brush, cactus flower, tumbleweed, creosote, heart wood, laurel, salt, and pine, I had to keep smelling it one more time.  It opens up with the sweetness of flower and weeds, it’s sassy and brassy and then it speaks is a much softer but husky voice.  The sweetness is like a thin silk thread that runs through the middle of this tapestry of under brush, woods and weeds.

These off the beaten track ‘perfume notes’ speak to my spirit.  I get the feeling of communing with nature in that primordial way.  I don’t know how Ms. Waddington came to putting this art in a bottle.  And some would say that it’s made for a man.  Since we all have within us the male and female part of our spirit, then my male part connects with Durango.

But instead of compelling me to be manly, it makes me want to sing a sexy western like “Cow Cow Boogie” the way Dorothy Dandridge did; put on my fitted suede shirt, with matching circle skirt trimmed in leather, put on my cow girl hat, saddle my horse and go on a slow twilight gallop during that hour when the sky is a painting ablaze in brilliant reds, oranges, yellows and pinks. Ahhh yeah!  Durango, it will take you there!

While Shelly Waddington’s perfumes have a high degree of botanicals they are considered mix media formulations.