Donna Karan Gold

I've been lukewarm about lots of recent releases in the fruity floral Valhalla we call the department store fragrance counter. Send a flurry of snowy white blossoms past me, though, and I perk up my nose. I have been stalking one particular white floral fragrance with a keen premonition that it would get me. On Friday, a kind soul behind the Nordstrom's counter poured me an advance sample of the eau de parfum out of a rather industrial looking two liter bottle of the stuff. I am officially got.

Donna Karan Gold (by Quest with Estee Lauder's Trudi Loren) is a bitter and spicy green Casablanca lily perfume on a base of liquid amber and patchouli. The first burst from the vial is a fresh almost cucumber scent, followed by a green sweet heart of lily, jasmine, and acacia studded with a piquant white clove and golden balsam (a term of art that refers to the blend of Peru tolu balsam, olibanum, benzoin, vanilla, and cistus).

The eau de parfum balances the scent of fresh green stems with the powder of pollen, a spicy carnation aspect, the narcotic indolic jasmine, a touch of ylang and a vanillic finish. The pure parfum is rumored to be more of a rich oriental fragrance that highlights Donna Karan's favored notes of cistus, incense and vanilla.

Where most lily fragrances smell too much like carnation, soap, or, my pet term, Jaznilla, Gold offers up a pollen-dusty green tipped bouquet on a mellow oriental base that accentuates the scent's seductive and animalic character.

Gold does not render lily by way of vanilla pudding, but offers up instead the erotic, humid aspect of a live flower. Gold is distinctly different from Serge Lutens Un Lys, a beautiful vanilla musk clothed lily. Gold is more multifaceted, brighter and more interesting; move alive.

When Gold enters the room, umbrella petals arch their backs and send walloping waves of lily out into the air, a scent that is at once astringent, spicy, sweet, indolic, and dark in all its stunning whiteness. The fragrance stands, like a luminous Noguchi paper globe lamp, on a spare but elegant pediment of patchouli and amber.


Notes include: casablanca lily, fluid amber, sparkling acacia, white clove, gold pollen, jasmine templar (templar refers to a method of CO2 extraction that results in a rich jasmine note), golden balsam, and East Indian patchouli.