DSH Perfumes Uptown Moonshine Review (Dawn Spencer Hurwitz) +An Intoxicating Draw

January 4, 2019January 14, 2019

Cab Calloway plays the Cotton Club, New Year's Eve, 1937

The Cotton Club, 1924, New Year’s Eve. Gents and their gals sip bootleg from hip flasks in Harlem’s ritziest joint while trombones wail hot blues. The air is thick with Havanas and Lucky Strikes, the perfumes from a hundred pulse points as bodies jump and jive to a frantic Charleston. With its maple-y center and goodtime guy notes of whiskey, cigars and spice, Dawn Spencer Hurwitz’s new holiday perfume, Uptown Moonshine, grins over its shoulder that Prohibition never stopped anyone from having a ball.

Photo by Emma Summerton for Vogue Italia, Feb 2011

The opening of Uptown Moonshine is a rich gourmand swirl of brown sugar, vanilla, caramel and booze like a tipsy crème brulee or alcoholic softserve: instantly comforting, dairy-sweet and just a little naughty. Barrel-aged bourbon, with its vanillic, woody undertones, amplifies as a rich tobacco cuts through, smelling like an expensive Cuban just out of its wrapping. The cigar note takes precedence over the sweet, alcoholic opening as DSH Perfumes Uptown Moonshine spreads out, becoming drier the longer it wears.

Speakeasy, 1920s, stock image

Balsamic notes slow things down from a jitterbug to a waltz. Nutty cabreuva and sandalwood add some heft and more dryness to the middle stages, balancing out the gourmand notes nicely. In this unhurried tempo, DSH Perfumes Uptown Moonshine takes on some spice – I detect pinches of pepper and cardamom. Hooch and tobacco hang like a smoky veil over the gourmand notes and the fragrance shifts from dessert to afterhours club.

Photo by Steven Meisel for Vogue, Sept 2007

The dry-down is like the way remnants of night cling to the small hours of the morning. A redolence of booze, toasty woods and tobacco hugs the skin, accompanied by the thick, sleepy smell of maple syrup and amber. DSH Perfumes’ Uptown Moonshine is as deliciously toasty as a down comforter after a night of hard partying. And it’s a lovely smell to wake up to on these first days of the New Year.

Notes: Birch tar, brown sugar (accord), Carolina moonshine (accord), oakwood co2, whiskey whiff (accord), amber, ambergris, Australian sandalwood, bourbon vanilla, brown oakmoss, caramel, castoreum, Peru balsam, tobacco absolute, Bulgarian rose otto, cabreuva wood, grandiflorum jasmine, bergamot, davana, spice notes.

Disclaimer: Sample of DSH Perfumes Uptown Moonshine graciously provided by DSH Perfumes. My opinions are my own.

Lauryn Beer, Senior Editor

Editor’s Note: Dawn Spencer Hurwitz is the recipient of The Hardest Working Perfume person of 2018, as well as Best of Scent 2018 awards for Eau Cerise, Lis Oriental and Paper*Whites–Michelyn Camen, Editor-in-Chief

DSH Perfumes Uptown Moonshine Holiday 2018

Thanks to the generosity of DSH Perfumes, we have a dram of DSH Perfumes Uptown Moonshine for one registered reader anywhere in the world. IF YOU DON'T REGISTER YOUR COMMENT WON'T COUNT CLICK HERE. To be eligible, please leave a comment saying what appeals to you about DSH Perfumes Uptown Moonshine based on Lauryn’s review, where you live, if you have a favourite DSH Perfumes fragrance, and in what past year and place you’d like to spend New Year’s Eve. Draw closes 1/7/2019

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