Like the rotting banana astride its 10 carat amphibian throne at Mar-A-Lago — is this rather wonderful perfume a cheeky reference to the plapface in chief and his Geminian, drooling brain-schisms? – any perfume with a thrillingly realistic banana peel and fruit top melange will immediately stand out in even the edgiest of niche perfumeries. It smells, quite simply- yes you guessed it – bananas.
I laughed out loud. That yellow blast of Floridian musa at the beginning of the perfume sent me on a whirl of nostalgic hyper-bananes : natural, synthetic – I loved chewy b-candies at the sweet shop as a kid as well as ice slushy milkshakes – Miami Split definitely has a whiff of dessert – and is probably more what Abel had in mind than an addled Ronald Clump sliding about on mushy slippered banana skins ; had I been flush with cash I would probably have purchased it on the spot.
It dries down to ‘white oud’- a curious proposition that shouldn’t work, but in my view emphatically does ( this perfume definitely won’t be for everyone, in particular my friend Michael who has actual bananaphobia and would immediately be sent a gaggin’), the perfumers at Abel – incredibly, an all natural fragrance house that elevates non synthetic ingredients to new creative heights – having a deft hand in layering ingredients, even novel, headspace fermentation techniques as they used here – to diaphanous, sophisticated effect.
I used up my extrait edition of the same house’s lovely Cobalt Amber many summers ago – a pink peppery labdanum that floats from the skin in a sensuously gentle manner – and would very much like another bottle; this is the kind of scent you can just spray on of a morning without too much thought, knowing that you will smell nice the rest of the day – and was also intrigued by the mood-fizzing aldehydic uplift of their very fresh and happy-inducing Laundry Day – soda-fresh lime, passion fruit layered over sinuous vetiver – this would make an excellent work perfume and I plan to make it mine come the hot weather – but it is undeniably the Banana that gets the most applause in this review. If only from the point of view of olfactive novelty, I need this in my collection. It made me smile – unlike that other old fruit in the ‘White House’ who is ready for the bin — and makes me retch.
It is also fortunate that you don’t have to ransack the coffers of your own banana republic to acquire these scented lovelies either: small affordable bottles are available at the Nose Shop in NewWoman Yokohama just enough to quench the thirst for the yellow Chiquita -while not sufficient to push you over straight over the edge of the dreaded banana precipice. Next pay day I plan on getting all three.
The top notes have gone. But then so have mine. And middle, and base, possibly, as well………but I will come to that in a minute.
Vivienne Westwood enjoys a cult status in Japan, where there is still a sizeable Anglomania (Oasis, who I detest, are worshipped here – I once met Liam Gallagher backstage after an Ocean Colour Scene concert – I was once in the band – and he was a twat, albeit with a quite stunning, wolf-like pair of sapphire peepers), everybody still goes on about The Beatles, and the J-fashionistas still venerate Alexander McQueen, but even more, the late Madam Westwood. In fact, the oddball girl across the street – lips full of piercings and shaved eyebrows and tartan leggings is a worshipper (a few winters ago, I saw her scrabbling in the iced slush like a sped up, FX-laced J-horror, snow collecting in her long black hair; scooping up enough snowbricks to make an eerie ice effigy – I stood there, transfixed, wishing I could film the scene, but then again I am friends with her mother and it seemed inappropriate; due to her British couture fixation, we refer to the daughter now as Vivienne-san).
Though usually pretty generous with my perfumes, that mute in a leather jacket is not getting my two Westwood perfumes; Boudoir and Libertine. The former, a powdery, filthy orange blossom is genius, and on me dries down to the most tobacco-y, hippiest josssticks; the latter a deliciously green fruited honeysuckle with patchouli-ish amber basenotes – a very strange concoction that evokes the wonderful Curious by Britney Spears (a fucked up magnolia) and even the algaei-ish singing pondskaters of Cacharel’s much maligned Eden; white-musky, but laden with passionfruit and pineapple and fresh green leaves with a laundromat-cute heart of jasmine and synthetic chevrefeuille; one of those blends that you know just works on immediate application in its entirety – immaculate from top to bottom but with just enough dose of eccentricity – this is Vivienne Westwood we are talking about, after all – to render it intellectually interesting as well as sensual.
I reached for my bottle of this last night on an impulse. This particular flacon is one that D picked up for me in a junkshop, my second bottle. Pleased though I was to have it again, it cannot be denied that the top notes are broken. Perhaps whoever had once owned the perfume neglectfully it left it out in the sun, or it was tossed in a cardboard box somewhere in its journey from owner to second hand landfill, but there is very little of the green remaining, and the florals are crushed. I sense its inner uniqueness nonetheless: breathing under the surface, and I am patient. Eventually, the honeysuckle musc that is the soul of the scent emerges (it is a gorgeously sunny this morning, and I am going to wear this to the gym and then up to the hospital : it still has that something), and faith in the overall integrity of the fragrance is restored.
**
It was strange how I got this one.
It was at my first school in Japan, about twenty five years ago – in fact probably right after Libertine was released here because the woman who bestowed it upon me was a fashion type absurdly beyond the ball (I couldn’t be more ambivalent about Fashion; on the one hand, aesthetics are everything to me – and, bizarrely, I was in Vogue Japan again this month in a piece that feels like pure fantasy if you translate it compared to the often painful realities of my recent existence (https://www.vogue.co.jp/article/geek-beauty-2026-neil) —without beauty, life means nothing to me and I appreciate every moment of that in whatever form it comes in every minute of every day on a constant basis); at the same time, fashion is the most vacuously pretentious and passive aggressive form of human endeavour I can think of – to work in the industry must surely just to be surrounded by the most shallow and fascistly judgemental c”””s in existence – and how mediocre was The Devil Wears Prada 2, incidentally, no matter how sublime our Meryl was at certain moments?)
As usual, I digress – and Jesus do I digress these days; I can hardly think straight, which has been hard, going back into the classroom after a year off work having hideous surgeries that weren’t quite successful and then on top of that spinal and other issues that have really knocked me for six, what with all the painkillers and god knows what else affecting organs and stamina and wellness in general, I have felt like a condemned jellyfish; a misdiagnosis of the terrifying stenosis, where the nerves constrict in the back, causing agony ; prescribed blood pumping drugs to widen the veins and nerves when I am already one of the most overtuned nerve people on the planet; gooosh, the head spins in the classroom as I stare at 46 eyes staring back at me and try not to collapse at the blackboard, ooh you better belooba
-sorry, I knew this would happen; that as soon as my waters broke and I finally starting writing a post all hell would break loose in the afterbirth – and I will definitely not be frying up this placenta.
Where was I ?
Oh yes, I was talking about that bobblehead.
Because she did have a bobblehead. As in, a bobblehead. Like one of those painted toys with a detachable head that wobbles on purpose when it is too big for her body. But made more difficult by far by wearing platform clogs and comme des garcons type garments that looked ridiculous – if gaggably mesmerizing – in a language school environment when all the other dullards were turning up in suits or leisurewear and she would come in, Fellini/esque: dressed up every time as though she were a nun in a Van Eyk painting at the front row of London Fashionweek. And sensed something responsive; an empathy; she could talk to me; I knew all the fashion houses she was paening to; I was also a sensitive geekfreek like her and even once gave her a cassette tape compilation drenched in L Occitane Patchouli after she had arrived for the lesson one day with a bottle of Vivienne Westwood Libertine ‘;trust me, as a teacher you don’t often get gifted new bottles of perfume by your students – and I was thrilled.
*
Do I sound like a bitch?
Yes.
I don’t doubt it. The drudging myself up from the sinkhole of unwellness has turned me into a curmudgeonus grinch (left knee replacement still very much a work in progress, but slowly getting there; the right one postponed because I truly couldn’t trust if the surgeon had done a proper job with the left; instead relenting to a monstrous nerve disabling operation on the right – ‘radio ablation therapy’; six syringes; three local anaesthetics that were inserted and that were excruciating and then three other foul substances injected directly in order to burn the nerve endings – what was I thinking say yes to that, FFS? I don’t know, I have relinquished self authority in the last few years to the medical establishment; too exhausted to resist any longer; ok, if that’s what you think is the right thing to do, doctor, I suppose I will go with it….then ending up with a floppy right foot hanging off at the angle and walking with a slight ragdoll paraplegia that I forced my nerve endings to overcome – literally; feeling the nerve signal going from my brain all the way down and making that motherfucker attach to my ankle and walk as nature originally intended, just like Uma Thurman).
((this not the only way of gradually clawing my way out of the sewage strewn cesspit of my weakened physique and doom-sludging brain fog; the cliched expression just one day at a time really has been useful, and phoning friends; getting though one day of dizzying overwhelm, one day at a time (loving being back in the classroom simultaneously; the connection! the beautiful youth! the sense of connection and purpose! the rediscovering of my pedagogical talent, which was lurking underneath all along!). Still, it has come with a cost; hardly being able to see the register; vertiginous swaying as I turned my head and stand up to write something on the blackboard – I really must get a new pair of glasses; what the hell is wrong with me; obviously, these are not the right prescription any more or is it just renal failure?); but a fantastic consultation with an actually positive back specialist a couple of weeks ago helped immensely ; no, you don’t have a trapped nerve or stenosis, so you don’t need that medicine (TF!), you do have a herniated disc in your lower lumbar vertebrae- and boy can I feel it – but no osteoporosis or arthritis in the rest of your back – you have good alignment and a strong spine so get down the gym and cycle and strengthen your core muscles and wear this Jean Paul Gaultieresque corset for good measure – all I need now is a pointy pale pink satin cone bra —-no, the JPG is my addition, although he did ‘prescribe a corset‘ ; and he did say everything else; but how nice to actually have someone human and fun and uplifting rather than the sad racist fuck who made me feel so miserable as he spat out his stenosis diagnosis I could have happily mangled him up in his own MRI machine. Nurse! Oh dear! What is this dripping ?There seems to be a crushed bone specialist in the nerve tunnel- could you clean up the mess o kudasai ))
But I believe this was a review of a Vivienne Westwood fruity floral. So let me get back to that then.
I am on the up. Which is why I am back onhere. I am definitely stronger. Physically and mentally. And obviously, it was never going to be straightforward going from isolation and rehabilitation and in a very passive position for all that time to suddenly thrusting myself back into the classroom where I am the engine.
Last week I finally got on top of it all though; properly connected with each student, even remembering their names. So perhaps I am more intact than I had realized : Perhaps I have not lost all of my notes after all. Imperfect as hell, for sure; degraded, undeniably. A definite whiff of deterioration. But like the lovely perfume I am going to spray on after I take a shower in a minute – then wait for an hour for it to develop into that still rather delightful heart…..still hopefully not entirely without its uses.
Sakura– centred perfumes are, in general, pretty vile.
But I realized today that the blossoms, when in multitudes, really do have the most delicately ravishing smell : against the blue sky near my house, they were warm, fruity, almondly fecund; cold; aloof -reaching briefly into the eternal
Several days later, I am still reeling from watching the Louis Theroux documentary on Netflix, Inside The Manosphere.
Although I was very aware of the likes of Andrew Tate and his disciples, and had read extensive articles on the topic of the newest misogny and aggressive bro culture that has infiltrated the minds of emotionally undernourished young men and boys worldwide (looksmaxxing anyone; smashing yourself deliberately in the face to make you look like a chiselled boxer?), I don’t think I had ever actually exposed myself to the reality of how these people operate; how they speak; how they denigrate; the sheer brutal hatred that shines from their eyes in the name of learning to ‘nut up’ or be a proper man. How they treat real, living women directly in view of the camera. I was horrified, flabbergasted.
There were several times in the programme when we gasped out loud. What these muscled up aggravators say to the women around them is so insulting, violent, awful, I could hardly sleep after and it has been going round and round in my head ever since. The pumped up aggression and body fascism; the gym addicted narcissism. The bedpost notches (‘the body count’). The horror of living in the Internet Age when any balance seems to have gone out the window and how this has become normalized for millions of hardened, frightened males around the globe. What it forebodes for the future.
If it seems as if I have been living under a rock, I really haven’t. We are all conscious of so much now but are unable to process it. The Tates and others like them are embraced at The White House: ultimately, we are unable to escape the Monster At The Centre Of It All, the great ‘POTUS’, whose influence in this regard has been incalculable; Epstein; Weinstein; #MeToo and then the swing back from it in completely the other direction in visceral reaction to the Pronoun Police and their left wing Gender Piety (which, for me, was also sometimes too calcified and unrealistic and oppressive) :I remember the moment that ‘Toxic Masculinity’ became the by-word for virtually all men and I though oh no, even if such a thing exists – and it does, surely; I hardly know a single woman who hasn’t been assaulted or affected by it in some way and macho behaviour truly is often very poisonous – but I also knew, instinctively, that there was no way half the world’s population was going to be tarred with the same brush and suddenly become ‘cancelled’. There would inevitably be an uprising; a rejection; an upward tsunami of testosterone in revenge.
And here we are.
I have been a victim of Male Rage quite a lot in my life, and others have been victims of mine. It is most definitely a thing (so is the female version, obviously but I am just talking from my own standpoint as I have not been able to experience that personally). Most men contain fifteen times more testosterone than most women; testosterone increases aggressivity. So there you go. There are male traits, characteristics; I demonstrate many of them myself. But surely the strict traditional binaries of gender are a still horrorshow for everyone – so restrictive, so much pressure to perfectly embody one or the other that it is difficult, sometimes to not go round the bend – I found growing up terrifying in that regard – constantly petrified I would be ‘found out’, that I was too girly; ashamed that I just couldn’t help myself dancing wildly to Shalamar’s A Night To Remember and autohypnotizing myself on my nine year old bedroom dancefloor to Blondie’s Rapture. I was just being myself – and I am still dancing to Debbie Harry -but words like sissy or poof still stabbed me like a mortal sword plunge through the gut. Hiding myself inside my young body; squaring my shoulders and trying to ‘walk like a man’. Folding myself awkwardly into a box that felt like an imprisoning straitjacket.
It is beyond my parameters to discuss an entire world of maleness, what it entails, and where it originates; so much has been written about how boys and men are ‘falling behind’ academically and in the work place; how they have lost their confidence now that traditional male behaviours have allegedly become so stigmatized that they don’t know what to do with themselves any more; how to act – and turning all females (their beloved mothers and sisters and daughters aside- one aspect of the documentary that was genuinely so pathetic; the tired old madonna-whore syndrome) into a despised enemy. To be conquered. Slighted. Raped.
*
It sickened me. And watching the screen – here we go – you could see how they must smell. Doused in angry aromachemicals designed to phallically thrust their way into the female consciousness, a woman picked up on a tacky street in a tacky Spanish resort town invaded by horrible Brits and Americans and turned into a slaggish meatmarket of the lowest common denominator; an easily legible olfactory symbol to have her abject and ready. Here come the man. Scent; such a powerful, three dimensional forcefield around a person: one that can accentuate, and exaggerate certain aspects of a persona to cartoonish and grotesque levels; the ‘beast mode’ ‘and high projection’ high street perfumes now in circulation that denote a pig that ready to fuck. No subtlety. Just that bleak and furious viagra.
It needn’t be like this. What I was watching was insanity. Yes, you can say it is peripheral, a minority – but when governments are inviting these people into their buildings and administrations you know that that is not true; the influence these people have is real and monumental. Witness ‘Adolescence’ – that stunningly created drama that showed just what can happen when a vulnerable boy can come into contact with this vile pollution; it seems trivial to discuss smell in this context, perhaps, but the greater the ferocity of the Axe deodorants and the high street ‘perfumes’ contrasted with the moronic sugar of their female equivalents, I think it is fair to say that the currents in society are physically represented in the molecules that are heavily contaminating the literal air. What I was seeing in that programme is borne out precisely by what I receive in my nostrils the second I arrive back at the airport in the UK.
There are other possibilities, surely. In philosophy, of course, but also even in scent. Perfume can be the very opposite of a vicious assault on the senses aimed at your immediate surrender; it can so easily confer a magnetic aura; and enigmatic haze, an intellectual, emotional or erotic beckoning that augments you rather than turning you into a bombastic silo of x and y chromosome cliches that inevitably lead to a rut. Watching The Manosphere I could only guess what the ‘men’ in question – the rottweiler bros – would spray themselves with; the women too, who conformed to every possible stereotype of what you imagine the tacky ‘beauty influencer’ looks like; hair dyed cracked blonde; Donald Trump levels of foundation to dye your skin orange (why? WHY does skin have to look like this? I have never understood it, the reasoning behind it; the pancake up to the neck, it is so fucking ugly; who wants to caress someone’s cheek and come away with dark yellow panda prints?); that slathered on Kardashian eye makeup, those twitching, false lashes like dead butterflies caught in a glue trap.
I remember in the eighties when the first versions of harsh masculinity started appearing on the shelves. I detested them from the moment I smelled them – Dunhill, Tsar, Jazz – I felt personally infringed upon, as I did when Charlton Heston appeared on a screen. I have written about this before, in relation to Sauvage, so don’t want to repeat myself too much here (I can imagine some of you already rolling your eyes, yes yes Neil – we know you hate aggressive men’s perfumes), but as we were walking along yesterday in the Ofuna sunshine discussing our reactions to the documentary again – sometimes you ingest things so monumental and hideous you have no reactions to them; it is all so understood by the other person that it seems too pointlessly obvious to even go into it, but they inevitably resurface again later, and thinking about smell, I was saying to D, that once upon a time, perfumes, fragrances, ‘colognes’ if that is the only word you can handle using, were so much more subtle and mischievous; clever, even; sexually nuanced – less oppositional. They weren’t ‘transgender’ or compromising a person’s man or womanhood. They just contained multitudes. Iconic masculines like Fabergé Brut or Old Spice were powdery fougere carnations but innocently/lasciviously smooth and sweet; Elvis wore them, as did my dad and cousins. There was a cheapness, yes, but also a suave mystery that made you ponder; inhale. Look again. And this man’s lady – while he was slinking in Aramis or Givenchy Gentleman might have been wearing Cabochard or Miss Dior – sharp, deep, green, growling, reaching deep into patchouli’d sexuality and chic – or perhaps Chanel Nº5 – which I was wearing yesterday – also, in fact, no simplistic ‘bimbo’: with its layers of warmth and cold, masculinity and femininity; a bodily frankness in its plushed fading stages that suggests the pleasures of mutual entwinement; curiosity, and shared pleasure- not the callous, bed-notching hardfucking proposed by the dicks on the programme where ‘the opposite sex’ is a mere conquest, to be tossed aside afterwards like a bag of trash. You imagine the wearer of the original Dior, Eau Sauvage, or a rascal like Jules, being genuinely interested in the woman he is pursuing a night with – the chase of the seduction an excitement, sure, and why not? but you also imagine him wanting her, intrigued by her; worshipping her even………..not hating her.
*
I think one of the reasons I am so (naively?) reacting so strongly to ‘Inside The Manosphere’ is because of where I live. Japan is hardly gender equality paradise – quite the opposite – there is certainly a lot of domestic violence here, Internet trolls are majorly on the rise, and just look how much groping goes on in public transport on a daily basis. There is an inbuilt resistance to women working in a variety of professions that are totally patriarchal in structure and don’t even try to hide it; even the language itself, in which men and women speak using different words to denote the self divides the sexes linguistically in a way that hard for the resistant native English speaker to adapt to (d and I can only say ‘watashi’, the basic, generalized ‘I’, never the standard masculine ‘boku’ and ‘ore’ – words I could no more bring myself to use than than I could say ‘atashi’ or ‘uchi’ – the feminine equivalents which would sound ridiculously camp and equally wrong, demonstrating that we have not really ever tried to adapt to the culture properly, stuck in our own particular lefty corner of gender liberal stubbornness).
As a perpetual foreigner, I will never really full infiltrate this culture and understand everything – the more intricate intricacies that still elude me. But at the same time, I have spent decades surrounded by Japanese colleagues and students, and what I observe and smell – there, but also out on the street, on the trains, everywhere in the cities – are my own genuine observations and inhalations. And the only ones stinking up the atmosphere with their bro-fumes are the increasing number of westerners, who smell so wrong in this air and stick out like toxic, rusting nails. Odourlessness is quite common; so are the natural smells – pleasant or unpleasant – that emanate from the average human body – neither smoking nor squiddy snacks do anyone many favours.But otherwise, when people are perceptibly fragrant, the pH balance is much nearer the centre than it in the western hemisphere; women in cedar/sandalwood, sweet boisés; or else fresh fruity or shampoo-like; or powder-kimono soft; but the boys also – clean; floral, savon-ish; cute+ Shiseido Tsubaki is a hair wash and conditioning combo I have mentioned before that is practically the National Perfume; washing powders and fabric softeners also sometimes have this rich, mid-octaved red floral smell that can sometimes be a little too loud in volume but still ultimately very pleasant; and actually, when up close, quite sensual, totally dependent on the individual. A person’s natural odour rising up with these scented additions. And therein lies the attractiveness; their breath, their skin essence , float up from within these abstractions, as in a vision.
Which is why I was really very fine yesterday wearing a rather pleasing limited edition perfume by Shiseido, Hanatsubaki – picked up, of course, for nothing from the junk yard (don’t you love the painted camellia on the box? – I do), and which is nothing original I suppose – an inheritor of some eighties and nineties fresher florality but which does have a convincingly fresh camellia-esque vernality and which smells lovely on the hair when wearing Chanel Nº5 – d said liked the combination when he leaned in – and so did I.
I am not, of course, that every male should be switching to a scent combination that could be read by many as being totally lacking in masculinity. But I felt entirely natural. A bit horny, actually. My body brings out interesting facets of the Chanel. Ambery, a bit naughty. Myself. And, as we walked under the blue sky, past the new cherry and peach blossom and the swathes of narcissi, I felt blissfully, blissfully, a million, million miles from those poor, misbegotten creatures in Marbella drowning pitifully – but so dangerously! – in their rabid anger, conspiracy theories, incel frustrations; their pointless, prophecy self-fulfilling cycles of woman-hating, noxious gender violence, and self hatred.
Nothing against incontinence. After all, various valve issues are in the family – it is probably my destiny.
But people aren’t honest enough about narcissi – which are blowing their tits off right now in the wind: some exquisite, some truly foul– but still mesmerizing (I am talking to you, paperwhites – halitosis on stalks).
I picked some anyway.
There are no flowers on earth more resplendently dodgy nor ambivalent
