Peppered Tomato Leaves, a ‘scented mist’ from Perfumes Longmarch that comes in great big bottles of 250ml to be sprayed everywhere (‘on t-shirts, tulips, Tintin, tissue, trapezes and tomahawks…’ ) is a stern, pared down tomato; bitter green, brusque and ruddy kneed from being dragged – through the hedgerow backwards – by a lock-jawed, hardbodied sex fiend. In contrast to the tomate charmante we looked at the other day, the likeably extrovert but innocuous Vice Versa, this is a more attention-seeking, spiced matrix of green pungency.
After a beautifully fresh-leaved, anise-twisted opening of peppercorns, orange, cassis, and photorealistic tomato vines, the scent quickly loses tomato kudos and proceeds, nimbly, on a more rough and ragged Lady Chatterley path of outside sex. The musky, almost acrid, absinthe-green of Frederic Malle’s French Lover, immediately apparent and familiar, is here in the base of the scent: a deep, hardened ferret of no sweetness…
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The Black Narcissus 