Monthly Archives: November 2017

via LIKE CAT NIP TO A TOM CAT : : : : : : CEDRE by SERGE LUTENS ( 2005 )

My sister has the enviable, but rather daunting task of welcoming Dame Maggie Smith today at the television company she works for ; greeting the grand Dowager of Grantham when she arrives with her chauffeur at reception, making her a drink, and escorting her upstairs to a private viewing room to approve or disapprove of a documentary that they are making about her, also featuring Dame Joan Plowright, Dame Eileen Atkins, and the inestimable Dame Judy Dench (so quite a lot of ‘dames’).

What perfume –  and what clothes?! –  to wear, as they go up (silently?) in the lift?

My sister is usually a torrid and sensual whirl of Roma Biagiotti and L’Artisan Nuit Du Tubereuse worn together, so one can imagine the twitch of the Living Institution’s nostrils as she damningly reads the air and turns her purview in her direction; a tightening of the icon’s lips as they both fixate on the floor numbers above them, and Deborah holds her breath in.

Perusing the essential, and inexhaustible, Celebrity Perfume Guide, however, I find in fact that this most venerable of British actresses wears a perfume I have never heard of before, a scent from the 80’s called Madeleine De Madeleine, apparently a drier, more reserved Piguet Fracas, a tuberose that my own fiery and impetuous sibling also wears, as it should happen, to quite ravishing effect.

Two hot tuberoses, stuck together in an elevator.

Perhaps they’ll get along like a house on fire.

That time of year is now very close on the horizon, when we ‘gear up’ for the colussus that is Christmas, fill up our shopping carts with truckloads of nonsense, and begin to tie things up at work before the winter break. Start organizing the requisite office Christmas party, where legless backsides are photocopied during clumsy embraces, shiny red noses are ‘hilariously’ donned by the office clowns, and repressed desires are sometimes, later, regretfully expressed.

Japan also has its end of year release: the annual and unavoidable bonding ritual of the ‘bonenkai’ : usually quite spirited and raucous affairs, where sake and beer are consumed in copious quantities as company employees gather in large numbers in restaurants and izakaya, and where it is acceptable to get quite drunk and perhaps pry a little bit more than you ought to into the personal life of that person you were always a bit curious about; when your boss has the right to make fun of you, sometimes quite mortifyingly so; hog the mike at karaoke; and everyone, red-faced and stumbling for the last train, is kind of glad when it is all over ( and any long denied secret assignations will be discreetly made, later, for a ‘love hotel’ )….

Traditionally, though, the British Christmas office party is more out in the open ; over the top; even scandalous : a bit of a free for all,  a disengorgement of pent up frustrations when people kind of know they have free license to be naughty, and wild; and then can later just blame it all on the booze, after they have snogged their secret crush by the water fountain, or have embarrassedly moved in a bit closer to that person they have long had an eye on stuck furtively, and longingly: frustrated and bored, for years, behind the keyboard of their computer.

Organza Indecence, a quite daring fragrance from 1999 by Givenchy that was inexplicably discontinued five years later ( to the horror of its devotees – this scent now has a large cult following and extortionate prices on eBay) strikes me as the perfect perfume for this familiar scenario : the ideal, invisible weapon for a premeditated, inebriated stumbling against that suit you have spent the entire year yearning for; fumbling; almost spilling your drink as you graze his lapels, snug – ‘unintentionally’  – in your heated,  ferally evocative perfume.

Mature. Rational. A warm and pulsing woody cinnamon amber with a heart of naked vanilla, Indecence is pretty much as sultry as they come, with the syrupy, heavy breathing cedar of the parfum extrait version of Shiseido’s  Feminite coupled with the dense vanilla spice of L’Elephant by Kenzo: not as elegant nor as mysterious as the former (not by a long mile); nor as sweet nor as radical as the latter, but still a rich, stealthy, and very adult-rated perfume that will make your Secret Santa clandestine desires known quite explicitly, as you move in closer-  to ‘Last Christmas’ – without your ever whispering a word.

Recently I have taken to burning perfume.

This began when deciding that a bottle of Maja Myrurgia, given to me by my perfume cohort Zubeyde, would smell better in the air than on my skin, and, dipping my daily Japanese incense sticks in a used bottle of 19 ( come on, I’m not that sacrilegious ), once they had dried, and absorbed, the delicate lavender rose Spanish patchouli of that black-laced, widowed classic, when lit, I was delighted by the gentle, powdered, calming and genteel miasma that arose slowly in the air. The incense itself is benign and unobtrusive enough to not interfere with the essential components of the scent, just  softens it….

In our ‘genkan’, or entrance, we have incense sticks dipped like oil slicks in a densely scented broil of raw patchouli essential oil and Annick Goutal’s strangely witchy Mandragore Pourpre. While the black pepper and citrus beginning of the scent on my skin is almost annoyingly fresh and alive, when lost in a skin of liquid patchouli, the anise and heliotrope facets of the perfume  that I like work nicely as semi-hypnotic scent wands that greet me pleasingly when I come home after a hard day’s night. When burnt, the smell is outrageous, the darkest, most sinuous patchouli perfume you can imagine, snaking its way in plumes among the nooks and crannies of the house, lingering fingers of roots and dust and powdered elixirs.

And upstairs, shockingly, I have been burning No 5. My extrait bored me, and I wanted to smell it airborne. Delightful, the soft aldehydic roses and jasmine floating on clouds of ambered smoke:  an outrage, an offering.

via IF YOU WANT TO BE VENERATED LIKE AN EMPEROR, GO TO A JAPANESE DEPARTMENT STORE AT OPENING TIME

It goes without saying that basenotes are fundamental. They are not an ‘optional’ afterthought. A perfume, unless the lightest of colognes, is not a perfume without them.

While we might be tempted to fall, like people, for first impressions, it is the lingering aftertaste, the core of a fragrance that counts.

And yet these days there seems to often be a vague betrayal at the end of our perfumes, even when, like ‘Rose Nacree Du Desert’, they begin rather ravishingly, all powdery benzoin- licked roses feasting on patchouli and light trimmings of oudh and you think ah!

But what is left on the skin, a scent strip, a few days, hours- or weeks even, later?

The cheapest of insistent, even squalid, ‘white musks’

To me, such endings feel like a deception.