How nice to have a weekend free after surviving six days on the trot :; yesterday at home with wine and cooking and an 80’s kitchen disco, blissfully listening to all those old 12” singles we lugged at backbreaking maximum weight from England to Japan.
Today, en route from Kannai station down Isezakicho street to our favourite Thai restaurant, Im Aroy, Japanese jasmine perfume already in the bag; Thursday, here I also picked up a pristine Ricci Capricci velvet-boxed parfum for virtually nothing, and there will be more later – we passed these dangling, perfumed atrocities that I immediately recognized as Hell’s Bell’s, Devil’s Weed, or Datura, one of the absolute poisinest plants in the natural world, psychotropic to the max, leading to hypothermia, convulsions, visions, and death (and probably easy to just slip into someone’s tea).
I grasped and inhaled one of the non-decomposing flowers pictured, and it smelled beautiful – literally intoxicating, and much closer to Serge Lutens’ Datura Noir than I had ever realized
Not a Lutens with which I’m over-familiar. But I shall now have to seek out a sample.
Note to self: never ask N for a cup of tea.
!!
You don’t need to smell it : just lilac lemon coconut and almond … quite odd
but I DID smell a keen resemblance to the real thing today and that was strangely thrilling to realize
I’ll avoid a cup of tea as well !!!!!
As if I would !
It just struck me that the poison is SO at hand of someone wanted to use it.., in the form of a scintillatingly sickly fragrant flower
He has made me want to try it too!
They look like demonic courgette flowers: not to be frittered.
aggh : I LIKE fried courgette flowers …. you bring death closer
In Leo Delibes’s opera “Lakmé” the protagonist kills herself by eating from the datura plant. No need for a cuppa, just nibbling the leaf does the trick there—
How beautifully horrifying.
Just a nibble ? It really is toxicity central, isn’t it, and yet some people mess with it as a psychedelic
You would think in that case they would not have the damned things just growing in the street. Any random toddler could amble along .
What I said in my reply to your December 2014 post of this scent still holds true for me in 2019. Sometimes I love it and sometimes I cannot wait to scrub it off.
Precisely.
I also revisited that old review : it is definitely an odd scent, slightly repulsive and alluring simultaneously.
And there IS something very attractive about the flowers, I think – the size of them for a start. These pictured were intensely perfumes
Lilac, lemon, coconut, almond? I’m intrigued. Closest I’ve got to either Datura Noir or the real thing is Keiko Mechuri Datura Blanche, which is probably a mile away. It is weird little slightly venomous powdery thing which I quite like.
Likewise intrigued.
Do you know the smell of the real flowers ?
I wish, especially after this excellent read.
Love the sound of your 80’s kitchen disco, by the way. Seems as though things are getting back to normal, Neil-style. Glad to hear it.
I know what you mean.
Really though, I should be promoting my book.
Any ideas ?
A generously funded book tour of North America, including a day or two in Vancouver, natch.
If only !
datura, yes. we had it in the garden bc my parents loved wild plants. I knew about its psychotrope lethality. my mom loved to wrench open the dangerously long-spiked black seedpods and splay open the beds within. to reveal the still more opaque pitchblack seeds. the flowers have an alluring smell, as White Flowers, yes, yet in a League of their own. SL’s Datura Noir (2001) stays tight to the original. Secrète Datura by Maitre Parfumeur et Gantier 1992 (probably by Jean Laporte) has more ingredients. (I see Serge Lutens’ Datura has even more ingredients. perhaps also bc the Datura is a Fleur Muette.) yet also smells divine. somehow I managed to get all the MPG’s & SL’ensens on time. when they were conceived. and then, still those bottles.