” I WAS TRYING TO BE GOOD, BUT THEN I REALISED IT’S JUST A MATTER OF TIME” …SABOTAGE by ART DE PARFUM (2023)

Neil : We both rather like this one. But you do have to like mandarin.

Duncan : I’m not particularly a mandarin fan – I sometimes find mandarin scents somewhat thin and artificial – but I did like this one with the grapefruit and mint tones. You are definitely more inclined to mandarin, though.

N: As a fan of the original Miller Harris Mandarine Vert, Il Profumo’s Mandarino and even the old Body Shop Satsuma perfume oil (a collector’s item these days, now going for 250 dollars on eBay!) I can do a bright n fruity array of sunshine citrus in a perfume’s opening (here augmented with grapefruit, rhubarb, bitter orange, petitgrain, and a splash of spearmint and basil), though I think the mossy cedarwood musk of the base ultimately works better on you. You woke up this morning still emanating a nice cozy glow. Fuzzy and soft. But still with a vague hint of that mandarin accord. Last night when we met after work in Hiratsuka, with your four sprays on the wrists, body and neck I felt a bit …sabotaged.

D: Haha. Good! Maybe this is the ‘disruptive’ and ‘bold’ aspect that the blurb trumpets. Though I must admit, wearing it I didn’t feel sabotaged or intoxicated or sabotaging or intoxicating; I felt comfortable and upbeat – nifty even. Nothing jarring or overdone about it. I enjoyed it on my skin.

N: I think the contrast with flirtatious tuberose in the heart works well in this perfume; what I am grateful for in this one is the total lack of vanilla. It shows you can still have an attention grabbing scent without engorging the throats of those around you with custard sucrose.

D: Amen.

N: I like the quotation inscribed on the box: “I was trying to be good, but then I realised it’s just a matter of time”- the idea of ‘self-sabotage’. Here the idea seems to be giving in to one’s inner hedonist, something you and I do all too easily because we get so bored with the dust and drear of daily reality – we enter the dreamworld instead at almost any given opportunity. Sometimes it possibly goes too far, but then all the cinematic flashbacks in the mind do seem worth it.

D: Well, upon opening the parcel, you immediately commented on the Almodóvar-like design of the box – the retro font of SABOTAGE with the washes of overlapping colour behind – like the titles of Bad Education or All About My Mother or many of those movies. The packaging suggests drama and cinema, yes.

N: Sabotage is also a big theme on Rupaul’s Drag Race, where the contestants sometimes yield to their ‘inner saboteur’ ; in other words, they let their inner demons peel away at their self-confidence, lose vitality and belief and then mess up during their performances. Life can definitely feel like a constant tight rope walk between self-doubt and a pull towards the negative, and the opposite – cheerful positivity with an eye of optimism for the future, when you just feel happy. I don’t know if perfume can swing you completely from one state to another – though for me, natural jasmine definitely has a mood boosting quality – I feel it at the physiological level, but so, though to a slightly lesser degree, do oranges and clementines and mandarins, actually. You just can’t help feeling heartened and pointed in the right direction. Although Sabotage might lack complexity in its final stages – it is a bit of a three-tone bastion (mandarin, tuberose, wood-musk) – overall in some ways, it has an immediate kick to it that puts you in a pleasing state of mind.

D: Definitely my experience of wearing it : a kind of lightly citric canelé, but a low-calorie rendition, that somehow manages to still be a treat without all the gourmand excesses – which is to say, it’s a tasteful creation with a certain clipped restraint.

N: I have to say that I don’t find it especially 90’s though. Art De Parfum is marketing Sabotage as a throwback to rave culture (though the citruses do come across as acid-smiley), but I don’t remember anything smelling quite like this back then. The CK One type of scent is entirely dissimilar; much more abstract and subtle; for me this is much more contemporary with its upfrontness, but, as you say, with the thick, vanillic sweetness mercifully removed: that heavily ubiquitous vulgarian odour present for example in Lady Million Royal by Paco Rabanne, which I reviewed recently with total contempt.

D: Yeah absolutely. When you think of classic 90s scents – the ozonics, or the sugary confections like Trésor, this is definitely quite different. (I guess Roma is earlier than Trésor – but similarly luxuriantly sweet, some might say tooth-rotting.)

N: In terms of the ultimate self-sabotage, this perfume could easily have been effectively worn by Michaella McCollum, the protagonist of that beyond-fascinating documentary we watched on Netflix recently, ‘Confessions of an Ibiza Drug Mule’. Naive girl leaves Ireland in 2013, jumps on a plane to Ibiza, puts on tight party dresses and is a hit on under the strobe lights by local fiends (a fresh spritz of Sabotage would be perfect to cut through the noise in a club situation and hit on somebody; the first fresh top accord goes straight to the amygdala) but then things really do go badly. I will never forget the moment when, imagining she is about to pick up an order for someone near Majorca, she boards a plane for Lima, having no idea where it is (always daydreaming in school geography class) until she sees the flight path on the screen monitor in front of her and realizes she is bound for the ‘jungles of South America’. Talk about the ultimate party come down.

D: Surely she would carry off this scent with aplomb. She should definitely be the poster girl. (Art de Parfum get onto it toute suite. 😂) She was so guileless and appealing somehow.

N: Ultimately, though you are open mouthed with disbelief at her foolishness and initial blind and total unworldliness, ending up in a Peruvian hell hole of a jail for smuggling in cocaine ‘hidden’ in a shit load of porridge boxes (who carries that much cereal about with them?), hats off to her in the end for getting through it all eventually, having full realizations of her stupidity (and not being afraid to admit it in front of the world), and then, when she pulls herself together again, becoming a player in prison by properly learning Spanish and working together with her team of inmates; becoming a hair stylist and beautician while in there and then talking her way out of her predicament in the Lima court, to then sashay her way like a movie star through customs at Belfast airport as cool and collected as Paris Hilton. A spray of eye-brightening Sabotage, just before manouevering the clamour of the furious media (who seemed to have been expecting a penitential wizened gnome to appear, having barely survived her ordeal), and who were not expecting her glamourous demeanour and perfectly coiffed new blonde do, surely would only have upped the furore.