Monthly Archives: December 2023

Our two local Shiseido shops closed down today. One a short bike ride away, the other, just round the corner.

(Our local shopping street: we live just off to the left from the brighter of the green shop rooves )

photos by d

The place - very handy – will be missed: (I have actually written about this shop and Shiseido on the Black Narcissus before).

The piece was entitled ‘The Secret Perfumes Of Shiseido’ and detailed our extraordinary discovery of an old box containing all the extraits of the original Shiseido perfumes from the 50’s onwards in an old junk shop in Yokohama and then taking it around to the Shiseido shop around the corner to show the proprietress its contents. Far from the glamour of Nombre Noire, Tentatrice, Rivage, Murasaki, the legendary Inouï, the beautiful Suzuro, let alone Feminité Du Bois, once Serge Lutens got in on the act of actually ‘creating’ perfumes for Shiseido, not just their stupendous maquillage, the local shop, where yes you could buy soap – I have just bought up their last Rosarium bath soap, see top picture, as well as a bottle of Koto Cologne - like Aramis arranged in a bath of cyclamen –

(our last purchase, just before I started writing this!)

(I left the bottle Tactics as I already have one)

-was (‘was!‘) actually more of a local tuck shop where, surprisingly, you could buy crisps, spaghetti, cakes, as well as all the daily essentials like toilet roll and washing powder, aeons away from the glamour of the urban Shiseido parlours of Tokyo, and a place where the lady gave knitting lessons and sold envelopes and batteries.

(yes, this was actually a Shiseido licensee)

It is sad when a place you have known so long closes their shutters for the last time, but then again what used to be a thriving shotengai or local shopping street has gradually, over the years, become a ghost town (tonight we are going to our ‘Japanese family”s house for New Year’s O-Shogatsu celebrations - they were once the prime greengrocers of the area) until a Tokyo movie company began regentrifying it all a little bit in recent times, with a couple of cafes, a very fancy fish shop collective, ‘vege-clubs’, local festivals and the like: things now feel comfortably like a mix of the old and the new. You can’t stop change.

Which brings me to 2023.

This has not been a good year.

Firstly, just in world terms. What can I say? It has been horrendous.

October 7th and its aftermath I haven’t been quite able to formulate words for, but I feel intensely for both sides, wherever that puts me on the political spectrometer: I pray that things are resolved as soon as possible and the bloodshed stops. Likewise Ukraine. With fascist autocrats gradually gaining power in Europe, and with Him poised to take power in the US in 2024, it is not easy to remain optimistic about the future of the world, when so much of the world now regularly, literally goes up in flames. These palpably are, on many days, very ‘end of’, worrying and distressing times.

From a personal perspective, it has also been a bad time for me. Childhood traumas and unresolved issues from the last forty years have been resurfacing this year and last, and my blood has just basically been a cauldron of poison and cortisol for the past eighteen months, quite seriously affecting my mental and physical health. In truth, this backdrop has limited my ability to do much perfume research into new brands and the like, as to a large extent I have just been in ‘survival mode’ doing the bare minimum to get by at work, where I certainly haven’t given my all as I simply have not had the sufficient levels of energy, even if in terms of human connection – with Japanese colleagues and students- I would say it has been one of the best years in my career. And that is certainly not nothing.

Thankfully, I am glad to be able to write at this end point in the year that after a great deal of pain, honesty, forced clarity and just….communication from the heart, real forgiveness and healing on all sides are happening now and will continue to breathe right into the whole of 2024. I have always believed in the new year as a chance to start afresh – clichéd as that might sound – but, when you have been sinking in the quagmire of your own bullshit for so many years, sometimes you simply have to make changes, rejig the cosmos; try to put all of that past behind you, and move on. And I am truly ready to.

ALL OF THAT ASIDE, SOME GOOD THINGS IN 2023

1. D and I had some, no many, fantastic times together in 2023. And I feel very lucky. We had our massive 30th anniversary party in June, a big success; it has all worked whether we are just slobbing at home with the cat, doing the shopping, eating gyoza, or out dressed up for wild extravaganzas. He definitely seems to have done more art/ cabaret performances than ever this year (Burning Bush has also put on a few shows, which were rather exhilarating) and I always enjoy the ritual of the suitcases filled with paraphernalia and heading out to Tokyo for an often literally underground show.

2. D and his best friend Yukiro’s movie Spoiled Identity had its premiere this year in the big city and people loved it. There will be more private screenings, some final edits, but the final product will also hopefully be shown at a Tokyo independent film festival in 2024. I absolutely loved being part of it.

  3. . Horticulturally, it was a good year: YOU CAN’T HAVE TOO MUCH VEGETATION.

  I am no plant specialist, but I have truly enjoyed having our ever expanding ‘tropical balcony’. Many of them we have brought inside for the winter now, creating something of a jungle feel upstairs – which I of course adore – but I intend to keep buying new plants next year and continuing the rainforestation of our house into 2024 and beyond. I need this refuge.

4. And speaking of tropicalia, WE WENT TO HAWAII.

This was of course the main event of the year: my talk, The Language Of Flowers, at the Doris Duke Theater at the Honolulu Museum Of Art, as well as a work shop the following day on Scent Literacy. We got to see old friends, met a lot of new fantastic people, got loads of perfume, and were surrounded by pikakes and plumerias. It was gorgeous. Admittedly, it was tough on the nerves, and I was still consumed inside with The Other Thing – I didn’t actually relax while I was there – but, at the same time, smells, sights, visual images have kept seeping back into my consciousness at unexpected points during the year and I realize that though my energies were focused on trying to do a good job with the events, I was absorbing it all nevertheless. While Waikiki was not our cup of tea, ultimately, the beach we drove to with Christopher and Christine along the coast was just like heaven

5. We also went to Singapore

At the time, in late August, I wrote a long piece on our experience in this unique city state but it got lost in the ether with one mis-press of a button (oh the stress of technology, sometimes, my lordy, and I couldn’t gather the energy to do a replacement piece).

We did really like it though and want to go back. It was different from what I had imagined. More down to earth; lived in; relatable. The National Orchid Garden was resplendent; Little India and Chinatown charismatic and just up our street, and I also found my favourite perfume of the year there – a roll on attar of sambac jasmine whose name I can’t even remember that I used in next to no time; indolic, sheening, alive, gorgeous, it cost next to nothing – I need to go back again next year and fill up my suitcase with them for the future as I was wearing it everywhere back in Japan in the warm weather, to work, on weekends; the extreme soliflore jasmineness of it all just made me ecstatic.

6. We connected properly with old friends

It has been a very good year for friends. Catching up and having proper talks in England (I usually prefer one to one) when we were there in August: I realized that, eccentric fellow that I may be, my relationships are real. They always have. And they usually last forever.

7. We bought an air fryer.

Yes, we may be late for the party, since the entire UK seems to have gone crazy a long time ago over these contraptions that let you cook things with less oil – and goodness, I definitely do need to cut down on the calories – but on a whim we ordered an air fryer that happened to arrive on Christmas Eve. Christmas Day we had planned to do a traditional roast chicken lunch, but ended up a tone of wine and listening to tons of records in the kitchen/ living room (utter heaven) to the sparkle of Xmas lights and, experimenting with the air fyer, didn’t actually get it on the table until 11;35pm. While there may have been flare ups about the level of cookedness – I am insanely fussy about meat and fish being exceptionally well done, anything less makes me sick – in the end, after getting all the settings right and making up, we had a very delicious midnight feast.

8. We got an espresso machine

A gift from some of my colleagues at school for the aforementioned anniversary, how could we have been living all these years without homemade, deliciously frothy, cafe lattes? I have quickly become the barista of the house, and it did take some trial and error with the frother overheating and splattering me with boiling ] milk or the coffee granules exploding all over the shop (and I do think that ‘drip coffee’ as they call it here, as in filters, is healthier in the long run in terms of blood pressure and antioxidants), but, still, a perfectly hot, properly frothed up brew in the morning really does start the day perfectly.

9. My senses were satisfied.

I am fortunate in having the ability to completely lose myself in aesthetic, cerebral and sensory pleasures. (Without this inbuilt propensity I don’t think that I would be alive).I am not one of those who just have the TV on in the background (we don’t even have a tv, thinking about it) or halfheartedly watch a film at the cinema, put on a record, or lackadaisically smell a perfume on the back of my hand. No. I have been immersed all year in films and music and perfumes. While I might not exactly have had my finger on the pulse of all the latest releases, fragrance-wise, you know what, I have come to the well earned conclusion that I really don’t really care. I am happy with the perfumes I have. And I get excited getting new ones. This is not to say that I am not curious for what next year might bring, but in terms of trying to keep up,I have stepped off the merry-go-round.

10. I loved writing The Black Narcissus.

Online writing is supposedly a dying artform/media mechanism these days, but I am just not designed for YouTube and TikTok : I have no desire whatsoever to make videos and be seen all the time and just find both of them totally exhausting. Just too much of an introvert at the end of the day, despite being presumed to be the opposite. I am happy, and hope you are too, with just spontaneously writing posts on here whenever I feel like it. About whatever comes into my head. I cannot exist merely as a promoter/advertiser of other people’s products and start every vid with a ‘hi guyyys!’ I am more likely to turn into an elephant.

11. I love writing full stop.

And will be doing much more of it next year, particularly for my book on Japan. It has been too long in the making but enough is enough.

Things were derailed; I was derailed, as so many of us were, by the pandemic (my friend Kunihiko was saying this the other day when we went out to the local izakaya for his birthday about his panic attacks and health issues that suddenly seemed to appear at that time : ‘I don’t know, I just went wrong during that period’, and I knew exactly what he meant; for me it is strange that even talking about the coronavirus now has somehow almost become taboo, old hat ; ‘we all went through it and so therefore there is no reason to talk about it’, but I personally disagree with that shove it under the doormat approach as I think each person’s problems were often specific to them: people really suffered; I know that I went mad, all of it documented, (un)fortunately, on here, and because of that (or because of swanning around Honolulu Chinatown) projects got shelved or delayed; it is great, therefore to have the sensation of being able to move forward and make progress. I have been writing like a maniac just this last week: I really want to encapsulate what it has been like living in this culture for so long. I want to share my story.

So thank you for continuing reading, or just tuning into, my sprawling baloney, The Black Narcissus, which will be in its twelfth year in 2024. Thanks for indulging me, and for all your insightful comments; I am looking forward to continuing the voyage with you next year.

Health and happiness

N

x

One of my old friends came back to live in Japan again this year, 25 years after we first spent time together getting to know the country and culture, lost in a new dream. It has been great reacquainting ourselves with one another after all this time – the last time we properly spent time together was at her wedding many years ago in Mexico; her husband is from Guadalajara and on Sunday night we went to their apartment in Yokohama to have authentic enchiladas and chilli bean soup and a cornucopia of avocado; Melanie and I can go to places and dimensions that most others cannot reach; I find our conversations liberating.

On the way to their place, an area of the city I haven’t been in decades, the last time being one of the most melodramatic days of my life (an incident I am writing about in a book about Japan I am currently working on, I can’t reveal it yet) D and I passed a couple of ‘recycle’ shops on the bus. One is a proper old school junk shop, another a chain emporium. We had arrived early, and had time for a quick mooch before socializing and went back down the road to investigate (there is nothing like the possibility of a treasure bargain). The bric-a-brac shop didn’t yield, even if the owner tantalizingly revealed that he has a stack of vintage perfume to hand but just hasn’t done anything with it yet in terms of pricing and what have you and was adamant that nothing could be done at that particular time. He couldn’t possibly say when either. So that was that.

The second, locked in some glass cabinets, had a beautifully pristine bottle of Hermès Amazone edp for $12, which I snapped up immediately as I may already have an identical bottle but it is something I wear with ease; it fills me with a smoothness that ruffles out my rough edges; androgynous and elegant/benevolent, it satisfies a particular spot.

Courrèges’ Empreinte, a delicate leather chypre I have reviewed before,is a perfume I own in both the iconic gold extrait bottle you can see at the top, plus a slightly jaded edt (less impressive both in appearance and in smell). An exceptionally chic scent, moss and quinoline and leather - but not a butch leather; more like a beautiful woman in a seventies faded white leather coat, clutching some gentle flowers (animalics and a curious peach/melon top note create a slightly distancing effect as though she finds herself somewhat superior to other people), I think I have nevertheless only ever actually worn this out in public once or perhaps twice. I like it, respect it, but don’t adore it.

One of the reasons my bottle goes admired but relatively unloved is that I am simply rarely in the mood for the Cabochard/ Miss Balmain / Givenchy III template on me personally (I am basically just not chic enough). Leather always gives me a feeling of ambivalence, even if I am great fan of the original Givenchy Gentleman. - there is something snooty and brittle and very Parisian about this genre of perfume that on me can feel like cosplay – these are once in a blue moon kinds of fragrances.

And yet the perfumer behind Empreinte (‘imprint’) was Robert Gonnon, a master of subtlety and floral enweavement of patchouli and chypre undertones who created monumental classics such as Anaïs Anaïs for Cacharel, the magnificent Ô De Lancome as well as perhaps the best lemon leaf scent ever created, the obscure but very beautiful Quiproquo by Grès - not to mention the divine exuberance that is Métal de Paco Rabanne. (read or re-read any of the links to past Narcissus posts here and you will find yourself whiling away a whole afternoon of vintage reverie…)

While Robert Gonnon’s refined imprint may be unmistakeable when it comes to this coveted Courrèges (though I have always preferred Courrèges in Blue), the issue at the time was whether I should buy it.

Sitting, almost hidden, on a glass shelf below the Amazone were two unopened, still cellophaned, 28ml Empreinte parfums for ¥6500 each ($45), wow the exchange rate is bad; that feels more expensive here, and, it being just before pay day, I decided that I didn’t feel like buying them. I would happily display one in the collection as the bottle perfectly suits our house’s aesthetic, possibly keep one back for the future as a gift, but there are times when you just feel like being sensible and saving money.

(This brings me to an issue I am uncomfortable with, actually, in Perfumeland; the insufficient amount of conversation around money, and how much this hobby/passion/ whatever you want to call it/ really costs. Because unless you are one of the top TikTok/YouTube perfume stars and thus being sent bottles of niche by the truckload every week, building a collection of perfumes is extremely expensive. Even ordering sample sets in order to be in the know about all the latest brands coming out is prohibitively impossible for the average person. Which is why, sometimes, all the presumptions about comparisons between acronymed scents; ‘you know, it’s a bit like TFVO or AAMO and YSLLP ‘or a million others that each scent lover is assumed to know and have ordered sometimes seems to be a little obscene; the privilege of it all, how much we have all probably spent and sometimes regret even; how prices have become absurd, like the latest $600 Guerlains; on occasion I just have to be more realistic financially - you might even say, ethically, and say no).

And yet.

As we were leaving, having an instinct that a big Empreinte parfum of that size might be worth a fair morsel on the internet, I checked the current eBay prices.

Admittedly, that is for a 60ml. But even the 28ml varieties we were looking at regularly go for $500; we were going to be late for the dinner party at this point and I also realized that, with the labyrinthine hell of the current J-Post system, where you can’t send anything in the post without downloading an app first and then printing out an exhaustively detailed document with hyper-anal descriptions of every item therein, something I just can’t do as I find it too brainbusting – plus, the staff are extraordinarily vigilant about liquids not leaving the country - it has long been impossible to send perfume anywhere when I used to do it all the time……so basically, it would be impossible to send or sell this anywhere.

(Unless I just wait until the next time I come back to England and put the two boxes in my suitcase… )

Music is extra emotive at Christmas. Particularly carols. And Bing Crosby. And Merry Xmas (War Is Over), which I find unbearably poignant even when things are relatively peaceful; I remember D and I once singing it at karaoke and then bursting into tears simultaneously; it can have that effect. And while the music can get grating, since we don’t really ‘do’ Christmas and thus have no need to trudge through shopping malls being bombarded with the same songs and melodies over and over again (I haven’t once heard Wham!’s Last Christmas yet this year only cover versions, and bizarrely, I am one of the few who never get tired of hearing that song – might have to dust off my Pudding Mix original 12″ and play it on Christmas Eve: as it always takes me back to being a fourteen year old in 1984 and just feeling woozy in the glow of Christingle) —- in terms of the earworm, so far the season has been benign.

But today I don’t want to write about Christmas music. I want to write about restaurant music (I do realize that complaining about such things is such a ‘First World Problem’ —but then so is raving and gagging about perfume).

I suppose the problem is that my extreme sensitivity to music in restaurants, cafes, bars etc, anywhere there is a soundtrack going on where you are eating and drinking and making merry (or just trying to read a book) sometimes makes me feel like I am the only one in the world who is actually in possession of auditory apparatus. Does no one else ever complain about this? Sometimes I imagine that I am the only one who even notices (an exception; I remember when I was in Florence with a pack of perfumisti for the opening of the Lush Perfume Library, and the very musical Ida Meister of Cafleurebon - an excellent opera singer, by the way, was with me in trying to get the groovy hotel staff to tone down and turn down the utterly inappropriate disco music they had chosen to dj us with over breakfast – who wants that when they have just woken up? It was unbearable ).

My hearing isn’t even that good, to be honest; I have had tinnitus for almost twenty years and hearing loss in my left ear of up to 40%, but I am still acutely receptive to music and noise and am finding that this is driving me away from establishments I might otherwise frequent far more frequently. Sometimes I really fancy eating one particular thing – after all, eating out in Japan is fantastic – but find that, knowing precisely what CD, or playlist on their computer they will be playing in advance makes me unable to stomach entering the premises. Particularly if the volume is too high (this I NEVER understand; I am club/dance lover, I like music L O UD -which is how I got tinnitus in the first place – when the music is the key point involved; we did all night house/techno for D’s birthday in Hamamatsu and I was practically making love to the speakers despite my affliction; the other night we were blasting out records with a new Bose speaker he has bought; a live album by Michel Polnareff made me feel as if the French singer were singing into my very soul); but surely background music in a restaurant or cafe is something different, no? On the Hamamatu, night in question, looking for somewhere to eat we had initially settled on one of those craft beer/organic hamburger type establishments, not entirely our thing but we were hungry and we had started out late, but sitting down, Enrique Iglesias’ Hero, which really isn’t one of my favourites, was playing so loud that despite the embarrassment of getting up and leaving when you have started talking to waiters, it would have been utterly unendurable for me to have sat there. I could hardly hear myself think, let alone peruse the menu. We had to go. I am just not going to be able to enjoy my dinner being blasted with shite.

Anyway. To ‘All By Myself’. Eric Carmen’s plaintive 70’s miserabilist heartbreaker (there was a lot of miserable music in the seventies, wasn’t there?) based on a piano piece by Rachmaninov is a personal melodramatic fave, at least every once every few years or so, and discovering a nice ‘Western Style’ restaurant in Kamakura that serves gratins and pasta and tuna melts, comfort food with delicious salads, I was happy and amused to hear it again. It had been a while. But not three times in one evening, the selection on loop (is this a strategy to drive out customers more quickly? Just stay for 40 minutes until the dreaded Melissa Manchester track (‘Don’t Cry Out Loud’ demonically comes back on again? The first time we heard it we laughed at the campness of it all, even if the shrillness of the singer’s voice drills through the delicate side area of your head like a partial lobotomy, but surely this is not a song you want to keep hearing on multiple occasions (is the chef, listening to this MD (they have an MD player in there, an anachronism from the 90′) not. in fact, insane?(we have been to the restaurant three times now; it might not be possible for me again, even if on Tuesday night the volume was at least mercifully lower though I am not sure I can handle Melissa again.). For those of you who don’t know this song, do feel free to check it out below:

I mean I don’t hate it, particularly the soft seventies opening, but let’s face it, if you are near the speakers and trying to hear what the other person is saying while forking things into your mouth, this power ballad is taxing to the nerves to say the very least. You feel as if you need to start clapping when it is finished. To let the eaters just eat in peace, couldn’t they just play some nice quiet jazz? (strangely, the more Japanese the eatery, usually the more Western the music usually: a cheap place in Ofuna I like plays melancholy jazz ballads and Bill Evans type piano, not overtly on repeat either. You can sink into your seat for a while, get refills of oolong tea and lose yourself in a book or your phone like plenty of other people). The other night, conversely, we felt like something hot and comforting and went to a tonkatsu restaurant, excellent food, but where banal saccharine Japanese tv themes in major keys played seemingly by a robot corroded my enjoyment of the evening greatly, particularly when it seemed to all have gone back to the beginning (have these people never heard of playlists/ mixtapes? Last night we made/had dinner at home listening to a compilation a friend in New York had sent, meandering through all kinds of genres but still coherent, and at low volume; it was perfect; that way you can lost in the music and just forget it is there, even; to me,letting things just repeat over and over again suggests a severe lack of imagination and delicacy/thinking about the customer (and the staff: I think I get this from my mother, to be honest. She used to work at a department store for Austin Reed, and was driven to utter distraction by Christmas music that would start at the beginning of November or earlier, practically ready to shoot the speakers out).

For my birthday this year, we went to Hakone Yumoto, a hotspring town an hour or so away, and came across a very bohemian and bizarre cafe restaurant right up our street, full of strange statuary and paintings, the kind of cavernous place you could lounge for hours sipping cafe au laits; the soundtrack, this time, classical, which suited the ambience perfectly…….but then there are only so many times you want to listen to Mozart’s Turkish March or even my beloved Debussy; the first time hearing my signature piano piece Clair De Lune made me sentimental and nostalgic, for when I played it as a child; the third time….time to get the bill.

The occasion that truly took the biscuit though was this. Many years ago we had discovered a very plush Croatian restaurant in the posh backstreets of Nihombashi near the gilded flagship Mitsukoshi department store, all red velvet Europeana and beef stews and dill and the like: fancy wine and an enjoyably retro atmosphere. it was not cheap, but it was one of those impromptu ooh let’s try here where you have food you have never tasted before, a new ambience. The wine was good.And the Croatian folk music they were playing was perfect for the setting. At first, we just sank into our seats and enjoyed the view. Perhaps a 35 or 40 minute CD. Exotic. Different. And unfamiliar music is of course less immediately grating than a famous song you know and can’t abide, or even one you do like, but just don’t want to keep hearing over and over again. But repeated music is repeated music nevertheless, and after about three spins of the exact same list of ditties I eventually asked the seasoned waiter politely if he could possibly play anything else.

“I’m sorry, sir. We only have this one CD in the restaurant.”

“.,…….,,……?!!!”

I asked him how long the restaurant had been in operation.

“About thirty three years, sir.”

Thirty three years of the same CD.

IS THIS JUST ME ?

If a perfume can be self-polarizing, then for me, Matiere Premiere’s Crystal Saffron is possibly the intensest. The central heart note of saffron, extracted from crocuses grown in the Greek region of Kozani, is mindbendingly good : delicious and beautiful and reportedly the highest quality of saffron available in the world. Wedded to a Somalian incense that anchors the base, you would think you had hit bingo ( and you still might – this thing is damn sexy and could easily sweep the naive and unaware straight off their feet).

The ambroxan though. Oh my lord. That intense, acrid, membrane piercing woodnote that makes my spleen and marrow cringe in instinctive terror, is so strong in this perfume that even in the little sample box, hidden in a drawer, the final stages of this scent make me want to call up the biohazard people and have it removed and scrubbed clean with gasmasks and hazmats.

Ambroxan and other woody synthetics are favored ingredients of perfumer Aurelien Guichard, who likes to combine them with very fine, even mesmerizing natural materials to addictive modern effect. French Flower, for example, treads an exquisite line between ambroxan and a heady sweet and brain altering tuberose absolute that you literally can’t get out of your head; I sniff at that regularly, it’s like a drug. Neroli Oranger is the perfume I received as my birthday and Christmas present this year from my parents (for me to get a second bottle of any perfume speaks volumes) as it is just stunning in Spring; so bright and refreshingly optimistic that it regularly garners compliments; when I combine with a fine bergamot oil, reactions have actually verged on delirium. Others in the range, though, the ultra brutalist architectures of Santal Austral, Bois Ebene and the shuddering Falcon Leather I just loathe at the deepest level of scent being ; like being twice basted in tar, drowned in a barrel of creosote (then buried in a teak-interiored casket breathing mahogany). It’s a personal thing ; some people get off on the sheer directness of such potency : I just feel under attack.

Which brings me to the newest creation in the collection, Vanilla Powder. Guichard’s deep and edible Encens Suave, one of his earlier releases, is a warm and very enveloping coffee/ cacao frankincense with rich vanilla that is fantastic when you need emotional warmth – when I saw the name Vanilla Powder on the sample box my heart skipped a beat as I knew that he can do a fine amber and that this one could be interesting.

And it is. Like a space age variation of Serge Lutens’ delectable Un Bois Vanille, a coconut-dusted vanilla with an almost aquatic, shiny edge is given ‘verticality’ and depth with a backbone of palo santo (and, then ( oh no you cry !) unfortunately, much to my chagrin, what smells like a dosage in the base notes of the detestable ambroxan….). With a saffronish edge somewhere in there, Vanilla Powder is not powdery in fact, more flirty and fetching ; very modern and millennial, it would work perfectly on the cute with clean skin in a club context, inviting, shimmering and bite-me ( it reminds me somewhat of the Ariana Grande Mod Vanilla I reviewed recently, all part of the current. MK Baccarat Rouge Brigade that are erotically persuasive but for me, just somehow too…. blunt). On my skin, the last fade of this scent is all modern wood-notes, and you know I just won’t ever, evergo there. I do like this house and the ones that I love from there, but if I want vanilla, i want it softer : I want vanilla

T’is Shalimar season.

The last night in London this August I met Olivia, who was moving house and downsizing her estimable and beautiful perfume collection. While much of the prized loot was going up on eBay, the most treasured and used bottles going with her to the new abode, she very generously (my eyes were like saucers) ‘wondered’ if I would like to have anything for myself, from a selection she was willing to part with.

As a shameless Shalimarholic – some readers may remember that I got a giant vintage eau de toilette last December for my birthday: once it gets cold it becomes my go to on weekends – there is nothing like it for a wrapped up night out in the city - I was intrigued to find out how this one would play out on skin as I had never properly worn it in depth before; as a former Vanilla Boy, I still do from time to time like to indulge in some podwork, the creamy black speckled bean always having suited me down to a T, and so I couldn’t resist taking O up on her generous offer (I also brought back in my suitcase a vintage Rive Gauche plus an original Shiseido Feminité Du Bois, both precious and gorgeous).

Sticklers for detail will be asking themselves yes but which Ode A La Vanille are you talking about? Sur La Route Du Madagascar, Sur La Route du Mexique or just the plain ode? There are subtle differences, as there will be with any perfume using extracts from specific varietals (I once stayed on an organic vanilla plantation in Java where I studied the production and harvest of the orchids as well as doing a talk on Vanilla at Perfume Lovers London where we discussed and analyzed beans from all over the world including Tahiti and Uganda). I am no expert, but familiar with some of the differences; the thing is, the three bottles Olivia had brought out for my consideration had been separated from their boxes, and it was difficult to know for sure which ones we were looking at (smelling). Choosing one of them instinctively-I think it is probably the Madagascar, the hidden vanilla at the bottom of the perfume just spoke to me more when I sampled it from the bottle cap – I waited until winter here before starting to wear it and it has become a real joy – the contents are dwindling fast : I need to put a lid on it.

What is fascinating about Ode A La Vanille is that unlike Shalimar special editions such L’Initial, Lite/Legere, Souffle etc, all eager sycophants that some might prefer but which I just find slightly irritating, Ode smells almost exactly like the original vintage Shalimar, just a little less acidic – definitely less lemon – and dries down in precisely the same delicious fashion; the ambery, opoponax leather and powder, that sense of being papoussed in warm splendour; the vanilla not remotely conspicuous; but sometimes, at particular moments, you suddenly catch a drift of the purest vanilla on your scarf; inadvertently from the fur of your cat where you have been stroking her; the vanilla a perfect augmentation.

– shame they smell like cat piss.