Monthly Archives: February 2024

Yes, but it has become VERY irritating that now in Japan, there are virtually no places where you can dispose of your rubbish

They don’t make them like this any more. But perhaps for that we ought to be grateful. While the bottle you see above – a vintage miniature picked up for free at a jumble market – fits snugly onto our kitchen knicknack shelf, and will be forever treasured (I love anything Léonard, and have a collection of flower patterned vintage seventies neckties that I enjoy), I will not be actually wearing Balahé – a seethingly slow-burning and erotic floriental that smells of cougar’s mother – anytime, in the near future, on myself.

It is so torrid.

Hailed by vintage scenthusiasts as a more tasteful, yet more full-bodied precursor to Dior’s Poison, with its plum-tuberose-opoponax theatrics, as well as a direct influence on Cacharel’s Loulou – Balahé is said to smell just like our beloved Loulou, and I concur —-just without ever having set foot in the tropics : there is no coconut nor tiare.

There is orchid, though (a lot of it ::) and orange blossom, jasmine, ylang ylang, rose, orris and civet – a thick, impeccable, powdery heft that feels like the original L’Ombre Rose extrait by Jean Charles Brosseau. An anisic, sheening, very 80’s pineapple note up top that put me in mind of Guy Laroche Clandestine from 1986 (they are by the same perfumer, Daniel Molière); and then that base, the perfectly smooth, sweet cloying suggestiveness that claws at your brain like an unseemly vamp breathing moistly down your neck: all balsams, sandalwood, vanilla, musks … an animal lick of earthily vetiver.

Leonard Balahé is very sumptuously put together. A dark, throbbing, sultry as, feminine triumph. But just as with other perfumes from this period, of the teased up and backcombed, satin-robed Dallas /Dynasty ilk, like Yardley Lace (1982 – don’t knock it, it was created by Dominique Ropion) and Gloria Vanderbilt, also from 82 – gorgeous in its way and by Sophia Grosjman! – such perfumes are so ludicrously ‘seductive’, with nothing but seduction as their raisons d’être, they can come across as almost nauseating : the cliché of the huge haired heavily made up maneater pushing up her décolleté in the side lit bedroom mirror, applying her parfum avidly to her person as the ‘finishing touch’. The kind of (quietly thrilling) scent you know you are never going to ever quite get off your body and clothes once ravaged ; from your mouth; your eyes, your nose hair — or your memory.

The hyacinths : check.

The crispness : check.

The citric green : check.

But then not really the honeysuckle, nor the chypric tones, nor the mystery.

Just a bit of duty free iris and a lot of white musk.

NOPE.

The current edt : much more Cristalle like.

I love the beginning.

But then this also wimps out and goes standardized blanderina.

No : even on this miserably cold, blustery windy day I want it icier

eau my god — it’s so kitsch I almost want it

Switching work perfumes mid term always feels rather daunting to me. You get into a groove of smelling a certain way every day – my default setting these last few months has been my Shiseido shampoo and Rosarium rose oil soap, plus Nivea Soft and to top it off, the pleasingly modern and pared down rose de mai/ warm woody balsamic fragrance from Parfums Dusita, La Douceur De Siam. It has worked well. Enveloping but not overpowering, I feel that it smells, somehow ‘honest’.

But all good things must eventually come to an end, and I am down to the last of the bottle. I want to save what remains. Plus, there is a sharp breath of spring in the air at the moment and, finding a cheap, half used. not pristine but fine in the important stages Cristalle edt, I took the plunge in its icy waters today, having washed and relaundered all my work clothes. I am wearing it now, as I sit at the back of a classroom, lessons prepared, naughtily writing this.

How does the original 1974 iteration of Cristalle smell? In a word: discreet. At least I hope so. I am getting some gentle traces now of a delicate vetiver oak moss, still detect the crystalline flowers ( there is a point in this particular slightly worn vintage when the metallic Roudnitska-ish Diorella like melon note interacts with a bitter almost leather tone and I wonder whether I really should be adopting it as a daily work perfume – but this soon fades and the whole does feel rather stylish. There is something so deliciously unspoken about it.)Whether others will feel the same is another issue, but in all honesty this Cristalle is so ‘barely there’ it will probably not even register in anyone’s consciousness: I am just enjoying how it is currently lingering ambiguously on the edges of my shirt cuff and sweater.

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Yesterday I put up a one sentence post connected to politics ( I am highly and deeply aware of the fact that changing one’s work scent in the grand scheme of things means absolutely nothing, but then at the same time if you only ever thought in those terms, erasing all the trivialities, I don’t think you could ever actually make it through a single day).

But even perfume can be political. There are a lot of Chanel think pieces in circulation right now because of the new TV drama on the rivalry between Gabrielle Chanel and Christian Dior, ‘The New Look’, the latter of whom apparently comes across as a virtuous man and a hero. the former an antisemitic Nazi collaborator, informer and spy for Vichy occupied France. With the publicity surrounding the show and the negativity damaging the image of its founder, will Chanel the brand suffer the cancelling consequences ? Should we all toss our Chanels on a big fire and renounce all further consumption?

I don’t know. I hate antisemitism and I detest, from the depths of my soul, everything that Nazism represents/ represented, but I am not sure what I think about the morality of wearing anything Chanel : Coco had already been dead four years when Cristalle was released : is Henri Robert’s lovely creation tainted by association, or can it work as an elegant work of olfactory work in its own right? The discussion table is open.

At any rate, Cristalle is working nicely for me cet apres-midi. The Chanel flower, the camellia, was also flowering in my garden this morning. Is that flower also guilty by connection?

How ethical are most of the products we buy, really ?

Roses are red. Violets are etc.

I sometimes wonder to myself what my favourite flower is : and it might be the rose. But only when they are large and luscious, in a wild garden, not clipped and pruned and slid into a horrible tubular plastic sheath.

The same with rose perfumes. There are so many horrible ones about, like the ‘Rosa Saltifolia’ by Maison Crivelli I smelled today, that made me feel sick.

In contrast, Tokyo flora outfit Aoyama Flower Market do some very attractively priced and quite decent smelling soliflores, like this Rose, which is clearly founded on real rose oil and does a perfectly good job of being rosey.

However, I vastly prefer their indolic and powerfully reeking Lily.

Sprawling and unruly, ylangish and uncontained, this thing is messy

– just like real love.

The occasional prudery of Japan can be quite interesting. While Shinjuku, where the main government buildings are located, is a major shopping and restaurant and entertainment hub, it is also the very epicentre of the Asian sex and pornography trade, very shady indeed (also the place where I smelled this perfume, incidentally, at the venerable, packed to the rafters Isetan department store in Kabukicho). You cannot actually escape sexual imagery in Japan. Girlie mags with big boobs about to pop out of bras stare out from every convenience store you go to, in stations and wherever else – unavoidable to the eyes, kids included – and massage parlours that give sexual services – ‘soaplands’, where tired businessmen can slip in quickly after work to get a bit of ‘relief’ – are unambiguously there on street corners in almost every town or city, sometimes in great proliferation (usually euphemistically known as ‘Fashion Health’ centres, there is not a great deal of taboo attached to going to them). No one bats an eyelid. Compared to the Godfearing West, Japan is actually pretty open about the human need for a bit of how’s-yer-father. And yet the word ‘sex’ has been redacted and censored for the Japanese release of Tom Ford’s Vanilla Sex, pasted out of the bottle with a red dash that in my opinion completely ruins the whole point of the whole charade, not to mention the aesthetic of the bottle. Couldn’t they at least have done it in cream?

Not that there is anything pornographic or even vaguely erotic about this perfume. Unless you are a feeder, that unusual sexual phenomenon where a very skinny guy gets all worked up into a frenzy about making his gigantic girlfriend overeat and gorge to his frenzied satisfaction. But each to their own. The smell of this, though. Both of us thought it was revolting.

Vom, as we recoiled instinctively from the Tom Ford counter.

Obviously intended to be a ‘naughty’ play on the idea of ‘vanilla sex’, ie. sex that is bland and unadventurous, not involving what I personally find to be the exceedingly tedious necessity of whips and chains and leather masks and harnesses and god knows what else in order to get a boner: for me, no equipment is necessary: just a person and a body and the urge; no orgy with twenty five people, some rubberized or intricately lacy lingerie (hideous!),; lizards, a mankini, being spanked or humiliated or beaten, hung upside down, fed through a tube, or whatever else is necessary to get you off, the ‘vanilla’ type – which is probably me – is occasionally the object of ridicule, as it is here for Tom Ford. I suppose this is understandable. The standard missionary position, known in Japan as the maguro, or tuna, is a famously boring marital or otherwise encounter where nobody moves very much, especially the lady underneath, dissatisfied and probably thinking about tomorrow night’s dinner during the whole process while making all the right noises as her husband grunts away … …sex is of course a complicated issue for many people. There are many varieties. Some need extra-curriculars: I am not judging. It is kind of funny, though (deliberate?) that the perfume ‘Vanilla Sex’, itself, is also in fact rather deathly dull – quite the Plain Jane or John Doe, really, while also simultaneously being as gut-rottingly sweet as a Tokyo Tower bestriding Godzilla-sized blob of playdoh.

The problem here isn’t necessarily the natural vanillas (a specially curated ‘Vanilla Tincture India’; Vanilla Absolute, and the Vanilla CO 2 extract all allegedly in the blend); though it might be the fake sandalwood in the base, or a synthetic called Ultravanil greasing up the proceedings like Mrs Margarine that produce the pit in the stomach problematics. It definitely is the very wrongful bitter almond in the opening, though, a very excessive addendum that tips the whole thing inexorably into gross.

Later, the vanillaggeddon dies down into a whispering soft banality that befits the idea of the standardized copulation Tom Ford is mocking with his mischievous perfume (I also smelled the ‘devil’ to this perfume’s angel yesterday, Vanilla Fatale, a darker, woodier number, but it didn’t make much of an impression on me, either to be honest). I was just bored. Certainly, neither makes me feel remotely horny -for me that would be more likely to be middle aged moustachioed Mexicans with big di – but perhaps I should stop there. Suffice it to say, I will not be rushing out any time soon to the iniquitous bowels of Shinjuku any time soon to be forking out ￥50,000 for a bottle of this sickening muck.

I guess I’m just too vanilla.