ROSE AND THORNS by TADA PARFUMEUR (2023)

Everything in Japan is chocolate right now. After all the standard predictabilities of the imported Halloween, Christmas, and then the old traditions of New Year, we get The Great Chocolate Brainwashing come the middle of January as women rush frantically to buy the fanciest French artisanal chocolate presentations to give to their friends, coworkers, and maybe, if the are lucky, even a lover: It has become the tedious commercialized norm now to buy tons of chocco of varying degrees of quality for the men in your life, sometimes your female friends and colleagues as well, even if in sheer monetary terms thankfully things are changing now a little, year by year, and there is no longer quite the demand that there used to be for the dreaded giri-choco, or ‘duty chocolate’, where office ladies who probably hated their foul breathed chain smoking eye-bagged bosses were forced to hand over prettily beribboned chocolate boxes with a fake helium titter, daintily back-heeled kick, and elaborate smile.

I / we don’t really celebrate Valentine. I just found an old piece just now I wrote, from five years ago, ‘My Funny Valentine’, in which I detail how the other half and I usually feel at this time of year (uncannily accurate still!) and what perfumes I love to smell him in : we have quite similar but also different tastes in most things - especially scent – but we did both immediately take to this rather attractive rose perfume by Thai indie brand Tada Parfumeur Rose And Thorns, when we were going through some new samples last Saturday, even if I am by far the more likely of the two, with my more flamboyant olfactory tastes, to actually wear it.

Thankfully this perfume is entirely chocolate free (I have never liked cacao notes and roses together : recently I wrote about some of the excellent Darren Allan perfumes I had been trying, whose Jonquille I am pleased to see was named as one of the best perfumes of 2023 by Cafleurbon, but in that piece I didn’t include the sickly Cupid’s Bow, an amalgam of plasticky roses and cheap chocolate that feels as though it had been snapped up quickly at a truck stop convenience store and left on a pile of glossy real estate magazines : it made me feel really queasy). Rose and Thorns has a far nobler mien, but it does, at its heart, also have undertones of a quite sweet and candied amber musk, a charming, uplifting coumarinic violet base, that puts me in mind a little of the original La Rose De Rosine – a perfume I have always loved as a frou frou pantalooned party gal - :an eighties version of cancan danseuses at the Les Folie Bergère.

There is a darker side: what is lovely about Rose and Thorns is its inherent dualism. As its name would suggest, there are thorns here in the rose thicket, not only sweet love blooms, and the beginning of this perfume is actually quite solemn and grave: a dark crinoline bustle of Bulgarian roses and ether; powdered and mournful as Victorian soap. The effect of the two contrasting sides of the perfume combining is quite powerful: a romantic immediacy, as well as a potent diffidence : as ideal for a Tokyoite loligoth teetering in platforms in Yoyogi park, as for a quieter, older person, in need of a solitary thick rose seething. Rather than piles of overpriced, overpackaged Godiva, or mini trays of extortionately expensive cutesy artisanal cookies that tip the whole country into diabetic crisis – I get such a mind-mouldy sugar depression just looking at all the conniving tack — personally I would much prefer to receive a nice solid perfume like this as a gift on February 14th - or in fact on any other day of the week.