TWO NINAS

After my Nina by Nina Ricci post the other day, my mother saw it and went straight upstairs to try out again a bottle I gave her years ago that was somewhere on her dressing table, but it had turned. Sadly, this is one of those more-sparkling-than-thou fragrances that naturally cannot remain in perfect intactness over the years; there will always be a slight, or complete, fading that inevitably takes place when the scent in question was such a champagne supernova in the heyday of its initial release (Nina bottles that go, really go, turning to meaningless alcohol).

What I forgot to mention the other day, though, because I had actually forgotten this myself, was that the heavenly parfum I was mentioning in that extended Nina piece was actually doctored: if you read my scandalous piece on messing with antique perfumes yourself by adding essential oils, ‘THE YLANG YLANG TERRORIST’, you will see precisely what I mean. If I recall correctly, my now currently favoured Nina that had been kept inside one of my perfume closets for a good few years was a dusky faded parfum with potential I had once discovered in some recycle shop or other with the addition of another pristine-ish edt I found, and some high quality bergamot oil that I had added to it and then left to macerate on its own terms to create my very own bespoke parfum de toilette . You must know : some perfumes respond BRILLIANTLY to bergamot: and Nina is one of them. It is as though a fairy tale prince had been revived to life by the magical addition of just one drop of water: Nina will respond in kind.

Serendipitously, I had spotted the two full bottles you see above, on the shelf at ‘my shop’, the slyly glamorous woman at the counter smiling like the Mona Lisa as I walked in (“here he comes again” she must have been thinking to herself). And seeing that they were very reasonably priced, to put it very mildly, (₤8.50 each) I decided to get both after la mère had said she would like to have another one. Later than I wanted to be for work – this was a bit of a naughty detour – I quickly put both in my coat pockets, carefully screwing on the bottle tops and zipping them up to boot (the eaux de toilette don’t have the beautiful and fetishizable crystal stopper of the parfum, but they are certainly, with their portability, much more practical for an incorrigible Mr Bean such as myself: arriving to work drenched in faded ballgown floral aldehydes would not have gone down very well with anyone in the building).

After work, on the train platform, I of course couldn’t resist trying them. The first, the clearer of the two, was in extremely good olfactory condition and brought back instant memories. Its aldehydic freshness; its feminine athleticism, were completely on point, with all the floral, woody and green facets scintillating properly in unison – perhaps a tad more fleeting than it should be, but I know that Judith Chapman will rock this one to absolute perfection (no one I have ever encountered wears this genre of perfume better). The other bottle had changed its colouration over the years, and some animalics had become more prominent, along with some of the deeper, more forested aspects of this composition, but it was also more androgynous and sexier somehow, and better for me with all the alluring chypresque aspects I have been enjoying vastly in the parfum – which I have been wearing on the sleeves of my cashmere sweaters with a great deal of excessive pleasure this last week- I just love the final accord and the drift that the final sillage gives off. Also, me being me, I did happen to have a fresh bottle of bergamot on my person (as you do: I find a drop on the back of the tongue at the mere tingling of a sore throat nips it in the bud - a piece of old Italian wisdom, where in the Northern regions il bergamotto is considered a panacea for virtually every ill). I knew, on smelling that second bottle, and remembering the citrus bergamia, that I just wouldn’t be able to resist.

Sure enough, before I even knew it, I was sat on the train in my four person seat adding bergamot to dark Nina. I would like to say that I slowly, judiciously, added three drops, checking each time – but I actually just thought fuck it and put in 25. While at first sniff I thought uh oh, what I have I done here, this was merely the perfume giving off alarm bells that it was under severe citric attack and didn’t know what had hit it – by the time I had got home and put some on to go to bed it was gorgeous. The following morning, on instinct, I then put just a little of this bergamotized variant into my mother’s bottle and voilà! It is virtually good as new.

Now, I don’t want to be getting lawsuits from devastated readers experiencing the olfactory equivalent of Perfume GBH (“but you said it would make it better!!“). I am not a cautious person by nature but for other people I would recommend some caution and common sense if you are handling a precious artefact that could potentially be ruined by the addition of an extraneous component that wasn’t in the original mix. However, I do know from my own experiments over the years that a little bergamot - which, after all, is a major component of this perfume – can work absolute wonders in stirring ingredients in the process of stagnation back into a new form of wearable vitality.

Cheers, Ninas !