Monthly Archives: February 2024

I do like a good bag of nuts.

An instantaneous and random top ten list of nuts :

NUTS: :  :  RANKED !!

(world war 3 is probably imminent, so let’s just do favourite nut lists instead !!! )

My own:

1.PEANUTS = MACADAMIA

3. HAZELNUTS (with chocolate, in noisette, gianduja, praline, oh my god)

4. CASHEW

5. WALNUT

6. ALMOND

7. PISTACHIO

8. PECAN

9.CHESTNUT

10. BRAZIL ( not entirely keen; sometimes they can feel more like eating a tusk)

Pistachios I do like, although I find them very irritatingly fiddly with my ungraceful thumbs when I am trying to crack open the shell : the reward sometimes doesn’t seem enough for the sheer effort that is required. Ready shelled, I think they are rather delicious, but they still don’t quite take me to the heights that the lowly peanut does, or the recently discovered unsalted macadamias from the supermarket across the road from work which I eat on a regular basis and which are sublime (and extremely healthy to boot: what’s not to like when all these nuts are all superfoods, massive in antioxidants and nutrients and minerals and cholesterol lowering substances etc etc : I feel sorry for those, like my neighbour’s ten year old son Kodai, who has a very serious nut allergy and has to carry around one of those antidote pens in case some nut fragment or other has made its way into another product: what is an occasional guilty pleasure for me – a Snickers – is for someone else a loaded Kalashnikov).

No, I am lucky in that nuts, physiologically, suit me perfectly. What can give me a mild to severe anaphylactic reaction though, is an overly clever clever perfume concept such ‘THIS IS OBVIOUS’. I am pretty damn allergic to very self-consciously meta or overly groovy marketing, which makes my eyes roll to the extent that they could get stuck facing upwards. I can just see all the entrepreneurs now with their Agnès B jumpers loped gently around their light blue-shirted shoulders sat round in loafers in their Parisian conference room, slapping their thighs with delight as one of them comes up with this little tagline, some kind of oui, mais oui! , ‘witty’ sub-Magritte-like statement of fact: une obvious vanille, etc, ho ho ho ! ! — although I can see how the lame and the simplistic, wanting something to grab them on the continuously multiplying shelves (like me, for example: after all, this did draw my attention among a million other perfumes in Shinjuku Isetan Men’s the other night) might think the whole package is pretty funny, pretty neat - or maybe it really just does sound better in French.

(Gripe over).

Looking more closely at the brand’s ethos and product statement for a minute, the idea behind This Is Obvious, on nearer inspection, is not quite as grating nor……. obvious. You might even take it as simply being a much needed backlash against fanciful over-elaboration.

Mmmm.

Plus I do actually quite like single note-oriented perfumes in general when it comes to niche: a fig, musk, orange blossom, rose, vanilla… when you can just reach for the juice you are in the mood for that day, just something easy – and this perfume is certainly agreeable. With a cardamom, carrot seed , Tunisian neroli, heliotrope and imaginary ‘pistachio’ accord at the centre, over a (f****** obvious, if you ask me) cashmeran and synthetic sandalwood musk base – you always knew where this was going, olfactorily, that it was going to court the Santal 33 crowd) – overall, Une Obvious Pistache is not a bad little perfume at all as nut-centric scents go. Perfectly pleasant. Smooth. Soothing to overwrought nerves. When it’s cold outside, and the world is close to annihilation, what’s wrong with just getting the latte machine going and reaching out for a little semi-amusing nutted comfort?

Yes. Une Pistache Obvious is light and creamy, and will put the sweet-toothed in a temporarily good mood. I quite like the corked flacon, the general look. I am not sure how truly pistachio-ish it really is, though, in truth: I find in general, this is quite a difficult note to pin down in perfumery. I got glimpses of pistachio, fleetingly, but not quite enough to take me back to my ultimate pistachio memory, which was the first time I ever tasted them on a family holiday in France, on the coast, an evening at twilight by a harbour, the well to do strolling along sun-kissed and contented, where I surveyed the amazing array of saveurs available on the dashboard outside the kiosk, so many of which I had not even heard of before, used, as I was, to the far more limited English seaside town options of orange ice lols and nut-sprinkled cornettos.

Would I choose framboise; amaretto, cassis or caramel beurre salé? Fraise ? I pondered, in a quandary. No, finally lured by the beautiful colour – not mint, but a new colour, pistache- I thought I would try the (for me) highly unusual light-green ice cream, not knowing at all what to expect. And I remember walking along the promenade as though in a dream, licking the ice cream cone delicately; thinking, at that moment, in my stripey francophile marinère t- shirt and floppy hair, that I was possibly the coolest seventeen year old in the whole world. Wow, look at me. This is delicious. I’m eating French, pistachio, ice cream….

The recent A. I. derived ‘pros and cons’ of perfumes listed on Fragrantica, where robots scavenge the troves of impassioned comments from reviewers below a particular fragrance’s notes, picking out the most conspicuous positive and negative comments about any particular perfume and then listing them side by side, are useful – and frequently hilarious. Giò, a very heady peach-jasmine-mandarin-tuberose-orange blossom spiced floral amber: solarized, powerful, beautiful in many ways, but also sickening for many people – the kind of over-ornate pleasure/ attention seeker whose perfume sucks up every molecule in the room – is described as being ‘throat grabbing’ and ‘overpowering’ ‘for some’, and as smelling like ‘rancid butter’ and ‘dated eighties smell’ for many others (the positives do include a ‘seamless blending of notes’ and a ‘deep, creamy base’.

I personally have found myself over the years secretly craving a bottle of Giò (pronounced ‘jyoh‘ with a short o sound like ‘shot’, not gee-yo, although a sales woman once sneeringly corrected my pronunciation in a department store in the centre of Birmingham - I just about managed to refrain from telling her I had just graduated from Cambridge University in Italian), simply because in many ways it is the zenith, or nadir, depending on your viewpoint, of the slightly base, insensitive, trumpeting orange blossom tuberose that either signifies a slightly delirious glamour doll who doesn’t care how much space she takes up in the room, or else a blazing drag queen (Burning Bush would definitely consider it in the spring).

Extraordinarily sexy in some ways, with the right dosage, Giò can be devastating: a real entrance-maker. Too much, just one spray too far – I would recommend no more than one, personally – and you will have witnesses clutching their oesphaguses in distress or breaking out in blotches and hives.

With its generosity of notes :

– detractors should remember who created this light-glinting gem of flirtful flamboyance - the genius Francoise Caron (Balenciaga Michelle, another femme femme coconut tuberose – Ombre Rose, the first two Kenzos… this woman sure knows how to build a man-killer floral). With Giò’s predecessors including such alluring sultresses as Givenchy Ysatis, its descendants Guerlain Mahora and Francoise Caron’s own Fleur D’Oranger 27 for Le Labo, this sort of scent is definitely only for the brave; for those who want to explode in citrus-licked summer flowers with lots of bare skin showing: the accompanying film made by none other than the great David Lynch (do you think he even smelled the perfume?)

In my view, this was a completely unconnected, non fragrance-adjacent ad, that attempted to inject some much needed mystery into all the proceedings of Armani’s first eponymous release (Giò is his nickname) in order to make it cooler than it actually was: the perfume is just too happy and exuberant and relaxed to be seen as convincingly ‘impenetrable’ in any way (there is very little ‘mystique’ in the blend ….you know this kind of person, typecast from the offset). Who is Giò? Giò is Giò.

Despite being long discontinued, the perfume’s main theme was later rather cleverly absorbed into the marine tea summer breeze that became Acqua Di Giò (1995), which had traces of all the flowers of the first perfume but none of the sickliness, and this one was much more popular commercially. The Aqua variant was then totally overshadowed, of course, by the men’s equivalent, a pour homme, released a couple of years later, which became one of the biggest blockbusters of all time and is still popular globally, although I personally – while understanding its cleverness of structure – never could remotely stand it.

No, give me the original Giò anyday. I was so excited to find a perfectly intact bottle the other day for next to nothing: I had been waiting a long time to score one. Sometimes I crave such oblivious ebullience (and so do many others, seemingly: the non throat grabbing faction in the comments section on Fragrantica seem to adore it and are desperate for it to come back): bottles like the one I found for ＄6 go for eight hundred dollars on eBay now, I was flabbergasted to see) Clearly sometimes, understatement is simply not always the order of the day.

Does anyone else love / hate / remember Armani Giò?

Today is Setsubun (‘Division’), a traditional lunar calendar-based festival celebrating the end of the year, the banishing of demons, and the welcoming of the auspicious second half of spring. A prelude to the vernal madness that is the cherry blossom season in Japan – often ravishingly beautiful – I had, bizarrely, until yesterday never properly stopped to think about what any of this less internationally less famous cultural phenomenon actually signified.

Realizing that my ignorance on the subject would make a good topic of conversation for the evening’s lessons (“Today I want you to teach me about Japanese culture! : let’s talk about the main events of February – Setsubun and St Valentine’s Day: there you go, talk about it in pairs for twenty minutes or so and then get back to me” !- something along those lazily unplanned lines I said to get out of having to do too much ) - anyway it worked, and in the process I learned some interesting things from the young horses’ mouths about this curious annual ritual which does still seem to be observed by the vast majority of Japanese families.

On the day itself, I had always seen the special ehomaki sushi rolls on sale everywhere you look, but I had not realized until yesterday that families all literally sit together in that year’s lucky direction (2024’s is east by northeast), in their kitchens or living rooms, all facing the same way, not looking at each other, and munch through the tubular ehomaki, not sliced up and with chopsticks but just as it is, like a burrito. Also, this must all be done in silence. You make a wish, and to speak breaks the spell. Somehow, with all my years of living here, I had never heard of this before. All except one of the students do this, and most then also follow the tradition of then throwing roasted soybeans, which are considered lucky, out of the front door, or else at their father, who will be wearing a demon mask, protecting his face from the hard beans that are being pelted at him gleefully by his children. Chanting “Out with the demons, in with good luck!” it all sounds like a charming family spectacle that they were all quite eager to tell me about (the time did fly): all of us liking the idea that a particularly negative time in your life can be chased away and that you can welcome in a more positive, fresher, new one.

On the way to class I had by coincidence just smelled an interesting new perfume that chimed perfectly with the day’s theme of rebirth and renewal. A collaboration between Osaji – a brand I have written about before (I enjoy the intriguing modern way this enigmatic J-outfit do florals, in particular their pungent Suisen/Narcissus and a more recent frankincense rose ) – and a positivity-toting Japanese graphic designer, Shogo Sekine, who presumably did all the packaging, to my knowledge, this is Osaji’s first overt citrus aromatic – they often deal in shroudier, powdered understatement – and boy, what a zinging yuzu vetiver citrus this collabo turned out to be.

The top notes of all the citruses in the rainbow, blended beautifully together in the opening salvo of Sekine – blindingly crisp, bright and yellow - are described as being mizumizushii by Osaji : vivacious, energetic, youthful, juicy – and indeed they are. Though very modern smelling, it also put me in mind somewhat of the chypric chypres of the past, in particular, the Armani Pour Homme crème après rasage I was addicted to at sixteen, with its creamy yellow lemon-limeness that I instead used as a body perfume under my shirts. With an aromatic lavender/geranium heart, and a slightly coniferous twang deep inside the blend before ceding down to a delightfully green grassy dry vetiver base, this is a perfume I might have to be getting next month, as I found, with a little tester paper slotted into a book I could steal sniffs from between lessons, that it was starting to drill a brand new hole in my want brain (vetiver lovers such as Leko Lin at Noseprose, you might need to try this one)

Sometimes I need a headclearer vibe like this. Just a natural ray of sunlight. The art direction (mainly) works for me as well – there is a ‘I have woken up in the sunny a.m. in an uncharacteristically good mood today and am going to just sit here and damn well enjoy every moment of my morning coffee’ thing happening, an optimism that rings all the way through the scent as well (even if at times I wondered if it were a little too strident, despite the sense that it was addicting me…………? )

Ultimately, though, there was something about the no-nonsenseness of the strict vetiver/citrus directness of this scent that massively appeals ; I find all the classic citrus vetivers like Vetiver Extraordinaire etc etc etc etc hugely overrated (and overpriced): there is a man-in-a-Zegna-suit chemical fuzziness somewhere in the base in those perfumes that always starts irritating me to death at some point (I would much rather wear the keen neroli lumescence of Creed’s Original Vetiver, for example, a perfume which Osaji Sekine also bears some relation to: . I like it sincere; full, but uncluttered). And this perfume even has its own bag, will you please, if you are that keen on it, so as you amble about, whistling while you work to your new, bees-knees-happy pamplemousse vetiver zizanoides, you can also walk around advertising the family of fragrance that you are wearing to all the people sipping their lattes in Tullys and Starbucks (kind of novel – what’s not to like? I even don’t mind the (deliberate?) misspelling of musky ) :

All in all, I have to say that the discovery of this scent fitted in perfectly with what was a pretty good day; and I am sure that henceforth, I will probably always make the setsubun association whenever I smell it.

As the adage here goes, out with the demons, in with good luck.

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.

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 !