As the cold approaches predictably I am drawn towards thick sweet perfumes that take off the edge. Funnily though, the most ambered perfume I bought this year (I ended up going back to the Indonesian shop on Arab Street in Singapore and bought three bottles – it was $6 after all and I should have got more but it was the last day and the suitcase was heaving) – which I wore, really blissfully – my favourite entire perfume experience this year ? ironically, on several sweltering equatorial evenings in August. Many perfumistas swear by heavy ambres in hot weather – perverse and antituitive, when we know you are supposed to wear citric/ aqueous watercolours, but the hardcore sisters like to sweat those perfumes out note by note layer by layer, feel the animal.
I do too, on occasion, think fuck it and wear Bal A Versailles Cologne on dirty skin on a warm day and reap the benefits. Usually, though, I much prefer an unspontaneous shower a couple hours before going out, lying on a bed – in this case our strange corner side room hanging right over a busy Singaporean thoroughfare – and letting that scent really sink into me as I know it is going to bloom later : if there is a category of scent that works on me it is amber, quite Shalimarissime.
I almost missed this one. Almost everything on the shop round the corner from the central mosque was oudh; some with unexpected textures and nuances I could have lingered over but we were boiling and needed lunch : quickly I sprayed on the only one that seemed non masculine / agar and kept walking.
Soon I was getting headspinning flashbacks to the original Obsession – the first formulation of which was…. well I can’t quite find the words for how I felt about it. Quietly deranging maybe: morbidly sensual, I wanted to plunge my powdered teeth into women when they got into a taxi; some Moschino ! – ie a tad sickly – the cheap top notes are a tad plastic banana – perhaps a drop of Must De Cartier; at any rate, this business is a real slow burner that takes its own sweet time to reveal its delicious labdanum – which stays for a day or two on the body – some rubbed off on the cat again the other day – sorry, Mori !but for three or four days she smelled sublime.
It only hit me recently what this actually smells of. Nag Champa incense, which I love. That powdered floral wist that hangs in room corners and softens hard emotions. In winter, or in summer, you sometimes need such heartwarming balm.
Ooh, I luv a bit o’ the ol’ nag champ, as my father used to say. He was actually very articulate but for some reason found saying that sentence like an old barrow boy quite funny. My nipponkodo hinoki just arrived, nice. But not exactly what I was after in terms of temple dreaming.
No ! It can’t be hinoki it needs to be the weird dark spicy agarwood stuff
dig further !
jaguarundina10/07/24 06:47
with Jean Desprez’s Bal a Versailles I had a hell of a trip these last days. I can still remember buying it in the 1990s. therefor I had to visit the Hague for there was a luxurious niche perfumery. I bought a 50ml Edp at an exorbitant price but had then long passed the ‘Oh how expensive it is’ line. I HAD to HAVE it. viva consumerism and warehouses as the new temples. but I still remember the scent of this perfume (seems a tautology but I feel it is right) and that proved very handy. because it was, after approximately thirty years the first time again I used this perfume. that is the case with the collection of 260 perfumes. some flacons vanish within the collection. standing behind 100ml flacons (a format I often use and ALWAYS blind-buy, and behind a Creed decanter of 250 ml of Jasmal), the lyre shaped flacon with yet enough gold to shimmer, just stood there. and that was the beginning of a mysterious trip which I never had anticipated. I spritzed two times and UP came a scent I didn’t remember from the 1990s. UP came this WALL of ‘Petrichor’ (the word I just learned by reading fragrantica faithfully) but then still to the N’th degree. it was a scent of thick, heady, hefty, inimpenetrable, rather uniform than facetted, scent of humus, hubris, debris, putrid thickness. I am used to all kinds of ouds. Dusita’s Oudh Infini, Terry de Gunzberg’s Terryfic Oud and Terryfic oud Extrême. Ex Idolo’s Thirty Three, a 30 yrs old chinese oud oil with white roses, the Montales, sultan Pashas Douce Amere (Bitter Sweet) oud attar for $ 250. al Oudh from l’Artisan Parfumeur, Juliette has a Gun’s Midnight Oudh, Maître Parfumeur et Gantier’s Oud Extravagant, etc., etc. but THIS was different. yet it immediately reminded me of Creed’s Irisia. a perfume which I love (I had almost written ‘I adore’). that thick, dense and lush-louche layer of oakmoss, patchouli, ambergris, iris, violet, mimosa, a dense and oversatiated perfume of through-and-through maceration almost upon decay, which I love, coming from the 1980s with all the hooker perfumes and then still the worst. Poison, Obsession, chanel COCO, Giorgio, Knowing, Moschino parfum de toilette, GEM, Nahéma, Creed’s Fleur de Bulgarie, Irisia, Vanisia, Tuberose Indiana, etc. but this brick wall of unscent came UP right into my nostrils yet I could endure it for a couple of days. yes it was the scent of decay, wilthed roses, tubéreuse, jasmine, syringa, mimosa, lilies, as also Oriza L. Legrand so masterfully can conceive: Marrions-Nous, Vétiver Bourbon, Relique d’Amour (which someone once described here as ‘it develops into an almost ghastly perfume’ and I had to laugh loudly), with civet which I also love. it was almost unbearable but then a wonder happened. after a few days of persevering spritzing, suddenly there came islands of what had to be the perfume sans ‘Pétrichor’, Chypre Mousse, and yet enough ‘complicative’ for me to appreciate and I REMEMBERED the perfume. not that it was the classical ‘a scent, then the memory’, but my memory of this perfume in the 1990s. I smelled sandelwood, roses, ylang ylang, lilac, orris, civet and several resins. a ‘proto 1980s hooquereuse’. so in came aspects of the real Classic, Amber-Floral-Animalic-Fougere-Chypre perfume and all at once. by using the nozzle (isn’t it called thus?) I let the oxygen again in contact with the perfume and had dissipated the BLOCK of mummified perfume in the petite tube and sprayer. I at least wanted to share this story and I DO find it a Versailles-Vercasiste perfume, denoting to the Grand Bals in the Versailles Baroqueries and Jardins, the tons of clothing all participants wore, satin and silk and damast dresses, the Gentlemen these peculiar trousers with ‘Flaps’, all urinous and sweaty (civet), the Ladies hidden and yet themselves under striatae and striae of make-up. yes it shall be festive and glorious. but above all it is a ripe perfume nor shunning wilthed flowers nor the humid, petrid floors of the forests but even more so the parquetterie on the floors of the Salle des Miroirs.