Monthly Archives: December 2024

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.

admittedly I didn’t want to be out at all but it was a friend’s 60th so you go anyway

what I don’t understand is this tendency, among certain people, to just answer questions, as though a superstar – yes this guy had an aura, looked like Jim Jarmusch but with long white hair and smelled strangely divine – you would have sworn it was Lutens Borneo 1840: perfume perfection but he professed not to know what it was, you know, being a man – but never ask any questions back

this repugnant narcissism tends to be more rife among north americans – it just does – you supply the reasons – but this particular dude was from rugby in the west midlands – quite close to where I am from

anyway – who gives a shit

the point is

ASK SOME QUESTIONS BACK, FUCKING SELF ABSORBED MOTHERFUCKER

I love the colour pink.

Although I almost never wear it, the eye popping nature of pink is instantaneous stimulation. In a J-world where almost everyone has been wearing tediously muted subtlety for the last decade – beige, beige, cream, beige, camel, grey, beige, and desaturated Muji and Uniqlo ‘blues’, ‘reds’ (russet: ugh I HATE IT !!) and ‘greens’ – as well as beige, whenever someone – a student; someone on the street – has the temerity to beige-bust and actually shine in a beautiful moment of vivid colour expression I feel momentarily lifted out of the stultifying beige bog that to me signifies a puny meek surrender to the sludge of stultifying conformity that can sometimes clog the veins of Japanese society.

Admittedly, pink can certainly be annoying. Nicki Minaj overdoes it, and I didn’t like the particular ugly cerise shade of last year’s ’Barbie Phenom’ ( which almost made me want to wear beige ) – it is certainly a colour very prone to the tacky.

And yet pink neon. Searing through the soul like a Soft Cell 12” in Soho, ‘81. Peonies unfurling in a side garden. Exquisite pale pink kimonos. Dragon fruit. Cockatoos. In Japan there are even translucent pink Koshu grapes that are splendidiferous – I have never tried them – but look

:::: pink gives a lift to the soul.

The latest release from Frederic Malle, a photo of which I should have taken at the Takashimaya department store in Yokohama which really pulled in my eye deeply : bottles stacked glowing atop one another, electricly lit I stopped in my tracks bewitched – smells very pink – extraordinarily pink. I liked it immediately. Like bubblegum, it is all peaches and vanilla and ylang ylang and banana – tuberose and iso e super and aldehydes, ooh lots of modern aldehydes – sickly, perhaps, but with soul and inner complexity. It has a definite presence.

I know nothing about ‘Acne Studios’ – whose current frontice-woman is Charli XCX, whose smash hit album Brat d got me for my birthday :

The ad campaign isn’t especially appealing to me and the brand seems to be in the Dieselish bracket – high end but not Balenciaga – the Malle collaboration conferring cool on the latter, olfactive kudos on the former , but I did like the presentation and perfume itself.

Acne says

I wouldn’t personally say neo-classical, more ‘future vintage’. There is a bold, gourmand element that reads contemporary, but I was also taken back to one of the pinkiest perfumes ever made, the gorgeous More by Shiseido / which I have written a lot about before if you want to learn more, as well as the ludicrously cutesie D’Humeur A Rire from the L’Artisan Parfumeur limited edition ‘Mood Swings’ box I bought on the King’s Road some time in the early 90’s :all strawberry shortcakes, little girls’ ribbons and enameled nails – jumbled up together with the inescapable fabric softeners of your local laundromat. It is quite fluffy, fattening and nice, if utterly unaffordable (¥54,000 for 100ml to smell like Britney Spears in a tumble dryer?): I could happily have it in my collection and would probably sometimes indulge, but it is not a perfume I will be scurrying to save up for.

There is also the issue of the word itself : ACNE.

Fortunately unafflicted myself by every pubescent’s worst nightmare, I still inevitably succumbed to zits and pimples as a self conscious teenager – squeeze or leave ?- and remember clearly the fuss I would make to buy a cover up stick at Boots The Chemists, mortified to be a boy buying makeup but then I could never understand why people would just stand there in the school corridor with their eye focusing boil in the middle of their face and not at least try to mitigate its horrendousness.

No, ACNE – meaning spots and oozing facial pustules and craters – certainly does not appeal. But all in all, I have to say, this perfume rather does.

Just had a very indulgent and varied birthday weekend beginning on Saturday with diva-ish backstage drama at our Shinjuku drag show where we performed in front of a twenty minute film we had made especially for the night – here is me five minutes before going on

…. I think it went ok although there were inevitable fuckups and regrets that brought the night down a little afterwards

The next day we realized that it was all much better than we had at first realized (: eau, les artistes !) and had a really lovely afternoon in Ueno Park, the more austere, spacious and fadedly elegant old part of Tokyo where we had lunch at the legendary BunkaKaikan museum cafe – hadn’t been there in years, and with all the yellowing ginkgo and zelkova trees reflected in gilded mirrors we spent a good couple of hours just sighing contentedly in semi-melancholic autumnal bliss.

I could quite happily have stayed there all afternoon it was so relaxing (plus walking has become rather painful indeed; all of this was a partial celebratory swansong) but I wanted to go to an exhibition – to just randomly choose one from the several imposing museums in the vicinity ): Monet was horrendously popular and I didn’t fancy old Japanese clay burial masks from millennia before ; we opted for a survey of birds at the Science Museum instead – a full selection of stuffed and preserved ornithology presented cleverly , although after a while with all the crowds and the overheating we were as birded out as Tippi Hedren.

Time for a stroll in the cold but lovely late autumnal fresh air.

We came across the Geidai Art School where I had never been before.

The museum cafe happened to be having a free mini concert of gagaku – ancient court music, still performed in the imperial household on special occasions – so we thought why not : perfect. We went inside.

The musicians were milling at the back of the shop. I couldn’t help approaching them , the scent of incense gradually flowing through the space so exquisite and penetrating – fresh, deeply dignified, and darkly spiced , this was not the hangover of smoke on fabric but smelled cold air fresh – and I simply had to enquire further.

Surprisingly accommodating and down to earth – with all their courtly regalia I suppose I had expected a more supercilious mien – one of the ladies graciously let me inhale the sleeves of her kimono : cloves, camphor, agarwood, cinnamon and unknown ephemera – it was profoundly sense-altering ; you could tell that the garments had been stored somewhere with sachets of incense ingredients in a wooden chest in a beautiful room somewhere and with the music – discordant to many ears with its strangely pitched flutes and koto and bagpipe-like instruments, but to us penetrating and cathartic – I could imagine the sounds echoing through the valleys and forests of Nara, the scent and music commingling in a way that felt transporting.

“It was like breathing “ D said afterwards.