THE CUSHIONING : : : : : JOURS HEUREUX by BIENAIMÉ (2021) + SIENNA BRUME by MIHAN AROMATICS (2017) + BANA BANANA by L’ ARTISAN PARFUMEUR (2019) + SOL SALGADO by THOMAS DE MONACO (2023)

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Good perfume acts as a cushion. As Pol Pot sacks Harvard and most other institutions of higher learning (great plan! great for future innovation and progess !) the rest of us gaze with a mournful sense of deep superiority in other, more sensorily soothing directions, longing for bathtime.

When the world goes bananas, go bananas. Smother it on. Spray til you choke. Dive into mountainous lagoons of talc. Perfume entire neighbourhoods. Wear a literal banana.

Banana is not a note I would choose on a daily basis. Let’s face it: banana is never going to become the new bergamot. Or tuberose or sandalwood. It is too……..specific (editor’s note: you might be wrong! According to the nose-sleuthing of Sandra Raicovic Petrovic at Fragrantica, banana was the leitmotif at this year’s Exscence in Milano). Okay, well anyway we had oats with bananas, walnuts and chilled milk this morning (very nice, and one must think of one’s heart), but the only true banana in my collection – Gorilla Perfume Ladyboy – ripe banana, violet and seaweed, has, bizarrely never been worn. Or maybe it was once used in an ironic performance context but this is not the kind of eau de parfum you would reach for on the morning bus. Passengers would be slipping on invisible banana peels trying to get off; some people are simply not going to react well to an in your face banana. In fact I have a very good friend, Michael, who is an actual bananaphobe. The amount of times he has voiced this hatred on social media is sometimes surprising (though I do understand his dismay at Japan’s ubiquitous fruit sandwiches; white bread, fresh cream, mandarins, bananas and strawberries all packed in like sardines, then sliced with vicious precision and wrapped in plastic (any man will tell you that a sliced banana is uncomfortable to look at and the taste is unsurprisingly quite sickly ) but in his case, anything banana has him retching. I am personally banana friendly, but sometimes go off them for months at a time because of their stringy powderiness, and then they they go black and dark yellow in the bowl like jaundiced dalmations.

Fortunately for Michael, bananas in perfume are relatively rare. I am sure there are several other bananas bananas out there that I am unconscious of, but the ones that come first to my own immediate perfumed mind, aside Ladyboy, are Comptoir Sud Pacifique Vanille Banane – exactly as it sounds- it smells like you are doing banana splits by the roadside; the sly green banana peel gracing the top notes of the foetidly lovely Patou Sira Des Indes – probably the most lazy and idolent smelling perfume of all time; Quasar by Jesus Del Pozo, which brought us fresh banana scent to the trad sport blue masculine, as well as Demeter’s very literal Banana Flambée, and, of course, the hilariously rotting bananas of Sarah Baker’s wonderfully sleazy Jungle Jezebel .

L’ Artisan Parfumeur, is naturally far too tasteful and rarified to introduce any sense of trashiness or vulgarity to its collection (if I may quote myself on Jungle Jezebel; ‘With big, flesh eating manplant accords of trumpeting banana, pink bubblegum, and pooey civet, this smells like a huge-chested Glamazonian taking a dump in the equatorial bushgrowth’. No, perfumer Celine Ellena is not laughing at the clusters of bananes hanging in the plantations here; rather she takes an exquisite and unusual top note of banana flower, lacing this quite delectable opening note with mace and violet leaf, and letting it tactfully breathe over powdery balsams and musks. In the process she does something unthinkable; she renders the scent of the banana truly graceful. I have been trying out some long ignored sample bottles today, and D took to this one immediately : once the initially delicate banana mirage starts to dissipate, you are left with a calming and savoury texturality that evokes cereals and hessian.

But onto further Jours Heureux – or ‘Happy Days’.

Firstly, I am slightly obsessed with this bottle. To me it is a perfect amalgam of niche and vintage; retro-esque but still contemporary. I want it. If the packaging were quite as pompommy and froufrou as the scent, though – all powdered almonds, violets, roses, vanilla – with subtle hints of geraniums and carnation in the heart (but buttressed by firm tonka), this could possibly read as too Miss Flopsy has nervous breakdown in boudoir mirror. But sometimes we do have our tragic Blanche Dubois moments (we certainly do), and yearn for the sheer solace of a thick, florale vanillé poudré to whittle down the sorrows a little; the sensation of powdery scents is what makes them such great armour in challenging times; they can surround you like a protectant forcefield, the talcum particles mingling the air like featherdown beneficently about your person (and hence my abiding love for Obsession, Shalimar, Vol De Nuit and Bal A Versailles and such like, all of which, in the right moment, I must confess , smell spectacular on me). Those who like their perfumes sweet and Loveheartsy – as I sometimes do; think Chanel Misia and Comète – which, Olivia, you smelled so glorious in when I saw you in North London, perfection, as though Serge Lutens Louve had gone to finishing school – or more powdery than powdery, as in Oriza Legrand’s astonishing Powder To End All Powder perfume, Jardins D’Armide ,which with more than a couple of squirts will have the busgoers clutching their throats as their pulverized air passages close from the mounds of jasmined cocaine entering the breathing apparatus; or, more accurately in terms of olfactory comparison, in this particular case, Lorenzo Villoresi’s classic Teint De Neige – still going strong, I smelled it again in Les Senteurs, Elizabeth Street, Victoria last month and it hadn’t changed – those who like the conservative boudoir of this perfume family will undoubtably take to Jours Heureux. It is nothing new, you have smelled this prototype countless times before, but still, this is very charming, sheerer in the base than you might have expected (where this genre usually just fades to animalic muffles, Jours Heureux progresses to a welcome floral clarity that is non-asphyxiating in its conclusion and thus suitable than most for public viewing. And imagine the heaven of using that soap and body wash before you apply it…….Sometimes a solipsistic dousing, and padding, is just what you need when bombs are exploding just outside your window.

Or. If you have the dough, you could just pack your bags and flee to some tropical island. The eternal deathlessness of summer, and White Lotus oblivion. To forget all the world’s troubles and focus on your suntan.

This is precisely what I love about summer. The glorious insensibility of it all. The sun burns away so much strife; now is the time in Japan when all the ex-pats, myself included, start the debate over the heat (for me it is still quite cold and I still need a heater on at night for proper incubation when everyone else is already in t-shirts and shorts ) but as I far as I am concerned we are just getting started. So many foreigners here go crazy the second the thermometer rises a notch but I am in utterly in my element.May is heavenly here; June, the rainy season, so profoundly green, so densely humid (everyone except me also seems to hate it, but I love the dewy face moisture of it all). The beginning of July is glorious. August, is, admittedly, like being roasted alive, and goes too far. I sometimes want to give it a dressing down for overstepping its mark. But you can still go to the beach around 4pm and bask in the late afternoon heat. At Ishiki Beach in Hayama, you just forget everything and concentrate on the sunlight dappling on the inside of your eyes. What bliss. And this is precisely the time for perfumes like Kenzo Summer – the solar mimosa with one of the happiest – if artificial – drydowns of all time; the time for all the beach florals and anything tropical (see here for The Black Narcissus Guide To Coconut); for jasmine, tiare.

I do love mimosa, but find it is a little tricky in perfume. Perris Monte Carlo Mimosa Tanneron comes closest to capturing the faithful fluffiness of the flower, but there is still something a tad sickly and too sweat- bosomed and claustrophobic in the base ( I sometimes enjoy the piercing desolation of L’ Artisan’s regretted Mimosa Pour Moi – it was never the same in reformulation – but that is a very acquired, wintry moment and it can plunge you into the doldrums. Conversely, I can appreciate compressed, carnal mimosas like Frederic Malle’s Une Fleur De Cassie but in their hidden, erotic pantings, if they come too close I find they also give me the jeebs). Parfums Thomas De Monaco – a new perfume brand by an artist and photographer based in Zurich- enters similar estival thematics with Sol Salgado, a salty, solar, woody floral that I find I am the most drawn to in the range. Aiming to capture the scent of sun on skin – as many a perfumer has tried to do before- there is something very snuggly and sundown pashmina about it as the Sloanes gather round the evening Seychelles fire listening to conches: it has’skin musks’, ‘cotton flower’, a full sandalwood, ambergris, and a smoked vanilla base (I don’t do even a hint of charred in perfume, myself, so that final accord is something of a dealbreaker for me), but I was suitably intrigued by the linden blossom/heliotrope/mimosa accord in the opener that I would quite gladly recommend this to the about to be vacationing Adult Woman.

There is a fine line between carefree and brainless. Sometimes I am content to choose the latter. Just as the the endoneurium, perineurium, and epineurium – the paddings that protects our nerve endings – offer a buffer between the fanciful dream and the hard raw-dogging of reality, I say a cheery hello to perfumes that offer a comparable olfactive service. And Melbourne’s Mihan Aromatics have created a very pleasing, and wearable, new addition to the genre of perfumes you can just spray on unthinkably and smell like a holiday. Fresh top notes of cucumber and palm leaf segue to a light coconut and a girding, subtly boisé base of copaiba in a simple but relaxing scent I would very happily wear to the Japanese beach once the heat rises a bit more; it feels embodied; right. Just the ticket to lay back, the rays flickering…… …… switch off.