SCANDAL POUR HOMME L’ELIXIR by JEAN PAUL GAULTIER (2026)

Walking behind some Europeans in Kamakura yesterday I was dismayed by the brain-bashing stench of the perfume a young ish man strolling ahead of me had unleashed into our rarified midst. It was…. disgusting. ‘Beast Mode’. Nullifying. A vulgarian boulder blocking up the airwaves.

In Japan, a country that favours olfactory subtlety, such ‘perfumes’ – can we really call them this ? – only pollute the oxygen. Even from several paces away I felt assaulted, as though clubbed by an ox: how could anyone come into physical proximity with such a pollutant-contaminated skin interface?

The chemists that gave us Baccarat Rouge and its infinite variants that slough the breeze like brainless pink godzillas burning our cilia with singed saffron caramels, monsterized jasmins and synthetic oudhs – do they not eventually wish they could retract them from our collective consciousnesses and take us back to a purer air ? All the inescapable, evil ‘ambers’ that troll our minds like a brain bludgeoning life sentence?

The Kamakura perfume yesterday – vile though it was – was nothing in comparison to what I smelled in a Shinjuku hotel room a couple of weeks ago, however – wow ! It was the most shocking, indeed scandalous ! reaction I have ever had to a perfume.

Admittedly, we were overperfumed ourselves. Our friend from Shanghai had very generous it booked a luxury weekend at a Hyatt and we naughtily stayed over – crowding in to her room before hitting the nightlife afterwards (still only in semi recovered mode I couldn’t, alas, take part in the dancing but went out for the first chapter ): she doused in contemporary Fahrenheit; d in Electimuss Puritas – a pink pepper vanilla frankincense – Yukiro in Paloma Picasso, and me in my somewhat smothering ‘Guerlain Winter Special’ – vintage Shalimar, Vol De Nuit and Heritage applied liberally six hours in advance – so yes, it was already too much, and quite old school I suppose- omg, there may have been some naturally sourced aroma materials ! only making any twenty first century heightened aromachemicals all the more noxious in cruel juxtaposition,

but Jesus Christ, when Tony walked in from his suite upstairs and entered our own clouds of excessive perfumanity I had the intensest inner response to a ‘fragrance’ ever in my life.

Reader, I was paralyzed.

Paralyzed! I couldn’t move or speak. A sudden plunge into brief, disorientating insanity.

Thinking at first it was just my usual jolt of initial sociophobia when meeting new individuals, I tried to open my mouth, but the overwhelming flattening of my nervous system by whatever monstrosity he had just obviously sprayed on a few moments before entering our space left me awestruck : physically speechless.

Karen kept looking at me as if to say when are you going to start communicating, but the toxic miasma of searing petrochemicals he had ruined himself with was so severe it took me about ten minutes to gather myself. Is this what nerve gas feels like ? A biohazardous attack, inhuman and system shredding ?

Eventually, of course, I pulled myself together, still marvelling at the power of his pungency and the fact he was supposedly on the pull in the gay zone later that evening ( surely only the fully anosmic could approach another person, no matter how physically attractive, in these circumstances), and though it was hypocritical, for your sake, I had to eventually ask him, if he didn’t mind, what the ‘interesting’ perfume he was wearing was called.

‘It’s the new Scandal by Jean Paul Gaultier’.

‘Usually I wear Tom Ford Tobacco Vanille’ he told me – and oh god, I wish you had was my inner reply

..’ but I got a sample of this at Shanghai airport as I thought it was quite nice..’

!!!!

Admittedly, it did later tone down to just a regular, irritating banality rather than an attack by a bioweapon designed to induce crippling neuropathy – but man, this was a serious nadir in modern fragrance for me : damaging to the spirit and physically utterly intolerable. Obviously this post is hyperbolic beyond endurance – so do take it with your own personal grain of salt – but still, in all honesty, like the proliferation of nuclear missiles currently mushrooming globally – for the sake of humanity – can these ingredients honestly be safe for our bodies ? I really do wish I could rid the entire world of this poisonous shit.