If I didn’t have bursitis of the elbow – my god, what next ?! such a collapsing old crock …
I would write in depth. About this and a million other things, plenty of them perfumed.
But I can’t.
Suffice it to say, I came back late from work, we had sparkling and a midnight feast on the balcony, reminisced a little and agreed that we could hardly relate to the kids we were then but were glad to be the versions of ourselves we are now – crumbling skeleton included.
We got together on a June 17th. I was out with my friend George. D was out with his friend Elissa. We all danced to house music in the basement of King’s College Cambridge and then flirted and gravitated towards our future partners.
Heady days…
Congratulations to G and E – we will always have the same anniversary – down to minutes and seconds …
Fragrancing is an art form. But it needn’t necessarily be limited to aromatics suspended in alcohol. In Japan, nioibukuro, or scent sachets, are secreted on the person to give off subtle aroma. I once knew a man who smelled divine every time I encountered him- his cunning technique? A bottle of lavender essential oil kept in his jeans pocket.
I carry freshly plucked gardenias and jasmine in my shirt pockets or wallet as a natural soliflore; I use citrus oil infused Vaseline as perfume ; I even once dazzled a friend at the theatre wearing vintage Vol De Nuit while scratching the peel of a yuzu that was hidden inside my winter coat – her praise for the combined smell was far more effusive than for the stage production itself.
Teabags are a new departure for me — though I realize that I have just lied. A cheap but very beautiful and very bergamotty Sri Lankan Earl Grey once graced the interior of my bag and was almost disorienting to the senses it smelled so tea-y
— but I don’t think I have ever ‘worn a tea bag’ – or tea bags on my actual person before – not until last week.
It was an unusual combination.
In the morning, though I never wear ‘Fancy French Fine Fragrance’ – particularly not anything muskily, femininely poetic in the classroom, out of the blue on Friday just as I was about to leave the house and needing some kind of soothing, emotional crutch, I suddenly had a hard craving for Annick Goutal’s – sorry, I still say ANNICK because all mine are in the vastly preferable original frou frou balletic bouteilles — I needed the green hyacinthed and honeysuckled loveliness of Grand Amour (1996), a highly romantic take on Guerlain Chamade, figuring that if necessary I could open a window if it didn’t feel right – but it really did.
The perfume blessed my commute. I never usually wear it, but on Friday morning Grand Amour was the perfect companion; gentle but not insipid; fresh but not naff; possibly more androgynous than I had realized, limpidly ambrous with a magical throw.
Who needs more than that, I hear you holler.
Passing a herbal tea emporium nestled in Atsugi station mine nostrils did pick up the most perfect trail of tropicsl lychee. This shop provides iced coolers of their selections in glass containers and miniature taps – practically Caron urn fountains – and the green rooibos ‘litchi’ as they spelled it – which iteration of this fruit spelling do you prefer, aesthetically ?- was the promoted tisane of the day; gorgeous, really, both in fragrance and flavour, even if I doubted the naturalness of the vibrant L-fragrancing itself.
I bought a small mini pack of five teabags knowing internally how I was probably going to use them – ie not in a mug with boiling water – and the second I ripped open the paper envelope I was devoured by a slew of lychee odour that would rip off the head of Yves Saint Laurent’s much regretted Champagne/ Yvresse ( and without that perfume’s melting teeth and chypric decadence – instead just a subtle backdrop of green rooibos ). Doing damage limitation – and knowing I was a weirdo as closed the teabags in my upper suit jacket pocket I found myself stirringly intoxicated by the incredible duality of the wilting hyacinth Bulgarian rose of Grand Amour with a ravishment of subtropical Japanese lychee in the top — it was almost deranging to the senses and it is possible that one girl in the class may or may not have been stoppering up her nose with several fingers but somehow I still couldn’t remove it from my person: so lynched was I by the lychee.
D noticed the melange on me later and approved ; and so the next day I wore the same perfumes : Grand Amour and a bag of lychee rooibos, also to a theatre performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I am going to buy some more from the shop when I go there again this Friday – ( I also want to experiment with other flavours – imagine APRICOT). Call me a madman if you will, but dear reader, I tell you :: this was a floral, fruititious DELIGHT.
Like the rotting banana astride its 10 carat amphibian throne at Mar-A-Lago — is this rather wonderful perfume a cheeky reference to the plapface in chief and his Geminian, drooling brain-schisms? – any perfume with a thrillingly realistic banana peel and fruit top melange will immediately stand out in even the edgiest of niche perfumeries. It smells, quite simply- yes you guessed it – bananas.
I laughed out loud. That yellow blast of Floridian musa at the beginning of the perfume sent me on a whirl of nostalgic hyper-bananes : natural, synthetic – I loved chewy b-candies at the sweet shop as a kid as well as ice slushy milkshakes – Miami Split definitely has a whiff of dessert – and is probably more what Abel had in mind than an addled Ronald Clump sliding about on mushy slippered banana skins ; had I been flush with cash I would probably have purchased it on the spot.
It dries down to ‘white oud’- a curious proposition that shouldn’t work, but in my view emphatically does ( this perfume definitely won’t be for everyone, in particular my friend Michael who has actual bananaphobia and would immediately be sent a gaggin’), the perfumers at Abel – incredibly, an all natural fragrance house that elevates non synthetic ingredients to new creative heights – having a deft hand in layering ingredients, even novel, headspace fermentation techniques as they used here – to diaphanous, sophisticated effect.
I used up my extrait edition of the same house’s lovely Cobalt Amber many summers ago – a pink peppery labdanum that floats from the skin in a sensuously gentle manner – and would very much like another bottle; this is the kind of scent you can just spray on of a morning without too much thought, knowing that you will smell nice the rest of the day – and was also intrigued by the mood-fizzing aldehydic uplift of their very fresh and happy-inducing Laundry Day – soda-fresh lime, passion fruit layered over sinuous vetiver – this would make an excellent work perfume and I plan to make it mine come the hot weather – but it is undeniably the Banana that gets the most applause in this review. If only from the point of view of olfactive novelty, I need this in my collection. It made me smile – unlike that other old fruit in the ‘White House’ who is ready for the bin — and makes me retch.
It is also fortunate that you don’t have to ransack the coffers of your own banana republic to acquire these scented lovelies either: small affordable bottles are available at the Nose Shop in NewWoman Yokohama just enough to quench the thirst for the yellow Chiquita -while not sufficient to push you over straight over the edge of the dreaded banana precipice. Next pay day I plan on getting all three.
