For £125 you could buy a decent item of new clothing or even a low end niche : full bottles of non- high street fragrances rarely come cheaper.
There are a few I have my eye on – I bought d a small travel size Abel Miami Split for d on our anniversary — I know it will come in handy for a performance with its dazzlingly realistic fresh banana-ness — but it is also pleasingly wearable in and of itself : creative conceptual perfumery with a humorous wink.
I rather like it. The sandy, spiced undertow reminds me of Comme Des Garçons Cologne – one of our old favourites – and I am sure it will be an enjoyable wear for this coming summer in Japan and in England.
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But liking something isn’t the same as loving something, and this Tuesday — pay day — I stole away before work to my secret treasure trove a couple of cities away — I hadn’t been in eleven months and after all the excruciations I have been through in recent times I felt I deserved a modest splurge – wondering if I might not find something that would exalt and thrill.
My hunch did not disappoint.
Besides a very old Y savon parfume — I love the louche seventies lounge bar of the box – this is more of an objet collectible than a functioning soap – I picked up a large Patou Joy edt for a friend ( as a joke I had sprayed on a pristine Eau De Joy on his wrist with a how about this for pissy expecting exclamations of horror rather than joie – but his reaction were the opposite : d is going to hand it over to him this evening )
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((( but Joy is the very last thing I can get away with wearing myself (who can?!): I just adore that original black bottle with the red cap that I find extraordinarily visually beautiful so couldn’t possibly part with that precious flacon))
Aesthetics really do matter when it comes to The Perfume Experience..Luxury’ –/as it is understood these days — absolutely bores me to death as an idea and reality, but there is undeniably something luxurious; luxuriant about a fully successful marriage of the tactile; the visual, and the olfactory , not to mention the poetic and the intellectual – I want it all.
The current Guerlain packagings only give me mild pleasure when I see them stacked up with their preposterous prices and only so-so designs – I want to fall hook, line and sinker with the whole shebang. Merely being old and vintage of course does necessarily bestow the qualities I am talking about ; some of the seventies / eighties’ iterations are certainly too gaudy or froufrou clunka-dunka — but the zigzagging Grecian geometrics of the above classic sixties’ designs have always pleased me immensely; many Mitsoukos and Vols De Nuit have, and continue to grace my collection
( this VdN is olfactory perfection – it will go in no time the way I wear it ; no box, but who cares when it is only ¥2200 (£10) and captures my body and soul?) )
….Chant d’Aromes though, my god : is that really what I am seeing in the glass cabinet for just twenty quid ? A gobsmackingly good find ; that mirabelle plum, those delirious honeysuckles over moss… what a glorious creation!
D may not like it on me – he never does enjoy the Ma Griffe type of floral chypre – though he quite likes Calandre and Caleche, which were always more androgynous and softly clandestine ( thanks again Victoria for that lovely Eau De Calandre you sent recently … such a nerve cushion ..)
( also Rive Gauche – so similar to Calandre- possibly slips metallically into corseted lingerie though I think the eventual sandalwood / vetiver eventually render it convincing on me – : i couldn’t resist this vintage bottle let alone a slightly musty but still rather lovely Ricci Farouche for the equivalent of £1.50).
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All very well and good.
But a Shalimar in the original purple velvet box…. and then a vintage L’Artisan Parfumeur Vanilia from 1978 in another case as well? — a truly lovely, exquisite ylang vanilla flower like a young honey bee alighting on orchid …. these are the very essence of perfect wearability on me and I could hardly believe my good fortune – and all for less than a 50ml bottle of Matiere Premiere with fifty pounds still to spare.
Contemporary Shalimars are fair enough, but there is something about the currently used leather/ bergamot clashes in the opening immediacies that induces a certain pituitary nausea. The older extraits, like this one, still have the lemon and baby powder inherent contradictions but are also chock full of all the Peru Balsams and opoponax and styrax you so desire, melding with the coumarins and vanillin: the last time I had one of these particular vintages was in Nagasaki about two decades ago, and I have been craving another bottle of it ever since.
I remember it was unbearably humid and hot; a bruised black and grey sky, pre-thunderstorm, the sky about to crack, and as we got off the overly air-conditioned bus and fell out into the Kyushu August broil I came on with an instantaneous splitting headache.
And yet in the confines of our hotel, I was in the middle of finally properly falling in love with real Shalimar; when it unfurled to the base neither of us could quite believe how incredible it was smelling on me : deeply sensual ; hypnotic; erotic.
Excitedly getting home on Tuesday evening with my haul after a rather gruelling day at work, d asleep upstairs, I changed out my teaching clothes and just sat on the sofa downstairs breathing it all in. Small helpings of Vanilia and Shalimar — not going to be profligate with these this time, I now know how hard they are to come by — but worn close together ….. …… ……………my oh my.