How could I not have seen this wonderful film before? Good lord it had me laughing and weeping at the same time. So tender. So sweet. So damning for someone like me in a way, always drawn, so much more, just like Mia Farrow, to the imaginary and the fantastical, than the ‘real’.
What fun though to watch it with people you want to be with on a Sunday night; in the dark, in your private cinema – with wine, and chocolate, and the screen.
Filed under Flowers
by Olivia
Une Nuit Magnétique, a Christine Nagel creation for The Different Company, is a perfume built on the push and pull of contrast and affinity: an olfactory magnetic field, touted as an aromatic charm, a lure, cast through a spicy floral amber. It’s a lithe oriental taut with charges and whose notes seem looped in circadian rhythms – a bottle of fire and silk.
The scent opens with a slightly spiky, vivifying duet of ginger and bergamot (with perhaps a touch of aldehydes) that – even though this an entirely warm perfume – puts me just briefly in mind of the tart, invigorating twinkle on the tongue of a summer cocktail, something aromatic and on the rocks. This is quickly softened though into a mulled, round accord of blueberry (a fruit I’ve always thought to have a slight cinnamon facet – and that carries here beautifully with the ginger) and the duskier, stickier baritone of prune. This fruitiness is not overly sweet, more unctuous and autumnal, and feels to me more akin to dried fruits than fresh summer berries.
Folded through the heart a pomander like garland of jasmine, rose and tuberose adds more fleshiness than florality – these notes are abstract and closely blended, so that the individual characteristics of each of these usually heady notes is hard to parse. Together however, their blend gives the heart lushness and texture. Given the amorous concept, and with the blueberry/prune fruitiness still weaving through this tuberose licked accord, you’d be forgiven thinking of that plum-tuberose 80s bombshell, Poison. Here though, while the idea is descendant, the interpretation is crystalline and snappy. This smolders in chic company, leaning more toward whispered possibilities of later privacy than the corset and kohl clad wanton spirit of the Dior.
Rather than the tuberose (which I perhaps wish was just slightly more decadent – but I have a fondness for lush, sweetened tuberoses) – it’s the rose, dusted and almost potpourri like that sinks into the musks and toffee-toned resins in the base. Here the perfume loops on itself – the spicy ginger handshake meets an auburn amber, fluffy musk and a skin seeping caramel benzoin. These wash up over the upper registers and coax the scent down into something like an autumnal bower. The malty richness of this base played against the bright zing of the earlier notes acts like a late year sun flashing through tortoishell. It’s at once gauzy and generous and glints like burnished copper, sidling up to the florals like a faint trace of your boy’s aftershave on your blouse.
While these stages of the fragrance – spicy/fruity/floral/resinous – seem like they might be quite distinct on paper, in their entirety the composition is compact and close weave. These notes are blended in a classical style so that the impression you get on smelling it is more akin to a centrifugal whirl; a fusion out of which different facets and accents intermittently peek, like soloists stepping forward from a jazz ensemble. Although presented as a ‘dense’ perfume, this wears with a transparency that reminds me of Christine Nagel’s earlier plush yet feathery Orientals – her Theorema for Fendi in particular, but also Mirroir des Envies for Mugler. Here too she has woven a handsome blend shot through with light; in which interior contrasts fuse through soft angles. It manages to be both spirited and rich, its sensuality distinct but coutured. There’s a sense of a shuffling groove – rhythmic, looped – in the interplay of benzoin’s molten brass and the sunny, vivacious topnotes that does create a languid, sensual effect.
While I think there is definitely an invocation of the magnetic, of seduction, in this relay between notes – calling and responding like sparking charges – ultimately this is not a risqué perfume. If anything it speaks more of love than lust, of contentment and deep-seated confidence (which is of course, deeply sexy) While perhaps nothing especially revolutionary, its soft-spoken assurance creates that centre of gravity that just makes you feel gorgeous when wearing it. It doesn’t seem to have garnered too much interest online, but I think it’s absolutely worth investigating. Wear it for a whole day and let it wrap around you: it’s the sort of perfume that captivates from the sidelines.
Filed under Flowers
I am a big eater of oranges in all their varieties, particularly the Japanese ones that are easier to get into quickly; mikan (mandarins/tangerines), ponkan, and especially iyokan, which are the sharpest, most eye-scrunchingly delicious winter oranges I have ever experienced and which are perfume in their own right – opening the thick, rich peel that tears away easily from the flesh, the large pores of their thick, oily skin spurt pure oil that can fill up an entire room with sharp, piquant lusciousness : the very air becomes vitamin C.
Orange essential oils are notoriously difficult to ‘fix’ (ie. prevent from evaporating very quickly in perfume blends), and in comparison with the ubiquitous lemon/bergamot cologne type, epitomised by Guerlain Eau De Fleurs De Cedrat and Eau Du Coq and the like, there are relatively few orange perfumes available. Yet mandarins, oranges and clementines are instant sense-pleasers; sunshine in a bottle. There is an intrinsic optimism in the smell of the orange: uncomplicated and cheering (and probably why children usually take to them before they do to other citrus fruit, and why the flavour tastes so delicious in combination with chocolate, another of my obsessions – have you ever tried Lindt’s amazing Orange Intense, all dark chocolate, lip-smacking orange, and tiny chopped almonds? It is amazing).
The following orange, clementine and mandarin scents are a good choice on days when you just want something easy and light; to boost your mood; either to accentuate the sunlight outside, or to compensate for its absence.
MANDARINE TOUT SIMPLEMENT / L’ARTISAN PARFUMEUR (2006)
For a few minutes, L’Artisan’s Mandarine Tout Simplement smells delectable; like unpeeling a tart winter orange and letting its juice dribble your tongue: fresh, zesty, and mood-enhancing. Within minutes though, as natural citrus should, these tangy exclamations have faded – to nothing more than a light note of cedar. At the high price, this lack of longevity might be problematic if you are searching for your signature perfume. As an extravagant pick-me-up though, L’Artisan’s creation is worth every penny, and comes in a huge 250ml bottle with a big old-fashioned squeezy atomiseur.
OYEDO / DIPTYQUE (2000)
The blurb for this scent spoke of hillside Mediterranean orange groves, and if the first place that comes to mind is Seville, you are not mistaken. But Oyédo is not the eye-munching tang of fresh bitter orange peel you might expect, rather its candied alter-ego: thick-cut, condensed, Seville orange marmalade . Oyédo, a scent I have considered buying on a number of occasions, but never quite committed to, is a very smiling and enjoyable scent, appealingly blended (with lime, some woody notes and an unusual pinch of thyme), but it is also sweet: as sugared and palate-touching as a boiled sweet.
On the subject of which, if you really do like the idea of an orange candy perfume, one that tastes exactly like orange Jelly Babies, there is also Pacifica’s delightful Tuscan Blood Orange.
ORANGE CHOCOLAT / GALIMARD (2009)
At Christmas, as kids my sister and I would gorge like pigs on the chocolates stuffed in the bottom of our stockings, once culminating in a fight involving three boxes of Ferrero Rocher, some stolen sparkly wine, and a Terry’s Chocolate Orange. This gorgeous oddity by Galimard smells exactly like the latter, at precisely the moment the wrapping comes off and the orange is tapped. You may squeal with delight (and if you are anything like me, buy a bottle on the spot if you ever come across one). Like grubby chocolate fingers though, once the juicy top notes fade and the smudged stickiness comes in, you might feel the urgent need for some hand wipes.
EAU DE MANDARINE AMBREE by HERMES (20I3)
Another wintery orange/mandarin scent that works well as a snug, indoor blanket is Eau De Mandarine Ambrée, a dense, and richly textured orange-amber from the Hermès cologne collection that appealed to me immediately ( I tend to prefer Jean Claude Ellena’s more sensual creations rather than those taken from the minimalist, ‘watercolour’ approach; I don’t like watercolours in art, and I don’t like wishy-washiness in ‘real life’ much either, give me COLOUR), and here the Hermès in-house perfumer lets down his guard for a moment; leaves the intellectualism on the shelf, and just creates a nice and easy perfume (with an intriguing pinch of passion fruit contrasted with the more vanillic base notes) that I find warm, inviting and sensual, yet familial.
EAU D’ORANGE VERTE / HERMES (1979)
There is a copse of bitter orange trees near the top of the hill where we live in Kamakura, and if you crush their dark green leaves in your hand, which I often do, this is the beginning of Eau d’Orange Verte. Essentially, with this classic citrus, Hermès put the snob in the orange: it is a refined cologne that captures the tang of green orange leaves and peel, and an intimation of the tree’s bark in the zing of petitgrain. The tart greenness of citrus is underscored with an unusual note of papaya and mango, whose potential sweetness is offset with a subtle finish of vetiver and patchouli. The result is a supremely sober, understated cologne that on certain occasions is just what the doctor ordered.
MANDARINE BASILIC by GUERLAIN (2007)
Some of the fruity Guerlain Acqua Allegorias have been disastrous – sticky, synthetic messes like Tutti Kiwi and the red-currant themed Grossellina that for me just didn’t work (and were promptly discontinued). It is interesting that two of the perfumes from this line that have endured, however, are classic citruses; the pungent, patchouli grapefruit that is the iconic Pamplelune, and Mandarine Basilic, still available, still lovely. This scent has that easeful simplicity and freshness I like in citrus scents; not overloaded with detail, just uplifting, with a contradictory soft-freshness evoked with the gentle mandarin/clementine top accord, underlaced with a diaphanous amber accord in the base, but given levity with green overtones of green tea, ivy and basil. This is one that I sometimes send my sister as a present as it often garners compliments.
ORANGE SANGUINE by ATELIER COLOGNE
Although at first I wasn’t sure if I liked the synthetic white musk note in the base of this popular (and deservedly award-winning) perfume, I have come round to it a little now and do think that the top notes of this clever mood booster are genius: just the loveliest, smoothest, smilingest oranges from the first spray (bitter oranges, blood oranges with a tinge of jasmine and geranium): clean, urban, optimistic, a scent that for many people just proves naturally irresistible.
MANDARINO D’AMALFI by TOM FORD
Another very fresh and sense-grabbing modern orange citrus, Mandarino D’Amalfi is an almost mindlessly cheerful, sunglassed and chipper scent that you can read about here in my review (I almost bought a bottle for Miami): like most orange or mandarin-based perfumes, it has that sense of possibility; of a new day or fresh start, when you feel like looking forward to hitting the pavement outside.
Sometimes, on certain days, you just need to look up at the sky, cut clean through all your musks and wilting, delicate flowers; your ambers and oudhs, your shimmering aldehydes; the iris, the poetry and the melancholia, and just spritz.
Filed under Citrus
I had wondered if this day might one day happen. Whether I would, in my ever-thrilling voyage into perfume, discarded by the Japanese as worthless flotsam in the bargain bins of flea markets, ever come across one of perfumery’s truly coveted holy grails: Shiseido’s Nombre Noir. A perfume so rare it has become legendary among scent lovers, long discontinued (and all remaining stock apparently destroyed with bulldozers), there are very few bottles left available in the world, now, the ones that do exist usually going for mind-boggling prices (around a thousand dollars seems to be the standard). It is a perfume that has been enraptured over, exaggerated, mythologized to the point that its very name for many of us has an almost talismanic energy. A black, pulsing, Japanese jewel. An amulet.
As well as the usual flea markets and antique shops I frequent, I have recently discovered a place in Tokyo, whose proprietor, an Indian man I can’t quite fathom, lets me buy things at often absurdly cheap prices. He says he is always open but never is, but still lets me know when the latest cardboard boxes will be arriving in advance so I can get first pick (then call him up, and one of his assistants might then let me in even if the shop is officially closed); a shambolic jumble of shabby old makeup, shower gels, half used perfumes and then, occasionally, something beautiful like Jardins De Bagatelle or Infini, boxed, new, ready for my eager hands to take over to the cash register and pay.
On this occasion he had told me that there would be a delivery on January 3Ist, and so there I was, catching the train up from Kitakamakura, wondering expectantly what there might be. We were rummaging around in the box in tandem, where I got some half-used Givenchy Gentleman and Kouros, some Indian ‘essential oils’, and a couple of other things, when for some reason I looked down towards the floor for some reason and found that I had to adjust my eyes.
Can it be?
Really?
Sotto voce:
Duncan, don’t say anything or make a reaction of any kind but look directly beneath me. That, there, is one of the rarest perfumes in the world.
I have never smelled it. Oh. My. God. Oh my god it’s Nombre Noir. I can’t believe it.
Out on the street, practically gagging with excitement I had to smell it immediately, opening the box (as you can see, this would have been some kind of special deluxe set with an eau de parfum or toilette and parfum extrait presented together), and although it would have been an absolute coup to have had them both, something in me strangely quite liked the fact that there was this mysterious lack, this voided indentation. The black, satin shadow. It added depth and secrecy, a story. A luxurious vortex of usage. Where was that other bottle? Who had it? What did she, or he, look like? Could it still be lingering somewhere in the refrains of some tucked away, Tokyo apartment?
*
I still had the parfum, though. The grand prize. And I couldn’t believe it. Unused, it would seem; solid in its black sculptured glass. Precious. And although part of me hesitated momentarily (should you really be violating this prized collector’s item?) I just absolutely had to find out what the fuss was all about.
We stood in the wintery sunshine and I opened up the bottle…..
Luca Turin:
The fragrance was, and still is, a radical surprise. A perfume, like the timbre of a voice, can say something quite independent of the words actually spoken. What Nombre Noir said, was ‘flower.’ But the way it said it was an epiphany. The flower at the core of Nombre Noir was halfway between a rose and a violet, but without a trace of the sweetness of either, set instead against an austere, almost saintly background of cigar-box cedar notes. At the same time, it wasn’t dry, and seemed to be glistening with a liquid freshness that made its deep colours glow like a stained glass window. The voice of Nombre Noir was that of a child older than its years, at once fresh, husky, modulated, and faintly capricious. There was a knowing naivety about it which made me think of Colette’s writing style in her Claudine books. It brought to mind a purple ink to write love letters with, and that wonderful French word farouche, which can mean either shy or fierce or a bit of both.
Christos, Memory of Scent :
There is this rare, elusive category of perfumes, the Perfect, Discontinued scent. It is the most sought after, exclusive, masterfully blended kind of perfume. It was so perfect that it had to stop existing. Its ingredients so pure and rare that they are no longer available. Every now and then a bottle appears here and there and everybody is either spending four digit prices or fantasizing about it. The lucky few that have smelt the Discontinued masterpiece are witnesses of its perfection: nothing available now comes near. Of course the Great Discontinued is nothing more than a metaphor for youth and nostalgia: what is now discontinued was once commercially available and what is now available will at some point become vintage. Somehow the present is never as good as the past sounds. A place revisited is never as good as the first time. Past youth seems so careless when looked at over once shoulder. It seems that turning the head 180 degrees towards the past forces the eyes to squint just enough to make everything look a little more appealing. The myth of perfection never seen and yet as real as our hopes is as old as the Unicorn. As much as I like to think of myself as someone evolved enough to see the unavailable for what it really is (non-existent) Ι have many times drooled over the essence of Unicorn and fantasized about a bargain bid.
Nombre Noir is my Unicorn. Serge Lutens’s ability to guide a perfumer in capturing the essence of a dream in a bottle and Shiseido’s aesthetics were a match made in heaven and Feminite Du Bois is a testament to this. Imagine this combination accompanied by the ultimate perfumery legend: a scent so rich in fragile damascones that it starts dying the moment one opens the bottle. A composition so rich in top quality osmanthus extract that it wasn’t worth selling. And a packaging so mysterious and intricate that added to the exorbitant cost of the product. Legend has it that a Unicorn can only be lured into the trap by a virgin. I was a lot luckier. A woman in black brought this Unicorn to me. Amazed at the generosity of my perfume friend I received a generous decant of the rare essence and this is my encounter with it.
Nombre Noir is not a dark fragrance. It is a luminous and abstract scent. It opens with a very strong and abstract aldehyde accord that seems to hold captive a rose in its heart. The combination of intensity and light brings to mind a marble sculpture. Although it is bright and almost translucent it has a volume and weight that are disproportionate to the impression it creates. Although it looks light enough to lift like a feather it is in reality unmovable. I have never encountered this combination of lightness and strength in another perfume. From a distance it smells velvety but up close it has a peppery sting. The rose itself is an over-ripe red bloom with its petals wide open exposing sweet and powdery golden anthers. What is more vivid in this rose is not the photorealism of the rose scent itself but the reality of the velvety texture of its petals. It is not sweet but it has a mature fruitiness, a fuzzy, sticky abstract fruitiness. As time passes the red rose becomes paler and whiter. Softer and younger. Underneath the topnotes there is this exquisite, old-fashioned heart of iris, vetiver and greenness that supports the top and lifts it like a balloon. I thank the gods of marketing dynamics that made this accord, which was so typically feminine a few decades ago, so undesirable to modern female perfume buyers that it has lost all its past associations with this gender. Having lost its collective memory load it is now reinvented and perfectly suitable for men. The heart of Nombre Noir has a lot in common with Chanel No I9 and Jacomo Silences but with a completely counter-intuitive brightness. In the drydown the abtract rose is still there but now it is fresh, pale and coupled with a delicate suede note.
Nombre Noir has nothing to do with darkness. It is all about regeneration. Watching its development is like watching a slow motion video of a bud blooming and dying, but in reverse. Maturity is followed by youth, freshness and potential. This is not a beautifully done rose dominant fragrance because everything about this flower is abstract. More important than the flower itself are the fuzz on the petals, the dewdrops, the dust.
ELENA VOSNAKI: PERFUME SHRINE
Have you ever lost sleep over the notion of an unattainable ideal? Have you longed and ached for that which you have not even experienced? Are you like the hero in Steppenwolf , a lone soul in search of the sublime revelation of self in the whirlwind of a crumbling civilization? Those questions might ring silly to someone who hasn’t known the pang of desire that a beautiful perfume stirs in the soul. And Nombre Noir is one such beautiful but unattainable perfume. In a revelation of Lachesis I happened upon a little stash of it out of the blue; the elusive Kooh-i-Noor that had been escaping me for long. Or so I thought. Years passed since the last batch of this black glove has been produced and I wonder how much of its initial beauty has been smeared like mascara after a hard night partying. I will probably never know. What I do know is that it was immediately and unknownigly admired by my discerning companion who proclaimed it “beautiful and haunting”. It is just my luck that he always loves the rare and expensive things, I guess. For what is worth I will cherish the little I do have and not break my neck in vain.
Nombre Noir was created in 1981 by nose Jean-Yves Leroy, one of the in-house perfumers for the Japanese brand Shiseido, under the artistic direction of Serge Lutens and Yusui Kumai, aiming to create their first “western” fragrance. Lutens chose an extremely expensive natural osmanthus and a synthetic aromachemical, a big-stock damascone molecule of rosy-woody with prune. In The Emperor of Scent, Turin called it “one of the five great perfumes of the world” and lamented its passing, creating a stampede on Ebay for the elusive golden juice of olfactory paradise. The perfume became infamous for its breakthrough packaging designed in collaboration among Serge Lutens, Shuichi Ikeda and Masataka Matsubara. “The most unremittingly, sleekly, maniacally luxurious packaging you can imagine: a black octagonal glass Chinese bottle nestled in exquisitely folded black origami of the most sensuous standard.” Despite its high retail price, however, Nombre Noir was losing money because of the packaging, according to rumours. And then it disappeared, to be lamentably discontinued shortly thereafter. The real reason seems to be because the high percentage of damascones contained contributed to the perfume being photo-sensitising. Damascones are potent aromacemicals synthesized in the lab through a difficult procedure that is reflected in their price. Because of that and their diffusive odour profile they are usually used with restraint, except for cases when the perfumer wants to make a point, like in Poison with its exaggeration of alpha and beta damascone or indeed in Nombre Noir. Alpha-damascone is rosy floral with a fruity aspect atop a camphorous note and winey nuances while beta-damascone has tobacco shades along with plummy sweetness. Alas their deterioration upon sunlight is another reason they are usually kept in minute quantities in perfume compositions. Except for Nombre Noir. And that was the death toll on it. The furore started with Turin’s quote and perfume lovers the world over were losing precious sleep over not having experienced this ingenious marvel of nature and lab mechanics. Everyone who followed the perfume community had heard about it but they thought it exiled in distant Peoria.
To me the fragrance of Nombre Noir is akin to a sonorous sonata that is echoed across a vast hall full of oxidised-metal (so as to look dark) chandeliers. There is the high ceiling of cedary notes, like those in Feminite du Bois but scaled a bit down, that keeps the atmosphere somber, yet the plush of the velvet cushions and the brocade curtains lend a baroque fruitiness to the proceedings, like dried raisins and prunes left out for all to savour, not unlike the hyperbole that is Poison by Dior. The sublime rose accord is laced with a boozy and tea-smokey note, restrained and not old fashioned at all, recalling to mind the unusual treatment that was destined to it in the exclusive Lutens scent Rose de Nuit. I can see how this could be worn like nocturnal ammunition against the crassness of a crumbling civilization.
*
Trailing Duncan down the streets of Ginza as he wore this scent for the first time for me, so I could experience it from afar and from different angles, I had to ask myself honestly, and as objectively as possible, if the perfume lived up to this adoring reputation. Was it as unique and divinely beautful as people had said? Would you, the people reading this, be missing out on an essential and integral experience of la vie parfumée if you had never smelled it?
I think the answer might be a tentative no. While beautiful and compelling (both of us did really like it right away), it is also quite familiar. This is not a perfume that just appeared out of nowhere, from the cavernous gloom of Serge Lutens’ heart, but was part of that early nineteen eighties trend of gothic/new romantic roses; chypric and gallantly glamorous new scents that marked the end of the seventies with a new taste for urban excess; the sound of Roxy Music’s Dance Away and Avalon, the sharply tailored creations of Yves Saint Laurent at the peak of his powers: fashion, and perfume, as costume. If you are familiar with Sinan, or Knowing by Estée Lauder, then you will have a rough idea of the ‘electric rose’ family of perfumes that Nombre Noir falls into, but in truth I would say that it is more a continuum of themes that were explored in Shiseido’s exquisite Inouï (which I prefer), the richness of Féminité Du Bois, and it is quite obviously also the prototype for Lutens’ later Rose De Nuit.
*
Nombre Noir is, undoubtedly, a very opulent and gorgeous rose. A power perfume. Glowering, concentrated, and smouldering in its deep wooden essences, smooth, with a high quality osmanthus absolute in the oiled and unctuous top notes that puts me in mind, for a moment, of vintage Patou I000 parfum. But where I000 is all elegant poise and almost overstated refinement, very French, very Parisian, I do find that Nombre Noir is somehow very definitely Japanese; very Tokyo in the middle of the burgeoning bubble economy, the time when it was released; I see rich women in the latest sharp-shouldered fashions; heavily made-up Japanese Grace Joneses channelling Shiseido’s angular, almost kabuki maquillage: business lunches; chic, expensive bars in the heart of Shinjuku; long, and thickly enamelled nails (the perfume is dispensed onto the skin like a brush for vernis à ongles, a pinpointed nail applicator, and this feels apt; the scent goes on almost like paint, like an ointment; a nuclear fissioned dot of scent that will bloom like a viper on the pulsepoints and whisper its sexual, state of the art story): ‘the bridge between west and east’: the message that perfume is here: the scent a rich, deep sanctuary of luxe and unspoken glamour.
Definitely unspoken, somehow: secrets locked inside a hard, lacquered black box: a passive-aggressive tension between silence and a dressed-to-kill clamouring for attention. Something watchful and guarded (despite its veneer of vermilion extroversion): a sense of brilliant containment.
So while I ultimately, after repeated testings of the perfume, don’t personally feel that Nombre Noir is as essential, or quite as exquisite as others seem to think, it is nevertheless one of, if not the very best, of its stylish and, ostentatiously era-specific kin. I can imagine some women smelling quite stunning in its grasp as they left their apartments at night for assignations in the depths of Tokyo’s labyrinthine, neon honeycombs: – a perfume like a shield or concealed weapon; an armour. As the rose blooms and reaches its strongest point, a beautifully dry and apricot-touched, resinously potent note of marjoram and coriander-laced cedarwood begins to grow, that lasts for hours, and becomes quite seriously hypnotic, drawing you in, shutting you out.
One last detail that I almost forgot: the price.
Five hundred yen.
Two pounds seventy.
Four dollars.
We went to a snake shop in Yokohama earlier this evening, as the D is doing a snake-based dance piece at a tiny theatre in Tokyo tomorrow night and we wondered if there might be some last minute props.
The ‘hebiya‘, or place that sells all things dead snakeish, has been there forever it would seem; unchanging in the nineteen years that I have been in this country (though I have never been inside, or if I have it was only once, and long ago) : dried, and dessicated, whitening snake bodies in the window panes, a man at the end of the shop beyond wooden Chinese screens who, when he looks at you from afar, makes you feel you shouldn’t enter.
We did anyway today but god the stench: I was so disoriented by it I couldn’t even bring myself to take photos (these here are stock ones taken from the internet). Cobras gasping half out of jars; vipers; anacondas; all manner of decaying and formaldeyding serpents in varying states of undress and decomposition as well as turtles wrapped in plastic bags just out there drying on the counter and god knows what else stacked up in chairs and drawers and in glass cabinets. It smelled unearthly; of rotting reptile and amphibian flesh, slimy; yellowing, repugnant: one of the most memorably foul and gut-churning odour experiences I have had in a very long time; we were out of there in a flash as I Iet out a breath and gasped in air deeply on the shopping street pavement.
If the man in the shop does, as I suspect, have some other businesses going on out in the back (because, how much business can a ‘hebiya’ make? ” Hang on just a sec, I’m just popping out to the snake shop….”) this scent is canny on his part: no one is ever going to be able to stand being in that place for more than a couple of seconds, not even the police. The smell of dead snakes, here, is assaulting; vituperous, sickening, the kind of thing that kids would do for a dare. Go on I dare you. Try and stay in that snake shop in Yokohama for a full five minutes…..
On the subject of snakes, though, and dance: perfume in performance art is a very underrated layer of meaning and effectiveness that can work quite brilliantly in adding psychological and sensorial depths to a piece by closing off your more rational receptors and allowing you to be more convincingly seduced on a three dimensional level by what you are experiencing (see also my piece earlier this year on The SmelI Of Kabuki). I have been intending to write about this for a while, but I remember a couple of years ago how a young butoh dancer, at Duncan’s studio, the beautiful Moe, after coming to my house and discovering By Kilian Love, then used that perfume in a mesmerizingly dream-like dance piece at the Kazuo Ono studio, emerging out of the dark as slowly as a Rothko stain as the edges of her sweet and lovely perfume rose out hypnotically into the audience. Another friend, and full time performance artist, Dominique BB, was also amazed when I presented to her the harsh and exacting Black March by I Hate Perfume (as she was doing a project with that exact name); its uncompromising and fierce smell of damp earth, death and cruel bulbs an intriguing fit for similar themes that she was exploring.
But to Snake/ Succubus, tomorrow’s thing, still being gestated as we speak, I was wondering if you have any suggestions for vivid, and serpentine perfumes? Duncan wants something a bit shocking, a smell that will hypnotize the audience into the mood of the performance when he comes out, snake-hipped, on to the stage. I am thinking L’Artisan Parfumeur’s Humeur Jalouse, if I have any left in my cabinets upstairs because there is nothing more stinging nettlish, poisonous and green, but perhaps there is something else you know that would work. Jacomo Silences? Something earthier, more biting: spicy?
What perfume would be perfect for a snake?
Filed under Flowers
