In Japan, I erroneously assumed that there had to be something repellent about this most husky of essences, earthy and bodily, like crumbs of old food stuck firmly in a smoker’s unkempt beard ; soil-like and buried; pernicious…insidious.
I realized, then – especially in recent times – , that natural patchouli essence is in fact everywhere. When you pass by the ‘daily incense’ section in the supermarket, stacked next to chemical cleansers and laundry detergent, the unmistakeable powdery combination of patchouli, benzoin and camphor rises up even from the cheapest blends like ghosts from the past and the present; penetrating but soothing , allusive, mysterious.
Intense, vivid and lingering patchouli oil as a perfume, or as part of aroma therapeutic spray mists and other lotions , is also a currently ubiquitous part of the Japanese urban scentscape. What I find to be a fearfully divisive perfume ingredient (patchouli-haters are among the most vociferously oppositional note-phobes in the fragrance community) clearly isn’t here in the J- city; with its inherent naturalness, deep-grounding earthiness and somewhat nerve-blunting anti-stress properties, patchouli, in its full resplendent state – not bastardized and castrated in its duty free sweet caramel popular form – despite its fuzzier, hippier connotations, often seems to denote a certain clarity.
Probably the reason why the shelf stock of this natural oil roll on (a 10% Javan patchouli in jojoba oil blend ) is fast dwindling at the only niche perfume shop I visited today in a department store in Fujisawa. It is basically everything you could want in a patchouli – the intuitively selected dilution prevents it from becoming too hoary or filth-hairy; it has the right balance of earth and sweet dryness; you can use it quite easily to bolster other perfumes ( I am fancying it in tandem with vintage Gentleman de Givenchy or the castoreum mimosa rose patchouli of the Paloma Picasso edp at an upcoming Halloween party on Sunday evening ). Personally, I find sometimes, that patchouli can grate on one’s inner aesthetics when the mood isn’t right – it can feel intrusive and neverending; rough; sick and scratchy; but when you are in the perfect state of mind to just bury yourself deeper underground, to escape everything, be at one with all its leaves and the musty foraging forest roots, a pleasingly complex but simple scent such as this one, just a little glided onto the skin, is undoubtedly the natural way to go.
I had been wanting to write about the osmanthus. About how late it was, and how strange it felt. But then the attacks on Israel, and the attacks on Gaza happened – unstomachable, brutal atrocities, so much immediate and destruction (is this the beginning ? In all probability, yes… so much to fear and dread in this situation it’s really horrible) – and it just didn’t feel right.
For the record, though, though a little dry perhaps at first, after the long hot summer when the flowers probably felt too cowed by the intense heat to open, they did, finally, two weeks later than usual, and the heady, intense, lush innocence of the white floral tangerine apricot the florets emit took you unawares; while perfuming the entire air of cities, all opening in tandem with their underground connections and hidden language, a constant, brimming smell hum of warm October, certain pockets of intenser osmanthus would make you gasp and stop in your tracks as your sad thoughts and worries about the world were suddenly interrupted, momentarily vanishing as you looked up and saw you were standing directly beneath a blossoming tree..
Last night we went to see Martin Scorcese’s new film, Killers Of The Flower Moon, a slow, dark and rivetingly poisonous epic about the deliberate eradication of Osage Nation Indians by avaricious Oklahoma oil men back in the 1920’s. Violent, beautiful and sad, as I wept quietly in my cinema seat at the end, and reflecting on it again today, I thought about how deeply, deeply regrettable and tragic it is that human beings are still so myopic and ethnocentric that they (we) can so easily dehumanize and annihilate each other without compunction, shoot bullets into each other’s heads at close range, blow people up, drive knives into the backs of others – women, babies, anyone, with such vicious ferocity and unforgivingly intense hatred.
There is no real connection between what I am writing about here, other than the fact that the Osage loved, and love a, particular flower that blossoms in vast swathes of carpeted colour in Spring, just as all cultures do flowers all over the world; the sakura cherry blossom and beloved kinmokusei / osmanthus in Japan; the roses in the Middle East. I don’t know precisely what flowers in Palestine and Israel in spring and autumn, but I fervently hope that some sense and humanity can prevail, that more precious life is not wasted in vain, that a semblance of peace is restored in the region, and that the people there, like me, will be able to just walk along and for a second or two, lose themselves contentedly in the transporting eternality of the air .
There is no flower more prevalent in Japanese perfumery than rose. While osmanthus (still to flower in my front garden; almost two weeks late!) inspires a lot of seasonal limited edition perfume solids and hand cremes and the like, is generally beloved as a scent choice, other flowers don’t quite scale the same echelon. I have smelled some interesting lilies on women recently; tuberose very rarely (Diptyque’s aquatic Do Son is undergoing a resurgence at the moment due to clever marketing by the brand but trumpeting garish and animal white florals barely make the grade, at least in public). Peony, sometimes. But No. Rose is the go to. Rōzu. Bara. (Aesop’s Rōzu, all heavy and rich, incidentally, is also becoming popular; in fact the brand has just opened two spacious stores in two of the main department stores in Yokohama, where scent and ‘aroma’ in general seems to be in a boom period, particularly when the perfumes in question are natural). In many ways a welcome trend – I can happily substitute the brassy crude western current vanilla chemical florals for the more deeply reverberating tones of sandalwood and Atlas cedar as a contemporary representative trope, even if – sorry, I am never satisfied, am I? – there is something that grates about the slightly self-righteous home spun mama hair in a just so top bun aspect to some of these boisé botanical concoctions that makes me want to run off pleadingly back to Serge Lutens.
At least with the current vogue for more ‘wellness-inducing ‘ woody perfumes, scents that may actually have true aromatherepeutic elements in them that relax the wearer (and those around them), we are thankfully a million miles away from the hurlsome wave of synthetic roses commuters were forced to endure for a while a few years ago when the noisome Eau Des Quatre Reines by L’Occitane, definitely in my most hated perfumes of all time hall of fame and an acolyte of the equally repellent Eau Chloe (and all the other Paul Smiths and Valentinos and ‘Lanvins’ and god knows what else that followed in their post-Calvin Klein Escape we will never forgive you) wake, all hideously ruled the airwaves for far too long with a nauseating prissiness that made you yearn for anosmia.
Very in-all-the-magazines and of-the-moment-being talked about domestic brand Shiro (‘white’ in Japanese) is always heaving with customers in its Lumine concession in Yokohama trying out its high end diffusers and room sprays, body milks and cool preparations, as well as its sensibly sized range of well put together fragrances (all quite nice, with a certain edge to them that allow them to avoid the predictable banalities). I have hovered around perhaps my favourite, Spice Of Life twice now, wondering whether I want it or not: a rose-based spice perfume of ginger and cloves, cardamon and cinnamon over woods that is aromatic, dense, a little sweet, possibly a little patronizing – it has a certain middle class, snug sense of superiority – but also with an incensed, patchouli-ish edge that also reminds me of the original, to die-for Patchouli for L’Occitane, whose demise it is difficult to write about without feeling a little sad. In any case, while not by any means a rose soliflore (none of the perfumes I am reviewing today are), there is something about this rose spice that keeps magnetizing me back to it. We shall see.
Osaji is a brand with all the requisite built-in ambiguity required in the current ‘enigmatic’ style, and I have already bought two of their narcissus blends and wondered about their violet and hinoki and incense perfumes as well; there is always a backdrop of something powdery and curious and hotspring-onsen soapiness, a certain autumnal shadowiness to their perfumes that is quite appealing (and not too expensive). With the recent more niche-ish Wild Rose Collection, the prices are tripled, but so is the dressiness. While the ‘daytime’ collection I bought might be good for a Zushi-based organic housewife picking up the kids on her bicycle after a ‘vegetable plate’ lunch at a typically chichi farmer’s market style cafe with her well to do paisleyesque friends, the wild roses are heavier, more brocaded, more dressed up, with a certain sense of expectantly tasteful occasion.
No 9, billed as a ‘balsamic rose’, is a very nice, plush and rounded frankincense perfume with rose benzoin accents and ylang pepper frillery, but this scent is ultimately all about the play between a very warm and lilting olibanum resin and the wild rose oils used in the blend; I want to try this one on skin. No 18 is more baroque and kaleidoscopic-complex, with bright spices and citruses and rose accents playing off sandalwood, cedarwood and patchouli – I was almost reminded briefly of the Italianate style of men’s perfumes like Ungaro III here; vivid and confident, this is one for the rucola and wild chives brigade who also visit the opera.
I posted a wildly appreciative review earlier in the year of Tokyo based Hinoqii’s powdered temple incense perfume Zukoh, all dreamy and spicy, user friendly and subtly pre-yoga, but the brand also has three quite interesting fragrances in its portfolio, all 100% natural, all centred around the Japanese cypress tree oil, hinoki.
When I first tried these perfumes on skin in the summertime (I will review Kei and Rei in forthcoming posts) I was totally not in the mood for them. Hinoki is very terpentinic and sharp in many ways; deeply autumnal and pine-needley, almost antiseptic, and that kind of smell just doesn’t always suit my frame of mind, particularly when I am just lusting after gardenia.
At the same time, I do love this kind of smell. Hinoki essence is inherently purifying; you can feel it cleaning and clearing the air around you, both literally and emotionally/ spiritually, and though Roku (“A dusky iridescent sky flowing into the forest foothills, where clear rivers and mountains mysteriously meet”) has an initially quite strange combination of hinoki, shiso (perilla), fresh rose notes and citric yuzu in its opening salvo, one that puts you gently and elegantly somewhere you are not sure of – in itself a recommendation – on skin, the blend then gently dries down to an exquisite incense/vetiver note, deeply earthy and dry, like the male dry scatch of a Buddhist monk’s kimono; something private, reflective; redeeming.
Neil : We both rather like this one. But you do have to like mandarin.
Duncan : I’m not particularly a mandarin fan – I sometimes find mandarin scents somewhat thin and artificial – but I did like this one with the grapefruit and mint tones. You are definitely more inclined to mandarin, though.
N: As a fan of the original Miller Harris Mandarine Vert, Il Profumo’s Mandarino and even the old Body Shop Satsuma perfume oil (a collector’s item these days, now going for 250 dollars on eBay!) I can do a bright n fruity array of sunshine citrus in a perfume’s opening (here augmented with grapefruit, rhubarb, bitter orange, petitgrain, and a splash of spearmint and basil), though I think the mossy cedarwood musk of the base ultimately works better on you. You woke up this morning still emanating a nice cozy glow. Fuzzy and soft. But still with a vague hint of that mandarin accord. Last night when we met after work in Hiratsuka, with your four sprays on the wrists, body and neck I felt a bit …sabotaged.
D: Haha. Good! Maybe this is the ‘disruptive’ and ‘bold’ aspect that the blurb trumpets. Though I must admit, wearing it I didn’t feel sabotaged or intoxicated or sabotaging or intoxicating; I felt comfortable and upbeat – nifty even. Nothing jarring or overdone about it. I enjoyed it on my skin.
N: I think the contrast with flirtatious tuberose in the heart works well in this perfume; what I am grateful for in this one is the total lack of vanilla. It shows you can still have an attention grabbing scent without engorging the throats of those around you with custard sucrose.
D: Amen.
N: I like the quotation inscribed on the box: “I was trying to be good, but then I realised it’s just a matter of time”- the idea of ‘self-sabotage’. Here the idea seems to be giving in to one’s inner hedonist, something you and I do all too easily because we get so bored with the dust and drear of daily reality – we enter the dreamworld instead at almost any given opportunity. Sometimes it possibly goes too far, but then all the cinematic flashbacks in the mind do seem worth it.
D: Well, upon opening the parcel, you immediately commented on the Almodóvar-like design of the box – the retro font of SABOTAGE with the washes of overlapping colour behind – like the titles of Bad Education or All About My Mother or many of those movies. The packaging suggests drama and cinema, yes.
N: Sabotage is also a big theme on Rupaul’s Drag Race, where the contestants sometimes yield to their ‘inner saboteur’ ; in other words, they let their inner demons peel away at their self-confidence, lose vitality and belief and then mess up during their performances. Life can definitely feel like a constant tight rope walk between self-doubt and a pull towards the negative, and the opposite – cheerful positivity with an eye of optimism for the future, when you just feel happy. I don’t know if perfume can swing you completely from one state to another – though for me, natural jasmine definitely has a mood boosting quality – I feel it at the physiological level, but so, though to a slightly lesser degree, do oranges and clementines and mandarins, actually. You just can’t help feeling heartened and pointed in the right direction. Although Sabotage might lack complexity in its final stages – it is a bit of a three-tone bastion (mandarin, tuberose, wood-musk) – overall in some ways, it has an immediate kick to it that puts you in a pleasing state of mind.
D: Definitely my experience of wearing it : a kind of lightly citric canelé, but a low-calorie rendition, that somehow manages to still be a treat without all the gourmand excesses – which is to say, it’s a tasteful creation with a certain clipped restraint.
N: I have to say that I don’t find it especially 90’s though. Art De Parfum is marketing Sabotage as a throwback to rave culture (though the citruses do come across as acid-smiley), but I don’t remember anything smelling quite like this back then. The CK One type of scent is entirely dissimilar; much more abstract and subtle; for me this is much more contemporary with its upfrontness, but, as you say, with the thick, vanillic sweetness mercifully removed: that heavily ubiquitous vulgarian odour present for example in Lady Million Royal by Paco Rabanne, which I reviewed recently with total contempt.
D: Yeah absolutely. When you think of classic 90s scents – the ozonics, or the sugary confections like Trésor, this is definitely quite different. (I guess Roma is earlier than Trésor – but similarly luxuriantly sweet, some might say tooth-rotting.)
N: In terms of the ultimate self-sabotage, this perfume could easily have been effectively worn by Michaella McCollum, the protagonist of that beyond-fascinating documentary we watched on Netflix recently, ‘Confessions of an Ibiza Drug Mule’. Naive girl leaves Ireland in 2013, jumps on a plane to Ibiza, puts on tight party dresses and is a hit on under the strobe lights by local fiends (a fresh spritz of Sabotage would be perfect to cut through the noise in a club situation and hit on somebody; the first fresh top accord goes straight to the amygdala) but then things really do go badly. I will never forget the moment when, imagining she is about to pick up an order for someone near Majorca, she boards a plane for Lima, having no idea where it is (always daydreaming in school geography class) until she sees the flight path on the screen monitor in front of her and realizes she is bound for the ‘jungles of South America’. Talk about the ultimate party come down.
D: Surely she would carry off this scent with aplomb. She should definitely be the poster girl. (Art de Parfum get onto it toute suite. 😂) She was so guileless and appealing somehow.
N: Ultimately, though you are open mouthed with disbelief at her foolishness and initial blind and total unworldliness, ending up in a Peruvian hell hole of a jail for smuggling in cocaine ‘hidden’ in a shit load of porridge boxes (who carries that much cereal about with them?), hats off to her in the end for getting through it all eventually, having full realizations of her stupidity (and not being afraid to admit it in front of the world), and then, when she pulls herself together again, becoming a player in prison by properly learning Spanish and working together with her team of inmates; becoming a hair stylist and beautician while in there and then talking her way out of her predicament in the Lima court, to then sashay her way like a movie star through customs at Belfast airport as cool and collected as Paris Hilton. A spray of eye-brightening Sabotage, just before manouevering the clamour of the furious media (who seemed to have been expecting a penitential wizened gnome to appear, having barely survived her ordeal), and who were not expecting her glamourous demeanour and perfectly coiffed new blonde do, surely would only have upped the furore.
“Dirty Peach captures the first days of summer with a sweet and tart scent that exudes sun-warmed peach skin and the sensual, soft curves of creamy white jasmine “
is the ploy for this new fragrance by Heretic, a brand I almost always seem to rather like, and this new peach version of the central conceit of slightly ‘dirtied’ main components is no exception. It smells full and lovely – cute, yet sufficiently adult – and much less toxic than Tom Ford’s more evil and concentrated Bitter Peach, which felt too lacquered and overdone to me personally.
Funnily enough, I bought a gorgeous jasmine and peach soap by Kew Gardens in my lunch break last weekin the same department store I have just smelled Heretic;
I have been enjoying showering with it so much – heaven, tbh – that as an olfactory experiment, I sliced off a portion of the towel dried giant soap and have been carrying it around in my pocket to see how much the scent would then emanate – a pleasing amount, actually while also wearing as much Heeley Jasmine OD to work as I feel I can realistically get away with ; peach perfumes can be overpowering and artificial; in the Kew, the peach is a minor player, sublimating itself in a divine jasmine / stephanotis heart; in Heretic, this duality is reversed, the peach note reminding me strongly of Twinings Te Alla Pesca. teabags of which my Italian friends used to boil up in a saucepan in Rome and call a cup of tea ( now this really would be considered heresy in the UK).
That Dirty Peach is designed to evoke the beginnings of summer makes me melancholy (because autumn itself, for me, exquisite though it may be, is just a slow plunge into melancholia; the inevitable heat being leached from the air every year just feels like a personal tragedy, though most people around me seem rightfully relieved seeing that it was the hottest September on record in Japan).
I can’t help my physiology though. And perhaps this is why I latch onto these delicious treats, peaches so happily summer ripe, the smell of jasmine, for me, basically a sanctuary
( vast array of harmonious and yet contrasting notes courtesy of Fragrantica)
(excuse the ugly photo, it is now nighttime)
An oddball of a ‘floral aldehyde’ ( is it? Where Caleche makes perfect sense to me, this hairflowing, maney outlier will always remain at my arm’s length (just like horses : creatures I have never particularly taken to). having completed the Amazone set today with a bargain rare vintage parfum, I thought I would take you on a jaunt across the Hermesian tundra.
At times alarmingly sweet (a throbbing heart of narcissus and hay like warmth), strangely adorable (you could easily fall in love with her), yet offputtingly uncategorizable – and with on the spectrum levels of unheldback honesty, there is an integrity and coherence to the range as a whole which means that if you like one iteration of this complicated, and in some ways quite beautiful, scent, you will probably require it in every format.
Expecting – and perhaps hoping for – added earthiness, I was shocked an hour or so ago by the intense mid-pitched sweetness of the Amazone extrait (no lower chords, just force on the keys and a sustain pedal); like a posy of narcissus sewn inside a moss velvet cushion; unstitched.
The Eau de parfum /- pictured at top and in my view the one you need – has a calm pulsion and the best balance -respiring confidently from within – the edt more hyacinth and galbanum, but also an aspect of wan; the edf ( eau de fraicheur ) a somewhat different beast: a different scent, even, with added mandarin and bergamot and raspberry/cassis but for the era slightly awkwardly passé ( I like it though, and there’s still the heart of the Amazone at the core). You could, and should, in fact, probably, wear all four of these Amazones on the same day and night in different combinations and proportions if you can personally gel with the peculiarity of this semi-androgynous composition (not quite a chypre: insufficient basenotes – vetiver, patchouli, – to ground the hunter, who just wants to roam free) ; not pretty enough, despite the flowers, to constitute any ‘classical’ floral aldehyde ; yet warmly appeasing; sincere, unbroken
I was surprised to find out the other day that stephanotis is the same thing as jasmine madagascar. Perhaps I knew this already and forgot. But there is something very Englishy about stephanotis; all floral coronated trellises and nuptial shepherdesses, whereas the latter comes from Madagascar, an entirely different visual; the home of wide-eyed lemurs, chameleons; ylang ylang and vanilla vines.
The potted Japanese stephanotises I have on my balcony, now creeping everywhere and clasping onto other plants, when flowering late in August and early September, have a white, truculent texture; slightly spongey
; steadfast and moony, rather than triumphant and fragrantissimo, like the related but contrasting French jasmine de Grasse and its permanent blooming state of plenary ecstacy.
As written on the bottle of Culpeper Stephanotis, this traditional, bright but almost unassuming flower for the new bride is ‘sweet-smelling, young and fresh’, a quality that certainly comes through in the slightly faded tincture left in the bottle bequeathed to me from Emma this summer after she had done a nostalgic clear out of old teenage bathroom drawers. The note of stephanotis in this simple is the same one in the beautiful Nocturnes by Caron (see my original review); similar also, to the more pungent and blowsy version found in the vintage Floris (more powdery, sandalwood orange blossom; allegedly first sold in 1786!, with a proud trumpeting of bolstered stephanotis heady in the heart and head). Niche house Grandiflorum also has its own more subtle and moonlit evocation of the flowers, Madagascan Jasmine https://theblacknarcissus.com/2016/06/21/madagascan-jasmine-by-grandiflora-2015/– see the original review for that lifelike, strange and green stephanotis perfume here.
Nocturnes, an aldehydic white floral and personal favourite, was once savaged by Luca Turin as being a perfume that should never have existed (ie purposeless, and very wrong and conservatively boring in some way – comparing it to a beauty pageant in Texas : for some reason he just absolutely detested it) but I always thought it gorgeous; both ceremonious – in the sense of ‘I am really putting on some perfume tonight’ – yet also intimate, alluring, and discreet.
Much, in fact, like the captured flowers in this old Culpeper stephanotis. Silently outreaching at nighttime couched in green. Translucent and glowing.
