Fleur de Weil is a very bright, piquant, gentle yet unassuming little floral bouquet that, according to Parfumo – there is very little information available out there nor bottles available as it was apparently released then immediately withdrawn – contains nothing but notes fleuries.
Thank God. Sometimes I can do without the whole top to bottom gradation shebang, the trudging through the treacle of fake ouds and vanillas and white musks and all the rest of the synthetic horror that clings to your skin like a giant sea snail, unscrubbable;
The beauty of Fleur De Weil, of which I only have a tiny miniature I picked up in some junk shop or other, is that it is so fraiche: a field of flowers with some tints of fruits – roses, marigolds, honeysuckle, orange blossoms all diluted and glassified into the most delicious shampoo sheen; worn with my winter orange lip balm I made myself (70% blood orange; 28% grapefruit; 2% geranium ) as I leave the house on this bright and sunny day I smell spanglingly clean and delightful.
If only there were more of it!
Do you have any of your own unicorns / gone scents / yearnings for silo levels of scented plenitude ?
I have a perfect perfumed relationship with Chant D’Aromes. As in, I don’t wear this scent often but am excited that it is there in my collection – and more importantly, I love it when I do.
I have two bottles. One, the classical beauty you see above – the vintage, the exquisite, though like easily broken champagne glasses in the washing up bowl the base stem long became severed from the flacon – so woeful ! – so she is hidden away somewhere with probably just an eighth left. So luminous, so mossy.
I also have this (reformulated) edition in the bee bottle (late nineties/ early 2000’s?) though mine is still two thirds full. I actually love this iteration just as much. Though instantly familiar in many ways – even if you have never smelled CdA – can’t find the French circumflexes on my phone – pardonnez-moi – you will still know the type: that fresh, green, floral aldehydic, light and airy chypre reminiscent of Carven’s lettuce fresh Ma Griffe (Jean Paul Guerlain’s first wife, for whom the perfumer first made CdA as a wedding gift, had sworn true love to the Carven, but Jean Paul was determined to create something similar but even lovelier – and who can deny that he succeeded ?
Ma Griffe is far more crisp, pared down – almost startingly fresh and new. CdA is fuller, lilting, one of the happiest perfumes ever made.
There is nothing else quite like it.
The expected bergamot and mandarins are a gateway to the orchard, but swiftly an unusual clasping of gardenia, honeysuckle and mirabelle plum take centre stage, softened with cloves and frankincense, sandalwood, vetiver and just a whisper of vanilla, all evaporating dizzily upwards in a swirl of joyous aldehydes jasmine and ylang:rose, soft, yet trilling with the soon to come classic chypre base – caressing, velveteen – never in doubt. Green is the colour of my true love’s eyes ; delicate; rich.
This is a sparing relationship : I don’t want to impose, nor waste the bottle. The likelihood of my finding another one is sparse. Vintage perfume is disappearing from view, and what is left is often extortionately expensive
-like the bottle above, which I would adore to own, but which is this price
on eBay.
It’s a shame. Japan is still awash with vintage Mitsouko. I love, need, and wear Mitsouko more frequently than I admit to myself – to me it is a comfort scent that provides a pleasantly cushioning backdrop whether at home or outside. It just….is. I don’t thrill to it, on the whole – there are exceptions to that rule when I feel plush and divine – but on the whole it is more like a trusted old friend I have perhaps taken a little for granted.
If I were a true raving Mitsouko devotee, though, I would definitely move into temporary lodgings in Japan with empty suitcases on a special, ambassadorial Perfume Visa, lie in bed drinking bubbles and simply order and order from online auction sites here like Mercari- where Mitsouko, in all its forms and iterations – and almost always vintage – can be had for a song
(¥1000 = about five pounds / seven dollars)
Mitsouko is like tap water here. ABSURDLY cheap. The bottle above to the right (¥2,200) is my preferred form of the extrait : just a tenner for spiced, sylvan perfection!
There are only two historically entrenched Guerlains in the fragrance fundaments au Japon, hence the relative abundance.Vol De Nuit is the only other ubiquitous Guerlain ( not Shalimar ) here in certain circles : only Night Flight and Mitsouko made it into the Japanese psyche in the same way as Chanel No 5 or Diorissimo from Paris as bona fide omiyage high level souvenirs : Apres L’Ondee? What is that ? As you know, Vol De Nuit is one of my absolute holy grails so I take solace in knowing there is still so much of it out there in dusty old Tokyo armoires hidden in lower drawers of some stoic nonogenarian gritting her teeth rather than de-seal some pretentious French Perfume but for me, those black and white outer sixties boxes with the inner zebra skin felt rorsasch are perhaps theultimate aesthetic.
So. You see. Not cheap as chips like our Mitsy, but still a darn lot more inexpensive than other delicious Guerlains I have also been craving such as a perfect Nahema.
Insanely overpriced!
I have just about enough Nahema to be going on with so can probably survive the avarice of lusting after these bottles (because sometimes you just do want to practically drown yourself in these fumes, n’est-ce pas rather than wistfully dabbing and noting the fall in the meniscus). And yet there is also a great pleasure in treasuring the preciousness of what is left. They become almost rarified olfactive artefacts you stare at respectfully valuing each drop.Chant D’Aromes is also now far beyond my reach.
(WANT ! but shan’t have..) Semi affordable ! But
It is a kind or of a shame though, because I sprayed on some Aromes the other day on an intuitive whim on skin and a scarf with a certain level of Chapmanian abandonment and thoroughly enjoyed it. Aaaagggh, And then yesterday, at our friends apartment in Yokohama for a delayed and rescheduled Christmas Dinner/ Boxing Day/ New Yeat’s celebration complete with Christmas pudding and home made brandy butter and mulled wine, after giving Justin a big bag of samples of all the high end woody and oudhy things that he can pull off and I would never even attempt to (we had a fabulous sniffathon after dinner): Setsuko then brought out her own collection – including a Caron Fleur De Rocaille I once gave her as well as a pristinissimo diorissimo extrait I also bequeathed – HOW GOOD DOES SHE SMELL IN THAT MUGUET WHEN DRESSED UP IN A FORMAL KIMONO ? You will just have to take my word for it.
But anyway. She then mentioned Guerlain Chsnt D’Aromes.
‘Remember you once gave me a bottle ?’ she asked me, amazed that I absolutely didn’t.
‘Yes, you did. I love it’
I said she must have been mistaken. I hold onto this perfume rather zealously and it is not one I would tend to give out to other people.
‘No, you did – I will show you’
– and she went off to retrieve it.
What she brought back to the table was one of those 7ml Mitsouko extrait bottles – the ones still used by Guerlain – that I must have washed rigorously and aired and dried and relabelled, and then decanted some of the delightfully vernal elixir into – empty now but still unmistakeably CHANT D’AROMES. We glanced at each other. ‘Ah… yes’.
D and I did part one of our annual perfume collection polishing and dustathon today and I calculated, sly-eyed, re-evaluating my two bottles that I probably do have enough left to give her a refill. She wouldn’t let me take the bottle of though – she wants to come here, to the source. I had totally forgotten ever giving any to Setsuko in the first place but then she said ‘I really like it- so fresh, light, floral but … soft ‘ so emphatically that I realized there was no other option : sometimes, things in life this beautiful do simply need to be shared
I heard myself say just this upon entering one location of a very cheap and good quality Japanese Chinese eatery whose name I can never remember and realizing — shock !!! gasp !!!!!!! horror!!!! ——— you didn’t have to order via QR code menu or with the emenu device —- this place ain’t aspirational – but could order things with a real live human.
You know what. Things are tiring enough. And I understand (I don’t understand at all) that pressing some ugly grubby screen when the server is standing right there in front of you go boomer etc etc might make things easier for someone up in the chain but come on it was so much better like this : —- in fact this ‘franchise’ (a novella could easily be written about even the characters there tonight good lordy the fuss being made over some passing chili oil and gyoza juice being dropped onto some old bloke’s uniqlo fleece – you’d think he was the king of Bhutan —- but anyway ) yes: tonight was a whole panoply of humanity in bite size dumpling ——- the twitching servers making at least some eye to eye contact and I loved the whole humanmess of it
Had a bit of a bronchitis week – couldn’t get out of bed for three days but now on the mend. But why is it that in such situations I am always drawn to this kind of spiced, brocaded rose perfume? I am covered in this one today and I am loving it.
To quote myself from an old review:
Armani is a strange creature. To me it is a glorious mix of the chaste and the carnal, a baroque green rose chypre with a troubling ambery afterglow, overlaid delicately with herbs, woods, and spices. A ghostly girl in white ruffles who in reality has the heart of a tiger. Insistent, pallid, hypersensitive, you think of her at first, until her lushness and erotic undertones take over and you realize she is a powerhouse.
In certain reviews I have read about vintage Armani, the talk is all of chypre, and it is true that the scent, particularly in one early black vintage bottle I have, has quite a lot of oakmoss (the defining characteristic of this perfume group): but the benzoin and amber that graze the fuzzier, semi-oriental later stages of the scent, along with the heart notes of Turkish and Bulgarian roses, take it very far away from the witchier, darker scents we associate with that classification, such as Paloma Picasso, 1000, and Magie Noire.
Armani is a perfume of tension. The fluttering sweetness of the rosed heart is overlayed with an atypical top note of glinting, tart marigold/tagetes (a trendy note of the period, also a main feature in Lauren and Courrèges in Blue), and a very green accord of pineapple, galbanum and spearmint which persists throughout the fragrance, even in the more nebulous later stages. This accord, painted in virginal brushstrokes, contrasts brilliantly with the spiced Reine Margot below, those honeyed red roses buttressed with notes of cyclamen, orchid and narcissus. It is all very, very, sweet, and very clingy somehow, with a wide-eyed quality that disturbs and gets under the skin.
In 1982 I myself did not have any opportunities to smell this on anybody as the girls at my school were all wearing Impulse, or Exclamation! . The first time I smelled Armani Pour Femme was ten years later in Rome. I was waiting in line to enrol at the Università di Sapienza, and a girl, standing in front of me, who we will call Christina, introduced herself. It is possible that I am quite a callous, superficial person because what I remember more about her than anything else to this day is her scent : most other things have faded away. Having said that, it is also true she was very reticent and didn’t give much away herself. . But somehow she didn’t need to: she wore Armani to perfection, and it almost spoke for her: its sweetness, its strange greenness, and that disturbing, ambered aureole surrounded her with a very palpable sophisticated allure; a classical, almost grave, enigma.
Why am I so put off by the idea of watching Angelina Jolie play Maria Callas in Pablo Larrain’s new ‘sumptuous’ bio-pic, Maria?
It’s strange, because I find Jolie mesmerizing. She strikes me as being a genuine weirdo – which I totally relate to : a unique actress – who else could have played the psycho-slippery female version of Cuckoo’s -Nest-Jack Nicholson in ‘Girl, Interrupted’, for which she won the Oscar for best supporting actress? This was a character whose IQ was so through the roof she essentially no longer knew how to exist. It was over-acting – if you want to look at it that way – but the ingestible craziness ate the screen. She was incredible in Gia, where she played a drug-addicted model. I like her in action films like Salt, and especially in the hyper-violent Wanted, which she nailed. She was very good in Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, even if the spotlight was stolen from her rather ruinously by her own lipstick (in a sepia film, yes her lips are to die for I realize, and I do love red lipstick – but mamma mia, ‘Chanel, sorry Guerlain Rouge A Levres’ should have been credited as the co-star). Her directing, in my opinion, is underrated – both Unbreakable, about Japanese atrocities in World War II, and First They Killed My Father, about the horrors committed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, were solid, earnest, affecting, if occasionally heavy-handed films, even if her disastrous self-directed ‘divorce drama’ starring her very self and her ex-husband and now sworn enemy, Brad Pitt was literally unwatchable (when Brad starts ‘speaking French’……..my goodness…… )
I also respect and like Chilean director Pablo Larrain. Maria is the third film in his trilogy of Famous But Rather Troubled Twentieth Century Women – my subtitle, not his – the others being Jackie, where the divine Natalie Portman did a pretty good job of inhabiting the supposedly icy Onassis in the post Kennedy shooting era – the blood-soaked shirt was unforgettable, but the fact that I liked it didn’t surprise me; as most Black Narcissi know rather too well, I am now, and will forever, be obsessed with Ms Portman because of her role as Nina Sayers in the magnificent Black Swan, my piece on which is probably the most emotional and torrid you will ever get from me. I can’t see a picture of her now, even in some standardized pink Dior poster, without getting a micro-pang in the heart and stomach.
What surprised me far more was how much I loved Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana in the second part of the trilogy, ‘Spencer’. I find that Kristen’s overly-self-conscious lip-biting and general twitchery to denote ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ can sometimes work against her – she was atrocious in David Cronenberg’s Crimes Of The Future, like an AI android programmed to act like Kristen Stewart (or perhaps that was the entire point, and I missed it?). I thought the nervous energy she always brings to the table was just right in Personal Shopper, a ghost story about a fashion assistant flitting between London and Paris and a film I adore; and though I didn’t believe for a second that she was Jean Seberg, she looked so utterly beautiful in that film with her blonde crop and cut off tops – and it was so well crafted as a whole- that I didn’t remotely care.
But Princess Di? I suppose we Brits have a thing about others doing bad posh English accents. Some have still not got over Dick Van Dyke’s cockney in Mary Poppins – though it’s now obviously a one of a kind classic (and me and D often sing it at karaoke).. And Keanu Reeves in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, whose astonishingly absymal mauling of an upper class English voice is indescribable……………… comes full circle, in the end, and suits the high campery of the entire proceedings (oh my god, Lucy writhing in the garden…..) Eventually you wouldn’t want it any other way. In general, though, perhaps because I am an English teacher, I am overly sensitive to these things. A bad accent usually means a bad film for me. Some can nail it perfectly; Emma Stone can for sure; she was Britisher than British in Poor Things and The Favourite; I think Julianne Moore is pretty good; I love Nicole Kidman but I often think there is an Australian undertone to whatever accent she is trying out, whether American or British – her lurching into proper Aussie in the otherwise brilliant Portrait Of A Lady by Jane Campion really took you out of the action in what was otherwise an exquisitely overwrought film; one moment you thought you were in eighteenth century London, then you suddenly found yourself in Crocodile Dundee. Gillian Anderson can obviously do both because she is both British and American – although D walked in one day while I was watching The Crown – a series I thought was superlative in the extreme but which he couldn’t abide – we do have our differences; I can do more mainstream than he can – and he stood open mouthed, flabbergasted by the horrendousness of Anderson’s wheezing, sidewalking hairsprayed crustacean impression ofThatcher which had us both collapsing into hysterics (and for which she obviously won a lot of prestigious awards…I am usually out of sync with what ‘Academies’ etc considers to be good acting). The opposite is obviously also true with American accents, of course. You can’t take the Hermione out of Emma Watson. Michael Caine has never even tried. My hairs stand on end every time I see a Brit – particularly Daniel Craig – who I like otherwise attempt to do a classic Southern Drawl – but you know better than me so do tell me otherwise..
Anyway. I couldn’t for a second imagine Kristen Stewart, she who was so perfect as a moody, and very American teenager in the Twilight Series, madly in love with a blood-addicted but deliberately appetite suppressing vampire Robert Pattison – becoming British royalty. And my mother’s shackles were definitely raised to cushion-chewing levels one night, brother and father gone to bed, as we turned down the lights, opened up another bottle of red, while my sister, D and I settled down on the sofa one evening to watch the Diana bio-pic at my parent’s house. I love cinematic debates – it fascinates me how easily opinions differ, even with close friends whose taste is so often similar to yours; my friend Peter and I often sit agog at the other’s praises and dismissals; He liked The House Of Gucci; D and I both thought it was beyond dreadful – Gaga’s accent, porca miseria, D even slunk off to bed rather than continue the sufferance of watching it – which is quite an extreme blip of politeness for him but I suppose his taste membranes had just been too ingloriously busted; I myself eventually got into some of the bald-headed gilded ridiculousness of it all by the end (but really, just give the Sopranos or Godfather). Strangely, M3GAN, the camp as Christmas horror movie – my entire favourite of last year, but which Peter didn’t especially adhere to, whereas I saw it twice in the cinema – was an 80% family success; it thoroughly hooked in my dad, who loved the intricacies of the narrative and immediately declared he wanted to see it again; my brother, who was roaring thumping the armchair in approval several times, and my sister, who was shrieking in uninhibited delight with me and D all cackling in delirium and who later declared she was going to order a Megan poster for her house the next day. (Mum thought it was stupid, which it kind of is.)
But I digress! A few tassles were chewed during ‘Spencer’, and I think she reached its conclusion – but I can’t be sure. D, my sister Deborah, and I were somewhat transported by it, though. Stewart nailed the essence. The whole was so fragile and beautiful. The score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood made it even better. And what I love about Larrain’s films is the subversion of the usual ultrapredictable character arc: the overexposition and beginning, the problem to be resolved and then the conclusion, all the principles of basic screenwriting which in truth have never interested me past about the age of three. I don’t NEED that. I just want to be SUSPENDED in something, to lose myself in a different time and place. And boy were we suspended. I could feel the physical and emotional coldness of The Palace as they all ‘holidayed’ up in Scotland, freezing Diana out. She felt convincingly, and tragically, alone. She captured that. You were in the mid-beginnings of her downward spiral. ‘Atmospheric’ doesn’t begin to hint at how full the film is with re-memorable period ambience- to me every detail, perfect; even the slightly off kilter fish eye lens of a South American director putting his own spin on things so classically British made it all feel slightly odd; renewed, and therefore more real, when so many period dramas, to me, just feel like a trip to the taxidermist’s. When Diana just can’t take any more of the stuffiness of The Firm, and recklessly drives her two young sons to a fast food restaurant to a backdrop of Mike And The Mechanics’ All I Need Is A Miracle – I was in heaven; it was so heartlifting and beautiful, despite the awful tragedy you know is going to happen not so far into the future…..
Yes, Larrain likes his tragic divas and socialites. All of whom had fine taste in scent, by the way. Jackie liked the sophisticatedly dirty – Bal A Versailles, Jicky; Joy, 1000 – I love the idea of her crêping past the crowds coolly and defiantly in the original Patou 1000 extrait – so alluring, so dignified, so superb in every respect; Krigler Patchouli – apparently a very straight up but deep New York patchouli I have never experienced but can imagine being adeptly prickly yet warm; and Jil Sander 4, a rich, spicy, early nineties number when she wanted to funk things up; on the days she wanted to be more aerated and floral, she allegedly wore Fleurissimo, but so, probably, did Queen Nefertiti, seeing that the house of Creed was launched roughly around the year 1365 BC.
Diana, true to the demure image she gave off – I forgot to say, sorry Kristen, you were great, but have you seen Australian Elizabeth Debicki as Diana in the last series of the Crown? She was taller than Di was – ok, shave her shins off! – but the acting, the accent, my god, how could someone do it THAT perfectly? – her whole dememenour was off the charts jaw-droppingly good, in a way that you felt you were actually watching Diana, rather than an impressionistic ‘capturing’; no, I was saying , sorry, re Diana’s butter wouldn’t melt initial aura, that she also went intentionally for the publically demure in her scenting, favouring Penhaligons’ Bluebell for daywear, which Thatcher also wore, presumably plagiarizing the-then-queen-to-be’s scent in an attempt to give her a whiff of humanity; she also wore Houbigant’s Quelque Fleurs, which is a pretty little number, and for warmer moments Hermès Faubourg 24, which my mum wears and gets complimented on, as well as the devastatingly lovely Van Cleef & Arpels’s First – her actual signature.
Perfume-wise, Callas went somewhere in between, classic and sophisticated, but favouring the rose/jasmine/sandalwood safe comfort zone of Chanel No 5 – can’t go wrong with that – and the cooler, but similar- Detchema De Revillon (ditto). Intriguingly, she is also said to have used Luchino Visconti’s favourite perfume, Hammam Bouquet, quite a dirty, androgynously powder pressed – a definite hint of perspiration – rose, iris and sandalwood perfume; it has its angelic aspects, but the fact that it was based on the Turkish Baths at Jermyn Street tells us quite a lot about its probable, far more sensual, origins. Maria Callas, once her eyesight was failing, would apparently leave Hammam-Drenched handkerchiefs on the stage, in the precise places she needed to be during that night’s opera, led to her arias by her perfume.
I am presuming that both Pablo Larrain, and Angelina Jolie, have tried dousing up the props and the curtains with Hammam Bouquet to give some veritas to the proceedings of Maria ; the trailers I have seen leave me deeply stiffening and cringeing (as do the pictures I have put up above; to me she just feels instinctively, disastrously not the girl.) I just can’t place Callas and Jolie together, at all. But at the same time, I am not Pablo Larrain, who is an aesthetic virtuoso, and I do like to be proven wrong; the first two films took a little getting used to before I could try to sink into their luxuriant textures, so perhaps this one will do too – if I don’t choke to death in horror on my popcorn; part of me is definitely intrigued by how all of this indulgence and majesticity pans out on screen (things take longer to get on Netflix and in cinemas than they do wherever you are) so I would love to hear your personal insights on any of the points shared above if you have already seen it and to hear that I am mistaken. Is it good? Is it terrible? Just middling? What’s your take? If you are not a cinephile, then let’s talk about the divas’ scents instead, or insights into their lives. But if any of you were in raptures watching ‘Maria’ and recommend it in any shape or form – even the apartments in Paris, etc, the mood, because I can be easily swayed by convincing and instinctual, not prissy – and particularly CGI – production design – we saw Gladiator II at the cinema on my birthday and it was as persuasive as a giant set of lego; like Angelina Jolie, who was apparently terrified to the core of taking on a singing role, and this part specificially, but took it anyway because of her fear, I just might take the plunge.
One thing I (re) realized : much as I would love to meet up again with some of the lovely perfumisti and perfumiste I have got to know over the years and can imagine us communing post-armathon, back-of-handathon and wristathon and sample-sprayed cards bursting meaninglessly out of shoved in books over vino in some beautiful ancient charmery in Cannes, Milano or Firenze, the reality is that I am just too neurodivergente to possibly deal with all the chemical overwhelm.
I have become very olfactive-sensitive to pierce the-duodenum blood/metallic screech : I could have vomited smelling the Beaufort range of scents in Nose Shop Shinjuku, which to me make nails across the blackboard feel like a gentle manicure – these perfumes are my nemesis. There are plenty of that type around of course; people like them. Fair play if you do. For me personally, though, these EDs (endocrine disrupters – probably true for the majority of perfumes, let’s be honest), are nothing short of sprayable horror stories.
Thankfully, less desperate to be conceptual brands do still exist (in the old days the inspiration for the creation was usually just ‘let’s make an irresistible smelling perfume’) and I was pleased to realize how many longstanding ‘alternative’ brands still exist. I didn’t see any L’Artisan Parfumeur anywhere – are they ok ?- but all the usual suspects, from the Malles to The Different Company to Nicolai to Ella K – to Orchestre de Parfums to Unum to Bond No9, and many others were still going strong, some after decades; I found it gratifying that despite the constant tsunamis of new brands being birthed every day – often, in my view, just out of sheer greed and not real artistry (discuss): Giants like Le Labo, Diptyque, Creed, Byredo and Mariela Replca are all HUGE in Japan right now —-no, it was pleasing to me that even the less sledge-hammeresque niche houses are also now so entrenched in the public’s perfumed consciousness that they can continue not only to exist, but to also make good scent.
The fruity gourmand has obviously been done to death, but there is something about Dea Bendata – or Blessed Goddess – that speaks Seasonal Cheer. With all the spiced oranginess in the initial burst of Nepalese Timur pepper, pomegranate, green grape and Turkish rose; the warm balsams of the base ; the sense of fullness – not wretched spindles of corrosive irondust ladled callously over poisonous ozoned fake woods for the ponderous beard-clutching Hipster — make this perfume – like an Italian mulled wine and panettone, full of vivacity and good humour with a great deal of twinkle in its eye -rather appealing. In spiteful times, we sometimes need such generosity.
Well this is certainly a provocatively named perfume to come across on a Shinjuku afternoon – especially at this time of the year.
At first I assumed the name was pure sensationalism – and nothing wrong with that when there is so much extortionate ennui piled up on the shelves you have to get your pretentious customers’ attention somehow – but it turns out that the genesis for this what in many quarters would be considered completely blasphemous perfume – musty, dusty – and definitely somewhat lusty (but also, it must be said, a a little bit fusty) was a Danish performance piece from the patchouli-drenched unwashed musked decades during which the artist paraded stark naked in anti capitalist protest through the Copenhagen stock exchange) and cheers to that: Christ himself would hate our current systems which are inherently anti-Christian – just think about it for a moment: possibly the actual Anti-Christ has just been elected the next President Of America).
Does the perfume itself live up to the Sex Pistols level shockery of the title ? (I can still remember my puce-faced apoplectic grandfather when the group appeared on Top Of The Pops singing Anarchy In The UK : I was a terrified and very confused seven or eight year old cowering in the backdrop (but slightly excited)).
I agree with the brand, though – who might consider a grammatical editor – that the scent has integrity. It feels warm, whole.
