Category Archives: Flowers

Yes, whoever said it the other day was right. Frederic Malle’s brilliantly named ( and smelling ) Synthetic Jungle has been changed to Synthetic Nature. Just seen the bottle in Isetan

What aesthetics-devoid PC fuckery is this ? What leach of any poetry / poeticism / common sense ?

Who could ‘Synthetic Jungle’ have possibly been offending ?

The lemurs? The python?

A piece I wrote for Electimuss on Puritas because I love it. This is now my favourite perfume on d- a gorgeous, airy frankincense with perfect sillage.

https://www.electimuss.com/blogs/news/frankincense-the-sacred-essence

It has been a turbulent year. Most of my close friends have had extreme stress – deaths in the family, work issues, relationship strife, health problems, house disasters- and that’s before you even start thinking about the violent flux that has been the world, which no one in their right mind could consider calm or stable. The Year Of The Dragon was certainly energetic, Jesus – but it was more than many of us could handle. I myself have had a rather tumultuous time, not on an even keel, very up and down – my sudden announcement in the early summer that I needed to be off work for my knee troubles never mind the students and their exam success was considered blasphemy in my organization, with my roiling up the schedules and student prognostica in boulders of rocketing magma thrown with abandonment like Donald Trump: oh impulsive Sagittarius, can’t you think things through more?; I acquiesced, agreed to have surgery later, but the seas have never quite become as calm or waveless as I would have liked in the time since (bring on the Christmas and New Year Holiday…I just need to be outside of a super organized and obedient Japanese administrative structure for a few minutes.)

In the annals of human history, I wonder how 2024 will be rated by the scholars. War, Regime change, drastic political lurchings, freak weather systems, but no one has the energy to think about ‘the environment’ any more with everything else going on even though that is all we really have…. (a Netflix documentary on the waste that Amazon and other greedy megaliths cause on a daily basis almost pushed me over the edge when I was bombarded with all the commercial Christmas crap yesterday in Yokohama station…..all these things that we just don’t need….it actually brought on a headache.) But, like everyone else, I am just dragged along on the inevitable tide; this is the stupid society we have chosen, the way of life that is deemed to be normal, and there’s nothing I can do personally about it so let’s just crack open another beer.

This has definitely been a transitional year. I have been tempestuous – the global atmosphere itself so full of upheavals and strife that even if all were perfect in my life it would be impossible to find real serenity in any case, never inured or cut off from my surroundings as some people choose to be , but there have definitely been positives in 2024 that I am very grateful for. In some ways this has been a year of (re)connection. Me and D are super happy. So many nice experiences together. My family and I, after a difficult period, are back on track and I really look forward to seeing them again in the spring back in the UK if we can. Yes, there have been some bust ups with friends here in Japan when I have gone off the boil because my nervous system is sometimes so overwhelmed with all the various stimuli that I can’t quite nail social interactions. But real friends are real friends and we smooth out the wrinkles and keep going (thanks Melanie, Yoichi and Yukichi and others).

Another excellent development in the last academic yearhas been my relationship with my Japanese colleagues in the English department. For seven years, I was cast out into a wilderness of isolation because of my inability to connect with another foreign teacher that joined the company with whom I shared mutual toxicity, bizarre because I liked him in many ways and he me, but the other’s presence made our hairs stand on end and hearts beat fast in absolute phobic rejection of each other to the extent that in the end it was agreed by the powers that be we couldn’t be in the same building (he once told me that often, when I entered the room, the coldness of my eyes spread through the room like poisonous ice fog and gave everyone the chills; an observation I have never quite recovered from (I wrote about this rather vividly in my strange piece on The Caucasian in Japan, Replicants if you fancy indulging in yet more psychodrama). The upshot of all this, anyway -sorry Mandy Aftel, I always end up dragging myself too much into perfume reviews, don’t I? What a narcissist! Who cares about your work dynamic, the readers exasperate, just tell us about the mthfckng perfume..). All in good time, children, all in good time-

no, the disastrous result of all this co-worker neurosis for me personally was that because it was agreed by the kamisamatachi gods upstairs be that we couldn’t possibly work together any more, I ended up not working with the English teachers, but rather only with the very foreigner-shy maths and science teachers, or the even more elusive Japanese language and Social Studies teachers, with whom I barely exchanged a word : often just a heavy lidded closed off Edvard Munch character in a unpeopled, miserable vista.

Then, o jubilation – the other ultrasensitive person in question mercifully left at the end of last year- suddenly, to everyone’s amazement, I could have sworn he was going to stay for life with his ho ho ho Santa ‘gregariousness’ – and though I genuinely wish him well, I can’t deny that his departure hasn’t helped enormously in my day to day interactions. Now that I mainly work with the English teachers, as well as the odd friendly biology and economics teacher who I get along perfectly well with, I can actually relax in the teachers’ room : I finally feel like part of a team. We all like each other. There is never any aggro, unpleasantness, sarcasm, personality clashes – it is always calm and genteel. One new teacher who joined in the spring ostentatiously loves tea, and is often brewing this or that high end blend and pouring it out in paper cups for everyone, something I find rather charming, so the other day I decided on an impulse to give him some of my favourite tea on earth, Vietnamese tra sen -or lotus – a floral green tea I first tried in a very beautiful and dreamy situation in Hanoi and whose flavour and smell I still adore.

I wrote about this blissful drink in my Hypnosis of Lotus piece; I find the taste and aroma of tra sen to be both relaxing and mentally clarifying at the same time – it is also very enjoyable heavily diluted in a big 2L bottle of water and refrigerated and taken out for the day in hot summer weather – just so fragrant. Familiar, yet not, it smells a little like jasmine tea, but both more tangy and with gentle balsamic and vanillic undertones in the base. The tea connoisseur inhaled it from the packet and exhaled happily – he seemed delighted to have added it to his collection of upscale tea leaves he keeps in his desk draw and I imagine that the lotus will be doing the rounds in the teacher’s room when I go into the school tomorrow afternoon.

I have never smelled lotus oil, and especially not blue lotus oil, which sounds impossibly exotic but which is what natural perfume queen Mandy Aftel uses as the main opening accord of her new perfume Sacré Bleu. A quick online check tells me that the essence extracted from Egyptian blue lotus flowers is deeply calming, hypnotic – and apparently induces ‘lucid dreaming’. The dried and crushed flowers can also be smoked, like a joint (‘intoxicating’, ‘even hallucinatory’ according to some accounts), and Portia of Perfume Posse’s perfect review can tell you more about the olfactory development of this perfume in note by more detail – I can’t better it.

I will admit I found the composition initially confounding: what is this? D couldn’t quite get his head round it either. It was only when I honed in on the lotus in the opening and made the direct connection with the tea I know so well, the scent it emanates from the canister in concentration, that I could really smell the lotus if you know what I mean; with the florality of boronia there is also a definite black grape aroma, a fruity tang that then ingeniously melts into a really beautiful aged Mysore sandalwood essence melded over black tea: strangely addictive. This final accord in Sacre Bleu is the kind of real, deep rooted santal you want clinging to your winter cardigan as you potter about peacefully contemplating （or not, just trying to live in the moment,) I find it very comforting, especially in the superior extrait de parfum, where the sandalwood comes even more to the fore, as you knew it would. This feels grounding – but also opening. I will save my samples for days at home over the new year break, when I hope to take even more stock of things and work out ways to live more healthily next year. Another of the positives from 2024 has been the e-bike that the d got me in the summer; oh the liberation, how wonderful Kamakura has come back in reach again rather than the stuffy crush of suburban bus routes: the beauty of cycling down past Hachimangu Shrine on a sunny December morning with its now empty lotus pond, which in the height of summer will be full to the brim with lotus flowers opening on the surface of the water to the accompaniment of splashing koi carp, and herons.

But to open the question to the readership floor …

Has 2024 been fulfilling/relaxing for you personally, or have you also been tossed about like a tumble dried sock in the chaotic cyclone that is human existence?

If so, how do you regain your inner composure ? What is your personal lotus? What takes you to a more tranquil, serener space……?

As the cold approaches predictably I am drawn towards thick sweet perfumes that take off the edge. Funnily though, the most ambered perfume I bought this year (I ended up going back to the Indonesian shop on Arab Street in Singapore and bought three bottles – it was $6 after all and I should have got more but it was the last day and the suitcase was heaving) – which I wore, really blissfully – my favourite entire perfume experience this year ? ironically, on several sweltering equatorial evenings in August. Many perfumistas swear by heavy ambres in hot weather – perverse and antituitive, when we know you are supposed to wear citric/ aqueous watercolours, but the hardcore sisters like to sweat those perfumes out note by note layer by layer, feel the animal.

I do too, on occasion, think fuck it and wear Bal A Versailles Cologne on dirty skin on a warm day and reap the benefits. Usually, though, I much prefer an unspontaneous shower a couple hours before going out, lying on a bed – in this case our strange corner side room hanging right over a busy Singaporean thoroughfare – and letting that scent really sink into me as I know it is going to bloom later : if there is a category of scent that works on me it is amber, quite Shalimarissime.

I almost missed this one. Almost everything on the shop round the corner from the central mosque was oudh; some with unexpected textures and nuances I could have lingered over but we were boiling and needed lunch : quickly I sprayed on the only one that seemed non masculine / agar and kept walking.

Soon I was getting headspinning flashbacks to the original Obsession – the first formulation of which was…. well I can’t quite find the words for how I felt about it. Quietly deranging maybe: morbidly sensual, I wanted to plunge my powdered teeth into women when they got into a taxi; some Moschino ! – ie a tad sickly – the cheap top notes are a tad plastic banana – perhaps a drop of Must De Cartier; at any rate, this business is a real slow burner that takes its own sweet time to reveal its delicious labdanum – which stays for a day or two on the body – some rubbed off on the cat again the other day – sorry, Mori !but for three or four days she smelled sublime.

It only hit me recently what this actually smells of. Nag Champa incense, which I love. That powdered floral wist that hangs in room corners and softens hard emotions. In winter, or in summer, you sometimes need such heartwarming balm.

admittedly I didn’t want to be out at all but it was a friend’s 60th so you go anyway

what I don’t understand is this tendency, among certain people, to just answer questions, as though a superstar – yes this guy had an aura, looked like Jim Jarmusch but with long white hair and smelled strangely divine – you would have sworn it was Lutens Borneo 1840: perfume perfection but he professed not to know what it was, you know, being a man – but never ask any questions back

this repugnant narcissism tends to be more rife among north americans – it just does – you supply the reasons – but this particular dude was from rugby in the west midlands – quite close to where I am from

anyway – who gives a shit

the point is

ASK SOME QUESTIONS BACK, FUCKING SELF ABSORBED MOTHERFUCKER

I love the colour pink.

Although I almost never wear it, the eye popping nature of pink is instantaneous stimulation. In a J-world where almost everyone has been wearing tediously muted subtlety for the last decade – beige, beige, cream, beige, camel, grey, beige, and desaturated Muji and Uniqlo ‘blues’, ‘reds’ (russet: ugh I HATE IT !!) and ‘greens’ – as well as beige, whenever someone – a student; someone on the street – has the temerity to beige-bust and actually shine in a beautiful moment of vivid colour expression I feel momentarily lifted out of the stultifying beige bog that to me signifies a puny meek surrender to the sludge of stultifying conformity that can sometimes clog the veins of Japanese society.

Admittedly, pink can certainly be annoying. Nicki Minaj overdoes it, and I didn’t like the particular ugly cerise shade of last year’s ’Barbie Phenom’ ( which almost made me want to wear beige ) – it is certainly a colour very prone to the tacky.

And yet pink neon. Searing through the soul like a Soft Cell 12” in Soho, ‘81. Peonies unfurling in a side garden. Exquisite pale pink kimonos. Dragon fruit. Cockatoos. In Japan there are even translucent pink Koshu grapes that are splendidiferous – I have never tried them – but look

:::: pink gives a lift to the soul.

The latest release from Frederic Malle, a photo of which I should have taken at the Takashimaya department store in Yokohama which really pulled in my eye deeply : bottles stacked glowing atop one another, electricly lit I stopped in my tracks bewitched – smells very pink – extraordinarily pink. I liked it immediately. Like bubblegum, it is all peaches and vanilla and ylang ylang and banana – tuberose and iso e super and aldehydes, ooh lots of modern aldehydes – sickly, perhaps, but with soul and inner complexity. It has a definite presence.

I know nothing about ‘Acne Studios’ – whose current frontice-woman is Charli XCX, whose smash hit album Brat d got me for my birthday :

The ad campaign isn’t especially appealing to me and the brand seems to be in the Dieselish bracket – high end but not Balenciaga – the Malle collaboration conferring cool on the latter, olfactive kudos on the former , but I did like the presentation and perfume itself.

Acne says

I wouldn’t personally say neo-classical, more ‘future vintage’. There is a bold, gourmand element that reads contemporary, but I was also taken back to one of the pinkiest perfumes ever made, the gorgeous More by Shiseido / which I have written a lot about before if you want to learn more, as well as the ludicrously cutesie D’Humeur A Rire from the L’Artisan Parfumeur limited edition ‘Mood Swings’ box I bought on the King’s Road some time in the early 90’s :all strawberry shortcakes, little girls’ ribbons and enameled nails – jumbled up together with the inescapable fabric softeners of your local laundromat. It is quite fluffy, fattening and nice, if utterly unaffordable (¥54,000 for 100ml to smell like Britney Spears in a tumble dryer?): I could happily have it in my collection and would probably sometimes indulge, but it is not a perfume I will be scurrying to save up for.

There is also the issue of the word itself : ACNE.

Fortunately unafflicted myself by every pubescent’s worst nightmare, I still inevitably succumbed to zits and pimples as a self conscious teenager – squeeze or leave ?- and remember clearly the fuss I would make to buy a cover up stick at Boots The Chemists, mortified to be a boy buying makeup but then I could never understand why people would just stand there in the school corridor with their eye focusing boil in the middle of their face and not at least try to mitigate its horrendousness.

No, ACNE – meaning spots and oozing facial pustules and craters – certainly does not appeal. But all in all, I have to say, this perfume rather does.

Just had a very indulgent and varied birthday weekend beginning on Saturday with diva-ish backstage drama at our Shinjuku drag show where we performed in front of a twenty minute film we had made especially for the night – here is me five minutes before going on

…. I think it went ok although there were inevitable fuckups and regrets that brought the night down a little afterwards

The next day we realized that it was all much better than we had at first realized (: eau, les artistes !) and had a really lovely afternoon in Ueno Park, the more austere, spacious and fadedly elegant old part of Tokyo where we had lunch at the legendary BunkaKaikan museum cafe – hadn’t been there in years, and with all the yellowing ginkgo and zelkova trees reflected in gilded mirrors we spent a good couple of hours just sighing contentedly in semi-melancholic autumnal bliss.

I could quite happily have stayed there all afternoon it was so relaxing (plus walking has become rather painful indeed; all of this was a partial celebratory swansong) but I wanted to go to an exhibition – to just randomly choose one from the several imposing museums in the vicinity ): Monet was horrendously popular and I didn’t fancy old Japanese clay burial masks from millennia before ; we opted for a survey of birds at the Science Museum instead – a full selection of stuffed and preserved ornithology presented cleverly , although after a while with all the crowds and the overheating we were as birded out as Tippi Hedren.

Time for a stroll in the cold but lovely late autumnal fresh air.

We came across the Geidai Art School where I had never been before.

The museum cafe happened to be having a free mini concert of gagaku – ancient court music, still performed in the imperial household on special occasions – so we thought why not : perfect. We went inside.

The musicians were milling at the back of the shop. I couldn’t help approaching them , the scent of incense gradually flowing through the space so exquisite and penetrating – fresh, deeply dignified, and darkly spiced , this was not the hangover of smoke on fabric but smelled cold air fresh – and I simply had to enquire further.

Surprisingly accommodating and down to earth – with all their courtly regalia I suppose I had expected a more supercilious mien – one of the ladies graciously let me inhale the sleeves of her kimono : cloves, camphor, agarwood, cinnamon and unknown ephemera – it was profoundly sense-altering ; you could tell that the garments had been stored somewhere with sachets of incense ingredients in a wooden chest in a beautiful room somewhere and with the music – discordant to many ears with its strangely pitched flutes and koto and bagpipe-like instruments, but to us penetrating and cathartic – I could imagine the sounds echoing through the valleys and forests of Nara, the scent and music commingling in a way that felt transporting.

“It was like breathing “ D said afterwards.