Category Archives: Flowers
WOULD YOU, COULD YOU, EAT A COCKROACH?
WARNING: THIS POST IS NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART
Caramel pudding with roundworms – Chinjuya restaurant, Yokohama
WARNING: THIS POST IS NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART, SO DON’T READ IT WHILE EATING YOUR LUNCH – I OF COURSE FULLY REALIZE HOW UTTERLY REPULSIVE IT IS AND WILL PROBABLY DELETE IT BY MORNING SO PLEASE DON’T ABANDON THE BLOG – I JUST CAN’T RESIST WRITING ABOUT IT AT THIS PARTICULAR MOMENT AS I AM JUST SO PERSONALLY SCANDALISED: IT WILL BE BACK TO THE FAMILIAR AND FRAGRANT BEFORE YOU CAN SAY MISS DIOR
I do not often do private lessons- only when the circumstances are right and they suit me – but it was very nice to see one of my students again tonight: Y, who I hadn’t seen for a while and who gave me some amazing omiyage or souvenir presents: some delicious Taiwanese fruit cakes; some green tea, and a bottle of vintage Jicky parfum (whaaaaaat I hear you cry, but it is true and out of the blue).
But anyway, that is another story. Our main point this evening is this: upon practicing ways to answer the question ‘What’s new?’, I was met with this: “Well, yesterday evening I went to a ‘rare animal restaurant……would you like to see the menu?”
I would.
(deep fat fried crocodile paw)
Now I have pretty quick-working nifty peepers that can scan a lot of visual information at a glance, and within a microsecond my eyes had feasted on pure horror: never mind the bear, the snake, the crocodile paw, the moth larvae… my sight had rested upon the unmentionable and the unthinkable: COCKROACH.
On a menu? To be eaten?
Gimmicky theme restaurant or not, there is some serious taboo-breaking going on here, even in jest. Cockroach? Are you sure that you want to read on?
Before I came to Japan I had never, to my knowledge, even seen one (fellow British people, do we even have them on our fair isle?) Upon arrival here, though, on this hot, and humid island, I came to know them. Their quivering antennae that send a chill through the body with their intuitive, post-nuclear intelligence: their foul, and dirty scuttling ways: their eggs (UGH>>>>>>>>>shuddddderr)
And I have had my own horror stories.
- Not knowing how to deal with one and hitting it and it breaking apart into perfect halves, allowing me to see the filth goo that dwelled within its lid:
2. Hitting another one with a slipper and not seeing its partner, which then proceeded to fly directly into my face (I literally lost my mind for a couple of seconds and fainted back on to the tatami)
and
3. Running to pick up the phone, barefoot, one hot summer’s evening and……….well I am sure you can imagine what happened next.
(this was all in our old house, incidentally: after five years in the new place – we moved to where we are now right after the earthquake – I am mercifully yet to come across one)
Suffice to it say, I am not a fan (but then again, who is?) They are repugnant, but to give them their fair play, I will say that I did once do a very strange lesson at my previous school in which we discussed whether human beings had the automatic right to kill them, an ethical debate in which I was sticking up for the roaches (I am quite interested in specieism as a philosophical idea as there is so much irrational and emotional idiocy bandied about when it comes to eating creatures: I have never for one second understood the logic that it is ok to eat a cow but not a cat (even though I have one): or a pig but not a dog (when the former is supposedly more intelligent and thus will suffer at least as much as a mutt). The Japanese eat raw horse here (basashi, and I tried it, and hated it), but then we in England eat pigeons and rabbits, or at least some fancy restaurants in London I have been to serve it, and that would be just as revolting to your average nihonjin as eating candied crickets (god they were vile) would be to a Cockney.
Still, when my student showed me the photos from the restaurant I must confess I stared in horror. I am not much of a meat person to be honest at the best of times (having been a Morrissey-influenced proper vegetarian for five years or so in my late teens…..oh the arguments, the fights, the screaming, the tears at the farmers’ gate as I wept tears in bovine, adolescent empathy, but I meant it, and still feel strangely guilty practically ever time I eat some flesh, even though I do, to be honest, quite often have a taste for it. )
No heart, or lungs, or brain, or skin for me though; just lean meat in small quantities, and, hypocritically, like most people, it can’t look like the creature in question. I just don’t want to be reminded of it, particularly if it were these poor chicks:
One minute they are mimosa fluff balls, the next they are this. Monstrous!
As for the other things that my student and her party sampled and digested (I in all honesty could never even venture anywhere near the VICINITY of a restaurant like that – apparently snake and bear didn’t smell very nice in Korean yakkiniku barbecue style ( I can’t even bear the original beef version….the smell of that meaty smoke on my clothes makes me feel complete and utter despair when I am riding the train back home afterwards), so the idea of my clothes fumees au serpent et a l’ours is even worse.
But moth larvae?!
BLEURRGH! (she said that even she couldn’t try this one)
and as for this………..thing….which we couldn’t even find the English name for, but some kind of mollusc or crustacean like insect, no money whatsoever in the world could induce me to even be in the same room. Oh sweet putrescence, it truly is revolting.
But you know what is coming next, so shield your eyes. Before you go around saying that Japanese people go around eating roaches, though, they really don’t. The ‘gokiburi’ has to be the most despised living entity in the whole of the country – people are phobic, there are adverts in summer times for how to get rid of them, and the idea of eating them would be as least as horrifying to virtually every citizen in this country as it would anywhere else. But Y did have a taste of them and declared them to be ‘delicious and creamy’.
Well she is certainly more audacious than I am. I think I would simply rather die.
Filed under Flowers, Psychodrama
A STAIRCASE JASMINE: : : ROUTE D’EMERAUDE by ISABEY (2012)
Jasmines come in all shapes and sizes : svelte, buxom, overloaded, even coy. Usually, though, they keep their jasminisms clear : “Je suis jasmin” , “ Io sono gelsomino” – their titular blooms clear and precise even as they rasp away at your ear and nose and do their sensual, jasminesque thang.
Route D’Emeraude, apparently inspired by a journey to the opium-growing Golden Triangle area of Laos, Thailand and Cambodia, initially also makes its green, green-tea sambac main theme very clear in its overtures: quite giddy and humid, top-registered and gleeful – very much a South East Asian variant of the flower rather than the Patou-like Jasmine de Grasse and its smoother, Chanel-owning cousins.
Similar to the sambac jasmine used in By Kilian’s Imperial Tea ( for anyone who has been to these countries or at least experienced their luscious wares, this smell will be all too familiar – the jasmine tea I bought from Vietnam last summer I opened for the first time the other day, for example, and found it almost embarrassingly sensuous and perfumed, particularly at the office). Fragrances that use this more carnal and tropical essence of jasmine smell very vibrant, exotic and extroverted. Isabey’s Route D’Emeraude also takes this tack in making a refreshingly jubilant scent that seems made just for a starlet (actual or imaginary): bare-shouldered, smiling, and descending a white staircase as perfume spirals flirtatiously from her person.
While the green notes in the top accord allow the jasmine flowers at the heart of the perfume to unfold themselves at their own pace in the opening, it soon becomes clear that rather than a delicate sambac soliflor, what we have here is a full bodied, semi-oriental multiflor, with quite adult tuberose and orange blossom underlaying the sambac, alongside intimations of a woodier, ambered, musk-driven benzoin adding to the intemperate and ‘intoxicating’ throw of the perfume as well as a crucial and anchoring, spicier element of cinnamon. In its texture, scope and overall sillage (quite extensive, I would imagine, if sprayed) one is reminded slightly of Nuits Indiennes by Louis Scherrer, with its licentious sensuality, but conversely also, of more proper American allegiances to coiffeured and society perfumes such as Estee Lauder’s Private Collection or even the perfumes by Elizabeth Taylor. An ‘event’ scent, in other words – and a creation that I quite like for its plushness and sense of occasion, although at heart (and only she knows where she comes from), this creature is perhaps a touch less artistic – even trashier, possibly – than she would ever dare to admit.
I MISS VIOLET by THE DIFFERENT COMPANY (2015)
YOU CERTAINLY DO …
This is a full on, fruit-throated little minx: plummy, osmanthussy, and violet to the max, a sort of Caron Aimez Moi by way of Creed’s Love In Black, rapacious and unapologetic, extravagant, and in love with all shades of mauve, purple and violet.
Quite nice, if a little throbbing and sweet.
Filed under Flowers
DAPHNE (FOR DAPHNE)
The scent: piquant and peppery lemon rose, accentuated by the rain.
Filed under Flowers
Party girl : LOU LOU by CACHAREL (1987)
Because I am SERIOUSLY into this perfume at the moment.
Olivia, at least I know you understand…..
NB:
I was very wrong about the reformulation in this original (and rather naive) review. While the re-edition does a brilliantly cunning approximation in the blaringly triumphant top notes, making them fresher, and dare I say it for a few seconds even more appealing, the dry down in this deceptive little wannabe is total and utter crudsville. Just wan and thin fake sandalwood, nothing, as our little baby Loulou chokes on an E and expires her last in a pile of plastic trash.
The ORIGINAL Loulou, unfazed and unhinged, just keeps on smoking, pouting…….flaunting…..and she smells gorgeous throughout: of almonds; of vanilla; of deepset heliotrope, of resins and of joss sticks: in hindsight a brilliantly, androgynously, incensed-sandalwood trouper.
Where her try-hard doppelgänger is already entering rigor mortis on her tray in the morgue; the real deal Loulou is tossing back a cherry brandy cocktail; smouldering; and laughing on a last minute plane to Goa….
Filed under Flowers
A SPRINGTIME DREAM : : HELIOTROPE by PERFUMER H (2015)
Of all the British perfumers – Penhaligons, Czech & Speake, Floris, Jo Malone, Angela Flanders, among others, it is Miller Harris, founded in 2000, that is perhaps the most consistent, both in terms of integrity, texture, and overall theme, yet also the most daring. Although I only have a couple of the house’s fragrances in my collection (Citron Citron, a tight and acerbic lemon, and the almost wilfully strange, sharp and contrapuntal Terre De Bois), this is a house that in my view has always combined a very appealing ‘English flower garden’ aesthetic with something harder, yet diffident, at its heart. From the uncompromised ferocity of Feuilles De Tabac, to the nonchalant pink feather boas of Noix De Tubereuse, the purple hippy Figue Amere or the melancholically rain-imbued La Pluie, you always sense in a Miller Harris perfume that there are more complex emotions lurking beneath ( I think this is the problem with many niche perfumes: where all the pizazz and luxe is very glinting and surface, emotionally, the scents are often dead inside). Base notes with Miller Harris are always rich and high quality and very contrasting with the more ethereal middle and top notes – there is a summer garden seriousness that belies the airy-fairy, raspberry trifle la la la.
It seems now though that Lyn Harris, always the sole perfumer for Miller Harris, has now left her original perfume house and started a brand new venture in London, the quite mysterious sounding ‘Perfumer H’. This new venture has a more stripped down and singular aesthetic – quite zen, almost, in terms of the shop surroundings and the bottle design – and currently just five perfumes that correspond to the classic fragrance classifications of citrus, floral, wood, oriental and fougere, a collection that will be refreshed bi-annually (though perfumes in the back catalogue will be still available for purchase).
They are all very good (reviews of the rest of the collection will come later) but I unhesitatingly first went straight for the Heliotrope, a powdery, anisic, almondy flower scent I am always drawn to – we even once had some actual heliotrope plants, faithfully true to the smell I was expecting from the perfumes I knew, if rather faint, in our old garden, until we discovered that the flowers are actually dangerous cat killers – highly toxic to those keen-eyed, fluffed up beasts – so that was that; but in any case, I often tend to enjoy floral confections that contain this note. Heliotrope forms an important part of the odour profiles of such classics as Guerlain’s Apres L’Ondee and L’Heure Bleue, as well as the gorgeous Loulou by Cacharel; soliflores are uncommon, but I did once consider buying LT Piver’s Heliotrope Blanc (though I feared I may have just ended smelling like a fat, lacy courtesan so I desisted in the end). Also Etro, who never shy away from unfashionable notes – smell their pure, Ouzo-ish aniseed Anice for an example – do a nice, powdery and sweet heliotrope that while cossettingly powdery and comforting to the nerves, is nevertheless a bit high on the caster sugar.
With her own Heliotrope (the ‘oriental’ in the current collection), Perfumer H is more cautious about overegging her almond pudding and instead goes for diaphanous and clear: the top accord of this perfume is delectable, floaty as an eggshell, closely dusted as sugared almonds, angelic: yet with the sense of waters still flowing below (it is quite floral and citric simultaneously), the vanillic bonbons of the base notes caressed by a prominent neroli/orange blossom note that I personally find a touch regretful as I just want the almonds: give me almonds, give me arsenic! give me cyanide! Almond blossom was always a smell that made me go almost delirious when I was at university, down by the river; its scent – so piercing and pure, both pensive and ecstatic – was the ultimate heralding of the English spring and the death of winter, and in Cambridge the gardens and the river at this time were so beautiful you could die – I would be doolally, and beside myself, skipping about like a March hare scavenging armfuls of tulips, but even at this age, now, even the presentiment of those vernal sensations still make me excited and happy to be alive.
This heliotrope scent brings back some of those memories. Of that delirious carefreeness. A calm and unfussed deliciousness. If the idea of a light, downy, orange blossom heliotrope tickles your fancy, therefore, I would highly recommend trying it. As the perfume settles on the skin, the heliotrope flowers nuzzle and fall asleep gently in their natural eiderdown, the orange flowers gone; the vanilla and powdered musks just right: not too sweet but not too thin, either – addictive but innocent: simple but not stupid.
Delightful!
I leave you with a nicely played rendition of Scott Joplin’s ‘Heliotrope Bouquet’:
FOUGERES AND THE BABE MAGNETS: Classics and otherwise in The Ladykillers’ Hall Of Fame………. featuring Kouros, Aramis, Paco Rabanne Pour Homme, Fahrenheit, Green Irish Tweed, Tsar, Drakkar Noir, Antaeus, Jazz, Platinum Egoïste, Azzaro Pour Homme, Safari, Cerruti 1881, Rive Gauche Pour Homme, Polo, others……
AND WHILE WE ARE ON THE SUBJECT OF LADY KILLERS…….
Filed under Flowers
MONSIEUR by EDITIONS DE PARFUMS FREDERIC MALLE (2015 )
Alfonso de Portage, race car driver, and one of the inspirations for ‘Monsieur’.
Gianni Agnelli, industralist, another.
Mark Birley, playboy billionaire: and yet another.
‘Manly and elegant… the formula, both simple and essential, has evoked, since its genesis, remorseless seducers who would playfully flit from women’s embraces to social merrymaking’.
Indeed. On smelling Editions De Parfums’ latest release, Monsieur, these are exactly the feelings that are conjured up in your mind’s eye: of a man who means business. The ad, featuring a tailored, bespoke suit sleeve just covering a very obviously expensive Swiss made watch, is very Bond: every detail just so; sleek, jaw-clenched; very narcissistically self-aware.
Much has been made of this new perfume’s extragavant usage of patchouli – Monsieur is supposedly to patchouli what Carnal Flower is to tuberose – which the promotional materials claim has not been used at such a high dosage (50% of the formula) since the 1970’s: presumably a reference to the patchouliest of classic masculines – Givenchy Gentleman (one of my favourite perfumes of all time, incidentally – a delightfully hirsute, but effortlessly elegant patchouli leather) on which which this modern competitor is apparently doing an exclusive penthouse riff.
And it is quite effective. Opening with an almost disconcertingly sharp mandarin note bathed in rum , the clear, refractionated patchouli essence of the perfume soon makes its sensual presence felt: very taut, and very polished, while presently, more trouser-heavy, carnal notes of musk, amber, amber and vanilla make their presence in the base as our protagonist begins to feel a bit restless and horny at the end of his long and impeccable business day . You can almost smell his later conquests here, with a bodily, more intimate aspect laid bare under the overall patchouli frame: yet another successfully accomplished seduction at some private members’ club, the creme de la creme of his upper echelon, socially stratospheric, quiet brutality (think Michael Fassbender in Steve Mcqueen’s tale of passionless sex addiction, ‘Shame’).
I can imagine this fragrance being quite a big hit for Frederic Malle. Though apparently boasting more patchouli in its construction, this is used more thoughtfully and judiciously than the trowel-it- on, bucketload indigestibility of the hodgepodge patchoulis by Tom Ford or Christan Dior, which plug themselves up ungraciously with synthetic ambers and everything in-the-kitchen-sink to create real nose bombs that I personally cannot at all abide: too brash, sweet, and unharmonious (at least to my own very oversensitive nose). Monsieur is undoubtedly more ‘classy’ and has a definite quiet stealth in its overall construction, which the remorseless seducer that the perfume is intended for will undoubtedly use to his advantage.
The inherent problem with this perfume for me though is that is has little soul. If androids ever become a reality in the future, a few spritzes of Monsieur on the Italian bespoke suit and about the crotch area would certainly make the artificial intelligence seem more humanistic (and undeniably masculine). But that’s about as far as it goes, and I think the source of this sense of something amiss lies in the kind of basic materials that are being used: the perfumer, Bruno Jovanovic, like many perfumers using patchouli in a modern context, uses a particular form of the essence obtained by molecular distillation (‘to purify it in the extreme to turn it into the key link in the evaporation chain’) in order to make a smoother and less fuzzy variant. And I can definitely see how this would work: patchouli is known to have perhaps the lowest evaporation rate of all the essential oils in aromatherapy, which is precisely why it is so insistent, persistent, and long enduring (and why so many people hate the stuff). It thus makes sense, from the perfumer’s point of view, to use a more purified, streamlined version of the smell that will blend more effortlessly with the other notes and give the composition lift and clarity. For me, though, as I have written before, the very earthiness and complexity of patchouli oil, its soil like darkness, is where its beauty lies. These neutered patchoulis are missing the point in my view: it is like draining the indoles and disturbingly erotic elements in white flowers such as jasmine, gardenia lilies and tuberose, or syphoning off the dirty-skin velvetness of other basenotes such as labdanum, benzoin or costus; the hairshirt compromised pleasures of decaffeinated coffee, or dealcoholized wine.
There is, of course, a place for experimentation with aroma materials, to contemporize them and make them feel newer and fresher in the latest contexts. But for a bitter orange/ mandarin patchouli accord you are so much better off going with Micallef’s under-discussed, but very beautiful Patchouli, with its intimations of Campari and late night trysts, or for a really classical but very masculine, pulsating hard-on patchouli, Lorenzo Villoresi’s brilliant version of natural patchouli leaves: a midnight-dense, beautifully composed creation that, rather than setting out on a day or an evening of seductions and conquests, doesn’t even have to try.