Category Archives: Flowers

Switching work perfumes mid term always feels rather daunting to me. You get into a groove of smelling a certain way every day – my default setting these last few months has been my Shiseido shampoo and Rosarium rose oil soap, plus Nivea Soft and to top it off, the pleasingly modern and pared down rose de mai/ warm woody balsamic fragrance from Parfums Dusita, La Douceur De Siam. It has worked well. Enveloping but not overpowering, I feel that it smells, somehow ‘honest’.

But all good things must eventually come to an end, and I am down to the last of the bottle. I want to save what remains. Plus, there is a sharp breath of spring in the air at the moment and, finding a cheap, half used. not pristine but fine in the important stages Cristalle edt, I took the plunge in its icy waters today, having washed and relaundered all my work clothes. I am wearing it now, as I sit at the back of a classroom, lessons prepared, naughtily writing this.

How does the original 1974 iteration of Cristalle smell? In a word: discreet. At least I hope so. I am getting some gentle traces now of a delicate vetiver oak moss, still detect the crystalline flowers ( there is a point in this particular slightly worn vintage when the metallic Roudnitska-ish Diorella like melon note interacts with a bitter almost leather tone and I wonder whether I really should be adopting it as a daily work perfume – but this soon fades and the whole does feel rather stylish. There is something so deliciously unspoken about it.)Whether others will feel the same is another issue, but in all honesty this Cristalle is so ‘barely there’ it will probably not even register in anyone’s consciousness: I am just enjoying how it is currently lingering ambiguously on the edges of my shirt cuff and sweater.

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Yesterday I put up a one sentence post connected to politics ( I am highly and deeply aware of the fact that changing one’s work scent in the grand scheme of things means absolutely nothing, but then at the same time if you only ever thought in those terms, erasing all the trivialities, I don’t think you could ever actually make it through a single day).

But even perfume can be political. There are a lot of Chanel think pieces in circulation right now because of the new TV drama on the rivalry between Gabrielle Chanel and Christian Dior, ‘The New Look’, the latter of whom apparently comes across as a virtuous man and a hero. the former an antisemitic Nazi collaborator, informer and spy for Vichy occupied France. With the publicity surrounding the show and the negativity damaging the image of its founder, will Chanel the brand suffer the cancelling consequences ? Should we all toss our Chanels on a big fire and renounce all further consumption?

I don’t know. I hate antisemitism and I detest, from the depths of my soul, everything that Nazism represents/ represented, but I am not sure what I think about the morality of wearing anything Chanel : Coco had already been dead four years when Cristalle was released : is Henri Robert’s lovely creation tainted by association, or can it work as an elegant work of olfactory work in its own right? The discussion table is open.

At any rate, Cristalle is working nicely for me cet apres-midi. The Chanel flower, the camellia, was also flowering in my garden this morning. Is that flower also guilty by connection?

How ethical are most of the products we buy, really ?

Roses are red. Violets are etc.

I sometimes wonder to myself what my favourite flower is : and it might be the rose. But only when they are large and luscious, in a wild garden, not clipped and pruned and slid into a horrible tubular plastic sheath.

The same with rose perfumes. There are so many horrible ones about, like the ‘Rosa Saltifolia’ by Maison Crivelli I smelled today, that made me feel sick.

In contrast, Tokyo flora outfit Aoyama Flower Market do some very attractively priced and quite decent smelling soliflores, like this Rose, which is clearly founded on real rose oil and does a perfectly good job of being rosey.

However, I vastly prefer their indolic and powerfully reeking Lily.

Sprawling and unruly, ylangish and uncontained, this thing is messy

– just like real love.

The occasional prudery of Japan can be quite interesting. While Shinjuku, where the main government buildings are located, is a major shopping and restaurant and entertainment hub, it is also the very epicentre of the Asian sex and pornography trade, very shady indeed (also the place where I smelled this perfume, incidentally, at the venerable, packed to the rafters Isetan department store in Kabukicho). You cannot actually escape sexual imagery in Japan. Girlie mags with big boobs about to pop out of bras stare out from every convenience store you go to, in stations and wherever else – unavoidable to the eyes, kids included – and massage parlours that give sexual services – ‘soaplands’, where tired businessmen can slip in quickly after work to get a bit of ‘relief’ – are unambiguously there on street corners in almost every town or city, sometimes in great proliferation (usually euphemistically known as ‘Fashion Health’ centres, there is not a great deal of taboo attached to going to them). No one bats an eyelid. Compared to the Godfearing West, Japan is actually pretty open about the human need for a bit of how’s-yer-father. And yet the word ‘sex’ has been redacted and censored for the Japanese release of Tom Ford’s Vanilla Sex, pasted out of the bottle with a red dash that in my opinion completely ruins the whole point of the whole charade, not to mention the aesthetic of the bottle. Couldn’t they at least have done it in cream?

Not that there is anything pornographic or even vaguely erotic about this perfume. Unless you are a feeder, that unusual sexual phenomenon where a very skinny guy gets all worked up into a frenzy about making his gigantic girlfriend overeat and gorge to his frenzied satisfaction. But each to their own. The smell of this, though. Both of us thought it was revolting.

Vom, as we recoiled instinctively from the Tom Ford counter.

Obviously intended to be a ‘naughty’ play on the idea of ‘vanilla sex’, ie. sex that is bland and unadventurous, not involving what I personally find to be the exceedingly tedious necessity of whips and chains and leather masks and harnesses and god knows what else in order to get a boner: for me, no equipment is necessary: just a person and a body and the urge; no orgy with twenty five people, some rubberized or intricately lacy lingerie (hideous!),; lizards, a mankini, being spanked or humiliated or beaten, hung upside down, fed through a tube, or whatever else is necessary to get you off, the ‘vanilla’ type – which is probably me – is occasionally the object of ridicule, as it is here for Tom Ford. I suppose this is understandable. The standard missionary position, known in Japan as the maguro, or tuna, is a famously boring marital or otherwise encounter where nobody moves very much, especially the lady underneath, dissatisfied and probably thinking about tomorrow night’s dinner during the whole process while making all the right noises as her husband grunts away … …sex is of course a complicated issue for many people. There are many varieties. Some need extra-curriculars: I am not judging. It is kind of funny, though (deliberate?) that the perfume ‘Vanilla Sex’, itself, is also in fact rather deathly dull – quite the Plain Jane or John Doe, really, while also simultaneously being as gut-rottingly sweet as a Tokyo Tower bestriding Godzilla-sized blob of playdoh.

The problem here isn’t necessarily the natural vanillas (a specially curated ‘Vanilla Tincture India’; Vanilla Absolute, and the Vanilla CO 2 extract all allegedly in the blend); though it might be the fake sandalwood in the base, or a synthetic called Ultravanil greasing up the proceedings like Mrs Margarine that produce the pit in the stomach problematics. It definitely is the very wrongful bitter almond in the opening, though, a very excessive addendum that tips the whole thing inexorably into gross.

Later, the vanillaggeddon dies down into a whispering soft banality that befits the idea of the standardized copulation Tom Ford is mocking with his mischievous perfume (I also smelled the ‘devil’ to this perfume’s angel yesterday, Vanilla Fatale, a darker, woodier number, but it didn’t make much of an impression on me, either to be honest). I was just bored. Certainly, neither makes me feel remotely horny -for me that would be more likely to be middle aged moustachioed Mexicans with big di – but perhaps I should stop there. Suffice it to say, I will not be rushing out any time soon to the iniquitous bowels of Shinjuku any time soon to be forking out ￥50,000 for a bottle of this sickening muck.

I guess I’m just too vanilla.

I do like a good bag of nuts.

An instantaneous and random top ten list of nuts :

NUTS: :  :  RANKED !!

(world war 3 is probably imminent, so let’s just do favourite nut lists instead !!! )

My own:

1.PEANUTS = MACADAMIA

3. HAZELNUTS (with chocolate, in noisette, gianduja, praline, oh my god)

4. CASHEW

5. WALNUT

6. ALMOND

7. PISTACHIO

8. PECAN

9.CHESTNUT

10. BRAZIL ( not entirely keen; sometimes they can feel more like eating a tusk)

Pistachios I do like, although I find them very irritatingly fiddly with my ungraceful thumbs when I am trying to crack open the shell : the reward sometimes doesn’t seem enough for the sheer effort that is required. Ready shelled, I think they are rather delicious, but they still don’t quite take me to the heights that the lowly peanut does, or the recently discovered unsalted macadamias from the supermarket across the road from work which I eat on a regular basis and which are sublime (and extremely healthy to boot: what’s not to like when all these nuts are all superfoods, massive in antioxidants and nutrients and minerals and cholesterol lowering substances etc etc : I feel sorry for those, like my neighbour’s ten year old son Kodai, who has a very serious nut allergy and has to carry around one of those antidote pens in case some nut fragment or other has made its way into another product: what is an occasional guilty pleasure for me – a Snickers – is for someone else a loaded Kalashnikov).

No, I am lucky in that nuts, physiologically, suit me perfectly. What can give me a mild to severe anaphylactic reaction though, is an overly clever clever perfume concept such ‘THIS IS OBVIOUS’. I am pretty damn allergic to very self-consciously meta or overly groovy marketing, which makes my eyes roll to the extent that they could get stuck facing upwards. I can just see all the entrepreneurs now with their Agnès B jumpers loped gently around their light blue-shirted shoulders sat round in loafers in their Parisian conference room, slapping their thighs with delight as one of them comes up with this little tagline, some kind of oui, mais oui! , ‘witty’ sub-Magritte-like statement of fact: une obvious vanille, etc, ho ho ho ! ! — although I can see how the lame and the simplistic, wanting something to grab them on the continuously multiplying shelves (like me, for example: after all, this did draw my attention among a million other perfumes in Shinjuku Isetan Men’s the other night) might think the whole package is pretty funny, pretty neat - or maybe it really just does sound better in French.

(Gripe over).

Looking more closely at the brand’s ethos and product statement for a minute, the idea behind This Is Obvious, on nearer inspection, is not quite as grating nor……. obvious. You might even take it as simply being a much needed backlash against fanciful over-elaboration.

Mmmm.

Plus I do actually quite like single note-oriented perfumes in general when it comes to niche: a fig, musk, orange blossom, rose, vanilla… when you can just reach for the juice you are in the mood for that day, just something easy – and this perfume is certainly agreeable. With a cardamom, carrot seed , Tunisian neroli, heliotrope and imaginary ‘pistachio’ accord at the centre, over a (f****** obvious, if you ask me) cashmeran and synthetic sandalwood musk base – you always knew where this was going, olfactorily, that it was going to court the Santal 33 crowd) – overall, Une Obvious Pistache is not a bad little perfume at all as nut-centric scents go. Perfectly pleasant. Smooth. Soothing to overwrought nerves. When it’s cold outside, and the world is close to annihilation, what’s wrong with just getting the latte machine going and reaching out for a little semi-amusing nutted comfort?

Yes. Une Pistache Obvious is light and creamy, and will put the sweet-toothed in a temporarily good mood. I quite like the corked flacon, the general look. I am not sure how truly pistachio-ish it really is, though, in truth: I find in general, this is quite a difficult note to pin down in perfumery. I got glimpses of pistachio, fleetingly, but not quite enough to take me back to my ultimate pistachio memory, which was the first time I ever tasted them on a family holiday in France, on the coast, an evening at twilight by a harbour, the well to do strolling along sun-kissed and contented, where I surveyed the amazing array of saveurs available on the dashboard outside the kiosk, so many of which I had not even heard of before, used, as I was, to the far more limited English seaside town options of orange ice lols and nut-sprinkled cornettos.

Would I choose framboise; amaretto, cassis or caramel beurre salé? Fraise ? I pondered, in a quandary. No, finally lured by the beautiful colour – not mint, but a new colour, pistache- I thought I would try the (for me) highly unusual light-green ice cream, not knowing at all what to expect. And I remember walking along the promenade as though in a dream, licking the ice cream cone delicately; thinking, at that moment, in my stripey francophile marinère t- shirt and floppy hair, that I was possibly the coolest seventeen year old in the whole world. Wow, look at me. This is delicious. I’m eating French, pistachio, ice cream….

The recent A. I. derived ‘pros and cons’ of perfumes listed on Fragrantica, where robots scavenge the troves of impassioned comments from reviewers below a particular fragrance’s notes, picking out the most conspicuous positive and negative comments about any particular perfume and then listing them side by side, are useful – and frequently hilarious. Giò, a very heady peach-jasmine-mandarin-tuberose-orange blossom spiced floral amber: solarized, powerful, beautiful in many ways, but also sickening for many people – the kind of over-ornate pleasure/ attention seeker whose perfume sucks up every molecule in the room – is described as being ‘throat grabbing’ and ‘overpowering’ ‘for some’, and as smelling like ‘rancid butter’ and ‘dated eighties smell’ for many others (the positives do include a ‘seamless blending of notes’ and a ‘deep, creamy base’.

I personally have found myself over the years secretly craving a bottle of Giò (pronounced ‘jyoh‘ with a short o sound like ‘shot’, not gee-yo, although a sales woman once sneeringly corrected my pronunciation in a department store in the centre of Birmingham - I just about managed to refrain from telling her I had just graduated from Cambridge University in Italian), simply because in many ways it is the zenith, or nadir, depending on your viewpoint, of the slightly base, insensitive, trumpeting orange blossom tuberose that either signifies a slightly delirious glamour doll who doesn’t care how much space she takes up in the room, or else a blazing drag queen (Burning Bush would definitely consider it in the spring).

Extraordinarily sexy in some ways, with the right dosage, Giò can be devastating: a real entrance-maker. Too much, just one spray too far – I would recommend no more than one, personally – and you will have witnesses clutching their oesphaguses in distress or breaking out in blotches and hives.

With its generosity of notes :

– detractors should remember who created this light-glinting gem of flirtful flamboyance - the genius Francoise Caron (Balenciaga Michelle, another femme femme coconut tuberose – Ombre Rose, the first two Kenzos… this woman sure knows how to build a man-killer floral). With Giò’s predecessors including such alluring sultresses as Givenchy Ysatis, its descendants Guerlain Mahora and Francoise Caron’s own Fleur D’Oranger 27 for Le Labo, this sort of scent is definitely only for the brave; for those who want to explode in citrus-licked summer flowers with lots of bare skin showing: the accompanying film made by none other than the great David Lynch (do you think he even smelled the perfume?)

In my view, this was a completely unconnected, non fragrance-adjacent ad, that attempted to inject some much needed mystery into all the proceedings of Armani’s first eponymous release (Giò is his nickname) in order to make it cooler than it actually was: the perfume is just too happy and exuberant and relaxed to be seen as convincingly ‘impenetrable’ in any way (there is very little ‘mystique’ in the blend ….you know this kind of person, typecast from the offset). Who is Giò? Giò is Giò.

Despite being long discontinued, the perfume’s main theme was later rather cleverly absorbed into the marine tea summer breeze that became Acqua Di Giò (1995), which had traces of all the flowers of the first perfume but none of the sickliness, and this one was much more popular commercially. The Aqua variant was then totally overshadowed, of course, by the men’s equivalent, a pour homme, released a couple of years later, which became one of the biggest blockbusters of all time and is still popular globally, although I personally – while understanding its cleverness of structure – never could remotely stand it.

No, give me the original Giò anyday. I was so excited to find a perfectly intact bottle the other day for next to nothing: I had been waiting a long time to score one. Sometimes I crave such oblivious ebullience (and so do many others, seemingly: the non throat grabbing faction in the comments section on Fragrantica seem to adore it and are desperate for it to come back): bottles like the one I found for ＄6 go for eight hundred dollars on eBay now, I was flabbergasted to see) Clearly sometimes, understatement is simply not always the order of the day.

Does anyone else love / hate / remember Armani Giò?

Today is Setsubun (‘Division’), a traditional lunar calendar-based festival celebrating the end of the year, the banishing of demons, and the welcoming of the auspicious second half of spring. A prelude to the vernal madness that is the cherry blossom season in Japan – often ravishingly beautiful – I had, bizarrely, until yesterday never properly stopped to think about what any of this less internationally less famous cultural phenomenon actually signified.

Realizing that my ignorance on the subject would make a good topic of conversation for the evening’s lessons (“Today I want you to teach me about Japanese culture! : let’s talk about the main events of February – Setsubun and St Valentine’s Day: there you go, talk about it in pairs for twenty minutes or so and then get back to me” !- something along those lazily unplanned lines I said to get out of having to do too much ) - anyway it worked, and in the process I learned some interesting things from the young horses’ mouths about this curious annual ritual which does still seem to be observed by the vast majority of Japanese families.

On the day itself, I had always seen the special ehomaki sushi rolls on sale everywhere you look, but I had not realized until yesterday that families all literally sit together in that year’s lucky direction (2024’s is east by northeast), in their kitchens or living rooms, all facing the same way, not looking at each other, and munch through the tubular ehomaki, not sliced up and with chopsticks but just as it is, like a burrito. Also, this must all be done in silence. You make a wish, and to speak breaks the spell. Somehow, with all my years of living here, I had never heard of this before. All except one of the students do this, and most then also follow the tradition of then throwing roasted soybeans, which are considered lucky, out of the front door, or else at their father, who will be wearing a demon mask, protecting his face from the hard beans that are being pelted at him gleefully by his children. Chanting “Out with the demons, in with good luck!” it all sounds like a charming family spectacle that they were all quite eager to tell me about (the time did fly): all of us liking the idea that a particularly negative time in your life can be chased away and that you can welcome in a more positive, fresher, new one.

On the way to class I had by coincidence just smelled an interesting new perfume that chimed perfectly with the day’s theme of rebirth and renewal. A collaboration between Osaji – a brand I have written about before (I enjoy the intriguing modern way this enigmatic J-outfit do florals, in particular their pungent Suisen/Narcissus and a more recent frankincense rose ) – and a positivity-toting Japanese graphic designer, Shogo Sekine, who presumably did all the packaging, to my knowledge, this is Osaji’s first overt citrus aromatic – they often deal in shroudier, powdered understatement – and boy, what a zinging yuzu vetiver citrus this collabo turned out to be.

The top notes of all the citruses in the rainbow, blended beautifully together in the opening salvo of Sekine – blindingly crisp, bright and yellow - are described as being mizumizushii by Osaji : vivacious, energetic, youthful, juicy – and indeed they are. Though very modern smelling, it also put me in mind somewhat of the chypric chypres of the past, in particular, the Armani Pour Homme crème après rasage I was addicted to at sixteen, with its creamy yellow lemon-limeness that I instead used as a body perfume under my shirts. With an aromatic lavender/geranium heart, and a slightly coniferous twang deep inside the blend before ceding down to a delightfully green grassy dry vetiver base, this is a perfume I might have to be getting next month, as I found, with a little tester paper slotted into a book I could steal sniffs from between lessons, that it was starting to drill a brand new hole in my want brain (vetiver lovers such as Leko Lin at Noseprose, you might need to try this one)

Sometimes I need a headclearer vibe like this. Just a natural ray of sunlight. The art direction (mainly) works for me as well – there is a ‘I have woken up in the sunny a.m. in an uncharacteristically good mood today and am going to just sit here and damn well enjoy every moment of my morning coffee’ thing happening, an optimism that rings all the way through the scent as well (even if at times I wondered if it were a little too strident, despite the sense that it was addicting me…………? )

Ultimately, though, there was something about the no-nonsenseness of the strict vetiver/citrus directness of this scent that massively appeals ; I find all the classic citrus vetivers like Vetiver Extraordinaire etc etc etc etc hugely overrated (and overpriced): there is a man-in-a-Zegna-suit chemical fuzziness somewhere in the base in those perfumes that always starts irritating me to death at some point (I would much rather wear the keen neroli lumescence of Creed’s Original Vetiver, for example, a perfume which Osaji Sekine also bears some relation to: . I like it sincere; full, but uncluttered). And this perfume even has its own bag, will you please, if you are that keen on it, so as you amble about, whistling while you work to your new, bees-knees-happy pamplemousse vetiver zizanoides, you can also walk around advertising the family of fragrance that you are wearing to all the people sipping their lattes in Tullys and Starbucks (kind of novel – what’s not to like? I even don’t mind the (deliberate?) misspelling of musky ) :

All in all, I have to say that the discovery of this scent fitted in perfectly with what was a pretty good day; and I am sure that henceforth, I will probably always make the setsubun association whenever I smell it.

As the adage here goes, out with the demons, in with good luck.