The Black Narcissus

 

 

Vintage Bal A Versailles parfum for only two hundred yen (one pound sixty pence).

 

Makes the thought of the soon to come Autumn and Winter just that slightly more bearable.

 

 

 

 

 

I woke up the other day knowing that the only perfume I could wear was Les Roses De Rosine’s Roseberry. Only. But this happens sometimes; a scent I virtually never wear, that is hidden somewhere in the back of my closet,  suddenly comes to the forefront of my scent mind and then only that perfume will do, one that just wills me towards it (do you also have this? Almost a premonition?)  The three Rosines that I own, all found cheaply in Yokohama, are just perfumes that I somehow don’t usually think of wearing on a regular, day to day basis, and yet Roseberry – a curiously astringent, less-berry-than-you-might-imagine, chamomile, green, and wine-note laden rose perfume with softer iris and cedar notes hiding in the background, has been quite unexpectedly driving my other half wild the last few nights – you would think we had just met, seriously – and is now suddenly my scent of the week. La Rose De Rosine, the original perfume from this house, a gorgeous, bright, balsamic and powdery violet Turkish rose that I do turn to on occasion on a sultry summer’s evening, quite amazed a friend that was over from England when I randomly suggested the other night that she try it when we were doing perfume (she swore that she would definitely have to get some as soon as she got back: like her, I also really do think that this is exceptional, just a devil-may-care jolt of life, and love, and happiness, almost giddy);  and I find that even Zephyr Rose, a weirdly aniseed-topped, mintily aggressive fresh rose, a more recent release and one that I had never even heard of before I came across it (something I often now find to be the case with this perfumery) is now down to her dregs; ready for the bottle bin: exhausted.  She worked quite well, though,  as a guest-greeting house rose, a bathroom spray, or as an adjunct to perfumes that needed a quick rose-up. A cherry on top. A rosebud. A spritz. Odd, and a bit harsh, but nice. Fresh. French. I remember the Parfums De Rosine boutique, tucked away beautifully, all glass and filigree metal and windows, at the Palais Royal in Paris, thirteen winters ago or so, and thinking, how pleasing, all those roses, how pretty…………. but where is Serge Lutens? And yet this evening, with Roseberry once again gracing my person after a rose soapy long evening bath, and feeling exceedingly right, I am more complicit. I have always loved the lettering and the packaging, the colours, and the inconspicuousness of the Rosine roses, and I know that I have quite liked virtually every rose from this house that I have smelled; and yet not usually quite enough, for reasons I am not sure of,  to splurge away my income. I don’t know. There is always something else I want ; they are ‘secondary’; there are almost too many of them now; they have overwhelmed me. But what about you? Are you a Rosine person? Do you have any other suggestions? What else, what other potentially essential or gorgeous roses from Les Parfums De Rosine, have I been missing?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I wrote recently about my last exploits at the Tokyo recycle shops; about the fact that you almost invariably come back home with something to add to your collection, even if it is something that you have in your possession already. Yet another Caron Infini; Madame Rochas, or a Hermes Eau D’Orange Verte.

 

 

Sometimes, though, extravagantly gorgeous things turn up in these places, even if you don’t actually find them yourself. Zubeyde, my psychic friend who loves perfume as much as me and also has faster access to it than I do living in the heart of all the action (rather than down here among the mountains and the zen temples), somehow manages to find, on occasion, things like THIS – a 10ml butterfly parfum edition of Annick Goutal’s lovely L’Heure Exquise from 1984 for about 20 dollars that was wrapped in some cellophane shouting FACTICE! FACTICE! IT’S A SHOWROOM DUMMY, DUMMY!  but which, when I actually unwrapped and unstoppered the precious flacon you see here,  turned out to be the real thing, quite potent and beautiful, a charming little perfume that is cursorily similar perfume to Chanel No 19 in its similar uses of galbanum, hyacinth, iris, roses, and woods, but which over time proves to have quite a different internal spirit; much more powdery; pinker, warm and relenting than the sharp, green angularity of the beloved Chanel, with the accent on a vanilla-infused base note of sandalwood extract; more romantic and pleased with dusk, rather than the vetiver-leather masculinity of No 19’s more cynical, tree-darkened night.

As you can see, right now it has pride of place on one of my cabinets, in our room.

 

 

 

On top of as a whole other bag load of goodies (Patou Amour Amour, Coty Imprevu, Faberge Aphrodisia), Zubeyde also came down to the house that day carrying in her knapsacks with her a HUMONGOUS bottle of pristine condition Jicky eau de toilette (which I had never actually experienced before, I am only familiar with the current parfum); the flacon, a monster, basically bigger than her head.

And all for about 10 dollars.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was big enough for me, certainly,  to be able siphon some off quite happily into my almost empty modern Jicky parfum bottle without anybody noticing nor making a difference to how much was seemingly in the flacon (see above, on another section of my collection) – so great when you can get a refill unexpectedly like this when the sad, dry, bottom meniscus was all you thought you were ever going to have again. Somehow, the original is so much more alive, more evocative of the provencal landscape and sky; the lavender more plaintive and natural, the entire blend smoother and more lovable, dreamier, clearer and less uptight – a beautiful cream white shirt underneath, some flesh visible to the noticing eye, rather than the buttoned up tweed jacket Cecil of the current, more conservative Guerlain provision.

Thanks, Z, for letting me steal some.

 

 

 

 

 

But wait. The best is yet to come.

 

 

 

 

Ta Dah! says Zubeyde on the bed, as she produces her wares one at at time, a rabbit’s magician from a black velvet hat. One by one them come out, the convalescent sat hungrily and dazedly before her, his glass of sparkling cava, eyes only on the prize.

 

 

 

And what came next……I could hardly get over the fact that, tossed among the high street flotsam and jetsam and general unwanted detritus, pulled out from the bag like an Egyptian white colossus, was a huge, 50ml vintage extrait presentation of Caron’s classic N’Aimez Que Moi.

 

 

 

 

The drama. The sheer visual tension. The expectation, as you pull the amulet out from its protectant boxes, thick with material and heft,  to unveil the, lip-pursed, corseted, Moulin Rouge fantasia that is waiting, voluptuously, beneath: : : : :

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My god would you look at this thing.

 

And for about 25 dollars. The portentous, ivory velvet white box, sealed like a beautiful tomb.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The poetical, embossed, Parisian  Grecian urn on top.

 

 

 

 

( I suppose it is the stain, here, that discounts this perfume in unstainable Japan, with its obsession with the pristine, but for me, personally,  it almost adds something, a sense of history, of a person having once owned it –  it has lived…) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As the gold-printed black box, hidden beneath the cream, reveals another level of Caronian security, we get closer to the perfume itself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Peek-a-boo.

 

 

 

 

 

AAAGGGHGHHHH –  she is peaking out ‘coyly’ from the sanctity of her dressing room, she knows the power of her roses

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘oh,………………….won’t you come in……….?’

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oui madame, je vais. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Et voila!!!  She smells GORGEOUS.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

 

 

Now that I can climb our steep set of stairs with relative ease (my healing and progress continue unabated: not perfect, I still get pain, I am still going to physio once a week and I still need to build up my muscle strength; but I walk – or plod, rather-  around our house on my legs unaided with sticks;have been cooking standing up for the first time this week, am basically living normally and most definitely on the road back to normal – I go back to work in three weeks time), we have moved back upstairs, after four months downstairs in the makeshift bedsit, into the bedroom, the Japanese tatami room and perfume chamber where these pictures were taken: my favorite place in the house, and where I am sleeping so much more deeply than I was on my rented handicapped bed that, for now, is still standing unused in the kitchen.

 

 

 

And when I lie on the floor on my futon at night, from where I am lying I can smell N’Aimez Que Moi.

 

 

 

Even just with the slight crack open, as you can see, on the dresser, the smell is visible.  This perfume radiates. It positively tra-la-las of love and wine and roses from its box. Beguilingly sweet, voluptuous and dramatic, this Ernest Daltroff Caron is a full, shocking pink smelling Turkish rose quivering with life that has been candied in sugared violets, lilacs and delirious musks, a million miles away from the perfume I once reviewed a while back now (from a current parfum sample) in which I wrote about death in the First World War; the dust and the must of fading sweethearts and sad remembrances. Posies and grandmothers and the past. But that’s the problem with new versions of old perfumes – I have never really understood the point of them, in truth.  You should either keep them as they are, let them die, or create something new, not try to embalm a corpse that doesn’t want keeping, that wants to be sent to heaven.  When you smell this, the original N’Aimez Que Moi as it was intended to be: delicious, incredibly confident and full of flirtatiously Satine pizzaz, you realize how fantastic the heritage of Parisian perfume really is, how it can be so swoonsomely petalled and sweet, how the presentation – outrageous, surely – how camp is this thing?  only adds to the excitement of putting it on; a perfume that impetuously screams LOVE NO ONE BUT ME to her suitors that are unabashedly hanging at the fringes of her dressing room and who can do nothing but nod acquiescently, slavishly, as they make their way, mindlessly, and submissively, towards her bed.

 

 

The last time I wrote about a perfume called London it was by Guerlain: a fruity little nothing from Les Voyages Olfactifs by Thierry Wasser that, to my knowledge, is no longer available. The vast majority of that piece, however, was not concerned with the perfume, but was instead spent savaging a city I have never really liked, have hated, even. I have always felt instinctively within myself that there is a shroud, a pall, an alienating hauteur and aggression, a coldness, to London that has always, even when I lived there, kept me at arm’s length.

 

That said, the sheer levels of vitriol levelled at the place on that occasion were rather excessive, even for me (not that those who read The Black Narcissus come to this website for the minced, the pastel, or the polite.) Still, some Londoners and London-loving Anglophiles were I think a little taken aback by my dark summations, which were probably overtinged by personal reminiscences, very subjective impressions, and the fact that I haven’t even lived in the country, let alone London, for over twenty years.

 

Splurging at will about a place where I am almost permanently ill at ease, for whatever reason, seems almost quaint and blissfully ignorant in my memory now. At that time, at least I was still a European citizen,meaning I could live anywhere I wanted on the continent. I liked this. I took it for granted. And I had no idea that this apparent certainty – the idea was possibly for us to retire to our apartment in Berlin, where we would have had free health care – would change at the whim of a pompous and privileged politician – David Cameron, now happily making a fortune giving paid speeches and living the high London life, who would gamble all of our futures on a wanton and capricious parliamentary game, betting that a national referendum on whether or not to leave the European Union would lead to a clear verdict of Stay, just so he could give his Eton educated middle finger to his similarly clueless fellow conservative ministers, people who were truly born with compassionless silver spoons in their mouths and have not a jot of an idea of how the majority of people actually live. David Cameron gambled. We lost. And all for NO REASON. For me, ‘Brexit’ was an infuriating catastrophe on a number of levels.

 

Like the Trump voters ( oh, that man, that maniacal Mango Mussolini who could lead us all to nuclear destruction soon with those deliberately mindless outbursts from his mouth!); like those people, the nationalistic, tabloid reading, Union Jack -munching ‘Brits’ who voted to make us leave an organization – the world’s largest economy, to which we need access in order to remain relevant in any viable way – just so that we could stubbornly retreat into a backward-looking, petty, Rule Britannia island mentality of ‘keeping them out’, leaving Europe behind, and continuing down the inevitable, class-ridden, stultifying quicksand of rich vs poor; those people have condemned us, unthinkingly, based purely on primal and atavistic impulses led by the ‘newspapers’ of Rupert Murdoch, to a future of shrinking international importance and financial hardship; a parochial, us vs them island mentality that I personally can’t relate to.

 

Yet despite my continuing mourning of the Brexit result and my very real feeling that it was absolutely a wrong ( and such an unnecessary!) decision that will ultimately prove disastrous for the country in the longrun as we gradually fade into global oblivion, from an exterior, and aesthetic, perspective, the shutting of the gates to Calais, Amsterdam, Bruges, and the rest of the outside world will, I think, ironically, in some strange ways, make the country (I am referring to England specifically because I am from there; Scotland, Wales and Northern Island have their own identities to contend with), more ‘exotic’, more unique and, ultimately, English. Like Japan, an obsessively ethnocentric and deeply xenophobic place that last year accepted a total of 28 refugees in crisis, the closed-offness of both nations – in its heart, Japan, an ancient and historical, imperialistic island like the ‘United Kingdom’ will always see itself as apart from all other cultures; it doesn’t remotely even see itself as Asian despite the undeniable influence of China, Korea and India in its history – this reserve, monomania, and sentimental clutching onto the trinkets and realia of culture- decorative fans, kimono, wooden dolls, teapots – will also make the twee and pretty Englishness of the fine bone china gift shop even more special and peculiar to our green sceptred isles; the London red double deckers will seem more significant, Big Ben will intone ever more commandingly, and ‘Englishness’ will be fetishized and its quaintness adored by visiting Americans, correctly visa’d Europeans, and ‘hordes’ of credit card wielding Chinese.

 

I don’t mean all this entirely facetiously. England is actually very beautiful. It is all still within me. It will never leave me. The countryside, the Shakespearean heritage, the old pubs, the wit and the wonderfully irreverent and rebellious art culture, all of it will remain alive and well I am sure, magnified and marinaded triumphantly inside itself now those pesky Eurocrats won’t be able to touch it. There will be an insularity, an Englishness, a clannish implosion where the garden gnomes of middle earth come alive, and pixies and fairies once again roam free in our glorious, forested woodland, and little blonde haired alabaster skinned children will hold hands joyfully around the maypole. Little England will be reborn.

 

But what will become of London ?Will the secretive, lavish, tax haven still be the centre of global capitalism, as it has been in recent years, where the megarich of Russia and Saudi Arabia have bought up vast swathes of land and property and invested  (= hidden) unscrupulous assets undemonished? Or will it lose much of its financial clout, seeing that many countries, Japan included, saw The City as their gateway into Europe? Will they not simply transfer their wares and their services to the continental mainland, resulting in great losses in jobs and revenue as manufacturers relocate there in order to have immediate access to the European market, as they have, hassle-free, until now? Will the result of Brexit not be a huge drop in political and monetary influence? Who knows (who cares?)But even if immigration is curbed, I imagine that our great metropolis will still, for a very long time in the future, remain a multicultural hotpot of a myriad ethnicities and backgrounds, the ultra-wealthy, the destitute; royalty and the sex-trafficked; the trendier-than-thou and the homeless; comfortable, semi-detached boroughs for the ‘yummy mummies’ and their mollycoddled offspring; the ruthless, smartsuited financiers, the Rastafarians of Brixton, the Orthodox Jews of Golders Green all Moulinexed together in the unfathomable city they call home.

 

 

Bitter ex-pat pontification and over-seriousness aside ( I have actually had twinges of homesickness recently), how to capture all this, all of this history and complexity, this flux and change, in perfume?

 

Gallivant ( love that word : I am often accused of ‘gallivanting’ about the place by various people in my life),is a brand new perfume house that seeks to encapsulate the founder’s favourite  world cities in scent. There is nothing new in this of course, as the idea has been executed several times before, but it is still always novel, somehow, sniffing a selection pack of topographical olfactive evocations and seeing if any travel bureau light bulbs light up in your head. Brooklyn, not a city, obviously, but just one neighbourhood, and thus the anomaly in the collection, is for me the most pleasing,  a very upbeat, lemon-meringue white musk that is sweet and quite sassy and which puts me in a good mood. Simple, but nicely constructed, it is an easygoing blend of a lemon peel infused soufflé and a freshly washed white tee.  It is perhaps easier to encapsulate just one particular zone of a city like this with an olfactory conceit than its entirety, and though I have never been there – but would like to – this kind of semi lights up my polaroids.

 

Istanbul, as you might imagine, is a creamy ( and moderately dreamy ) modern oriental, with all the spices, coffee, amber and opoponax you might expect; familiar, competent, quite sensual – it fills up a room – but nothing the Turkish tourist board will be promoting any time soon I don’t think; there is a flatness from an overwieldy dose of Ambroxan or something similar that negates – if unifies – the simmering possibilities, even while the general gingery goodness is still worth a sniff to the curious. I might ask my friend, Zubeyde, an Istanbul native, if this is remotely Istanbulish or not – I can’t judge.

 

Not too far away geographically, but quite different in terms of perfume type and temperament, we find Tel Aviv: a brassy, and trashy, white floral with endocrinic, metallic woodnotes that puts me slightly in mind of the old XS Pour Elle by Paco Rabanne. It’s kind of sexy, suggesting a lot of bared tanned flesh, dyed hair and thickly applied makeup, but it certainly isn’t classy. I know Tel Aviv is supposed to be quite the party town though so maybe for some people its perfumed namesake will have some resonance, who can say. I somehow doubt it though.

 

 

As for Gallivant’s London:

 

 

“It’s addictive, big, soaring, down to earth, and has a wicked sense of humour. It’s a wet spring. Roses from Columbia Road. Georgian architecture. A hint of dustiness. An earthy, lush wetness you can almost taste. East End Boys and West End Giris. Second-hand leather jackets. Creative, new, old, beautiful, ugly, rich, poor. All rubbing along.”

 

 

 

If this all sounds quite promising, the olfactive cold rainy dawn of reality (god, British Mondays in winter working in London, it’s a miracle I ever got out of bed),  – is a slightly salty, aquatic rose : light, quite uplifting, with an almost oudhish, smoky subtext lying somewhere beneath the chemicals ( presumably the leather jacket as you huddle at the bus stop), plus cucumber, wet puddle topnotes, all fresh, bedazzled, and slightly disturbing. While I do personally associate the whole m’lady, curtsying, thatched Elizabethan Rose with England, in a very positive way -I have a thing about traditional floral talcs, for example, Yardley included; there is something so beautifully pure and uptight about the soaps and smells of a traditional English bed and breakfast ( none of the feline animality of the Parisians, dripping in civets, and in musks – we like our bedspreads and soap dishes to smell as rosy and matinal as Jane Austen novels) – I am not entirely convinced that this ‘rose by the estuary’ leather jacket malarkey entirely works, at least not for me personally. I don’t know. I think London is just too grandiose, yet also slippery and ungraspable, ultimately, to be pinned down by something so effervescent and slight.

 

 

Someone who definitely knows, and really loves, London, is Roja Dove. The former, mad Guerlainophile who famously blagged his way into the company as an obsessive young fanboy and then became England’s most talked about and famous nose, is the founder of the Harrods Haute Parfumerie, still curated by him, as far as I know,  and which is a must stop for any perfume person shopping and parading their way around the Big Smoke on a Saturday afternoon. A hushed, and gilded, Aladdin’s Cave on the fifth floor of the lauded, if claustrophobic, establishment owned by Princess Diana’s lover, where a perfume lover can glide about hushfully on silent carpets and a consortium of black mirrors; sample, and dream-  of having enough money to be able to actually buy something there (no, I exaggerate : yes, there are exclusives in Baccarat crystal and the likes of Xerjoff, but the rest of the fragrances are just expectable niche prices),

; still, this is certainly not your average high street counter. The eponymous fragrances are not at all bad either – well blended with a general integrity, plush; and London is recognizably yet another such perfume from the stable.  Rich, luxuriant, balsamic, oriental, this is essentially an Anglified Tom Ford Noir = Guerlain Heritage; lavender, tonka, vanilla, amber, woods, and at first I did think heLLO, this is something I am going to wear come winter, probably quite a lot, my kind of perfume, even if something was niggling me in my subconscious about it as it gradated on my skin slowly that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

 

That doubt emerged more clearly in the base notes later on, where a stingy fake sandalwood completely ruined for me what otherwise would have been a keeper. Where the Guerlain Heritage eau de parfum sinks into my skin like a swan feather eiderdown of quite provocative male sensuality – really, that thing is gorgeous and I have to get some more, London never reaches such heights ( or depths). It just kind of, coasts. Happy and puffed up as fat Larry ( Donald Trump might love it if you changed the name to Trump Tower). Still, it is quite nice. Our friend Karen has been wearing it during her stay in Japan this summer (she was also the recipient of the Malle Promise that is even worse in retrospect than I originally said it was), and the London, much better than that, has warmth, character, and presence that are not too shabby at all; likeable and grand enough probably to be a more convincing a portrait of London – the centre of it, the richer people’s part, at the very least. The financial hub. Each person’s London is their own though: you can live in leafy South Kensington in a big white house, or in a tower block just a few miles away in North Kensington, like the tragic Grenfell Tower that burned down in a shockingly fast inferno from neglect and negligence by the local council recently. Sometimes these extremely different worlds barely intersect, there is far less contact than in Tokyo – a far more equitable place – and it is this, ultimately that puts me off the city. When I lived there, for two long years, I always just felt pushed along the streets and the underground by the individualistic but faceless multitudes – but always lonely.

 

Ignore me, though. Many, many people – a lot of my friends included – do love the place:

 

 

“I had so much fun creating London, the scent of my hometown. I have tried to capture the vibrancy, dynamism and sense of surprise that pervades every corner of this great city. From the glamour of The Ritz and the naughtiness of Soho, to the power of Westminster to the simple elegance of St James Park, each element of this scent is evocative of my love for London. The iconography for London draws inspiration from the thirteen dragon boundary marks that watch over the city – the iconic winged guardians of the old gateways to the capital.”

 

 

Yes. In all honesty, when it comes to London, its charms, its pleasures, and its soul (if, indeed it has ever had one), you can, in all likelihood,  trust Roja Dove a lot more than you ever could me. Really.

 

 

The spectrum of jasmines is vast, and varied: I find there is probably more heterogeneity and interpretation within this type of scent than practically any other. Vetivers will still be vetivers; ambers ambers; citruses citrus, and even the other white flowers such as the lily, the tuberose, and the gardenia, seem to almost have inbuilt limitations to their permutations and proportions of ingredients in order to convincingly portray their floral origin.

Jasmines, however, come in a multitude of different expressions. From the barely there ‘jasmines’ of the Bulgari Mon Jasmin Noir range of fragrances, to the horrifying indole monster that is Gorilla Perfumes’ Lust, there is a veritable rainbow of differingly tweaked jasmine formulations thrust in between: from the symphonic, aldehyde jasmines ( First, Joy, Creed Jasmal); the fresh endless fountain ( Il Profumo’s Vent De Jasmin); the sandalwood conceptual ( CB I Hate Perfume’s Where We Are There Is No Here) to the voluptuous and full soliflore (Serge Lutens’ luminously hypnotic A La Nuit). There are vanillic jasmines ( Micaleff’s sweet and seductive Watch); green jasmines ( Grandiflora’s Madagascan Jasmine, Brosseau’s Jasmin Lilas)…….all kinds of jasmines, really, but somehow, no two are really ever alike.

Still, some jasmines are certainly more memorable than others. I like, and wear, Floris’ very English and politely bucolic ( but possibly slightly boring) Night Blooming Jasmine, for example, which is about as sexual as a little flower-covered thatched cottage in the Cotswolds. For a REAL night blooming jasmine, however,  a perfume that is really redolent of the heady, fulsomely living flowers exhaling their beautiful nocturnal siren call, you could do worse than to douse yourself in Sana Jardin’s new Savage Jasmine, which pretty much is what it says. Cradled only with almost virtually imperceptible sandalwood and musks, this is probably the most soliflore Jasmine perfume I have encountered.  It really is jasmine: jasmine: jasmine: so if you are allergic to jasmine; hate the scent and the soul of the jasmine flower, the smell of this sensurround perfume will probably drive you to suicide.

 

When I was in hospital I wrote about how Sana Jardin, this new ‘ethical perfumery’, had brightened up my days and my spirits with their sunbeam-infused orange blossom/ neroli Berber Blonde. I like this perfume house’s approach: very natural smelling, modern, but constructed, somewhat minimalistically, along classical lines. Savage Jasmine, to be released quite soon I believe, is more self-contained and simple ( some might even say simplistic) than Berber Blonde. This ONLY smells of jasmine, probably of the Arab variety (dense, animalic, a little bit fruity and rough and extremely sexy), but what I particularly like about it is the way that the perfumer has managed to craft a jasmine soliflore that is somehow both heavy and light at the same time. It floats on the air around you – both a skin scent and a wafter – and would make a fabulous ‘grand entrance’ scent for someone wanting to steal the spotlight – while not being sickly or overpowering. While I almost wish that there were some extra embellishments just to turn the blend into the Full Fantasia, that is probably just my maximalist, Sagittarian self doing the talking. Ultimately I think this is probably just about perfect as it is. Lovers of exotic jasmines and properly indulgent perfume, you need to smell this.

 

If Savage Jasmine is warm, womanly, and calmly outrageous, Vilhelm Parfumerie’s new amusingly titled Don’t Tell Jasmine is hysterical. Girlish ( or wannabe girlish); bright to the point of searing; practically bouncing off the ceiling with serotonin repleteness, yet actually really quite appealing, I had never even heard of this house ( yes, yet another niche outfit debuting with ten new perfumes in their lineup) but I do rather like their semi-retro futuristic design and concepts and the bottle, bestowed on me by Persolaise the other week when he came to stay, does look nice in my computer room, tucked neatly beside my begonia. The juice inside also most definitely carves out its own, unique little space in the thriving, jasminesque compendium.

 

Don’t Tell Jasmine is both breathlessly high-pitched and natural, indolic ( Italian or French jasmine?) and simultaneously urban/artificial, with an illuminated and sweet/sharp accord of lemon and Kir (cassis) cocktail, and what Vilhelm Parfumerie refers to as ‘petal musk’. I am a great believer in first impressions in perfumery: as with people, they are as important as the base notes ( the true self, the psyche and id, and the heart ). Ideally, the perfumer, with inspiration and technical precision, will have mastered all these stages to present a fully composite rendering of the fragrance’s soul (unless, like many perfumes, it is soulless),but in truth, these days you are lucky if you even get one. Don’t Tell Jasmine certainly gets the opening right: the perfume passed Duncan’s stringent First Impression Test immediately – he is excellent at inhaling and knowing immediately- even if the later, synthetic lilac notes, quite air-freshener-like, on my own skin began to slightly grate ( on younger, female Skin I can imagine this not necessarily being the case). Still, this is seemingly quite a fun new New York perfume house for us all to play with – I like the sound of their Basilico & Fellini, Darling Nikki ( just because it’s a Prince song), and the apparently very lifelike Modest Mimosa – I want to smell more. Rather than the overreaching and grave overconceptualism of many contemporary perfume houses, sometimes you just want to take a spritz and smile.

 

 

 

 

 

I discovered the full range of Martin Margiela fragrances yesterday.  At Ginza’s soulless, frigid, testosterone-free men’s fashion emporium, Hankyu – where blood-sucked succubi a la mode prowl stone-faced in search of wallet-decimating garments that they believe will restore some meaning to their vapid and meaningless lives.

This is the coldest, most reticent service in the world; my corpuscles filling up with antifreeze as we attempted to tolerate a miserable void of consumerism and slavish adherence to fashion codes, the modish; observing the gaunt and fleshless, hollow-eyed figures, their fine-boned fingers inexorably magnetized towards distorted, ripped and molecularly rewritten clothing that will only succeed in making them look like brainwashed, human-hating morons.

I despise this philosophically heinous snobbery; this pointless veneration of imported European luxury, where perfume bottles are handled as if they were holy religious relics or priceless works of art, where you can’t even spray or smell them without feeling that you are somehow impinging on the ‘dignity’ of the passionless fuckwits at the counter, whose passive-aggressive, bottomless reserves of froideur make you feel that not only should you not be requesting paper strips to test what seems like quite a fun series of scents – ‘replicas’ of actual experiences – Martin Margiela instead uses ribbons and his ‘assistant’ really wasn’t dispensing with them freely – but that they would really rather that you had actually backed away completely from their customer-repelling counters in the first place.

 

And this after I had just bought Duncan a t-shirt from one of the fashiony counters nearby! Wowee. But no. This was not enough. We obviously didn’t look right, we weren’t the idealized demographic, we weren’t ghosts out prostituting our souls for the sake of a ‘fashion moment’, and so these pallid, sexless, ageist and racist morbidly dull fashionistas merely treated us as though we were scum queen undesirables that they would just instead ignore.

 

It’s a real shame, as I quite liked the look and smell of some of these perfumes. Because although they are not cheap, in niche terms, compared to the Tom Ford concession one floor down below, for example, where a young, purse-lipped, very soignee female assistant with a sphinx- like unblinking demeanor ( from the huge pole up her ass) just about let us sample the rest of the Vert collection – all good, but Vert Boheme is still definitely my favourite –  these Margielas were, from some perspectives, relatively reasonably priced.

 

Beachwalk, a salty, sunscreen holographic olfactory apparition that I think is possibly the best of this type, is a scent I would consider buying if I can avoid throwing my drink in the face of the deathly, paste-faced, thin-moustachioed sales assistant while doing so; Lipstick On the kind of cool, powdered, earthy iris I love with some sweeter, heliotrope facets – I wanted to get to know it more. Others seemed quite interesting too, but I am afraid the gut-clenching over-seriousness and reverential gravitas of the place was becoming so intolerable – you could practically hear the creature’s inner, silent sighs as we had the gall to request more fashion ribbons – that I had to leave.

 

Fuck Hankyu.

I hope you go under.

 

 

 

( our own vaguely Bohemian botanical balcony..)

 

 

I first met Dariush Alavi ( aka Persolaise ) at the Jasmine Awards in London. We clicked immediately and met up for a drink shortly afterwards where we exchanged life stories, perfume ephemeralia and email addresses, later also discovering that we share three, major, passions : perfume, Madonna, and the cinema (and not necessarily in that order). Not often in accordance, either, but those fiery differences of opinion make for stimulating conversation and give new slants on various perspectives, from what are the best Madonna songs – we had a fantastic and rather joyous night of karaoke here the other night together with Duncan and the legendary Madame Persolaise); whether Martin Scorsese is as good as he is made out to be (he believes he is; I still have my doubts); to what niche perfume houses are soulless and overpriced (I am perhaps more cynical about a lot of them than he is) to a shared adoration of the classic Guerlains and Chanels and Diors – I gave him some immaculate Diorissimo esprit du parfum and cologne; a Joy vintage parfum in the classic black and red bottle and an extrait of Le Galion Snob because it shares the very same name as his book.

 

On their part, the Persolaises came laden with gifts. They had asked if there was anything that they could bring to Kitakamakura from the U.K. and I said Heinz baked beans – because I love and grew up with them and you can’t really get them here, plus, you know, any perfumes that you don’t need, samples and what not, never imagining that when they came down to our house for two nights after a few days in Tokyo that Dariush would be proffering up to my eagerly clasping hands full bottles of intriguing, extortionate niche, including Tom Ford’s Shanghai Lily and, from the more recent Private Collection of 2016 (scents I had not yet got round to smelling before), the delicately lush and entirely convincing, Vert Boheme.

Knowing my opinionated vociferousness and innate ease in speaking the truth (sometimes a social handicap, but basically a gift), Persolaise told me to just be honest if I were to review any of the ridiculously generous cache of valuable bottles that he had given me, and I will be. Two of them I am at best ambivalent about, the ouds and pure sandalwood are already safely stowed away in my perfume cabinets for potential future moments, but even though we clashed a little over Tom Ford, whose perfumes I often quite like but whose psychological depths and validity I often doubt ( he loves Tuscan Leather, Noir De Noir and Santal Blush; I like Jasmin Rouge, Grey Vetiver and Ombre De Hyacinth but have never bought a full bottle of any of them ), I have to say that the two Private Collections that he gave me were completely up my street.

 

The man is very detail oriented. A perfectionist, I would say, so I imagine that he must have carefully selected which perfumes he was willing to dispense with, mulling over properly which ones I was likely to enjoy, as a dusky, spiced, clove-studded carnation lily and a refreshingly green mandarin honeysuckle are just what the Narcissus ordered.

 

I had briefly smelled Shanghai Lily before somewhere at a department store in Tokyo, and had immediately formed a generally positive impression of it. Far more impressive than the dull and lacking Lys Fume, whose small sample bottle I sometimes use as an air freshener in the computer room upstairs, Shanghai Lily is a fully realized and genuinely atmospheric, warm ( yet dark) composition, veiled and vanillic, almost ghostly in its florality but still narcotically seductive. While the soft, woody, skin-huggy base is not quite as compelling as the almost cinematically vivid beginning of the perfume, as night lilies exhale their torpor on breaths of languid, almost melancholic spice, this is definitely a perfume that I will wear when my clove-studded cravings start tearing their heads come the Autumn and Winter.

 

Vert Boheme is perfect for this season, and I am drenched in the thing as I write this on my iPhone heading out for a day of scent researching in Ginza. I had of course read about this new quartet of 70’s inspired green perfumes and was rather interested to see how they had been executed, whether the perfumers involved had managed to capture the essence of the greener trend of four decades ago (No 19, Silences, Cristalle) yet transmogrify them successfully into a contemporary setting.

 

Judging from this particular perfume, they have. Vert Boheme has the basic odour template of the original Chanel Cristalle without its harsher metallicisms; rather it has the lush, dew dawn sunbeams of Annick Goutal’s lovely Eau De Camille ( 1983). The base, while not the heightened poetry of the finest perfumes, is still extremely pleasant: gentle, green, like the memories of lying in long grass. The top notes are alive and refreshing, a burst of mandarin and galbanum entwined with magnolia and freshly opened honeysuckle, not too chemicalized or overly strident, and the whole has a quietly elegant yet subtly passionate aspect to it that I am finding extremely enjoyable. I think I, or rather Persolaise, might have found my scent for the rest of this summer.