JAPAN, PERFUME
Filed under Flowers
NE ME TOUCHES PAS : : : : : : COMPLICE by COTY (1974)
The thing about Complice is the bottle – possibly the most exquisite I’ve ever seen and held in my hand but never actually owned: a pleasurably weighty and luxurious glass flacon labelled in a flourishing Art Deco script and an elaborately cut glass headdress that rests on top like a nuptial coronet.
The scent itself though – rare, especially in the pristine vintage form I encountered it in once – also has something, despite its familiarity (the more you encounter old perfumes you realize that they too often had a ‘generic’ nature to them in the way that the current scents do: there were a lot of copy-cat, ‘generally pretty’ floral aldehyes about: not every old perfume was especially distinctive or an olfactory masterpiece).
Complice is one of these lady-like, filigréed Parisian florals, with the light, silk foulard of green and spice we’ve experienced many times before in perfumes such as the more idiosyncratic L’Air Du Temps, typical, delicate, yet affecting scents that once breathed their incorrigible elegance on air of the streets of Paris like soft, unravelling secrets. Yes, it cannot be denied that the Complice’s flacon is perhaps more memorable than its delicately forlorn contents of musk and narcissus: its exhalations of peach skins, lilacs and cold, powdered orris. But there is still, once the top note aldehydes fade, an untouchable aspect within the classically constructed blend that makes it appealing – something papery, white and pristine, like the cool breath of February snowdrops.
Filed under Floral Aldehydes, Flowers
film-making on a sunday
quick uncut snip from our horror film: this is the Heian death curse
Filed under Flowers
TOKYO CHYPRE: : : INOUI by SHISEIDO (1976)
Japan is justifiably famed as an ingenious imitator of other cultures’ inventions, while usually adding that perceptibly nipponesque something to the mix to makes them its own – tucked guilelessly under powdered kimono sleeves.
In terms of fragrance, Shiseido, perhaps the most famous cosmetic company here, has a domestic perfume range that is somewhat run-of-the-mill and prestige-free for most Japanese women (while remaining unattainably exotic for some perfumistas overseas), comprised of mainly elegant, if unexciting, japonified versions of western classics: Murasaki (a green iris clearly based on N°19), Koto (any fresh floral 70’s chypre), Concerto (Patou 1000), Memoire (a whiff of L’Interdit) and More (a copy of Nº 5 or Detchema.)
Inouï, though, which presciently signifies ‘extraordinary’ or ‘unprecedented’ in French, seems on this one occasion to have pipped its jealous Paris to the post and been a very clever innovator. A fantastic, green-balsamic chypre that predated Lancôme’s Magie Noire (another masterpiece of this genre) by two years, its reputation in some quarters as ‘the perfect chypre’, which I cannot dispute, has allowed its cachet to grow to the extent that a bottle of this perfume will now regularly go for $1500 at perfume specialists and internet auctions (and aside one tiny mini, it has tellingly never come up at the fleamarkets either….)
Like many, I myself had also only read about this perfume and had assumed that I would never get to smell it, but then was lucky one day to have access to an intact version when a Japanese dressmaker friend of mine happened to go back to her parents’ house one weekend in Kamakura and retrieved an old bottle of the Inoui eau de parfum that she had hidden away, long ago, somewhere in her bedroom closet (she had got rid of it when the boyfriend who had given it to her twenty years ago suddenly finished with her…the scent was still too much of a painful reminder and she had no plans on wearing it any more, holding onto her bottle now more as an investment for the future). Despite this, she generously let me borrow the bottle for a whole weekend.
*
This really is a compelling and delightful perfume. While the forested, chypre-animalic finish of the scent, played out with a dry, resinous blend of oakmoss, myrrh, cedar, civet and musk, with evergreen tonalities of juniper, thyme and pine needles, is slightly reminiscent of Lancôme’s finest black magic hour (but without all the patchouli), the top notes of Inouï are a different affair altogether: a peerlessly crafted, assured, and very upliftingly green accord of galbanum, lemon, peach and raspberry-breathed freesia that reminds one a little, just briefly, of the dewily sylvan opening of vintage Y (Yves Saint Laurent).
Elegant and mysterious, the final result on the skin, lingering and insistent, is confident, sexy, and inscrutable, with none of the red-nailed and gold more obvious vampishness of other perfumes in the category. It is perfect.
Filed under Floral Chypre, Flowers, Japanese Perfume
THE FLEETING EVANESCENCE……. NU GREEN by HONORE DES PRES (2009)
Much of the criticism aimed at this somewhat maligned creation, a green, restrained, but equ…
Source: THE FLEETING EVANESCENCE……. NU GREEN by HONORE DES PRES (2009)
LOVE IN THE GREEN GROVE: : : : CALAMUS by COMME DES GARCONS (2000)
Part of Comme Des Garçons’ now discontinued Leaves series, Calamus is one of Bernard Duchaufour’s earlier less fussed, more smooth and linear creations – an extremely green, fresh and aerated scent that achieves its peculiarly verdant lightness with an ingeniously conceived blend of young bamboo leaf, grass oils, celery seeds and angelica root. The initial impression is like tumbling into a bed of welcoming grasses and sap : crushing the new green leaves of May between your fingers; a leaf-dappled smell, calming and nerve -purifying, that gradually becomes a soft and white pillow-like lactic powder: downy and dreamy like a sleep under the leaves, in the sun.
‘GRAND AMOUR’ by ANNICK GOUTAL ( 1996 )
“Brenda lay on the dais. Her tray was beside her and the quilt was littered with envelopes, letters, and the daily papers. Her head was propped against a very small blue pillow; clean of make-up her face was almost colourless rose pearl…….a nereid emerging from fathomless depths of clear water…”
On the cusp of embarking on a desperate, pointless and finally unfulfilling affair with a handsome cad down in London, Evelyn Waugh’s beautiful but bored Lady of Hetton Manor (in his 1934 novel ‘A Handful Of Dust’), would have sat in a spring-scented, flower-filled room perfumed like this: breathy, on-the-brink hyacinths; roses, lilies, and honeysuckles, strewn decadently over tender balsams and the faintest memory of vanilla.
A romantic homage to Chamade (but less powdery, animalic, and ultimately less tragic), Grand Amour has effortless grace and classicism, but still, at its heart, a slightly wilted reminiscence – a sigh, like a chamber of beauteous hyacinths on the point of dying.
Filed under Flowers
SUBTERFUGE
….is what I feel in my new work perfume for spring: Gardenia by Elizabeth Taylor.
Filed under Flowers