The Black Narcissus

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I learned a lot from the real tuberose flowers I encountered last year in Indonesia. Mainly, that the slovenly, skirt-hitched, snow-white she-devils – sloe-eyed, tropical, sultry – tuberose: that classic, buttery tuberose you either love or hate, sickening and stench-breathed to some; voluptuous and heart fluttering to others, is a very loose interpretation of the natural reality of the flowers I regarded and smelled before me, which I found, rather, to be more chaste; green : contained. Quite innocent, almost. Pretty. White. Yes, as I wrote in my piece on those Malang tuberoses, as the day wore on, the flowers did release vague olfactive reminiscences of all those classic tuberoses at different hours of the day; a reality that fascinated me, as I name-checked favourites that I got brief perfume snatches of; but which did nothing, all the same, to detract from the fact that tuberose, despite that lactic, pink- fleshed, come-on, is a lot lighter and fresher in reality than we have been led to believe. She has been tarnished as a harlot, the dirtiest of all flowers, with just one thing always there on her mind, but I have to say that I sensed something different. And while Carnal Flower definitely comes closest to the actuality of the tuberose flowers, at least the ones of the Javan variety that I experienced personally, there is still, though, perhaps something overly studied about that scent; a certain ‘bite of seriousness’ that is dense, clinical, abridged, despite its airiness. Having said that, I do love it, as I do practically all tuberose perfumes – I just can’t help myself – they break through the boring barriers of the everyday mundane, somehow, these flowers – my favourites including Tubéreuse Caprieuse by Histoires de Parfums (a scent to lose my mind to); Moroccan Tuberose by Illuminum (tropical, clear and dreamy); Balenciaga Michelle, withs its deep, Sapphic secrets; and Tubéreuse de Caron (which I think is just about perfect). I also retain, still, a soft spot the original tuberosian Chloé by Parfums Lagerfeld as well: so soft, gauzy, bodied….

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sensual Tuberose, a limited edition scent from Bois 1920, is a worthwhile addition to the ever-expanding tuberose canon, a scent in the classic, fresh and creamy vein, with a sweet and fruited tuberose accord (peach, coriander), wedded to skin-tracing moments of orris butter, heliotrope, and coconut, and undernotes of patchouli, musk, and benzoin. It is quite sexy and alluring, flighty – flirtatious, if perhaps lacking that magical something – that unifying, secret ingredient that might have made it more unique. I would need to spend an evening with someone wearing Sensual Tuberose to come to any further conclusions about its qualities – I fear there may be a thinness in its heart – but that might just be the way my skin is interpreting it.

 

 

 

Honour Woman is a very un-Amouage perfume in many ways (light, tuberose/gardenia, slightly ozonic), and a welcome respite from all those spiced, heavy, sweet ambered unguents, oudh and woods that the famed Omani house is so well known (and rightly loved) for, but which I tend to get sick of quickly. Honour, to me, smells a little like a hi-tech remix of Chanel’s Gardénia reformulation; a fashionable tuberose/gardenia hybrid freshened with pepper, rhubarb, coriander and metallic sheen to beat the desert heat, but nothing to lose your heart (or indeed, honour) to. The alleged base notes of frankincense, vetiver, opoponax and leather are so subtle as to be quite unobtrusive, but do allow the scent to fade quite nicely, a finely tuned balance of the sweet and its opposite. No Arab tuberose, then, Honour is essentially a fresh, blameless, modern white floral – quite nice, but, again, for me at least, lacking in some essential twist.

 

 

 

 

Mona Di Orio’s perfumes and I are not natural bedfellows. While I came, eventually, to understand the appeal of her Vanille, and have also come to appreciate Musc and Cuir, on the whole I find that I have to really brace myself for the arrival of any perfume from this house on my skin. What other people find idiosyncratic, sensual, dense and uncompromising, I just, on the whole, find unpleasant and weird: there is a perverseness there that I can’t ever really understand, as though the perfumer were purposefully making the scents unpleasant and difficult just to make a point. As a non-conformist type myself I respect this standpoint, this bucking against expectations, but from a personal, straightforward and essentially hedonistic smell perspective I am afraid I just don’t enjoy these perfumes at all. And Tubéreuse I find almost nightmareish. The beginning of the scent, by far the worst and most unacceptable stage, has a sour, woollen dustiness, replete with what smells to me like a suffocating powder of turmeric, some citrus, and some barnyard animalics (with echoes of her former mentor, Roudnitska and his decaying Diorella melon barely keeping the lid on the decadence beneath), before the timely arrival of a natural heart of Indian tuberose absolute. The perfumer, however, as always, deliberately confounds our expectations of the title note by obscuring the tuberose floral scent with swathes of cashmeran and bergamot, a fuzziness that, once settled, does eventually develop into a sweet exotic aura that I can imagine might be pleasing on the right person (or someone who understands this perfume better), but to me, personally,  this is possibly the worst tuberose perfume I have ever smelled. I hate it.

 

 

 

 

 

A more readily comprehensible tuberose by far (if one that is still somewhat difficult to take), is Blu by Bruno Acampora, a scent I had never heard of until recently when a friend living in New York told me that she had been to a fantastic perfume emporium called MiN (who provided these samples), and had fallen for Bois 1920 Sensual Tuberose as well as Blu by Bruno Acampora. Now this one is a full on, in-ya-face, poolside tuberose: bright, alive, like an outtake from a Californian David Hockney painting. Tuberose as shameless bonne viveuse. The blue of the pool dapples. She suns herself; dreaming, drink empty by her side, and, hearing footsteps, slaps herself awake from the daydream as sunbeams dot her eyes and her vision clears. She lifts up her sunglasses, blinking, nonchalantly sprays on some Blu, before rising, lazily, up to meet her visitor, fixing his eyes with her gaze. The tuberose scent she spreads throughout the air – mature, womanly, rich – is frank and unapologetic; sleazy, almost – a rank, and salacious tuberose essence underscored with sandalwood, orange and ylang ylang and a plethora of naturally blue ingredients that colour the perfume oil with their pigment. Rasping, engorging, almost fungal……….ladies and gentlemen, make way for Blu. With her sex, sheer strength, and floral bravado, she has simply mown down the competion in today’s bout of four tuberoses.

 

 

 

Our flower’s reputation remains unchanged.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The summer holidays are finally here.

IT CAN ONLY BE COCONUT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I love this.

The moment I smelled Scent Gloss for the first time, I was whisked;  blow-dried straight back in time to the 1980’s: to my friends’ teenage bedrooms, just hanging around and listening to cassettes…….. homework and clothes on the floor, scrambling to find the right thing you just knew was under that piece of paper somewhere; a crumpled 7”, lipbalms, Smash Hits, hairspray – a big eighties jumble of cheap, sweet, things constantly in use.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scent Gloss, which I think is a fantastic name, is a polished, upbeat, very pink and bright floral of roses, tuberose, orchid, and lush, purple lip-pursed magnolia, all laid shinily over warm, clinging and tender skin musks.

It is a shiny, neat perfume for teenage girls, or at least the teenage at heart. I must confess, though, that I have, on occasion, worn this perfume to work (so god knows what that says about me…..)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bergamot, an essence indispensable for its sharp freshness and ability to impart a cologne-ish, poetic immediacy to the beginning of all kinds of perfumes, is a fragrant oil derived from a small, pear-shaped citrus fruit native to the city of Bergamo in Italy, and has featured prominently in Italian folk medicine for centuries in various parts of the country, prized for its ability to cure a variety of complaints, according to Paolo Rovesti’s ‘l’aromaterapia dell’essenza di Bergamotta’. With its beautiful smell, something like a marriage of lemon, orange, lime and lavender (the fruit is thought to possibly be a hybrid, in fact, of citrus limetta (sweet lime) and citrus aurantia (bitter orange), bergamot was practically considered a panacea for all kinds of illnesses, both physical and psychological, a potent, refreshing yang citrus essence that is uplifting and lightening to the body and the spirits, yet also calming and relaxing to the senses.

 

 

 

I love bergamot. This was probably the first essential oil that I bought, way back when, possibly for the connection with Earl Grey tea (by far my favourite way to drink black tea), and the fact that, unlike essential oils of lemon, orange and grapefruit, all of which I adore for their sunny, direct simplicity, the smell of bergamot goes one step further somehow – there is something almost mysterious about it.

 

 

 

Perhaps this is why the note is so beloved by Guerlain. Although most perfumes list bergamot essence in their the top notes, for its appealing ability to lift, and scintillate the perfume from within, most Guerlain fragrances feature the essence especially prominently. The spectacular sunlight-on-moss effect of Mitsouko is achieved with the contrast of the sharp bergamot in the top notes with the murkier, chypric forestry beneath; equally, the gourmand, anisic friandise of L’Heure Bleue works because of the startling contraposition between the mouthwatering, irisian, musked thickness of the main body of the perfume and the piquant bergamot opening. Nowhere, however, is bergamot used more prominently than in vintage Shalimar perfume, which is said to contain a staggering 30% of pure bergamot essential oil, the heartmelting ‘cheese cake’ effect that Shalimar achieves so beautifully stemming from the vanilla, opoponax, and balsam base balanced with sensual floral essences, then shot through with that mouthwatering lemon and bergamot in the top.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beautiful it may be, but bergamot oil can also have quite significant effects on the body, and I should know. It is powerful stuff. And this last week there have been two incidences that have brought this home quite dramatically to me.

 

 

 

 

This time of year is one of the busiest for me, and I almost always get run down in body and mind, resulting sometimes in cold sores that I loathe for their face-disfiguring qualities, especially when you are standing up in front of Japanese eighteen year olds who are scrutinizing your every move. When it comes to these hateful viruses, you want to get rid of them, and get rid of them fast, and I find essential oils are by far the best way to achieve this. Tea tree is effective (but I can’t abide the smell); lemon is quite good (but it can burn); eucalyptus I have discovered recently gets the job done, as does lavender (probably the second most effective), but I have discovered this week that bergamot is by far the best. It really is. Not only does it smell gorgeous, and can thus be dabbed on during the day without worrying about whether it is wrecking your scent profile (it is probably improving it), but the bastard virus stands no chance in the face of such a potent, citric life force and can offer no resistance. It quickly disappears.

 

 

 

Which is great. Except that I also used bergamot in a very ill-advised manner this week and am now really suffering with the consequences. Like last year, I have had an ear infection these last two weeks (hell when you are teaching), and the antibiotics I was given haven’t been working. To give them a boost, and seeing the success of the bergamot essential oil on my lip I decided to put some (a lot, this is me we are talking about – if only I could learn restraint) behind my ear, on my throat, and all around the painful area to it to prevent it from getting any worse. Which would have been fine, probably, had I not, then, the next day, obliviously gone and sat on our balcony, gorgeous at the moment, and sat in the sun for an hour or two, forgetting, despite all the years of reading aromatherapy books, that bergamot oil is of course phototoxic, meaning of course that it vastly increases the rate at which the skin reacts to UV light……..

 

 

 

 

Although I did one of those stupid, but addictive, Facebook personality quizzes the other day (‘How much of a redneck are you?’) and proudly only scored 4% ( I think that I would have probably have got 0% had I chosen ‘salsa’ over ‘guacamole’), I am now, to my chagrin, an actual redneck. A huge red patch on my neck, throat and all round my ears, that looks like a burning red birthmark and right now doesn’t seem to be going down.

 

 

 

I should know better. Because, you know, Shalimar also burns me. Every time. It is just something that I have come to accept. Almost a no pain, no gain thing: I burn through the lemon and bergamot stage, then it goes down and I get to the delicious creamy vanilla beneath and it was all somehow worth it. On this occasion, though, despite my great love for the scent of bergamot, I have now realized that I am going to have to treat it with a lot more wariness. It is fierce, powerful stuff.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The main thrust of contemporary high street perfumery is vulgarity. A pushed up cleavage; cling-wrapped derrière; the rubber-lipped Kim Karshadian of a ‘celebrity’ magazine culture that is peached up, pouted and packaged in a fruity, pink, vanilla’d explicitness; a fruitchouli ‘sensuality’ (you will never know how much I hate Coco Mademoiselle); or else virginalized, and rigidly chastity-belted, as the pure-as-the-driven-snow ‘roses’ that are often, in their holier-than-thou, quite angrily overt ‘get your eyes off my derriere’ passive-aggression, strangely, somehow, even more crass.

 

 

 

Despite this rather rum state of affairs out there in the world of popular perfumery, there is definitely, nevertheless, still a market for more nuanced and intelligent scents that don’t place themselves as definitively at whichever position they have chosen on the culturally prescribed sexometer, that go for a more subtle, distanced approach, melding sensuality, and the mysterious promise of what may be, with fragranced veils of a more demure (some might say prim) floral architecture: in essence, producing scents that are much less cynical, Pitbulled, Tanquerayed-up f***s in a night club toilet, than more gentle, and soulful, scents that draw on a more subdued, pristine quality to instil intrigue and interest, to not state her intentions quite so directly.

 

 

 

 

In a sense, both Paradis Paradis and Opardu, soapful, green-and-white floaty summer dress creations, are nostalgic, throwback scents, immediately familiar in their savonesque, ladylike, almost motherly, purity. Puredistance’s much lauded Opardu – whose very name is meant to hint at what has been lost, in some sensitive, semi- Proustian manner, is certainly quite redolent of something comforting and feminine (Duncan said it reminded him of the smell of his mother’s make-up bag): for me it approaches more the Platonic ideal of White Soap, particularly of the Japanese variety: Shiseido’s Savon D’Or, for example, with its raised-on-a-pedestal, irreproachable, soapen hardness, as human and fleshed as a Grecian statue; and as removed from all hints of coarseness as it is possible to be.

 

 

 

 

Though described by some as a beautiful, old school, glamorous scent, I would have to say that despite its undoubted lushness (a glimmering, luminous floral abstraction of tuberose, lilac, Bulgarian rose, gardenia, jasmine and heliotrope) Opardu strikes me more as a slightly cold, if undeniably romantic, scent with some of the ‘respectable’ aura of Estée Lauder’s White Linen, but without that perfume’s aldehydic traditionalism. It smells more modern, perfumer Annie Buzantian (creator of Lauder’s groundbreaking Pleasures and Tommy Girl, among others) successfully combining these plush, green florals with more sensual, powdery cedar musks in the base, to produce, for once, a proper contemporary ‘perfume’ that will appeal to anyone who likes to wear scent  as a conduit to escape; to walk about, dreamily, haughtily perhaps, and ‘rise above’. I find, also, though, that there is something almost salty down there in the depths of this scent, an aspect that makes the perfume less pliant and doe-eyed that it initially might appear to be, and hints, possibly at a potential sexual table-turning when these two attractive and well-dressed people leave the exclusive restaurant they have just successfully met at for their fourth date; and, with a slight glint in her eye, head, for the first time, to her room at the hotel on the opposite side of the street.

 

 

 

 

Paradis Paradis is a far simpler affair than Opardu, clearer-eyed and lighter; uncomplicated. It is also less original. In fact, this perfume is so familiar on first sniff your smell brain immediately goes off searching into its compartmentalized pockets of perfume memory wondering where you know it from. A few seconds later you have it: it is a perfect hybrid of Hermès Hiris and Gucci Envy, with the identical, airy, melancholic iris of the former welded to the taut, chic, slightly bitchy green of the latter (quite successfully, I might add), and creating a full-blossomed, feminine scent that is quite appealing. While similar to the Hermès, a scent I wear myself on days that I want to close myself off from everything, slow down within myself, and enter its aqueous, introverted, almost perverse ill-humour (has a scent ever been more melancholic?), Paradis Paradis is a more optimistic scent: lighter, creamier, with the Envy-ish green note holding it all in place and giving it a slight touch of sass and flirtatiousness. This perfume would be perfect for a garden party in summer, the hostess flitting about in a brand new, carefully fitted cotton dress bought for the occasion, in control; giving out smiles, drinks, and tidbits of food and gossip to her guests, an almost coy, girlish aroma following her pleasantly wherever she goes on the breeze; but, crucially, and intentionally, never giving too much away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Black Narcissus is so excited by perfume that he will even buy old discarded shower gels and body creams from flea markets, discarded for a dollar by the owners who found no use for them, even when they have been opened and when most people wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole. I don’t care. They intrigue me. I need to know how they smell, the voyeuristic curiosity of other people’s bathroom cabinets, when you lock the door behind you, look around, and sample their treats and toiletries at your leisure.

 

 

 

Trésor: Surprisingly deep and woody, cedary, taut, shot through with that pungent, spiced, Lancôme rose – the shampoo of a seductress goddess extraordinaire (she sits next to him, almost coyly, and runs her hands through her hair with one hand,, knowing the effect that this is going to have on him as she holds the stem of her martini glass with the other….), but too strong for me to use that way when I tried it on myself the other night. I could hardly sleep.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

            

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Calandre: How old is this? Why do I risk some decades-old bathroom product on this body of mine? How do I even know it’s even safe for human use?

 

 

 

 

I don’t.

 

 

 

 

 

But it smells sublime. Sublime. And Calandre is a scent I often pick out from the back of the perfume wardrobe when summer comes, usually in August for some unknown reason, as it smells lovely down on the beach by the water, combined, on skin, with all those brain-soothing suncreams, sunlight, and daydreams and you drift in and out of yourself and just don’t care about anything. This is rich, silvery, aldehydic rose/ green lather, gorgeous on hair as well as you rinse it out with water and watch that indulgent, washed away foam go swirling, slowly, down the drain like Janet Leigh. I used it yesterday; a lot, all over, before putting it back in the drawer and heading out for my day feeling clean, Paco Rabanne’d and distanced from the mundane. A subtle, dreamy, 1960’s on the surface of my being. My clandestine pleasure.