Merry Christmas !! WINTER DELICE by GUERLAIN (2000)
Hoping you have a lovely day, whatever you may be doing, wherever you may be..
TWO WALKS IN WINTER : : : : : : : WINTER WOODS by SONOMA SCENT STUDIO (2008) + TERRE DE L’ ENCENS by CLOON KEEN ATELIER (2012)
This time of year, when we are finally able to distance ourselves a bit from the daily grind, from the accumulated stresses of work and the ‘real world’; the bullshit that is the world news; the petty strains and pressures of the office: when the air is clear, the sky, and the stars are bright, when we can begin to find some clarity and level-headedness and contemplation, is the perfect opportunity for us to walk. To just walk, and think, recuperate, unwind, get some mental and physical air and think about the year that has just passed as well as the one that is about to come.
Duncan and I are fortunate in having some very beautiful walks here where we live in Kamakura. And now that the hectic term is over, I look forward to taking advantage of them. Some paths that lead directly to the grounds of the most important zen temples, some that go through some very beautiful woods and eventually to the sea, and others, leading to a lake, that are not frequented by many people, that almost feel like secrets.
Usually I would run a mile from a perfume called Terre De L’Encens. I love incense, have been burning my usual Japanese incense for most of this week, and as I sit here, my chest and back are also drenched in essential oils of frankincense and rosemary, as I try to recover from a cold I caught last week. I adore olibanum boswellia, and in fact almost bought a frankincense perfume yesterday ( my final day of work this year): Incense by Florascent, an all natural perfume based on a beautiful natural extract from Eritrea that I have had my eye on for a while, but I decided instead that I had better save some money back for Kyoto instead ( we go there tomorrow, for Christmas ).
Despite my love for the otherworldly and breath-slowing aspect of frankincense, though, incense and woody perfumes, which the niche perfume market is really quite over-flooded with in my view, really do bore me to tears. All those Byredos and Tauers and Nasomattos and the like, those cruel-hearted urban oudhs, just smell, to me, on the whole, of unimaginative fashionistas giving off some dry, arid, ‘edginess’ that I personally find most unattractive, even aggravating.
Terre De L’Encens, by Ireland-based Cloon Keen, is an incense scent that for once dares to tread new ground. Like a beautiful walk in the beach air, this clear and pleasant perfume offsets a very bright, luminous, clean frankincense note (‘incense hyperessence’), with an aerated floral accord (iris, immortelle, pepper) that in my opinion really works. Where from the somewhat uninspired name you might expect the usual clogged and burnt ebonics, instead we find here a pleasingly liberated frisson of loneliness and togetherness; the salted mineral marine facets and ‘clear, radiant ozonic’ top notes contrasting properly with a certain lip-softened aspect; a subliminal, animalic element (labdanum, ciste) that prevents the usual banality from ever setting in. I find a pleasing simplicity here, a kind of warm and elegant solitude as we walk along the coastline; a clean-lined, pearlescent space like some gradually dawning female enlightedness.
Terre De L’Encens is not a dazzling scent by any means, but that, to me, is the point: it just smells nice, wraps the wearer in a clear-eyed sphere of skylight dreaminess and ease, as you walk, look out at the seaside horizons, and thank the universe for your blessings.
* * * *
When I see ice and snow piled high on trees and bushes, I feel magic.
Everything else just drops away. It can feel as though you were alone in the world, that all the pollution and greed of mankind no longer exists, that you have returned to some kind of snowflake, primeval innocence: to childhood, and Christmas, and just the simple, beautiful reality of iced air penetrating the lungs, the magpies suddenly startling you from your reverie as they take flight into the beyond in a ruffling, shaking powder of snow. I love to walk in such a scape, lose myself in the white of the sky, of the grass. But at the same time, I have to admit that I am physically entirely unsuited to the cold. It affects me inordinately. I have a deep fear of it, and as a result, I am instinctively far more drawn to heat and warmth. This is also true for perfume. It seems as though I was born to wear ambers, patchouli, vanillas, and deep, rich perfumes that ground and surround me with a comforting, protective halo; eskimo furs of contrarian goodness to let me enjoy the frozen lake; the icicles frozen solid on the branches while feeling concurrently that they are outside, exterior to me, that I can feel my warm blood pumping in my veins, my heart hot, my body protected.
From what I have read, some people are apparently disappointed when they smell Sonoma Scent Studio’s Winter Woods, expecting some bleak, more poetic and touching scent that will conjure up the delicacy of frosted branches obstructing the path, the spirituality inherent in being lost in the forest ………….(” The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep. And miles to go before I sleep…………..”)
But Winter Woods, a clever play on words, does in a way make one think of a walk in the woods in fact, but more from the perspective of the walker himself clad snugly in warm clothes and perfume, the lung-protecting, rubefacient qualities of wood essential oils: of cedarwood, sandalwood, guaiacwood, elements that all have the characteristic of heat. In fact, this perfume is very warm indeed, sultry even, especially in the almost raunched and sensual outerstages when it dries down to an ambered, bodied, conclusion of castoreum, vetiver and ambergris, with a healthy quantity of classic oakmoss giving the perfume a mossy, chypric aspect almost redolent of an underembellished, and more masculine, vintage Femme or Mitsouko (but without the spice).
This is a slow perfume: less a brisk walk in the forest than a half-somnambulent plod, legs heavy, meandering into a clearing, wrapped up – too much even, in thermals and coats and scarves – where you sit on a log and stop; mull things over; meld with the surrounding woodwork.
There are seemingly no top notes in Winter Woods. All is cellos and basses: just a smokey, fireside aspect obtained with extract of birch tar resin, the cosy fireplace you know is waiting for you when you return home. The perfume – thick, genuine – is almost chocolatey: not in flavour exactly, but in its rich, inchoate texture, a deceptively simple scent that I almost wish were more complicated (some nutmeg? some orange peel, even a touch of paprika?) just to take it into more fully orchestrated territory. And yet the perfume works perfectly as it is. Ligneous, rich, dense, and somewhat magnetic, it is as fortifying, as reassuring, and as solid, as an oak.
Filed under Flowers
LOVE WON’T TEAR US APART: UNKNOWN PLEASURES by KEROSENE (2013)
I will admit that my first reaction, from just a little touch from a sample vial on my hand, was that this smelled a bit like the gunk you used to get in the plastic top of an old orange squash bottle. Citrussy, sure, and bit sugary, but, what’s all this nonsense I thought to myself as the perfume began to then slowly de-coagulate into a closer perspective: a thick, Lemon Pledge cake shop scent for an old dear; a cloth; a mop: and a vanilla-themed pastry treat waiting for her over there on the counter at the end of her labours.
The story behind the perfume, to my surprise however, is as follows:
” You’re walking down a cold street in Manchester, listening to Joy Division, sipping on a warm cup of London Fog. This fragrance opens with the smooth sweetness of honey with Earl Grey tea, with a zing of lemon. It dries down to a cozy vanilla, soft tonka bean, and waffle cone base sure to make any gourmand lover smile. “
The second time I tried this perfume, to try and get this very American take on the miserabilist Manchester experience (the ‘waffle cone’ probably gives it away I would say), I put on a lot more, half the sample probably, and, suddenly, there it was: a blast (and it is a blast) of creamy, furniture-polishy lemon bergamot making quite the impression, fused together richly with some buttery, ginger biscuit-like vanillic undertone, quite curious and immediate, but for me, I have to say, a weeny bit sickly. On my skin at least this stage feels a bit like a battle: lead singer Lemon belting out furiously against whatever creamy, fattening business is trying to rise up from below the bonging and thronging stage floor; and and until the perfume softens down to the later stages of a more convincing citrus-oriental, when I start to quite enjoy it, I find this stage of Unknown Pleasures kind of hard to take ( I do like sweet perfumes, but I also have my limits).
The idea of someone’s personal experience being translated into perfume, however – almost like the Etat Libre D’Orange concepts gone more individualistic – is quite appealing to me, as is the basic idea behind this scent. I like the precision. Before I got tinnitus, six or seven years ago (self-inflicted, from dancing too close to a speaker in Tokyo when my favourite Madonna song came on), I was also a headphone wearing pop maniac, and I miss it (though myself I always preferred New Order, the group that Joy Division became after lead singer Ian Curtis hanged himself: more exciting, electro, fun, and danceable). I am similar to Detroit -based Kerosene indie-perfumer John Pegg, however, in that I am also prone to a bit of The Cure, and a bit of Gothic, New Wave misery once in a while, and I can easily imagine the strangely British thrill of the huddled up, cold city ice; the private death-cavern industrialism of music such as Joy Division flooding your brain, all contrasting with the soothing, sugar-cup warming of a hot styrofoam latte warming your hands as you trundle along. The strangely oxymoronic pleasure; literal and aesthetic cold contrasted with the hot sugary invasion from the throat (although it does also have to be said that this is very much the foreigner’s fantasy; the ‘London Fog’ beverage alluded to in the spiel would be unknown to most Brits (looking it up I discover it is a kind of Earl Grey Latte); the entire scenario, like the scent itself to be honest, to me, not personally ringing any Mancunian evocative bells.
But what of the perfume itself? The base of Unknown Pleasures is certainly quite sweet and convincingly neo-gourmand – very literal holographic cake. Where, say, Hermès Ambre Narguilé encapsulated a cinnamon-tossed crême brulée aspect within a pared down, but still very smoothed, classic ambery structure, this, despite the pleasingly richly ambered conclusion, feels a bit ‘novelty’: it really does smell just like a lemoned, honey-centred cheese cake. Quite enticing, actually, if you like a bit of overt miel in your perfume (I’m not always sure that I do), but I must say that the oddness and the lingering sensuality of the base does make me want to try some more Kerosene scents, particularly Copper Skies which I hear is a straighter, heavier, amber without all these extra cake shop condiments. I like Unknown Pleasures, though I think that this perfume would probably have Ian Curtis spinning in his grave. It is much less Joy Division, somehow, no matter which way you look at it; I think it sounds, to me, ultimately, much more like an album track by Bananarama.
Filed under Flowers
L’ENIGME DE L’ENCENS JAPONAIS…….SERGE NOIRE de SERGE LUTENS (2008)
I wrote the other day about the strange, dark beauty of the best Japanese incense. And for those who may have not had access to this experience, I was thinking about what perfumes closest approximate what I like best about o-koh: the shadowy, mothballed aspect that puts me in mind of an old temple priest’s kimono hung on the door of some wintery corner; that exquisitely poetic Japanese austerity which takes the severe to its profoundest, most otherworldly extreme and leaves you agoraphobically facing the void; dreaming; looking at the precepts of your own culture more deeply and wondering what life in fact really is.
While a lot of the incense I have tried is stress-appeasing in its woodful, powdered mellowness; heart-opening and sensual, like Horikawa by the house of Korin – a spicy warm oriental that fills up every nook of a room with its cinnamon and ambered goodness – much of the other incense you can try at the Buddhist shops is compellingly odd, especially when smelled in its full intensity from the box; almost alien and offputting in its black, moist camphoraceousness that teases out some lingering ancient Japanese spirit, entirely unwestern in its grave, self-disciplined, zen-master sternfulness. I have bought boxes of this incense nevertheless over the years, enjoyed its almost sour, pickled amalgamations of oudh/agar/kyara/jinko and other blended naturals such as cloves, cinnamon, patchouli and camphor. But particularly camphor. That cold coolness, that medicinal fire that separates us from the daily reality and leads us into the religious; the purifying, hairshirt, doubled down ecstacies of ascetism and meditation.
I have only really smelled two perfumes that put me in mind of this quality. One is a scent I smelled in London two years ago with a specific Japanese theme (but whose name I can’t come up with right now), that combined some very camphoraceous incense with ume plum as well as other quite original combinations of ingredients to odd but quite mesmerizing effect: I remember standing transfixed in Liberty, feeling a strange kind of reverse homesickness as I was successfully transported back to Japan by that perfume. The other overtly Japanese (to me at least, though it is not directly expressed in the publicity released around one of Serge Lutens’ most difficult scents), is Serge Noire, apparently created to express the rather arch and fantastical concept of a phoenix arising from the ashes (‘an ode to everlasting beauty under cover of night’s rich plumage’). This perfume: rich, disconcerting, deep and dark, based on notes of ‘black wood’, ‘crystallized ash’, incense, cinnamon, clove, amber and camphor, has a similar quality to quite a lot of the Japanese incense I have smelled over the years. Though Parisian, and recognizably so, with its correct gradations from wood and powder to herbaceous and upper spice, the effect is similar. The stunning opening of the vintage version (I have just emptied the one sample I have from ‘back in the day’) has a napthalene-like bite, the smell of mothballs woven into a spiced, burnt, incense clay of woven woods and cloves that is intensely enigmatic at first, quite hypnotic, though it sadly dries down to a much more familiar, musky sandalwood accord that does not match the curious magic of the opening, and which I do have to say I have always found slightly disappointing. I smelled the newer version the other day in Tokyo from the bottle also, and it didn’t seem to have quite the kick of the original version, but I would like to try it again just to make sure. Despite its flaws, Serge Noire is quite a fascinating scent, and it is worth trying if any of the above descriptions do appeal to you. There are not many scents out there that are quite this severe, this difficult and recondite; that access the particular emotion and aura of some the most unusual, even sombre boxes of Japanese incense.
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JAPANESE INCENSE SAMPLING IN TOKYO.
There is no doubt in my mind that Japanese incense, an ancient tradition that continues unabated to this day, is of a quality and beauty that surpasses all others. We are not talking ‘joss sticks’, of the inexpensive sandalwood incense used in Chinese temples, or the ‘Lotus Love’, thickly pasted cheap Indian incense on sale at music festivals. No. We are talking here about mysterious, beautiful, almost eerily emotive incense that rises up, beguilingly, in austere, religious smoke: in temples, from houses; a curious, ghostly vapour that is both spiritually calming and sensual: kyara/jinko (agarwood), sandalwood, cloves, benzoin, cinnamon, rose, camphor, patchouli, osmanthus, hinoki…..all in various combinations, proportions and recipes, boxes of incense arranged in Buddhist shops for the peruser’s inspection. Usually, one is forced to lift up the box, and mess with the carefully wrapped boxes (which can cost up to 20, 000 yen (200 dollars), in order to smell the contents, but I was pleased to see, in a shop in Tokyo yesterday, that the many kinds of incense available, many of which I am familiar with and use myself on a daily basis, were available to be tested in small containers that held a few broken sticks; enough to get a good idea of what the smell of each variety will be like.
In truth, many incenses smell quite different when lit; some are even more beautiful, others too harsh and ‘smokey’. Neverthless, I did think that this sampling method was useful, and I wish that more incense shops did the same.
You can read more about Japanese incense below in my post on Zen. I will also be going to Kyoto over Christmas, which has some truly stunning incense shops, some, such as the beautiful Kungyokudo, which have been blending and making hand-made incense for centuries. I will write a more detailed report then.
In the meantime I ‘m interested to know though: have any of you ever used Japanese incense? If you haven’t, you don’t know what you are missing.
Filed under Flowers
Oh, you old devil you………LA FIN DU MONDE by ETAT LIBRE D’ORANGE (2013); D’HUMEUR MASSACRANTE by L’ARTISAN PARFUMEUR (1998); + SULPHUR by NU-BE (2013)))
I watched too many horror movies as a child. I did. And while I credit the terror that those brilliant products of the seventies and eighties engendered in me with helping to give me a rather unchained, lurid, and vivid imagination, the searing, mind-altering experience of seeing such petrifying films as Salem’s Lot; The Exorcist; and The Omen I + II with my younger brother, both of us scared beyond witless and hysterical and unable to sleep (our father barking at us even more terrifyingly to GET TO SLEEP) has given me not only a subliminal fear of crows and their eye-pocket-pecking potential (for life), but also left me with a profound fear of anything devilish, evil, or satanic; not even funny: not even in jest. The topic is one I quite simply fear to touch – exposing perhaps, a conservative side of myself on The Black Narcissus, that I am yet to fully, (and will never, probably) explore.
Duncan brought home a copy of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus the other day, a masterpiece of European literature by all accounts that I am dipping into with definite fascination, but also a certain trepidation, with its tales of artistic genius and pacts with the Dark One, particularly since some Italian friends of ours the other night suggested, in all seriousness, that Lady Gaga, who I am going through an absurd thing with in these last few weeks, might actually be a satanic force ( and I have been POSSESSED; still am: by her latest, and brilliant, album ARTPOP).
To me, while I took this all – discussed over dinner in a pasta restaurant in the north of Tokyo – with a certain bunch of salt, they were, as I say, genuinely in earnest; and they are both, in any case, fearfully intelligent types; fingers really on the various pulses (so oops there goes my innocent pleasure….)
While deep down inside I think that Stefania Germanotta is probably more of an angel to be honest: more an angel, certainly, than the devil’s hand maiden; I have to admit, embarrassingly, that nonetheless, some fearful, infernal seeds have still been sown: unwantedly, and a bit frighteningly, in my brain.
I know that I do have a strongly mischievous and contrarian side to my nature, I am naughty, quite rude, and a bit saucy; and I do truly hate the hypocritically pious, and the ‘holy’, and the whole of right wing America, and of England, who are obviously way more aligned with Satan, if he exists, than Lady Gaga, (isn’t advanced capitalism, in some ways, the devils’ work?): but there is nothing remotely, actually, (surely!!! surely…. tell me!) devilish about me I like, naively to believe…….. ( is there?!!)
And though I am highly attracted, still, and always, to the lavish baroque ridiculousness of the luxuriant vampire, that whole world (of Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey’s exquisite Blood For Dracula; of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, to name but a few- a pile of ludicrous, luscious nonsense from 1993 that, as any friends of the time will attest sent me into total rapture when I was at university; saw me speaking in a Transylvanian accent for two weeks after, despite what anybody thought), I am never drawn, ever, I don’t think, to anything genuinely evil. This may seem like stating the obvious, but I have known people who have flirted with such things; and I am always, myself, deeply wary of even approaching these dark, nether regions of cosmology that may, or may not, truly exist. You will never catch me within even a mile of a oujia board; oh no siree (though if someone close to me died, who knows?……….)
In any case, today’s admittedly weird post (come on, it is the end of a long term) might seem like an odd choice for a perfume review, especially during this spiritual (in theory) festive season in the run up to Christmas, but I have just in fact received samples of two perfumes, fun little things, actually, that touch on the very themes I have been superficially elaborating on right here; one, the great sulfurous, Luciferian abyss that mankind has (rightfully?) feared for millennia; and the other, the actual, tectonic shaking end of humanity itself.
In truth, if you were to smell either of these new scents blind, images of destruction, annihilation, or of almost any form of malevolence would almost definitely not surface, particularly in the case of the cloud-fluffily floss-minx that is Fin Du Monde; which, like Divin Enfant, another supposedly devilish scent from this deceptively rule-breaking enterprise, is definitively all bark and no bite. Sulfur, however, a fine new perfume by Italian outfit Nu-Be, whose seven current perfumes are all conceptually based on the periodic table, does have a certain, hot-spiced Mephistophelian spike in its tail. A person leaning over you at some restaurant, or at a club, or even on a train, wearing this scent: nonchalantly, blatantly: might be really, physically, or just intensively, rather irresistible.
This is what Etat Libre D’Orange has to say about their latest perfume….
“Etat Libre d’Orange presents the end of the world.
Okay, we know what you’re thinking. Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt. You’ve heard the ominous warnings, the dire threats. You know all about the cults, the cataclysmic visions, the Armageddon battle. You’ve endured the panic of the Millenium and the Mayan prophesy, you’ve read about the End Times and the Rapture.
And you’ve actually seen it! Yes, we’ve all witnessed the end of the world, in one or more of its possible manifestations. Maybe you remember the look of horror on the face of Charlton Heston, when he realizes that this savage planet dominated by apes was actually good ol’ Earth. You might have seen Slim Pickens as aircraft commander Major T.J. ‘King’ Kong, who straddles the bomb like a cowboy and rides it to the ground, thereby setting off the Doomsday Machine. Or Will Smith, running from the virus-mutants, the only survivors of a plague. You gaped at the two sisters and a child, huddled together in a teepee as the blue planet Melancholia hurtles toward earth, and you watched how a variety of Canadians observe the last night on earth – praying, partying, finally achieving an orgasm.
And maybe you screamed when that giant hand came crashing up through the cabin in the woods as the ancient gods reclaimed earth….
Natural disasters, man-made catastrophes, plagues and religions and nuclear bombs – so many options! And as the world comes to an end, we shudder and shriek and weep and maybe even laugh (Dr. Strangelove!) – from the comfort of our plush seats in the dark movie theaters………
But now we know what the end of the world might look like. And we know how it will smell.
Like popcorn. “
You know, I actually kind of love this.
So conceptual! So playful, so hilariously Dada-esque; the end of the world being reduced to the scent of popcorn, which this perfume doesn’t exactly smell of, but which is about as equally threatening. I do kind of love this tongue-in-cheek total silliness. And La Fin Du Monde is, in fact, very typical of this perfume house: a fun, and in some ways quite daring, enterprise whose perfumes I often like, but which I also find quite thin and overly similar to each other, usually, once I have overridden the thematic pleasure that the always amusing copy engenders (essential to this house’s enjoyment; without the story dreamed up for each scent I honestly don’t think there would be very much there at all to get excited about: but here, plugging right into the Chapman heartstrings, they even blatanly reference one of my very favourite films from last year – Melancholia by Lars Von Trier…….they really covered all the bases with their cinematic end-of-worlds here….)
This latest release – cute, playful, pliant, kind of typical – is a sweet, gourmandish, iris/carrot seed/ambrette number with curious top notes of cumin, sesame and popcorn (and, apparently, though don’t necessarily believe it – gunpowder) that goes from a irisian, papery, and peppery, pleasant initial freshness, to a more vanillic, sugary and sensual ending of sandalwood, vetiver, and styrax that you have, in some ways, smelled before. It lingers, and finally even emotes, (empathy for those hyperventliating heroines trying to escape on the big silver screen?), quite nicely, if a touch weirdly. It has character, certainly, and that is definitely something. In the long run of things, however, I would say that La Fin Du Monde, a name for a perfume that should surely command respect, a reaction, or at least something, something EPIC, is most definitely a case, unfortunately, of (rebellious, audaciously, gallic) sugar-spun style over real substance.
Sulfur
“represents the demonic spirit, the darkness. A juice coming from the shadows, a satanic elixir… ……notes revealing the bowels of the earth………nothing is pure, a fragrance evoking hellish potions: warm spicy accord of pimento, cinnamon and black angelica . Earthy and root notes of vetiver, patchouli and moss. Animalic character of costus and castoreum………. And deep resins like opoponax and myrrh.”
I must say, actually, that this perfume is pretty good. It is a taut and masculine composition, modern but classic, that makes me feel as though Tom Ford’s Grey Vetiver had suddenly ripped off his tailored suit, his overly manicured attitude, and, for reasons, not yet disclosed, instinctively got low down and funky in some back room…….the opening a nose-tingling miasma of reddish elements that does in fact capture some feeling of heat and of volcanic-ness (this comes by no means from the bowels of the earth I would say, though – not that I have been there….), but, definitely, more enclosed and tingling than the usual………
What it does indubitably evade is a certain thinness that I hate in many recent perfumes. While there is none of the musky plenitude of the eighties’ machos, those Ungaros, Tsars, Kouroses and the like, those perfumes that bent from the neck, from the chest, and announced themselves unbearably (so wonderfully!) in your face, there is still a tightness here; a bound-together, spiced and turned up woodiness that is dry, feisty, a touch troubled; quite sensual.
When it comes to sulphur, though, the natural smell of which I despise, especially when it comes in the guise of the bubbling, helliciously eggy spouts of steam that rise up from Japanese hot springs, I am very glad, to be honest, that the perfume in question today does not actually smell of this substance (Who would actually want to smell of sulphur?). Though in truth I do have another ‘angry’ scent like this in my collection, actually, the tinder-dry D’Humeur Massacrante from L’Artisan, a limited edition from back in the day that likewise played on a sulphurous theme; the heat of a match being struck, an incandescent moment of fury. That also has pimiento, and pepper, and other fiery substances, particularly an overdose of nutmeg, and it kind of, I have to say, makes Sulfur seem a bit of a pussy in comparison.
On the other hand, Massacrante (I always loved that name! A perfume to massacre people by!) was meant as a mood diffuser, as part of the Sautes D’Humeur collection that also starred perhaps the greenest perfume ever made, the stinging-nettle laden D’Humeur Jalouse, as well as the girliest; the little girls’ nails and puppy dog’s tails pinkness of the hilarious D’Humeur A Rire.
These scents were never really intended as fully fledged, orchestrated perfumes anyway; they were designed, more I think, as little excerpts to break up your day, to accentuate or else get rid of a certain mood. Massacrante is great, undoubtedly, but has a certain two-dimensionality. Sulfur is more rounded; gets deeper, and more resinous and impressive as it goes on, increasing in horniness, smooth-tonguedness and well-rehearsed, urban-seductive techniques as the hours, slowly in your purgatory of boredom, waiting for this horndog to arrive……. pass.
Nu-be’s (what kind of name is that, incidentally?) ‘Sulfur’ is not really supposed to represent the devil, then, I am happy to say; but, like the about-to-go-out-person wrapped up in furs and defiant last-minute squirts of Etat’s Fin Du Monde, with its later, more suggestive notes that linger more than you might expect from that jazzy, easier-than-thou opening, this perfume, in its arid truculence, its sly elegance and vetiver assertion is, undeniably, despite a lack of any real originality or transgression, really, actually, kind of devilishly sexy.
Filed under Flowers