The Black Narcissus

A couple of years ago I was working in a city called Atsugi. With its air of yakuza-tinged macho-hood and its main thoroughfare full of meat restaurants, there was a swagger to the place that I personally found refreshing. It was simultaneously, under neon, both amusing and disturbing to come out of the main school building at night to see guys in slim moustaches and double breasted suits; sunglassed older toughs looking menacing in limousines if you walked to the station down a particular side street (the students were instructed to go the other way); but as a foreigner, as an alien, you could just glide through, watching like a goldfish bowl.

At the Atsugi station, there was a lily, alive for months and months that was very persistent and seemingly indestructible. I would drink my after work can of beer at the far end of the platform where I could be alone and look out into the underside of the traintracks and bid it hello; wondering how it could still be going even as we got into the colder weather in mid December. At that point, it was admittedly starting to falter a bit, a little ragged but clinging on; but where it was situated, somewhere beneath the white stone stairs of the stationmaster’s office and the concrete step before the train entry, must have given it a strange form of unique microclimate that enabled it to thrive for so long, refusing to quite give up to the ghost. Prior to this one lonely stalwart, there had been whole fields of lilies seeded on the ashpalt railtracks straggling with weeds from the summer onwards; in Japan lilies grow everywhere, wild, glorious, and I always find the scene, and the smell – which either permeates or nauseates the air, depending on your standpoint – incredibly thrilling. There are lilies of every variety that bloom in seasonal waves , overlapping each other in their debutante stages; stargazer, candidums, longliflorums, calla, tiger lilies easter lilies ; when they are all out in bloom I ride round my neighbourhood in ecstacy, stopping to smell, and sometimes pick, them, though the sickliness inherent in lilies – a ripeness always threatening to orgasm, a seminal lume that can be gagging – leaves them better on the stalk.

Natalie Feisthauer’s lily scent for Maison Crivelli, Lys Sølaberg, is inspired by the sight of lilies flourishing in an unexpected place, the fjords of Norway:

“The lily that made the biggest impression on me, was one that I came across after several hours spent walking through damp marshes strewn with tall grasses and scattered flowers. That day, as usual in the region, the weather was highly unpredictable…..Along the way, we caught sight of numerous waterfalls flowing down dark granite walls. Our final destination was a village on the cliff edge, facing the sea. We reached it around midnight. And yet, although it was the middle of summer, the sun still hadn’t set. In the distance, we could see rays of sun illuminating the waves, creating an iridescent shimmer. I remember taking shelter for a moment between two wooden houses with thatched roofs. And right there, at that very spot, I was surprised to see some lilies.”

“Working on this fragrance, I was lucky enough to be given total freedom to express my interpretation of the memory Thibaud (Crivelli’s founder) and I had shared. What struck me most, was this very original aesthetic vision of nature. I wanted to transcribe the remarkable beauty of the fjords, with the sun shimmering on the sea, the sweet smoky aspect of the lilies, the power of the wind, the mineral stone, and the darker, more humid aspect of the peat. I wanted to convey the idea of Mankind faced with rugged nature. And so there is a real duality in this creation. It opens with a beautiful pearlescent light to begin with, then evolves towards a note that evokes the power of the elements, which is almost telluric, and not at all fragile. The creation expresses itself and evolves in contrasts between the smoky, spicy lily facet, the radiant, slightly alcoholised quince, and a peaty/woody facet provided by the amber woods and an overdose of ambroxan, as well as an absolute of roasted oak shavings, which adds a remarkable, strong and incredibly sensual patina to the accord.” – Nathalie Feisthauer.

With its central and base notes of dried fruits, ambroxan, cedar, guaiac, ‘smoke’, tobacco gilded to wine lees, quince and carrot seeds welded to oakmoss and oak, you can probably guess what I am going to say next about Lys Sølaberg: : : …………………….

There is no lily.

There are no flowers.

Where is the lily?

The complete and utter lack of perceptible florality I smell here is quite troubling to me as a perfume writer as it makes me doubt my own apparatus (Has anyone else tried this and if so, do you detect a lonely lily struggling along the railtracks?) As a standard, familiar, 2020’s-ish sweetish, androgynous ambroxan wood spice this works quite nicely, in a style that dates back to snuggly winter perfumes such as Lutens’ Fille En Aiguille: peaty, smoky, whiskeyish perfumes abound in the niche world : you could line your shelves with boozy winter woods like one of those specialist, fetishistic Tokyo collectible whiskey bars ; but it is difficult for a trembling white flower to survive when cloaked in so much oak. I was imagining, from reading the notes before smelling, that somehow the lily would prevail and be visible, exhaling its breathing liliness somewhere among the dry but boggy quagmire. Alas, my sensitivity to synthetic wood notes and some form of olfactory blindness (probably because of the sheer sumptuousness of my bi-annual extravagant exposure to real lilies which must have overpermeated my smell brain) – prevent me from taking – at all – to this particular Norwegian Wood.

Le Magnolia De Rosine, unlike Lys Sølaberg, does what it says on the tin. Very much so (too much so? Some bastards will never be satisfied). This rather impressive soliflore, co-authored by frequent Rosine creator Delphine Lebeau and the legendary Pierre Bourdon – according to Fragrantica, he created Creed’s Fleurs De Bulgarie in 1845 – smells as vividly laundered white as it looks; a gleaming bright hyperfloral that indeed does conjure up the realness of a heaving magnolia bloom on the bough. Quite cleverly so : real magnolia essence is used in the composition, along with lily of the valley, notes of freesia, citrus, and a variety of roses to replicate the petallic freshness that the perfumers were after.

“After having offered a subtle and modern lily of the valley with LE MUGUET DE ROSINE, Marie-Hélène and Louis Rogeon wanted to introduce a new soliflore in the collection, and they choose the magnolia. Even if magnolia tree does not come in their garden in Picardie – situated too much in the north of France – Marie-Hélène and Louis both have a strong relationship with this flower. Marie-Hélène as a child spent some holidays in Britany, and she remembers the huge, strong and dark magnolia trees, exploding in August with velvety, creamy flowers, surrounding the atmosphere with their fresh citrussy smell, covering the fragrance of the rose bushes. A memory of a solar perfume, synonymous of joy, with the delicacy of the roses as a background. For Louis, the story is more unusual. Very near to our boutique in Jardin du Palais Royal, in a street named rue Notre Dame des Victoires, one magnolia tree has been planted. And every summer, this part of the city, when you close your eyes, becomes a garden. As an enchantment, the powerful of the fragrance is such that it covers all the other urban smells.”

Perhaps this is the key problem with this perfume (covering up something; an unrealistically beatific concealment; flowers, themselves so much more fleshy and easily corrupted on the stem). Not that there necessarily is a problem as such with Le Magnolia De Rosine, and we know already that I have some sensitivity to this flower for whatever reason, perhaps partly from the eeriness of an experience I once had with a woman here who was once obsessed with me and who gifted me a magnolia perfume she bought especially for me in Florence, but there I possibly digress. I do think that Les Parfums De Rosine’s Magnolia is one of the best and most realistic magnolia soliflores I have smelled: I can imagine using it in an art performance: it would be amazing at a wedding. There is a luminescent creaminess, a dreaminess, that is extremely attractive in many ways; holistically photorealistic for a while, without any jagged edges (that is, before the inevitable L’Occitane-ish/ Roses De Chloe peony/citrus/rose ending, when the illusion starts to rather fade and it all feels a little bit cheaper; still pretty, in an office photocopier, prosaic coffee in plastic cup kind of way – yet even the segue to this stage is effortless…..).

Yes. It’s good. It’s just that

Cherry Oud is a perfect example of a perfume I think is done extremely well but detest. I love cherry – anything cherry; I really love it badly and actually thought that the unjarring segue from delicious, dripping cherry to rich, perfectly decent quality oud and leather in a perfectly Guerlain modern manner was very impressive in this perfume when I tried it excitedly for the first time ; for a few seconds, as I crossed the busy boulevard in Shinjuku outside Isetan last Saturday, ‘I lived’.

Yet I really regret having sprayed this ridiculously expensive, horrible thing and inserting it into the top pocket of my coat: it has bothered me – intensely – all week; I can’t have that end accord anywhere near me, and am now going to have to put several items that this scent has been contaminated with directly into the washing machine several times for a long cycle.

The concept of what constitutes ‘affordable’ is all relative. Those milling around the Guerlain counters at Isetan the other day willing to spend over 60,000 yen, on, say, on a full bottle of the middling carnation and benzoin perfume Oeillet Pourpre from the Art Et Matiere collection, objectively have much more money than the regular Joes on the street here in Japan where that amount of cash would make up more than a quarter of the average person’s monthly starting salary (the poverty rate is slowly rising in Japan at present, currently estimated to be around 16% of the population). In dollars that is 427, still not peanuts for the vast majority for people, myself definitely included – I simply don’t have that kind of disposable income and never will – but 60,000 yen feels more akin to 600 dollars in real terms here: unimaginable as a daily perfume. The yen has been sliding precipitously recently – like the pound – and such a price, for a perfume that is exactly the same formula as Guerlain’s semi-mainstream release of a few years ago, Lui, merely in a new and rather medicore bottle but tripled in cost, strikes me as something akin to outrageous.

In global terms, obviously, all of this luxury we spend our time feasting on is beyond unfeasible for most of the world’s population. We are living in a bubble. I have just been reading about the misery of climate catastrophes in Madagascar, where the population seems to be living in very dire circumstances scrabbling to make a living from day to day, and where even the production of vanilla, the country’s most important export, and which will of course find its way into the delicious elixirs of Guerlain, has been imperiled by a poor flowering and harvesting this year. Hypocritically, I don’t suppose I will try to do anything practical to try and rectify this situation ( I once met a Japanese man working in the field of vanilla bean trade and production who invited me to go out to Madagascar with him ; we lost touch), but it also doesn’t necessarily hurt to sometimes be aware.

Walking along the upmarket, if slightly twee and old fashioned – all ribboned teddy bears, sparkling jewellery, and porcelain knick knacks alongside bakeries and tea shops and specialists selling honey and coffee ; the dearly beloved shopping district of Motomachi on Saturday, dinky and chichi as ever and gearing up for Christmas, we passed by the youthful emporium United Arrows, always popular with the voluminously cream coloured baggy ungendered twenty year olds of today. While D had a look at the clothes (nothing ever fits me there so I don’t even try) , I had a quick browse through the perfumes and scented novelties, the imported French and Portuguese soaps, and of particular interest, the set of fragrances created by Jean Claude Ellena for Cologne Of The Cloisters meisters, Le Couvent Des Minimes.

Le Couvent Des Minimes is one of those mid-range perfumeries that offer appealing products which please all the senses – their Cologne Of Love , a really lovely orange blossom, nasturtium and vanilla perfume is divine and helped preserve my soul when I was in hospital and rehabilation five and a half years ago. I like the bottles and packaging of this brand very much personally – though with their themology and animal characters there may be a whiff of nicking from Zoologist. Still, they are good: and very reasonable. The above colognes are 55 pounds in the UK for a 50ml. The current equivalent, 7,500 yen here in Japan, feels a little more pricey, but still, given that they are all made by a perfumer like Jean Claude Ellena, who certainly needs no introduction, in trying one of these you know you are in capable hands.

We don’t do oud or ‘amber wood’, but I am liking the hibiscus wolf and the spike leaved kestrel

These two were quite pretty : the butterfly on the bottle!

Theria – the zebra – is a workaday iris, but then saying that is a contradiction in terms. Iris butter is expensive, and this is pure orris at the beginning, with a galvanizing cardamom and narcissus heart and vanillic cedar in the base that went a bit sweet on me but which struck me as a very good ‘off to the shops’ in-expensive-cotton-wear type of spritz (rich people need such things in our daily lives). Nubica, the lion, is also a nice amber patchouli that would be the perfect Christmas present for someone who likes the more exotic vanilla bean in their lives without it being too overcaloried; I like this one and would like to explore it further as a possible option for myself, even if in truth, I haven’t been in gourmand mode for quite a while now, finding the tonka and vanilla bean as a genre rather suffocating (wearing something like, say, the very overpriced and molar-melting Dior Feve Delicieuse now, in my current state of head, would be a gluttonous castigation, like the greedy boy in Roald Dahl’s Matilda being force-fed Mrs Trunchbull’s chocolate ‘gateau’.).

No. Instead, I think I would invest in the new Agapi – by far the most experimental, and indeed, singulier of this range which was the one I decided to wear for the afternoon as we walked away from the restricting shopping area and up to the hillside and trees of the Yamate Bluff with its addictive oddness (a quite original combination of cloves and ambroxan in the base over a heart of ylang and a piercing top accord of very realistic passionfruit melded with an orange cultivated in Cyprus, the mandora). This is one of those scents you are never quite sure of – in the shop it took me back for a few fleeting moments to when I bought my first ever bottle of perfume, Xeryus by Givenchy, down a rabbit hole back to my teenage self – a spray of forest freshness, the initial effect almost coniferous, definitely androgynous, engrossingly sniffable, and an unusual attention getter I would imagine – (a head turner for someone jogging by in a tracksuit, through the woods and past a outdoor swimming pool lido, closed and barbed wired off for the winter, and next to it, a Japanese archery practice – Kyodo – area, where archers in traditional uniforms and still poses, shot their arrows in comfortable silence).

‘Agapi’ – which means love in Greek, is, according to Le Couvent Des Minimes, an ode to this perfumed, ornithological scenario :

“High up in the branches of a tree, a pair of birds sing and dance with boundless tenderness. Sparkling citrus notes mingle with sun-drenched exotic fruit: a colourful, joyful and carefree fragrance……………..like the inseparable lovebirds.”

I am very late to the party with this one. But if there were one scent I was the most eager to try when I finally got back to Isetan department store in Shinjuku yesterday (the first time in almost three years…) it was Synthetic Jungle. Having read all about it, I needed to know for myself.

Based on the idea of a homage to the ‘cult green perfumes of the 70’s’, Frederic Malle hired Anne Flipo of IFF to create a modern super-green in the vein of Chanel No19 and Lauder’s magnificent Private Collection. Smelling it from the bottle briefly before I sprayed it I knew I would like it immediately – for me, this is happily familiar; more vintage Lauren parfum meets Sisley Eau De Campagne than the aforementioned classics – only less basilic; clarified and pretty, shiny, an intense burst of blinding verdurance in the initial blast that in the first minute or so is very sharp; disharmonious; almost radish-like.

In his review of the new Frederic Malle perfume Uncut Gem I read on Persolaise that Synthetic Jungle, while praised critically, has not been too commercially successful. It is not difficult to understand why. When the first impressions of a scent are this provocative and uncompromising – a fact that draws me in, but which for those who recoil from things this green as they would from a snake, you know you are in potentially no go territory.I am the opposite. I am dying to go there. Though ‘difficult’, there is a botanical ecstacy and clarity here that does indeed evoke the sap of the vaporous jungle morning; a luminous lily of the valley and hyacinth, which fades to what smells like living magnolia on the stem (a subtle patchouli and oakmoss underleaf does nothing to bring back the dark forested guilt and inveterate snobbery of 19 and Private Collection; those are far woodier; pinched); Synthetic Jungle instead quickly coalesces to a beautiful modern nostalgia trip with the sheening marigold uplift of the aforementioned Ralph Lauren, Cardin de Pierre Cardin and other greenhouse florals from the seventies: it refreshes the senses: : I think I want it.

The North sends international continental ballistic missiles over Japan quite frequently at the .moment but you never hear anyone ever talking about it. The weapons, which could wipe out whole cities, and populations, are met with shrugs ( why is this ? Can you imagine if, say, Denmark were doing the same over the UK? (“Oh well, it looks like Copenhagen is being ridiculous again… WHATEVER)

It’s a strange state of affairs. Maybe everyone in Japan is more concerned with managing daily life than fretting about wanton and very badly styled megalomaniacs ( someone get Kim Jong a personal stylist RIGHT THIS INSTANT)

or maybe the bigger neighbours – China and Russia – seem to pose more of a palpable existential threat.

Whatever the case, on our way to Tokyo just now it was fascinating to drop in at a photography exhibition at a municipal citizens’ centre in Yokohama called the “People Of Pyongyang.”

North Korea is so secretive, so closed off that you rarely get a glimpse into the daily lives of the people living there. It was very interesting to just see some snapshots (of course, we don’t know the precise stories behind all of these pictures, how much was staged, but even so): I found it rather heartening to see some actual people behind the dehumanized facade.

It looks like they might even use perfume.

We are having a day in the Yamate area of Yokohama; passing by the Foreigner’s Cemetery. I just took this picture of a glass container being lit by the afternoon sun : it almost feels like it could be a perfume advert.

On the one hand, Mandarine Basilic Forte is quite a nice perfume. In fact, if you had a time machine and catapulted this scent back to me in my youth, I would have been besotted. Zesty, warm, balanced, lovely, this mandarin and orange blossom-infused vanilla with a touch of basil would probably have ticked all the right boxes. I can feel my retro-fitted elation. Back then, we had Obsession, we had Roma, but we didn’t have this later genre of cute, hermetically smooth neo-vanillic gourmandarie that has monopolized the global nasosphere since the 2000’s. Now, this kind of base accord is utterly commonplace. Before that, had I come across a sparkling citrus like this with floral, balsamic tones, I would probably have been wide-eyed and gleeful in the shock of the new.

From this perspective, Acqua Allegoria Mandarine Basilic Forte would definitely make an excellent first perfume (if you can afford it to give as a stocking filler for a teenager, that is; with extra concentration of ingredients comes a higher price – the 100ml bottle retails for around $165 – much more expensive in Japan).

It is cute, enveloping, coquettish – ‘adorable’.

Looked at from a more negative angle, Guerlain co-perfumer Delphine Jelk’s composition, with its woozy Bourbon vanilla and sandalwood, and a spritely touch of blackcurrant up top, is just so intensely familiar as an archetypal current female fragrance that I yawned just seconds after the initial spritz ; walk through any duty free or department store in the world and you will know what I mean. Rectified vanilla is the thing – it is a sillage that is devastatingly commonplace, even if in Mandarine’s case it does, I must say, throb with a certain specificity.

The original Mandarine Basilic is, also, for me, problematic. I have a bottle – I liked its gleaming new, citric hair sheen quality – but there was also always something overly astringent and acidic that pierced and pinched the cranial trigeminal nerve, inducing migraine-like headaches (continuing our brain conversation from the other day, I have something like a ‘phantom’ condition where if I even just remember perfumes of this type; definite headache triggerers that usually involve very sharp, ‘clean’ notes in their ingredients in perfumes such as Clinique Happy, Floret by Antonia’s Flowers and anything else with a strongly synthetic, dry cleaning edge, I can get an actual headache as a result, as though the memory itself stimulates something in the head. Has anyone else had this experience, or do you at least have some scents that make you feel chemically ill?). My sister also used to wear the original Mandarine Basilic – I sent her a couple of bottles as Christmas presents over the years, and it was a real compliment getter (as, bizarrely, was Clinique’s Happy For Women for me, probably the most commented on perfume I have ever worn, ironically, even though I had a quietly searing pain in my skull each time as a result and it was eventually no longer worth it; this scent, also, is probably the only scent that has ever led to me, in a round about way, being literally slapped across the face – feel free to relive my unbelievable experience here; for the sheer horror that is ‘Happy For Men’, you might also have a laugh if you read this;) Deborah did like it, going off on an (unusual for her) citrus tangent and referring to it as her beloved ‘sexy orange’, until it started to make her feel physically sick; all of this meaning that when I tried the Forte version yesterday, I did so with a certain trepidation.

My final query here of course would be as to why there would be a forte version of a cologne in the first place. Obviously, I see that there is a business incentive in creating new flankers of the most popular AA’s – amazing to still see Pamplelune and Herba Fresca doing well, next to Rosa Rossa and Neroli Vetiver etc after all these years – giving more gourmand twists to well known staples for a newer generation. At the same time, an eau de parfum of a cologne does seem like something of a self-cancellation. The entire point of the original set of Acqua Allegorias was to distance these fresher, lighter, more capricious creations from the classic, powdery odalisques from the Guerlain vaults. In collapsing the olfactory interspace that separated these compositions, there is novelty – but also a paradoxical confusion.

A perfectly Japanese experience.

I have become quite interested recently in the concept of neurodivergency. Used to describe a wide variety of ‘disorders’ or mental differences ranging from severe autism to those on the spectrum to those whose brains simply work differently to the majority, I wonder, sometimes, whether I also belong in the category of the neurodivergent.

Firstly, the dreams. I dream so intensely, all night, every night – full, blistering oneiria with incredible detail, emotionally wrought; often exciting; erotic, frequently terrifying, exhilarating but exhausting – a lot also have soundtracks (D has seen me waking up singing a theme or song before); to me this is entirely usual, and yet, when I ask people around me – students, teachers, hardly anyone seems to dream or at least remember their dreams, and then I almost feel alienated and embarrassed as though I were a different species, realizing that my brain is so much more febrile and wild; porous and delicate than the average person but I don’t feel remotely sad about this either – to me my dreamlife is such a rich universe that I almost feel pity for those that don’t have it. I often feel too sentient; empathic like a sponge; slightly psychic. Extremely oversensitive to light, noise, atmosphere; colour; smell. Exhausted by too much human connection, even though I am a teacher – the eternal difficulty for the extroverted introvert.

So far so good (at least I think so – is it strange to just accept yourself?). The other side to this, though, of course, is ‘imbalance’, if it needs to be seen that way (I keep telling students, and this is one area I do well in and which is very important to me, as I feel it is my mission to encourage these young vulnerable people not to be too down on themselves about not being perfect in a culture that tends to be perfectionist; that you don’t have to be good at everything; that the widely held, and very guilt-ridden belief that perseverance and endeavour can triumph over everything is utter nonsense, because it just is – no one can be good at everything and neither should they necessarily want to be – the human tapestry of possibilities and potential so vast and multicoloured that there are always and always will be people who can do something you cannot and vice versa; and because I have myself heard very technically sound pianists pounding away like machines on the keys at migraine inducing levels at day long ‘happyokai‘ recitals of eager child to adult amateurs in staid, pleated dresses and mini tuxes and yet you just know that no matter how much they practice like furious automatons in their houses at night they will never actually be able to play a lick of music ,and that listening to even a couple of hours of this innane furiosity made both me and the d feel like our heads were going to explode; I truly believe in proclivities, natural abilities, inclinations; interests; we are not like hot irons that can be hammered into shape by convention even if other people try to make us believe we should be – and although it is always good to try different things (if you want to), when it comes to lacks, and inabilities, I believe that desperately trying to overcome them when you lack the innate ability is like flogging a dead horse.

My own disabilities definitely include a great lack of spatial awareness – a very chronic clumsiness that could be termed dyspraxia (oh the smashed perfume bottles!) I have to focus for a long time and try desperately hard to work out which way to put a gas cylinder into the kerosene heater, something a lot of animals and young babies could certainly work out more quickly. I think I may also be slightly dyslexic when it comes to numbers (in fact I know I am). While I can work out percentages in my head so am hopefully not 100% clueless, it is quite easy for me to forget my PIN number at the bank; very easy for me to get numbers the wrong way round (the students also laugh, but have largely got used to, my total inability to count; I invariably hand out the wrong number of papers to be distributed around the classroom — ‘Mr Chapman, er, two more please‘ is a frequent refrain – a problem that became rather more serious when – and this embarrasses me to admit but here we go – back in 1993 when working at an international language school in London, and on a day trip to Cambridge, I failed to count the number of students on the bus home (my mind went totally blank and I was just faking it as the bus driver was urging us to leave), leaving two Russian girls behind in the city who only by chance saw our very bus going by one of the colleges, hailing it down furiously and shouting at me in outrage as I sat slumped, red-faced, at the front near the driver’s seat mortified all the way to the drop-off).

Yes. I knew instinctively that I never could, nor would want to, drive a car (and have never even had one driving lesson – no one needs Neil Chapman behind the wheel on the road), and though I did my very best, I managed to get an abysmal grade E in my maths O level, the British equivalent of a junior high school diploma, without which you can’t go to university, meaning that when the system changed to GCSE the following year, I had to go to the secret maths dunce class on afternoons when others were outside playing tennis or doing drama club, just scraping a C with a great deal of perseverance (and utter, utter boredom).

Anyway. Mathematics. My discalculia.

How is all of this relevant to perfume?

Well, primarily for the fact that in trying to review this collection by new Italian brand D’Otto, with perfumes created by the excellent Paolo Terenzi, a perfumer with a mind-boggling number of Italian niche fragrances under his belt, most famously for Tiziana Terenzi, I simply couldn’t work out which was which ( compounded by the fact that when viewed upside down on the futon, the vials seemed indistinguishable) It has actually been hard to do this review this morning as I have been so confused, eventually having to spray each on on tissue with big numbers written in black marker pen and even then I have not been sure that I have been describing the right one. A baboon could do a better job.

I also fail to entirely understand the concept behind the names of these scents (it seems to be a given now, in the independent perfumery world, that practically any new launch by a new scent outfit must embrace a visual, artistic, historical or topographical crux around which that house tries to distinguish itself from all the others clamouring for attention in a very overcrowded market; hence we have endless brands trying to embody international cities; colours; music; movies; years in history; elements; animals, the list goes on and on and can be fun and interesting sometimes even though personally I just prefer an enigmatic title of something like Arpege that doesn’t try to explain away too much about the olfactory composition with other conceptual constructs but rather just is what it is; here, the idea, apparently, is that each piece in this initial collection of five fragrances corresponds with a particular painting from the early twentieth century period of abstract art; hence we have Kandinsky, Mondrian, Klee etc each represented in perfume – which I get, but what’s with all the f****** numbers?)

Scrutinizing the five samples from the D’Otto collection, I was at first completely incapable of working out which was which. My brain…..went into warp hole incomprehension. 3+5, 5+3, 2+6, 6+2, even just writing this has scrambled the wires (I gave up the Japanese written system the first week I was here as I just can’t imbibe it mentally – sonically and aurally, I have absorbed quite a lot over the years, but my number phobia stretches to other alphabets as well, blimey I am limited! ) As a selling point, I don’t think this is particularly smart . Even if you are a mathematical genius drawn to numbers, do these perfume names draw you in? (the bottle design does, but..) is there an enigmatic inscrutability here that I am just not getting because it is numbers themselves that just don’t appeal ? (I remember my mathematician friend George, who I was joined at the hip with at university explaining to me in frustration one day that my quick-damning prejudices against his mystifying studies ) were just locking me out of a whole beautiful universe that I would never be privy to : and for a brief moment, I may have regretted my temperaments and leanings and wondered how it would have been if I had been born an entirely different person.

But now to the perfumes themselves.

1+7, which I can recognize because there are no other perfumes with the same digits, is really rather beautiful.

Although I intensely dislike the painting this perfume is allegedly based on (I have an aversion to all shades of brown so cannot, for example watch westerns or any film with that palette) and have no synaesthesic nod of recognition smelling and looking (to me 1+7 definitely smells green and white), this is a scent I would like a full bottle of. It is lovely. The opening is totally delightful, reminding me of the green, citric shampoos from the 70’s I have waxed lyrical before about on here; the whole, gentle, fresh, natural, like wind blowing through the trees in spring. I feel calmed by this. I smell hope.

5+ 3 is also very handsome perfume. As one Fragrantician says, this is quite reminiscent of vintage Serge Lutens’ Chergui – I was thinking Cedre at first, but no, they are right, it is Chergui, so if you miss the original version of that strange and unusual blend that many people still pine for and feel like a denser experience, you will really love this; it is deep, mysterious, with a gorgeous tobacco honeyed mystery to it that could prove quite magnetic on the correct wearer. Again, I personally sense zero connection to the Mondrian, with its clean lines and primary colour palette – this to me would be a deep honeycomb amber with flecks of coral and dark orange – but perhaps that is just my weird cerebellum.

3.5, which I keep confusing with its anagram – is an obvious homage to Christian Dior Hypnotic Poison – a higher quality version thereof, and indeed very luminous, positive, like the happiness promised by the cheerful painting – if potentially a little bit sickly (this is the full Italian diva ; radiant and self confident – you can just feel her, bare-shouldered and self-confident, swanning into the gala). I like it, even if I have never been drawn to the works of Paul Klee – I just don’t like them – and can find no bridge whatsoever between the picture and the smell.

2.6 is the only perfume from the initial D’Otto collection that I can see any resemblance / match to the painting the scent was inspired by. Dark, bitter, this is the kind of wood scent that has me running for the hills and has been done many times before by houses like Byredo, but if you like such scents, the familiar, creosote dark brown/ blackness, 2.6 is a fairly convincing rendition.

It might smell good on you, but I must say that I don’t like 6+2 at all; to me it is just yet another overdone woody where the inchoateness of amberwood chemicals cancel out each other into a black hole of manly – but then I am just not able to appreciate any perfumes of this type in the first place – I just have an intuitive aversion to this whole genre.

The original inspiration that this scent is based on (by far the worst match!)

is also, I must say, just so hideous to me personally that I literally hesitated whether to insert this one into this piece. Looking at the above painting just makes me insane – it is wrong to me on every level, to the point of nausea. But I guess that is the point. These things are very subjective :: for the perfumer who has come up with a high quality batch of perfumes that many will find pleasurable (I do recommend trying the sample set if any of these sound appealing), these paintings – all considered masterpieces by the establishment – are representations of what he was seeing in olfactory form. For me, however, strangely, there is virtually no correspondence between the two.Then again, my brain is different…