The North sends international continentalballistic 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)
Hello, Mr Weapon Of Mass Destruction
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.
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.
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 playa 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…
The timing was impeccable. Just as I started excitedly gorging on Season Five of The Crown, a package arrived in the post from the lovely Rose Strang, containing some rather regally bearing perfume.
It has been a very good teaching term. Taxing, but I feel close to the students and have been enjoying it – yet still, I am also now already close to burn out ; ready to disengage: immerse myself fully in lives other than my own – even royals in caricature (Elizabeth Debicki as Diana :::: spectacular); (Jonny Lee Miller as John Major! Olivia Williams as Camilla ! Is Imelda Staunton the best sovereign portrayal yet?)
Yes, it might be a bit soon after the death of the Queen, and the series might not be fully ‘historically accurate’ – much to the fury of the British tabloids (but in that case, neither is anything, in truth, not even the utterances from our own mouths, which do not strictly always concur with the ‘facts’ even when they happened mere seconds ago, our memories intrinsically unstable…..) Personally, I don’t hold to the idea that everything presented on a screen about living or historical figures should attempt to be carbon copy of ‘reality’; a dramatization is not a simulacrum; fictional, artistic license a given not warranting disclaimers. For me, these are thespian explorations, attempts to personalize and bring fully to life otherwise rather cardboard, and two dimensional figures that supposedly represent us, parading themselves inside our consciousness; ( and do we pay for them). All film and TV, it could be argued, including news programmes, all fonts of public information, are ultimately, basically, made for us to consume as forms of entertainment, and so I can’t really understand all the furore surrounding The Crown, particularly when so much is objectively verifiable – the mortifying transcripts published in the Daily Mirror of Charles dirty pillow talking to his married lover, for instance, and in a country which traditionally has little deference for authority ………..with Judy Dench writing an indignant letter to the Times — it all feels a bit like a storm in a teacup; one which I am sure has the Netflix executives clapping their hands together in glee.
Whatever your take on this subject – whether these people are touchable or untouchable – it certainly makes for very good television. Even if you ‘hate watch’ this series (quite easy for those who despise its subject), The Crown is compelling, brilliantly crafted, deeply riveting stuff.
I NEED THIS BOTTLE
This time three years ago, I was secretly in Florence, awash in memories and the rain, attending the opening of The Firenze Perfume Library on street leading to the Duomo (which stocks my book in both English and Italian). Naturally, I spent some time at the Santa Maria Novella flagship, an apothecary shrine of perfumed beauty that, though having studied in Florence for a month or however long it was back in the nineties as a young university student, I had somehow managed to never discover – this was actually, unbelievably, my first time entering this sacred space. Wow. The farmacia, cloistered in a centuries old building, is divine for the perfume lover – almost too much to cope with- the paper-enwrapped soaps religious reliquaries; the original Iris, one of the many editions of acqua di colonia, a cool, floral aldehydic I wrote about admiringly several years ago.
The new, recently released and more modern eau de parfum edition, L’Iris, is a very welcome addition to the venerable Florentine stable. Silvery, soft, metallic; feminine and undeniably posh, the soapy fresh lift of magnolia, geranium, Sichuan pepper and neroli in this new version is the gateway to a rather traditional (you might call it timeless) iris, ambergris and musk that has an immediate ‘social rightness’ and acceptability, faultless as a dressed up scent for lunch – with any kind of ladies – or afternoon tea. Redolent, vaguely, of Hermes Hiris, or a far more bookish and ethereal relative of her more business-like cousin in Milan, Prada, L’Iris is green, appeasing, perhaps a little grating in its sheer nicety (‘magnolia’ tends to get on my nerves) but, still, undeniably rather lovely.
Wearing its wealth and simultaneous opulence on its sleeve (though in a rather chunky and ugly bottle) is the gorgeous Heritage by Fragrance Du Bois: a very rich, rather swoonsome floral amber with smooth oud in the base I had never heard of before that feels like the most beautiful, hypnotizing soap. With a similar texture and scope as Puredistance Opardu (but without all the lilac),, Amouage Gold, or some of the mellower Montales, this is one of those immaculately blended sandalwood-based, orris-vanilla jasmine incenses with a heart of aldehydes that you just sink into, or rather let sink into the skin on your wrist with its long-lasting, unhurried sillage and moreish elegance. With its eye-watering price – $600-$800, I will not be buying a bottle, but I will certainly be cherishing my sample, saving it for silent and soothing reality-evasion ; times – like the vastly enjoyable and guilt free bingeing, yesterday, on all the top level acting, costumes and set design (and the music!) – that ingeniously frame all the spoiled – but historically traumatized, British royals, with their loves and their betrayals, grievances for one another, always musing and pontificating on their immutable roles in society; trapped, staring out, onto the garden grounds hidden behind carefully curtained, embroidered lace.
Strolling down a road I have never been down before (how can it have taken me so long to go in the opposite direction?) I not only discovered a – today closed but – very beckoning, curious looking recycle shop, but also an entire temple complex – complete with miniature ukiyo-o-e museum, to which I will inevitably return.
Sometimes on these extended lunch breaks I feel lonely. Not so today : in the blissfully warm, autumnal sunshine I sat on a stone ledge beneath a tall cypress tree and just felt the air.
In front of this wooden sliding screen window, before a house in the grounds, was a beautiful yuzu tree; with thick, crinkly skin; just a graze of its tight, crenellated surface enough to release some of its scent; the sacrosanct atmosphere forbidding all theft ( I am terrible when it comes to citrus ).
Even the cold pressed yuzu oil somehow doesn’t render the unique beauty of this long prized natural essence. The Muji essential oil I bought recently worked nicely in an iyokan, grapefruit lip balm/ vaseline hand cream I have given to some students ( for optimism and positivity ), some friends and myself called The Magic Orange, but it was more likely the iyokan-bright eye opener that starred there; the yuzu more a cameo background.
A drop on my toothpaste in the afternoon was quite enjoyable (deliciously cleansing and gum-clean), but still, I have never really found anything yuzu inspired that comes close to the natural peel. There are countless Japanese made solid perfumes, hand creams, body sprays that feature yuzu; some quite nice but usually with that synthetic unwanted undertow that you always hone in on.
In perfume the yuzu it is often too sweet (Oyedo by Diptyque; a real toothacher); brash ( Heeley Note De Yuzu; nice but a bit too late 90’s gay club); odd (Parfumerie Generale’s minty Yuzu Ab Irato); flouncy yet drab (Yuzu by J-Scent, Yuzu Fou) or even non-existent (Caron’s rubbish Yuzu Homme, which seems not to contain even a single drop).
No. It is best in the fruit.
Just picked from the branch with its prickled twig; rubbed on the skin..
