The Black Narcissus

It has been a difficult year for all of us. And it isn’t over yet. But at least there now does seem to be a light at the end of the tunnel.

If Dusita Paris’s previous two fragrance releases – Pavillon D’Or and Moonlight In Chiangmai – reflected the shared introspection and more ruminatory, solitary feeling of nighttime melancholia, the new release, a floral bouquet that would not be amiss at May nuptials, there is a certain bridal giddiness – revels in precisely the olfactory opposite: a proclamation of spring and the sense of desperately wanting to finally burst out of your confined shell.

Composed with highly strung joies de vivre of neroli, tea rose, jasmine, tuberose, ylang ylang and lush greens, Cavatina is a florid rush to the brain; high-pitched, tingeing on insanity and viridescent joy. I don’t have the official list of notes, nor the poem that the fragrance has been inspired by, but the energy and sheer sense of RELEASE that the perfume puts across to the sprayer effortlessly conveys what Pissara Umavijani presumably intends to express. To me this perfume smells of sharp white magnolias on the bough, in all their lemon cream greenness, demanding to be set free.

A ‘cavatina’ is apparently a short operatic aria ( or piece of instrumental music with a classical refrain ); and the scent does have the exuberant directness and alacrity of a soprano’s coloratura. Unweighted by woods or the heavier notes, all here is in the higher registers, very feminine and unrestrained. For me personally, the word ‘cavatina’ evokes childhood summers playing the piano, when my grandparents and other relatives would always request me to play the main theme from The Deerhunter – also called Cavatina, with the windows opening onto the garden outside on Sunday evenings when it was still light, and a piece of music I don’t think I could bear to listen to right now for its heart-rippingly emotive melody, at a moment when we have no idea when we will be able to actually get back to England again. Will it be next year? or the year after that ? Or even the one after that … ?

I know, of course, that we are not alone in our own predicament. It is the same for so many people around the world at this unprecedented, stressful time. In many ways, we are stuck. With our memories, in one place. Thwarted. On the pause button.What Pissara Umijavani seems to be saying is, yes, but this doesn’t mean that you can’t still enjoy the world around you, the flowers of summer and spring; that – if you enjoy high octaved rushes of garlanded green flowers – some will find this shrill – that the small, enjoyable pleasures in life can still be precious.

https://m.facebook.com/watch/?v=4045064738879273&_rdr

Looking forward to reading more and smelling the scent…

D once worked for a theatre company in London, and spent a couple of summers at the Edinburgh festival. Although neither of us got on especially well with all the wide-eyed, over-energized and earnest thesps ( I tend to cringe, my hairs standing up on my skin slightly when watching plays – too sensitive to every self-conscious gesture of the actors to suspend reality; standup comedy,also – FORGET IT; HATE IT; direly embarrassed if even a single joke falls flat, inwardly urging and willing the ‘set’ of semi-improvised preplanned ‘gags’ to end as quickly as possible ), I enjoyed spending time in the city exploring its long, meandering streets – when they weren’t clogged up with wacky unicyclists and clowns, painted mime artists standing motionless for cash; touts selling tickets and flyers left right and centre; zany cartwheelers gymnasting down the thoroughfares; once you waded your way through all the tourists and the jugglers and the giddy theatre goers dogging the main high streets you could sometimes come upon an old Scottish street with a tall and blackened facade, wind your way to a four hundred year old pub for a quiet pint in the corner with some silence.

One afternoon, after one too many excruciating ‘performances’ of Fringe, I suddenly perversely felt like going the other way – fleeing from archness and art and all the live acting and impersonation and finding myself slumped in a big commercial cinema watching Braveheart – with a packed house of people cheering and roaring at the onscreen battlefield mayhem. The villainously effeminate, cartoonish English aristocrats with their bowl haircuts,limp wrists and enunciated snide sarcasms vs the semi-naked rock gods in Mel Gibson’s guitar/hair warrior epic as the Scottish clans courageously defended their territory made me slide even further down into my cinema seat, bemused and slightly embarrassed, if unroused ( I was never one for the Last Of The Mohicans style pictures; Dances With Wolves; in fact I was GLAD to see Tom Cruise finally slaughtered in The Last Samurai because at least it might mean that the musketed slogfest would soon be coming to a close and I would not have to endure his smug face for a moment longer ( I prefer Apocalypse Now for its chaos, visual acuity and moral ambiguity or the war films of Oliver Stone; Terrence Malick’s The New World, about the ‘discovery’ of America and the tragic clash of civilizations one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen; Saving Private Ryan was effective);but it was certainly a memorable afternoon, surrounded by local cinema goers fired up by their history, chanting and clapping in a crescendo of Oscar-winning victory. And at least it was a welcome two hour break from buskers, aerialists, and weeping soliloquists.

Scottish independent brand Jorum Studio, whose range of perfumes is at once atavistic and quite avant garde, with Carduus, takes the titular theme of the thistle ( ‘nemo me impune lacessit : no one attacks me with impunity ‘) and imbues a tough, but warm-hearted herbal fougere with a whole plethora of ingredients that simultaneously reads ‘fresh laboratorial niche’ and Paco Rabanne Pour Homme meets Rochas Mystere. Gristly and bristly but without the whole whiskey caboodle – which I am personally bored to death of in perfume (just DRINK the fucking single malt, no need to wet your puny neck and wrists with cigars and vanilla ); it is rounded, burnished, aromatic; believable…and kind of sexy.

‘Unashamedly polarizing, Carduus is a blend of jagged leaves, herbal seeds and xeric barks ‘ :

Official notes :

Vetch? Meum? Tormentil? Fascinating. ( I also like ‘ fade’ as a new term for drydown .)Despite the seemingly disparate, clashable and unknowable ingredients listed here : Hart’s Tongue and Sea Holly, Cherrywood and musk-thistle, all of which might seem like one herb too many in the hubble, bubble, toil and trouble hairy cauldron of broiling Englishmen, Carduus is actually engagingly smooth : rich and harmonious : manly in a good way : a big -boned, bearded ‘brute’, with a wry, and approachable wit.

Smelling perfumes from glass jars is always a sensory excitement – you get the full panorama. And yesterday, at Nose Shop in Yokohama, I had one of the most thrilling ‘headspace’ experiences I have had in a long while.

Tuileries Palais Royal is a ‘fragrant mist’ that smells PRECISELY like the inside of new tulip heads and just bloomed blue hyacinths; totally photorealistic, natural ; like being in a flower shop or garden.

With one note only, the scent eventually just fades to a pale, forget-me-not blue hyacinth scent that brings back happy memories of being at my grandmother’s house, but for all lovers of the hyacinthine – this retails for only 35 Euros – niche packaging, but nice pricing – this could be used as a fascinating ‘top up’ tulip and hyacinth note for last minute arrangements and flower transformations.

Today, though – we are going out – I have selected for him the amazing Cuir Garamante by MDCI, a perfume that I have not properly tried before : underwhelming but very gentle and full in its virility, this is a powdery balsamic sandalwood with a touch of oud and labnamum that has the most beautiful sillage. Quietly elegant – with a hint of sweat.

The delicate new cherry blossom is out now on the trees but it is not really doing anything for me. I prefer the clusters of rich flowers in magenta, white and luscious pink in vast eiderdowns of canopies in Ueno Park and along the river in Meguro, where my parents and I once turned a corner onto the sheer gaspworthy splendour of the scene, our eyes brimming with tears the beauty was so immediate; crowds all in photo-snapping jubilation, by the thousand.

That was several years ago. Today we were out in Kamakura on a grey humid day; the sea and the sakura drab, uninviting. But I was stopped in my tracks by the woozy, rich drowsy scent of these flowers, heavy with pollen, and an almost hops-like new fecundity that drew me in on the side of the road to smell them up close.

Were they linden/ tilleul/ lime blossom? A not dissimilar fragrance. But then I noticed the shape of the leaves and broke one off to smell it – ah yes, bay laurel. Bay blossoms. I didn’t know such a thing existed. But the uprush of feeling – that heart searing adrenaline of early spring – took me back to the pained ecstasy of my university days, when I was always escaping the headfuck of academia and everything else by breaking into the secret college gardens that you weren’t meant to go into; deeply inhaling the piercing air and sweet heartbreak of the almond blossom; hawthorn, and mock orange.