It’s almost impossible to think back to a time when you could wander around a city maskless thronged with shoppers and go perfume hunting; spend the day going back and forth, stopping for coffee or cocktails, excitedly taking scent strips from your bags and pockets, forming ideas about which ones you think you might need. I can’t even fantasize about this now as the threat of others’ breath has contaminated the pleasure. It will take a long time to detraumatize. Many people reading this might not even have been outside their living quarters for a year, or if they have, only for essentials – not indulgent luxuries. Others might have ventured into town and experienced the semi-pointless and awkward rigmarole of trying to lower your mask to insert a scent blotter into the papered contraption for nasal perusal while carefully not exposing another to your asymptomatic killer virus and sort of sniffing it but not really enjoying it because perfume is not something to be done in half measures.
Some of my best ever perfume shopping experiences have been in Paris. I went with Helen for one trip, and another with Duncan, and it was bliss. Just wandering about down the avenues on your way to the next destination down this street or other, mentally calculating your rapidly dwindling finances and wondering which ones you will be able to take home. Back at the hotel, excitedly taking out your purchases and hoping you won’t spill them before you even get on the plane. There is nothing else quite like it – Caron, Serge Lutens at the Palais Royal, Guerlain on the Champs Elysées; Montale, Maitre Parfumeur Et Gantier, so many possibilities; rather than the standardised department store with its made-for strip lighting concessions and the encircling assistants in their false eyelashes and sallow jaundiced foundation, you are in beautiful old buildings, boutiques with restaurants and bistros you can pop over the road to when you need sustenance. If there again I would dart into Dusita to experience the perfumes in their home environment and have some tea with the owner; make my way to the Nose Boutique, Sens Unique, Parfums de Nicolaï as well as the gallery of niche that is Jovoy (I love places you can step outside like this to get fresh air and come to your senses, relocate your brain and nose rather than the interminable escalators and artificial fluorescence of Harrods or Selfridges and Galleries Lafayette / Printemps where the claustrophobe in me is often worse for wear).
I like to enjoy it, take my time.
Now I am on spring break at home, I am trying to declutter the shambolic living circumstances we have been living in for far too long by rearranging my perfume bottles bit by bit and trying old samples that have somehow escaped my attention. I know I liked Jovoy’s 60’s musked patchouli Psychedelique enough to include it in my book, along with the excellent La Liturgie Des Heures, (which I think might be my favourite ever frankincense. Really lovely). The final part of this 2011 trilogy by perfumer Jacques Flori that I had semi-neglected is L’Enfant Terrible, a rich, warm, and woody spice balsamic very redolent of Feminité Du Bois (Virgina cedar and sandalwood melded with dates and a deliciously spicy, almost medicinal, initial accord of nutmeg, caraway, coriander and orange). I don’t know if the base is as perfect as the original Shiseido in extrait, but the beginning is better in my book than the current version of Bois. I really like this as a late winter bloomer before the hot weather kicks in, and Cocteau’s novel ‘Les Enfants Terrible’ from 1929 was one of the first works I ever read in French : I have always loved his generally surrealistically elegant aesthetic. The Jovoy range also features a perfume based on Sartre’s existentialist play Les Jeux Sont Faits as well as 27 others I have never smelled. Have you? My curiosity is re-piqued. Plus, my sense of humour is naturally drawn towards any perfume called ‘Diplomatic Incident’.
AIM : : : : : Wear Christian Dior’s blockbuster. Better understand it with an open mind.
Try and objectively enter the headspace of the millions and millions of people who are still flocking to get their hands on this modern megalith.
METHOLOGY : : : : : : : Physically wear the eau de toilette on own skin.
CONCLUSION : : : : : Foregone.
Christian Dior’s ultra-successful Sauvage, launched in 2015, is now the top selling perfume in the UK. This includes all perfumes targeted at women, despite the fact that men’s fragrances usually sell only 50% as many bottles. In other words, we are talking about an absolute and phenomenal smash hit for the creation by Patrick Demachy for the Parisian house of Dior, which must be ringing its tills in continual delight at what is a cosmetics industry Sensation. It is not easy to get to the top of the Scent Charts: it took Chanel Coco Mademoiselle and other perfumes several years, but Sauvage quickly achieved global domination. Once the bars and clubs re-open across the land, as they hopefully will soon now that the vaccination program has already successfully inoculated half the population, you will undoubtedly be able to smell the fresh and husky tones of this granite-jawed archetype devouring the air around you: all the characteristics of the fresh active fougère, honed down to one suave, and insistent accord, every time you turn a corner – where somewhere, someone holding their drink in their hand will find themselves once again gravitating, helplessly, towards its testosterone pull.
Noticing the other day that I had a sample of this perfume in my possession – meaning that soap and a tap were nearby if necessary and I knew that they would be – I decided, on a whim, to brave the waters. I think I may have unfairly demonized this perfume in the past, made it a scapegoat, and that isn’t fair if you have never even tried the damn thing. I am absolutely, unquestionably, not the target audience for this product – I am sure all of this goes without saying – but in the spirit of knowledge ( = power ) I do approach my dark blue vial with trepidation, and just a tiny bit of excitement.
My first, pleasantly surprised impression, is that Sauvage is clearly of high quality. I had mistakenly assumed this was just one long hiss of hand grenade aroma chemical, but in fact, with the fresh top accord of Calabrian bergamot, two kinds of pepper and lavender/geranium -with labdanum underneath recreating the classical fougère template, Sauvage is actually much graver and more dignified – even elegant, in some ways – than I had been anticipating. Combined with the hum of ambroxan, cedar and patchouli in the soon-coming base, in sum total, you have a pared down, minimalist take on the standard usual male genre (which sometimes pours in the entire kitchen sink but ends up the same anyway); suavely economical; a ‘man of few words’ : a no-nonsense, jack-of-all-trades piece of manhood decked out in business suit.
It is very easy to see the attraction to this scent: it has a harmony. An in-built integrity, planed by the ages. If you are in that rigorous and there-on-a-plate kind of mood, like the fougères of yore, Sauvage has an immediate and graspable appeal. The scent could hardly smell more familiar if it tried, all of the classic ingredients condensed into a single, perfected trope of such smoothness and universality it smells like the entire male population of the world in one bottle – or at least the boys, and the men, who willingly allow themselves to be so designated.
While the opening accord of Sauvage may have been a somewhat pleasant surprise to me, not dissimilar to others of the type such as YSL’s more enjoyable Rive Gauche Pour Homme from 2003 (which was equally unoriginal but had a verve and a sting to it that I preferred, and that made you look up as someone walked past), and Eau De Berlin by Harry Lehmann, which D occasionally wears, I have to admit that the main theme of Sauvage, – when the dreaded businessmmen-taking-a shit-at Birmingham-airport-toilets-before-a-Europe-bound-flight-early-in-the-morning smell – a sewer of stewed coffee and bad breakfast and overstrung Axe deodorants, shaving creams, and aftershaves and domestic arguments and stifling aggressions such as this one commingling with natural body products being evacuated and the smell of yawns and of repetition and of dressing to measure and the sheer painful carapace of being a man produce a smell of such misery it plunges me automatically into despair : this, also, as I surveyed it on the back of my hand, made me feel quite numb with depression, with an angering boredom that knows no end; a blindness; a sense of ‘no way out’, of stunted possibilities, of the offices I sometimes temped in, of total cul-de-sac.
In short, as could probably have been predicted right from the beginning of this futile experiment, despite my attempts to be open minded, this definitely acts as some kind of ‘trigger’ for me. I know ‘triggering’ is a contentious issue – and can sometimes in my view go too far – but this blueprint of what a man should smell like, I don’t know…………..even just smelling Sauvage on the scent strip in front of me now at my desk as I write this – does something to me that goes beyond olfaction. It is the trauma of childhood and pubescence and having ‘manhood’ paraded in front of you by adults; in the school playground, at the scouts, at part time jobs in offices, at the soccer stadium, in the changing rooms during P.E, all the aromas and the language and the joshing and the ribbing and the puffing out of chests and the swaggering of shoulders and the dick grabbing and showing off: it was like communicating with aliens; idiots; I was simply never able to properly engage in this casual, never reveal-any-real-emotion grandstanding and bullshitting and play fighting or real fighting and ‘practical jokes’ that the male of the species is supposed to engage in – it was all immeasurably tedious, so exhausting to the spirit. It may have been painful to feel outside of it all, that I was a freak, but I just simply had to keep all of it at bay and revel in Kate Bush and Debussy for self-preservation. D was the same: absolutely no interest whatsoever. He just painted at his easel in the garden. We were estranged from our surroundings. And it was much better to just read a book and keep your head down and hope it would get better in the future. Which it absolutely did. Thank god. Because otherwise I could not have lived in the world. Today you would call all of that ‘toxic masculinity’, I suppose: I am not sure how apt that expression is – to me it was just exasperatingly dull- but because I was naturally blessed with such a strong personality from birth and had so much exuberance it could not be contained, I was never bullied – I was one of the lucky ones;friends with everyone around me up to a certain point, keeping my small handful of close confidants to myself and then expanding into real communication once at sixth form and university, when such nonsense was so much further away in the distance and could be avoided, except for the times when I had to enter a ‘business environment’ for summer jobs when it all, and smells like this, came rushing back. Although I think I look good in one, a business suit has always to me felt like something of a costume.
At home, my father always had the good taste to never wear any of the dreaded fougères, though I am not sure if he chose them himself or my mother did. However these potions were selected though, they were like liquid manna from heaven. It would not have gone down well – you can be sure that there would have been some ‘accidental spillages’ otherwise – as I had something akin to an extreme mental allergic reaction to these smells that I didn’t hesitate to express out loud. Certain aftershaves – particularly YSL Jazz, Van Cleef & Arpels Tsar, Ralph Lauren Safari for Men and Dunhill Edition, which formed the Hall Of Unforgivable Evil, were, like Charleton Heston, who I developed a bizarre and intense phobia of, having to leave the room if he ever appeared on TV (when I saw him later on a clip at a National Rifle Association convention clutching his machine gun above his head and intoning again like Moses on the mount it all made sense): like that man, these smells seemed to encapsulate everything I detested in life at the time with every fibre of my body. Being gay, and supersensitive, being ‘closeted’ (such bullshit!) against my will , was very difficult, and these loathsome smells you couldn’t escape if you went out clubbing or even just in school, just felt like a Chernobyl of twisted masculine oppression that existed purely to sicken my spirit. I was never anything other than happy being male myself (whatever that means); it was just that version of maleness with all its inbuilt shortcomings that I found so deeply offensive to my own personal sensibilities, like being a young gazelle forced into the horned and leathery hide of an old rhinoceros. The scents that were there in our house – Eau Sauvage, Chanel Pour Monsieur, Givenchy Gentleman, Paco RAbanne, Quorum, Old Spice, and Kouros were so much more complex and multifaceted than the inherent suppressed violence of the typical fougère; that bitter-breathed ‘adult male’ breathing acridly down your neck, and I wore most of them as well as surreptitiously trying on some of my mother’s – No 19, Ô De Lancome, Ysatis, Samsara, hugely enjoying the burgeoning sense of self I would experience when wearing them on school days. When out toiletry shopping I learned to assiduously avoid ‘that smell‘ (at that time I had no idea it was called a fougère), which always featured ubiquitously and inevitably not only in the aforementioned classic minions of the type but which were all inescapably diffused down into every shaving cream, underarm stick, talc, hair cream……..like the haircuts available in North Korea there were only a few very limited options – a stinking whole universe of products for men impregnated with that awful road to nowhere: usually some decorum on the surface but always ready to resort to the fist, the hell of prescribed male behaviour that probably prevails from Toronto to Timbuktu. (Mercifully, Japan has never been prey to the fougère).
The base accord of Sauvage, less-all consuming (thank god I only sprayed the most microscopic amount possible from the tester) allowed me, after some difficult moments – and I will admit I washed off the main theme after a while to speed up the experiment – to eventually get away from all these negative sensations a little: some of the mindlessness began to gratefully dissipate , and the Sichuan and other peppers as well as the lavender all come back more clearly into focus: at this stage I felt some similarities here with Comme Des Garçons excellent, if over-persistent, Black Pepper and didn’t feel so besieged. Here we can also see that despite its mainstream magnetism, to its credit, the Dior perfume is no cheap video nasty. It is well made. They haven’t skimped on raw materials. It is just providing what everyone presumably wants (or has been conditioned to want). Like the Big Mac, or the Whopper With Cheese (I actually used to work at Burger king so I know what I am talking about), the gargantuan conglomerate is simply tapping right into the moulded id of its targeted consumers; this is obviously what ‘the men’ require to feel confident, and this is what their women want them to smell like, so kudos to the perfumer for creating such a capable money-earner for Dior ( who have a scent coming out in May that I vastly prefer : a floral marine that is quite dreamy and escapist) —- perhaps the income from these big cash cows keeps creativity alive in other areas, and I am fine with that. Each to their own (and, as I said, living here, I mercifully never have to smell this kind of perfume in Japan because although this country may be 122nd on the global gender equality index in terms of politics, working conditions and a whole other plethora of measurements in which women are subjugated to men – and this is obviously nothing to be proud of to say the least, it also emphatically does not have the same kind of bludgeoning machismo that is prevalent in so many other cultures; the streets are not violent: men approaching you, even in groups or apparent gangs, are not inherently threatening, there are no daily knife attacks, no shootings; no mugging ; there is a gentleness that I loved from the moment I got here. D does too. It’s a whole different ball game. Boys are far more physically affectionate with each other as school kids, people bathe together naked at hot springs from a young age, so there is not that angst ridden homophobia and mutual body terror:people are much more at ease in a bodily sense than they are in the west and this makes it less necessary to delineate your territory with strong and brash xy chromosome scent markers. Despite the high prevalence of bullying in schools(including for LGBT kids: I am never going to pretend Japan is a utopia), overall there seems to be less jibing and pressure to ‘act like a bloke’ ; the masculinity here, in a culture that is inexorably drawn to the ambiguous, far more natural ; less extreme; despite the ridiculous savagery of the work culture, less straitjacketed. I am pretty sure, therefore, that this smell could never achieve mass popularity here, as it represents something that is not appealing to the average person, male, or female, in the first place. Yes, Sauvage is promoted in department stores, and no doubt some young bucks do wear it, in certain social groups – maybe the pimps and the hostess bar owners who come out at night, I don’t know. But I doubt very much indeed that a smell like this would ever catch on to the terrifying extent that is has back in England. It is basically unimaginable. Because despite the easily perceived quality of ingredients, the capable scent construction, the canny success of the advertising campaign featuring Johnny Depp – also very popular in Japan – which has been phenomenally powerful in drawing customers in towards the fragrance; the obvious appeal of the wild ‘savage’ as a way to boost a man’s sense of power and virile sexual performance, I still have to ask the question: why, after sixty or more years of such unchanging conventionality, and all the olfactory progress that has been made in the meantime, do people actually want to smell like this?
It’s been a while since I have written about a Serge Lutens perfume, but I would seem to be the ideal candidate for Des Clous Pour Une Pelure (nails for a peel; i.e a clove-studded orange). I love both notes. I love nutmeg. And I love this blue bottle.
The scent itself has a certain fresh, untrended appeal – a bit left of centre, a bit ‘out of the middle of nowhere’, probably best suited to deep winter, although I don’t find it warming or lovely enough to be entirely cherishable. The base is a woody spiced, delicately ambered scent that takes me back to gingery men’s fragrances of the 80’s such as Ricci Club and Versace Pour L’Homme – wearable, easy going – it would make quite a nice daytime scent for just hanging out.
The top is very cloved, initially, with a fresh, grapefruity-orange-mandarin note that should feel natural and harmonious with the spices but which personally reminds me of brightly coloured Christmas candles – I don’t feel the peel is correctly studded with the spicy nails; that something is slightly off.
Monsieur Lutens has always been playful and capricious, though, making some interestingly odd little perfumes : he also likes to rejig his collection every once in a while – putting the bottles in entirely different flacons, reformulating them, rearranging the prices – in a sometimes seemingly ad hoc fashion.
Louve, Tubéreuse Criminelle, and Borneo 1834 – three of my favourites from the line – are now in these gratte-ciel skyscraper bottles and are more than twice as expensive (about ¥34,000) as those in the ‘new’ Collection of Politeness ( ¥14,500 – much more doable) which features Des Clous Pour Une Pelure, alongside some golden oldies such as Fleurs De Citronnier, Santal Blanc, Gris Clair, the cold and metallic LEau Froide and L’Eau Paille, and the abisinthine, more herbal and smoky Eau Armoise which I have yet to smell ( I can’t believe I haven’t been to Tokyo in over a year……)
A slight release, then, but one with its own particular idiosyncrasies that will probably find its own niche, quite good for a ‘spiced beginner’ if not destined to become a Lutensian Classic. At the end of the day, the prolific Serge Lutens is always bound by aesthetics – I could buy this perfume for the bottle alone – because he is a true aesthete at heart and always has been.
Funfair smells of popcorn, cumin, and ozone :sweets – candy floss, maybe- and the greasing of the machinery against black sky. An emotion. A very odd, realistic, popcorn aroma is what you experience – and something uncanny. It is not an easy ride —– how I loved rollercoasters, dodgem cars, all the terrors before – now in my current state of compromised equilibrium I can’t imagine anything worse —— the fragrance having something niggling about it; addictive, nauseating, that you can’t quite get enough of.
The other day, D put Funfair on by mistake when he went off to work – thankfully only one spray to the wrist – confusing the bottle with another far more conventional perfume Fougère Intense from the same house which is more teacher’s roomfriendly. When he knelt down to say goodbye to me in the morning (I was still asleep) there was a ozonic tinge and caramelised caress on my pillow there when I woke up again. With its homely, sinister smell, I wondered how he was going to get through the daywithout anybody commenting. Whether all the girls in his classes would get the munchies.
When the funfair used to come to town, by travellers and carnies, from afar ( – they were real outsiders : you could sense, the moment you set eyes on them before you even heard them speak that they ‘were not from around here’, and it elicited a great excitement. But also a fear. Something unknown entering the usually empty park at night against the silhouette of trees). There was a darkness behind all the machinery; the bright lights flashing against the night: I felt switched on, very sharp, but also afraid. My brother could readily get lost for hours on the beach just wandering off and playing in the sea making sand castles, causing the worst possible panic for my parents, whose desperation and distress were physically palpable, a flash of metal in the blood you could taste, dizzyingly fearful – I tried to block the unfurling in my mind ( but this was the era of the Yorkshire Ripper and other murders and we heard about things on the news………..) – until he was eventually found none the wiser. Just happily absorbed. Then when we were out one Saturday night at the fair, he ambled off again; we couldn’t find him – so fraught – I think the police were called; though I don’t know how this was possible; how the attendant hadn’t noticed – not seeing him just going round and round, on one particular ride, preoccupied, laughing to himself in delight for what felt like several hours.
Other memories: my nan having a minor heart attack, but laughing continually about it as it was happening, on the ‘waltzers’, which veer and pull back with such incredible physical velocity so that you grip the bar and scream your heart out watching your paternal grandmother’s eyes roll back into her head and coughing but still somehow loving it ; saying to Duncan ‘I love you’ for the first time when on vertiginously high ride at the Strawberry Fair in Cambridge, a folky, hairy, cider-swilling kind of affair that is not really my gig but was great to visit once year : his sheer child-like wonder at the funhorror, the vertical swoops and drops and gut-swilling sudden yanking to the side got to me, and I realized the lack of pretence – the joy he was experiencing as we reached the highest point that looked down over the River Cam and I turned to him and told him.
Many years later we went to New Orleans and Florida with his family to celebrate his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary,; at Busch Gardens, I think it was in Orlando, on by far the most terrifying rollercoaster I have ever been on hanging over the sea at night; then four or five of us on a white knuckle rafting time ‘attraction’, spinning helplessly under waterfalls and the drowning water cannons on the bank fired by people who had paid for the privilege (the word ‘soaked’ doesn’t even begin to cover it, and it was so cold – it was winter – that our teeth were shattering like skulls and I thought we would all get pneumonia). But there were, if you kept putting money into the slots – some hilariously full size ‘human hairdryers’ we climbed straight into for warmth, where we slowly managed to get dried off and I amused the nieces and nephews and passersby with my boxer short twerking as we gradually got slightly less wet dancing together and sunset turned to darkness and illuminations; the crowds gradually making their way back to their respective cars.
Funfair brings back a lot of this. It’s a novelty scent – but more than a one-note Demeter. It captures something intangible. The fun and the anxiety. The sickliness of overeating. The burnt, electrical frisson of the cold night air. I remember my brother and I, probably at my own instigation, having started watching the Hammer Horror films only very recently at that time, even though we knew that we shouldn’t ,because we were both just too petrified at the core level later on when we had to go to bed. The previous week’s episode, which we had been allowed to stay up to watch because of my nagging, was the terrifying House That Bled To Death – after which jelly and ice-cream and children’s birthday parties were never quite the same again. (D and I actually watched it again the other week : those 70’s soft core, vaseline-lensed films are now all available online, and it is still really quite creepy, with its surburbian macabre and curtain-shocking plot twist, even for an adult: )no wonder it crawled so deep under the skin of seven and nine year olds as we riled each other into getting more and more disturbed and overexcited as the night went on). We knew, that when we got home that night, after tiring of the fair, or of running out of pocket money to go on any more rides, we would be watching another episode in the lounge on TV about a killer werewolf (or was it the witch?) : howling at the moon with hair erect. I had shivers of anticipation running in my veins at the thought of it all. But for now, just one carousel or Ferris wheel or or the helter skelter …..oh go on, please.….
At night I often sleep clutching a bottle of frankincense oil in my right hand. A reflex perhaps from when I was a baby, a clenched fist – the tucked thick glass of the essence fits perfectly into my hand and is comforting : pale streams of olibanum dematerialising into my palm.
Whenever I think of this essential oil, oddly perhaps, I think of Boy George. Known to wear pure frankincense as a perfume, the singer of Culture Club and a personal icon from my childhood has, despite his litanies of controversy over the years, always, like Madonna, been fascinated by spirituality, incorporating visual and lyrical religious themes into his work from the outset, particularly in his excellent 90’s incarnation as the singer of Jesus Love You.
A bizarre incident from ten years ago or so confirms this. A Greek Orthodox Church representative, Bishop Porfyrios, was apparently sat one evening at home, watching a BBC documentary on Boy George (as you do), when he suddenly spotted, to his astonishment, hung on the pop star’s living room wall, a stolen painted icon of The Jesus Christ of Pantokrator, looted forty years ago (- not by Boy George, naughty as he always was) from the church of Charalambos in Neo Chorio-Kythreas in northern Cyprus. Startled, he immediately set about contacting the former George O’Dowd through his Cypriot composer friend John Themis – and the precious artefact, without contention, was promptly returned to its original source. According to a legal document published by the University of Geneva, ‘during a personal meeting between the singer and the bishop, appropriate certifications for the ownership of the icon by the Church Of Cyprus were presented to Boy George and both parties orally agreed to a settlement’.
When I worked in the leafy, ultra wealthy area of Hampstead, North London, in the mid-nineties, I used to sometimes deliberately walk past Boy George’s house on my way to the Heath back home – noting wistfully and nostalgically all the graffiti and chalked kisses on the walls scribbled outside the house from still obsessed fans (Japanese particularly – he was a superstar a megastar, here; worshipped by screaming stadia of young teenage girls who fell in love with his kabuki androgyny) and reigniting my obsessional adolescent pop enthusiasms in my bedroom when I would play both Culture Club and Dead Or Alive on repeat and do pastel paintings of both lead singers – I went to their concerts, out of my mind with excitement, shrieking hysterically with female friends from school (and for Pete Burns even wearing an eyepatch as he did in Spin Me Round): I even once somehow actually persuaded my dad to go in costume as Boy George – a combination of the Victims sleeve – see top – and the Miss Me Blind/It’s A Miracle cover – below – for a fancy dress party where his colleagues and acquaintances were quite horrified by his camp mutation into the Karma Chameleon, but where I was, obviously, the reverse and rather ecstatic.
Keeping it in the family, another interesting Culture Club anecdote: : one evening in 90’s London, the very same Boy George was giving unambiguously come-thither bedroom eyes to my brother (a sound engineer/ mixer at clubs in London) when he was guest star DJing there and Greg was working his graphic equalizers ; flirting with him outrageously and trying to take him home – to no avail. I was very jealous – not that I could ever see George that way; to me he is more a rebellious instigator, a gorgeous singer, and a bitch-tongued melodicist who loves or loved the limelight and who I looked up to because he was just so out there, ‘gender bending’ along with the divine Annie Lennox and others of the period and almost terrifying when he first appeared on Top Of The Pops singing Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?…. Like other icons – David Bowie, Bjork, Prince, Kate Bush, Lady Gaga – I could never see him as a sexual being (to me they are more like extra terrestrials and he was more like Mother Theresa). I would have loved to have swapped places with my brother through, to have the opportunity to meet and chat with the Church Of The Poison Mind, to tell him what we meant to me, perched on a leather banquette in the venue with a couple of drinks, if not necessarily – as he was apparently hoping with mon frère – in the sack.
George receiving the gift of an icon in exchange for a bigger one.
But back to frankincense.
Saint George
Like the man himself, at night I sometimes put some frankincense essential oil on my wrists (in my case for sedation purposes – it changes the mental calibration), but there is always also a medicinal rush of terpenes too sharp on the skin at first, transposing to more spectral octaves only a few hours later, when the smell has a hallowed purity to it that makes you understand why it is vital to the rituals of so many world religions. It really is a kind of sanctuary.
As a perfume though, it doesn’t quite cut it. Serenity notwithstanding, unlike patchouli, vetiver or sandalwood, it is just too volatile and vaporous – always rushing its way towards the heavens. To be worn aesthetically, for me it needs to be fixed with other materials to do it justice, to anchor it more in the real world. I like how the substance is handled in the majority of the best ecclesiastical niche incense perfumes on the market, particularly those by Filippo Sorcinelli, who treats frankincense quite beautifully, with an almost masochistic, devotional transparency: I can also enjoy it though in much more secular ‘oriental’ settings, sweetened with amber or vanilla. Goutal’s Encens Flamboyant was always compelling to me but a little too harsh and burnt among the sweet embers of the crystals; scents like Heeley Cardinal a little too self serious. More sugared, and gentle frankincense perfumes include the lovely Baiser De Florence by Ella K – heliotroped and fluffy, eminently wearable, and the rich, crimson cushioned frankincense-amber that is Herve Gamb’s wonderfully simple Rouge Cardinal, one of the best in the genre. Now, another delightful addition to the frankincensian canon, (finally, he gets to the perfume, exclaim the billowing readers) is Encens Suave, by Matiere Premiere.
What is so nice about this extremely wearable perfume is the central note of Somalia Resin Incense – beautifully clear and balanced in terms of translucence and radiation and always at the core of the scent throughout – muffled ethereally with an interesting note of ‘Venezuelan Coffee Extraction’ Andalusian labdanum absolute, and a steadily sweetening but nicely tempered base accord of benzoin absolute from Laos and vanilla absolute from Madagascar ( a real ‘culture club,’ in other words – boom boom ). The frankincense stays throughout, though, like a jewel in the centre of a gold ring, even as the benzoin, ever so slowly – on my skin at least – I wore this last night – starts to dominate the whole. By morning, rather than comfortably ghostly and resinous, it was much more vanillic and sexy – probably more like the church choir’s floozy. The point is, though, that there were no cracks in the development, no gaps – all was contiguous and smooth and expertly blended. In other words, whether you take to this particular frankincense will depend entirely on your tolerance/addiction to the benzoin and vanilla – D was loving this on me last night I have to say and I also found it very pleasurable – but which at times take on an accent that is redolent of Prada Candy ( – if it was doing Holy Communion).
I tend to get seasonal cravings in advance: the smell of orange blossom and neroli have been tugging at me in yearning fashion the last couple of weeks – partly because they are rejuvenatingly ‘rise above’ floral notes for me that soothe and uplift the spirits (there is a definite headspace created by both ingredients that is apart from other flowers: a sense of spring madness, in the best possible sense, when the rising exhilaration of everything budding around you and bursting into green is always worth the wait).
Except this year I can’t. Reality has been shit, so let the dreaming begin. Today there are flood warnings because of the cold torrential rains outside slamming against the window, but I am in my own zone. Still unsteady from the labyrinthitis that has made me lose my bearings, but not spinning or on the verge of vertiginous collapse. A little anxious that I will never return to my wildly dancing normal self, yet still in a semi-blissful state at home at my desk, sampling new scents, keeping it all beautifully at bay.
Recent neroli orange blossoms I have reached for when the desire for some back-of-the-hand floralcy has hit me upon returning home – and soon, the actual orange blossom will be out on the trees at the top of the hill : I will be able to bury my head in it – include Penhaligon’s Castile, and Ortigia Sicilia’s Zagara/ Orange Blossom – a dense, simplistic, but sassy blend of petitgrain sharpened orange blossom, neroli and sandalwood with a confectioner’s glaze and a zest of brittle glamour. I have gone to bed wearing this a couple of times recently as it is quite rallying and vigorating: like the leopard on the bottle, it has a pleasingly gaudy pizazz.
Miller Harris’ Lumière Dorée
– described by the British perfume house as ‘intoxicatingly fresh’, is an outlier in the orange blossoms I sometimes use as it is almost rapaciously forthright, with a just opened orange flower neroli rinsed in an almost saline solution of ‘crisp ambers, cashmere and white musks’ counterpointed with orange bigarade and heady jasmine. The effect is coruscating but also shimmering: the scent goes straight to the heart nerve : once inhaled: never forgotten.
Precisely when I am in the exact mood for orange blossom, two perfumes fortuitously arrived in the last two days founded on these vernal ecstasies. Hallelujah.
Today I shall begin with the lovely Matiere Premiere Neroli Oranger by perfumer Aurelien Guichard:
The designer’s brief:
INITIAL IDEA: ‘A work around the purity of orange blossom’
MAIN INGREDIENT: Absolute Orange Blossom Tunisia
CREATIVE APPROACH: ‘Highlight the fresh and radiant facet with Neroli Oil Lebanon and Bergamot Oil Italy. Amplify the delicate floral character with Ylang-Ylang Oil Comoros and Floral Musks’.
The result : a definite success: : a very sensual and bodied orange blossom that starts out fresh and bright, almost explosive (and thus perfect for evening-wear entrances in summer), the ylang ylang more of a cushion to the orange flower notes than a main feature, the overall effect much more sundown perfume than niche soliflore….. a smooth, buttery, gilt underscore that brings to mind Piguet Fracas ( Tora I think you need to try this ): a definite mood enhancer and easy to wear and just the ticket for the coming weeks as winter finally leaves us for the year and the trees and the flowers take over.
Next: Tobago’s Innocent Love. While all the perfumes so far discussed dance to a contemporary neroli/orange blossom tango, Innocent Love by Japanese brand Tobali veers at once in a more traditional yet also unexpected direction : a beautifully embellished neroli cologne that I think might need to acquire a full bottle of for my own usage. While an open citrus lover (‘he was in the closet but was never afraid of declaring his love for lime and bergamot peel)’), I have never really liked the rosemary/old fashioned musks that taint and ruin the lemons and oranges in many colognes, the classic templates in citrus/herb/nerolis like those of Santa Maria Novella or 4711: I have always prayed for the beginning to continue without the end (a bit like life itself). Others, of the more urban modern template such as Grand Neroli by Atelier Colognes dazzle you initially but then fade to bland – and I can never stand the disappointment.
Innocent Love, in contrast, begins with one of the best citrus openings I have ever encountered, with ‘white neroli’, bergamot and a very vivid tangerine revitalising the senses from first touch, over a very light ambered musk and base of ‘Hidden Japonism 834’ – this Tokyo company’s very own Guerlinade – and a deliciously gentle middle section of buoyant jasmine sambac plus a perfectly judged hint of lavender to keep everything deliriously optimistic and pleasant throughout.
A delight: sometimes I really just need perfumes like these: florals that are alive and instantaneously happy.
It takes a certain bravery to try something new. The ‘requirements’ for men’s perfumery are so entrenched, so unbudging, that it would be impossible to overemphasize how tired the whole enterprise often feels. Mainstream fragrance is often conservative at best, only inching very slowly, trendwise, in unchartered directions, sometimes even exacerbating already exaggerated masculine tropes – Dior Sauvage, Paco Rabanne One Million – to the point where an entire gender becomes shackled.
H24 is the first Hermès men’s fragrance release in 15 years, the last being the innovative, now-modern-classic Terre D’Hermès, a flinty, grapefruit, mineralistic vetiver suspended in Jean Claude Ellena’s minimal, but very tenacious, central concept that in the unfolding years has become highly popular. I personally find it tiring, but when it first emerged on duty free shelves back then it was very original – there was a new refinement and elegance; a toned silhouette with less brute muscle, more sinew.
Christine Nagel’s brand new creation for Hermès is entirely different to its predecessor, and even more groundbreaking: a futuristic take on freshness; green and clean, both alien and human, without a traditional masculine edict in sight. I am trying to imagine ‘your average man’ picking this up from the shelf in a department store or airport from the huge selection available and selecting this one as their first choice rather than a much safer bet : to a large extent the public’s scent receptors have long been formed on what is current, what they smell around them. If the norm for women is endless percolations of the candy florachouli, years, even decades, of Angel, Coco Mademoiselle, La Vie Est Belle, Flowerbomb, and all of their imitators, anything outside those socially accepted parameters becomes perilous and risky for the average consumer. People like to sink into their comfort zones. Men even more so.
Christine Nagel, the intrepid nose at Hermès, was adamant, nevertheless, that such widely accepted clichés would not form the basis of, nor even appear in, the new addition to the house’s collection, expressly avoiding the inexorable aggro-ambers that form the basis of the vast majority of men’s fragrances. Instead, she worked with the designer for the Hermès men’s collection, Véronique Nichanian, to capture the more evaporative but stimulating concepts of ‘workshop steam, cashmere, and botanical extracts’ through an unusual combination of clary sage, rosewood, a ‘co-distillation’ of narcissus, and a synthetic called sclarene that smells of metallic, freshly ironed steam. The result, at least on first play, is like nothing I have ever smelled before – in itself a wonderful thing.
The top notes of H24 are what make me nervous about the perfume’s commercial potential. There is a sharp, almost sour, fruity piercing of sap and light in the opening accord that is unplaceable (because it simply has never existed before) which, despite or because of its oddity, feels immediately optimistic, futuristic. Even dazzling. I do think that there will be an immediate divide between those who are put off by this novelty and unfamiliarity – the sensation of synthetic photosynthesis; a scything away of the funge of the past; mind-clearing — and by those who are attracted to its pristine newness. The middle section, green, perhaps more feminine, and for me with strange, distant echoes of the piquant verts of the seventies and eighties like Lauder’s Private Collection (the perfumer has referred to H24 as a ‘high tech chypre’), has a dreamy, almost melancholic interplay with the proactive energy of the main, and this is my favourite part of the scent: there is a vague nod to the past, in some distant galaxy – but with a fresh, youthful poise. The final accord is a more placid, metallic musk fused with the constant, but pleasant, leaf – like haze that is there throughout the perfume’s duration, with less impact on the senses and emotions, a little flat, a touch unmoving perhaps – yet as a holistic whole, I know I would still very much enjoy smelling H24 on a new generation of younger, more boundlessly emancipated beings.
On this day ten years ago at 2:46pm, a giant megathrust earthquake of magnitude 9 struck off the coast of Tohoku in Northern Japan triggering a triplefold catastrophe – not only the mass destruction caused by the earthquake itself, the biggest tsunami ever to hit the country in its history, but also the subsequent nuclear meltdown at the reactor in Fukushima that threatened not only people living in the immediate area of the radioactive leak, but the population the country at large ; over 19,000 people buried, crushed, or swept out to sea – or still missing : a national trauma of an unprecedented scale that caused an immeasurable suffering that continues to this day.
We live about 300km to the south of the epicentre, but even in the Tokyo area, the shaking was strong enough to make you feel that you were about to die. I therefore can’t even begin to imagine the sheer extent of the violent devastation those up north had to withstand; the fear; the resulting giant waves that were big enough to wash away entire swathes of towns and cities along the coastline, desperate drivers of cars trying to outpace the waters, and those trying to flee on foot at the mercy of the sea as they were caught up in the mud and debris; unstoppable floods of boats, floating warehouses and bicycles and trapped families in broken buildings.
As well as the immediate carnage caused by the earth tremors and the waves ( I could not bear to watch any of it on TV at the time for self-protection but it was inescapable in the air around you), it soon became apparent after the initial shock, that a possible nuclear disaster on the scale of Chernobyl was about to ensue, with a large percentage of the foreign population fleeing the country as a result. I hadn’t realized until reading an article in The Japan Times yesterday that up to 30 million people might have been ordered to be evacuated from the Tokyo area if the winds had blown the radiation in the wrong direction: fortunately they blew in the other. It was difficult to handle: you were unmoored – the ground continually like liquid under your feet, intermittently swaying; the air itself felt hazardous to inhale. We were living in sealed up quarters to keep out the ‘nuclear rain’: you kept up with the daily atmospheric readings and wondered if it was safe to go outside. . The US military was potentially to be taken out of the country, leaving it unprotected – there were continual power cuts across the country : it was upheaval on an unimaginable scale.
I have started writing again about my own memories of that time; the other night I wrote as if in a trance, for hours, re-seeing myself walking home for three and half hours in a slow, dreamlike daze during the blackout, in darkness walking up the hill, not knowing what had happened to D: I have previously – several times on the anniversary – also put up a piece I wrote during the immediate aftermath, in this post from 2013 in which I detail our fears, frustrations, and dilemmas about what to do : the sheer heartbreak of imagining the levels of misery the people were going through in the freezing Tohoku region, where family members had disappeared, could not be found beneath the mud and the rubble, but who would sometimes be discovered later in quite macabre situations – in the branches of a tree, washed up on the beach, entangled in fishing ropes. It never occurred to us at the time to go up to the region to volunteer, as almost a million people did, including a lot of foreigners here as well as thousands of American soldiers (I think we made the excuse to ourselves that our insufficient language skills would have been a hindrance), but in reality perhaps we are not just altruistic, self-sacrificing, nor strong stomached enough. I don’t know. This now gives me a feeling of guilt.
But we didn’t flee either. We considered it – and were being urged to do so. By friends and family, by the British government. Yet somehow, the pull to stay was far greater. We live here. It is our second home. Our life is here. It is not perfect, but we love Japan. It would have felt like a betrayal. And once the aftershocks had diminished, and the threat of the reactors to cause cataclysmic damage had been curtailed, it was relatively easy for those living in this area to get back to normal. Spring came, summer came – you went on with the future.
For the traumatized people up in Tohoku, though, the situation was and is entirely different. Many were homeless – and have been living in makeshift shelters ever since that are not warm enough in winter. Although the government has put a great deal of money into the reconstruction of the region, it is insufficient, and many places are still like ghost towns – often literally. Whether you believe in the supernatural or not, it is difficult to watch this documentary without coming away moved and profoundly disturbed by the pain and distress that is so visible in the faces and body language of those who survived: such was the immediacy and intensity of the deathly havoc wreaked on usually peaceful villages and towns that it seems, according to many locals, and usually implacable and sanguine taxi drivers who have chronicled passengers who disappear into thin air, that there are countless spirits still wandering around their old stomping grounds who just cannot find rest. A lot of young people, who weren’t ready to go and are confused about where they now are. I hope that they can, eventually, find some peace.
The tragedy of 2011 is indelibly carved into the souls of those who were here during that difficult time; it made you realize how precious life is and that it is always full of upheaval – you can be alive one minute and dead the next. It could happen at any time , to anyone – including another similar earthquake ( a couple of weekends ago there was a large tremor that shook Fukushima, announced by seismologists as aftershock from the earthquake in 2011). The plates below the earth are still rumbling, discontented. The danger has never gone away. And now of course the world is in the middle of a pandemic that soon will have killed almost 3,000,000 globally, which no one, besides epidemiologists, could ever have predicted: how quickly our lives were upended by a tiny, invisible lethal organism. It has been hard: internal, and insidiously different from the external physical jolting and violence of a major quake, the challenges of this new threat are nevertheless similarly psychologically exacting; the isolation of lockdown, the constant suppressed fear, the worry about loved ones; the terror of dying alone in an agonising manner; intubated, unable to breathe. It has been a new, and very different kind of challenge that has tested the resilience, and sanity of everyone. Hopefully though, once the tides have turned, as before, we will all get through it.
As, to some extent, presumably, will those that remain, or have returned, to the stricken areas in Tohoku they were born, from a sense of loyalty or simply because they still felt in some way that it is still home. Eventually. The grief and inconceivable spiritual impact that those terrible days in March had on each individual living there, though, must make this very difficult. Possibly insurmountable. In today’s newspaper, commemorating the tenth anniversary of the disaster, a survivor, whose daughter was among the missing and who spent five months searching for her body, notes sombrely, that ‘contrary to popular belief, time doesn’t heal – you just get used to living with sadness.’
I wrote a big treatise last Saturday on mint, and a taxi we once got in which smelled so unbelievable I had to ask the driver what it was as we were about to get out, when he (without invitation) just reached to the dashboard and sprayed me on the back of the hand with a pure essential oil ofhakka, by Kitami – the most popular brand of Japanese peppermint : we were floored by the utter fresh purity of its mintiness –
– – but in the confusion of the last few days I seem to have lost it.
It was an especially minty post, though, and if I find the bunch of paper it was written on again – I am now, mercifully, I think on the mend – I will put it up (I was scribbling like a maniac that day – my brain all over the place after the morning collapsing to the floor with dizziness and somehow getting to work and back).
Hakka, from Hokkaido, is highly mentholated, very white and green, like the packaging, and a beautiful smell. Extraordinarily physically and mentally refreshing, I am already addicted and am going to invest in more products : strangely, I had almost bought some on the Friday for only the second time – it is sold at a famous book store, along with incense – as though I knew what was about to happen: I sometimes intuit things like this advance even though I had felt in tip top condition that day.
This mint, and a very clear and penetrating rosemary oil, have definitely been of help in recentering and fending off the vertigo from the labyrinthitis though when I came home five days ago – I had no idea what was in store for me when I lay back onto the futon and felt suddenly as though I were being hurtled through space while circling like a boomerang – spinning and lurching out of control so hard I had to close my eyes tightly and was yelping and shouting in total panic. Fortunately I am not the puking type so the deep nausea was vomitless but the next day, and the next, it was the same- trying to stand up and then getting thrust back onto the sofa by a poltergeist, collapsing back down whenever I sat up it was horrible – although, it must be said, that this was actually very benign compared to much more severe cases where the unsuspecting find themselves unable to move, even their eyes, and are supine for days, weeks……..
My case, though heinous – totally unexpected but much more common among people (and animals) than I had realized – has certainly been far less mentally excruciating than so many accounts I have read of this inner ear imbalance that totally robs you of agency and casts you about like a rag doll on the moon.
Mint was not enough in this case though. . Only medicine – an IV drip at the clinic round the corner – and various pills, to treat the blocked inner ‘vestibule’.
