I have a tendency to not pay my phone bill until it’s been cut off for enough time for it to become a real problem. That moment had definitely come today, so I dutifully went to the Softbank shop to do my business, opening my wallet to pay the unpaid bill for March/ April, forgetting, of course, that I had put, in amongst the Japanese bank notes I had got out the other day, a sprayed blotter paper full of Tresor L’Absolu ( that I had absently mindedly picked up while coming home from Shinagawa station on Sunday afternoon post flea-market (nothing to report I’m afraid apart from a two dollar bottle of vintage Dune parfum that I half poured all over myself on the train).
Handing over the money in the mobile place today I think I must have blushed, at least inwardly, for there bloomed before me, suddenly and out of the blue, an enormous, rose-peached, cleavage. The guy receiving the money seemed to acknowledge something – though he kept it to himself – but there was no mistaking that incredible smell: it was TRESOR REDUX, back in all her full-bodied, curvaceous, Italianate glory; powdered, almost Nahema-like in its intensity and in ya face absolution, it gave me the sweetest, most nostalgic pangs; made me totally miss my friend Denise – not short of a bob or two herself I might add in that department – she who now lives happily in Australia but who we used to spend so much time with here in Japan; Denise who wore the original Tresor like no other, who it suited, in her white t-shirts and freshly washed jeans, strutting along singing hysterical operatic arias and Julie Andrews madnesses, to utter perfection.
After the nuclear levels of boredom that were engendered by Chanel Coco Noir, on espying the black bottled Tresor I imagined that some equally abhorrent dullness must have been committed on Lancome’s sweetest. But smelling it today, dazzling in its Bulgarian rosy, peach-killing, Marilyn Monroe-ish (surely she would have worn this?) no-ransom beauty, I realize that instead they absolved themselves of the perfume’s recent edition – wan, poor, and lacking something, according to the armies of loyal Tresor-philes on Fragrantica – with a fuller, Godzilla edition of a scent that, while asphyxiating me in its big-cupped, dreamy fullness, makes me smile even now as I smell it wafting on the blotter, and truly, and deeply, miss my friend.
The Black Narcissus 