Merry Christmas everyone

The big day of gift-giving in Germany is the 24th. I gave perfume (Rousse for the wife , Divine L'Homme Coeur for dad-in-law, a pack of care products from The Refinery for "junior") and received... whisky (gotta work on my reputation). Yesterday I wore Sharif by La Via del Profumo, low key radiance and a tribute to the Magi, today I stayed clean, as I was busy in the kitchen all day with chestnut soup, Turkey and hazelnut praliné semifreddo; extensive cooking orgies and perfume just don't mix. For the relaxing part of the evening it's going to be Aveda Chakra 7 Balancing Body Mist, not just meant to represent wisdom and joy of life, but also a very Christmassy scent built around olibanum, angelica root and elemi gum. It is strongly resinous-green, quite enlivening and archaic, lacks any kind of modern perfumist structure and fades within a few hours, as a body mist would be expected to do, but it works for me, particularly on this day. 

Ceci n'est pas santal - Santal Majuscule by Serge Lutens

I was griping about the disappearance of Mysore sandalwood six months ago - how fitting, that Serge Lutens would now release a perfume ironically title Santal Majuscule - ironically, because there's no CAPITAL LETTER sandalwood here. In fact, it's hard to make out any at all. Smelled blindly I would have taken this to be Amouage Jubilation XXV, or maybe Paestum Rose by Eau d'Italie, two perfumes (by Bertrand Duchaufour) I briefly owned. I sold them, because I found the gourmandy rose just a bit too much, both in terms of the actual smell and its ubiquity - that sugary floral accord has been all over the place in the last couple of years, it seems (I also perceive it in Cannabis Rose). So this is a spicy woody floral, but the wood is just another conventional accord dominated by the soft textures of cashmeran, iso-e-super and the likes. There is nothing here close to an actual Mysore sandsalwood note.  "Santal" "Majuscule" smells nice enough, though its confectionary intensity is not my cup of tea at all subjectively, but it's aesthetically redundant and misleadingly named - making Uncle Serge's schoolboy reminiscences a bit beside the point. Wasn't it nice, when a perfume named Rousse matched a redhead (like my wife) perfectly and Arabie actually smelled of 1001 nights. 

Ring out, solstice bells

What better time to revive state of the [car]nation than around the winter solstice, when the days begin to wax again. I shall be waxing poetic again myself, now that I'm on Christmas break, on this and that, but for now, let me please advertise Anya McCoy's lovely winter solstice project which includes lovely prizes every day and reflections on solstice rituals across the world:

A New Tradition: Anya's Annual Winter Solstice Giveaway Event

Anya is starting a new annual tradition on her blog. She has long been fascinated with this time of year, when, as a child, she noticed the cold, dark days of wintertime Philadelphia were made tolerable by the festive lights of Hanukkah and Christmas. In her neighborhood, Christmas lights were kept lit in windows until New Years Eve, brightening the dark streets and making the cold more tolerable.

This year, Anya is inaugurating a Winter Solstice Event on her new blog, hosted on her own website. The former blog site didn't allow her to see the email addresses of people who left comments, and some giveaway prizes went unclaimed when the winners couldn't be notified. Now, everyone will be notified immediately after their name is randomly chosen.

The celebration of lights will begin on the shortest day of the year, Dec. 21st, and continue through the lengthening days with a giveaway every day. Anya will also write about personal, perfumery, mystical and practical events that have shaped her in her art and life. It will be a lovely journey that she hopes to share with you, and with the giveaway gifts, pay it forward to the community of customers and natural perfume lovers who have helped build her businesses.

You can register at the blog to receive updates on posts, or subscribe to the RSS feeds for posts and/or comments by visiting the blog page.

http://AnyasGarden.com/blog

Adieu, Mysore mon amour

Sometimes an obvious truth, one that has been discussed and acknowledged time and again, often enough to have simply become cognitive inventory, sometimes such a truth, which has become commonplace as a purely intellectual concept,  grabs you out of nowhere and acquires a new terrible weight when it's connected to a sensory impulse, something palpable that incurs an emotional response, a jolt, which then again sets in motion a reflexive process about reality, change, loss.

We've all read and written about the demise of Mysore sandalwood, its effects on the perfume industry, the inadequacy of synthetic substitutes, the growth of a new sandalwood industry in New Caledonia, Australia etc. But this morning I sprayed on some vintage Floris Sandalwood, of which about 2ml remain in my posession from an ancient decant swap with a long gone basenoter. And it just hit me with such force that this part of perfume culture, but for the last traces, which may linger on here and there below the radar, is basically over, gone, fini, terminado, aus und vorbei.

The almost unadorned beauty of this simple sandalwood scent from a once proud perfume house has long since been replaced by a shadowy surrogate, wholly inadequate Ersatz, and will never shine again. That is hard to accept in the face of such perfection once achieved. So you chase the end of the rainbow, that vintage bottle of Floris, or Crabtree & Evelyn, or something else that's been rumoured to be the real thing. You keep running west to keep the sun from setting for good, but it gets harder and harder. In the end, you cannot stop time, and where better to learn that lesson than through perfumery, the most ephemeral of all arts and crafts.

So what to do? Build a shrine to memory, like the untouched room of a lost loved one, a Platonic essence of scent that will never turn rancid (or will it, by its very sterility)? Let go and accept, embrace the new reality of what the market can deliver? Dusty brocade or new day rising? 

Ouder than Bombs - A Best of Aloeswood

The extensive Oud-hype in "niche" perfumery has been an object lesson in how this marketing regime works: on fashionable trends rather than creativity, as business rather than art, as a branch of the mainframe aromachemical industry rather than a countercultural and economic project by aesthetic elitists. "Oud" became completely dissociated from the actual natural product, a rebranded signifier representing exclusivity, rarity, mystical oriental traditions on the marketing side, but a stereotypical woody iso-e-super base in terms of actual scent. The usual highly profitable game of high-flying illusions above  a bland mainstream safety net.     
Of course, such corruption is not specific to western capitalism. Oud is a substance so rare and yet so highly desired in the Middle and Far East, that its sources have been plundered as wrecklessly as those of musk and sandalwood, while the market has been swamped for years with inferior products, stretched with or entirely consisting of either low grade materials or synthetics. Even extremely high prices offer no protection from forgery. Thus it will take a very experienced nose and a very trusting relationship with suppliers, or even better producers, to get at the real thing. One should always keep in mind Jean Paul Guerlain's story from his wonderful "My Journeys in the World of Perfume" about seeking a sandalwood supplier for Samsara, thus travelling through the remotest countryside of India near Nepal only to find "neatly lined-up drums bearing the labels of companies well-known in the perfume industry!" (p. 91)
Dominique Dubrana of La Via del Profumo, of whose work I have clearly outed myself as a great admirer previously, has chosen a different route. Armed with the deep respect of the natural perfumer for his or her materials, he has embarked on a journey with a number of members from basenotes to create refined Ouds which put the true high quality oil at the center, but carefully mounted as a precious jewel with a ring of accentuating materials. Fittingly named Oud Caravan No.s 1, 2, & 3, I have graciously received samples of these labors of olfactory love and shall be writing about them, as I explore these complex fragrances. The Ouds are quite distinct, and I shall begin today by noting their primary opening characteristic:
No. 1: decomposing foliage. A sharp clear impression based upon the childhood memory of playing adventurous games upon huge steaming mounds of leaves which were slowly turning to humus. Fruity-earthy-smoky-rotting this takes me right back to that moment in the past
No. 2: herbal-spicy ambery wood. The most accessible of the trio as it references well-known factes of perfumery.
No. 3: horse stables. That unique sweetness of horse's bodies and their dung mixing with the sweet hay of their feed,  a peat-fire burning nearby. This one best confirms my theory that if you love those phenolic peat-sated Islay Malts you cannot but enjoy Eaglewood as well. 


These are just impressions from the first seconds of smelling - the caravan has not yet crossed through the city gates, but a central theme of the journey has been clearly established. Too fascinating not to continue onward, and the experience happily makes you forget the dreary legions of industry banalities that besmirch the name "Oud," here returned to its true glory.

Image courtesy of www.scenicreflections.com

on the term "functional" in clothing, perfumery and food

In Germany "Funktionskleidung," i.e. functional clothing is the uniform of the middle class, especially as regards jackets.Legions walk around in hiking or trecking gear by Jack wolfskin, or, if you wish to be more exclusive, The North Face, or, if you're a trendy pseudo-elitist, perhaps Moncler. The term functional as applied to these synthetic textiles is ambivalent. On the one hand it (rightly) suggests that they are purely functional, without any pretension to style or aesthetic expression. On the other, they (wrongly) seem to suggest, that a traditional Crombie, Chesterfield, Duffle or Caban made of wool  is somehow dysfunctional or at least a lot less functional. Which may be true in the antarctic or when climbing the Nanga Parbat, but certainly not in some Western European city center.
Likewise, functional food conveys the image that its "conventional" alternative somehow fails to  function in terms of  providing specific nutrients, which the latter, as a redesigned industrial product sold at a premium supposedly does perfectly. Of course, the primary function of functional food is to generate profits for the food industry and little else. Again, nobody in the prosperous parts of the world requires complements of this sort to a regular, intelligent diet.
In fragrance, the distinction between functional and "haute" perfumery is old and seems entirely sensible. The former employs perfumery a means towards modifying (theoretically: improving) a product, be it cosmetics or car seats; the latter constitutes perfumery as an aesthetic end in itself aimed only at titillating our noses. But there's the rub. I doubt this distinction is still capable of being maintained in view of the nature of the perfume industry today. For one there is not much "haute" in most "haute perfumery" these days. The great mass of releases are formulaic, redundant, assembly-line concoctions made from the cheapest available materials and the only way you can tell them apart is by the Potemkin image campaign they are dressed up with. In fact, it is often hard to tell a perfume from a cleaning product, because both use the very same materials. Thus, to me, Jean Claude Ellena's Jardin series for Hermès smells in no way like gardens, or like luxury, but like a series of airport toilets heavily deodorized with various fruit-and-floral scented sanitary products (Frankfurt "uses" Un Jardin sur le Nil"). And this is the work of one of the grand present-day perfumers, so it is said, who has more time and funds on his hands than most.
Besides industry policies dictating the cheapening of perfume, there is also a problem on the consumer end. A lot of people's noses have been entirely denatured. We all know of the tests with children who prefered artificial strawberry flavors in yoghurt to the real fruit, because they had been socialized into viewing the former as "strawberry" and could not handle the complexity, refinement and sensory challenge of the real thing. Well, most people are so overexposed to functional perfumery that apparently they no longer realize how strong and far from natural smells fabric softener, cleaning, and cosmetic products smell. When I sleep in so-treated bedsheets, I have to wash my pyjamas - sometimes twice - because from contact alone they reek to the heavens of "April-fresh" dihydromyrcenol infusions.Consumers seemingly don't mind or even demand of their personal fragrance to reproduce the virtual smells of their chemicalized environment - a vicious circle from an outside perspective, but a wet dream for Symrise or Givaudan. Ultimately, 99.9% of  perfumery today is functional - it's primary function is generating "haute profit." Like everything (and everybody) else in a neoliberal system, that is the criterion by which it will be judged. Happy 1984, err, 2012 y'all.

Smoke and Mirrors in perfumery and politics

Just read on basenotes about the apparent crisis of the house of Montale. It seems this perfume (and watch etc.) house is the brainchild of a Palestinian entrepeneur, Ammar Atmeh, based in the United Arab Emirates, who used Pierre Montale as a French "de luxe" front, the latter perhaps not even being involved with actual perfume creation and raising the question whether the stories about Montale's service to Arab royalty are true or just so much PR. As a house Montale's made a few nice fragrances (I personally enjoy Royal and Black Oud and would like to try Cuir d'Arabie), but their release policy bordered on the absurd in terms of quanitity, redundancy and confusing naming. They also seemed less than well-organized in terms of communications and PR (involuntary guerilla-marketing?).
While an end of Montale would not be a dramatic loss to pefumery at this point, it will be interesting to see whether further facts emerge from a possible mud slinging contest (apparently Messrs. Montale and Atmeh are doing battle over the trademark, which is why Montale perfumes have been recently appearing under the name "Tanelli" - so now it's an Italian front?). Also one can safely anticipate the appearance of lots of Montale perfumes on ebay and other grey market outlets, so fans will be able to stock up.

I gather that this is a sober lesson on never believing any of the marketing BS perfume houses invest so much energy in - except if you happen to enjoy the illusion - and simply to focus on the scent in front of you. Whether it's a fake M. Montale, a reengineered Count d'Orsay, Creed's phoney perfume history, or even Guerlain's real pre-LVMH history - it says nothing about the nature or quality of the product you are paying big $ for now. A few artisans aside, behind the dreamworld of perfume lie multinational cosmetics and chemical giants and slick business plans, big business and new economy and not all that much craft or art. You can smell the result in every department store. 

It's all the more vital that bloggers, since nobody else wants the job, apparently, do what they can to focus on what Andy Tauer christened "perfumism" - the sphere of quality-driven artisan perfumery, while contributing to as much transparency as is possible of the smokes and mirrors business of perfume. Certainly  pro fumum, burnt offering to the gods, has always also served the purpose of mystifying truths uncomfortable or not desired to be seen. Smoke gets in your eyes. Ask the Greeks and Italians, whose governments have just been taken over, without democratic legitimiation by the people at large, by so-called technocrats, which is just another name for the consultants and bankers who were responsible for the banking and Euro-crisis in the first place and are now supposed to solve it (hello to Mr. Geithner back in the US). Both Mario Monti of Italy (ex-EU commissar and Goldman Sachs advisor) and Lucas Papademos (former chief of Greece's  central bank and VP of the European central bank) are part of the "Frankfurt Group" a coterie of  functionaries who installed the dysfunctional EURO system fully aware of the potential consequences and beholden to the interests of big finance rather than ordinary Europeans (English readers check here for more) That's what their policies look like, too. The whole thing stinks. Like a cheap perfume.