state of the [car]nation

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

2011-12-22T15:34:00.003+01:00

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

2011-12-05T15:03:00.001+01:00

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.

Perfume is Dead. Long Live Perfume

2011-11-28T17:04:00.002+01:00

Classical Perfumery is dead. You hear this a lot these days, and contrary to Mark Twain, who could reply to his premature obituary that "the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,"this artform most likely is indeed as deceased as the famous Monty Python parrot .
The simple course of time with its inevitable transformations of tastes, the hegemony of accountants at the corporations who control 95% of the market, the interests of the aromachemical giants, and the regulatory policies of IFRA reflecting those interests have combined to make so many nails in that coffin over the last decades (honorable mention goes to the wreckless non-sustianable exploitation of natural resources like Mysore sandalwood, rosewood etc. pp.). Anyhow, when the epitome of perfumist integrity Andy Tauer is creating Pentachords rather than a second L'Air du Désért Marocain one could cynically assume he is not just playing with concepts, but perhaps preparing for the future status quo of scent creation.
But... I do not want to play the cry-baby here insisting on being pacified with Vintage Sous-le-Vent and this won't be a reactionary rant (although I love a good reactionary rant if it's in the name of endangered cultural heritage rather than endangered privileges). I just think that the situation raises the question of where the art, rather than the business, shall go from here, other than down the drain. And I certainly hope that what is currently widely offered as "niche" is not the conclusive answer, because that is too frequently striclty business involving very little in terms of art. While most niche start-ups just seem to be hollow business plans serving as storefronts for generic products from Symrise, Givaudan or IFF, many of the great niche names seem to have entered a phase of stagnation. Lastly, little is to be expected of the grand old houses in terms of creative boldness, even less as they become firmly controlled LVMH subsidiaries. The vanguard will be found among small operators with a vision, be it one-person natural perfume houses or other kinds of rugged creatives who rise to the highest standards from a belief in what they are doing. And perhaps the good news is that these kinds of folks can more easily find audiences these days through web-networks, and that they have new exciting materials at hand to complement and enrich what is left of the traditional palette. CO2 extraction and the fractioning of naturals have yielded some fascinating results and while technology per se may not produce aesthetic advances, we all know the beginning of classical perfumery lay in the chemical revolution and the new methods of extraction and synthesis it yielded.
This brings me to Undergreen perfumes, a project launched by two French fellows, Patrice Cardenoso und Jérôme Bonnet, who hired Fabrice Olivieri of Trends Lab to create their two perfumes, White and Black. Since I translated their PR material from English into German, you may consider me biased, as well as competent to judge its quality, which I found problematic linguistically and in style. I wish even smaller houses would realize the necessity of investing effort and money into well-made, culturally sensitive translations of their ad copy - it represents them and falls back on them when producing undesired chuckles rather than an atmosphere of luxury and desirability. Undergreen does not hold back with bathos when celebrating its unique selling point: embodying a new style of natural perfumery rejecting "aromatherapeutic" "new-age" aesthetics for a contemporary, trendy niche-style while scrupulously emphasizing natural origins and sustainable practices. It reminds me a bit of Ernest Callenbach's "Ecotopia," a very American ecological novel from the 70s which fuses faith in technology and Yankee ingenuity with Hippie eco-counterculture. Or of Steve Jobs. Yes, fans of Apple aesthetics will love these perfumes, too. Now this sounds like and could verily be just another marketing angle in an increasingly crowded market of high-end perfumery, but to my nose, the concept actually works and is genuinely reflected in the perfumes. I do not know to what extent the naturals employed here are manipulated in spinning cone columns or the like, but the fact ist: Black and White smell like throroughly trendy niches, without sporting what I find obnoxious about thoroughly trendy niches. Black is certainly not nearly as saturnine as the ad copy may suggest. As someone reared on truly dark vintage scents I would class this as easy-to-wear and downright pleasant. It's a bit like a de luxe version of mat; very male with its black licorice notes - but in high resolution 3-D quality. Plus there's a nice phenolic "Islay Malt" birch (and Oud?) note. In sum Black is a moderate-to-light and very pleasant modern gourmand fragrance, which excels by taking a trendy melange of notes (coffee, incense, oud, guajac) to a higher level by avoiding the usual synthetic suspects. As a classicist I could use more murkiness, skankiness etc. here, but that's not the point - it's that this is a well-made, beautifully smelling scent in a contemporary style. I'm impressed. The same logic applies to White. It's a white (surprise!) floral (jasmine, ylang, tuberose, orange blossom, iris are all there) of great transparency, spiced up with minty zest and coconut. Touches all the bases of hipness but goes on to score a home-run quality-wise. I think it beats nasomatto's Narcotic Venus to a pulp (although it's much less muscular).
In sum, I believe Undergreen are making a meaningful addition to the perfume market and one of the most interesting launches this year (note: I was only paid for translating, not for writing this - but in any event, smell for yourself). Next, the queen of transparency, Mme. Giacobetti should work for these guys (not to diminish the accomplishment of Fabrice Olivieri in the least). I'd love to see her rendition of a green fougère in this line.

The Fall of Creed

2011-10-12T22:28:00.004+02:00

One of the interesting aspects about the house of Creed is its unusually large portfolio of gentlemen's scents. Creed is, in fact, a house men are a good deal more enthusiastic (and quarrelsome) about than women and much of its image seems targeted at aspirational males. While I will happily acknowledge the quality of Jasmine Impératrice Eugénie, Fleurs de Thé Bulgarie, Ambre Cannelle, Angélique Encense (all of which can easily be worn by men, of course) Creed's reputation to me rests primarily on a series of very classicist masculine/unisex scents, most of which were conceived between 1975 and 1985, when Cool Water's pre-incarnation Green Irish Tweed announced a shift towards a modern citrus-aquatic and a more noticeably mainstream synthetic style embodied by Millésime Impériale, Royal Water, Silver Mountain Water, Himalaya, Original Vetiver and Santal and others (Bois du Portugal of 1987, as well as Neroli Sauvage and Royal Delight of 1994, were beautiful throwbacks to the older trad style). It is among the old school Creeds that I have found many of my most beloved autumnal scents, which rate 5 stars in my book and to which I always return. There's the soft smoky wood and sharp lavender of Bois du Portugal, the clovey-spicy herbacity of Royal Scottish Lavender; the warm sweet luxuriantly fruity Royal English Leather and its florally augmented cousin Royal Delight; the blend of outdoorsy naturalness and high end barbershop sophistication of Baie de Genièvre Feuilles de Canneliers (juniper and cinnamon); the pomander-potpourri glory of Orange Spice, the green and creamy Mysore beauty of Bois de Santal and the stunning complexity of the sweet, harsh, floral, spicy, warm, manly and formal Vintage Tabarôme. Perfect companions for thick cashmere sweaters, rough vintage Tweeds and elegant tuxedos I could do with no more than these thoughout the dark, but festive season and feel both perfectly well-groomed, elegant and comfortably insulated from the elements a well as being aesthetically attuned to them. These essences, brimming with fine naturals and eloquently quoting the traditions of 19th and early 20th century craft, truly light up autumn, like an olfactory painting of a richly colored New England forest. It is thus a shame that so many of them are no longer available, or at best as limited exclusives not affordable for middle class mortals. The fact is, when I got to know Creed, the house had already long turned towards a style which I personally don't care for and the vestiges of its former philosophy are disappearing for good. I understand that a firm has to go where the money is, to an extent, and it's not with vintage fogeys. But recent company policy seems to reflect the all-to-prevalent "keeping up with the Niche-Jones" mentality of jacking up prices while moving towards a blander "John Doe niche" style that bears the marks of Givaudan or Symrise molecules rather than a master perfumer. Autumn, for all its harvest riches, can be a melancholy season. But I find some consolation that when spring comes around, there will be some other Creed classics in my collection for now: Cypres Musc, Sélection Verte, Neroli Sauvage and Bois de Cedrat are waiting in the wings. And when these are gone for good, a handful of perfumers around the world will still be there, crafting new delights, faithful to the true artisan creed. You'll read about them here.

jekyll & hyde

2011-09-28T14:03:00.024+02:00

More news from the Eau de Cologne front. Askett & English is a recently launched firm from Marlow in bucolic Buckinghamshire. Askett is the name of a nearby hamlet, not one of the owners, The double name is supposed to suggest English (fragrance) tradition (think Turnbull & Asser in shirts, Dege & Skinner in suits and of course the high end Czech & Speake, the mid-range Truefitt & Hill, or the TK Maxx bargain bin favorite Asquith & Somerset), as do the restrained packaging (slightly reminiscent of the old Crabtree & Evelyn) and the copy on the website. The Cologne duo of "Essential" and "Absolute" is currently available in Britain at Les Senteurs, outfitters Harvie & Hudson and a number of other reputable addresses. A&E dons the mantles of "artisan perfumery," the "tradition of classic cologne,"and "rare quality and taste." A tall order for a fragrance start-up, but we saw Grossmith pull it off (admittedly, with a long, rich history to draw upon).

Is all this backed up by the fragrances? I believe not. Essential and Absolute (strange names for Eau de Colognes, is this a borrowing from Atelier's "Cologne's Absolue" concept?) are actually a bit Jekyll & Hyde for me. The former is a decent aromatic citrus, the official notes being lemon, bergamot, aromatic herbs, lavender, jasmine, tonka, cedar, vetiver. There's nothing English about it in style, the most obvious reference to me being Goutal's Eau du Sud (A & E do in fact refer to their scents "recalling summers spent in Italy and France."). Essential pales in direct comparison, both in construction, which shows synthetic tailends compared to the flawless natural impression of Eau du Sud, and oil quality. It's a crowded genre to begin and Essential lacks both the ambition to compete with the very best in the field and a new twist which would set it apart from many similar fragrances. I'd roughly class it with Taylor of Old Bond Street quality-wise, who sell at a third of the price of A&E.

Absolute is a 90s aquatic citrus, pure international style with nothing Britsh or traditional about it. The light bergamot note is overpowered by a generic synthetic cocktail to produce the typical fabric softener effect known from Gendarme and a gazillion other fragrances and "fresh-fragranced" products. If you're a fan of Truefitt & Hill scents, i.e. like the whole Victorian packaging bit but actually prefer a modern aquatic vibe in your fragrance, then this might be for you. As everyone who knows my tastes is aware of, I cannot stand aquatics and this one is no exception. At least it comes cheaper than Serge Lutens' cruel joke, the ridiculously redundant L'Eau.

A & E has chosen a currently very tight market for itself, with every fragrance house and their grandmother having issued an Eau de Cologne in recent years. All I can say is good luck.

Meanwhile, my off-the-cuff recommendations for "fortified" Colognes remain:

Monsier Balmain (lemon/bergamot)

Guerlain AA Pamplelune (Grapefruit)

MPG pour le jeune homme (neroli)

MPG Fraiche Baidane (lime, mandarin)

Annick Goutal Eau du Sud or Detaille Aeroplane (aromatic citrus)

Eau Sauvage (bergamot)

Eau de Guerlain (simply brilliant)

jitterbug perfume from a garden of delights

2011-09-20T14:24:00.004+02:00

Natural perfumer Anya McCoy is a witch, which obviously should be understood as a compliment. It doesn't require mentioning that her creations do not smell like typical synthetic-plus-natural products, but they also transcend the aromatherapy clichés of many natural fragrances. In fact, they speak of a deep wisdom about all manner of plants, as the herb women of yore passed it on from generation to generation. Thus witch (did you know the Royal Mail even features a lovely witch on a stamp? It's Nanny Ogg from Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld, a character worthy of emulation by all of us).
I like to believe that I would smell this wisdom in Anya's perfumes even without knowing about her magic garden in Florida, her ethnobotanical studies and long involvement in organic gardening. They have a certain "je ne sais quoi" that comes about when people genuinely and deeply live what they do ( I'm not being paid for writing this, though please note the samples were provided free of charge :-) ).

I'll be posting about several fragrances from "Anya's Garden" in weeks to come, but Pan deserves an article of its own. It brought a smile to my face the first time I smelled it and still does. Why? Well, for starters, it's a very nice, classic ambery Fougère made from superb materials. That's a good and rare thing and I'm giving bonus points to every perfume these days that will not clobber my nose with cheapo synthetic redundancies because the perfumer had no budget, no time or no more ideas (oh yes, I'm talking $$$$ niche here, not drugstore stuff).

But there's more, beyond the dusty green opening (cedar, hay, lavender), a strong, but really good, non-headshop patchouli that picks up on the dryness and builds a bridge to the gently sweetened beeswaxy drydown (but nothing here is sticky in the least). That "more" is the (billy) goat's hair tincture amply discussed by all reviewers of this scent, which makes the whole thing "Pan out" (cough!). It's not skanky - you have to deduct the droppings, pee and other barnyard details from the animal. This may be a rutty goat, but it is proudly-standing-on-top-of-Olympus-Mons-clean. It's not even erotically animalic (at least in an obvious way), as the homage to Tom Robbins' ribald novel Jitterbug Perfume would suggest, but really quite well-behaved - definitely there, though, and certainly recognizable if you've spent time around hairy animals. It also seems to modulate the other notes and works nicely to harmonize them in Pan, as it perfectly connects with the coumarinic aspect of the lavender and the leafy-earthy patchouli. Pan can be applied generously, as sillage is rather moderate and it isn't too lasting either (the presence after an hour is very subtle). Great fun while it lasts though, just as those encounters with the horned God, and a beautiful perfume for men and venturous women which one should have around if only to sniff the bottle. My only suggestion would be to release a flanker (Pan-Demonium?) which would sufficiently dirty the original up in the direction of Jicky to create a flat-out erotic variant - a challenge when avoiding civet, but I really think Billy the goat is full of potential.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/PanandDaphnis.jpg)

Dukes of Pall Mall - Greetings from the Victorian 1980s

2011-08-31T15:01:00.002+02:00

Some people would say I have a Dukes of Pall Mall fetish. I can only reply that these perfumes justify it.
Dukes of Pall Mall comes across as a venerable gentlemen's establishment in the style of Trumper's, and as much is suggested by the little accompanying leaflet, which states, in carefully chosen words, that "Dukes of Pall Mall continue to compound toiletry preparations for private warrant...based upon these original formulae" of the Regency period. In fact it would seem the enterprise was launched in the 1980s with a faux patina. The company was incorporated on July 21, 1982 and in 1983 Country Life magazine announced the launch of the only two known product ranges by the firm, Cotswold and Belgravia, a town and country pair of scents clearly evoking the traditional style of English perfumery by name as well as by their composition. I am aware of cologne, after shave and after shave balms under these names and from what one occasionaly reads on shaving fora they aqcuired a good reputation amongst the small circle of Anglophile traditional shaving aficionados, though the firm did not hold out very long. By 1989 the company was held by one Terence Revill who operated from his home. I acquired versions of both colognes from this era through ebay (recognizable by the Harrow address, rather than the 46-47 Pall Mall of the old flacons) and the quality was noticeably inferior. My first encounter with Dukes had consisted in the blind purchase of a number of bottles of Cotswold aftershave through online beauty discounter direct cosmetics (from whence harked my first Crown perfumery scents, as well). I was stunned from the moment I smelled this beautiful juice, a quintessential old-fashioned citrus-floral that blows most of the other "traditional English" survivors out of the water due to the incredible quality of its ingredients. That, for some time, has been a problematic issue with houses such as Floris, Penhaligon's or Taylors of Old Bond Street (of which only the latter commensurately sell their products at a bargain price), who frequently sell fragrances related to their original formulations only by name and are of vastly inferior quality. Dukes, however went all-out on top-notch ingredients, something that admittedly was a lot easier to do in 1983 than 25 years later. A lovely citrus top (bergamot, lime, verbena?) is followed up by an utterly beautiful accord of jasmine and ylang that never fails to entirely captivate my senses - particularly, for some reason, in the Aftershave version. It is so stunning that the light woody-musky base remains a mere afterthought. Cotswold is a sublime perfume which could not possibly be bested as the fragrant complement to a fine country suit, or even a blue chalk-stripe city outfit, but in today's perfume context it would equally well adorn a dandy.
Belgravia is supposedly based on a formula from the 1860s, but it is in fact a classic and beautiful fougère with a 1980s vibe. I cannot get over how close it comes to Penhaligon's recent Sartorial - if you subtract the modern ozonic elements from the latter and imagine it done with really good raw materials. Both are orientalized fougères, featuring lavender, floral notes, patchouli, spice, moss, coumarin and most characteristically a wonderful warm heart of beeswax. I do not actually find it particularly urban(e), but nearly romantic, though it is unquestionably sophisticated, elegant and never gets loud. In the context of 1980s powerhouse extremes it would perhaps seem lean and clean. The quality, if perhaps not the complexity of the composition, I find to be on par with the famed Patou pour homme - whoever created these beauties was a master of the art who knew his or her stuff.
It is a shame that more perfume lovers with a taste for vintage styles cannot smell and wear these lost Victorian treasures of the 1980s. I will let slip here, though, that I have lately smelled a new version of Belgravia, but that's all I can say for now. As for the unknown entrepeneur who launched Dukes of Pall Mall with a sense of history and quality, if not enough good fortune (hello, Gobin-Daudé), here's three cheers and a royal salute for creating two gems of English perfumery.

almost summer: atelier cologne

2011-08-23T12:49:00.001+02:00

I have always been fascinated by Eau de Cologne, which in its apparent simplicity is a great challenge to any perfumer. As his correspondence and notes show, the inventor of Eau de Cologne, Johann Maria Farina, was obsessed with the quality of raw materials and oils, their distillation, blending and maturation and I believe it still holds today that in no fragrance genre is quality, and a reliance on the best naturals in particular, more important. I was quite excited to read about Atelier Cologne, which appeared on the scene in 2009/10 in the wake of the Eau de Cologne renaissance which has seen houses great and small coming forth with classic or modern waters (many of which I found to dismally fail the "Farina test"). The concept behind Atelier is to build on classic Eau de Cologne types, but increase the perfume concentration, so as to provide the desired freshness and lightness without compromising on longevity (thus avoiding Napoeleon syndrome, .i.e. dousing yourself with 20 bottles of EdC daily). This is a wonderful and challenging idea which has a few predecessors, such as Eau Sauvage (classic EdC plus Hedione), Eau de Guerlain, and a number of very accomplished scents by Maitre Parfumeur et Gantier's scents (e.g. Pour le Jeune Homme is a classic neroli cologne amped up to EdT status). But Sylvie Ganter and Christopher Cervasel are the first to build an entire house around high powered Eau de Cologne and it seems they are doing well. The fact that they are cooperating with quality suppliers Mane and Robertet, known for first rate naturals, increased my excitement.

The free samples I graciously received were beautifully packed with postcard still lifes visualizing each scent and a brief prose fragment adding words. A great idea, the photography is well done, while the prose (in the English version) could use a little improvement in my opinion (but those are fine points).

The fragrances themselves,I feel, promise more than they deliver - but I must add that what I seek in an EdC, contrary to other perfumes, is not so much art, but a perfect referencing of nature. That's one reason why I feel the EdCs by Chanel and Lutens are monumental failures, apart from the fact that they smell like cheap bathroom products. But on to Atelier Cologne's foursome:

After a hesitant start, perfumer Ralf Schwieger's Orange Sanguine blossoms into a zesty, mouth-watering, true-to-life blood orange, but a pasteurized-juice feel soon catches up on this beautiful moment and when the florals set in, it becomes pure hotel soap, slightly reminiscent of Roger & Gallet's Extra-Vieille, in fact. That's nice, if you like it, but not what I seek in an Eau de Cologne and also not good enough for the money charged.

Top notes:	Blood orange, bitter orange
Heart notes:	Jasmine, geranium from South Africa
Base notes:	Amber woods, tonka beans, sandalwood

Trèfle Pur: A limey-citrus green with dusky notes. It lacks the purity of something like the body-splash like Extract of Limes by Geo. F. Trumper and will inevitably remind some folks of washing up liquid. It quickly veers into shampoo or beauty-product terrain. I simply expect more from niche, though I know I rarely get it.

Top notes:	Bitter orange, cardamon, basilic
Heart notes:	Clover absolute, violet leaves, Tunisian neroli
Base notes:	Patchouli, moss, musk

Grand Néroli is nice, as most nerolis are, but a bit too musky for my taste. The drydown has some smokey-amber which works well, but the scent is not convincing, becoming too intrusively synthetic as it progresses. Doesn't hold a stick to Xerjoff's Kobe quality-wise, but then virtually nothing else does in my book. Of the four sampled Ateliers, it is nonetheless my favorite.

Top notes:	Moroccan neroli, chilled lemon, Sicilian bergamot, petitgrain
Heart notes:	Persian galbanum, moss, birch leaves
Base notes:	Clean musk, white amber, vanilla from Madagascar

Bois Blond is so extremely faint I suspect I am anosmic to some key ingredient. I smell pure spirit at the outset, and then a weak synthetic dark wood note. It just doesn't happen.
Official pyramid:

Top notes:	Tunisian neroli, pink pepper
Heart notes:	Moroccan orange flower, incense
Base notes:	Blond woods, musks, vetiver from Haiti

The Atelier colognes include some nice notes, but it is not one note that bryngeth summer - or maketh good cologne. The feeling of a really high-end, refreshing, natural Eau de Cologne isn't there, while the intensity and duration is not all that great in turn. The idea is great, the esthetic is accomplished, but I feel these scents will only satisfy, if you're looking for rather conventional fragrances on the light, fresh side. Personally, for the genuine Eau de Cologne experience, I'll stick with the classics and a few all-natural scents.

confessions of an anglophile

2011-08-12T22:29:00.008+02:00

This was going to be a jovial little piece of perfume writing on the defunct house of Dukes of Pall Mall, the origin of my blog moniker and a bit of a fetish of mine - not just because their two perfumes, Cotswold and Belgravia, were indeed amazingly well-made, high-quality fragrances, but because I harbor an irrational fondness for the faded culture of the English gentleman and chap. A figure which could still instill hatred and mockery in the 70s as a principal symbol of British classism (Monty Python's upper class twit sketch would be a classic example) but has meanwhile become so marginal it can actually now serve as a position from which to satirically and self-ironically observe the new inanities of cool Britannia - witness chap hop. As London is once again burning, and a whole lot of other places, I started to wonder to what extent the inflexibility of the class system, in which the insignias of gentility from Savile Row suits to a shave at Trumper's were vital cultural capital, has contributed to the current malaise - Britain taking last place among all developed nations in terms of social mobility is a telling fact. What I didn't wonder about for a moment, was the extent to which 30 years of unbridled neoliberalism, whether of the Tory or New Labour variety, have turned much of the sceptere'd isle into a social wasteland of consumerist zombies (a fact the brilliant Shaun of the Dead made abundantly clear in the most hilarious way possible). In fact, these emotionally numbed mobs destroying their very own communities, armed with blackberries, apolitical, antisocial, narcissistic to the core, with nothing on their mind but loot, since their value system exclusively revolves around generating self-worth through sporting vaunted consumer goods (cultural capital!) are simply the underclass version of city bankers, brokers and hedgefund managers who have torched thousands of communities and wrecked innumerable businesses while piling up bonuses. These rioters are not rising up against the system, they are emulating it with the available means at hand. City bankers and Croydon wankers, tearing apart society from both ends.
Back to perfume (sort of): I say this not in self-defense of a personal favorite: but the old-fashioned classism embodied by Dukes of Pall Mall looks almost quaint beside the shallow and vain "American Psycho" consumerism of "luxe pour luxe" vanity, represented, for one, by the inanely priced Clive Christian fragrances, and the niche perfumery business as a whole, which, let's face it, has fed heavily upon the massive redistribution of wealth from the many to the few which has been going on in the US and UK for decades under the guise of free markets, deregulation, tax cuts for those who don't need them and other Chicago School oddities. Those with less and less money keep up the facade of middle-class affluence by piling up debt and the ones with nothing will evidently smash windows. Economically, socially and psychologically, the hyper-consumerism of postmodern capitalism has become a dead end. Replacing communities (public space) with shopping malls (consumer space), self-improvement with self-gratification and emotions with commodities is turning people (and then their neighborhoods) into burned-out wrecks, self- and world-loathing sociopaths or, at best, alienated shopping junkies.
Is a new asceticism the answer? Hardly. There's plenty of drabness in Tottenham already. Apart from the political necessity of restoring true social democracy, i.e. a society sincerely aiming to include, to meet out social justice and ensure true equality of opportunity through education and public services, we need to turn to enlightened hedonism, to indulge in pleasures that put us in touch with ourselves rather than providing surrogates for real life. I'm not saying that Utopia will be achieved by way of Guerlain. But if you can learn to see the beauty of a perfume, rather than its worth as cultural capital, perhaps you can also learn to see the beauty in yourself, rather than accepting the S&P rating you're stamped with by society. And people who can accept themselves as they are have no need to vent an inner rage on others, or establish their worth through symbolic consumption, whether as shopaholics or looters. Stop burning down houses, start burning credit cards, then go smell some roses.

Sharif Giveaway - and the winner is...

2011-08-09T16:44:00.001+02:00

Thanks for all your comments on the ideal contemporary oriental and for participating in the first state of the [car]nation prize draw. From the 17 comments (not counting mine) one was drawn by using the services of random.org. And the happy winner is Mikael, the last commentator. Congratulations on winning a truly fabulous fragrance - you have been contacted on basenotes :).
To everyone who played: the best of luck for the next giveaway! I hope you'll be dropping in now and then, there will be more reviews, reflections and draws coming!

Fragrare aude! (Dare to smell good)
The Duke of Pall Mall

Sharif - a new fragrance by la via del profumo and a bottle giveaway!

2011-08-02T15:42:00.003+02:00

Anyone with an interest in natural perfume will be acquainted with Dominique Dubrana aka AbdesSalaam Attar and his perfume house La Via del Profumo located in Rimini, Italy, but known to most of us through the Internet. Apparently it was a Dubrana's perfumes that converted Luca Turin from thorough skepticism about natural perfumery to appreciating its possibilities - no mean feat. Since synthetics are what provides bone structure in modern (i.e. post 1880) perfumery to the natural oils' "flesh," natural perfumes often come across as spineless hodgepodges failing to bring any kind of artful arrangement to notes, that would transform them from at best smelling "pleasant" into works of true beauty and refinement. Dubrana's creations, however, are characterized by a crystalline clarity that reveals a meaningful order among the blended essences and generates images and ideas in the mind, as a great perfume should. At the same time they benefit from the aesthetic advantage of natural perfumes - the avoidance of the shrill redundancy which now characterizes far too many perfumes which wear their synthetic nature on their sleeve, all bones, like anorexic fashion models. His last fragrance, Mecca Balsam already showed how well suited this approach is to the oriental genre, which can so easily decline into a brash affair of sticky florals, screaming amber and wood synthetics and nose-numbing Yankee-candle vanillin. The new release, Sharif, which initiates a series of oriental-themed fragrances aimed at Middle-Eastern tastes, confirms it.
"Sharif is the scent of a noble Arab Sheik who chose the supreme elegance instead of the show of wealth, kindness and seduction instead of arrogance. In the pure tradition of the Middle East, Sharif consists of intense notes of leather and aromatic woods with the delicious aroma of amber scents of the East, and sweet almond," the perfumer tells us. It is, first of all, a wonderfully pleasant perfume and an ideal entry into the world of natural perfumery, as it is much more accessible than the starkly meditative, distantly elegant Mecca Balsam. The latter requires study before you can deeply appreciate it, while Sharif provides pure pleasure even before you begin investigating its complexity. There is a perfect harmony of spice and sweetness, dryness and deftness, of clarity and density, the slender elegance of a minarett and the opulence of a plate of Arabian sweets. The dry craggy resins of Mecca Balsam's pilgrimage are here enveloped in smooth delicious amber. Imagine yourself being entertained in the golden tent of an Arab nobleman, the scent of fine resins rising from incense burners, eating honey and almond cakes while a pipe rests by your side and a distant smell of leather saddle and noble horses wafts over from the stables. You are at peace, but you feel energy brimming inside you. New deeds of your own choosing await, but for now, you enjoy the tranquil flow of life and its pleasures.

Since words will never do such a beautiful fragrance justice, here is your opportunity to smell Sharif for yourself. Courtesy of AbdesSalaam Attar, state of the [car]nation is giving away a 32ml bottle of Sharif which is not only worth over €100 but might also seriously transform your perceptions of the oriental genre of perfumes. All you have to do to enter this contest, is to write a commentary below this article in which you outline your vision of "your perfect 21st century oriental fragrance." The winner will be drawn at random from all such entries. Please make sure you leave a contact in your comment that will enable me to e-mail you in case of winning. The contest will close a week from now on Tuesday at 16.00 CET and the winner will be announced and notified a day or two later. Have fun!

Eau de Beeb, the trilogy's conclusion

2011-07-29T12:31:00.001+02:00

Somewhat belated due to a vacation break, here are my thoughts on the final episode of BBC 4's documentary Perfume. In juxtaposing a relaunched, ancient ultra-niche "family" perfumery with the market research done in Brazil for a new Axe (Lynx for Britons) product this episode picked up where episode one's Guerlain/Hilfiger contrast left off, though with higher stakes and less cliché. Though some perfumistas apparently thought of the Axe segments as a waste of time, viewers learned the significant lesson, that low-end perfumery and functional fragrance are actually the big money makers for scent and flavor producers such as Givaudan. Moreover, as exemplified by a lower middle-class Brazilian product tester, it is floor cleaners and washing-up liquid that contribute immensely to our scent socialization, not necessarily fine fragrance, and even they have an aspirational function, as in putting distance between yourself and the stench of the favelas. Finally, who would have guessed that Brazil is one of the largest and the fastest growing markets for scent in the world, and thus, like other economically fast-paced threshhold nations a key market for Western conglomerates, who will happily adapt to local fragrance culture if it only moves product. This time around, the marketing people, i.e. Ann Gottlieb, came across as a lot more competent, as well and I assume the two "young male" focus groups portrayed in the film were only representative of many more interviewed in reality. As Axe was peddled to Brazilians, so the Grossmiths were taking their wares to the Middle East, a culturally ironic offering of Victorian orientalism to actual Sheiks which gives postcolonial notions of the "Empire writing back" another turn of the screw. It was a charming and a well-engineered contrast to the ace New York PR folks in Brazil, to see Mr. Grossmith, new to perfumery and selling (but apparently guided by the marketing-savvy Roja Dove) pedaling his high quality 1001 night fantasies of yore to wealthy Bahrainis and the personal luxury assistant of the head honcho himself. Certainly this episode provided some insight into the wide economic and cultural spectrum involded when it comes to matters fragrant and while many more issues could have been addressed (especially of the kind obsessed over in perfume forums, such as IFRA, reformulation, obscene profit margins - OK the last one's just me), Ian Denyer's trilogy was a pleasure to watch and surely an eye- , or rather nose-opener, to the previously uninitiated average scent-consumer. More of this would be most welcome

Morroco's Scented Treasures - Ecologically Certified

2011-07-13T11:15:00.002+02:00

Prof. Dr. Jalil Belkamel talking Morrocan essential oil

There's a wonderful exhibit right now at Frankfurt's Palmengarten, a beautiful botanical garden in the heart of the city with numerous stunning tropical and other climate-zone hothouses, rose gardens and many other attractions. It is my favorite spot in the city and offers something for everybody in the family, children included. The current exhibit, called 1001 oils deals with the history, extraction and uses of plant oils, waxes and fats in medicine, craft and industry, and of course cosmetics and perfumery. As part of the exhibit there was a Moroccan week in July featuring food & drink, music and dance, craft and touristic PR, and of course Moroccan oil prodcuts. The delicious and healthy Argan oil, the best of which is hand-produced by Berber women in the country's south, where the world's last significant population of trees exists, comes at a high price but its unique nutty flavor (from roasted nuts) is exquisite, as are its properties as a (neutral, unroasted) carrier oil for aromatherapeutic blends or massage oils. Of course Morocco is also a significant producer of neroli, as well as Mediterranean oils such as lavender, rosemary, thyme and many others. All this was explained in detail by Prof. Dr. Jalil Belkamel, one of the heads of Nectarôme, an organic producer of essential oils and cosmetics from the village of Tnine Ourika near Marrakech. Combining old herbal knowledge and traditions, contemporary aromatherapy and wellness approaches targeting Western markets, while practicing sustainable and socially responsible agriculture, this looks like the kind of model operation required to bring vital economic impulses to North Africa with its persistent poverty and lack of perspective for young people, both at the heart of much of the political unrest and massive migration to Europe, and to which simplistic modernization schemes provide no answers. For example, the mechanization and industrialization of Argan oil production proved nearly fatal to the business and to the people who had been living off of this trade for centuries, as quality deteriorated and factory owners siphoned off the profits. The Moroccan government thankfully realized this and together with a Federal German development agency managed to create an effective network of women's cooperatives that now produce the only traditional high-end Argan oil and sustain the craft of its production and the families engaged in this traditional labor.

a wild, fragrant meadow at Palmengarten

Besides enjoying the Nectarôme talk in the beautiful Berber tent pictured above, I tried some of the products and found the neroli, lavender and rose to be of excellent quality. They do not sell to the perfume industry, but I suggested they should - or develop their own natural perfume line. Well, it was a great afternoon trip to Morocco and its wonderful fragrances, flavors, sights and sounds. Now I want to go there for real.

Eau de Beeb - BBC 4's perfume documentary Part Two

2011-07-07T12:48:00.000+02:00

Entitled "Bottling the Memory", part 2 of Ian Denyer's documentary trilogy "Perfume," continued with a transatlantic perspective, but managed to leave the clichés of the first installment behind. Focusing on several levels - two maverick perfumers, a teacher and his apprentices, a bespoke client and simple users reveling in perfumed memory, the hour was well used to convey insights into the technical, philosophical and artistic-aesthetic principles of perfume making. We saw Hermès in-house perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena pondering over a new creation for the Jardin series, inspired by the beautiful rooftop garden of the Paris boutique, working away in his Gropius-style house/lab in Southern France. We got to now Christopher "I Hate Perfume" Brosius in his Brooklyn studio and in London, researching a bespoke scent for an anglophile client (tie designer Sean Crowley) seeking the smell of "Old England." And we met Jean Guichard of the Givaudan Perfumery School (Givaudan is one of the big four scent and flavor producers) and his small band of apprentices, who dreamt romantically of creating beautiful scents, but were busy in the school of hard knocks identifying various molecules (but also strolling through lavender fields to get close to "the real"). What came across beautifully was how scent is so intimately linked to both place (Brosius talking of the specific smell of English books due to the humidity) and time (how the smell of London has changed, as leather taxi seats, smoking in pubs and phone booths with paper phone books have disappeared) - and how therefore smell and memory are often one as an encapsulation of a specific place and time. This was nicely conveyed by snippets of two women talking about their scented memories, the younger of her mom dressing up for a night out (glamor, romance), the elder about precisely such nights on the town after WWII, wearing a signature scent. Brosius and Ellena also shared fascinating memories and philosophies of scent and with such a cast of interesting characters (I think Quentin the sensitive-romantic apprentice will become a great philosopher-nose one day) the episode flew by and became a rich memory itself.

A Desert Rose Lost in Time - Paco Rabanne's Ténéré

2011-07-05T12:28:00.009+02:00

Ténéré, a 1988 scent marketed to men composed by perfumer Pierre Wargnye, who more recently created YSL homme and Viktor & Rolf Antidote, is a beautiful failure, a risky venture undertaken at the wrong time. Naming it after a desert could not conceal the fact that this is a distinctly floral-green fragrance, something male consumers in the West tend to keep away from. Despite the strong tradition of floral aspects in gentlemanly scents to this day (sartorial scents such as Green Irish Tweed, Grey Flannel, Kiton Men still feature violet notes), the problem of male heterosexual insecurity regarding scent was still an issue in the 1980s. Moreover the metrosexual trend that would thereafter evolve sailed on acquatic unisexism rather than explicit florality. Still, Ténéré might have been seen as a bold avant-garde statement, if it weren't for the fact that it's forward-looking florality was tied to a retro-masculine vibe in the form of a notably Paco Rabanneish fougère aspect: a soapy green mediterranean masculine "trad" feel based on lavender, artemisia, tarragon, perhaps galbanum, which clearly pulls the fragrance in the direction of the Seventies. Add the animalic-indolic component in the form of honey and jasmine and this challenging fragrance, launched of all times at the dawning of the age of Cool Water's aquatic hegemony, was bound to fail.
The intact vintage bottle I own, contrary to a previous flawed miniature, is not excessively urinous, as has been said of Ténéré, but in fact balances all components quite well. From a 21st century perspective there is nothing even remotely girlish about this scent, despite the notable presence of rose and muguet. It smells debonair, distinguished, romantic - and decidedly unmodern due to its green-herbal complex. The base is high quality, a powdery melange of masculine wood and spice with soapy florals. Ténéré never was and never will be a popular fragrance , but I believe it could be the signature scent of the most interesting man in the world.

Notes:
top: bergamot, cassia, green notes, grapefruit, lavender, rosemary, lemon
heart: anise, artemisia, tarragon, honey, orris, jasmine, muguet, carnation, rose, cinnamon
base: amber, leather, musk, patchouli, vetiver, cedar

Eau de Beeb - BBC 4's perfume documentary

2011-06-30T16:38:00.001+02:00

This documentary by Ian Denyer, a rare occasion of perfume being featured in the mainstream media in a non-PR function, was eagerly anticipated by the perfumista community. Part 1, "Something Old, Something New" ran on the 28th of June and is available online (see link - if you are not in the UK, a software named Expat Shield may be of service).

So, how was it? Entertaining yes, challenging, no. Perhaps the dramatizing reality-TV inspired "docu-soap" format is the most one can hope for these days from TV. The style was very much akin to the BBC Savile Row documentary, which juxtaposed traditional Savile Row bespoke tailors with textile giant Abercrombie & Fitch (and omitted some fine detail in the process). Here the old-world de luxe house of Guerlain, stuck in the early 20th century, is compared with hypermarketing US giant Estée Lauder creating a new perfume for the Tommy Hilfiger brand.

It's infotainment rather than a "serious" documentary, which would have dwelt on Guerlain's transformation from independent perfume house to LVMH subsidiary and the consequences for its perfume policy. These things are only gently hinted at in the form of a new Shalimar flanker aimed at "opening the door" to a classic for younger women. Dramatizing the story as a contest between a genteel French perfume culture, embodied by the withering gentleman Jean Paul Guerlain doting about in his chateau, and American big business represented by shallow marketing execs mouthing platitude after platitude is playing on popular clichés, while ignoring the global nature of mass market capitalism as it defines the perfume (and every other big) business everywhere. This is a a distortion I'm not happy about (though well acquainted with) as a scholar of transatlantic perceptions.

That said, chief perfumer Thierry Wasser's attachment to Guerlain (the person and the company tradition) came across as very deep and sincere and his consternation in the wake of Guerlain's racist gaffe was painful to watch (and a golden moment for filmmakers seeking to capture big emotions - blech). It was also interesting to observe the Hilfiger campaign people scrambling about - quite amateurishly - in view of the heap of redundant nothingness that Loud (for him, at least) turned out to be. Why somebody as talented as Aurelien Guichard has to be hired to produce a 100% generic formula, exept for PR purposes perhaps, is beyond me.

The really fun part was Chandler Burr, who was fresh, intelligent and honest. In a less respectful documentary they would have let Burr judge "Loud" in the end to give an idea of how a modern-day marketing machine is basically about noisily selling hot air (or worse).

All in all, part 1 clearly falls short of truly informed and critically informative documentary work, which a multi-billion dollar industry should certainly be worthy of. Still non-perfumistas will have learned one or two new things. I enjoyed the program, but one day I'd like to see a hard-nosed documentary on the perfume business.

wodka oud

2011-05-23T21:55:00.001+02:00

Wodka sales have exploded in recent years, while the market for other spirits, such as Scotch, is stagnant. "Vodka is odorless, colorless, tasteless, and highly mixable. You need a strong image because it's fairly commoditized." says a beverage exec in a Business Week piece on the trend. Oud seems to be fast becoming perfumery's wodka, or shall we say, the development this Asian elixir long prized in the Arab world is taking under the hands of Western commodifiers resembles the slippery slope from a complex Scottish single malt bursting with character towards a neutral spirit which only differs from water in being alcoholic. It's the Wodkafication of Aloeswood, Aoudh, Eaglewood and what else it is called. When Montale started to make this potion accessible to Westerners (after a bold early exploration in YSL's M7) it provided a respectful rendition of the real thing, particularly in the flagship Black Oud. Strong, not quite as wild or good as high end natural ouds, but beautifully blended with rose, rather static, yet highly intriguing and pleasing. When the big players (Givaudan, Firmenich et al) started offering "instant oud" bases, the usual trend cycle kicked into gear, everyone and their grandma suddenly issuing Ouds. But just how oud are they? Bond's signature anniversary fragrance was unfortunately not odorless, but certainly oudless, smelling more like a cheap drugstore perfume than bottled luxury (white musk from hell). By Kilian's Pure Oud is neither pure nor oud, but the umpteenth rehash of Comme des Garcons' once avantgarde incense series, a papery-grey-velvety iso-e-super soup so utterly banal that Calice Becker must have put it together during a five minute coffee break. While sipping really bad coffee. In a sour mood. With a hangover (you get the point... and please note that experts disagree). Wodka popularity and oud corruption, as well as the fact that my bill at the grocer's today ran € 6.66 are clear indications the end of the world is near (or was that last Saturday?) or at least that culture as such is still continually in decline - but being an open midend skeptic rahter than a cynic, I hope Mona di Orio's new Oud will live up to intimations that it's a really heavy hitter and thus prove Spengler wrong once again.

Above picture showes Vodka Extreme EdP for Men by Paris Elysées, which may or may not smell cheap, but at least is so.

Penhaligon's Shenanigans

2011-02-06T20:40:00.011+01:00

I'd love to own a suit by Norton & Sons. That's the Savile Row bespoke tailoring establishment featured in Penhaligon's campaign for their most recent release Sartorial. The choice makes sense as Norton's current owner Patrick Grant is trying to straddle the low-key conservatism and discretion that defines Savile Row houses and the contemporary branding necessary to keep an operation in the black these days. Penhaligon's, while no longer British-owned, plays on its Victorian heritage, while its fragrances have meanwhile become quite contemporary and certainly lack the exclusivity - and sadly too often the quality - of a £ 5000 suit. If I were managing this house, I'd release a nearly-all-natural, über-quality line of historical scents at £ 1000 a pop to show Creed and Clive Christian what luxury REALLY means and build some neo-Victorian upstairs-only cachet - but that's a different story. Quite. For as Octavian Coifan has argued, convincingly, I believe, Sartorial is really Marks & Sparks in bespoke drag, i.e. a very nice, middle-brow 1970s fougère with a Duchaufour update and a touch of luxury. When I "haze" Sartorial on, I can look past the modernist metallic ozonism which is supposed to represent the shears and steam of a tailor's workshop. Applied directly last week, though, this Eau de Toilette went through an uncanny evolution on my skin. It started off smelling like some cheap toilet cleaner, the likes of which is encountered in public buildings, schools etc. Just nasty no-budget functional perfumery stuff - forget all the fancy bespoke imagery. It next progressed to a poor-man's Burt Reynolds retro-macho-cheapo-deodorant product. Slowly it approached the level of haute - well, sort of - parfumerie (cheap Rive Gauche knock off?). At last (all this was taking much too long considering the price tag) the high quality beeswax note started to take over and things fell into their proper place to make a nice, allround masculine with a touch of elegance. And curiously reminiscent of Dukes of Pall Mall's Belgravia, a forgotten EdT from 1983 which is also a beeswaxy fougère, but made from far better materials. What I learned from this is firstly, that Sartorial is the kind of fragrance for me, where mode of application is a vital factor and secondly, that I will wear Belgravia with my Savile Row suit. Which is not from Norton & Sons, but a vintage (of course) piece by James&James.

How to wear chocolate in January

2011-01-10T13:57:00.008+01:00

Get yourself a package of Michel Cluizel's Noir Infini, 99% cocoa, chocolate pastilles (they call them minigrammes). The 1-kilogram bag is a mere 20 Euros at my store - affordable luxury. Dissolve them in milk (I use 3 teaspoons for 200ml, adding about a teaspoon of raw cane sugar. I do this in a teflon-coated pan to avoid excessive burnt-milk-pot-cleaning procedures). Stir with a whisk and bring to a very brief boil. Pour into cup. If you like, use a milk frother to whip it up further. You'll notice, though, that this chocolate has a voluptuous texture all by itself, usually achieved in such products by emulsifiers and thickeners. Cluizel does not use soy lecithin or anything else. The flavor is rich, full-bodied, intense, complex and immensely satisfying - and the 99% cocoa means you can individually temper the sweetness.
Now, put on a spitz of Lutens Borneo 1834 or Coromandel (my choices), Il Profumo Chocolat Amer or Amen/Angel, relax in your favorite compfy chair and revel in sensuous delight. If you really want to intellectually distract yourself from this sensory reverie, you can pick up Maricel Presilla's wonderful book on chocolate.

Essentially Me - Sensuous Innocence, Rigorous Classicism and Hot Stuff

2011-01-04T00:36:00.004+01:00

For today's look at essential oil merchant and craft perfumer Alec Lawless' creative work, here are three decidedly feminine scents by Essentially Me that really won me over. What unites all of them is that the predominance of naturals de-caricaturizes fragrance styles which have become utter freaks by the use of cheap and frequently loud substitute synthetics in mainstream perfumery, often ending as drugstore shadows of what they used to be. Here they are restored to classic beauty.

Classique:

Is it ever. So much so you really need to be somewhat mature, favour a conservative wardrobe and think of the Beatles as new-fangled. That soapy clove embedding florals will always remind me of the distinguished, friendly elderly ladies that doted about our neighbourhood when I was a child. A pleasing memory, but not one for me to wear.

Heart: floral rose

Nuance: citrus

Intrigue: fresh herb and spice.

Notes:
Rose otto, rose de mai, orange blossom, neroli, ylang, geranium Bourbon, jasmine
Bergamot, green mandarin, petitgrain
Coriander, bay, clove bud, vetivert Bourbon.

White Blooms:

This is innocent and sexy in an intelligent manner Audrey Hepburn would have loved. Such a pleasure, also, to be smelling white blossoms rather than screechy-blaring-in-your-face “WHITE BLOSSOMS.” Like the milky bosom of a Courbet canvas compared to Hollywood’s contemporary silicon balloons, sensuous, yet tasteful.

Heart: delicate white floral

Nuance: soft green balsam

Intrigue: warm woody.

Notes:
White Champac, orange blossoms, pink lotus, jasmine.
Absolutes of hay and beeswax
Sandalwood, frankincense, benzoin resin

La Joupe (dedicated to our British fragrance friends)

I’m afraid that under the new UK austerity policy this fragrance will soon be outlawed, as it is simply too buxom and voluptuous a floriental to be tolerated. The neroli-tuberose-jasmine-ylang axis is incredibly sexy, warm and opulent, but the naturals play out their strength here, in that the composition never descends into gaudiness. It’s Liz Taylor before the Seventies. It’s also just the right scent to seduce men, politicians included, so maybe we could reconsider that austerity bit, eh, darlings David & Nick?

Heart: heady floral

Nuance: Oriental

Intrigue: musky.

Notes
Tuberose, orange blossoms, jasmine, patchouli, ylang
Vetivert bourbon, frankincense, guaiacwood, labdanum, tonka, oakmoss, vanilla

Essentially Me - Hi, I'm Amber

2011-01-02T01:09:00.003+01:00

In the perfume neighbourhood, Amber is the girl next door who could be so much fun if only she wasn’t so bland, so vanilla, so boooring. And yet she insistently hangs around your house and seems impossible to ignore. Thankfully there are some people who remember it’s about sugar AND spice. Serge Lutens’ Ambre Sultan is my favorite amber because that girl got' herb. Happily, Essentially Me’s Amber is her own spice girl, too. It’s the mint and thyme in particular that raised my eyebrows and spirits. Plus an amber not totally overdosed on Ambroxan and related drugs is always a genuine relief. The end result is an interesting, masculine-tilted, but entirely unisex potion recommended to all who wish to escape the drudgery of mainstream amberdom.

The notes as given by Essentially Me:

Heart: masculine floral
Nuance: balsamic incense
Intrigue: herbs and spice

Mint, caraway, thyme
Jasmine, lavender, rose, clary sage
Labdanum, frankincense, sandalwood, myrrh, vanilla, patchouli.

Happy New Year

2011-01-01T12:16:00.002+01:00

To those still reading - know ye, that I fave found blogging in the traditional style incompatible with a life of overwork, child-rearing, and hassling winter bugs. I guess I'll just settle for for the occasional perfume-historical or cultural essay, though I will try to regularly discuss interesting vintage and lesser-discussed contemporary scents. On that note, a happy new year, live long and prosper and may you always smell good! I'll be posting more "Essentially Me" review this week and we shall see where things move from there.

Sincerely and olfactorily yours
The Duke of Pall Mall

Essentially Me - It Souks!

2010-10-27T17:29:00.010+02:00

No, this is not an ego-trip gone sour, rather I'd like to share my impressions of the natural perfumes sold under this moniker by Alec Lawless. Lawless runs an essential oils business with his wife as well as creating bespoke perfumes and providing various perfumer`s equipment through Essentially Me.

A group of lucky basenoters will be sampling and reviewing the ready-to-wear perfume line and I'll be conveying my impressions here as I work my way through ten natural fragrances.

I must admit I have become rather turned off by the fragrance industry as a whole and see little hope for any improvement. The mainstream industry is all about pushing low-quality redundancy at whatever the market will bear while establishing ultra-expensive luxury lines selling what would have been considered a proper fragrance, no more, no less, in the 1980s at prices that start at about a month's worth of welfare payments and end somewhere around the price of a small automobile. Niche has widely degenerated into a fashionista racket with endless new style-over-substance editions of design-conscious flacons and silly brand concepts haphazardly concealing boring, primitive or simply more of those prefab industrial smells.

Paranoid IFRA regulations benefiting the aromachemical big players do not help either and it seems that the only pockets of resistance are small, often one-person perfume operations such as those of Andy Tauer, Dominique Dubrana, Mandy Aftel, Liz Zorn or Dawn Spencer Hurwitz, who are dedicated to preserving and enhancing the art and artisanry of perfumery, rather than merely making a living off of it.

This is a wonderful opportunity to delve into the olfactory universe of another such individual, and the first fragrance by Alec Lawless I have treid is called Souk.

Here's what Essentially Me says about it:
"This was inspired by travelling in the Middle East and India where there is much to celebrate from these ancient cultures. The haunting smells of the spice markets, the Arab love affair with the rose, fragrant gardens, precious woods, resins and incense. Sandalwood, frankincense and Cedar of Lebanon are blended with balsams to provide a complex woody heart. Rose Maroc, jasmine, orris and neroli bring floral tributes from surrounding lands. Citrus fruits, herbs and oriental spices bring nuance from the market stalls and the ancient mysterious opoponax suggests incense with help from frankincense and sandalwood. Deep complex and beguiling - the beauty is in the mystery."
http://www.essentially-me.co.uk/finished_fine_fragrances.php#souk

My thoughts:
Are you going to Scarborough Souk? Yes that's right, the green-herbal elements in this unisex beauty balance the balsamic-spice so as to create an English oriental, the two fragrant worlds coming together nicely in the rose, which is, after all, so quintessential to both. A pleasing alternative to the French orient smarting under the syrupy heel of that charming despot Serge Lutens.

Guerlain's Gaffe

2010-10-18T11:37:00.007+02:00

There's been quite an uproar about Jean-Paul Guerlain's remark in a television interview, that in creating Samsara "Pour une fois, je me suis mis à travailler comme un nègre. Je ne sais pas si les nègres ont toujours tellement travaillé, enfin…"

While I lack an indepth knowledge of French cultural semantics, I'm uncertain whether the translation in the Anglo media of "nègre" as "nigger" is not somewhat misleading, the former having been common public usage through the 1960s and beyond to designate blacks, and thus not dissimilar to the English "negro" or the German "Neger." These terms were used affirmatively by Africans and African-Americans, such as Marcus Garvey (1920s), Leopold Senghore(1930s) Martin Luther King and Malcolm X (1960s), while their use by "white" societies inevitably infused them with the ubiquitous racism of those societies, leading to a (difficult) shift to alternatives (Afro-American, African American, black, noir and others) since the 1960s.

The pejorative quality of the word and the turn of phrase, with the added callousness of questioning whether any black ever worked as hard as Guerlain did, is unquestionably injurious, uncivil and racist in nature. We can safely assume that M. Guerlain's days as a publicity instrument of the Louis-Vuitton-Moet-Hennesy-owned House of Guerlain are numbered. That a number of organizations will be pressing charges against Guerlain seems exaggerated though. We are not talking about Jean Marie Le Pen here, after all, and a legal course will achieve nothing. Vigorous protest and the opportunity to use this gaffe as a starting point for a reasoned discussion of racism issues in French society would seem a more promising path. But then it is not to be expected, that anti-racists organizations are immune to the baneful effects of media hysteria any more than any other institution and perhaps targeting one politically irrelevant old man is providing some psychological compensation for their utter helplessness in the face of the rising tide of European xenophobia as embodied by pathetic fearmongers such as Geert Wilders or the highly questionable policies of the Sarkozy government, for that matter.

Personally I'm saddened rather than angered by Guerlain's gaffe (then again, I'm white). I simply can't say I'm outraged by this haughty old man's public callousness in the same way that slavery in Mauretania or labor conditions in China co-sponsored by the West's shoddy consumerism outrage me. But you'd wish that a man like Guerlain, capable of such refinement and sensibility in his artful line of work, so well-travelled and cosmopolitan, was simply incapable of harboring a worn-out racist cliché of this sort. Such an insensitive remark from an obviously cultivated mind serves as a sorrowful illustration of how segregated and selective civility may be. Monsieur Guerlain, I regret to inform you that your status as gentleman has been revoked.

Harrod's The Perfume Diaries

2010-09-30T22:20:00.005+02:00

Well, I've learned one or two things from the "Evening of European Perfumery" I attended last week at Harrod's Perfume Diaries exhibit. For one, if you invite company reps, even from the top tier, to give talks about perfumery, you're going to get a bland PR presentation on why their house is so great and on the new/upcoming release. That wasn't really surprising, yet nonetheless somewhat disappointing. The other thing I learnt is that Olivia Chantecaille is even better looking in real life than on photographs. She wore a stunning, minimalist dress in orange which looked very haute couture and clashed violently with the dashiki-like Hermès thing Roja Dove was wearing to prove his olfactory asthetics are far superior to his visuals (as Luca Turin once remarked, most Hermès products are hideously ugly marvels of traditional quality and craft). As you may note this post has been made commensurate to the gravity of the reported event. However, I need to point out that the little exhibit put on by Harrods with the help of numerous perfume houses really is worth while seeing, as they have assembled an impressive number of beautiful and interesting flacons, including a fair amount of rare gems, which most of us will at best normally get to see in books. I also liked the idea of providing little smell stations featuring four scents representative of each decade - if you ever needed proof that things have been going downhill since the late 80s, there it was. But there was a silver lining, too. Chantecaille presented its three fragrances Vetyver, Pétales and Kalimantan and they were old-fashioned in a good way. I know what you're thinking, but no, I'm not saying this because I was hypnotized by Olivia's beauty. The ubiquitous claim of high percentages of top-grad naturals was backed up with facts. Vetyver was very traditional, unisex, green-nutty, drawing on some of the classics, very good, but giving me a headache just as Guerlain's and Lubin's renditions do (beyond that, this was far better than Guerlain's male product, but not quite as convincing as Vetyver pour elle). Pétales is a traditional, natural-smelling rich bouquet fragrance, that I'd prefer over all those ghastly fruity-floral synths from hell on a woman any day, though I wouldn't have minded a tad of dioresque dirt in there. Kalimantan, as the name suggests, provides patchouli spice and amber, not too innovative, but on par quality-wise with classic Lutens juices. It is good to see such a commitment to quality in at least some houses and one can only hope that high-end consumers will register and reward this, rather than jumping after the next fragrance gimmick. The olfactory trail of Comme des Garcons certainly indicates that the glory days of anti- or guerilla perfumery are over and it's time to refocus on basics. Call it slow smell, but that's a subject for some future manifesto.

Roses are red...

2010-09-09T09:12:00.015+02:00

OK, folks, I'm not a bloggy kind of person which has meant that I've frequently slipped into extended essaying here (not a bad thing per se), with the counterproductive effect of posting only a few times a year. Since I do want to make this space a bit livelier, I will try to be more frequent and brief, albeit without relinquishing occasional attempts at lengthier meditations.

So here, for one is a picture from a beautiful Victorian-style Salon de Thé in Strasbourg aptly called Au Fond du Jardin. This lovely place of respite right next to the Palace Rohan and the awesome, but busily touristy Muenster was bound to remind of perfume, not just because of the divine Madeleines that come in a baffling variety of brilliant variations and will surely burn themselves into your olfactory and gustatory memory as powerfully as the ones Proust smelled, but because the whole place is about the smells of flowers (dried rose leaf infusion, gently floral- scented tea compositions), the tastes of sweets and spice and a plush world of yore which can only evoke classic heady perfumes in ornate flacons.

I communicated as best I could with the gracious host and Anglophile Frédéric Robert (the "stylist") and his partner Laurent (the "creator") and felt naturally compelled to recommend Penhaligon's Hammam Bouquet as a perfect scent for anyone who so lovingly designed such an Ur-British environment in the heart of Alsace. I also had on hand a few scents from my travel coffret which seemed perfect matches: vintage Italian-made Czech & Speake No. 88 and Washington Tremlett's Black Tie, both made by the wonderfully skilled folks at Forester Milano , who have access to some phenomenal floral essences. That brought to mind another of their rose masterpieces, the beautiful, melancholy-masculine Domenico Caraceni with its dark resin and tobacco. Feasting on an Audrey Hepburn Madeleine (spices & Earl Grey), sipping the floral Un ange à Rome (rose and bramble) in their little flower-drenched forecourt, while traces of a fine rose scent sweeten the air is as close as paradise as one will get on earth - to Strasbourg, friends.

Castile to Hampstead, via Milano

2010-05-14T01:20:00.002+02:00

The trend towards reviving Eau de Cologne shows no sign of abating, which is a good thing for a classic cologne fogey such as myself. I was graciously gifted with a bottle of Washington Tremlett's Hampstead Water recently (officially a fougere, but to me it's a high-longevity EdC), which I had been most eager to try, as that brand's Black Tie is one of my perennial favorites. Both scents happen to be creations of Shirley Brody's, a key figure in contemporary British perfumery. She was involved in the rebirth of Penhaligon's in the late 70s as well as the conception of Czech & Speake's aromatics line, which, before the recent relaunch of inferior reformulations, constituted the pinnacle of English-style fragrance craft (ironically, Made in Italy). One of her more recent endeavors is the little known XPEC line which manages to combine an excellent perfume with the most horridly misguided branding (both the name and the packaging are incompatible with the classic contents that would seem to appeal to traditionalist, straight-razor-shaving, Savile-Row-clad fragrance aficionados). But she has also been a major force behind the Tremlett brand, thus continuing the cooperation that once existed between Czech and Speake and the fragrance firm of Forester in Milan, who were responsible for such masterpieces as C&S No. 88, Domenico Caraceni and the aforementioned Black Tie, as well as the hard-to-find Gianni Campagna series with gems such as Vento Canale. Perhaps, then it was the through the Brody connection that Hampstead Water immediately reminded me of Penhaligon's Castile. Not that the former is a clone or anything and I doubt Brody was involved with Penhaligon's anymore when Castile was released in 1998. The similarities likely result from the simple fact that both are Eau de Cologne style fragrances, HW featuring bergamot, orange, lavender, water mint, leather and musk, while Castile is built around neroli, petitgrain, bergmot, orange blossom, rose, woods and musk. As the notes suggest, the tops are quite similar, but Hampstead is a good deal fresher via the mint, while Castile is defined by the warm orange and rose interplay. Still, it somehow makes sense to me to see Brody's spirit hovering above all these waters like a fairy godmother of English perfumery. I guess I have a crush on her...Anyway, in the geography of Eau de Cologne, Castile is closer to Hampstead Heath than you may think - just travel via Milan.

Image: "The Writer" at Hampstead Heath with a bottle of Castile

Of good smells and bad taste

2010-05-06T10:19:00.006+02:00

In the 1890s nouveau-riche Americans shocked Old Europe with their unique combination of immense wealth and what appeared to the English, French, German, Italian etc. better classes to be an utter lack of cultivation. Starting in the 1990s it was Russian oligarchs and their entourages who did their best to confirm the platitude that superwealth married to a lack of cultural sensibility will produce the most astounding aesthetic carbunkles. The gaudiness and excess of Moscow's superrich has been amply documented. Needless to say Old Europe's fashion & beauty businesses then and now, large and small, have always used their cultural capital to sell good taste - or bad - to the new money. A small but conspicuous Italian venture called Xerjoff, founded by Italians Sergio Momo and Dominique Salvo in 2004, has specifically targeted, as the name already suggests, the new rich Russians with an extensive and expensive line of perfumes. In fact, they do their best to make Creed and company look like drugstore scents.

Now, at first sight the whole affair could easily be dismissed as a typical hot air balloon. For starters, the English language copy on the website and product is appallingly faulty and vacuous, clearly the result of overly literal translation from the Italian by an amateur. As a former translator I have never understood this slovenly approach to language among international companies for whom image is essential. Is it so difficult to get feedback from competent native speakers? After all, how would you feel about a $300,000 Maserati whose computer system notifies you to "please to be putting on seat belting for driver safeties"?
Secondly, Xerjoff suffers from the industry epidemic that has now fully infected niche firms - throwing way too many products on the market in too little time. Xerjoff already features three distinct lines, the flagship XJ 17/17 (weak name) with four scents, Shooting Stars (twelve scents) and Casamorati (four scents). Such speed inevitably comes at the cost of originality, as even the best noses will be reworking established formulas.
Lastly, the styling of several of the products - particularly the high end Murano flacons of the 17/17 line and the faux retro Casamorati series - is an aesthetic nightmare. Whatever money can buy is thrown together to create costly kitsch that would make designers from Aalto to Wagenfeld rotate in their graves - though Jeff Koons may perhaps squeal with delight, as perhaps will the designated target group in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

BUT - VERY BIG BUT - setting aside the aesthetic repulsion and instant-niche skepticism, one delightedly discovers that the gaudy canisters do not contain some nameless industry swill of the "who cares what it smells like as long as it costs thousands" variety, but very high quality essences, some of them stunninghly beautiful and worthy to be smelled and worn by fragrance aficionados(few of whom will ever be able to afford them) rather than superficial millionaires. As I was told by someone who knows the numbers, Xerjoff, contrary to many supposedly high-end niche firms, actually invests unually high amounts of money into the best essences and is, in this respect, on par with quality-obsessed one-man houses like Tauer.

You can read numerous perfumista impressions on an extensive basenotes Xerjoff testing thread based on a sample extravaganza aimed at introducing/hyping the brand to/in the US, but I'll limit myself to three cases in point here:
XXY from the 17/17 line is an overly sweet, rather uninspired unisex (?) scent, so generic in its combination of fruit, floral and amber that you may just as well buy some $40 mainstream product, if you're in it for the perfume rather than the exclusivity experience. A 3/10 on the perfumery scale, but a 10 for nouveau-riche-silliness here.
Much more impressive is the 17/17 lines Xerjoff homme, a bow to the grand Knize Ten - equal, perhaps even superior in quality and a bit more rounded and creamy to suit contemporary tastes. Imagine K10 pushed in the direction of Creed's Royal English Leather and Lutens Cuir Mauresque. So, here we have a truly top-notch, if not highly original scent of deep, rich leather, suitably dark, but without excessive harshness. An 8 on the perfume scale for an excellent variation of tradition that may well become the personal preference of many a perfumista and will introduce nouveau-newbies to good rather than merely expensive perfume.
The big winner in this trio, though, is Kobe from the Shooting Stars collection (€ 384 for 50ml) - the best and most interesting men's neroli scent I have ever tried. Superb essence, supplied with unusual longevity, free of the unpleasant off-notes marring, e.g. Czech & Speake's (reformulated) or Norma Kamali's Neroli, and creatively blending citrus (bergamot and orange notes supporting the neroli) with resinous notes of labdanum, rosewood, styrax, benzoe and restrained oud. This is innovative, intelligent, beautiful and I want to know who did it. As to the price: considering that Creed was asking $ 405 for 50ml of a pretty synthetic-smellingAND short-lived green floral (i.e. Windsor) I'd say you're almost getting Kobe at a bargain. Ah, but let's not get snotty. If we leave all the hoollaballo aside, what we have here is a small house producing many good and several great perfumes for too small an audience. I hope those rich Russians appreciate just how fine these smells are, before the next luxury hype vies for their attention.

BONDage & Dominance

2010-04-30T23:16:00.008+02:00

Bond No. 9 is one of those perfume firms which have succesfully commodified the concept of "niche perfumery," which, from an aesthetic angle, was initially meant to embody a vision of perfumery as a craft based on the integrity and artistic control of an inspired creator and which now represents a streamlined pseudo-exclusivity based on imaging and PR rather than the actual quality or originality of the product (read more about niche degeneration here). Its founder Laurice Rahme, who was called "an industry bête noire, combative and obstinate" in the NY Times, somewhat modelled the Bond approach upon Creed perfumes which she had distributed in the US before breaking with them, transforming that brand's largely invented Old World pomp & circumstance narrative into a Big Apple story feeding on the well-established global attraction of New York as the capital of glitz, urbanity, cosmopolitanism and diversity. Perhaps not surprisingly, some early Bonds are rather uninspired copycats of Creed's succesful Green Irish Tweed (Chez Bond) and Silver Mountain Water (Hamptons). As a matter of fact, the staggering number of 43 releases in the 8-year period of the company's existence pretty much precludes any true dedication to originality and creativity. Naturally, the scents are created by external noses working for the big aroma & scent giants. Out of the 36 Bonds reviewed by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, 22 are judged "awful" and "disappointing."
Perhaps it is amateur psychology to assume that Bond No. 9's guilt over its little plagiarisms and general creative redundancy (hardly uncommmon in the business) has pathologized into a damaging case of paranoia about evil forces threatening the company's identity. It does seem like the firm is projecting its own attitude towards perfume onto strangers which are then accused of haunting poor little Bond No. 9 (there's a David Lynch movie somewhere in here). It was only a rumour that Rahme was pivotal in effecting the ban of decant sales on ebay (a concerted effort by numerous perfume houses). What created major repercussions in the blogosphere was Bond's threat of suing a one-woman perfume operation for trademark infringement over using the word "peace" in the name of her perfume "Peace on Earth" - a term Bond seemed to believe was its own in the world of beauty products after having released the 9/11-inspired "Scent of Peace" (a generic fruity floral more deserving of the name "Scent of Wuss"). While it may be understandable that companies are particularly eager to protect their brands in this fluid virtual age (though it's quite obvious Bond did not have a case by a mile in this particular instance) the arrogant attitude that shone through Bond's undiplomatic handling of the matter left a bad impression among a major part of the perfumista community - but not bad enough apparently for history not to repeat itself. It has been reported that Bond No. 9 has warned the decanting service The Perfumed Court, via twitter of all things, to desist from decanting Bond No. 9 fragrances as this supposedly represents a trademark infringement. This is nonsense of course, as anybody has the right to dispose of their legally acquired property as they see fit, but the question is: doesn't Bond realize that TPC, known as a reliable and trustworthy source of decants to the perfumista community, is providing free marketing for their brand and bringing in new customers for them from all over the world? That should be considered an asset rather than a threat, especially in these times of recession and after an obvious miscalculation on the potential of the German market, which was seriously oversaturated with Bond No. 9 (half-price was a common site, it was going on the grey market for 60 Euros). If I had ever been interested in this line, which I was not, this heavy-handed approach would have cured me once and for all. It's time someone told this outit to stop pestering the perfume world with its mean-spirited corporate antics and mediocre wares and to desist from infringing upon his trademark rights. I mean Mr. Bond. James Bond.

Mecca or Monaco?

2010-04-28T12:35:00.009+02:00

La Via del Profumo is the natural perfume studio of Dominique Dubrana, who crafts fragrance under the name of Abdes Salam Attar and is inspired by the mystic Islamic branch of Sufism. His fragrances have been hailed widely as transcending the traditional shortcomings of natural perfumes such as lack of structure, complexity and longevity. Even Luca Turin, who used to be quite skeptical about natural perfume, has given very high marks to Dubrana's compositions.

His latest "scent of the soul" was inspired by his trip to Mecca and is accordingly called Mecca Balsam. As part of the sampling/discussion group on basenotes for MB, I received a generous sample of the essence which I have studied over the last months. And I admit, understanding Mecca Balsam was itself something of a pilgrimage. I've revisited it again and again, as my sample permitted and from an initial discomfort and skepticism I have come to deeply appreciate it. I am, I suppose, a convert . To me Mecca Balsam is not soothing in the sense of providing complacent tranquility. It carries within it the whole spectrum of a pilgrim's path. Dusty, forlorn roads, rocky, forbidding terrain (the austerity and dustiness of dry resinous labdanum), the pleasure of being hosted by a gracious stranger (dry, but rich tobacco, sweet enticing tonka) the deep, sweet satisfaction of reaching the sacred destination and finding there: yourself (the divine licqourous wine of those amazing florals, soft, meditative frankincense interacting with the dry resins & the tobacco). The sum, thus, is greater even than its magnificent parts: rich, complex, distinct and yet with the typical subtlety of a natural perfume, or as Octavian Coiffan so aptly put it in his review, an archetypal oriental freed of excessive ornamentation.

The effect, surprisingly, is somewhat two-faced. Mecca Balsam does exude a spiritual quality worthy of its name and its creator's intentions. But make no mistake, it could just as well be employed to seduce those around the wearer in very worldly ways - like a subtler, more genteel Domenico Caraceni for, indeed, men of the world. The abscence within it - of the stereotpyical loud synthetic amber, of screechy metallic florals, of frankincense on ISO-e-Super-steroids - imparts it with a serenity and exclusivity that would make it grace a plain white pilgrim's tunic no less than the bespoke-tailored, gold-buttoned navy blazer and crisp white shirt of a yaughting millionaire. One can thus choose what sort of wealth one wishes Mecca Balsam to display - that of the pure spirit or that of the art of fine living. The latter may not have been part of Dubrana's vision, but it makes Mecca Balsam even more impressive and enticing as a work of fragrant art.

bittersweet musings under the boxtree

2009-11-22T23:19:00.004+01:00

Here I am wearing an artefact, drops from one of those few forlorn bottles of the shipwrecked fragrance enterprise (un)known by the name Gobin Daudé. It's the first new - to me - fragrance in quite some time that has triggered reflections rather than just a mental shrug of the shoulders. I tried a few By Kilians this afternoon - it might have just as well been any other line - and found them just another permutation spit out randomly by the great niche perfume generator with its basic algorithms of absinth this and incense that plus iso-e and a tad of exotic gourmand. Uh yeah, me self-critically thinks, you're just a jaded fop with too many bottles of Dukes of Shmukes in your cupboard, but then I smell Sous le Buis, a real act, a quantum leap, of creativity, something refusing to conform to standard parameters, a natural perfume that no one could ever push into the aromatherapy corner, because it does those old names proud, those Guerlains, Carons, Chanels and sweeps the floor with all this ennervatingly conformist Vegas variety show playing 365 days a year, the Buxton-Duchaufour-Ellena Can Can. Yeah, you're geniuses, but I'm telling you the act, from where I'm sitting, is wearing pretty thin and who cares whether the manager made you do it. Call me a betamax bumpkin for praising a venture that failed, what's the point of making great perfumes that not enough people want to buy? Hell, ask the starving Schuberts, the impoverished Van Goghs. Victoire Gobin Daudé, wherever you are, you are a goddess, you have the power to breathe life into an assortment of oils, to grow a true French Rococo garden from molecules. You really do what a perfumer is supposed to do, to - apologies for borrowing Star Trek imagery rather than quoting Apollinaire - create a holodeck in a bottle. Here's a perfect rendition of a sculpted boxtree on a wistful, lusty spring day and as if that weren't enough you manage to remind me of the days when Nino Cerruti was a grand green masterpiece and show Jean-Claude what Eau de Campagne really should have smelled like. All this genius, all this beauty lost to a business plan that would not compute. Why? I don't know, don't even care, all I know is, I'm so tired, I'm so sick and tired (ah, my beloved Morrissey) of the mundane being sold as the sublime, at a premium. I've rarely played this game (no full retail for me, there are mouths to feed), but even just watching it is getting too much. But I'm no spoilsport, not that anyone would give a hoot for what I think, so this is for the eyes of hardened veterans, not to crush the enthusiasm of the young-nosed newbie. A salute to the few, who do no bow to the market, and as to the perfume industry per se, well, to quote the Mozzer once more, the world is full of crashing bores.

Craft and Modernity

2009-09-18T12:09:00.006+02:00

Shockingly, my most satisfying acqusition in 2009 has not been a perfume - though it is perhaps not entirely unrelated to fragrance. Bear with me and find out whether you agree.
It was on ebay.uk that I stumbled upon the tea service pictured above. I had to have it and to my surprise managed to snatch it for a ridiculously low price (as in: "$500 for a bottle of the original 1882 Fougère Royale is a ridiculously low price"). You may not find the design overly impressive - functionalist ArtDeco, a typical 1940s bauhaus-inspired design - until I tell you that this set is actually older than Fougère Royale - pre 1872 to be exact. It is attributed (by Harry Lyons, Christopher Dresser: The People's Designer, p.205) to Christopher Dresser (1834-1904) perhaps the most radical and pioneering British designer of all times. A botanist by profession, Dresser promoted the adaptation of stuctural principles found in nature in design, as evident in his textile designs, while his boldly geometrical metalwork was also inspired by travels to Japan. Dresser wished to combine aesthetics, functionality and serial production, as well as being one of the first designers to sign his work, making himself a brand. He anticipated many bauhaus ideas by half a century. It's not surprising that Alessi still offers Dresser designs - you can purchase his radical teapot for a mere 4,000 Euros, the toastrack is a bit cheaper.
Now you understand why I had to have this (Art Nouveau, Art Deco and 'bauhaus' are my favorite design styles), but where in Jacques Guerlain's name is the perfume connection? Well, bingo. The blend of traditional craft and industrial modernity Dresser embodies immediately reminded me of the birth of modern perfumery pretty much coterminous with my wonderful tea set and embodied in the names of Coty and Guerlain. Coty reinvented perfume by embracing the products of new distillation technologies - super-pure power-absolutes previously unthinkable as well as synthetics such as coumarin and ionones. Coty and Guerlain also represented a new era of, by previous standards, mass production and professional marketing aimed at the new affluent middle class equipped with leisure and money and prone to consume the new wonder world of products, many of which had previously been reserved for the upper crust. Jicky is known to us as perhaps the living monument of the new modernism in perfume, both technically, aesthetically and sociologically and many of the principles and innovations it embodies are precisely those that define the work of Christopher Dresser. Thus, nothing could be more consonant than to pour myself a cup of Hajua Assam from my avant-garde teapot while wearing a fine old Guerlain (I personally prefer Mouchoir de Monsieur - 1904 - over Jicky) on my handkerchief. And dream of the glory days of (perfume) design.

making history III: the usable pasts of creed and farina

2009-06-22T23:56:00.020+02:00

After a long hiatus we now conclude our look at history and perfume with two extremely juxtaposed approaches of perfume houses to their past – call it source-based history versus history as myth. According to Family Business Magazine the Perfume Houses Johann Maria Farina gegenüber dem Jülichsplatz and Creed are among the oldest family-owned businesses, tracing their beginnings to 1709 and 1760, respectively. Not surprisingly, their age and history plays a key part in both company’s image and marketing. Roughly 30,000 visitors annually tour the old Farina premises in the heart of Cologne known as the birthplace of Eau de Cologne, which house a store, museum and the current managing director Johann Maria Farina’s offices. The company stresses its 300-year dedication to quality, a glorious past as the leading perfume manufacturer for a 200-year period, and a wealth of illustrious clients. Similarly, Creed’s reputation is built around its role as purveyor to the rich and the beautiful, from the royal courts of yesterday to today’s Hollywood elite, as well as references to old artisanal traditions passed down from generation to generation. Both these firms do indeed have a genuine history, as opposed to the many brands who borrow past names but are really newly formed ventures. And yet, the way they deal with their histories could not be more distinct. Succinctly put, one could say that Farina Gegenüber has almost obsessively displayed its history to the public from the necessity of defending its position and reputation against innumerable plagiarizers and forgeries, boasting a series of 2000 court cases which has not yet ceased. Creed, on the other hand, has always felt a need to both obscure and rewrite its history from the desire of wishing to appear as a 250-year old fragrance house, rather than as a respected tailor’s who happened to dabble in fragrance and only became a perfume house proper in the late 1960s or beyond (there is little evidence even for this late period). The purpose here is not to judge these approaches, but to illustrate how two comparatively small perfume houses with no major PR budget use and have used history under differing circumstances to position themselves in a competitive market up into the present, where their businesses create status illusions and confirmations and emotional fantasies for high end consumers in the niche market. Such fantasies, as one should never forget, are the basic product perfume houses sell, for which their fragrances are simply carrier substances, like alcohol for essential oils.

Creed: A Royal Fantasy

The Creed entry in Family Business Magazine reads:

“In 1760 King George III appointed James Creed to make fragrances. In 1854 the company moved its operations from London to Paris. Both Prince Charles and the late Diana, Princess of Wales, commissioned the company to make scents for them. Today, owner Oliver Creed produces 238 fragrances.“

The problem is that such testimonials tend to be unsubstantiated and, more importantly, that there is no available evidence for the historical relevance, or even the existence, of Creed perfumes prior to the late 20^th century. The oldest flacon I have ever seen an image of seems to hark from the late 1960s or early 1970s and bears the name of Olivier Creed. Major visibility seems to have arrived in the 1980s with Green Irish Tweed.

No documents, novels, advertisements, letters of the 19^th or 20^th century mention Creed perfumes, while the family frequently appears in the context of tailoring. Fashion dictionaries and museums feature works by Creeds, but every perfume history I have read is silent. One of the rare statements from within the family is a ghost-written autobiography by one of its “black sheep” Charles Creed (1909-1966), the uncle of Olivier Creed. Primarily an account of his own exploits at tailoring and womanizing it does make references to the family history and its meteoric rise to fame after 1850, when Henry Creed opened a Paris office and collected Royal Warrants from the French Court and Queen Victoria for clothes and riding habits. While it may be that Creed furnished fragrances as well, as did Guerlain, Farina and other renowned names of the day in perfumery, there is simply no available evidence. The internet spews out frequently conflicting dates and wearers of older Creed perfumes, which in their present form cannot possibly have existed prior to the advent of modern natural-cum-synthetic based perfumery in the 1880s. The beautiful Vintage Tabarôme was thus supposedly made in 1876 for George IV (b. *1762, c.1820, d.1830), Green Irish Tweed for Cary Grant (1904-1986) – it is now undisputed that Pierre Bourdon collaborated on GIT, perhaps in the mid-1980s, and would rework some of its key ideas in Davidoff’s Cool Water. GIT just may have been Archie’s deathbed wish, but the facts do not actually compute.

Olivier Creed, then, has chosen to rewrite the complicated history of a fashion house’s 19^th century rise and post-WWII fall into a brand story for his own fragrance enterprise and it has been an unconditionally successful strategy that enables his company to charge a premium for its products in retail contexts. The pomp and circumstance surrounding Creed, from the imitation Prince of Wales ostrich plumes suggesting a Royal Warrant that does not exist, to the monotonous incantation of stock phrases and name dropping by Creed representatives and in PR pieces is also cause for derision, e.g. by Luca Turin, but admittedly, it is a spiel that most everyone in the business plays in one way or another.

Farina Gegenüber: History as a Weapon

Like Creed, Farina Gegenüber is a firm with a rich heritage, a fact that nearly broke its neck when it failed to adapt to changing consumer patterns after WWII. After a long, slow decline, the family bought back all stock in the company from outside investors and began reconstituting the brand as an exclusive niche firm, recreating its historical flacon designs, stressing its unique selling point as the original Eau de Cologne, and restricting sales to selected outlets who may not sell the brand’s discount nemesis, 4711. As with Creed, this has proven a successful strategy that invests the product with a high prestige value. But contrary to Creed, the history of the Farina fragrance is unusually well documented, as it had become the subject of conflicting claims by competing Eau de Cologne firms inventing their own foundational narratives and frequently stealing the Farina brand name ever since the late 18^th century. The Farina archive is one of the most complete company archives in the world, it has been used for a number of academic studies in economic history and it documents the history of Farina cologne extensively – Royal warrants, orders by the celebrities of the day (we are talking Goethe, not some American Idol runner-up), historical advertising. While this does not preclude different interpretations of Eau de Cologne history, a basic factual record from which to proceed is extant and available and has formed the basis for evidence in many of the court cases fought by Farina (and they did win them all). Does this mean that Farina Eau de Cologne is a more authentic or better perfume than, say, Creed’s Bois de Cedrat (a light citrus cologne supposedly formulated in 1875)? No. The Farina you buy today is also a reformulated product containing synthetics. It is meant to preserve and convey the spirit of the original while catering to the wishes of contemporary consumers, e.g. in terms of longevity. However, while Creed long emphasized its reliance on ancient infusion methods and avoided the mention of synthetics (there have been modest concessions in more recent PR blurbs, as would seem necessary considering the obvious high content of synthetics in most Creed releases since the mid-80s) Johann Maria Farina, who is a trained pharmacist and perfumer, openly embraces the ethos of modern (i.e. post 1880s) perfumery and its use of naturals with semi- and fully synthetic materials.

Creed and Farina have chosen very different paths to create “usable pasts” for their brand, which are themselves in many ways determined by the nature of those histories. They offer fascinating insights for the historian of smells into the depths and shoals of the past of perfumes as well as lessons on the fictions involved in fragrance branding for the student of perfume culture today. But for the simple lover of perfume truth lies only within the flacon and history - is bunk.

read making history II: the carthusian candidate
read making history, faking history

emperor's clothes

2009-04-10T22:00:00.003+02:00

I have spent a delightful week in London, my favorite city, and despite the challenges and physical exhaustion that come with a 2.5 year old on an urban vacation, everybody had a good time. Daughter at Coram's Fields and the zoo , mom at the Tate and dad in Jermyn Street .
London is a great place for food and fragrance and like anywhere else in the world, there are renowned locations or products considered the epitome of quality and refinement. Sometimes these institutions are quite old and they have stuck to their principles and remain beacons of a past time. Others are merely facades behind which principles have been corrupted - or haven't kept up with new quality standards. This is all way too abstract, so let's make it practical: Fortnum&Mason is an inevitable address in every London tourist guide and I am not sure whether any native has been seen, on the ground floor at least, as a customer in the last twenty years - it's all full of Germans, Americans and Japanese eagerly buying tea, orange marmalade and other typically British fare at Francis Draconian prices. But just how good are these gold-plated foods? Well, to give you one example, F&M shortbread is not even pure butter, it contains cheap vegetable oils. Good old M&S , on the other hand, does pure butter shortbread (at a fraction of the price). They even have an organic version now and it's pretty tasty, if not quite Walker's.
The Fortnum approach is reminiscent of certain ultra-niche lines, which sell fragrant banalities in a fancy crystal bottle for astronomical prices to people who want to purchase prestige rather than smell good. Clive Christian is the F&M of English perfume - which one could care less about, if he hadn't bought and gutted the very fine Crown Perfumery for the purpose of using their bottle designs, while ending production of their truly well-made classic fragrances.
How refreshing, on the other hand, is the sobriety of Taylor of Old Bond Street, a classical men's grooming establishment that offers a range of simple and effective aftershaves and colognes with no other purpose but to equip the gentleman with the low key smell of the same - at an unpretentious 15 or17 quid a pop. I chose a bottle of Shaving Shop cologne as my souvenir - a fragrance which will remind every man of his father: aromatic citrus, with notable grapefruit and rosemary notes, and a mossy musky wood base - simple and yet strangely alluring, in other words, perfectly masculine.
Let me conclude by saying that we had some wonderful fish dinners at an unpretentious family run place, the North Sea Fish Restaurant in Leigh St., while the definite bummer of the trip was a disastrously bad & expensive meal at renowned eating institution St. John - I should have known that when Brits advertise "simple pared-down" cooking you don't get some kind of ingenious nouvelle cuisine a l'Anglaise, but ineptly boiled (i.e. half-raw) unseasoned cabbage.

Image: Our daughter's giraffe and a typical London view.

what it takes to make a perfume

2009-03-21T22:23:00.011+01:00

I recently interviewed Johann Maria Farina, the managing director of the world's oldest fragrance house, Farina Gegenüber [I shall be mentioning this frequently :-) ]. The original Johann Maria (1685-1766) was the inventor of Eau de Cologne. His descendant pointed out to me that an essential precondition for Farina to be able to create his citrus-based fragrance was the cultivation of bergamot, which had begun only about twenty years earlier. This story prefigures what happened about 160 years later, when the advances made in organic chemistry had the side effect of initiating modern perfumery which required the newly available semi- or full synthetics to build complex, lasting, innovative and affordable fragrances. That, of course, is just one of several technical aspects (among others was the necessity to advance distillation to a point where 70% and higher alcohols could be created to serve as a solution for herb or essential oils). These are necessary but not sufficient preconditions to explain the rise of Eau de Cologne or modern perfumery. We know that the ancient Greeks had the theoretical and practical know-how to launch an industrial revolution - physics, hydraulics, steam power etc. But there are numerous socio-cultural and economic reasons it did not happen - e.g. the availability of slave labor and the low regard in which manual labor, including applied sciences, was held. Eau de Cologne became a success because it corresponded to Enlightenment concepts of hygiene, health, civility and deportment - heavy musks were associated with artifice, depravity, and addiction, while the light citrus floral represented naturalness, vitality and hygiene. Likewise, industrial perfumery required a new white collar middle class as the backbone of a consumer society which would redefine bodies, female in particular, as spaces of commodified representation through dieting, fashion, and, of course, perfume.
Perfume, thus, is one little node within the vast and unfathomable network of causes and effects that is human history and agency and which binds us all together in ways we can rarely truly explain, much less anticipate. Next time you spritz your favorite, take a deep sniff of history and feel your connection with the cosmos.

laudatio temporis actae

2009-03-01T23:56:00.013+01:00

As I have been sniffing the reformulations of British house Czech & Speake's Rose, Dark Rose and Frankincense & Myrrh against the "vintage" versions I could not help wondering to what extent our judgment of new and old is determined by the eternal conservative-progressive dichotomy in human nature, individuals and generations. It seems like the first Cro-Magnons must have already complained about "that new fangled cave art" while the younger generation was probably bitching about "grandpa style bear skins." Burkean clinging to established tradition versus Jacobin belief that change means improvement, back-to-nature hippies against sci-fi utopians, the celebration of perfume technology's advances (so many new molecules a year, CO2 extraction) versus the hyperinflation of mundane fragrance clones and the dominance of profit-obsessed corporations destroying the art of perfumery.
Perfume reformulations, of course, are a special case. Most people don't mind the improvement of a product, like a car or a phone - though there is a healthy suspicion that it may involve some cheapening. Companies like manufactum are built on the premise that the product improvements of the last decades have had devastating effects on quality and are really just cost-efficient, profit-increasing planned obsolesence schemes or at best results of a misguided technological Whiggism. But when it comes to perfumes as aesthetic artisanry or even art, reformulation would seem to amount to desecration. Who would dare reformulate the Mona Lisa (except Duchamp) or paint over the Sistine Chapel? True, there are cases in which reformulations, often the result of a change in content regulations, seem to have been ultimately successful, as in the case of Mitsouko. But in the vast majority of cases, reformulations seem to be careless affairs determined by profit or market optimization and after a string of such experiences it is hard not to fall into a gloomy Spenglerian mood of 'decline and fall' (Turin and Sanchez' Perfume: The Guide is littered with such stories)

So how about Czech&Speake? This company, though started in 1979 rather than 1878, places itself in an English tradition of craft and quality with its massive bathroom fittings, as well as its aromatics line. They are on top of the British fragrance game and C&S No. 88, their flagship fragrance, is one of the finest creations ever in that tradition, rivaling its inspiration, monikerwise, Floris No. 89, for the title of quintessential English scent.

There are some issues about who exactly created these fragrances, but British nose John Stephen of Cotswold Perfumery played a major role. Ironically the fragrances were made by an Italian firm, Forester Milano for a number of years until production was moved (once again?) to England a few years ago. It was at this point that the fragrances changed. Foresters floral bases, for one, have a distinctive style and high quality, which one can also smell in Washington Tremlett's Black Tie . It gave No. 88 a deep, complex liquorous floral heart that made it stunningly neo-gothic or pre-raffaelite. While the new 88 is still an excellent perfume, that dimension has disappeared from the scent, which I perceive as a great loss. This made me anticipate the other reformulations with Spenglerian, or perhaps more fittingly Gibbonesque, trepidations of Decline and Fall...

And yes, while Rome, or London, still stand, change has not been for the better (sorry, Barack).
The perfumes have become lighter, more accomodating, the seem to have lost something of their eccentric personality, even if we are not dealing with the kind of lobotomy that Luca Turin accuses the house of Caron of. Thus Frankincense & Myrrh, one of the finest (and one of the few Iso-E-super free) incense fragrances has turned into a rather demure citrus-(cedar)wood standard with the incense moving into the ranks. Dark Rose, C&S' rose & oud challenge to Montale (and a very succesful one) suffers, like No. 88, from a loss of depth in the rose note, as well as turning to a lighter oud, making this quite similar to the daintier Montales such as Damascus. The end result may be just a little to full of English restraint. The same applies, more gravely so, to Rose, the most purely floral of the rose trio probably preferred by women more than by men. The old Rose was as treacherously innocuous as a Victorian novel. All sweetness and gentility, damast and civility - but between the lines there lurked and abrasive edginess (sharp citrus), immoral depth (superior rose oils), razor thorns. In this respect an utterly brilliant creation.

The new rose requires a direct comparison with the painfully mundane Amouage Lyric Men (no offense to fans) to appear at all interesting. It's the surface without those extra dimensions that made the original more than another decent smelling rose fragrance. Is it bad? No, perhaps not even mediocre. Just nothing I truly need with rose fragrances such as Rose Poivrée, Fleurs de Bulgarie, Hammam Bouquet, Black Tie etc. and C&S's own Dark Rose and 88 available.

Decline and Fall? No, but muddling along.

Illustration: Norman Rockwell, Abstract and Concrete (1962)

...of Orient Are

2008-12-25T22:51:00.009+01:00

“Since the time of Homer every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.”

- Edward Said

One needn’t share Edward Said’s overstated view of Orientalism, as developed in his eponymous classic study, to acknowledge that there frequently has been a strong European (and by extension American) tendency to see the ”East” – whether “near” “middle” or “far” in starkly binary terms. The Christian, prim, rational, enlightened, democratic, egalitarian, progressive, technological West has often defined this significant other in terms of heathenism, superstition, despotism, decadence, backwardness and inscrutability. Such stereotypes were used to stabilize one’s own fragile self-image and to assert a supposed general superiority which, in the military realm, became a reality beginning in the late 18^th century, when the conquest of India commenced in earnest, while the power of the Osmanic empire slowly began to wane. In cultural terms, the mystical East – always also the geographical location of Paradise and Jerusalem for Christians and thus far from being a negative - has served from the earliest times as an imaginary space on which to project fantasies of immeasurable wealth, the luxuries of what really was a superior civilization – silk, spices, precious essential oils and balms - and unlimited sexual indulgences of dominant men and submissive women sequestered in harems - perhaps the locus classicus of the orientalist imagination. The harem as we know it from the semipornographic kitsch of 19^th century Western novels and painting is simply the return of the Victorian repressed. Smell Penhaligon’s Hammam Bouquet even in its declawed modern form and you know it signified the other oriental H-word to contemporaries with its dirty floral prowess and musky sexuality.

Needless to say that the “oriental” is a defining category in European perfumery and fragrance history, from the spices and balms brought to the infant Jesus and craved by the medieval nobility, to Guerlain’s exotistic Shalimar or the recent Idole de Lubin. But what do Westerners expect of actual “oriental”, i.e. Arabian or Indian perfumes? When I placed my order for 5 perfume oils at a Berlin purveyor of everything from Islamic fashion to religious artefacts, incense and fragrance, could I possibly escape the cliché of being initiated into some sort of “secret of the orient,” of luxurious fantasies of Attar, oud and jasmine-rose excesses, of “authentic” Shalimar decadence? And wasn’t there, in the back of my head, the inevitable imperially-tinged hope that I could score the rarest of essences from a "naïve peddler" at a fraction of the price that firms such as Montale or Amouage charge for their Eastern delights? Well, I had had a few previous brushes with Arabian perfume products which brought home very clearly the messages of a globalized economy: good oud (agarwood) or sandalwood will cost a fortune anywhere, and you will always get cheap synthetics in a $4 perfume oil. No less a perfume scion than Jean Paul Guerlain recalls, in his My Journeys in the World of Perfume, a laborious trip to highly recommended Indian sandalwood producers in the town of Kannauj, as he was seeking a source of good raw material for his new oriental Samsara. What he discovered were “neatly-lined up drums bearing the labels of companies well-known in the perfume industry.”

So my expectations were tempered and I deliberately avoided going for the popular recreations of Western designer scents or anything that sounded like just another Calone-aquatic. Besides four typical blends at roughly 5 Euros for 3ml I decided to buy the shop’s top offering, an undefined Attar for 7.50 Euros per ml – still light-years from the outrageous cost of high quality ouds, which can sell at hundreds of dollars for one millilitre. And you thought investing in gold was clever. We’ll leave those treasures to the Sultan of Oman and see what the postman, rather than three kings, brought your financially strained perfume blogger. A caveat. I have smelled lenty of Western-sytle perfumes but only a few real ouds and attars, so my frame of reference is highly Eurocentric. But inspired by the Enlightenment, I do entertain the vague hope that quality can be universally recognized.

Bakhoor al Madni: Patchouli, indian Agarwood (Oud), Jasmine, Sandalwood, Saffron, Rose.

Bakhoor is actually the term for woodchips soaked in fragrant oils for burning as a form of incense. The ingredients sounded perfectly oriental. Unfortunately it smelled exactly like good ole American 100% artificially flavoured grape soda – a strong childhood memory of mine. The floral oils must either be cheap synthetics or really inferior naturals. The supposed woods and spices didn’t even get a chance here. Ghastly.

Mukhallat (=Blend) El Emirates by Al Haramain (a low to mid-price producer). No notes given. Rose and Oud, a Montale on the cheap. The rose is rather candied-sweet and the oud is probably synthetic – it is extremely mild and nearly more woody than typically pungent. It proceeds to move into a slightly soapy direction. Not bad at all considering the price – Montale’s rose is often similarly sweet, e.g. in Black & Royal Oud, but there is not enough oud power here to check that. To make a fairer comparison price-wise, this is way better than the awful Opium pour homme with its wretchedly synthetic vanilla-bomb orientalness worthy of Disneyland.

Misk Hindi: Patchouli, Castoreum, Rose, Indian Agarwood (Oud). This one spontaneously reminded me of Creed’s Royal English Leather, as well as of the typical smell in Indian convenience stores that sell spices, cosmetics, soaps and incense. Sweet leathery notes of castoreum, patchouli, balanced florals, no explicit oudh note. In direct comparison, REL is brighter, drier in the top, more leathery, and generally fuller, while there’s more herbal patchouli and muskiness to Hindi. Hippie associqations are inevitable, but I liked this a lot and it’s the winner among this selection.

Mukhallat al Oud by Al Haramain: Indian Oud, Musk: a boring synthetic oud on a synthetic skin-scent musk base. Next, please.

Attar: no details on anything. The only one with a distinct oud note – pungent freshly chopped wood in a saw-mill, dry leather notes like in a cramped shoestore, drying lacquer paint on a boat in drydock with faint whiffs of smoky-petroleum lubricant. Very solvent/chemical like. No obvious sweetness of florals, just some resinous balsamic note tucked way at the bottom somewhere. This may be natural or not, it certainly reminds me more of the natural ouds I have tried – which often smell so decidedly unnatural to a Western nose. Interesting rather than beautiful and requires more exploration. An interesting conclusion to a pleasant trip into a different and yet not-so-different perfume world that yielded at least two keepers.

So much for the Christmas edition of state of the [car]nation. Happy holidays to everyone out there and may good smells be yours in 2009.

Illustration:Fabio Fabbi, Harem Dancers (1885)

making history, faking history II: the carthusian candidate

2008-12-11T12:43:00.016+01:00

A cynic might say that the contemporary art of perfumery consists of putting 50 cents worth of materials into an expensive looking bottle which is then cleverly wrapped into the folds of a prestige brand that will allow charging $80 or $150 or $250 for the product (the price point may be part of the prestige sell). For companies not backed up by a strong designer brand – be it Calvin Klein or Boss in the mass market, or the more upscale Prada and nichey Etro, a flowery history can form the basis of high prestige. Age and continuity in volatile markets have always been considered markers of quality and dependability, and they offer the marketing opportunity of romantic narratives about glamorous dandies, passionate princesses, and secret forgotten prescriptions of eternal youth and beauty.

Monk myths in particular have enjoyed great popularity throughout the history of perfume marketing and they carry a kernel of truth, since monasteries were indeed the keepers of medieval societies’ botanical wisdom and antiquity’s heritage. These were harnessed towards the concoction of medicinal products out of which European perfume culture emerged – Eau de Cologne began its success story as a tonic to be imbibed or inhaled. In fact, the legend of what is Europe’s oldest documented perfume – Eau d’Hongrie or Hungary Water recounts that a hermit monk presented it to Queen Elizabeth of Hungary (a composite character uniting different historical figures) with the assurance that it would preserve her perfect beauty forever – which would help explain why the Polish King proposed to her when she was seventy-two.

Variations of this story abound and they frequently feature Carthusians, the herbal cracks among monks who are perhaps best known for their green Chartreuse liqueur. The legend promulgated by the House of Carthusia (as legend) recounts a gift of flowers by the Carthusian monks on Capri to a visiting Queen, which accidentally macerated, turning the flower water into a wonderful fragrance (unlikely when I consider the smell of week-old water in a vase of wilted tulips). The supposedly real history is that the monks’ old recipes were rediscovered in 1948 and were then reissued by a small laboratory in Torino and that the industrial synthetic-natural formulas now marketed under the brand name are made using “the same methods as the Carthusian monks.” I Profumi di Firenze has a remarkably similar secular version of this story in which a pharmacist rediscovered the ancient perfume prescriptions of Catherine of Medici, who is said to have brought culinary and perfume culture from Florence to the French court. Perhaps Leonardo da Vinci, known to be ahead of his time, invented the synthetic perfume molecules prominent in this house’s fragrances before they were rediscovered by modern chemistry? Now that would make history and perfumery journal headlines!

The many monks populating perfume mythology raise the question of whether the clergy should be incensed (no pun intended) by these ecclesiastical borrowings for crude commercial purposes? Well, when it comes to matters of business, the spiritual men of the cloth and the monk’s cowl have always taken a rather pragmatic approach themselves. Witness the monks of Caldey island, whose lavender water was highly praised by Luca Turin. If you read the ad copy of retailers such as manufactum, you get the impression that local lavender is lovingly distilled by Brother Lewellyn himself according to some old book of herbal prescriptions. But according to Turin, the formula was actually developed by a professional Belgian perfumer (hopefully Catholic, at least), Hugo Collumbien, who used the finest French lavender from the Vaucluse and provided it with longevity by fixating it with a (nowadays) synthetic musk called Exaltolid. Next time your at the Caldey monastery listen closely whether its really "Exulte Deo" the friars are singing.

But back to the Carthusians and the making of perfume history: one of the best known and for a long time most successful perfume products was 4711. And guess what? Company founder Wilhelm Mülhens acquired the secret recipe for his Eau De Cologne from a Carthusian monk who had fled the chaos of the French Revolution in Grenoble and was taken in by the Mülhens family of Cologne. A different version tells of the valuable scroll having been the monk’s gift on the occasion of Wilhelm Mülhens’ marriage, a scene imagined in the post-WWII painting you can see on the upper left. As it happens, the monk’s name was Farina- the Italian surname borne by the established and reputable cologne-producing families in the city. As Eau de Cologne became big business, it became common practice for Germans to buy the Farina name off Italians in order to establish their own Farina cologne operation. Alas, the historical record shows that Mülhens, listed in the Cologne registry as a “speculator,” bought the name off one Carl Franz Maria Farina in Bonn, Germany, who had been producing Eau de Cologne under the privilege of Franz, Archduke of Austria and Elector of Cologne. Thus 4711 began its history as “Franz Maria Farina” on not-quite-so-Carthusian ground but as a "phony Farina" - in fact he resold the name thirty times to other entrepeneurs. Only when the strenuous efforts of the original Farinas to protect their name resulted in the first pan-German trademark law in 1874 was Mülhens forced to drop the Farina name and adopted the ingenuously recognizable 4711 moniker, leaving the competition behind in the dust as the number became nearly synonymous with German Eau de Cologne in the 20th century and particularly after WWII.

This story leads us to the third part of this little series, in which we will compare the histories and mythologies of the two oldest operating family-owned perfume companies: Farina Gegenüber, makers of the original Eau de Cologne (1709) and Creed (1763), a well-known niche perfume house. We’ll see how Farina’s obsession with presenting facts and Creed’s obsession with avoiding them is deeply rooted in both houses' actual histories and the need to handle them in a way that ensured their economic survival.

making history, faking history

2008-11-24T17:27:00.005+01:00

The Nuremberg Christkindlesmarket, or Christmas Fair, is world-renowned. Harking back all the way to the 16/17^th century, when Protestants replaced the gift-bearing Catholic Saint Nicolas of December 6 with a newfangled Lutheran “Christkind” (reverting into the red-suited male Kris Kringle = Santa Claus = Saint Nicolas in the US) which brought presents on Christmas Eve (respectively Day), it is the very embodiment of old-fashioned German/European festive culture and attracts millions of tourists every year.

Not too many people know that central features of the market, particularly the grand opening ceremony featuring the angelic, blond-wigged child and two tinselled angels, which is even featured on the evening news, were invented by the Nazis in 1933. They considered the proper re-orchestration of the festival and its relocation to the city center, the former site of the Jewish Ghetto, a proper step in Re-Germanizing the town which would become the site of the more pagan spectacle of the “Reichsparteitage.” The Nazi mayor of Nuremberg also brought the town’s historical architecture into line, falsely Gothicizing Romanesque buildings to give them what was considered the proper Teutonic aura.

This little Christmas story is just a minor example of the way in which history is reconstructed, or often purely invented, for the purpose of serving some contemporary agenda. It is one of the oldest games in the book, because history has always provided legitimacy and is a key source of identity for our species, blessed and cursed with the gift of memory. In the world of perfume, history rarely plays a sinister role, but a considerable number of houses has chosen to build their brand image on impressive historical pedigrees which signify tradition, dignity, quality and an opportunity for consumers to connect with a luxurious past of nobility and royalty and the pomp and circumstance of the glorious old European courts. Among these purportedly venerable names we find Creed (1760) and Rancé (1795), Carthusia (1380) and Santa Maria Novella (15??), Farina Gegenüber (1709) and 4711 (1792) and numerous others. Needless to say that their histories, on closer inspection, not always turn out quite what they seem to be…

To be continued…

Illustration: Washington having bought Creed in Delaware.

fear of perfume, fear of obama

2008-10-10T10:57:00.005+02:00

In May of this year, the Turkish government's directorate of religious affairs published a text warning women of wearing perfume and other ways of inevitably stimulating men to thinking immoral thoughts and doing immoral deeds. This stimulus-response logic is not specific to Islam. We see it in Puritan tracts opposing the theater, which were based on the assumption that anything portrayed on the stage would inevitably be imitated by the audience. Watching Macbeth would produce murderers, rather than making people think about the moral issues involved in the play. Contemporary Christian fundamentalists share this attitude. They believe if you inform teenagers about sex, veneral disease and contraception, those teenagers will go out and do it. While if you teach abstinence and just keep silent about sexuality, nothing will happen. Except maybe to Bristol Palin. Likewise, if you tolerate homosexuality, it will "attract" and "corrupt" innocent children, as if it were some kind of epidemic. Lastly, if, like Barack Obama, you happen to have any sort of interaction with Willliam Ayers, a member of the Weather Underground 35 years ago, you are bound to be infected with his terrorist ideology of yore. The worldview underlying all of these assumptions is based on simple premises:
1. Radical Manichaeism: there is only good or evil. You are with us or against us. There is no gray area. People are thus one-dimensional. They are either part of the chosen, or evil and life is an eternal struggle against corruption by evil. Which leads to
2. The "virus" paradigm. What you are exposed to infects you. A sensuous poem will make you an adulterer. It is impossible to read Karl Marx and think about him, to perhaps (see point 1) consider parts of his anaylsis of capitalism useful and insightful, while rejecting others as faulty. If you read Marx (and take him seriously), it means you become a Marxist. Or, to use an example from the other side of the political spectrum, you have to ban HuckFinn, because it contains the n* word, the reading of which will instanteneously convert your child into a racist, rather than perhaps opening a space for the discussion of the significance of race and racism in American society. This attitude reflects a deep fear and distrust in a sinful and corrupt humanity, incapable of reasoning, discoursing, differentiating, growing and it invests words and signs with enormous power.
Thus, if you wear perfume as a woman, you are essentialy approaching whoredom - the widely held belief of the Victorian era and apparently still popular in Islam. You have chosen the path of immodesty and sin and its power will pull all those poor men into the maelstrom of evil that happen to smell your olfactory trap. Thus, also, the inability of the American right, beyond the merely strategic move of representing Obama as unAmerican, of understanding a person with a multicultural, plural background such as Obama. His name is Arab-African, ergo he is a Muslim. He visited Wright's church, ergo he is a black nationalist radical. He read a book by Saul Alinsky, so he must be a radical anarchist. He sat on a board with William Ayers (and Republicans) , so he's a friend of terrorists (and Republicans?).

It is impossible for the one fundamentalist mind to imagine wearing a perfume for your own pleasure, or for others to take pleasure in beauty without sinister thoughts. Or to be in fact erotically inspired by a perfume without ever considering acting upon that inspiration. It is impossible for the other fundamentalist to imagine an intellectual - somebody who engages with a plurality of ideas in an interested, detached, non-judgemental way, who, ideally, uses ideas to develop a differentiated view of the world - the very opposite of the black and white world fundamentalists need to cling to, riddled by their anxieties and repressed desires.

how john mccain turned politics into perfume

2008-09-12T11:45:00.006+02:00

Perfume is a beautiful lie, an illusion creating impossible flower gardens from synthesized aromachemicals, an impressionistic painting assembled by labcoats, love and passion from a test tube, a mass produced promise of individuality. Politics is the public space in which uncomfortable realities require debating, clashing interests must negotiate a consensus, in which ignoring cold facts will ultimately have devastating consequences. And yet John McCain, retired maverick, has had himself branded by the ruffian Rove and become the latest and worst exponent of the politics of perfume: create illusions, tell lies until the people believe them, deflect attention from genuine issues and manipulate emotions.
Politics has always been a dirty business and mudslinging is as old as elections are. The United States, however, has entered a new era of politics since George W. Bush was awarded the Presidency by the Supreme Court. Denial of scientific facts, systematic lying and violations of the US Constitution have become standard tools of governance in the White House. Senator McCain, of the party which controlled the Capitol from 1994 to 2006, has occupied the White House since 2001 and practically merged with K-Street has now declared he is running against Washington, together with a VP candidate pork-barrel laden and heavily earmarked. And the voters are loving it, since they seem to be confusing an election for the Presidency for another Mr/Miss Congeniality contest. Yes, a considerable part of the American people have become like the crowd of Süskind's novel Perfume. Lusting for the murderer's execution, once he dons a few drops of his magic fragrance the people become hopelessly entranced and the ugly outcast turns into a deified Prince Charming reigning over a Babylonic orgy.
What are the consequences? Wearing perfume is a harmless game of playing with dreams and identities. The fragrance fades only to be replaced with a different scent. A nation whose political perception has become as disconnected from reality as an LSD user's who thinks he can fly without wings, a nation which seems able to ignore the reality of a lost war, the collapse of the national mortage market and major banks and investement houses, the long term threat of climate change, its junkie-like relationship to oil and all the many mortifying challenges that lay ahead of it, such a nation will not be able to maintain its positon of global world leadership. If this ideology once again carries the day on Nov. 4, 2008, historians may once mark this period as the watershed moment when the U.S. chose for good to retire into a private mythology of itself as it began its slow descent to political irrelevancy, ending like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard , an aging diva who believes her perfume will project a past image of youthfulness through its intricate olfactory illusionism.

if cuba had been a crown colony...

2008-08-27T02:55:00.002+02:00

Cuba, like the rest of the Western hemisphere, was traditionally considered by the USA as its back yard. In fact, as far back as the Early Republic, Thomas Jefferson could assert that Cuba was "the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States" and after "liberating" the island from Spanish rule in the "splendid little war" of 1898 , the so-called Platt Amendment added to the Cuban constitution transfered essential aspects of the nation's sovereignty to the US. A playground for gambling US tourists and mobsters after WWII, Cuban suffered under the ruthless dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, a long time darling of Washington. As so often in Central and South America, the US failed to support democratic alternatives and its seriously incompetent policy ultimately lead to Fidel Castro's triumph, his turn towards hard-line Marxism-Leninism, JFK's Bay of Pigs misadventure and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In popular culture, however, the romantic image of mid-century Cuba, and especially Havana, has prevailed, aided by the economic stagnation under the Castro regime which has ironically preserved the city in picturesque (for visitors) poverty. The Buena Vista Social Club clearly trumps the more limited visibility of independent Cuban film makers or critical reportage and the imagery of fine cigars, rum-soaked nights, hot tropical rhythms and rusty pastel-colored vintage cars will probably be with us forever.

Considering the above history it is fitting that a US company would have produced a perfume called Havana , aiming to evoke precisely this kind of atmosphere. A heady mixture of bay rum, citrus, spices, florals, woods, resins and, naturally, tobacco - just about everything the perfumers had lying around, really - it is the quintessential machismo fragrance. Though released in 1994, it is very much in the style of 1980s male powerhouses and considered a classic by many fragrance lovers. All the more surprising that it was discontinued and now only seems easily available in South Africa, though a small minority, including yours truly, has indeed always complained that it is too much of too many good things. The public seemed to agree.

Since 2002, there has been an alternative to the American Havana . It is British luxury aromatics house Czech & Speake's Cuba, which works the iconic images of the island into a completely different olfactory story - one in which Cuba became a British colony in 1850 or so. In marked contrast to the excessive density of Aramis Havana, C&S Cuba blends the cool refinement typical of traditional English fragrances with the exotic smells of the old capital (the slightly modified coat of arms of which you can see above). The opening is an amazing feat, in which a strong civet note's fecal aspects are perfectly balanced out by a refreshing mint note, which in turn is kept from going all gaudy by the animalic element; all this is perfectly framed by unobtusive citrus and a subtle rum note. It's a mojito on a colonial-style porch, with the smell of the street wafting up from below. Masculine, but not chest haired and rugged - the panama hat is pristine and the white dinner suit was cut on Savile Row. There follows a wonderful, present, yet subtle blend of green tobacco, clove, bay and restrained florals and a warm base said to contain tonka, cedar, vetiver, and, this is very evident, frankincense.
This is what the British governor of Cuba smelled like around 1955, in some strange parallel universe not necessarily worse than ours. The fact that the bottle bears a red star represents the kind of British/niche humor which would not have worked too well for a US corporation such as Estée Lauder, who chose a tropical feather theme for Havana (no less ironic, though, considering how heavy that perfume is). Then again, holding Socialist ideas while running an empire was precisley what Britons were doing at midcentury, so the pieces of our alternative history actually fit together quite nicely.

Cuba is a worthy, in my opinion even superior, successor to Havana, as it manages to take the concept of a rich Caribean-style fragrance into the 21st century by reaching back to English perfume traditions. The result is, in fact, suitable for both men and women.
Now, is there anything missing in this story? Indeed, there is: Santa Maria Novella's Acqua di Cuba, for starters. But we will entertain the fantasy of Cuba as an Italian colony at some other time.

narcotic venus, narcotic adonis?

2008-08-25T02:34:00.000+02:00

What is full of illegal substances and makes great PR for repressive regimes? Of course, the presently concluded Olympic Games. Once again the public has been fed, and has eagerly gulped down, its two-week concentrate of reality soap athletic drama full of heroes, tragic losers and villains (though one can never be quite sure who is who), framed by two spectacular variety pieces that succinctly expressed what's at stake here: manipulating masses of bodies to generate profits and flex political muscle. China wins the gold medal count, the US has the most total medals, even Togo and Kirgisistan have their heros for a day. and we can all feel these Games have 'opened China towards the world' and at least the folks in Tibet are not worse off. Never mind the dregs whose appartments were bulldozed away to build a stadium by party decree. All of which leads me to present my fragrant choice for the 2008 olympics - anti-climactically after the fact, just to make sure you don't think I'm buying into the hype or crave membership on the IOC gravytrain. And the winner is: Nasomatto's Narcotic Venus.
Nasomatto fragrances have something quite Olympian about them. The company is as secretive about ingredients as the IOC is about its backroom dealings. They are as expensive as advertising time on US television during a Michael Phelps final. And they are as powerful as the latest dope cocktail that will make anyone's grandfather run the 100 meters in 9.5. It's as if Nasomatto wanted to cut through the ever-thickening jungle of niche fragrance competition to release an olfactory scream straight into your face, like those Ur-Schreis belted out by javelin throwers. The choice as an olympic scent came naturally, for the Nasomatto manifesto, obviously written by the same guy who composes Olympic communiqués, states "I give advantage to people longing to distinguish themselves" as well as "I take advantage of drugs and food." Now if that doesn't capture the spirit of the Games...
Narcotic Venus is supposedly about "the overwhelming addictive intensity of female sexual power.” That may sound more like the Kama Sutra Olympics and raises fears of another Sécrétions Magnifiques. Thankfully, what we get instead is - not white punks - but white florals on dope. This is a bouquet of summer flowers, green gardenia, jasmine and prominently tuberose, on anabolic steroids, akin to a 300-pound ballet dancer, or to stay in the Olympic frame of reference: what is this heavy weight boxer doing among 14-, er...16-year old slender-bodied gymnasts and why is she wearing mascara?
For all that initial power, nothing much happens here anymore. Sexuality? Ah, you know what happens to the libido with all those pharmaceuticals. No, there are no naughty indoles here at all, no lusty notes of groins in motion, no spice of life. It's all kept squeaky clean, a bird's nest filled with 10,000 white blossoms, smelling in unison. An impressive image, for a while, professionally executed, but whether that spells out beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To me it's a demonstration of power and skill, but it falls short on aesthetic daring. There is quality and abundance, but not enough soul or inventiveness. Thankfully we find that in other places. The true, undiluted spirit of sportsmanship can be observed, e.g. among players of Tipp-Kick, undisturbed by political functionaries, corporation cash or the need to dope.

hidden cost(e)s

2008-08-25T01:54:00.002+02:00

Costes by Hotel Costes is a favorite perfume of mine. As a fragrance bearing the name of a luxurious design-hotel, its aesthetic is not based on irritation or challenging conventions, but on conveying the sheer comfort and unrestrained pleasure of a hedonistic weekend in Paris.

Olivia Giacobetti created a spicy-sweet incense, with a slightly soapy and floral heart that avoids the ecclesiastical starkness of Comme des Garcon's Avignon, the olfactory antics of Etro's Messe de Minuit and the sartorial demands (Savile Row suit) of Czech & Speake's Frankincense & Myrrh, each a unique and brilliant variation on the incense theme. With her accustomed sleight of hand she managed to bottle a message of carefree leisure and casual luxury that makes Costes a joy to wear.

We can rest assured that Olivia G., though a hired hand of foreign extraction, was compensated handsomely for her labor of luxury. The same did not apply to a group of illegal immigrants working as cooks and kitchen helpers at one of the stylish eateries of the Costes group, the brasserie La Grande Armée. Working with forged papers, of which their employer was fully aware, and paying full taxes while denied equal pay and the benefits of the French social system, nine Africans decided they had had enough and occupied the restaurant on Valentine's day this year, demanding to be legalized before they would return to kitchen duty. They embody the economic logic of Paris gastronomy, where 60% of employees are without legal papers, increasing profits for operators and revealing to what extent high living standards and high life are intertwined with systematic exploitation in the heart of Europe. Supported by the French union CGT, seven of the rebels succeeded in their struggle, but there is little doubt that things will remain unchanged for many invisible cooks, maids, and other service personell at the Hotel Costes and elsewhere.

It has just become a little bit harder to suspend disbelief and plunge into Giacobetti's cozy fantasy. Somewhere beneath the incense lurks an off-note of hypocrisy and injustice.

perfume, politics, and everything else?

2008-08-25T01:46:00.000+02:00

a blog, if it is to be more than a collection of personal expressions, requires a thematic anchor, and this blog's anchor is perfume, something i am very interested in and spend far too much money on . but a blog is also a flexible means of publicly expressing one's views (if anyone is listening - question: do blogs exist, if nobody reads them ?). so why not also talk about matters of possible public interest, the political, when the opportunity arises? perhaps even linking them to perfume in some material or allegorical way or another. and, ocassionally, everything else, i.e. my personal interests and reflections beyond perfume (yes, they exist). whether this will come to anything remains to be seen, but for now: the doors are open, welcome.