How to wear chocolate in January

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

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

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

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!

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

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-racist 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

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.