Month: September 2014

La Dame aux Camélias

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– a review of aroma M Camellia Perfume

Very nearly every moment of our everyday lives, we are surrounded by functional fragrances. Items we use every day are scented, from cosmetics to detergents both personal and quotidian, from dish soap to body washes and hair care products.

Once in a blue moon, it happens one of these seemingly everyday fragrances is so good, so euphoria-inducing and mood-improving, I for one catch myself wishing they could be made into a perfume I could wear. If that proves impossible, I simply do the obvious if I can… wear it as perfume.

This was emphatically the case last year, when perfumer Maria McElroy of cult favorites aroma M perfumes and House of Cherry Bomb successfully ventured into cosmetics with her Camellia Oil line of hair, facial and body oils.

Not only do each and every one of them rank as among the best, most luxurious and effective products I’ve ever applied to my face, hair and body, they also contain the same fragrance, a celestial blend of jasmine, gardenia, neroli, geranium and rose, all anchored by a heartstopping, glorious frankincense that isn’t smoky in the slightest, but instead sparkles with all its luscious, shimmering lemony-earthy-green facets. If that weren’t enough, they also contain camellia oil, the beauty secret of tsubaki-abura that has kept Kyoto’s geisha beautiful for centuries.

It goes without saying I used up almost all my samples to the last drop for both reasons – they were simply that good!

Maria’s background as an aromatherapist was evident in the fragrance she created for her Camellia Oils. Who better than an aromatherapist would know the lure of luxurious self-pampering doesn’t end with how effective a product is, but also how it makes us feel when we anticipate its pleasures? In this case, mirror-finish, satin-smooth, healthy hair, and likewise glowing, velvet-soft skin from top to toe, and last but never least its transporting, heavenly fragrance?

After the many deserved accolades from beauty blogs, perfume writers and editorials and countless requests from her customers, she took the obvious next step and made a dedicated perfume available as both a high-concentration eau de parfum and a perfume oil like her other perfumes from the Geisha line.

So here it is on my desk in both versions – the eau de parfum and the perfume oil (a form of perfume I’m certainly addicted to, because it never overwhelms and lasts and lasts).

A lot can be inferred about my anticipation by my reaction the day I received it. Dear readers, I tore into that envelope with alacrity.

This was one of those occasions when I simply knew by hope, instinct or experience that it would not simply be good. It would be – so I hoped – at least as beautiful as the products that inspired it.

My hopes were not wrong.

In nature, for all their definite visual appeal (which even Coco Chanel incorporated into her aesthetic), camellias have no discernible scent. But if I were ever given goddess-like powers to decide what hitherto unscented blooms would smell like, I’d waste not a moment’s hesitation in decreeing:

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As for camellia, let it be this…

Camellia Perfume is a sibling of another perfume Maria created in collaboration with her House of Cherry Bomb colleague Alexis Karl. That perfume is Lil (for the Devilscent Project), an outrageously opulent floral bombshell, but Mademoiselle Camellia is nowhere so outrageous yet every bit as floral.

Instead, she seduces less by her presence but by her charming and seamless floral bouquet of classy, classic blooms; jasmine, neroli, gardenia, rose and geranium, which gives them all a viridian, fresh daytime edge, a flowery deep breath to invigorate and inspire you. The gardenia note in particular is slanted sparkling green by the geranium and does all it can to make those flowers sing.

Sing they certainly do from top notes to finish some long time later, but they also have an orchestra of luscious frankincense to accompany them. And such a virtuoso performance it is, too.

Frankincense, used for its fragrance for at least the past 5000 years, can veer in several directions in a perfume. With labdanum (another ancient perfume ingredient) for instance, it can be smoky, sensual and lascivious, yet here, it has been used as my most favorite frankincense type of all: the pure scent of the boswellia resin itself. Frankincense as it is used in perfume comes in three different varieties, each with its own olfactory profile. I’m not aware of what type of frankincense Maria used, but from the way it appears in Camellia Perfume, I’m going to wager my most favorite kind: Silver Omani, with its glorious piercing, pure lemon-meringue pine aroma, wrapping up those beautiful blooms with a bright, satin plume of happy, not at all a bad way to characterize the perfume itself, either.

As I’ve worn it these past few weeks, I came to discover Camellia perfume has a singular effect on my mood. In a September filled with not a few trials and tribulations, either of these versions has performed wonders in taking me to a happier, calmer place.

I said it before, I’ll say it again.

This is a perfume full of joy.

You now have no excuse for playing Camille or even paying homage to her real-life inspiration, the 19th-century courtesan Marie Duplessis.

But do spread a little happiness where and when you can, by paying your homage to this new and utterly delicious…

Dame aux Camélias.

Aroma M Camellia Perfume is available directly from the aroma M website as a high-concentration eau de parfum or as a pure perfume oil in a bottle that pays its own homage to yet another camellia lover.

Notes: Neroli, jasmine, gardenia, geranium, rose, frankincense.

Photo: Greta Garbo in the 1936 MGM George Cukor classic Camille. I like to think she’s sniffing this perfume. Duotone creation by me.

Disclosure: Samples of Camellia Perfume were sent by Maria McElroy. I’m not worthy.

Perfume Botox

kim-novak-ralph-crane-shoot-1958-1 – When perfumes become holographic

In the life and times of a perfume writer of a certain age in an era where perfumes are launched (and sometimes relaunched) at breakneck speed, it makes a certain kind of sense to stay away from heartbreak.

The heartbreak of venturing into the Brave Old World of vintage perfumes, that is. I leave that to my justly celebrated colleague and friend Barbara Herman of Yesterday’s Perfume, author of the likewise celebrated Scent and Subversion, who has jogged my own memory of perfumed glories past we used to wear more times than I can count, bless her.

But memory and perfume are so intimately entwined and so mutually evocative, even hardnosed post-punk cynics diehard optimist romantics such as I can sometimes be caught unaware. Especially concerning those beauties we wore once upon a storied time when we were less cynical, less heartbroken and perhaps far less inhibited by what we now know of perfumes and their history, never mind the way those perfumes have defined and underlined our own.

This was brought home to me in more ways than one when I received an anonymous package recently. It had no identifying marks or a sender’s address on it, even, and at the time I wasn’t expecting anything from anyone.

As soon as I opened it, however, I knew. The package came from my sister, and inside, to my own huge surprise, was a bottle of the current version of one perfume that really has defined me in ways great and small since the early Eighties – Lancôme’s 1978 Magie Noir.

I first encountered Magie Noir in late 1978 as part of a fashion spread in a Danish women’s magazine. The name alone was enough to get my attention, but at a very naïve fifteen, I was nowhere yet woman enough to wear it, I quickly discovered when I tried it. Those amber colored depths contained some arcane, occult secrets of womanhood I wasn’t mature enough or sophisticated enough to understand.

When it next made an appearance in my life five years later, I still wasn’t sure. My boyfriend at the time presented me with a huge bottle of the eau de toilette as The Perfume He Wanted Me To Wear, so I did, not least for the effect it had on him. Somehow, I still didn’t feel I was quite glamorous enough, beautiful enough, seductive enough, tall enough or even woman enough to wear it, but if it made him happy…

Throughout the Eighties and well beyond, Magie Noir followed me as a permanent part of my collection. It trailed in my wake on nights on the town, alternated with another 1980s witchy brew, Paloma Picasso’s Mon Parfum, it stayed on mornings after, it followed me on those occasions I had definite ulterior motives.

Even today these all too many years later, it remains the single most complimented perfume I have ever owned. I have yet to meet a man it hasn’t swiped sideways in a swoon. I even wore it at my wedding in 2000, a great, whopping cloud of it, because my husband insisted it was his favorite out of the five I owned at the time.

The marriage didn’t last, but Magie Noir did!

When in 2008, I located a bottle of the original formulation at an online discounter at an outrageously cheap price, I wasted no time at all in wishing for a bottle for my birthday. I still have that bottle today, doled out in tiny sprays, because once it’s gone – it’s gone.

Yet my sister remembered when a DK retailer had a nostalgia campaign recently and brought back modern versions of some of the greatest perfume successes of the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, perfumes that usually are nowhere available anywhere here. She even sent a text message to make sure: “Didn’t you used to wear Magie Noir?” “Hell, yes!”

A few days later, I received that current formulation. (Thank you, Sis!) And…

At some point, I caught myself thinking Lancôme should have just given up the ghost of former glory and called it Magie Blanche. Because unlike the original there is nothing in the slightest morally ambiguous about this version.

It’s a lot of things, most of them very good, but it’s emphatically not the original, and in this IFRA-compliant age, how could it be?

If the original is a rosy patchouli-flecked castoreum-laden, mossy witches’ brew with green fangs worthy of the three ladies in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, if not Lady Macbeth herself, this modern reformulation is not unlike seeing Lady Macbeth as a holograph of her former, witchy, manipulative, evil self.

She has, as they say, had some work done.

So this rainy, humdrum Sunday afternoon, I sit with the goddess Hecate – the original formulation – on my left wrist and the ‘rejuvenated’ Madame Macbeth on my right. How do they compare?

Well, they don’t.

If Hecate works her witchery best after dark and preferably after midnight with emphatic ulterior man-eating motives, Madame Macbeth much prefers the safety of daylight and the solace of the familiar. She is airier, lighter and infinitely fresher, to appeal to a younger audience, maybe? Certainly, if you were allowed to wear perfume to the office/workplace, no one would be offended by her presence. Her fangs have been replaced with perfectly aligned dazzling movie-star white caps, or to put it another way, more bergamot and less of that ensorcelling, eerie will-o’-the-wisp earthy-green galbanum.

Hecate, whose fangs are long and green with only a tinge of sunny bergamot and a distinct galbanum, makes no such efforts to conform to any other rules than her own. That animal growl that so defines her is present right from the start. Kneel in her presence, you hapless mortals! A goddess walks among you. For the love of all things atavistic and primeval, appreciate her. Or beware the consequences!

Because this goddess on the far side of midnight conceals a rich, deep, burgundy hued rosy heart (Bulgarian rose, if my memory serves me correctly) to lure any all-too willing victims even further into her passion play, down and down and down into the dark fur-lined abyss of castoreum and oakmoss where secrets are revealed and truths are made apparent and skins are peeled away and made irrelevant yet souls may taste immortality if they’re deemed worthy of such transcendent pleasures.

Madame Macbeth’s heart hides nothing more edifying than a dewy, fresh pink rose wrapped in a few casual patchouli leaves and an approximation of oakmoss almost as an afterthought. No feral creature growls down below. If she existed as a woman, you’d stare at her still-beautiful face and wonder:

“What the hell happened to you?”

The perfume equivalent of extensive plastic surgery, that’s what. Hecate’s witchy soul has had her forehead Botoxed, her cheeks and compelling facial lines packed with Restylane and her porcelain skin resurfaced with IPL. That heart of splendid dark has been liposuctioned out of existence. Her character retains just enough of its former beauty to remind you of what she once was and made her into a hologram. You can inhale what she is and sense what she was, yet what she was is now forever gone and far away, and what is left doesn’t stick around for long. I could easily wear – indeed, I have – this Madame for any occasion at all, and it’s still good enough that I will.

Meanwhile, Hecate laughs from the depths of her black abyss. “You had a goddess among you,” she seems to say, “yet you forgot what you had.”

As if.

With thanks to my sister Stephanie for the memories old and new. And also Barbara Herman, for sharing the mutual nostalgia. 

Photo of Kim Novak by Ralph Crane in ‘Bell, Book and Candle’ (1958). In this movie at least, as close as any human can get to being the great goddess Hecate.

A Dandy in the Dirt

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– a review of Jardins d’Ècrivains Junky

For all we prefer to think we live in an age that obsesses about hedonism as an aspirational lifestyle, the fact is nonetheless that as a society, we in the West are really obsessed… with control. Control of our bodies in terms of diet and exercise, endless self-recrimination/neurosis if we don’t measure up to the advertised ideal, control of our runaway minds and impertinent, inopportune thoughts, only now we call it the ultra-hip mindfulness, control of our careers and the circumstances of our very lives as an admonition and precaution in the hopes we may keep the nefarious demons of change and chaos that threaten us on the edges at arms’ length – or else.

Chaos, lack of control, dancing on the knife edge with those demons either figuratively or literally – all these things are best left to trained professionals who know how to embrace them, so we think in our manic panic control freak mode as we whirl through our chaotic times narrowly avoiding demonic roadblocks of yet more chaos.

You know them: the outcasts, the dreamers and dancers, the poets and painters and madcap musicians and artistes and wannabes and maniacal writers who need to make sense of this chaos in any way they can to explain it to the rest of us – or die trying.

If anyone could embody that dance on the knife’s edge, of dueling with Dionysus and divine madness in ways both great and ruinous, it would surely be William Burroughs, the author of the book and the inspiration behind the French company Jardins d’Écrivains latest perfume, Junky.

William Burroughs – prophet of the Beat generation, inspiration for countless imitators, and famous for his no-holds-barred and often harrowing prose – has always seemed a bit of a paradox to me. On the one hand, he was a Social Register aristocrat with a sharp eye for all its failings, and on the other, he personified la vie dans la boue in the best of his brutally honest books, describing the low lives and human detritus that surrounded him with an acerbic pen honed by his acute observations of both their human failings and certainly his own, and nowhere more so than in his first book, Junky.

Reading Junky today reminds me quite a lot of Thomas de Quincy’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater in its exposé of the perils and unearthly pleasures of addiction, but I suspect Burroughs’ intentions were very different from de Quincy’s, even if they both were addicted to two different versions of the same drug, laudanum (which is opium resin in an alcohol solution) and heroin (super-refined opium, super-potent, and one of the most addictive substances known to science). Whereas de Quincy gave us a Gothic Technicolor extravaganza of opiate visions complete with all the literary flourishes of his age, Burroughs gave us a very modern horror story complete with all the trimmings in incredibly spare and brutally honest prose. Personal tragedy, the ravage of its effects, the constant, incessant hustle for the next fix and the one after that, and the next, the agony of being without…

It seems like an odd premise for a perfume of all things, for all that both I and most of my readership are hopelessly addicted to perfume’s countless charms.

Yet Jardins d’Écrivains (the Garden of Writers, a name that had me at hello), a French perfume house which also makes other beautifully composed, luxurious writer-inspired perfumes, candles and bath products, has proven that they don’t take the obvious route with their perfumes. You’ll find no easy shortcuts or clichés in their entire lineup. I first encountered their line at Pitti Fragranze last year, and was certainly more than impressed enough to tell myself to get back to them when I could pay them more attention.

Lo and behold, here is Junky, and for a long time, there was something about it I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around until I realized two things: one, the paradox of William Burroughs himself, and two, the underlying meta-message of his book; that this singular horror could happen to anyone, even a man born at the apex of society with a silver spoon in his mouth – a very radical and highly loaded political premise in the early Fifties when it was first published.

To say that Junky begins green – and I do mean g-r-e-e-n – is an understatement. Green is another way to have me at hello – galbanum lovers, unite! Except that’s nowhere near the whole story, since a distinctive subversive heart beats beneath it – a cannabis accord that is unlike any other I’ve tried in a perfume (a few!). While it won’t get you arrested by either the FBI or the TSA, it’s very much present and unmistakable for anything else.

Yes, I inhaled! And more than once!

Before you know it, a seductive, seamless floral aura begins to bloom on the edges of your awareness. It begins as an indistinct blend, but gradually, it grows and grows and flowers on the skin in a slightly surreal way. Violet, iris and gardenia, says the notes list, yet I’ll wager that that list is missing another, less floral aspect of violet apart from alpha-ionone that accentuates the green theme in Junky – violet leaf, because I detect a lot of violet leaf on my skin. Since violet leaf is one of my favorite notes, this is no bad thing. The iris adds a dab of intellectual distance and irony fragrantly related to Burroughs’ own, whereas the gardenia – just a touch – turns up the volume on all three notes and meanwhile, somewhere in the background that pulse of cannabis beats beneath and betwixt the blooms. As they evolve, it gets harder to tell them apart and harder still not to ask the question: why hasn’t this been done before? And where is it all going, and what does it all mean? Not to mention: why do I feel dizzy?

For one thing, it means green from top to base notes. Those flowers are perceived through a green filter – first by the cannabis hello at the start, followed by those surreal flowers and then by a base that brings it to a final rest of cashmeran – making it soft and fluffy as any opiate dream. I get hints of incense, cedar and juniper, a shot of invigorating moss, a final wave of those intoxicating florals and some 6-7 hours later, a last laugh of that bittersweet cannabis before it vanishes to that Netherworld where such wonders lie in wait for us to discover them.

And the paradox?

The paradox is Burroughs’ own. He is always identified with the Beat Generation he did so much to define, and yet, for all its louche intellectualism and rejection of society’s norms, he also somehow stayed impeccably true to his own upbringing by being meticulous with his appearance to the point of being considered (by Allen Ginsberg not least) something of a dandy and that’s another aspect of this Junky. For all its surprises, Junky is a supremely delineated and exceedingly elegant perfume, just as Burroughs always remained the elegantier of the Beat Generation, somehow transcending the tragic and harrowing circumstances of his life, his unique perspectives, his work and his addictions through his equally meticulous prose.

This Junky, then, is not so much the how of Burroughs’ book, nor even the what, but the why. Why is always the question – and here, it’s a flawless green and perilous floral beauty of an ideal high I’ve found myself craving at different times this past hot summer.

Because anyone can become addicted to Junky’s charms, Even a dandy dwelling in the dirt.

Notes: Cannabis, palisander, rosewood, galbanum, violet, iris, gardenia, cashmeran, cedar, vetiver, incense, juniper, moss, myrtle.

Jardins d’Ècrivains Junky is available from First in Fragrance, Twisted Lily and directly from their website.

With my most profound thanks to Val the Cookie Queen, who does what she can to facilitate my own perfume addiction, bless her subversive heart.

Image of William Burroughs by Harold Chapman, The Beat Hotel, Paris, 1955. Photoshop modification by me.