• a review of Amouage Sunshine

Today was one of those days that reminded me of nothing so much as a particular kind of 1870s French novel, say Emile Zola’s Thèrése Raquin – a dismal, dank, dreary, lead-colored day drenched in chill rain so fine, it felt more like the raspy pinpricks of a dust storm than actual H2O.

In other words, a very typical November day in my obscure corner of Niflheim. Of all the twelve months of the year, November is the month I loathe the most/like the least. The weather worsens by the day unless it simply remains dire, dismal and drenched. Daylight oozes away drop by drop in the dark spaces between the days until all that’s left at the end of the month besides the hollow echo of my bank account is just over six all too short hours by which time, I’m so crabby even my cats avoid me.

Crabby isn’t the word I’d use to describe my mood this Wednesday. In fact, I was rather upbeat for a big change as I headed through the mist for the post office to collect a package. Having recently blown money on books I’d long been dying to read, I was looking forward to nothing more electrifying than literary edification and maybe a little inspiration of a kind blocked writers know all too well.

Yet it wasn’t J. K. Huysmans ‘Là-bas’ that smoldered on the post office counter this afternoon with all its diabolical syntax and perverse pleasures.

Instead, it was another kind of pleasure and an altogether different kind of weather report – a sample of Amouage’s new limited edition release from the Midnight Flowers collection – the aptly named Sunshine.

When I discovered the return address on the label and spluttered my habitual (and unrepeatable) epithet reserved for Amouage packages, I got my usual response: for a few seconds, the queue ground to a halt, an angel walked through the room as we say in Danish, and everyone else probably wondered what was in that package to deserve such a loud, spontaneous reaction and a sashay in my step nowhere in evidence when I walked in the door a few minutes before.

Sunshine is a part of the Midnight Flowers collection that also includes the matching candles and room sprays named Hope, Love, Happy and Smile. A portion of the proceeds of this collection is donated to a charity to support guide dogs for the visually impaired.

Amouage Creative Director Christopher Chong has, so far as I can tell by the evidence everywhere supplied by Fate, Opus VIII and Journey, been on an upward-bound mood swing.

Sunshine is an exuberant, bubbly and yet sublimely elegant perfume from its effervescent top to its delicious base and best of all to this aldehyde-phobic perfume writer, not one aldehyde was fleeced in the making of this perfume.

Normally, an Amouage perfume is a demanding haute couture-clad operatic diva to parse and interpret. It takes time, consecutive tries and not a little effort to appreciate its complexity and for me to coax whatever genies and/or stories from within the bottle. This is precisely why I love them so much – they keep me on my toes in all the very best creative ways.

Yet Sunshine – for all it’s very much and most emphatically an Amouage – is nothing like any of them. This was an instant, split-second coup de foudre bolt-from-the-blue, love at first sniff, and we’ve only just met …

So dear readers, bear with me as I try to calm down and make sense of something that makes my heart sing in ways sadly lacking this November. I rushed home from the post office, shushed the cats, and applied a cloud of it.

Such a cloud it is – a bright, bouncing laugh as sweet as a dolce far niente day spent in a hammock with a good book. If this brings to mind casual clothes and bare toes, a juicy, green crème de cassis vibe will tell you that’s exactly right.

Yes. I did say that. A casual, laid-back, chillaxing and positively groovy Amouage, which would be both a paradox and an oxymoron if it weren’t so true.

Go right ahead and laugh just because you can.

But wait! There’s far more joy in store!

How do you like your flowers? Sweetly heady with a faint blush of marzipan and vanilla? That’s the large box of Ladurée macarons glowing on the table at your side in this warm and summery shade, only these are flavored with a seamless bunch of osmanthus, jasmine and creamy, lemony magnolia so you can live it up not a just a little but a lot.

Live it up you surely will, because everywhere you go there you are, bathed in your own beam of sunshine exuding all the promises and boundless optimism of a delicious, ravishing love at first, second and thirty-second sniff.

You’ll find no November here, no doom, leaden clouds or literate gloom, only a far-off powdery poof of verdant, green patchouli and sweet tobacco as that life-enhancing light slants towards the horizon and the memory of a flawless, sunshiney day that will stick with you for weeks, months and years to come.

That one perfect day when sunshine was all you needed to have hope, feel loved, be happy and smile.

I dare anyone who wears this not to.

About the only pain I feel – and trust me, it is very much a pain – is that not everyone will be able to feel those gold-perfumed rays for themselves. Sunshine is a limited edition 100 ml eau de parfum exclusively available at the seventeen Amouage boutiques worldwide until February 2015.

As for me, buried alive and wrestling the Muse in the dire, obscure depths of Niflheim, I think that everyone should have a chance to breathe in the Sunshine.

It’s the perfect antidote, panacea (even for debilitating writer’s block!) and cure-all for autumnal blues and blahs.

In other, lusher, brighter words, a catholicon for November.

Notes: Artemisia, blackcurrant, almond, osmanthus, jasmine, magnolia, vanilla, juniper, patchouli, papyrus and blond tobacco. The perfumer is Sidonnie Lancasseur. 

Images: Paisley Sun by Tessa Hunt Woodland, Fine Arts America. Photoshop modification by yours truly. Image of Amouage Sunshine presentation courtesy of Amouage. Used by permission.

Disclosure: A sample of Sunshine was provided for review by Amouage. I was not paid, bribed or in any way intimidated for this review. But I thank the Very August Personage for his help in smashing through a massive wall (and long draught) of severe writer’s block that melted away like ice cream in a ray of sun.