perfume review

A Rose of a Manifold Stripe

– a review of Serge Lutens’ ‘La Fille de Berlin’

So rich in facets and form, so varied in color and so infinitely complex the perfumes that lingers within its velvety folds, it’s no wonder the rose has so many names, and so many smell so sweet. Some roses imbue the ambience of a summer day when they sing on the skin and other roses emote in alto, moonlit voices of alto, starlit dreams.

By any other name it might well smell as sweet (as not all roses do), and yet somehow, I feel that simple syllable ‘rose’ is much too simple and much too short to encompass all the many stories a rose can tell on the skin. Or is it that such a short, euphonious name for such a beloved flower contains at least as many stories, dreams and associations as the petals we can count?

Now, we have another rose, another tale, another song a rose can sing in all its dulcet hues, a rose with a new, untold story all its own … La Fille de Berlin, the Girl from Berlin.

Supposedly, La Fille de Berlin was inspired by that golden cultural renaissance of Berlin during the Weimar Republic, when everything bloomed – the arts, literature, the architecture and even the people to such an extent that 1920s Berlin today is a byword for a certain exuberance of mind and spirit that danced on the edge of decadence, and only too often fell all the way in with a defiant, Berlinerisch laugh.

But let M. Lutens tell the story:

She’s a rose with thorns, don’t mess with her. She’s a girl who goes to extremes. When she can, she soothes, and when she wants …!

Such a girl isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when I consider all things ‘rose’, yet I’ve dived into enough roses – and a few Lutens perfumes – to know I should expect the unexpected and brace myself for this story of a girl from Berlin.

Having never tried those other, famous roses, Sa Majesté La Rose or Rose de Nuit, I’ll take La Fille de Berlin on her own terms, thorns and all, such being the price you gladly pay a rose…

She is no ordinary rose, no common cliché of ruby red, sunlit yellow or moonlight white, she is a rose of variegated hue, striped in folds of crimson and cream, reality …and dream.

The dream is all a rose, and the reality is a luscious, luminous rose in a photogenic pose. It breathes a husky, sweet, innocently raspberry-tinged song which tells me a violet is laughing in the mix somewhere. A violet without a hint of powder or lipstick, a violet that coaxes on this lovely rose to other places, places that crave the fire and heat of peppers pink and black and determination, places that demand instead of asking nicely, places unexpected.

Surely, I never did expect what happened next, for inside this glowing daydream of a rose lie her thorns and her backbone, with an icy-metallic twist. Not iron, not any obvious kiss of steel or stone, but altogether lighter, tighter and thoroughly new, titanium thorns you never thought to see through those rose-tinted glasses, a faraway taste of blood and kisses, the price you willingly pay for knowing this girl and this rose.

Ah, but she has so many stories, so many tales, and even this one is still evolving, still opening up its petals to bloom as you watch and you breathe, still reeling with the surprise of those thorns and that determination.

Now you know her secrets and you know to keep them well, for now she shows her softer, muskier self, now this rose will all her pleasures prove with her animal, feline purr, she’ll kiss and laugh the pain away to make you forget those fatal thorns, make you forget all you thought you knew in one blinding bright surprise, make you forget there ever was any other rose or any other girl than one unforgettable, indelible girl from Berlin.

When she wants…watch out!

With such a story and such an inspiration, the obvious association would be that most fatale of femmes, Marlene Dietrich as Lola-Lola in ‘The Blue Angel’, as she entices her ardent admirers ever onward to despair and ruin.

Camilla Horn in 1927, hot off her breakthrough success as Gretchen in F.W. Murnau’s ‘Faust’

My impression is another one, another – regrettably forgotten – girl who came to Berlin and claimed it for her own, a girl who went on to fame and fortune, but a girl who somehow embodied not just all the allure of all ‘les filles de Berlin’, but also her many charms and her underlying innocence as Gretchen in F.W. Murnau’s ‘Faust’ (one of my own favorite movies), and that is Camilla Horn.

She is all of a piece as Gretchen, with all the hope and innocence of her kind – but with all that titanium will and determination. All the many beauties of a rose of manifold stripe, all the seductive secrets of this…Girl From Berlin.

So long as you remember – she rocks …and she shocks!

_________________________________________

Longevity is outstanding, and although this slants toward the feminine, this would be devastating on the right kind of man.

Notes: Rose, pink pepper, violet, black pepper, musk.

La Fille de Berlin is available from the Serge Lutens website for EU customers, and from Luckyscent and Barneys NY in the US.

A Renaissance Man

– a review of Amouage ‘Beloved Man’

Sometimes, assumptions can be dangerous. Dangerous, because assumptions lead to expectations, expectations are not always fulfilled, and disappointment can be deadly. If I have a credo I try my utmost to live by, it’s that I might as well bite the bullet and expect the unexpected. It’s one way to save ~~what’s left of~~ my sanity.

This was brought home when I received the hotly anticipated Amouage Beloved Man, anticipated because c’mon, it’s an Amouage!, and hotly since Beloved Woman blew so many of us away last year, yours truly included.

Of all the many things I so adore about the house of Amouage, one of them is the unique way their masculine and feminine perfumes play off and enrich each other – as if they exude two sides of the same eternal stories; The Age of Opulence (Gold), Grand Adventures (Epic), Great Expectations (Jubilation), A Haunting Affair (Memoir), The Memory of Loss (Honour), or even Beautiful Chaos (Interlude).

It could be me and my own warped perspective, it could even be my warped nose for all I know, but every Amouage I’ve ever encountered tells a story to a degree very few other perfumes do, and that’s something else to love about them.

In my own not-so-humble opinion, Amouage creates some of the Best Masculines On Planet Earth. In the (unlikely, if not impossible) event someone walks through my door with the intention to stay a while, he is doomed in more ways than one. To wear an Amouage (or three) is a given. No questions and no quarter. I shall insist. Nicely. If all else fails, I’ll quote the Universal Law of Dividends With Compound Interest.

So what – or who? – is this Beloved Man? Inspired by the 1980 movie ‘Somewhere in Time’ starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, Beloved Man is a bit of a departure from the usual Amouage masculines, less operatic, brighter and more timeless in feel and aura. It starts with elemi on me, all a summer-bright, charming, citrusy burst of light and ‘Hello, there!’ On this woman, it makes a definite statement, a subversive statement to femininity akin to wearing a tux with heels. Slowly – it would be far too obvious to give it all away too soon – the bright beginning fades as floral notes begin to bloom.

Geranium, jasmine and iris, says my note list, but just as in Beloved Woman (also created by Bernard Ellena), they’re seamlessly, flawlessly blended. I could tell you that it begins with geranium and ends with a deliciously dark, grassy, leather-tinged iris, but as it shifts and moves and evolves and involves you through the hours and the day, it grows lusher, woodier and, dare I write it, even a touch melancholy, a surprising twilit twist on a perfume that begins with such a luminous burst of light.

If you somehow expected your usual Amouage rollercoaster ride (or wafts of Wagnerian scope, scale and pitch), you’ll be in for a surprise. Beloved Man is none of that. Instead of rewriting the rule book of machismo with a capital M, it tells its story in a lower, more understated key. The surprises in its depth will find you, not the other way around, like all the most evocative fragrant love stories, the ones we remember the longest and best. Next to Beloved Woman, it tells that other story of definition…no need to conform to a script, only a wish to transcend the rules we write as we go and the yearning we may find – through time and beyond it.

On a humdrum afternoon last week, a friend of mine dropped by. We talked about things old friends will talk about, and in the course of our conversation (I wasn’t about to waste an opportunity with testosterone in the room), out came Beloved Man. He graciously offered his left arm to Art. Up came the Armani sleeve, out came a generous spray to adorn some stellar Norse knotwork. We waited a couple of minutes for the fallout to evaporate. Next came the big surprise. Lo and behold, out of the mouth of this iconoclastic, volatile black metal aficionado, Amouage virgin and notorious thirty-something Lothario came the words:

It smells like me, but better.

Who knows – there might be hope for him yet!

But in the event I were ever to give Beloved Man to an exemplar of same, I think it would suit the kind of man who had nothing in particular to prove, a man who had no doubts about who he was or what he wanted. He has no wish to break or bend rules he doesn’t define himself, no desire to assume another identity or persona. He is, in a phrase, all of a piece. Intriguing, complex, infinitely curious and yet with a smoother, softer and no less masculine edge he isn’t afraid to show to an appreciative audience. A Renaissance man, as iconoclastic as he wants to be and as classic as he always is and also – as surely as he must be…

A. Beloved. Man.

Some day, I hope to find him. In time – or beyond it.

Notes: Orange, grapefruit, elemi, geranium, jasmine, orris, saffron, cedarwood, gaiac wood, leather, patchouli, vetiver and musk. Longevity and sillage is outstanding (as are all Amouages), but it wears closer.

Amouage Beloved Man was created by perfumer Bernard Ellena in collaboration with Creative Director Christopher Chong.

Available as 100 ml eau de parfum (425$) from Amouage boutiques worldwide as well as Harrods in London, Tsum in Russia, Lane Crawford in Hong Kong and coming in March/April, Bergdorf Goodman in New York.

Disclosure: Sample provided for review by Amouage.

Image of Viggo Mortensen (My definition of a Renaissance polyhistor, used for illustrative purposes) via fansshare. Some rights reserved.

Babalon Rising

THE DEVILSCENT PROJECT XII

– a review of Opus Oils’ Babylon Noir for the Devilscent Project

It doesn’t happen every night that I’m awakened by a ghost. Yet this night, in that dread, dark hour when humanity exists at its lowest ebb and in dreams, a very particular ghost came to call.

What woke me was not her presence, but her perfume. Wandering in that twilit space of fragile memory and lacy emotion on the bridge between surreal and real, suddenly, a waft of strange, poisoned fruit reached out towards me like a vine, and as happens in dreams, the vine itself grew into a monstrous, sentient thing, unfurling its thorny grasp as it moved toward my neck, twining its way in a satin black ribbon up my leg, and surely it would wind around my neck if I didn’t…

“Been having any good nightmares lately, darling?”

It was a voice I knew well, an alto, sultry voice much like my own, but with a clipped, razor-precise and deathly intimidating British accent, and in an instant, the sticky cobweb remnants of nightmare fled screaming to the shadows.

I opened my eyes.

Perched on the pale pink cushion of my black IKEA desk chair sat Lilith, Queen of the Succubi, a vision in a black Valenciennes lace suit with leather accents cut with a precision only found in couture, her habitual patent leather six-inch stilettos on her elegant feet, gold-blonde hair gleaming in the light of a passing car on the street below. Flawlessly exquisite in that 21st-century porn-star way that left no room for either imperfections or doubts. And here was I, resident slob, resplendently barefaced in anti-aging night cream, leopard print pjs and spectacular bed hair.

Why, oh, why do these things always happen to me?

The next moment, my feline teddy bear Hairy Krishna hissed, spat and fled the room. That, too, was unusual.

“You!” I finally managed to say. “I could have sworn I killed you off in show-stopping style in Chapter 51.”

“Yes, well, be that as it may, I was given…dispensation, you could say. If I let that horrible man thing have the last word, my reputation would never recover. This will never do. And besides, darling…” Lilith leaned closer , and I was caught like a deer in the headlights of that deathly seductive scent, “as surely you know by now, villains have a way of returning when you least expect them, isn’t that so?”

This perfume was so thick with fruit, you could almost feel the juices running down your chin. It must have been peach, a peach on that heady verge of overripe, and another, even more fragrant fruit, what was it? This, I thought to myself in my panicked state, was how sin not only smelled, but tasted. Not just your everyday, quotidian, all-too-human sin. This was epic sin. The kind of sin lesser transgressions aspired to when they grew debauched enough.

“True. You had one final ace up your sleeve, as I recall. I’m writing that into the sequel. I also seem to recall I never invited you into my story.” I rubbed cobwebs from my eyes. Hairy Krishna sat at the door eyeing Lilith with a dispassionate eye, still as a statue, orange tail curled tightly around him, the tip twitching softly on the floor.

“Well, think about it. All good parties –all good stories, even – need a gatecrasher. It makes things ever so much more… interesting. Think about it. Without me, you’d be churning out Harlequin romances.” She said it with such a subtle sneer of derision, I felt chill pearls of condescension forming in my ears.

This was emphatically not the kind of conversation I was used to at 4 AM. This was not the perfume I was used to sniffing at 4 AM, either. That luscious, lethally poisonous peach cocktail was slowly but surely morphing into something still more fatale.

Tuberose. It had to be. A tuberose run through a polarized filter of inky midnight madness. So black, it made a laughing stock of anything called ‘noir’. This tuberose – this perfume even – was not called ‘noir’. It was ‘NOIR’. The quintessence of ‘NOIR’. The kind of ‘Noir’ other perfumes wanted to be if only they owned the right sort of gonads in an appropriate size and with the exact right kind of fragrant flogger. With intricately knotted falls, to be used when wet, with aplomb and just the right twist of wrist and shoulder…

This perfume made my own beloved vintage ‘Narcisse Noir’ seem like a wan, ingénue, milquetoast debutante who grew up in a convent.

“Lilith, why are you here? You’re dead. There is no way in Hell or anywhere else you can possibly come back. I made sure of it. This world is already evil enough without you. Besides, I’m quite intimidated enough.”

I was, too. I felt like the dumpy, naïve secretary in a Forties noir movie who loses out to the fatal charms of Barbara Stanwyck, and who could compete with that?

Ah yes. I could breathe it in now, that flagrant, fragrant flogger made from the hide of a mythical panther, the very last of its kind, exuding all its midnight black, exquisitely tanned, feral pains – and pleasures.

“I told you. I simply couldn’t allow it. Killing me off in such a tawdry, Hollywood fashion. So tacky, darling. I thought you had better taste. Then again, you did take my husband. Why is completely beyond me. He’s a moody egomaniac recluse with a very short fuse. Trust me. After four thousand years, I know these things. Perhaps your taste isn’t nearly so good as you like to think?”

The more things change, I thought. “I did no such thing. I just wrote it. Why, I can’t tell you. I knew I shouldn’t have bought all those CDs. Or looked at their covers.”

“Ah, but you did! How can you write it, if you never experienced it? Besides,” she sniffed and glanced down at the ten gleaming talons on her hands, secure in her own peerlessly wanton perfection, “nothing has ever come of it, actually. I mean, you’re not precisely tearing up the bestseller lists yet, are you? Face it, darling, you’re just going to fade away into obscurity, back into that nameless gutter where you belong with your so-called ‘writing.’ It will never happen. No one wants to know about any of your stories. No one wants to read them. No one cares. They never will.”

She sat back in triumph, crossed one long, elegant leg over the other, and smiled sweetly. Her eyes glittered in the glow from the streetlight, not with tears but with malice.

Four AM, and there I was…gutted in leopard print pyjamas. Barefaced. With bed hair. Breathing in all the dangers of a most perilous perfume, with its tainted fruity possibilities and its opulent, Da-Go tuberose, all its heady, animal, feline leathery growls and seductive, pernicious civet moan, all of it borne in the one dream I had left to manifest with a little mischievous help. I was so upset, I jumped out of bed. But the minute I drew breath to protest, to say something, anything, to howl my denial at the black of the moon, another voice I knew too well made itself heard.

“Bullshit.”

Dev came through the door to the other room, and Hairy Krishna suddenly came to life, mewled a sleepy mewl and wound himself around his feet with a loud purr. He knelt down and said hello, before he leaned against the doorjamb, arms crossed over his chest.

“Lilith, face it. You’re dead. For a very good reason. You may have been given compensation for today – I’ll have a few words with God about that one, can’t let that happen again – but it’s time for you to go.”

“You!” Even in the low light, I could almost feel the heat that suddenly radiated off her in her rage, heat that made her perfume seem to fill the room, the apartment, the entire world…all that strange and tainted fruit, all the tuberose, every aspect of some pantherine beast of half-remembered legend…She stood a little unsteady on her six-inch spikes, and glared her non-beloved ex in the face.

“And what makes you think you can get rid of me so easily? Or try to erase the truth? That your tawdry, tacky, nothing little writer will never be anything more than a pint-sized literary failure! I’m just saying what everyone knows…”

“No.” Dev walked over and opened the door. “You’re saying what you want to believe. That’s a very different thing. Get out.”

Lilith tossed her gleaming hair out of her eyes and turned at the door of my apartment. “So long as you don’t think…” she pointed at me, “That I’m anywhere near finished with you!”

The door slammed behind her with a bang they saw on a seismograph in San Diego.

He locked and bolted the door.“I should have seen that coming. I’m sorry.”

“Done is done.” I shrugged. Who cared? She was gone. Thank all the gods who ever lived.

“So what do we do now?” I felt him burning against me, shoulder to shoulder. There was a fiery gleam in his eyes and a grin on his face, a gleam I had seen not a few times before.

He took a deep, deep breath. Lilith’s perfume filled the room, but now, there was a sweeter, softer edge it somehow never showed on her skin.

“I’ve got a great idea, baby. Let’s misbehave!”

And in a scarlet cabinet glowed Lilith in a lace-wrapped bottle, biding her time…until the next time.

Opus Oils’ ‘Babylon Noir’ will be launched at The Three Muses Salon in Hollywood tomorrow; February 14th. With my abject, undying gratitude to Kedra Hart.

Twinkle, Twinkle…

– a review of Les Exclusifs de Chanel 1932

Like all the grandest love affairs, everything began so beautifully. One June day in the early Eighties, a nineteen-year-old disillusioned punk walked into a department store, thirsting for beauty to wear. She had emphatically had it with ‘ethical’ scents and cheap patchouli oils, or far worse, the many manifestations of musk human and otherwise that passed for ‘scent’ in those days. She might have been a punk, her clothing in meticulously delineated degrees of disintegration only truly dedicated thrift store hunts could provide and her makeup of black, orange and electric violet an artistic statement all its own, but by golly, underneath all those tattered shades of black beat the heart of what was surely the world’s cleanest anarchist. Therefore, so she thought at the time, what better way to make a statement than with a perfume that exuded all the class and elegance the world had somehow denied her?

She walked out some hours later carrying a precious and costly bottle of Chanel no. 19 eau de toilette, and while the other punk girls in her circle chided her for her wanton extravagance (among other things), the boys, on the other hand, came closer, compelled by the contradiction of funereal rags, sooty eyes and a chilly, intellectual aura that was everything she had ever hoped for.

A cerebral class act in a bottle.

So began my love affair with Chanel perfume. Forget no. 5 – it never worked on my skin, never seemed to evolve beyond ashy soap and cinders, Allure, Chance – those were not for me. I loved Coco (as it was), Cristalle (ditto) and I loved no. 19 in every permutation, and there was the sum and gist of it until Eau Première came out and I found that maybe I could wear no. 5 – or at least this one?

Down through time, that trinity followed in my wake. No. 19 landed me jobs, boyfriends, dates, Cristalle fortified me through summer picnics and steamy days and fireworks, Coco led to other, dangerous PM temptations. Sometimes when I felt subversive, I’d hit up a Chanel counter and sneak a spray or five of Pour Homme or Egoïste, just to… recalibrate the scales a little.

Then came that fatal day when the hotly anticipated no. 19 Poudré was released in this perfume empty quarter, and I burned rubber overtime to try it. Would this be the Eau Seconde of my beloved no. 19? Would I faint in a transported swoon?

Errr…no.

My first thought: ‘It’s been fileted! They’ve taken no. 19 off the bone, hammered it paperthin, and are now trying to sell us escalopes de parfum!’

My second thought: ‘Honey, let’s face it. You’re too old for this. This is meant for a wan, pale late teenager who’s terrified to offend and mortified to exist.’

With all my personal history of all things prestige, Parisian and Chanel, I felt personally betrayed. Where were those plush Persian carpeted roses and orris butter, where was that verdant vetiver drydown, that aura of feminine invincibility?

Gone in sixty minutes. As in…forgotten. Vanished. With not so much as a happy memory left behind. And this from the house of a woman who once famously said:

Perfume is not just an accessory, it’s the only accessory that matters

Alas, poor Coco. I knew her well…

Coco ~~Greige~~, whoops, Coco Noir came out, and was neither Noir, Coco, here nor there.

I gave up on Chanel.

So a perfume fairy relented and sent me a little vial of Les Exclusifs de Chanel 1932, and out on the far horizon, I eye a smidge of redemption in store for Jacques Polge. A smidge, mind you, as I still have an edge on my battleaxe for 28 La Pausa, which is gone in sixty seconds.

But 1932…I feel giddy just typing it. Named for the year Coco Chanel debuted her jewelry line, it is created as an olfactory tribute to that first collection, to diamonds to blind the eyes and mortgage several small countries, and if ever a perfume embodied diamonds, comets, shooting stars and all things razzle-dazzle, all that encompasses the fragrant heritage so many Chanel diehards loved and adored, this one does.

That first day I tried it, I was prepared to hate it on principle. It took not even ten seconds to fall in love.

1932 is as exuberant, as luxurious and as bright as a double-D flawless 10-karat diamond right from the start, with a burst of aldehydes all dressed up and prancing to go on a chartreuse-colored springtime romp of neroli and bergamot.

Oh, yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s party time! Let’s dance this dazzling starlit night away on champagne-colored moonbeams and effortless grace when those flowery showgirls arrive. Make a wish on a sweetly smiling jasmine if you can before her sisters rose, carnation and ylang ylang dance their spice and sass away under the stars and call that classy, haughty, chic iris forth to make you breathless with her beauty and your anticipation. Surely, the two of you have met before?

But of course you have, under many crescent moons and shooting stars and wishes that burned as fervent as any sparkling diamond dreams of all that meant life, and luxe and other four-letter words that can be whispered only under starry skies. You will have to wait for that midnight glow to see if she delivers on her promise, and she does. Iris fades like fireworks to a dark, sweet, ethereal vetiver, bopping off towards the horizon on a hop, a skip and a verdant laugh, until the next time, and trust me, there will be a next time when these times are this good, this happy, this bubbly.

It’s almost as if someone had taken the original versions of no. 19 and Cristalle, added a dash of no. 5 with those champagne bubble aldehydes, poured in a healthy shot of 28 La Pausa with its perfect iris and persuaded it to stay, added a flirty, light-hearted jasmine (nary an indole in sight) and a sparkling soupçon of emerald green Bel Respiro, and wrapped them up in grand intentions, a ten-karat diamond in all its refractive hues and tied a bow on all our wishes. It showcases the very best of all that made Chanel so grand, so classic and so great, and more than makes up for those two epic disappointments I won’t deign to mention.

Twinkle, twinkle, all you stars…how I marvel that you are!

Notes for Les Exclusifs de Chanel 1932: Aldehydes, neroli, bergamot, jasmine, rose, ylang ylang, carnation, vetiver, orris, opoponax, sandalwood, incense, musk, ambrette, vanilla, coumarin. Available as a (tenacious) eau de toilette in 75 and 200 ml everywhere Les Exclusifs are sold.

Image: From the Chanel 1932 jewelry collection, via fashioninquiry.com.

With grateful thanks to the perfume fairy who made this review (and not a few more!) possible!

The Occult Topography of Desire

THE DEVILSCENT PROJECT XI

– a review of Neil Morris’ ‘Dev #3’ for the Devilscent Project

The biggest drawback – or delight, take your pick – of writing fiction is when those figments of your imagination called characters take on a life of their own, as surely they will. Sometimes, they come to you fully fledged and rounded out, personalities intact, and sometimes, they seem to elude you, mocking you and hovering on that brink of existence just beyond your reach. Some characters gatecrash your story without an invitation and no bouncer no matter how big or burly can throw them out again, not even you.

There’s another kind of character. One who haunts your dreams and stalks your waking hours, one who somehow slides serpentine and silent in between the words whether you want it or not, the one who comes to stay, casting long, ominous shadows over all you create in that haunted house of mirrors you call your imagination, the one who must be or should be as real as anyone you know.

I call him Dev. Dev came to me on a wind-blown November night of rain and portent the night I began what would later become ‘Quantum Demonology’, yet somehow, through all I put him through and all I wrote, something about him remained just outside my grasp. He was too nice in the first draft, so he complained. (I rewrote accordingly.) He took me black and bleak places I never knew I had, made me realize and write what I never dared before, often breathed softly down my neck as I wrote and one 3 AM spooked me senseless when I looked up from the laptop for an instant to see him standing by the window watching me wrestle the words. (True story, I swear. I blame the music playing at the time.)

Yet not until the perfumers of the Devilscent conjured – or decoded? – all his multiple selves did he crack through that third wall and become entirely and completely real, as real as this room, or the people walking through the rain down on the street below as I type. All of them different, all of them true, all revealing insights into that complex entity he is, as well as who he chose to be at certain points in my story.

Here on my desk is another Dev, a Dev of super sexy Sturm und Drang, and supreme, suave elegance, a Dev you could never, ever forget and would never, ever want to. An homme fatal, if ever there were.

“OK, that’s enough of the purple prose, baby. At the rate you’re going, you won’t be able to publish this on TAG, but I’m sure a few erotica publishers might be interested.”

I jumped four feet and banged my head on my sloping dormer ceiling.

Dev sat in the windowsill right beside my desk, looking for all the world as if he had been there all along, keeping a jaded, knowing eye on me and my (horrid) procrastination habits. Same beat-up leather jacket, same wellworn jeans, same incendiary grin that could persuade me to do anything, write anything, go…anywhere. Only this time – it’s February, after all – he wore a midnight-black cashmere scarf draped casually around his neck that matched his turtleneck sweater, also black.

“I thought…” it took me a while to find my voice again, “I thought I’d never see you again. I mean…I moved, and…” I stammered.

“And you’ve been through the wringer meanwhile, poor baby. I know. I know everything. I’m sorry I had…things to do. But I’m back. And I’m not leaving any time soon, if that makes you feel any better.”

“I’m not sure. That could get complicated.” I thought of my former roommate on the ground floor, who liked to pop up to say hello every so often in the hopes I’d cook dinner for her again. She’d live on just-add-water anything otherwise.

“Hush. Let me deal with complications. They’re my specialty. So…Neil is at it again. A very prosaic #3 on the bottle. You know, I always thought it was the greatest thing that Neil Morris decided to join. I mean, estrogen interprets your prose in a certain way – that’s perfectly all right, and tells me you could have a monster hit on your hands – but Neil is a guy. He notices other things, keys off other words and other aspects. We had the overture with ‘Midnight’. And we had the first movement I could call ‘Great Expectations’ with his Dev no. 1.” He turned the bottle over in his hands, pushed up a sleeve and sprayed his wrist. The elegant nostrils of a long, straight Italian nose twitched with pleasure. “Dev no. 2 was a spicy, fiery, allegro con brio ‘Eat me’ creature.” He laughed. “So you did. Well, this is…something else, something just as intricate, but it goes another way.”

“Tell me about it.” I was writing my fifth pathetic attempt to review it when Dev popped up, praying that maybe this time, I’d manage to nail my impressions with the beautiful prose the perfume assuredly deserved.

“Sure.” He shrugged. A definite Noo Joisey shrug. “This…is the andante con fuoco, the point of no return, the inevitable. This one is the secret Dev you tucked away in your words, the one it took Neil to find.” He leaned closer to where I sat before my laptop, spellbound by his words.

It had been so long, so long. I thought my muse had left me forever. I breathed in those smoky, thunderous, floral overtones, the labdanum flowing its heated lava heartbeat current underneath. This stuff was so sensuous, it would surely be banned for Lent. If not bought up lock, stock and barrel by a certain global organization in Rome and stashed away in a secret vault as being ‘too incendiary for the faithful.’

“It balances on a very fine point – floral, sweet, heady. Supremely elegant, but this isn’t elegant like any clichéed tropes of perfumery – this is…a dangerous elegant, an occult elegance, one you might need a certain level of sophistication to truly appreciate. This one, baby…” he growled it sotto voce in my ear, and it took all I had to take dictation – “maps the topography of desire. All of it, and all you wrote into your story. Why do we want the ones we want, what is it we see reflected back to our secret, subterranean selves? We see what we could be and what we could invoke. We see what we could be, what we could feel if there were no limits, no inhibitions, if nothing else mattered at all.”

Before I let review be review and to Hades and Tartarus with it all, he moved away, back to the windowsill. I could breathe again.

“Why me?” He shrugged. “Because I took you to bedrock, baby, took you where you had never been before and didn’t know you needed to be and now…you can’t go back ever again to what you once were. Muses are dangerous. Trust me. I know.”

Now, I breathed in something else besides that molten lava labdanum, the seductive floral promises he might or might not keep, of narcissus? Jasmine? A whisper of rose? An animal stirred in that fragrant deep, an animal of an unmistakable kind…If this perfume really were that ‘topography of desire’ – which described it exceedingly well – then here was the mountain range of ‘want’ we try to climb, beating our heartbeat paths to the forest of ‘need’ that lies along the way.

Dev sniffed again. “Oh, yes. Here it is, that river of Lethe, not the one whose waters make you forget your earthly life, but the one that plants you in this instant, this moment with this person, this living reflection of your primeval self…animal, bitter, white-hot, musky, leathery. This is way out rock’n’roll rapaciousness, baby. What did you call it?” He peered over my shoulder as I typed, and again, it was all I could do to keep my fingers on the keyboard when they had other, more nefarious plans. If I ever had any inhibitions, any doubts, any secret places I feared to tread, they were long gone so long as I could breathe this.

“Ah! Yeah, that’s it precisely, ‘the forest of need…’ Here’s where you throw away the roadmap. There’s no road. No map. No mountains, no inhibitions and no forest, only two people and one heartbeat, one question and one answer. Nothing matters except where you are and who you’re with and it’s exactly where you want to be and what you want to do. Right where everything can be lost, and everything can be won.” He looked out of the window for a moment at the people passing by. “And then…” he said to his ghostly reflection in the window, “that final kiss of floral after the tempest has passed on elsewhere, that last caress of labdanum as a reminder of what was, and where you were. Entirely present in a perfect, supercharged, white-hot moment and there was nothing at all else.”

I was speechless. “Damn. Maybe you should write all my reviews.”

He laughed, the kind of laugh I hadn’t heard for such a long, long time. “Nah. Don’t sell yourself short. This perfume is sheer genius. A perfumer at the very pinnacle of his art and big kudos to you for inspiring it. And that’s another reason I had to come back. You forgot to believe, baby. I’m not blaming you. I’m just here to remind you…Believe. We made a deal, you and I. I won’t let you forget it.”

Faster than I could blink, he moved in a blur of black and stood behind me, breathing those perfumed, occult secrets down my neck, breathing me alive again.

I hardly dared to move. Such a perfume, such a journey, such a rush to see my daimon once again…

“Believe, baby. Believe…in yourself, believe that you can manifest anything, do anything, go where you’re wanted, be what you need to be. And another thing…”

His breath was hot down my neck, the silky-soft fringe of his cashmere scarf a caress on my cheek.

“Never forget…about that occult topography of desire.” I thought I felt a kiss at the base of my neck, as soft as cashmere fringe, and he was gone.

Only the sultry, silken growl of that audacious no. 3 in the room to remind me…

Believe.

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Note: Neil has told me that his five breathtaking perfumes for the Devilscent Project will soon be made available to the public. Believe it!

The Alembicated Genie

Perfume is definition, mood and literature in liquid