Amouage

Becoming Violetta


a tale – and a review – of Amouage ‘Lyric Woman’.

When ordinary mortals contracted laryngitis in the rainy month of November, it was an everyday occurrence. When the reigning diva at Covent Garden contracted laryngitis four days before the premiere of the season’s much anticipated ‘La Traviata’, it was an unmitigated disaster. La Diva would be indisposed for a month. The demanding role of Violetta was quite out of the question.

So the director had no choice but to call in her understudy, a decision that did not make him happy as he looked at this young woman with her wild hair and her wilder eyes. Like her, he was young, brash, arrogant as all directors must be, imported at great expense from Vienna, where his extravagant production had received rave reviews.

There were rumors of this young woman with her crystalline soprano voice, a voice fully up to the challenge of Violetta. Rumor had it she sang in a metal band in her spare time, songs vastly different from the peerless flight of Verdi’s score. Her voice wasn’t the problem. Her looks – unorthodox though they were – could be amended with makeup, wigs, all the paraphernalia of theatrical illusion.

No – the problem was her attitude. She was the understudy, she knew every inflection, every note, every aspect of Violetta the Paris courtesan. What she didn’t know or couldn’t feel was Violetta’s fire, her ardor, that mad passion that fuelled her love for Alfredo and led her to denounce him, even as she knew her own death breathed its own cold fire down her neck. She needed to become the instrument, she needed to breathe, to feel, to be…Violetta.

Alfredo, a dishy Italian fresh off a sell-out smash at La Scala, was also at his wits’ end. The premiere was tomorrow, the world would be watching, and this young thing could not feel Violetta, could not color her breathtaking voice with her pain, her gaiety and lust for life.

“Very well,” sighed the director, “Once more…from
‘So take what the moment of pleasure will grant for there’s nothing, nothing but this…’
he beckoned to the pianist in the rehearsal hall, and again, from the top, Flora, Gaston, the Baron, Violetta and the entire chorus began to sing.

He would be slaughtered by the press in two days. He could taste it. Triumph in Vienna, disaster in London. If something were not done, he’d be doomed to amateur productions in Stoke-On-Trent. Or Linz.

“Signore…” Alfredo’s silky tenor stopped him on his way to lunch. “An idea…I have it. This young girl…she is too young, too green to know such things. She needs – an education, prestissimo. I think I know how…” Alfredo whispered his suggestion in the director’s ear.

He would not have even dared to think of such a thing. It would be costly, of course. It would also be a small, trifling price to pay to avoid Stoke-On-Trent or even Linz, and certain disaster.

Late the next afternoon, having stretched her vocal chords far beyond anything she could have guessed they could stand, the young soprano eyed her bare face in her makeup mirror. In the corner on a mannequin hung a breathtaking silk dress in a mouthwatering shade of burgundy, as rich and deep as a perfect Romanée Conti, waiting for its chance to glow onstage.

Violetta eluded her, just as she always had. She herself didn’t have that experience, that worldliness, that knowledge in her blood, the knowledge it took to wear a dress like that red dress, the wisdom of a nineteenth century Paris courtesan, who only loved to please and who lived for pleasures. This was a different time, this was a very different world. How could she know? Every note she knew, every nuance, every quavering breath, but Violetta herself she would never know, never feel, never be, and this was her moment, this was her time, this was her one chance to grab the world’s attention and show her brand of magic. She would fail, she could feel it in her bones.

La Diva could rest secure in her sickbed at the Savoy and know the unknown understudy had not supplanted her from her throne.

There was a knock on the door, and her dresser opened the door to a delivery boy from Harrods, who handed over a small package.

“For you, Ma’am. It didn’t come with a card, so far as I could see.”

One small, exquisitely gift-wrapped box. Inside, a bottle of perfume, as dark-red and beautiful as the silk dress on the mannequin, heavy and somehow ominous in her hand. It glowed in the lights from the makeup mirror like a secret, ruby treasure waiting to be discovered.

Like herself, she realized with a start. She opened the bottle. A rose, a rose of infinite darkness and limitless ethereal light and spice, she thought, and then she breathed deeper, as if she were about to touch that elusive F6 note hovering just above her range, just out of reach, and then, all the secrets of a Paris courtesan of two centuries ago flew from that dark red bottle and into the room, the secrets of spice and wit, of dark and light, the sweetness of true love and all of one life’s ephemeral pleasures filled the dressing room, filled her lungs, her heart, her very soul, and the ghost of Violetta was there beside her, playing hide and seek in the burgundy folds of an opulent silk dress. “I am here,” that ghost seemed to breathe, “and while I am, I shall help you to become what I was, what I should be, what so few have ever understood about such a woman as I.”

She had never known that perfume could be so evocative, that a scent could whisper such a story of both sacred and profane, of sacrifice and joy. This was the secret that eluded her these past four days of frantic rehearsal, this was her Violetta, her moment, her time.

When she arrived at the party, her hair in snaky, luminous curls and her shoulders gleaming pearls in the dress, she hit those notes with a crystal-pure tone so flawless, so happy, so utterly the soul of Violetta that the orchestra nearly stopped playing. The audience was astonished to hear it, the director flabbergasted to see such a transformation in such a short time, the chorus on the stage transfixed by the sound. This was not that quirky, gawky girl of a few hours before. This was Violetta in all her glory, singing

‘Flora, you darling! My friends, what a pleasure!’

As Alfredo stood waiting in the wings to enter, he turned to the director and sotto voce, he whispered: “A change, no? You are young and Austrian, you would not understand. A woman can do only so much to convince herself. For the rest, she needs a perfume.”

This was her moment, this was her time. And ever after, she never went on stage without it.

Notes for Amouage Lyric Woman: Bergamot, Cardamom, Cinnamon, Ginger, Rose, Angelica, Jasmine, Ylang Ylang, Geranium, Orris, Oakmoss, Musk, Patchouli, Vetiver, Sandalwood, Vanilla, Tonka Bean, Frankincense.

Photo: Man Ray, Kiki de Montparnasse as ‘Le Violon d’Ingres’ (1924)

All thanks to Olfactoria, who gave me the opportunity.

Her Serene Empress of Rose


A review – and a long-ago tale – of Amouage “Epic Woman”

Very many sunsets ago in the fabled city of Samarkand lived a widow who had grown rich from the many rivers of treasure that flowed through like water from all ends of the great Silk Road. Silks, samite and ebony from faraway Cathay, spices and perfumes and gems from India to the far south, rare and costly incense from distant, mysterious desert trees, woods and essences from Chenla of the many wondrous stories the merchants exchanged like their goods in the teahouses by the riverside on breathless, hot afternoons.

The widow herself was of indeterminate age, not quite old and wizened by her years, but not so young she was an easy prey for the traders out to make a profit. Once, so the local gossips said, she had been a slave girl brought from a mountain kingdom to the south and west, but this slave girl had somehow managed to marry into a trading house, and when her husband died, she had continued his business, handling merchants and caravans and all manner of goods and trade with equal and admirable ease. No merchant was ever short-shifted in a trade, no caravan mistreated, and even the camels she knew to make happy in her care.

Like all women in any age and indeed all traders, this widow had a secret. In a private, locked room in her apartments grew her most prized possession. Not a huge Indian diamond sparkling in the sunlight, not any bauble or trinket of any empire north, west or south.

It was a rosebush. No more, no less, nothing else. One small, perfect rosebush, easy to overlook on its ebony tray in a sunlit spot were it not that it flourished in a priceless, ornate vessel of jade the green of the riverbank willows. It was a rose bush, yet no rose bush ever held such velvety blooms of such a ruby hue, and no rose along the Silk Road east or west ever held such a scent. To breathe it in was to know the true significance of the word ‘rose’, to know this rose was to know the secrets of all roses who ever bloomed, and any woman who loved roses. To know this rose was to know the very soul of a flower beloved of the world entire.

Yet today, this day like any other in the still heat of a Samarkand afternoon, the time had come for the rose bush to move on. The widow, her black eyes smiling through the fragrant steam of the silver tea tray, leaned forward on her pillow. This man, she knew to tell, had not come from Samarkand. He could have been from anywhere further west along the Great Road, from Persia, perhaps, or further south and west still, from Damascus of the many marvels, or the storied Bagdad where the great Harun ar Raschid ruled still, so it was said.

He was a tall, upright man in his late thirties, with the watchful, guarded eyes of a desert hawk, and as any hawk would, he never looked away from the widow. “You have cared for your secret well these twenty years, and you have prospered because of it. I was told to bring it on, many, many leagues away to where the incense trees grow beneath the desert stars, and to give you this…” he reached in his robe and laid a small object on the costly carpet – “as a reminder of your pledge.”

It was a carved rose in a singular hue of jade, the cloudy pink of a fading sunset, and the widow had not seen it for over twenty years. It was indeed a reminder of a promise she had made so many years ago, a promise that this rose bush would never wither, never die, and so long as she held faithful to her pledge, her care should be rewarded. Indeed it had, and yet, as the widow saw the sunlight through the screen sparkle on the jade, she felt a pang deep within her soul to realize she would never breathe its scent again, never know such a heartfelt, visceral joy. There would be other pangs, other joys, this much she knew, but none like this little rose bush.

The sun streaming through the latticework of the window onto the carpet was not enough to comfort her. Nevertheless she had promised, and she never made a promise she would not keep. It was time. That jade rose before her was proof. She sighed, clapped her hands to summon a servant, and sent for the rose.

“You will tend it with care?” She grabbed the man’s sleeve as he prepared to leave with his little treasure. “You will make certain this rose will not perish on its journey?” In her eyes, the man read a fervent plea, as earnest and as passionate as any mother’s for a beloved child.

“This, lady, is a rose that will never die so long as my people tend it,” he simply said, before he wrapped it with the utmost care and bowed before her. “As you gave your pledge, I give you my promise.”

He was gone in an instant down the teeming Samarkand street, golden in the late afternoon.

All along the wide and winding Silk Road the little rosebush traveled, and as it did, it seemed to absorb the many scents of the goods it met. Spices in a pouch on a passing camel, rare woods from Chenla and India on a merchant’s laden wagon, the jasmine and geraniums blooming in the courtyard of a Persian caravanserai. At last the rosebush came to grow in a secret oasis in a hidden mountain pass, where the Bedouin stood guard beneath the stars by their own costly treasures of myrrh and frankincense, and those, too, the rose absorbed and enriched with its presence.

For over a thousand years and many more the rose bush grew in its hidden valley oasis, grew and bloomed and thrived, forgotten by all but one family who kept their secret well, until the day came, as it had so long before, when it was time for the rose bush and its secrets to move on through time and out into a wider, wilder world.

One day, a perfumer in an Omani teahouse heard a rumor of a rose in a remote oasis, a rose unlike any other, a rose that knew all secrets and held all its history and all its long journey within the velvet folds of its blooms. As the perfumer stared into the depths of his peppermint tea, he thought to himself; “Such a rose is like a fairy tale. It never existed as anything but a rumor. But if it doesn’t yet, then I shall create it.”

So he did.

Yet in a remote and hidden oasis in the mountains, a deathless rosebush blooms still, for so long as one heart, one soul can truly love a rose, it will never die.

Notes: Pink pepper, cinnamon, damascene rose, geranium, jasmine, tea, amber, musk, frankincense, oud, sandalwood, guaiac wood, patchouli, vanilla and orris.

Amouage Epic Woman is available at Luckyscent, Aedes and First in Fragrance, and from the Amouage website.

Don’t Panic!


Ladies, Gents, Earthlings and Entities –
I’ve had a…HELLISH week. That’ll teach me to review Robert Piguet’s “Bandit” on a Monday. 😉

When I haven’t been pounding the pavement this week in search of a better – and better-paid – job in this recession to finance my expensive (perfume) habits, another monumental headache in the shape of Quantum Demonology has been giving me the world’s worst case of writer’s block at a crucial expository point in my story, right when I just know I can wrestle it into a shape suitable for submission.

Thanks to Karen Blixen’s ‘Seven Gothic Tales‘, I think I’ve cracked the block, and I’ve cracked a few sidewalks, too. A two-letter media phenomenon will be talking to yours truly next week. As they say, it’s a start…

Meanwhile, here are a few coming attractions:

Serge Lutens’ Jeux de Peau arrived today, and I can’t wait to review it! This should be a goodie…hot bread? Really? Or is Uncle Serge buttering us up?

A candidate arrived in my eternal quest for The Devil’s scent…and it’s no El Presidente, but is it a cigar?

There are tigers, and there are Tiggers. I found a Tigger in bottled form. Does it bounce? You think?

Ladies who lunch wear ladylike perfumes. This one is positively refined and suitable for dinner, too. And dinners for two.

It was the kind of story that launched a legend and a thousand ships. Will it float my boat, too?

He was a poet with a passion – and with a passion for perfume. The kind that could be bottled, maybe?

Scents of place or a sense of place? The fun isn’t over with Doc Elly and Olympic Orchids, and where there are fumes, there are words – and worse – to describe them!

In the meantime, the ghost of the Baroness came to call, and you don’t mess with the ghost of the Baroness…so that’s what I have to get out of the way..first!

I shall miss you while I’m gone. And if you can’t be good, be careful! 😉

Image: www.organic-ally.co.uk

The Courtesan, the Conjuror and the Cynic


– a review (and a tale) of Amouage “Ubar”

She would always come to his shop on the perfumer’s row in the late afternoon, when the worst heat of the day had dissipated to a shimmering golden haze above the streets and the ships in the harbor, when every sensation, every sound and every scent seemed to linger just a little longer than usual, when fine black lines delineated the shapes around the tools of his trade – the mortars, the oils and flasks and jars, the smaller boxes that held his secret treasures; resins and woods, precious myrrh and the white-gold tears of frankincense he hoarded and kept only for those trusted customers who paid promptly and in cash.

Like most everyone here in Alexandria, she obviously came from somewhere else. Her name he never learned, although he knew enough to see her for what she was, with her expensive shawls, the gleaming silks and linens dyed deep and vibrant colors, all the better to set off her remarkable amber-gold hair and that pale, milky skin that told tales of another, colder climate on the far northern edge of the sunlit world he knew.

She came accompanied only by a girl, so like her she could only be her daughter, and in all the many months he spent with her, the daughter would simply sit with a bit of embroidery in her lap listening, or else observing every item close by, the tiny cauldrons bubbling over the fire, his chopping boards and knives, the flower essences and bunches of herbs hanging in profusion on the walls, so heady in the summer heat customers had been known to grow dizzy and faint.

“I have an assignment for you,” the woman said that first afternoon. “I want you to make me a perfume. I will pay you well.” A fat and heavy purse of coins clanked on his counter top. “Consider this an advance.” She stood back and assessed him, as if to judge whether this were a task he were worthy of.

“Lady, I have many perfumes in my shop…the Susinon of one thousand lilies that Cleopatra herself perfumed her sails with these two hundred years ago, the Megaleion, I have the finest items from Callimarchos’ shop in Athens, I have Panathenaean, I have Royal Parthian perfumes, even, straight from the courts of the Parthian king…”

She did not let him finish. “No.” Such finality, such determination in that small and simple word. “I said,” she lifted an elegant hand and the gold of her bangles gleamed and flashed in an errant sunbeam from the door. “I want you to make me a perfume. For me. Not to sell to your customers or to smell on the whores in the harbor brothels…” her nose wrinkled in fastidious distaste. “A perfume just for me.”

“Then, dear lady, I shall need to know something of you first. What scents you like and dislike, where you might be challenged,, and what…”

Again, she did not let him finish. “I will come to your shop in the afternoons and tell you…stories. And when I am done, you will make a perfume just for me.” She inclined her head, and the pale and silent girl preceded her out into the street, already bustling after the afternoon’s siesta.
For years after, he would remember how he had stood that moment, transfixed in the sunbeams off the floor, wondering where to start. A perfume, just for her.

True to her word, she would come in the afternoons and tell of her adventures, of dancing for the Emperor at his palace in Rome so far away, of sunlit mornings on a rose-covered terrace in Rhodes, of the dust and heat of a faraway fabled city that grew rich off the trade in frankincense and the long and perilous journey she had undertaken once to India with a merchant who could not bear to be without her company. She told of the unexpected pleasure of finding patches of those tiny, bell-shaped flowers that she loved on cool, misty mornings in a shady forest. She told him of heartbreak and unexpected joy, tragedy and laughter, all the pains and pleasures of a life lived to the fullest extent of all her many passions.

For almost a year he toiled with her perfume, conjuring the memory of her life in his essences and oils, the animal hints of sensuality, the flowers and the fruity bite of the lemons that grew in his secret garden in the Delta. He chopped and brewed, he macerated and stored and applied every trick of this ancient land that he knew. He tried to capture the jeweled gleam of her hair, a double-spiraled errant curl at the base of her neck, the glint of a rosy ruby in a comb, the flash of wit he saw in her eyes. No question but she knew to enchant, and as she enthralled him with her stories, he enchanted the brew in his cauldron, committing the formula to memory and a secret, buried scroll.

Until the day came when he was done, and could do no more. He dreaded her visit, knowing he would now never see her again, or her silent, smiling daughter. He had been paid handsomely for his toil, and yet no payment was enough for the simple song of her voice, a silver tinkle of laughter as she remembered a detail, a place or a caress. This creation was his masterpiece. There was nothing throughout the Empire or far beyond even remotely like it.

“It is finished,” he forced himself to say when she came that afternoon. “There is nothing more I can do, nothing more I can add.”

She pulled at the stopper and inhaled deeply. Her eyes closed and for an instant, she seemed to swoon on her feet. Then, in a sudden shocking movement, she unfastened a brooch on her shoulder and pricked a fingertip. Two crimson drops, a dark, rosy red against the pallor of her skin, glistened in a sunbeam before they vanished into the vial.

“Now,” she said with that same stubborn finality he had heard that first afternoon, “now it is finished.” As she said the words, she fell to the floor as if she had fainted, and her daughter grabbed her and held her. She was dead.

He was speechless. “One thing only she left me,” her daughter said after a while. She took the golden vial from her mother and lifted it up. “She left me this.”

It was his masterpiece, his perfume, the memory of this storyteller in a bottle.

Down through the centuries swirled the memory of that woman and that perfume, through her daughter and her many descendants after her, until a damp and foggy day in a town on the edge of the old world found it again, the world the perfumer had known so many centuries ago.

This long-descended daughter was also a storyteller. In the warp and weft of her tales, she twisted yarns and fables, passions and music, and sometimes her memories of scents and sensations. She was convinced she had heard it all and tried it all, she had broken hearts on two continents and many countries, and there was little left to surprise her, not much to take her breath, her speech or even her words away.

Until a tiny bottle was opened, a tiny spray applied to her skin, and a ruby drop of blood-red rose, of a lemon grove in the Delta and a bouquet of lily-of-the-valley, of a memory of a woman and a life well-lived and well loved, a woman like herself, wrenched at her heart and made her cry that such a surfeit of beauty could exist and such powerful emotions could be felt.

Even by the cynic she thought she was.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Notes: Bergamot, lemon, lily-of-the-valley, rose Damascena, jasmine, civet, vanilla.

Amouage Ubar can be bought in many locations, including Luckyscent and First In Fragrance and Alla Violetta Boutique, although you might be required to take out a second mortgage on your house, take a second job or pawn your children if all else fails. Trust me, I’m thinking about it.

Image: Sir Frederik Leighton, Solitude (1901)

Coming Attractions


In the unlikely event anyone has been wondering, I have not forsaken you! As the snow has thawed, I’ve been snowed under elsewhere, and 36 hours in a day are just not…enough. This is not at all the same as saying I’m going to wimp out – so instead of a new perfume post, I’ll give you a sneak preview of what’s in store!

I know I’m on the road to perdition when…I spent the better part of an evening yesterday on First In Fragrance’s website, trying to decide what to try. Decisions, decisions…so many choices, and so little time.

But in the next few weeks, expect to see my takes on a few button pushers and the ones I ordered just because my curiosity is killing me.

Birgit of Olfactoria’s Travels has a lot to answer for – among them, my curiosity over Amouage. Oh, that slope is so slippery and steep, and Epic Woman is on the list…and it’s all her fault! 😉

Robert Piguet’s Bandit has been ‘walking her catgirls on leashes in leather‘…so I have to, I absolutely have to try this again, it’s been so long…

Byredo is a line I’ve never tried, but when someone pays an homage to one of my all-time favorite poets, I have to sit up and take notice! So…Baudelaire and Green are thrown in, too.

I’ve heard plenty of great things about Odin New York. C’mon. With a name like that, it’s like throwing a spear into a Viking horde in berserker mode. So in goes…Odin New York – 02 Owari.

Heeley is another line I’ve heard lots about…and just because the name tickles my fancy, I’ll start with Esprit de Tigre.

The fun won’t stop there. Another package from Olympic Orchids arrived today and is waiting for a pickup at my local post office tomorrow.

It will be glorious, I promise you!

So what are you, dear reader, dying to try? Let me know!

Image: Edmund Dulac, Psyche and Cerebus