Christopher Chong

A Dialogue in Definition

–  a conversation and a review of Amouage ‘Beloved’

“You know that famous quote:”

What is left after a woman removes her jewels, her clothes and her makeup? Her skin…and her perfume.

“Ah, yes. I love that he said ‘woman’.

“Girls could never carry that off. They don’t know enough, have too much to prove.”

“You mean, like those days I look around on the street and see all those Bright Young Things in their bright, fashionable dresses and catch myself thinking…I don’t envy you.”

“Precisely. There’s no reason why you should. You are what you are, all of a piece. You’re not afraid of making an impression.”

“Preferably a good one, but mainly that I make one! So what would such an impression be?”

“Be careful. Impressions are one thing, expressions another. Let’s start with that. You choose your expression, as in, say, you choose…a perfume. One that tells the story of you in that moment in time, your mood, your emotions, how you express yourself to the world, the impression you want to leave behind when you leave the room. Are you still with me?”

“Oh, yes! And very intrigued.”

“Good! So then…confident. Complex. Very modern, independent-minded, very aware of what goes on around you, very secure in your skin. Which is to say, as secure as any woman gets with age and the kind of acquired wisdom only an idiot wouldn’t appreciate as it deserves.”

“I like it! Keep talking.”

“Now for the challenge. How to say all that without words…Rose, of course. Every woman worth knowing contains a rose of a singular hue. You’re a feisty, fiery female, so we need something to capture that – a hint of spice, some opening intimations of your depths, but nothing loud, nothing obvious. A touch of jasmine, maybe, something as soft as a swans down powder puff, maybe a breath of chamomile and clary sage?”

“You’re only just starting and it sounds so complicated already!”

“You mean you’re not? Knock me down with a powder puff…I’m just trying to capture the …idea, the concept, the hello! moment.”

“But it should shift and move and change, or it becomes too one-dimensional, when we all know I have at least four. Or was that six?”

“Hush. I’m not finished. Where was I?”

“A breath of chamomile and clary sage…”

“That’s right. It would have to be seamless, no jarring edges, no discordancies, no taking you apart at the seams. Just this…shifting, kaleidoscopic, complexity of evolution…You’ve said hello. They’re taking notice. Next, we need to hint at those fathomless depths…the unexplainable you, the parts that can’t be dissembled, or the intricacies come tumbling down. This will not do. All of a piece, remember?”

“Like that famous line… ‘Men can be analyzed. Women simply adored.’

“I love a woman who understands what I’m trying to say. So…depth. Layers of meaning unfolding through time like a thousand-petaled rose, every petal a different meaning, another idea, another …kind of definition. Something elegant yet restrained, classical yet not boring, and again…seamless. Plush, luxurious and rich, that goes without saying. The olfactory equivalent of velvet that changes in the candlelight…”

“You’ve missed your calling. You should have been a poet. I’m swooning already, and we’re just into the heart notes.”

“You’re too classy, too cool to swoon. But a little…dizzy is fine. Remember…impressions! Ylang-ylang, maybe…violet, certainly, but not overly sweet, a little cistus, whispers of benzoin with those thick vanillic tones, a sotto voce ribbon of frankincense and patchouli smoldering beneath the floral, I think. Yes, that would be perfect. So long as it’s kept ethereal. Make them wonder, make them dream, never give all your secrets away, that’s the idea – and that’s your idea, too.”

“You know me too well.”

“Not at all. You’re a woman, there’s no such thing as ever knowing everything there is to know about a woman like you. That’s half the thrill.”

“What’s the other half?”

“Ah, now, it’s late…you’re home, you’re taking off your public self, that carefully crafted image, you step out of your shoes, you remove your earrings, you are ready to reveal that private, sensuous self, the one the world suspects but never sees, and that, too, is part of your endless intrigue. This is the woman who smolders, who glows like pearl after midnight. For those words, we need that suggestion of moonlight, those endless depths that reveal something of that secret self, that part that is all woman, that part that is skin – and perfume.”

“You had me at the ‘night is yet young’ part.”

“Excellent! A little cedar and sandalwood says midnight, the leather and the musk sing ‘skin’, the castoreum and the civet say…the private you the world will never know and never see, but can only guess, only wish they knew. We can say it just a little louder, that depth and that breadth and that scope and that passion that defines everything you do, that passion that only glows after midnight.”

“Do you know, it sounds to me as if you’re defining all women, or all that women should aspire to be…the kind of woman who would inspire such a perfume.”

“Not at all. I’d only do it for the truly deserving. Few women are. I’d do for the extraordinary woman, the woman most women aspire to be but they have to work at it. The best ones never do. They have nothing to prove, so they’re free to explore, free to act, free to express themselves according to their rules, their definitions.”

“I should be flattered. Actually, I’m a lot more than that. I’m amazed.”

“Don’t be. You’re amazing. Tell the world!”

“I don’t see how I can’t, with a perfume like that. And if anyone should ask, what name should I give them?”

“You mean you don’t know? Can you keep a secret?”

“As if you had to ask. You already know so many of mine.”

“I’d call it…Beloved.”

“You don’t think that’s too…démodé, too old-fashioned?”

“No. It’s nothing more and nothing less…than what every woman should be.”

Beloved. What every woman should be.

__________________________________________________

With a thank you for the Really Big Inspiration, who knows…

Notes: (from Basenotes)

Top: Jasmine, rose, clary sage, clove bud, chamomile, cardamom

Heart: Ylang-ylang, violet, everlasting flower, cistus, benzoin, olibanum, patchouli

Base: Cedar, sandalwood, castoreum, civet, leather, musk, vanilla, maltol and amber

Amouage Beloved is available as a 100 ml Eau de Parfum exclusively at Harrods, Bergdorf Goodman, Tsum and Amouage boutiques.

Disclosure: A sample was made available for review by Amouage

A Filigreed Drop of Bright

– a review of Amouage The Library Collection – Opus VI

Say that fabled word – amber – and a whole slew of associations come to mind. Those plush, sensuous, ornate magic carpet rides into some equally legend golden sunset of complex, heady perfumes, all the many Occidental dreams contained within the word ‘oriental’, every single one of them adding up to the name of a color, a category, a gemstone and a reverie. Amber in perfume conjures up words like animalic, leathery, sweet, smooth, heady, take-no-prisoners opulent. It can be a Beethoven scented symphony, or an elegant Chopin sonata. We know those notes so well, so well…but love those familiar fragrant phrases no less.

Once upon a time not so long ago, it was one of the two base accords in perfume that made me run for the hills screaming. Amber was far too obvious for my pseudo-intellectual green-chypre tastes, too animalic and possibly too hot to handle, too. There were secrets in those scents I simply wasn’t tall enough or pretty enough or just woman enough to handle, so I stayed well away and well within my comfort zone. I wasn’t an amber woman. Never. Ever.

Yet revolutions happen and perspectives change. My own seismic shift occurred when a small sample of a ground-breaking amber found its way into my hands, onto my skin and under my nose, and in one sniff, that stubborn continent of personal inclination whirled and eddied and changed forever. I started at the very apotheosis of amber, and if I were going to cross that line into amber love, then by golly, it had better be worth it!

Famous last words.

Here I am with still another amber, yet another subterranean seismic shift.

This amber is an Amouage.

Amouage, with all its storied heritage and maximalist approach to perfume, is a house that often slays me in ways both great and small.

No one, but no one, wraps such astonishing frankincense around such story-telling genies, and every Amouage I’ve ever met has always told a story. Even this one, even now, even as I wrestle with these words, Opus VI wants me to shift into narrative mode and tell another fragrant tale of filigree and fable, of moment and futurity, a story of a most unusual, unnerving amber.

Do you think you know something of ambers, do you have certain expectations of what an Amouage amber might be? Are you painting an olfactory image in your mind as you read, of all that word contains and adding the prerequisite five hundred percent?

If you’re anything like me, you are. As you are, that djinn in the bottle jumps up and down with unconcealed glee, anticipating the delicious moment it will subvert every expectation you have.

Opus VI is not your usual amber. If ambers are usually silk-smooth concoctions that wrap around your skin in a velvet touch, then you are in for a surprise.

It begins with a suggestion of the same green and bitter facet fans of Serge Lutens’ Ambre Sultan might recognize, with a detectable bay leaf burst and a spicy jolt to the nose, and veiled behind it intimations of that well-beloved amber glow on the far distant horizon. But half the thrill of any journey lies not in arriving but enjoying the ride.

As I do, as I wonder where I’ll be taken along the way, a thick, glorious ribbon of incense weaves around me like a cat on stealthy feet and blooms. There is no other way to describe it and no way to precisely describe its effects except to say that if I owned a fainting couch, I’d need it in 3…2…1…

But the journey isn’t over and my own perilous downfall is just beginning. As I’m taken through the shifting scenery that exudes from my skin, the djinn decides to undo me even further.

Nothing like the ambers you know and love, nothing like that well-beloved sweet caress of benzoin or tolu, but a different, woodier, spikier creature that takes all amber clichés and slants them in a different direction and puts them on a darker, moodier path. My nose tells me patchouli and sandalwood, something that reminds me of rich, bittersweet chocolate and something I can’t quite pinpoint but who cares when my axis has shifted and my continents have realigned?

There is nothing I can do and nowhere left to go except to laugh at my own pretentious attempts to nail this perfume to the floor of my words if it slays me. That djinn hides a story it wants me to find, but this is no tale of Sheherazade, no travel back in time, this is very much here and totally now, a thoroughly modern reinvention of what is often such a hackneyed phrase, but Opus VI is no cliché.

It has taken what should be obvious and made it new. It has surprised me and delighted me with that half-hidden veil of amber, glimpsed behind a wooden screen, and filigreed a future full of possibilities upon a huge surprise it took me no time at all to fall so very hard for in all those fatal, fragrant ways.

I have tried and very much liked the opera of volumes I through V. But the number VI did me in, changed my perspectives and possibly even me as well.

Love will do that. Especially when it takes you by surprise, as surely Opus VI did when it filigreed all my future possibilities and wrapped them…in an amber.

Disclosure: A sample was provided for review by Amouage.

Opus VI of the Library Collection was created by Amouage Creative Director Christopher Chong in collaboration with Dora Arnaud and Pierre Negrin.

For the review I wish I could have written, may I recommend the incomparable Persolaise.

Amouage Opus VI will soon be available from the Amouage website, Les Senteurs, Luckyscent & First In Fragrance.

A Light for the Dark

– a review of the Amouage Epic Woman candle

Everyone past a certain age knows that love – the kind of love that changes you forever, the kind of love you never expected – will some day creep in on stealthy feet when you least expect it. Some day, maybe a rainy day, you will look up, your heart will stop for five breathless beats and …wham! Pow! You have been hit by that coup de foudre, that punch that knocks you sideways and never leaves.

Perfume, too, is no exception. In a year full of revelations, I’ve stuck my nose in marvels I never knew existed, been taken on journeys I could never have imagined. Opportunities have opened up for me, connections have been made and friendships distilled in the virtual alembics and fertile crosswires of perfumes and phrases.

It all began that night I decided to invest in a few samples of all those wonders I was tired of reading about, because really, nothing could be so wonderful, so fabulous, so much the epitome of everything that makes me literally incensed enough about perfume to write about it and share that passion.

I have never been so thrilled to be proven so wrong in my entire life.

In that sample pack were two Amouages. I had read about them, read about that maximalist sensibility, the very best of absolutely everything, the all-out opulent swoonability of them all, and the time had come to see if one post-punk attitude problem had grown too old and too jaded to swoon.

No.

What happened was no less than astonishing. Ubar was first since I had a hunch about it, a hunch that it might be perfect for me. Except that instead of writing a straight-up review, I wrote a story of a courtesan and a conjuror perfumer in ancient Alexandria, the captured essence of a life told in a perfume, and I don’t know where that came from, either.

Next I knew, it happened again. Only this time, it was Epic Woman. And it was…an epic story of an immortal rose that traveled from East to West and from Samarkand to a hidden, secret valley in Oman, where it blooms to this day, exhaling all its storied past if only you are lucky enough to find it.

Since then, my Amouage reviews have been told as stories, not because I want to write them out that way, but because they want to be written out in narrative form no matter what I do. I suspect it’s meant as a compliment, but it’s a hard way to write.

Epic I did love, and I did wear, although at times, it seemed to wear me. Glorious stuff, but maybe I just wasn’t…Epic enough? Too mundane, too ordinary, too short, too…blonde?

Other marvels, other wonders wandered in and out of my cabinet and into my treasure boxes, and sometimes I wrote them as stories and sometimes I didn’t.

One day, I frightened several small children at my local post office when I came to collect a package I only knew came from London. This was before I saw the box. The second before I screamed.

It contained a candle and a note and the scent inside that emerald green glass was…Epic Woman. I’ve kept it on my desk, which is where I write and sometimes on my nightstand when I want to feel decadent. As I would write, even when it wasn’t lit, I would catch a trail of something so haunting, so beautiful, it would remind me why I love what I do, even as I tear out my hair trying to get my words to fit the page.

It would burn when I wrote, and many things I’ve written since have been accompanied by that emerald glow and the scent of Epic Woman, and somehow, it crept all the way into my synapses and all the way into what I need and aspire to be. In this year of reinvention, when I’ve started over on so many levels and in so many ways, that trail of fiery spice and burning flower and glowing incense and oud was the New, Improved, Intrepid edition, the trail of that woman who banishes the ghosts and conjures genies and transforms them into possibilities and hopes in a half-darkened room, lit only by a desk lamp and an emerald green glow.

The scent is thicker than the perfume, with more of the glorious, opulent base, but it’s perfectly true to the scent. I think my wick had a bad hair day the day the wax was poured. It flickers, despite being kept trimmed and draft-free, stationary and carefully burned in the ‘Fame and Reputation’ section of my Feng Shui-ed desk. The only mishap was when a moth somehow landed in the unlit candle. Hairy Krishna was all over it in an instant. He scratched the glass but he caught the moth.

My living room no longer smells like little boy and the orange pomanders I make with ribbon, cloves and oranges. Now, I breathe as I type…the possibilities I create, the hopes I now have, the connections that I treasure and the many inspirations that find me.

I’ve been a woman for quite some time, have become rather good at it, even. In a momentous year, I have become intrepid, audacious, daring.

Thanks to a flickering, emerald, hyperfragrant glow, on this darkest night of the year, I look up and I discover…that I’ve become Epic, too.

The Epic Woman candle is available from First in Fragrance and the Amouage website.

Disclosure: The candle was sent by Amouage for my consideration.

Epic Woman and Epic Man were created in 2009 by perfumer Daniel Maurel and Amouage Creative Director Christopher Chong.

Image of Winter Solstice sunrise: Paleocave

Image of candle: Amouage.