Pierre Negrin

A Sunrise and A Soft Goodbye

One Last Sunrise

– a story and a review of Amouage Journey

The Peace Hotel, The Bund, Shanghai, late July 1937

He could never remember afterwards how long he stood at the French doors watching the sky above the Bund and over the China Sea bloom from its dark midnight blue to the paler, opalescent, star-flecked hues of gold and violet of impending sunrise. This would be his final sunrise in Shanghai, the last time he would stand by this balcony with this view of a future he could scarcely have imagined on the mean, narrow alleys of Kowloon where everything began so long ago.

How could he have known in that other life, when all he had been was the second son of a simple woodcarver from an endless line of artisans, Cantonese who came to Kowloon hoping to find better, richer, more prosperous lives than their hallowed ancestors?

Look at me now, Father, he thought to himself as the sky above the Bund grew ever lighter, look at me now with my flawlessly tailored suit and my movie star haircut in Shanghai’s most elegant hotel, watch me walk out the door of this hotel suite with my expensive suitcases, watch me as I walk up the gangplank to the SS Aurora with my first-class passage to Valparaiso and onward to Buenos Aires and Montevideo, see me as I leave this old and tired and uncertain world behind with my new name and my new life shining all its unknown and very modern promise in front of me.

He had come so very far from his old Wong Tai Sin of Kowloon self, today would go farther still, for today would be the day he left his old self and old Shanghai behind. Already, rumors and not so idle talk flowered in the teahouses behind Nanjing Road, already people pointed their fingers and their fears towards the Japanese in Manchuria, and it was time to leave his past and his cares behind him while he still could.

Big Earned Du would kill him as mercilessly as only he knew if he ever discovered how his affable, mild-mannered ‘left-hand-man’ had been skimming a quarter-inch off the books of four of his night clubs on Nanjing Road for over three years. If he knew how Left Hand Man scrubbed his loot and his conscience as sparkling squeaky-clean as any Chinese laundry at the baccarat tables of a very private gambling club in the French concession, a club not even the renowned Du Yuesheng, who ruled all of Shanghai and most of its vices with an iron hand in a silken glove would ever dream existed. He wouldn’t know about the many deposits to an account at the American Express offices or the other accounts at Rothschild’s Bank, have no inkling of the thousands of American dollars sewn into the lining of his steamer trunk as a safety measure.

Above and beyond all things else, Big Eared Du would never, ever know about his left hand man’s reasons or rhyme, or just how much the favorite torch singer of Ciro’s nightclub had been responsible for it all. She was the one who cooked up the plan along with her friend, she showed him how to cover his tracks, she taught him to feign Eastern inscrutability as his weapon to hide what his own, darker netherworld of Shanghai should never, ever know.

Or was it rather… that even an woodcarver’s son from Kowloon could leap free of all conventions and expectations, could come at the world roaring like the dragon of his birth year with all his Oriental fire, spice and essence?

Was it that a man like himself, so underestimated, overlooked and unappreciated could throw all tradition, convention and propriety to the wind for a woman who would have made his prim and proper family recoil in horror?

She was a thoroughly modern, audacious blonde South American contralto who sang Cole Porter and George Gershwin for the smart set at Ciro’s. She was the toast of Shanghai and a favorite of his boss, and yet – in a town that knew every secret and every vice everyone wanted to conceal, not even the boss suspected she belonged to his left-hand-man, although it would be far truer to say this: Big Eared Du’s left-hand-man belonged to her.

He had seen enough Hollywood movies to know that a man such as he, a woodcarver’s son from the wrong part of Hong Kong, Chinese to his core despite the Western clothes and his Clark Gable hair cut, would never be a hero, would never get the girl, never be anything else but a cardboard villain in a celluloid cliché of a Shanghai that was its own kind of outrageous fiction everywhere else but here.

Today, he was about to disprove all of them. He got the girl. He had the getaway. He had the promise of a new life ahead under the new name printed on his impeccably British passport, a passport that opened all the doors not even Big Eared Du could knock down.

He stepped out into the first rays of the rising sun. As he breathed in the morning, he breathed in his old self, the Bund and even Shanghai deep into his lungs and pores one last time in this one last sunrise, to say his bold goodbye to all he had been and a bolder hello to all he would become.

The bold, green bite of bergamot and a hint of the orange blossom perfumes she so loved all wrapped up tight within a dim sum totality of Shanghai spice and fire, the waft of burning incense and juniper berries from a passing temple on his way, the rich scent of tobacco from his cigarette case, a faraway musky bitter smell of leather as a portent of what lay ahead on another side of the world where Du would never think to look.

It was too late for regrets and second thoughts. He breathed everything in with all it promised this one last sunrise, held it deep within his heart, his senses and his lungs before he exhaled it back out over the Bund and the city, right before he made a wish on his birth dragon that whatever his future in a faraway land might hold, it would be a journey and a new beginning to a life the left-hand-man would never have dared imagine.

Yet a life the John Lee of his new passport – audacious, modern, a cosmopolitan man of the future – in his Uruguayan exile would never once have a single cause to regret.

Notes for Amouage Journey Man: Bergamot, Szechuan pepper, cardamom, neroli, juniper, incense, geraniol, tobacco leaves, tonka bean, cypriol, leather, musk.

A Soft Goodbye

The French Concession, later that morning

“Are you sure you’ve packed everything you want to bring?”

She turned away from her view of the tree-lined boulevard toward the voice and the question.

One of China’s most illustrious faces laughed back at her as she indicated all the self-evident chaos of impending departure.

“Well, my clothes, obviously, jewelry, silks, presents for my brother and his wife, a few mementos… I’ve arranged with Lin to have the opium bed, the screen and the cabinet shipped tomorrow, but of course, I’ll be gone by then.”

It was time to close the chapter on her five years in Shanghai.

Five years as a runaway bride from an arranged marriage and a daring escape with her dowry to keep her, only in Shanghai, a purloined dowry and a pretty face was never enough for anything she ever wanted to do.

In Shanghai, what you were and what you had mattered far less than who you knew.

Yet luck had surely been on her side that night four years ago when China’s reigning celluloid Butterfly paid a visit to Ciro’s and introduced herself simply as Hu. That night, a burgeoning friendship was born between the chanteuse with her broken, halting Shanghainese and the celebrated movie star, a friendship that weathered all the storms two women with such vastly different backgrounds could create between them.

Even so, before the movie star, before the nightclub singer, before their respective histories even, they were simply two women and two instant friends, no more and never less.

She came to Hu and poured out her heart when she found herself eyeing the dashing stranger at Ciro’s who came every night with Du and eyed her right back, she told her friend everything there was to tell of seeming chance meetings on Nanjing Road and later clandestine dinners on her Sundays off in humble Nanshi restaurants where Du was never welcomed and she was not known, where no one would think to look and fewer would care to question the presence of the courteous, immaculate Chinese gentleman and the laughing blonde chanteuse.

She had never been one to give her heart away lightly, always kept her distance with a smile when those audaciously modern Shanghai dandies tried to dazzle her with promises as florid and enticing as their extravagant backstage bouquets.

Her left hand man was far more bold for being so discreet, for surprising her with the other, secret Shanghai she had come to know and to love through him.

One hot August night he presented her with a small, delicate sprig of blooming osmanthus and told her to breathe it in, all the way in, when somehow, all she loved about this mythical, mad city of contradictions and mysteries and sins both real and imagined came wrapped around this glowing little flower the hue of a Shanghai sunset.

This was their secret, this sweetly scented flower that laughed its fruity, honeyed path through the teeming streets of Nanshi, past the spice merchants shops and the unexpected surprise of a jasmine bursting out of its pot on an apothecary’s counter and sharp, sunshine puffs of mimosa, when the whispers of a lacquered cedarwood cigarette box told her sotto voce what depths he contained, when that little sprig of osmanthus stole her last objections and her heart away and never gave them back.

She told Hu everything, told her own celluloid story of a romance that could never happen, should never happen, and Hu, as all true time-honored friends would do, began with her help to weave a story of how to make it possible, how to make it happen, how to make her own love-struck movie so infinitely much more real than any flickering black and white dream in the dark.

Away from all of this, away from Shanghai, over the oceans and far away back home to Montevideo, away from her best friend and an uncertain future that loomed like a storm cloud over the western horizon in Manchuria, but how uncertain could her future ever be going home with the man she loved, a man who gave her his priceless gift of a sprig of Shanghai osmanthus?

“Oh, Hu…” she turned away from the balcony with a pang in her heart, knowing this would be a farewell, and who knew when they would see each other again in these precarious times?

“Do you think?”

Hu laughed outright, a laugh that all of China loved, laughed to see the question in her best friend’s face.

“Do I think you will escape, do I think our mad plan will succeed, do I think you’ll get away with it?” and four years of secrets shared laughed their own champagne bubbles beneath her words, “In Shanghai, everything is possible!” Hu walked to the balcony and reached out. She plucked a small sprig of osmanthus from the bush that bloomed in its porcelain pot on the balcony and tucked it firmly into her friend’s lapel beneath a jade brooch.

“I don’t believe. I know! It’s time to go – your ship sails in an hour!”

They hugged with all their history between them, hugged as hard as best friends would, before Hu marched her to the door and said:

“Now go with the Gods, darling. Go home – and say your soft goodbye to Shanghai.”

Notes for Amouage Journey Woman: Apricot, osmanthus, nutmeg, cardamom, jasmine sambac, mimosa, honey, cedar, tobacco, saffron, vanilla, cypriol, musk.

Created by Alberto Morillas and Pierre Negrin in collaboration with Amouage Creative Director Christopher Chong. .

Amouage Journey Man and Woman is available from Luckyscent, First in Fragrance and directly from the Amouage e-store.

Image of Amouage Journey courtesy of Amouage. Used by permission.

Much invaluable research came via The Chinese Mirror and the Ling Long Magazine archives of Columbia University.

Disclosure: My samples were provided courtesy of Amouage. I thank the Very August Personage from the bottom of my storyteller’s heart for making this review so incredibly hard to write yet such an endless joy to research.

Also thanks to Ms. Hare, who ~~kicked/shamed/~~double-dared me to finish it. Or else.

Refractions in a Jasmine’s Eye

– a review of Amouage Opus VIII

In over three and a half years of perfume blogging, I’ve reviewed over five hundred perfumes. Some great, some spectacular and some… not quite so much. Some reviews have come easy and some have come hard, not because I hated the perfume (although that has happened), but because in order for me to haul out The Perfume Reviewer kicking and screaming (because she basically just wants to enjoy it), I have to find an angle, a hook, bait to reel the reader in.

In all that time and with all those marvels, nothing I ever review – and I’d like to emphasize this – is ever so hard to hook, angle or locate the bait as just about any Amouage.

Once upon a storied time – how can it be three years ago? – I dismissed Amouage as being too rich for my blood, just another hyped-up hyper-luxurious brand that couldn’t possibly live up to the accolades heaped upon it. I can’t afford even one of them. I’d cover my ears and sing “La-la-la, I can’t hear you!” when my fellow friends and perfume bloggers sang its praises on their blogs. Finally, I gave in to my own relentless curiosity and those verbal, knowing smirks from those same friends and bloggers and ordered two outrageously expensive Amouage samples of Epic Woman and Ubar at First in Fragrance just to knock them down to an approachable, human size.

The rest, as they say, is history. Whether I’ve surprised myself writing narratives or merely bathetic attempts to just capture my impressions in words, by all the patron saints of perfume they are, every last one I’ve tried, really… all that and so much more.

It pains me more than you know to bang my head against the keyboard and tell you their newest release, the Library Collection’s Opus VIII, is no exception to that rule. It also proves just as slippery and elusive to decline and define.

I’ve long had the sneaking suspicion that the unisex Library Collection is where Creative Director Christopher Chong lets his inspirations run a little looser and freer and gives his perfumers license to write literature in essence, absolute and accords. If Opus V could be called Carnal Iris, and Opus VI Odysseys in Amber, Opus VII was a bottled Edgar Allan Poe tale all the best and sublimely Gothic ways titled Spenser’s Forest.

Opus VIII is a new tale in a new setting with countless plot twists and turns, this one as blinding sunshine bright as Opus VII was moody, magnificent darkness.

I don’t know how or even why, since it’s listed nowhere in the notes or anywhere else I could find, but on me, Opus VIII begins as incendiary green as a morning in early May. Jasmine sambac is indeed a greener, fruitier variety of jasmine, which might explain why I was kicked awake and aware by an emerald green punch of fizzy, razor-sharp Persian lime.

Lime! Not mojito, not caipirinha and not at all margarita, but a warm, bittersweet green sunrise as a heliotropic jasmine begins to unfurl and that blinding bright gilds its edges and everything begins to glow, everywhere you sniff. Was that a hint of banana leaf? No. It’s that heady jasmine. Or else it’s the sensuous sparks of saffron and ginger firing up the floral fireworks.

But instead of your usual summer fireworks imagery, see instead a jasmine sambac chrysanthemum bomb exploding in an endless hall of mirrors, some convex, others concave, and yet others flat, wavy and in varying hues of blues, golds and greens. You just don’t know where to look, never mind how to sniff. The florals are distorted and painted large on scented woody billboards advertising alternative, gravity-defying magic carpet rides of what flowers are able to do in a perfume if they’re allowed.

Once thing is certain – they’ve never quite done this before.

Ylang ylang, with those custard and banana leaf undertones dances and flirts with the jasmine in perfect step with frankincense adding its own lemony, woody allure.

Like all the Opus line and indeed most Amouages, Opus VIII is incredibly hard to parse. Just when you think you have it all mapped out, the figurative magic carpet is pulled out from under you. Up is down and down is up. Jasmine is not at all jasmine sambac, but instead a phantasmagorical jasmine, no! Wait! Orange blossom! Yes?

No… it’s this spicy, woody superstructure elevating all the flowers up and up – or is that down?

Reflections? Refractions? I could apply both words equally well to convey my impressions. I’ve worn this on at least twelve occasions and worn twelve different perfumes – sometimes, it’s that jasmine sambac core that dominates and sometimes, it’s the woody superstructure that shares certain similarities with a few recent masculine releases, notably Fate Man.

What I will have to tell you is that this journey through a sunlit hall of mirrors takes hours and hours, and as you make your way through this jasmine sambac labyrinth, you’ll never know what you may find or even how to find it. This is possibly the most cohesive yet utterly discombobulating perfume I’ve ever sniffed.

To say I’m confounded is understating the issue. I suspect that’s both the raison d’être and the modus operandi of Opus VIII. To offer up reflections of flowers – some real, some imagined – swirling around a jasmine sambac vortex suspended in a spicy, woody, deliciously bittersweet base that by both inspirations and perfumers’ sleight of hand all add up to endless and endlessly entertaining…

Refractions in a jasmine sambac’s eye.

The Library Collection’s Opus VIII will soon be available at Luckyscent, MiN New York, First in Fragrance and directly from the Amouage website.

Notes: Jasmine sambac, ylang ylang, orange blossom, frankincense, saffron, ginger, vetiver, gaiac wood, benzoin, Jamaican bay.

Perfumers: Pierre Negrin & Richard Herpin in collaboration with Creative Director Christopher Chong.

Disclosure: A sample of Opus VIII was provided for review by Amouage. For which I thank the Very August Personage.

Illustration: M.C. Escher.

Chiaroscuro in Amethyst and Onyx

– a review of Amouage Opus VII

Among all my many moods and frequent fancies, one moves me more than nearly any other and sets my imagination alight, the delicious, delirious champagne bubbles of …anticipation. That timeless moment when anything and everything is possibility, when hopes and dreams and wishes slither inside to fuel the fires of your imagination, assert themselves and remind you that anything can and will likely happen, that you might know and experience what you never did before, go places you never knew you could.

Even now, even today, even as it seems in this endless dreary winter that sent Spring straight to an icy fevered limbo, anticipation takes hold and bubbles away in my mind, even as I have a slight hint that my anticipation might be just warranted enough, justified enough to make these fragrant hopes and ephemeral dreams a little more real, a little less dream to catch as it flies.

This day, this instant, my anticipation has a name, a prosaic name from an anything but prosaic house, the house of Amouage, and the name is nothing more and nowhere less than… Opus VII.

Once upon a time, the Library Collection line of Amouage seemed to be a counterpoint to their main line, scented sonatas as opposed to symphonies, Schubert lieder rather than full-blown Wagner operas, or novellas as opposed to doorstopper novels.

So I even believed at the time, until an inkling that arrived as the same time as Opus VI became a definite suspicion, if not a proven fact with the arrival of Opus VII.

You see, I suspect that the Library Collection is where Creative Director Christopher Chong gets to play with ideas and concepts that somehow fall outside the scope of the main line, where he might want to do things and say things on a different scale and to a different end.

Here is Opus VII at last after months of speculation, here is another concept and another idea. I have no press release to cling to nor any reviews to eye at a distance, no list of notes, nothing to go on. I am simply flying blind by my nose, walking that tightrope walk between my words, my emotions and my impressions without a safety net, and all I can hope for is not to fall flat on either my words or my face.

It is like nothing I expected, nothing I thought it would be. Nevertheless, it is an Amouage, and therefore, nothing if not surprising.

What would it be, so many of us wondered, would it be an iris, asked some people, would it be a leather, would it be anything at all like its predecessor?

I could answer all of those questions, but that’s no way to review an Amouage.

Opus VII is an iris, an iris apparent to my questionable nose from start to finish, an iris that refracts and shimmers and sparkles not with intimations of a light and airy, chilly spring, not at all like any famous irises you might think you know. Instead of light, it gives you a decadent, delectable and nearly Gothic twilit dark, instead of repeating all those famous orris commonplaces, it delivers something else, something unexpected – it gives you an iris with a haunting, slightly foreboding edge. Not ominous so much as arresting, compelling your attention in an instant.

Orris butter has so many facets on its own, far more than the flower its rhizomes sustain. With Opus VII, you will find in the opening alone not a few of them, interlaced with each other in compelling ways I can’t recall ever having encountered before. An earthy, spicy jolt to my senses of black pepper, an opening sunburst song of bergamot and maybe a touch of grapefruit that winks on your skin and is gone before that most regal, midnight purple iris steps forward to command your attention, as it surely will. Not a cold, chilly iris, not even so haughty as many irises are, but still a touch…imperious, as all irises should be.

This iris – borne up by a supporting cast that might include davana, a note that always, always haunts me and stops me cold, glows with a whisper of dark chocolate which could be patchouli, a basso profondo, poised pulse of labdanum and frankincense (that glorious frankincense Amouage uses like no other brand I know), and another arresting note that also always compels me like few others, a note I think might be a supple, silky smooth myrrh.

If that were all Opus VII were, I’d be beyond thrilled.

It’s not.

Understand, all these disparate elements take hours to show themselves in the spotlight. They wend and weave and dance their separate measures throughout, sometimes appearing clear as day, clear as a key light shone upon them, before they imperceptibly recede and retreat, only to reemerge from the shadows when you least expect them.

Now you smell them. Then, you don’t.

Suddenly with a shock of awareness, they appear again.

And then.

Then comes another thread, another ribbon of dark, refracted light that spirals from top to bottom, from start to finish and back again, and this is called leather in still another midnight shade and hue. As soft and as pliant as a flawlessly fitted glove, as luxurious and dense as suede, it seems neither one nor the other, but the hide of some otherworldly animal, caught and tanned if never tamed by some sleight-of-hand, arcane secret we mortals may not know, but only have the privilege to breathe in.

Call it hyperbole, call me out on my exaggerations and verbal excess, yet I tell you…this is what Opus VII is and these words are the story it tells me.

Since my sample arrived, I’ve spent not a little time with its wonders. I’ve sprayed my skin, I’ve sniffed the bottle, I’ve immersed myself by spraying not just myself, but my pillows and my Tibetan prayer flag, too. I’ve been more than a little obsessed with it in a way I’m not normally accustomed to. Through not a few days and the nights that followed those days. I’ve tried to capture the djinn as they flew and listen to the story they told, wondering where that story began and how it ended.

When my own realization hit, it hit through music, as happens often in this musically obsessed household. I sat and listened last night to Igor Stravinsky’s ‘Rites of Spring’, and as I did, the djinn within Opus VII began to dance with far more abandon than even the great Nijinsky could manage, dance as they told a story of emerging from the depths of an endless, icy winter, of springing forth from the shadows and next, running back to the twilight gloaming that conceals them.

They laughed at my pretensions and my anticipation, only to wrap me snug and warm against the sudden, shocking chill of early spring with that otherwordly, chiaroscuro silk velvet pelt of amethyst and onyx, of iris and pepper, frankincense and labdanum and a deft touch of patchouli, of leather and myrrh.

An emergence, a story, a dance, anticipation, a plush, velvet olfactory pelt of an otherworldly animal the world will soon know as…Opus VII.

_______________________________

Amouage Opus VII was created by perfumers Alberto Morillas and Pierre Negrin in collaboration with Amouage Creative Director Christopher Chong. It will be available from Amouage boutiques and Amouage retailers from mid-April.

Image 1: A black iris bud, via Wikimedia Commons, adapted by me.

Image 2: Opus VII presentation, courtesy of Amouage. Used by permission.

Disclosure: A sample of Opus VII was provided for review by Amouage. The Alembicated Genie is never endorsed by any perfume house or company, all reviews are original, I’m never compensated for reviews and all stated opinions are my own.

*********Addendum*********

Since writing this review yesterday, I’ve been informed by a reliable source that Opus VII does not, in fact, contain iris at all. So I’ll proclaim the Humpty Dumpty rule of (terrible) perfume analysis and say…Your Mileage (and sillage) May Vary. But such were and are my definite impressions, and as it is, my review remains.

***************************

Anodynes

– a review – and a story – of Amouage Interlude Man/Woman

Like so much else in his frenetic life, what he was doing now was absolute madness, rushing like the White Rabbit down West 14^th Street so he wouldn’t be late, late, late for this very important date, wouldn’t miss this for anything on Earth, this seeming mundane insomniac four A.M meeting in a donut shop of all places because it was the last place anyone would think to look for either of them in this nowhere hour, too early to be morning and too late to be night.

She was too careful to leave much to chance, too cautious not to cover her tracks and leave back doors open for a speedy exit. Like any woman worth knowing, she had many secrets and kept them well.

One reason he was running down the street at this insane hour was simply because she knew all of his, too.

They had known each other since the days before everything happened, before they became what they were now, before the rest of the world demanded all of both of them with a fifty percent tax on top. Before life became so frantic with all the things they had to do to stay where they wanted to be and needed to do. Ever since, he had a deal with her – to meet once a year, no matter what happened or where in the world they were, in a location they both agreed upon at the meeting before.

He felt guilty that until forty-odd hours before in Hong Kong, he had forgotten all about it, so guilty he bought her an expensive present he thought she might appreciate. It was with him now with the companion he bought for himself in the hope it would remind him of her and of all this secret history that made him rush breathless into a donut shop at four in the morning to be greeted with the welcome, warm surprise of hyper-fragrant empty calories.

She sat at the last stool towards the back with a huge cup of Starbucks and an apple fritter she had yet to touch. She looked much as she always did at four A.M., with her hair up under a sixpence pulled down over her face and no makeup, her leather jacket making her look much younger than he knew she was.

“I nearly didn’t make it,” he said when he sat down next to her. “I was in Hong King when I got your message.”

“For shame. What do you do, put me up on the lost and found shelf the other three hundred sixty-four days of the year?” She mock-punched him in the shoulder.

“No. I just try not to cross the days off in the calendar until the next time. What on Earth were you thinking – to meet up at this hour?”

She laughed. “I had a deadline. This was one way I knew I could make it on time. I told myself yesterday I couldn’t get out of the chair until I finished, so I could meet you with a clear conscience.”

“Did it work?”

“Actually, it did. Otherwise I would have had to cancel, and that wouldn’t do.” She shrugged. “Life is crazy enough, don’t you think?”

“I know it is. You should have seen me have hysterics at the ticket counter in Hong Kong. I had to be on that plane.”

“I’m so glad. Where are you even these days?”

“Everywhere. Singapore. Paris. Los Angeles. Buenos Aires. Hong Kong. Shanghai. London. I go where they send me, and try not to complain about it.”

“Poor you. Doesn’t it get old, living out of a suitcase?”

“Of course it does. I heard that you moved, by the way.”

“I did.” She sipped her coffee. “I either bought real estate or I paid way more taxes. So…Manhattan. Just to make my life a little more frantic than it already is. ”

“Meeting an old friend at four A.M isn’t frantic? It’s almost enough to make me wish I drank.” That made her laugh, just as he knew it would. “That reminds me. I brought you a present.”

“Ah. You shouldn’t have.” Beneath the brim of her cap her grin spread from one ear to the other.

“I know. I did it anyway. I think it reminded me of you.” He put the glossy bag on the counter, and immediately, she pulled out the gift-wrapped box.

“Oooooh,” she cooed. “Perfume. Very, very expensive perfume. You realize this has all sorts of loaded significance, don’t you?” She opened the box, and although it was almost too quick for him to catch it, he saw the surprise write itself on her face, saw her face light up as her smile changed. “My favorite shade of blue.” She snuck a furtive look at the waiter behind the counter at the other end, and as he looked away, she removed the cap and sprayed her wrist underneath the counter. “Hello!” she exclaimed when she sniffed her wrist. “This is an entire novel in a bottle, you know that.”

“Of course I do. Perfect for a novelist!”

“That sounds so much more distinguished than mere ‘writer’. Hmm. It’s green, it’s bright, it’s spicy, it’s… a breath of fresh air in a window I fling open after working all night. When I look to see the sun is coming up outside my windows.”

He reached for her apple fritter and bit into it. “You mean, that moment when you stop whatever it is you’re doing and realize that for just a few seconds, it seems as if the world has stopped too, ” he mumbled around a mouthful of pastry.

“Yes. Like that. Oh! Wake up and smell the coffee, baby! Is that coffee?” She laughed again, and watching her evident, child-like pleasure was almost worth the panic attacks he just sidestepped to get there on time. “Fruity coffee!”

“You tell me. You used to write about perfume.” This was one hell of an apple fritter.

“Another life ago. Is that what you’re asking? You want the perfume writer’s scoop on your present? ”

“I guess I’m asking what you think, or if you’ll wear it, or…you know. I’m not usually in the habit of buying you perfume.”

She sniffed her wrist again. “Next time, I’ll just call you up at four A.M. and ask what you’re wearing.”

“The Wall Street Journal. Reading glasses. So not sexy. Or…” he suddenly remembered. “The counterpart to what I just gave you.”

She leaned closer right by his neck and breathed him in. “That’s outrageous. I do mean outrageous. Allspice with a green bite underneath it, and…oh! Leather! Sweet, luscious, supple, silky leather and am I getting…what is that? Tarmac? Rubber? Not just any rubber, and nothing in the slightest bit bad, but much more than a little…dangerous. Yes. Dangerous! That’s it! You’re the gazillionaire bad boy my mother warned me about. The guy who lights fires in hapless lovelies on five continents and always leaves in the morning. His secretary has been instructed to send roses. Not that it helps.”

He had to laugh. “I’m nothing like that. And you don’t like gazillionaires anyway.”

“True. ” She sniffed her wrist again. “But I love this. Why they always say a perfume has evolution, I don’t know. This is more of a revolution…it goes up and down and all around a thick, floral heart, like a spiral spinning around all the many contradictions that define it. It’s really busy in a very intricately crafted way. Frankincense that should be written out in capital letters, but no frankincense is ever so glorious as this…this is…the apotheosis of all the word and the material implies. Ah. But wait! There’s more!” She laughed again. “A novel in a bottle! We’re getting to that inevitable point of no return. There will be no happily ever after.”

“For four thirty in the morning I’m hugely impressed.” He was, too. No amount of money could have bought him a conversation like this one. Too bad he could only have it once a year.

“Hush.” She leaned in on him again and breathed in. “Smooth, but just… rough enough to make it interesting. A girl always likes a little bit of…rough.” As she said that last, her voice dropped to a smoky, sultry alto that gave one simple word a universe of meaning the scent he wore seemed to embroider upon, sparks and glints of heat, of firelight and wisps of rising, fragrant smoke from a roaring bonfire of exotic woods that only grew where dragons lived to guard the trees.

It was jetlag. It had to be. Or else it was these two infernally great perfumes. Worth every yuan he paid for them just to hear her say ‘rough’ like that.

“I don’t have enough time for bonfires,” he heard himself saying.

“I know. I don’t, either.” In the space of a heartbeat, her regret played across her face like a piano note and was just as quickly gone, but he caught it in the way she shifted on her chair and slightly away from him, as if wrapping herself just a little tighter and smaller. A piano note with the damper pedal down.

“So why do we meet like this once a year?” He found himself wanting to distract her from that hint of blue he saw in her eyes, illuminated by the light bouncing off the display case of cookies in front of her.

She blinked, turned back towards him again and lifted one eyebrow. “You mean you don’t know?”

“You’re the novelist,” he shot back. “You tell me!”

“Well, to remind each other that it’s the world that’s crazy, but you and I aren’t. You’re my anodyne, and I’m yours. Everything and everyone coming at us from all directions, constant streams of information, stress, noise and clutter and all that messes with our minds.” Again, he saw that lightning flash of regret that blazed over her face before it vanished.

“That there’s…” she went on after a while and a sip of her coffee, “these rare instances every blue moon, where everything just…stops, and you stop with it. When you breathe in, and you are all of a piece, you’re whole and entire and an entire, complex universe in one fleeting, shining instant. You don’t have to do, you don’t have to go, you just have to be. Like now.”

She replaced the blue bottle in its box, put it back in the bag and sniffed her wrist again.

“How do you know I’m not crazy?” He had to ask. Sometimes, he wanted to be just a little crazy.

“Because you brought me serenity…in a beautiful blue perfume bottle! And you wore your own to see me. That tells me everything I need to know.” She had a mischievous glint in her eyes, one he hadn’t seen in a long time.

“Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”

But when he returned to the counter, she was gone, with only a trace of that magnificent, ambery, opulent trail behind in the sugar-scented donut shop. There was a card on the barstool.

On the front was her name, her new address, her email and phone number. And on the back, a quote from a poem.

The soul selects her own society

Then shuts the door

On her divine majority –

Obtrude no more.

Below, she had written “Hong Kong. Make the time for a bonfire. Oh. Yes. You’re going to need two more bottles of this.”

Which was when he realized that she had taken not just the bottle he had brought for her, but his own too, still in the Tsum department store bag.

He laughed, laughed so loudly, the waiter at the other end of the counter came over to ask if everything was OK.

Oh, yes. It was just about perfect. As perfect an anodyne – or an interlude – as anyone could ask for.

Image of Interlude Man & Interlude Woman: Amouage

_______________________________________

Notes for Interlude Woman (Perfumer Karine Vinchon-Spehner): Bergamot, grapefruit, ginger, marigold, kiwi, frankincense, rose, coffee, orange blossom, helichrysum, jasmine, opoponax, vanilla, benzoin, amber, sandalwood, oud, oakmoss, leather, tonka bean, animalic notes, musk

Notes for Interlude Man (Perfumer Pierre Negrin): Bergamot, oregano, pimento berry oil, amber, frankincense, cistus, opoponax, leather, agarwood smoke, patchouli, sandalwood

Amouage Interlude is available directly from the Amouage website and Amouage boutiques. It will be available at First in Fragrance from September 24^th, and elsewhere Amouage is sold.

Disclosure: Samples were provided for review by Amouage

With thanks to the usual suspect and Emily Dickinson, too.

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.