A Perfume Like A Witching Spell

Newsletter #20: an appointment with the Wicker Man

It’s June, it’s winter, and it’s freezing. The sun is over in Greece and Marrakesh and St Tropez, and in its place there’s an Antarctic bite to the air in the south that never disappears even in the middle of a cloudless day.

Monday was a public holiday in New South Wales, the King’s Birthday. This is one of those funny symptoms of the Commonwealth - Australia has a (contentious) national day in summer like most countries, but we also get a public holiday for the sovereign on a day that is nowhere near their actual birthday. Much like the monarchy, it is something more symbolic than practical.

Recently I’ve been chewing over a concept for an article on British perfumery, and the King’s Birthday has me thinking about it again.

When you think of the great centres of modern perfumery the British aren’t the culture who first leap to mind. But there is a history and tradition of perfume in this part of the world that goes back hundreds of years. In the modern world the idea of Britishness - the performance of it - is big business: one needs only to visit the Penhaligon’s booth at any department store to find evidence of that.

I’ve never thought to sort my sample collection by geography (though that is how I sort my non fiction book collection, which sits next to it on my bookshelves). On the King’s Birthday I spent a good half hour plucking out a set of British house creations: Papillon, Floris, Beaufort London; 4160 Tuesdays, Penhaligon’s, Heeley; Jo Malone, Ormonde Jayne, the Creed sample I got sent for free and want desperately to pass on to someone else but which I keep as a reminder of how low capitalism can bring perfume.

It’s an interesting collection of samples to smell with an attempt to find a thread of commonality. I don’t think there is one, though perhaps there’s a dualism - a divide between huge, bombastic scents and perfumes of deceptively simple elegance. There’s a respect for natural materials in ‘sophisticated’ upper-class aiming British houses that is similar to their French counterparts but more… boring, somehow. I suppose it’s like how Anglicanism is just Catholicism with the most interesting bits stripped out. Cathedrals with no stained glass.

Every time I smell the latest overpriced nonsense from Clive Christian or resniff Wild Bluebells by Jo Malone I always have the same thought: these are perfumes for people who think wealth can replace personality. It is in fact possible to ‘refine’ a perfume so much that there is nothing left of interest for the wearer at all.

Because gentle refinement is anathema to me, I end up picking Carduus (Jorum Studio, 2019) to wear and ponder for the public holiday.

Jorum are a young Scottish house with a botanical vibe that make interesting perfumes with decidedly rough edges. Sometimes smelling their scents can feel like a deliberate provocation, as if perfumer Euan McCall is shoving the most confronting concotion you’ve ever smelled under your nose and demanding, ‘what about this? Is this a perfume?’

The answer is yes, but sometimes only barely.

This provocation can be evidenced in the notes list for Carduus, which reads like the ingredients for a herbalist’s brew:

Chamomile, Bengal Pepper, Honey, Clary Sage, Sea-holly, Marjoram Tea, Myrtle, Rose Absolute, Vetch, Clove Bud, Hart’s Tongue, Tuberose, Musk-thistle, Heliotrope, Tormentil, Mahogany, Cocoa Absolute, Tobacco, Meum, Deertongue, Cherrywood.

As you might expect, Carduus is a bitter monster of a perfume. Carduus is the Latin name for a family of thistle plants, and that is the central thesis of this scent: rough, dry weeds that will sting you if you come too close. The perfume is built around a central tobacco accord, but in no way is this your typical sweet-cigar scent. The tobacco is instead cleverly used for its dry, haylike facets. It forms a backbone for this scent of dried, rough things, like the giant skeleton of a Wicker Man.

Mahogany and sea-holly and vetch and milk-thistle I can’t claim to smell in this perfume. But the feeling of these things are there: the feeling of small, handmade woven baskets filled with herbs plucked for drying; of dry, warm fires in stone cottages; of ancient ways of making ancient cures - and ancient curses.

There is warmth in Carduus, though nothing as comforting as an amber accord. Its drydown has traces of the animalic - a slug of musk, a bite of leather, a touch of honeycomb. These build with the tobacco into a sunlit-attic feeling that is almost reassuring, until it’s subverted by the bitter herbs into something more grotesque.

Because the scent is so herbal many people leap to call Carduus a fougere, but what’s happening here is done a disservice by simple categorization. Frankly, the perfume’s too fucking weird to fit naturally into any of the great fragrance families. (The majority of Carduus’ components are things that humans eat, but you would never dream of calling it a gourmand).

Carduus is much closer to the hippie-adjacent, Etsy-dabber bottle world of experimentation and innovation than classical French perfumery. There is always power in turning your back on the traditional structures and concepts of an art form and forging new ground. The way Carduus does this is by hearkening back to a time of wilder, darker nature - it is a smell that smells like you imagine the world did before cities and industry and gas chromatography.

There are some perfumes that throw you back to the time when wolves still roamed in England. This is one of them.

There is no comfort in smelling Carduus from the bitter beginning to the bitter end. There is only the strange victory one feels when confronting and overcoming harsh things. When you spray Carduus you are in combat - can you endure this smell? Can you find enough interest or beauty here to enjoy it? Will it change you to do so - or will it uncover something inside you that you did not know was there all along?

Like the original, brilliant Wicker Man film there is an unsettling folk-horror feeling to Carduus. It’s a perfume with more herbs packed in to it than your spice drawer, a melange of chamomile and sage and thyme and marjoram and clove that somehow all blends together into a strange, almost anisic smell that is both compelling and bizarre.

As a perfume Carduus’ tone is autumnal and sinister. It’s witchy, not in the pointed-hat way but in the Rihannon way, the witches three in Macbeth way - there is danger here but you can’t stop sniffing. And you will have ample time to do so, as it is a perfume that lasts for days on the blotter - but that may also be because its scent is so strange and jarring that it’s impossible for your brain to filter it out as unthreatening.

If you have never seen The Wicker Man, you should - it's a movie quite unlike any other. It is set on a bright, beautiful island right on the cusp of summer - the place is even called Summerisle. Its people wear bright, happy clothes and its soundtrack is gentle folk music. And yet the place simmers with unease and dead - in fact, its beautiful setting only enhances the horror of the story and its final crescendo.

Wicker Man is proof paramount that blood and gore are almost ancillary to horror - violence in the midst of mundanity is the horror. A perfume made up of smells from your spice drawer shouldn’t feel so confronting. But the fact that you know these smells, that the back of your mind can place them even while you cannot comphrend the strangeness of the scent as a whole is the point.

The mundanity is the horror.

It feels strange to enthusiastically recommend a perfume by saying “this feels like a folk horror film”, and yet I am and it does. I think it is important - necessary - to push past our initial gut reactions to a perfume to examine them on a deeper level. By doing this you begin to shift the Overton Window of your own tastes to better embrace the weird stuff, which is always the most interesting stuff. But there is also a sense of real accomplishment in tackling a scent as difficult as Carduus and coming to a level of understanding with it.

And I think perhaps understanding is the furthest one can go with Carduus. It’s just not a perfume built for love.

The Wicker Man is a film about an English policeman who travels to a Scottish isle whose townspeople have revived an earlier, pagan way of life. The context changes but the tension between old faiths and new, between civilisation and the wilderness, are evergreen.

When a civilisation has such deep roots you can pick up any thread and weave a story that still resonates today. That’s how Carduus feels - an old story being told through a new medium.

And maybe that’s as much of a characteristic of British perfume as anything else. ▣