Dispatches #2
Perfumes for the Marquis de Sade, good Shakespeare, and a handful of quick sniffs
Welcome to Dispatches, a place where I talk about anything I’ve been ruminating on for the week.
What I’m Smelling
The best thing I’ve smelled in recent weeks is Attaquer le Soleil: Marquis de Sade (Etat Libre d’Orange, 2016). Perfumers have a weird fascination with the Marquis; this is the third fragrance I’ve smelled named after him, the other two being 1740: Marquis de Sade (Histoires de Parfums, 2000) and SM Cafe (Strangers Perfumerie, 2019). 1740 is very powdery and SM Cafe has the best coffee note I’ve smelled in perfumery. (But even it is not a true coffee smell, as this is nearly impossible to achieve - even a good coffee note in a fragrance will not smell like fresh espresso but rather a vat of instant that’s been sitting too long in a hot room).
What can we interpret from a perfume named after the progenitor of S&M? One assumes the brands wish to contrast pain and pleasure through the vehicle of perfume - to show how that which is bitter can still be sweet. Musk or other animalics would be a clever vehicle to do this, but the note that connects all of these perfumes is actually the obvious choice: leather.
1740’s leather a very traditional birch tar, the kind that would have been cured into gloves and boots in the Marquis’ own time; SM Cafe’s is stark, with an almost plastic quality, playing heavily on the fetish theme; and Attaquer le Soleil’s is not a leather at all, but rather the leathery facets of its core ingredient: labdanum.
My love for labdanum is well documented. It’s a deep, dark, resinous, funky scent, both familiar to our noses because it is present in the amber accord and foreign as we nearly never smell it as a solitary note. Even scents with labdanum in the name, like Labdanum 18 (Le Labo, 2006, in yet another hideous example of their fondness for misnaming perfumes) and Labdanum & Pur Patchouli (100Bon, 2017) let other notes take center stage.
But Attaquer le Soleil is marketed as a soliflore labdanum scent, supposedly containing no other notes. My nose calls foul on that: there’s frankincense in here at the very least, and maybe a small touch of citrus to reinforce the piney, scrubby facets of olibanum. But these serve only to reinforce the labdanum and make it more emphatic. The scent is linear, not changing so much as slowly fading away on the skin. But I like this about it: Attaquer le Soleil truly lets the labdanum shine, rather than contrasting it against other heavy notes. Labdanum is perhaps the best note to shine a singular light on as it is almost never without vanilla in perfumery, the two of them forming part of the amber accord.
The word I would use to describe Attaquer le Soleil is biblical. There is a feeling that resinous perfumes give when they don’t shy away from the funky, animalic facets of the natural material, a sort of prehistoric olfactive button that’s pressed in our brains. The bible is one of the most fragrant books you will ever read: Song of Solomon alone is dripping with references to rose oil and honey, new figs and flowing myrrh. Humans have connected the scent of incense to the divine for thousands of years, because resins like olibanum and sytrax and labdanum smell so complex and strange and wonderful that only a higher power could have created them (even if that higher power was merely nature). This is how labdanum feels, and this is how Attaquer le Soleil smells; less Marquis de Sade than the Queen of Sheba. Sensual, a little frightening, comforting and alienating all at once.
Attaquer le Soleil was made by Quentin Bisch at Givaudan. He’s a perfumer on the rise - he made Nomade (Chloe, 2018) which was Givaudan flexing the muscles of their new oakmoss synthetics by creating the best feminine designer scent in years, and also Angel Muse (Mugler, 2016) and Delina (Parfums de Marly, 2017), gourmand feminines that use unusual notes (hazlenut for Muse, rhubarb for Delina) to stand out from the pack. But those were Bisch playing in his sandbox: Attaquer le Soleil and La Fin du Monde (Etat Libre d’Orange, 2013), which he also made for the house, are a challenge. ELDO is one of those houses that gets the overworked fragrance firm perfumer to colour outside the lines.
And Quentin Bisch earned his paycheck with Attaquer le Soleil. It is a stunner. The warmth of the resin plays against the animalic - the labdanum contradicts itself. Leather and smoke, the sweet and the bitter. Wear it to the leather club and then wear it to church - the Marquis plays both ways.
What I’m Reading
Have you ever read a book that you had to force yourself to finish? Not for an assignment or because some you care for urged you to read it and there is no plot summary on Wikipedia, but through sheer force of will? That was me this week when I finally reached the end of The Game of Kings, the first book in Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles.
The book is set in 1540’s Scotland and is a political-adventure-thriller that follows the titular character, Francis Crawford of Lymond, as he tries to clear his name of an accusation of treason. Lymond is a brilliant, ruthless, overdramatic and cheeky darling with blonde hair that women on the internet like to fancast as Tom Hiddleston. He probably wears leather pants. You know the type.
The series comes highly recommended. Like, seriously recommended. It’s been a long time since I’ve been swept up in a truly immersive book series, and I was craving that feeling. So I started Game of Kings… and got about 50 pages in before I stopped. The writing is dense (not so much a problem) and I could barely follow who was in the scene, let alone what was going on (very much a problem). But I had read that Dunnett’s style takes some getting used to and decided to push through.
My background knowledge of the time period - borne of a childhood love for Mary Queen of Scots that has led me to inhale anything from Antonia Fraser books to the CW’s Reign - helped give me context, but it was still slow going. I stopped entirely about a third of the way in. When I picked it back up months later, within fifty pages I had guessed a character’s secret motivation and the desire to see if I was right spurred me to keep going, and I finished the book three days later. (And I was right after all).
The trick with Lymond, I learned, is sleight-of-hand - Dunnett writes scenes in a cloak-and-dagger method as if you, the reader, already know what is happening, and only later reveals the information that makes the sense of what you’ve read and gives it meaning. This is frustrating when you don’t know that it’s happening and then deeply satisfying when you’ve caught on and you know that you must slow down and truly take in every word on the page. Dunnett demands your trust but won’t bend and scrape to earn it - you must meet her where she lives, not the other way around.
When I finished the book, I realised that the writing style reminded of another series - C.S Pacat’s Captive Prince - and was delighted to see that I was on the right track again: Pacat has stated that Dunnett is her favourite author and Lymond was a huge inspiration for her.
Reading Lymond feels a bit like dueling with Dunnett herself: she is brandishing the foil constantly. She throws out literary references and untranslated sentences in French and Latin with ease, and if you stumble on anything you either stop and look it up so you can understand or shrug and keep going. The book is the very opposite of a modern bestseller: instead of trying to hook you from page one, it opens in media res and then happily barrels along, expecting you to keep up.
Lymond does not take itself as seriously as a historical series. It is not dedicated to recreating the day-to-day lives of its characters; it straddles the line between mass market pulp melodrama and realpolitik thriller. It reminded me of Shakespeare, of good Shakespeare - an adaption that understands that creating three dimensional characters will automatically make any setting feel lived in, because you experience the characters interacting with it. Shakespeare is immortal because the emotional connections between the characters resonate with all of us - they are desperately, tragically human. And once you dig underneath the surface of Lymond, you begin to understand that Dunnett’s characters are as well.
The Lymond books have been rereleased in very tasteful covers, but I prefer the original, overdramatic pulp ones. (There is not a single scene in The Game of Kings that resembles the cover below. Bless.) Was I partially swayed into trying the books because the third novel has the delightfully perfume-y name Pawn in Frankincense? Absolutely. It may not seem that way, but I really am quite easy to please.
I started the second book, Queen’s Play, as soon as I finished the first. Dorothy Dunnett, let’s dance.
Quick Sniffs
I recently smelled the new release from DS & Durga, Jazmin Yucatan. I always want more from DS&D than they give - their perfume structures are big and bombastic a la Dominique Ropion but the execution is thin and translucent like Jean-Claude Ellena. The result of this is a house that is doing two styles of perfumery badly. But I was happily surprised by Jazmin Yucatan. Jasmine is not my favourite note - it often smells to me like toilet air freshener - but it’s nicely done here, not too fresh but not cloying either. The Yucatan comes in through a green note, which is thankfully not the sharp bitterness of galbanum (my most loathed note), which would drag this into chypre territory, but instead the dryness of vetiver. This is a rooty and earthy vetiver, crisp like a field of newly cut grass. This dryness is reinforced by a crisp tea note, probably the maté accord that is having a moment right now. The contrast between the lushness of the jasmine and the dryness of the green in Jazmin Yucatan kept me interested. It is also a member of a very satisfying group, perfumes that are perfectly named: if I had to imagine in my mind a jasmine growing in a field in the Yucatan, I would think of this smell. DS&D are perhaps finally finding their voice. ★★★☆
More adventures in leather, this time Etat Libre d’Orange’s Tom of Finland. But I feel like I should call this one UnLeather - it is touted as a fetish-y thing but it smells quite sweet and strange to me, almost like Cherry Cola. It reminds me of YSL’s M7; they are both scents that feel leathery but not heavy or cloying. The star ingredient in Tom of Finland is an overdose of Safroleine, a Givaudan molecule meant to evoke saffron. The perfume is a sweet leather wrapped in a neon cherry accord, the whole thing dusted with a powdery note quite reminiscent of talc. I like this, but I already own M7 so I don’t know if I need Tom of Finland in my collection. Some further testing needed. ★★★☆
I feel like I need a decoder ring every time I approach the Narciso Rodriguez stand. Every perfume is named the exact same thing and I can never remember which coloured bottle I’m going for. But I was handed a sample card of their newest scent Musc Noir by a sales attendant, saving me the frustration of having to sniff my way to it. The scent opens with a watery plum notes that smells slightly sickly, before quickly descending into a powdery, cloying musk. Sonia Constant, who made Ombre Leather (Tom Ford, 2016) made this, and I can only attribute her talent being wasted on a flanker nobody really needed as to why this is so horrid. ★
I’ve been trying to smell as many celebrity scents as I can for this piece, and hanging around the cheapie section of the store I found a genuine gem: Almond by Monotheme Fine Fragrances Venezia. This is a house that does linear, good natured, ephemeral knockoffs of famous designer scents in charmingly gaudy bottles that go for about $19.99. This scent shocked me, as it is the opening note of warm, bitter almond from Hypnotic Poison (Dior, 1998) exactly. I always spray on a blotter first but as soon as I smelled this i put it on skin. It is slightly fresh from the almond blossom and I expected to disappear in an hour or two but it lasted through a long brunch-turned-lunch I had at a cafe. I kept trying to subtly smell my wrist to see if it had faded, and was delighted when it still hadn’t four hours after spraying. I went back and bought it that same day. Hypnotic Poison is one of the best gourmands and the best designer feminines ever created; Almond will do for the cash strapped in a pinch. An absolute steal. ★★★
That’s all for now!