Dispatches #3
A stunning amber perfume, an apocalyptic song, more Potemkin Russias, and some quick sniffs
Welcome to Dispatches, a place where I talk about anything I’ve been ruminating on for the week.
What I’m Smelling
It is finally scarf season in my corner of the world, both the best time to be alive and the best time to wear perfume. When I woke up at the beginning of the week and was met with a chill that nipped at my nose I joyfully pulled one of my scarves from the back of the cupboard and sprayed it with Ormonde Woman (Ormonde Jayne, 2002). This is a witchy brew of black hemlock, abstract florals, sweet amber and an Iso e Super spine; it is perfect for a scarf because the opening accord surrounds you with pine and mystery, the olfactory equivalent of listening to Rihannon by Fleetwood Mac, and the drydown lingers for days.
I try to smell something new every week. In lockdown I was relying on samples, and when new ones didn’t come I went back and explored others in my collection, layering them in increasingly weird combinations. (My family did not enjoy it.) Shops are open now and I’ve taken to haunting perfume stands and methodically smelling things I haven’t tried yet. The group of perfumes I haven’t tried gets smaller and smaller., but I enjoy finding interesting things at stands I wouldn’t normally gravitate to. It’s like Pokemon for perfumes: gotta smell ‘em all.
I try to space out my trips so the salespeople don’t get too angry at me lurking like a perfume poltergeist. This week I decided to visit an unknown country: the tiny L’Occitane store tucked into a corner of the fanciest shopping centre in my region. I’ve browsed the L’Occitane stand in department stores before - they usually have one or two scents like Eau des Baux and Verveine. L’Occitane is one of those infuriating brands that discontinues and brings things back at random.
They are also a bona fide Provençal company, and being down the road from Grasse is the greatest creed any fragrance house can have. L’Occitane reminds me of classic Grasse perfume houses like Molinard and Fragonard; all three brands make simple and ephemeral things that smell very natural and are dirt cheap. There are worse places you could spend your money.
Entering the l’Occitane store - the shopfront was painted in a welcoming shade of mimosa yellow - I saw an entire stand of fragrances and not just one or two, which was a good sign. Out came the pen and I grabbed a handful of blotters. There were a few duds (Terre de Lumiere, a gourmand that smells like a Bath and Bodyworks spray) a few fine but forgettable things (Thé Vert, a budget version of Jean-Claude Ellena’s gossamer trailblazer Bulgari Eau Parfumee au The Vert), a few well made gems (most of the masculines including L’Occitane, a lovely fougere you could easily imagine on the crisp white shirt of Alain Delon) and one absolute knockout: Ambre (L’Occitane, originally launched 2001, rereleased 2016).
Amber is perhaps the most subjective genre in perfumery. There are as many different kinds as there are countries and it is a rare person who likes them all. For my money, I don’t care for ambers that are too powdery or cloying (Ambre 114); I don’t want to smell of the souk (Ambre Sultan) or grandma’s attic (Grand Soir). I like my ambers with the vanilla turned down low and the resins blasting high. I would say my Goldilocks amber is medicinal above all other things - Ambre Loup (Rania J, 2015) is one I adore. And when I sprayed L’Occitane’s Ambre on the blotter, it reminded me of Ambre Loup immediately. Bolstered by the fact that the brand’s perfumes usually don’t last very long, I took a gamble that the perfume wouldn’t turn into vanilla pudding on my skin and sprayed it on my arm to see if we would get on.
Twenty minutes later and we’re the best of friends, because Ambre is absolutely stunning from top to bottom. It is spicy, but not cardamom or cinnamon or any spice that can skew lactonic and creamy - it’s cloves, cloves, cloves, that gorgeously bracing eugenol scent that I love above anything else in the spice rack. The heart of the perfume is labdanum, and when it appears I wait for it to take its usual place at second string to vanilla but it never does. Labdanum is at the forefront of this perfume from first spray to the mellow, coumarin-hay drydown. I was delighted to look the perfume up on L’Occitane’s site and see that they intended for this to be a cistus dominant scent. The description reads:
A true Mediterranean fragrance. When the sun is slowly setting above the Mediterranean shore, cistus plants fill the air with their delicious ambered perfume.
The absence of powdery notes in this perfume makes it a labdanum that is not too heavy or cloying on skin. The cloves make it an amber that is not soft and round-edged but spiky: the cute kitten with sharp teeth.
It’s as I’m smelling Ambre that I realise we are having a little moment, cistus labdanum and me. Does this ever happen to you? A note or an ingredient stands out from the fore in different things you’re smelling, and the time of year and your mood is just the right fit for it? This has happened to me with vetiver, iris, and now labdanum. I love all of these notes at any time of year but since smelling Le Lion, labdanum seems to be everywhere for me.
In a sign I’ve truly gone off the deep end, I have begun to create an olfactory reference library for myself. So often in perfumery we smell complex, sophisticated combinations of notes when our noses have no familiarity with the raw materials and their original scent profiles. I’d love to buy natural materials from a place like perfumer’s apprentice but they won’t ship to Australia, but I have benzoin resin and frankincense tears and labdanum paste that I ordered from Etsy on the way.
When I get my labdanum I will bring out every labdanum-heavy scent I have to compare it to the real deal. There’s an old method from before chromatographs that perfumers would use to try and identify the notes in another brand’s perfume: identify a note and then smell the real thing in a pure concentration, making you ‘nose blind’, then smell the perfume again. Supposedly the other notes will be more prominent. I wonder if this experiment will work with labdanum.
Ambre lasted for hours on my arm, labdanum all the way down, and costs $79 for a 75ml bottle - a steal. Usually I’m a believer in multiple wears before buying a perfume but I circled back and bought Ambre that very day. I knew that the next time I go to a L’Occitane store it might not be there anymore. And I didn’t want for this lovely thing to only be a memory.
What I’m Watching
The hour of our long national nightmare has finally begun: Shadow & Bone is here. Adventures in Leigh Bardugo’s dollar store Russia are about the last thing we need right now, and yet I have no doubt that everyone (including me) is going to be talking about it for the foreseeable future.
The race to create a fantasy series to equal the popularity of Game of Thrones is one of the most farcical journeys in television today. The irony of it all is that Netflix’s first attempt, the short lived and wildly expensive Marco Polo, was their best; now Netflix is doing what they always do and throwing money at the problem. Instead of being all things to all people there will be a fantasy series for every type of fantasy fan: if you enjoyed the gritty roadtrips and realpolitik from GOT, The Witcher is for you; if you liked the soapy, melodramatic, fire-and-iceness of it all, watch Shadow and Bone instead.
Both shows employ Game of Thrones-esque separated storylines that eventually converge. The problem with this in Shadow and Bone is that it is based on two book series (and presumably also the third Grisha series in future) that are wildly different in tone, plot, and quality. Watching the showrunners try to create a bizarre Frankenshow by smashing Grisha and Six of Crows together is clunky, inorganic, and awkward.
This is an issue that is waging war on the Young Adult novel as a species: people want elaborate worldbuilding from a genre that simply does not have the word count to provide it. There is a reason high fantasy books are frequently 150,000 words or more and a reason young adult books are not. When creators try to bridge this gap we get things like A Court of Thorns and Roses and Shadow and Bone: series that are not YA, not high fantasy, not clear in purpose, and not good.
I finished Shadow and Bone last night and have no doubt I’ll have more thoughts on it in the weeks to come. I will say that it made me break open my copy of Alexander Afanasyev’s Russian Fairy Tales as a palette cleanser. Many of these stories begin with a standard opening line, similar to ‘once upon a time’; “Across thrice-nine lands, in a thrice-ninth kingdom, in a thrice-tenth country”… There is something about this that makes you feel bewitched and enthralled immediately, your mind changing gears from the mundane to the fantastical as if a switch has been flipped. You are there, in the wooden house, in the forest, in the place where magic is real and all things are possible.
It the precise and perfect opposite of the feeling you get when watching the Ben Barnes Boring Villain variety hour. Shadow and Bone: lying in wait on a device near you.
What I’m Streaming
When I feel apocalyptic, I listen to Nick Cave.
As a performer, Cave has many moods: winsome, romantic, murderous, liturgical. But no one does storm-and-thunder quite like him, and there is no song in the world quite like Tupelo.
Nick Cave is one of those artists that are so prolific that their music spans decades, embracing a range of genres and styles. Tupelo is the first song on The Firstborn is Dead, a 1985 album that is Cave at his most demonic. Named after a John Lee Hooker song of the same name, Tupelo retells in terrifyingly Biblical terms the night of the birth of Elvis Presley. Supposedly it was also the night of a once-in-a-generation storm, and the track is backed by sounds of thunder and rain. The lyrics could be kindly described as ominous. Elvis Presley was a twin and his brother was stillborn; Cave weaves a fable out of this, a sense that the world is rioting and nothing can settle or survive ‘until the King is born’.
Tupelo is a song Cave recorded when he was young, mean, and angry. If terror is the feeling anticipatory to something awful and horror is the reaction to something that has already happened, then Tupelo is suspended between. It is both wading through the gore and still waiting, knowing that whatever is coming will be so much worse. It is Southern Gothic like Faulkner and neo-biblical like The Prophecy (1995), a film where Viggo Mortensen plays cinema’s most unsettling and compelling Satan. A dark and velvet evil - that is the energy that Nick Cave threw into Tupelo.
The Mercy Seat is considered by many to be Cave’s greatest biblically influenced narrative song. Tupelo is darker and bleaker, with that unsettling underbelly also wielded by Cave on songs like From Her to Eternity and The Carny, a wrongness that makes your stomach churn. It’s one of my favourite songs. Listen to it if you haven’t.
Quick Sniffs
I had the chance to smell the ‘room sprays’ from Frederic Malle this week. From what I understand these are simply perfumes diluted into a water solution - they are sold in laughably big bottles that look like a spray-and-wipe for your kitchen bench, except they cost $250 a pop. Jurassic Flower, whose name I adore, is a white floral with an apricot-osmanthus twist and a slight touch of green in the top; Cafe Society is a modern take on Jicky (Guerlain, 1889), having a fougere-lavender top accord underpinned by a rough animalic civet, similar to the drydown of Une Fleur de Cassie from the brand. My favourite of the set was Rosa Rugosa. A combination of a fresh floral rose and a sticky-sweet rose jam, it smells as if someone had spliced Tea Rose (Perfumer’s Workshop, 1977) and my beloved Rose Flash (Tauerville, 2014) together. I understand that these scents are all sold as candles as well - why not bite the bullet and make them perfumes? ★★★
I love when a perfume surprises me, and of late nothing has surprised more than the latest flanker for L’eau d’Issey, Fusion d'Issey (Issey Miyake, 2020). I am not a fan of the original L’eau, and tend to steer clear of the aquatic genre in general, but sprayed this because it was one of the only things in the store that I hadn’t yet smelled. And I’m glad I did - this is a welcoming and warm coconut scent. I usually hate coconut notes in perfume but I think this scent being a masculine has kept it from being too sweet. Combined with a woody amber typical to modern masculines, Fusion becomes a pleasant and wearable gourmand that retains a sense of freshness. I quickly looked up who created this and it was, of course, Nathalie Lorson. There is no perfumer in the world better than her at crafting something beautiful out of a formula budget that is next to nothing. ★★☆
An elegy for a perfume I loved and will probably never own: She Shihan by talented Polish perfumer Piotr Czarnecki. This perfume has sold out everywhere and I can’t find any information on the brand being active currently - never a good sign. She Shihan is a plum-rose with violet and a boozy, slightly incense-y base. It smells precisely of the fancy liqueur-filled chocolate trays that one only ever got on birthdays or special occasions as a child. It’s a gourmand that isn’t too sweet, with some tobacco and whiskey nuances descended from the original, masculine marketed Shihan. It is a full bodied and luxurious perfume that feels old world but not dated. It makes me think of rich, deep colours, of a warm room with red wallpaper and gas lamps to make it feel lush and welcoming, the kind of place men would retire to smoke cigars while women in beautiful dresses played cards and sipped brandy. I will keep an eye on selling groups for this one. I have a small decant but would love a full bottle, if only to think of fancy chocolates and a world long since extinguished. ★★★★☆
That’s all for now!
I just found you and I'm very excited. Love the details of perfume! I'm currently obsessing over getting my hands on Red Moscow which was purportedly the Chanel No 5 of the USSR. Have you smelled this?