Dispatches #4
The scent of Napoleon, a lockdown film experience, a godly incense perfume, and some housekeeping.
Welcome to Dispatches, a place where I talk about anything I’ve been ruminating on for the week.
16 Floréal
When the French throw a revolution they are not content until every part of society is toppled and rebuilt. When the Ancien Regime fell in 1789 the revolutionaries wanted to destroy anything connected to the old world order so thoroughly that they even changed the names of the days and months of the year. The short lived and deeply poetic French Republican calendar changed the months to align more closely with the natural world. November became Frimaire - “frost” - and June became Messidor - “harvest”. On this calendar, the month from 20 April to 20 May was called Floréal - the month of flowers.
On the 5th of May, 1821, Napoleon Bonaparte breathed his last on the island of St Helena. On the 5th May, 1921, Chanel №5 was first released to the public from an atelier in Paris.
There is nothing to connect these two moments in history besides utter coincidence and an infallible Frenchness. It can be argued that neither of these things were truly French - Napoleon was born on the island of Corsica when it was still governed by the Genoese, and №5 was created by Ernest Beaux, a Russian perfumer who had fled the Revolution in 1917. But for the perfume lover in me this is a happy coincidence. There have been many articles and events covering the anniversary of №5, that most legendary of perfumes. But today I wanted to talk about Napoleon, one of the most notably scented people in history.
Napoleon, the conqueror of Europe, that Corsican menace, adored eau de cologne. He used multiple bottles of it containing about 75 ml of fragrance every day during his campaigns. His love of fragrance was well documented:
Napoleon had a standing order with his perfumer, Chardin, to deliver 50 bottles of cologne a month. He loved its cooling qualities and after washing, and would drench his shoulders and neck with it. He particularly loved the scent of rosemary, which is a key ingredient in eau de Cologne, because it flourished along the cliffs and rocky scrubland in Corsica, where he was born. A quarterly bill for 1806 shows Chardin supplied 162 bottles of eau de Cologne costing 423 francs.
Dutch historian Caro Verbeek, who wrote her dissertation on the scents of the battle at Waterloo, stated in an interview:
"We know Napoleon was wearing his favorite perfume that day (at Waterloo), which would resemble the present-day 4711 eau de cologne and which was called 'aqua mirabilis, The cologne contained compounds believed at the time to help protect people from disease. This perfume was used in almost every war since by many soldiers and for the same reasons."
This is where fragrance becomes a kind of living history. We may never be able to know what it was like for Napoleon at Waterloo, but we can know how he smelled: 4711’s simple and enduring cologne formula is available in every chemist in every country in the world. Its trademark blue-and-gold label even looks Napoleonic, a gilded fragment of the old world. The legend goes that when the French marched into Cologne in 1794, the townspeople tore the numbers off the houses to confuse the French. One of the French generals ordered the house numbered again, and the perfumer’s house became 4711. The perfume has its own history - it is one of the oldest surviving perfume formulas, dating back centuries - but when I come across it, I always think of Napoleon Bonaparte.
4711 is the quintessential cologne, and it is easy to conjure up the scent in your mind - citrus and fleeting. But whenever I actually smell 4711 I am always surprised at how floral it is. It has a strong note of orange blossom, light and slightly sweet. It is the smell of flowers in full bloom, not the cutting greenness of new bulbs or the lush narcotic syrup of dying petals. Colognes are famous for their fresh notes, being composed mostly of short-lived citruses and aromatics, but 4711 is deceptively complex. There’s the slight peppery tang of basil and that smoke-edged tartness of bergamot, but the heart of 4711 is that fresh and floral orange blossom,. It smells to our modern noses a little like the tutti-frutti sweetness of baklava syrup or Fruit Loops, and in the 19th century would have been quite heavenly indeed.
4711 is an entire fragrance, not just some brief top notes like many colognes that are produced today can be, but it never outstays its welcome and disappears after an hour or two. (Perhaps that’s why the Emperor went through so many bottles.) You can smell why it was so loved in Napoleon’s time, when general hygiene was much poorer than it is now; 4711 smells fresh. Splashing it on makes you feel renewed, like having splashed water on your face, like walking out of a dark room into a bright and sunlit garden.
One of my favourite depictions of Napoleon is Bonaparte Before the Sphinx. It is meant to evoke the myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx but for me it speaks of Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem on the impermanence of empires. Shelley wrote Ozymandias in 1818, three years after Waterloo. One can imagine Ozymandias as a sort of epigraph to the Emperor, the promise that the truths of Napoleon’s life would one day be lost to history and all that would be left would be half-ruined statues and spoiled grandeur.
When I smell 4711, I smell in a man in a bicorne sitting on a horse named Marengo and watching the world slip away from him at Waterloo. The story of Napoleon is so compelling because it is about how a man can carve his way through chaos and revolution to make an empire from his own ambition and brilliance - and then lose it all through hubris and pride.
The story of Napoleon is that greatness is perhaps not in conquering but in building something and making it last. That is the story of cologne as well, a perfume structure so simple that it is timeless, so refreshing and comforting that it can be bought in your local chemist for a few dollars and yet was ordered in buckets by a man who made the world tremble.
If Napoleon were alive today, I imagine he would be proud indeed of the perfume culture in France. Perhaps he would wear Sables, Annick Goutal’s masterpiece that centers on immortelle, the everlasting flower that grows in abundance on Corsica; maybe he would wear one of the wonderful scents made by Corsican perfumer Marc-Antoine Corticchiato for the aptly named Parfums d’Empire. Or maybe he would wear that same old 4711 Cologne, the eau de protection that saw him through Toulon and Austerlitz and Jena and Leipzig, the march towards Moscow and away from Waterloo, all the way to his final home on St Helena.
In the end, only Napoleon could defeat Napoleon. At Waterloo he smelled of orange blossom. He died on the 5 May, 1821. On Robespierre’s calendar it was 16 Floréal. Summer was around the corner, and it was the month of flowers.
What I’m Watching
On Mother’s Day I went to the movies. My mother loves the movies, especially Gold Class, and in the before times we would go once a month or so. I have not been to the cinemas since New Year’s Eve 2019 when I saw Jumanji 2: Welcome to the Jungle. A combination of the pandemic, paranoia, and a lack of movies I wanted to spend money on kept me from going to the cinema for a year and a half, easily the longest I have ever gone without.
The movie we saw was the pandemic themed Locked Down, starring Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor. These are both actors with an abundance of charm, and there were a handful of fun cameos (mostly over Zoom) by other actors, but all in all it was not a good movie. It wasn’t as claustrophobic and grim as the similar pandemic film Malcolm and Marie, but it did feel more like a therapy session than a film.
The basic concept of the movie is that Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor are a couple who have just broken up but are forced to stay in their house together due to lockdown. Through sheer coincidence they realise that they are in the perfect position to steal a million dollar diamond that has just been sold to a warlord and is due to be shipped out from a display at Harrods. In pulling off this heist - which may indeed be the least fun heist ever committed to film - they realise, shockingly, that they still love one another after all. Most of the film is about how the characters are (not) coping with lockdown. I suppose will act as a little slice of evidence for our times when someone’s child asks ‘hey, what was it like to live through the COVID pandemic?’ in twenty years.
By far the best scene in the film is when Hathaway and Ejiofor walk through the Food Hall at Harrods and create themselves a thousand-pound picnic that they take to the roof to eat together. As a person who has never been to London and always dreamed of visiting, this was delightful. I think about fancy department stores in other countries, sometimes. Hathaway and Ejiofor walked past a Guerlain counter in Harrods and I almost gasped. I’m the kind of person who watches hour long videos of people walking down Oxford Street when the Christmas lights are up, so I felt quite pandered to in this sequence.
Did I enjoy this movie? Not really. Pandemic themed media in any guise, television or film or ten second Tiktok, is the last thing I want to be watching. I’m already living through the pandemic; I don’t need to be watching someone else living through it. But I enjoyed myself anyway, watching Locked Down, because I was at the movies. I had forgotten in the year and a half since I’d last been how much I loved sitting in a dark room and watching a giant screen and not thinking for an hour and a half. It’s something I had never thought to miss, because I’ve been going to the movies my whole life. When you go so often you forget how enjoyable the actual experience is, how even seeing a bad movie at the movies can still be a good thing.
This is why I find it funny when Christopher Nolan and other self proclaimed auteurs talk about the death of cinema. It’s a bit like how people used to think ebooks meant the end of paper books - when in reality the internet has created communities of book lovers and even book influencers who love to buy hard copies. There will always be movies and the movies because there will always be people who want to sit in a big, dark room and watch a big, beautiful face go on a little journey. And I’m one of them.
I can’t wait for the new Fast and Furious movie to come out this week. I want to pay way too much money for a choc top and a soft drink and sit in the recliner chair and watch Vin Diesel drive a car into space. It’s been a long pandemic. We all deserve this.
What I’m Smelling
Incense perfumes, much like religions, can be broadly split into East and West. There is the cold, austere, and bracing frankincense that you will find in a perfume that is called churchy in the pejorative and then the warmer, richer, agarwood-and-spices style popular in perfumes created for the Middle Eastern market. Lighting fragrant things on fire and sending smoke wafting up to the gods is one of our most universal human rituals.
This divide can be seen in the trailblazing Incense series from Comme des Garcons, which features five perfumes based on different religions: Avignon (Catholicism), Zagorsk (Orthodox Christianity), Ouarzazate (Islam), Jaisalmer (Hinduism) and Kyoto (Buddhism and Shintoism). Incense is the one thread that connects all of these scents - they are all glass clear and beautifully linear incense perfumes, but the stark coldness of Avignon is miles away from the decadently spice laden Jaisalmer. The series has come to define the post-modern incense perfume genre, particularly the one-two punch of Avignon and Kyoto from the infamous Bertrand Duchaufour.
The most glaring omission from the Incense series is a perfume for Judaism. I have found myself standing at the Comme des Garcons display more than once, thinking on this hypothetical: what would this perfume smell like if one were to extend the Incense line? It has always seemed a missed opportunity to me, and I never really thought another nose would take world religions as inspiration for a perfume in this way again.
Then along came Ma Nishtana.
Prin Lomros is a perfumer on the rise. Thai born and based, he is talented, creative, subversive, and prolific. His most recent perfumes have been in collaboration with Zoologist but he has multiple brands to his name including Prin, Prissana, and the playful Strangers Parfumerie line. It can be confusing to figure out exactly what Lomros made for which brand, and how it all fits together. Ma Nishtana is from the Prissana line, which is the most expensive of Lomros' output. The Prissana line are heavy and serious perfumes, all extrait strength and inspired by the opulence of the Middle Eastern perfume tradition. Their composition is also rooted in vintage scents and it shows: they are similar to the Papillon line from Liz Moores in terms of their complexity and intricate structure.
The note list for Ma Nishtana, like all of the perfumes in the Prissana line, is immense - it includes saffron, amber, aldehyde, frankincense, styrax, black pepper, labdanum, castoreum, clove, and allspice.
The first remarkable thing about Ma Nishtana is that it is an incense perfume without a dominant smoky note. It is the easy path to make an incense perfume heavy with the sweet-acrid scent of burnt things. But incense has a fragrance before it’s burned, and in my opinion the perfumes that are the truest incenses - Avignon, Bois d’Encens (Armani) - avoid the campfire smoke altogether and focus on the other facets of incense, the pine-lemon sharpness of frankincense or the creaminess of myrrh. When you smell a perfume like Ma Nishtana you realise that other fragrances that automatically pair incense with smoke are doing this note a disservice.
The frankincense in Ma Nishtana is in the Comme des Garcons style: clear, bright, and cold. It is the iron core of this perfume, and though there are about fifty other things swirling around in here it retains this clarity from opening to drydown. This is a remarkable feat: the reason that scents like Avignon are so simple is that pairing frankincense with anything else tends to overwhelm the note, and it becomes lost in the background. But Ma Nishtana stubbornly holds on to its frankincense, reinforcing it with some fizzy aldehydes in the opening and then a very Biblical companion in myrrh, another incense note, into the drydwon. Myrrh always smells to me like a tragic starlet in a 1920’s silent film, opulent and macabre, and so it smells here. It brings a depth and decadence to this perfume.
But this is only part of Ma Nishtana’s story. At times, this perfume smells like it has every incense note in perfumery fading in and out. Along with frankincense, the most prominent of these is a stunning nag champa accord. You know those YouTube cooking shows where they take fast food and make fancier, gourmet versions? Ma Nishtana smells like someone has taken nag champa, that cheap incense you get in the blue and white packaging from the hippie store, and done the perfumer's equivalent.
Nag champa is an artificial incense scent comprised of sandalwood and either champaca, jasmine, frangipani, or a mix of all three. Ma Nishtana smells like the most expensive nag champa in the world is simmering away inside it - the real Mysore sandalwood, the night blooming jasmine from the finest fields. It smells like creamy wood and dried flowers, rich and dusty and warm. I have never liked the smell of nag champa, but I am fascinated by the platonic ideal of this scent in Ma Nishtana.
The last great player in Ma Nishtana are the spices. There is a huge slug of warm spices in the base here, cloves and allspice and caraway. These spices are there to emphasise the incense notes, to make them warmer and well rounded, buffing this perfume out until it is rich and full and potent enough that even the tiniest spray will expand to fill an entire room. The base is powdery and resinous with labdanum and styrax and a touch of patchouli. But these are supporting players to the central frankincense-nag champa heart of this scent.
Ma Nishtana is deeper, darker, and richer than nag champa or frankincense or spices could ever be on their own. It takes other notes and revolves them around that incense heart, emphasising it but never losing clarity. This is an incense perfume, a spiritual perfume - this is a perfume for prayer.
Ma Nishtana is the beginning of the phrase ‘Why is this night different from all other nights?’, and is traditionally spoken by the youngest person at the table during a Passover Seder. If we take the Abrahamic religions and generalise terribly, naming Christianity as ‘West’ and Islam as ‘East’, then Judaism is somewhere in the middle; both and neither; the parent religion from which the others all flowed. If we take Ma Nishtana as a perfume inspired by Judaism, then it meets the brief in by doing something I have never smelled before: it attempts to combine the cold, stark frankicense of an Avignon with the warm, resinous spice of a Jaisalmer and the powdery smell of joss sticks in a Buddhist temple.
The contrarian reading this is going to say, ‘Casbah does that!’ And Casbah (Robert Piguet) is a grand perfume indeed, a cardamom and frankincese bomb that will last for days in a room after you have sprayed it. But it is centered on frankincense alone, much like Avignon. It is not a spiritual perfume but an atmospheric one - it wants to evoke the souk, not the synagogue. Ma Nishtana aim is higher and its reach is further - it is a deeply spiritual perfume, meditative and almost somber.
The reason why we associate incense with religion is clear: we burn it in temples and churches and on our altars. The harder question is: why do we burn incense here? Why has humanity been using incense to make spaces spiritual for thousands of years? There is something in the scent of resins and agarwood and even nag champa that makes us feel like there must be a greater power, that there must be something more - something divine must have made this. Incense smells like it is beyond our understanding. This is what you burn when you ponder the mysteries of God.
Ma Nishtana knows its place in the world and is cleverly composed to show that one does not need to use oud to make a Middle Eastern inspired incense perfume. Incense is the very definition of a Middle Eastern note in all its forms. In Ma Nishtana, Lomros has taken the incense perfume styles of East and West and brought them back to the middle like a homecoming. It makes sense as a perfume when it shouldn't - there's too many things happening all at once, too much shouting, the spices and the fatty aldehydes, the pepper and the norlimbanol (a loud woody-amber) in the base. But the cacophony is what makes it so masterful; somewhere in the midst of hundreds of notes and a handful of clashing perfume styles, Lomros has found the balance.
Ma Nishtana is beautiful but slightly unbearable, overwhelming and room-filling. You can see a mind moving behind the curtains in the composition of this scent, as you can in all great perfumery. Ma Nishtana is extrait strength and costs an eye-watering $215 AUD for 30ml - but it is the rare, rare perfume that might actually be worth the cost.
I am not Jewish, and I have never participated in a Seder. But from what I understand of Passover it is about telling a story, sharing a history, and bringing tradition to life for the younger generations. You hear the tale of Exodus and you perform the rituals and through them you become a part of the story too - as its custodian. This is the type of spirituality that Ma Nishtana evokes; there is a feeling of memory as you smell it. This is the scent of something that has been passed down to us, generation by generation, all the way back to the time of Solomon and Sheba. It is one of the most remarkable incense perfumes I’ve come across, and I encourage you to seek out Ma Nishtana too. Smell it, inhale it, adore it - and then pass it along. ★★★★★
Some Housekeeping
I've been away longer than I planned to. Things in the non-digital world have been hectic lately, and I never want to post something to Incense and Orris that has not been given the time and attention it deserves. I wanted very much to have this ready to publish when Substack featured I&O on their front page, but sadly missed it. To everyone who has joined during and since then, welcome.
Along with more Dispatches, I have quite a few projects brewing: some more House Overviews, from budget to indie to designer to more niche; an article on fragrances not found in perfumes; a look at perfume literature and my own perfume library; a deep dive into a notoriously chaotic chain store that also happens to sell fragrances; the next Q&A; and a handful of history and culture projects.
Those who follow me on Instagram will know that I got a brand new order of perfume samples this week. My office is now wall to wall scents, overlapping each other and giving the uninitiated (which is to say, the rest of my family) a headache. But I am in heaven. First impressions have been noted and I look forward to the weeks to come as I wear these perfumes and really puzzle them out on skin. As such, I'm not ready to review any of them yet, but look for some in depth reviews along with my quick Instagram story thoughts on these artisan scents in the coming weeks. It is winter in my corner of the world, which is the very best time to smell perfume - and to write about it, too.
That’s all for now!
Wow, I need to find a sample of Ma Nishtana ASAP — it sounds right up my alley!