Rose Essay VII – A Surface of Translucency: ‘L’Eau de Chloé’ by Michel Almairac

Imagine a soft white gallery space. The roof and walls overhead are glass, filtered with screens to protect the space from direct sunlight. The room shimmers with diffused emerald light, flooding across floors and walls from high shaded windows. This from reflections of the grass outside, like motes of chlorophyll floating in space.

The room is empty except for a single work hanging on a vast white industrial wall. From a distance the work consists of a single image of a calamine rose on a white ground. Some texture, engraved marks in the white. No frame. But as you move closer you realise the rose is warmer, deeper in tone with tiny flashes of mauve through the captured images of the petals. The winter background is in fact washed with a subtle soft shade of green, a diluted sap tone that has settled into tiny imperfections across the canvas. Underneath the green there are tiny traces of violet and pink, washed off and the new work inscribed above, palimpsest-like.

This is how I breathe, feel and imagine L’Eau de Chloé; the latest incarnation of Chloé by Michel Almairac who also created the smash hit original all-conquering rose scent from 2008. Chloé hit a chord, the marketing campaigns were superb and the juice itself was a stylish and non-threatening blend of aspirational warm sexuality. Most of all everything felt feminine, empowered and right.

There have been other fragrances since then, the hypnotic Love Chloé (super sexy campaign…) and the oddly clinical Eau des Fleurs collection of Capucine, Neroli and Lavande. But this new interpretation of the original Chloé for me is the best so far. Almairac has pulled the elements apart and reconfigured what made the original so addictive and still managed to reassemble the parts into something fresh and utterly captivating. The most important aspect of this new scent is the articulate use of naturally distilled rose water that flows through the entire composition. This transforms the notes, coalescing the whole into a dewy palette of extraordinary delicacy and conversely steely strength and persistence.

On first application it seems as if the entire composition has been drenched with rose water, it suffuses everything. It smells and feels like one of those perfect all American verdant lawns, bordered with white picket fences, watered by the hypnotic put-put-put of a water sprinkler. But Almairac is a master of subtlety and impressionism as he proved last year with the soft floral leather he created for Bottega Veneta. His impressionistic portrait of a room with leather-bound books, open windows, grasses, flowers, the walls witness to subtle generational wealth with mannered grace and an appreciation for beauty made the fragrance a near perfect exercise in perfumed restraint and elegance.

There are lovely glistening citrus notes of cedrat and grapefruit at the top of L’Eau de Chloé, both of these ingredients have bright, sharp aspects to them, but a certain sweetness too, cutting gently through the headier more sugared tones of violet, rose and sweet peach. I do detect a underlying cocktail facet to the design of the scent, as if a dash of rose syrup was slugged into a Bellini mix, or perhaps rose petals bruised in the glass with ice then the cocktail poured over.        

The base notes are cedarwood, amber and patchouli. Heavy sounding, but in reality, warming, supportive and very sensual. The amber especially gives the rose water a glow as it settles. Last year’s deliciously juicy Rose

Water & Vanilla from Jo Malone was a textbook lesson in how to use rose water, sprinkled from on high with laughter and spices, cold and silvery, like mountain spring water giggling through snowy rocks. Almairac has used the rose water in L’Eau de Chloé to soothe, seduce and caress the senses. The initial freshness drops away and reveals little wafts of vintage face powder; a delightful retro note tucked away in the witty use of violet and rose petals. But oh I love the translucency, the elegance with which the layers have carefully draped over one another to enhance the initial gauzy gulp of happiness that comes when you first spray it. Because that’s what you get, a sense of joy.

Perfumes rarely make me smile; I tend to be of a darker hue in my outlook on life. However, this fragrance did made me smile, albeit fleetingly. It’s not doing anything radically new (granted the rosewater flushed through it is invitingly innovative) and yet it feels somehow like it is.

I made a couple of student films when I was younger with student filmmakers who worked at the same arthouse cinema as me. It was chaotic and fun. And I died a little every time I watched myself. One of the films had a scene filmed in grainy Super 8 style video in a field where I had to walk toward a man near a tree in very bright sunlight. I had a boa, I can’t remember why now; I probably just suited it then. I trailed a cigarette in one hand, the other raised to shield my eyes from the sun. My hair was so long back then and whipped around my face. The music that played over the final version was weird and melancholy, but I was a lover, lost then found, meeting the flame of my life beneath a tree where we carved an anchor into the bark to celebrate our desire. As I lived with the L’Eau de Chloé scent on my skin, wearing it for several days, it was this weird scene of me swaying almost drunkenly through high grass, smoking and laughing in the bright summer sun that kept playing over and over again into my head. And I realised how much I loved the fragrance, the wealth of rose, the powder and dew, the retro violet and the kindly way it wrapped the skin in just the right amount of memory.    

For more info on this delightful fragrance, click below:

http://www.chloe.com/#/collections/fragrance/chloé/eau-de-chloe/en

Chocolate Essay II – Feral Taste of Desire: ‘Chocolat Amère’ by Il Profvmo

Chocolat Amère by Il Profvmo is my touchstone chocolate fragrance, dark and bitter, it sits on the skin like lacquer. A masculine chocolate, designed to settle into moaning darkness and fever dreams. I have never tired of it and every time I wear it I am asked what I have on. It turns heads; people sniff the air expectantly, searching for an animalic trail, a whiff of hunt. It is not something I ever thought I’d find in a chocolate scent.

Il Profvmo was founded by Italian aromatherapist and cosmetologist Silvana Casoli. She recently created a bespoke scent for Pope Benedict XVI, inspired in part by the Pontiff’s alleged hankering for his beloved Black Forest. The fragrance has notes of lime blossom and grasses. Silvana has already authored two fragrances for the Catholic church; Acqua Della Speranza (Water of Hope) and Acqua Della Feda (Water of Faith). I like the uneasy mix of sacred and profane in her work. The classic Catholic dichotomy. Nice to see it pop up in fragrance, albeit rather glibly. The website is a little disappointing, poor info, typos and an irritating soundtrack. It’s a pity because the range is underrated and has some very special things buried amid the rather messy graphics and orientation issues.

The fragrances are often hard to find (Luckyscent, Amazon weirdly…only a few though). I came across them in Harvey Nichols in Edinburgh who as usual stocked them for six months, failed to promote them properly, buried them away in the corners of their perfumery with Rancé and then discontinued them saying they didn’t sell. This is the HN way. But you do stumble across them in the oddest places: a clothing store in Amsterdam, niche homeware stores in Manchester, department stores in Moscow.    

Casoli’s perfumed oeuvre is intriguing and varied, ranging from floral fragrances to gourmand interpretations, spicy and green offerings and interesting experiments in abstraction. Two other favourites from the line are Nuda and Macadam. Nuda is skin incarnate, supposedly skin in ecstasy, but it has a disarmingly creamy softness that tugs the mind between carnality and comfort. The use of white musks is billowing and layered perfection. The perfumed expression of Renaissance marble.

Macadam is the perfumed personification of Roger Vivier patent shoes skipping along springtime Parisian streets, water flung from flower shops, freshly washed hair, a touch of pavement, a whiff of car, that special early vibration of Paris mornings. It is a very odd scent, a gentle collision of floral, green, forest and musky powder. It works, audaciously, just.

The range also has a range of oil-based fragrances called Osmo Absolus. These are quite something. The website has lots of puffery about evaporations curves, skin osmosis…. blah blah. But the reality is a line of well-made oil based scents with warm and lingering drydowns that rise constantly from skin to the brain. I have tried three. They are intense, with complex body interactions. They drop into the skin and then work out their own way to smell. I loved the Patchouli Noir, this smelt astonishing as a base under the Chocolat Amère, ramping up the truffly woody aspect of the cocoa bean. The Vanille Bourbon is sweet and silky, gorgeous for vanilla lovers like me. And the Musc Bleu is a glittering intensity of skin musk. It smells like turning the lights off and turning to realise your lover is glowing in the dark like white fire.

I have a real passion for chocolate. I love it cheap and sweet, white and fleshy, truffly and serotonin boostingly deep. I’m not a chocolate snob, I like the elegance of high percentage cocoa solids with roasted nuts and black cherries say or just on its own melted in the mouth with clarifying Earl Grey Tea. But I crave the simple rush of Cadburys milky smoothness too. It’s a mood thing.

It’s the same with chocolate in my fragrances. Sometimes, I want the dramatic cocoa show of Amour de Cacao by Comptoir Sud Pacifique or the milky peach fuzz softness of the original Omnia by Bulgari, white chocolate notes and mandarin. My skin adores the new Angel flanker, part of The Taste of Fragrance series, a collaboration with Parfums Mugler and Helene Darrouze, the Michelin starred chef, based at the Connaught in London. A huge whoosh of dark cocoa has been added to the original candyfloss and caramel infused formula. The result is quite beautiful, red berry rich, truffly and skin-lickingly sensual. Musc Maori by Parfumerie Generale is another favourite, white musks, coffee, cocoa bean, tonka and vanilla. But strong and woody, with tremendous verve and personality, the man in the room you just can’t stop looking at out of the corner of your eye. Something I sampled recently and can’t stop thinking about is Greedy Chocolate by Montale, the purveyors of all things oud. Love the name alone. It is glossy chocolate ganache with orange smeared undertones and a massive lashing of dirty vanilla. Very odd and really should not work. Like the dessert you know you really should not have, but god it tastes amazing. Cocoa, moka bean, bitter orange and vanilla; the notes are simple but balanced with a patisserie chef’s master hand.

One of the first chocolate gourmand scents I remember owning and loving was Eau de Charlotte by Annick Goutal, created for her daughter in 1982. The subtlety and delicacy of the gourmand notes is interlaced with cassis, mimosa and vanilla. It is a very French fragrance, the pale yellow tones of mimosa drifting across a breakfast scene of bread, jam and warm hot chocolate. Like many perfumes, it has specific memories folded through it for me: of a boy, tattooed with random text from Baudelaire, sharing my Sunday breakfast over a rough-hewn wooden board, scattering crumbs over smoky trashed sheets. Kisses tasting of chocolate and Bonne Maman jam.

It’s the contradiction of sweet stuff on skin that draws us in. The gourmand thing has gone AWOL these days, with so many dizzying permutations of sweetness. Caramel, strawberries, toffee, licquorice, milk, hazelnut, popcorn and of course every style of chocolate known…..But a counterpointing is needed to fan the flames of sweet desire, to enhance the feral qualities of good chocolate; a touch of shadow, some vibrating rose damascones, vetiver bourbon, deep shrubby patchouli, Madagascan vanilla, tobacco, creamy orchid or indolic Casablanca lily.  

The Aztecs made the raw cocoa bean into a cold drink called xocolātl, a Nuhuatl word meaning bitter water. The beans were fermented and the drink was consumed in vast quantities with presumed aphrodisiac qualities. The Mayans preferred their version of the beverage warm and this appealed to the voracious Spanish invaders who took the bean home to Europe in the 16^th Century. It was hugely popular at the Spanish court and spread across Europe. The first chocolate house opened in London in 1657.

Some of like us like it dark, some of us like it sweet. Chocolate I think can be rather telling. White chocolate is baby soft and safe, the chocolate equivalent of the missionary position with the lights off and no talking. Milk is comfort, oozing and creamy, skin-like and lickable. We know this stuff, Cadburys, Galaxy, the melt in the mouth, the sensation, the chemistry.

This was done so well in Missoni Missoni by Maurice Roucel, a masterpiece of floral gourmand counterpointing. The milk chocolate notes are tempered with magnolia, peony, orange, Japanese apple and amber. The Italian love of hazelnuts is woven through it giving the composition a soft kiss-kiss drydown that is dewy and highly addictive. Missoni later released Gianduja, a massively ramped up nutella-tastic scent (with added praline and hazelnut facets) that just reeked of smeared animalic amber and chocolate. I loved it. Smelt kinda morning after sexy on me. Although occasionally it made me feel like I’d been at a Nutella orgy and passed out somewhere after the foil was broken on jar three…

A near perfect essay on the history of chocolate was created by Bertrand Duchaufour for L’Artisan Parfumeur. Released in 2002, Piment Brûlant was inspired by the Aztec chocolate love potions downed by Montezuma before he visited the women in his harem. A creamy raw chocolate note has been blended with red pepper lending the composition a bizarre red-hot and sweet combo like sugar dusted electricity. A really gorgeous silvered poppy seed facet mingles with clove and vanilla to round off this abstracted gourmand scent. It was launched originally with Olivia Giacobetti’s Safran Troublant and Poivre Piquant, also by Bertrand. The collection was called Les Epices de la Passion, all three fragrances promoted with an aphrodisiac angle. I love the way Piment Brulant sits on my skin, the chilli smells like freshly cut bell pepper as the scent opens out. The chocolate has a fabulous raw edge to it, like sniffing melted 90% cocoa, earthy and dirtysexy. Along with the Chocolat Amère, it has the feel and drugginess of real quality cocoa.

As an aside…….Amid the recent Mugler reboots, the only one I didn’t like was the Amen re-orchestration, with red chilli shot through the original gourmand formula of coffee, chocolate, musks, lavender and tonka. Oddly the element of red heat unbalanced what for me is already a rather chaotic and thin scent. Smelt like putting your tongue to the knife that cut the chocolate and chilli. Cold, oily and metallic with a little tingle of fire. Not impressive.

But lets return to the theme of chocolate as a revealer of sensual types… Dark chocolate is bitter, smooth and to be savoured in small quantities with a fine port perhaps or an aged malt. There is elitism in the high solids, the upper echelons of darkness. There is an implied sense of connoisseurship and appreciation of fine craftsmanship in the consumption of the bitter, darker cocoas, either on their own, single estate bars, or concoctions designed to enhance the beauty of the bean.

As with fragrance, chocolate flavourings have gotten a little crazy. I do like sea salt and caramel blends. Sea salt on its own it very odd and works well with a fine green tea. I sampled some herb chocolates last year, and liked one with tiny echoes of sage running through it. Nutmeg is a favourite note of mine and black tea as well. I’ve tasted Islay malts, damson and mushroom in dark chocolate recently and found these bleak, dank notes marry well with the brooding nature of dark chocolate. It seems the darker cocoa lover is the person who can whisper your name and melt the skin from your bones.                   

The reason Chocolat Amère works is the witty and handsome blending of materials. Like a man who knows how to put together his fabrics with subtlety and grace, the fragrance presents itself with warmth, passion and understated elegance. The gourmand facets of the scent are played off against spices and white flowers. As in Roucel’s Missoni Missoni, where a similar counterpointing plays out between the sweetening flutter of magnolia and peony with the rootier chocolate, amber and hazelnut facets. The keynote in Chocolate Amère is the galbanum, the earthy resin that gives classic fragrances like Must de Cartier, Balmain’s Vent Vert and Penhaligon’s cult Bluebell their distinctive woody, green aroma. Cut with the bitterness of dark chocolate and lit through with incense and spices (particularly a lovely rounded sweet nutmeg note), the galbanum lifts the whole gourmand accord to an altogether more complex atmospheric experience. The dispersion rate of the structure seems to spread like the cooling of quality ganache on marble.

I know a lot of people deplore the rise of gourmand notes in perfumery, but with studied application of chemistry and natural oils the results can be sensual and deeply satisfying. There is the strange struggle between comfort and desire that plays out in our mind as we inhale the sweetness on skin, be it our own or the skin we’re loving. The transition from a state of comfort and spooning to licking, clawing and fucking can be shockingly sudden and feral. This beautifully rendered portrait of dark chocolate desire reeks of this.   

For more info on Il Profvmo and Silvana Casoli's fragrances, please follow link below. 

http://www.ilprofumoshop.com/

Touching Skin in the Dark:‘Perfect Sense’ directed by David Mckenzie Part II

Perfect Sense is filmed on location in Glasgow. The city is elegantly utilised, alternatively desolate and vibrant. It was used as a location for one of my favourite films, Death Watch (1980) by Bertrand Tavernier, starring Harvey Keitel about a man who has a camera implanted in his head so he can record the last days of a dying woman played by a luminous Romy Schneider. Sadly, it was Schneider’s last film and torn apart for American release. The European version is excellent (if you van get hold of it), dark, brooding and amazingly prescient about the ghastly scramble for the horrors of reality television. I saw it years ago and Glasgow glowered off the screen. It came back to me very vividly while watching Perfect Sense, the streets and shadows, the architecture and very particular Scottish light. The city is very much a character, the Clyde, the Necropolis, the bustling wide streets, the banter. Having worked and partied in Glasgow, it was interesting to see the city’s unique blend of industrial and architectural splendour serve a domestic and pandemic backdrop.

As Michael and Susan’s love grows deeper and darker, the emotions become more exposed and raw. They realise the endgame is coming and need to face themselves and love as much as they can. The film raises an age-old adage of what to do or say as time runs out. A scene where they photograph themselves with redundant Polaroid film stock and watch the image develop is very moving.

Their intimacy, kissing, sex and togetherness are very emotive, driven partly by an awareness of time fading. As with all of McKenzie’s films, sex and nudity is natural and urgently sensual. Both Green and McGregor flash great skin, comfortable in themselves and each other. It seems real somehow, fitted together.

Eva Green is a beautiful woman, at her best in this kind of role it seems, a damaged control freak, afraid to let go, longing for love but terribly afraid of the consequences. She is a strange actress, at once incandescent and angry, then tear-swept and terribly moving. Her chemistry with McGregor is palpable and their movement toward something meaningful in the face of multi sensory failure and darkness holds you tight throughout the film.  

Michael slowly unravels as his love for Susan blooms and the virus robs him of his senses. McGregor is sometimes accused of being a somewhat shallow actor, surface and little depth. But in Perfect Sense, his movement into the light of love and connection to Susan are committed and emotive. Their scenes together have urgency and a naturalness that makes the oncoming darkness so painful to contemplate.

Perfect Sense depicts a world where we are brutally stripped of the things that define us: emotion, memory, smell, sound, and vision. We are asked to re-negotiate our connections to our loves, environment and ourselves. This was never going to be easy. Many fail; there is rage and violence, tragedy and loss. But also humanity and luminosity amid the chaos and pain. The scene where the characters are overcome with insatiable hunger and devour anything around them is hard to watch. Susan crams roses in her mouth in a deserted car park while the woman she clings to desperately chews on a lipstick from her bag. The hunger subsides. Calm is restored, but the unsettling nature of the scene means we are aware that the virus can burn like fire, consuming without pity.

Virus as metaphor is nothing new. The consumer endgame. The modern fatigue of living, our inability to connect, lost in ourselves, manifest in paranoid disease. Perfect Sense is stylised suffering, an exploration of our tenuous connection to our world and how we really feel, if indeed we really feel anything at all.    

I was immensely moved by the film’s exploration of loss; the disappearance of scent and the subsequent spiraling away of associated memories. Never again would the complexities of the brain’s limbic system be triggered by yeast or a split vanilla pod, a snuffed candle or the eerie sweet scent of concrete after summer rain. All of that would be gone forever. This is an unbearable thought. These are huge themes and sometimes the film staggers a little under the weight of them. Some reviews have sniped at the low budget aspect of the film, but so many films have been killed by hubris, sunk by the dazzle of overwrought CGI. The virus and its devastation are realised in subtle detail. It is a human tragedy, not a special effects one. It is also a human drama. We have all the emotion we need to witness in the love and lives of Michael and Susan. The recent nervy coverage of bird flu, foot & mouth and SARS outbreaks has shown us all too easily how the world reacts to potential pandemics.

The final semi-apocalyptic scenes of the film mirror the terrible conflicts within the lives of our protagonists. More senses fade. Communications collapse. The last terrible stages of the virus are rendered beautifully as the world rages against the dying of the light. Michael and Susan stumble their way toward one other in the film’s moving final scenes. I hardly dared breathe. And then I sat and wept.       

Perfect Sense is a remarkable film. It was virtually unnoticed on release. David McKenzie also directed Young Adam and Hallam Foe, two other unique and challenging films. Hallam Foe is still Jamie Bell’s best performance and Young Adam reminded everyone just how extraordinary Tilda Swinton was and revived interest in Scottish beat writer Alexander Trocchi. McKenzie has an eye for abstraction, oddness and offbeat sensuality. There is great emotion too; the twisted loneliness of Jamie Bell in Hallam Foe and the incredible pent up sexuality and bitter frustration of Swinton in Young Adam.    

  

I must mention the score. A haunting marriage of strings and heart by Max Richter. Mournful and romantic, it travels through the film, wrapping itself in and out of the character’s lives. It has insistence and subtlety, a gentle sobbing harmony and wide emotive spaces. I listen to it a lot and as soon as it starts I see the film rise up around me, vibrant and alive.

Watch this film. It will move you. As someone who spends a lot of time smelling things and obsessing about scent and the importance of memory; studying olfactory connotations past, present and future, Perfect Sense really affected me, got under my skin, made me ponder and analyse my connections to myself and my scented anchors. I looked at what I loved and wondered…is this enough?

The concept of the SOS virus is terrifying, ruthlessly wiping out what we are, wiping our senses, obfuscating our memories, leaving us behind as something else. Something empty.  

In the end, we must touch skin in the darkness and learn to love differently or not love at all. 

Touching Skin in the Dark: ‘Perfect Sense’ directed by David Mckenzie Part I

Without warning you are inconsolable, grief rips you apart, you are overwhelmed by what might have been, ghosts of past lovers, shadows and memories of the departed. You are poleaxed. Bus drivers come to a stop and sob at the wheel. People howl at the sky. A traffic warden falls to her knees and weeps uncontrollably in a bright sunny street.

Your world of recollection is under assault. Memories are fragmenting. Then without any warning, your sense of smell vanishes. Suddenly you are asnomic. The one sense linked directly to memory, the slideshow and album of who you are, the elusive movie flickering with faces, places, sounds and scents. Gone.

This is the disturbing scenario played out in David McKenzie’s poignantly crafted film ‘Perfect Sense’, starring Ewan McGregor and Eva Green tentatively trying to love as the world falls away from them. It is described as sci-fi/thriller. It is really neither. There are elements of both, but it is essentially a love story, of complex and painful love, born against the odds, a race against oncoming darkness. It is also an atmospheric exploration of our relationship with our senses and how they connect to us to each other and the world around us. 

The sci-fi references refer to the unknown virus that suddenly appears across the globe causing the initial symptoms of grief and asnomia. It doesn’t kill, but infiltrates the world, causing crashing waves of sadness, followed by the loss of smell. With it goes memory. There are periods of adjustment as people seem to adapt and move on, waiting to see what will happen next. The virus moves like SARS or bird flu, quietly, calmly. It is an epidemic, unpredictable, but with momentum and insidious intent.  

First, overwhelming grief and then no sense of smell. That’s the disease. They call it Severe Olfactory Syndrome. SOS.

A strange and hypnotic voice over by Kathy Engels narrates the breakdown of world order and associated progression of the virus and its mutations. These global glimpses flicker throughout the film, in clips of film and stills. They are shot beautifully with verve and immediacy. Cut with footage of real war, pandemic coverage and riots, the images lend urgency and despair to the central claustrophobic love story.

Ewan McGregor is cast In Perfect Sense as a lad about town chef, busy, stylish and oddly empty. He is aging well. Chunkier, more sensual. I like him as an actor, I know many don’t. He has a presence and charm on screen and takes risks many actors are not prepared to take. He can be intensely sexual, loving, moving and amusing. He can also be flat, dull and just god-awful. (The Island anyone?). But his work in Velvet Goldmine by Todd Haynes, The Pillow Book for Peter Greenaway, Young Adam, also by David McKenzie, the more recent and utterly charming Beginners and his fabulously fey southern turn in I love You Phillip Morris have showcased his charm and versatility.

In Perfect Sense he is Michael, charismatic, grinning and full of the banter. Never falling in love, loving sex, loving the ladies, but unable to commit, unable to even sleep in his own bed if there is someone in it with him. He likes to keep his distance. The TV chef style vacancy suits his character; he loves his work, surrounded by a white suited posse of chefs, sous-chefs and underlings. A nice touch is the restaurant owner played by his real-life uncle Denis Lawson.

Eva Green is Susan, an epidemiologist, working at one of the city’s main hospitals. Her apartment overlooks the back of Michael’s restaurant and so fate starts to meddle. She and her colleagues desperately struggle to understand the nature and intent of the virus. I must admit I am not the greatest fan of Eva Green; she can be a cold performer, whose strange predatory beauty is rarely served well on screen. For many she will always be Vesper Lynd. She was truly beautiful and original in the role and made you understand why Bond might mourn and kill forever.

Her French/Swedish mélange gives her a hooded sensuality that calls to mind the dangerous and unsettling magnetism of Charlotte Rampling. But whereas Rampling has always been open to exploring the darkness within, Eva Green has for me been a little disappointing in her career arc to date, relying on a lot of nudity and rather blunt performances. Her role in Sparks, directed by Jordan Scott last year was excellent however, playing an enigmatic teacher causing sensual mayhem at an all girls school. A kind of debauched Miss Brodie. Her oddness and detachment serve her well in Perfect Sense. She haunts the film. Unable to have children and filled with memories of a father she adored, she is emotionally adrift and buried in her research.

Susan and Michael’s tentative courtship and deepening love plays out against the viral backdrop of the sensory epidemic as the worlds slips slowly into degrees of panic and recovery. There is no closure, no predictability, and no patterns. Just a disturbing certainty that one by one the senses will erode and vanish.    

It is a simple yet shattering premise. A global sensory loss. Watching it unfold through the lens of Susan and Michael’s relationship is very moving, as they stumble into their love, ignite it and fight to keep it burning as all the normal markers of everyday life and living are stripped away.

The virus rolls across the world like water. Susan and Michael are weighed down by memory. Her father, his guilty visits to his mother’s grave. Their strained and fevered sexual encounters. As is usual with these films, a lot of time is spent convincing you that beautiful people are essentially unhappy. It does not quite pull that off, but Eva Green does melancholy rather beautifully with her baleful eyes and flattened out delivery of lines. There are moments however when she smiles; it feels like sun burning through rain.

McGregor stumbles a little with the big emotions from time to time; they play out a little too obviously across his face and delivered with the eager shine of drama school role-playing. But he grows into his persona and as his feelings really take hold and he realises what he might lose and what it left to hold onto, he becomes quiet hypnotic to watch, digging into something primal to express his last chance at loving someone.

The virus defines them. They are witnesses to each other’s debilitating grief. She weeps for the memory of her father who called everyone sailor. He cries next to her in the dark of the bed. In the morning, they calmly realise their sense of smell has vanished and their world has shifted forever. It is startling to watch and reminds us how connected to the sense of smell we are. With its loss goes a myriad connections to the past.    

The greater loss are the memories that are no longer triggered. Smell and memory are connected in the brain. Cinnamon might’ve reminded you of your grandmother’s apron. The scent of cut hair could evoke a childhood fear of cows. Diesel oil might bring back memories of your first ferry crossing. Without smell, an ocean of past images disappears.

The world rages. More senses fail. Cities weep, riot and slowly crumble. All this is seen in a series of reportage flashes intercut with glimpses of Michael and Susan struggling to work and love as the parameters of routine are eaten away. There are attempts at normality, re-adjustment. Smell becomes texture and sound. There is a wonderful scene where a street performer engages a group of people including Michael and Susan with music and touch; she uses a leaf drawn across a cheek, pungent words, a bow quivering on strings to evoke the smells of the forest where the leaf might have once hung.

Things become ultra sweet, ultra sharp. The sounds of the restaurant are thrown more sharply into focus, the sound of place settings, wine in the glass, a knife on a plate, conversation. McKenzie and his cinematographer Gilles Nuttgen use some luminous images, a multitude of simple yet complex concepts. Fluttering trash, masked cyclists, sunlit pipe bands, a love of shadowed rooms, religious fanatics, doomsayer’s tears and feverish skin.

  

Pageant Crack: ‘Princess Night’ by Vera Wang

We have all glimpsed the surreal and saccharine images of toddlers spinning and glittering on gaudy little catwalks. It exerts a weird and sugary if unhealthy fascination, the competitive moms, the terrifying razzmatazz and the channeling of frustrated dreams. But there is a terrible pathos too; echoes of lost prom nights, endless evenings spent gazing at TV movies, dreaming of stardom. All of this focused ruthlessly into preening and disturbingly garbed tots knocking back go-go juice before parading for trophy after trophy cheered on by air-punching moms. So it felt incredibly weird when I smelt the new Vera Wang Princess Night, all I could think of was so-called pageant crack…the now infamous go-go juice…sugar and dizzying sweetness and an unsettling poisoned darkness; this closed little world of suspended sequined belief and frustrated dreams. Scent rocks the mind in some strange and surreal ways.  

Princess Night is pitched a few notches above the other Princess offerings. They have all been tooth aching sweet and somewhat disposable. But, my defenses are down; I’m a little out of love with niche just now, bored with high concept and art-house fragranced pretention. I go through phases like this. I just want something to drown in. Britney’s Circus Fantasy was an awesome find, glow in the dark raspberry and porny lip-gloss lip locking. The spray and go equivalent of the richly saturated imagery of Mert & Marcus, dripping models and poreless skins. Dolce & Gabbana’s Roue de la Fortune was another guilty pleasure, a little more Miles Aldridge, all pina colada rush and plastic jasmine, glossed up flesh lit against stained and dripping walls. Trash is about subversion and transgression. Pushing the unexpected. Hardly anyone I know expects me to rock up in Princess Night, hence the fun and sexiness in wearing it.   

I loved all the controversy about the so-called pageant crack or go-go juice, supposedly poured down the little things before they went on. A mix of Red Bull and Mountain Dew, a popular fizzy drink, it buzzed them and then caused massive tantrum crashes. I watched the scary tinseled Honey Boo Boo swigging back on a bottle and then strutting her sequined pinkified stuff. Car crash TV at its best.

Princess Night has heady gulping qualities, swigging addictive top notes, ubiquitous wild berries, raspberries and a strange watermelon note that for a moment smells startlingly real then shatters into sherbet and cream. It is a little grimy and smudged as it settles. The kisses more serious, less tweenie, more emotional, more intense. With just a hint of angst.

The ingredients are a roll call of the usual suspects of the neon gourmand: sugar, vanilla and fruits. But the arrangement and management of the notes, the glitter of raspberry, the drip of watermelon is rather impressive. The descent into spiked prom night punch notes of spiced orange and corsage jasmine and rose is weirdly smooth and controlled. There is a tired tantrum kick out to the drydown, a faint slamming door, and a teenage pout of a fade that I couldn’t help but like.

I’m kinda niched out just now and Princess Night caught me. It’s like my weakness for Christina Aguilera ballads; I know they should not make me emotional, but hey they do.

So I bathed in Princess Night’s My Little Pony glow for a while. It was like being a teen again, being incredibly angry and shouty, no-one listening or understanding a chest full of pain. Yet feeling deeply sad and childlike at the same time. Curling up on your bed with a light on, imagining it was a fire on a beach and a boy was whispering your name in the flickering glow.

It’s quite addictive without really knowing why. A passing infatuation. The pale and lovely boy on a bike you see one morning as you hurry to work, the shy girl looking up from her coffee and a second-hand copy of The Great Gatsby. I was hooked to my own skin for hours. Was it too girly, was it even appropriate? It had at its heart that lovely cereal warmth I adore in my beloved Lann Ael by Lostmarc’h.

The gaudy glitter rolled heart shaped bottle is a little cheap and like Honey Boo Boo’s eye-watering ensembles, probably best viewed with half-closed eyes. The so-called pageant crack of Red Bull and Mountain Dew fires up the little tots to spin and sparkle till they crash and burn amid a hyper real universe of competitive surrealism. So the bottle is probably just right.       

There is a time and place for all things. We all have guilty crushes. Films we know are rubbish but laugh and cry at anyway. Disposable pop is its own shimmering art, perfect for forgetful nights as you wander home after stressful workdays. There are days when high art, conceptualism, art-house cinema, laborious lit etc. just irritates and bores me. I’ve been watching London Fashion Week recently and been sooooooo bored by the so-called clothes walking up and down the runways. A lot of print and virtual space has been taken up with discussing London’s return to form, the dynamism, the edginess, and the forwardness. I disagree. It was dull, repetitive, gaudy and actually rather ugly. Swinging between the starry bourgeois acceptance of Burberry Prorsum and Mulberry to the frankly hideous ramblings of Meadham Kirchoff and dull cocktail revisitations of Stella McCartney.

I get so tired of archness. It permeates all levels of consumerism these days. Perfumery is no exception. More and more Houses are toying with abstraction and over-elaborate thematics. The true nature of fragrance, the emotion, the style, the connection to ourselves, our past and our collective memories is being overshadowed in a desire to persuade us that we can wear scent like art, we are potential galleries and can become ‘display’ and ‘interaction’.

Therefore, the relief of liberally applying neon-tastic scent and feeling sensually sinful is rather joyful. The fact that it smells fucking great is of course a bonus. Princess Night has all the exhilarating rush of pageant crack, a fabulous ride of scintillating fairground sweetness, a nighttime ride on the waltzer trying to shout love to someone next to you. Drowning in fruits, vanilla and sugar and holding on tight as the spinning night kicks in.

Now, where are my sequins……?     

For more info on the Vera Wang Princess line, click below: 

http://verawangprincess.com/