ANIMA DULCIS 2023 - ARQUISTE

The cult of Mnemosyne hangs limp over the world of perfumery. It is now, by and large, the task of the perfumer to conjure an impression of place, space, time, in much a similar fashion to the ancient practices of ‘mnemotechnics’ — memorisation and conjuration of images that involves the entire embodied psyche to function. ‘Inspired by the French Riviera’, ‘Inspired by the streets of New York’, ‘Inspired by 1890s London’, and so on ad infinitum. Sometimes, this act of impressing memory via the olfactive falls short. There’s a weird unease that settles on the senses when smelling a perfume that is too obviously and too artificially attempting to engage the wearer in this type of conjuration — it falls by way of pastiche, further still to parody, until it lands into the pit of unfashionable. I’m thinking particularly of D.S and Durga’s Cowboy Grass (sorry!), or even D.S and Durga’s Jazmín Yucatan (sorry again, I think maybe I need to re-try these perfumes, but I found them deeply underwhelming in a way I was not expecting), or Penhaligon’s Oud perfume range. 

Sometimes, this impression works beyond comprehension. 

This is how I feel about Anima Dulcis 2023, helmed by Mexican perfume house Arquiste. Rarely do I feel so deeply affected by a perfume than this, in part due to the fact that it simply works well with my skin, but mainly due to its phantasmic qualities of evocation. Inspired by 17th century viceregal México, the perfume manages to capture a rare seismic olfactory effect. 

The perfume is anchored by Mexican vanilla bean, cocoa bean and chypre —  a foundation of sweet, bitter, woody. The heart contains clove, cumin, huele-de-noche (night jasmine), and a combination of smoked chilis — ancho, guajillo, chipotle. The top, which lightly dances over the heady bases — sesame seed, Mexican cinnamon bark, and Mexican oregano. On first spray, the toasted sesame dominates the profile, leaving a lingering nutty sweetness that binds everything underneath. Sweet, bitter, spicy, anis, floral, smoky. What it produces is not just a simple gourmand scent; but a powerful evocation of the act of cooking itself. It traces the olfactory sensations of the place of cooking — in this instance the Convent of Jesús María in Mexico City. Carlos Huber, Arquiste’s founder, has a history in cultural preservation and architectural research. This scent makes this focus so uniquely clear it teeters on the edge of uncanny. It therefore, more-so than most perfumes who attempt to recreate a spatial and temporal context in their perfumes — anchors it in a specificity that endows the scent with a rich, complex and sensual palette. The mineral notes of terra cotta tiling, the wooden beams, and the stucco walls collide with the gourmand-based notes specific to the cuisine of Mexico City and beyond — smoked chilis, vanilla, sesame, oregano, and cacao. The act is coupled with the place, nestled in the complex matrices of colonial history and indigenous practice; an incredibly skilful exposition of olfactive power that is rare to come by.

This perfume is truly special, and several others in their catalogue are also this impressive, namely Peau, which I also adore. However, the one huge downside is its stomach-churning price, available at £180 for 100ml. However, samples of this are available on the Bloom Perfumery website, and that’s how I’ve been enjoying it (by now I’m on my third sample).

Pairs well with: reading Roberto Bolaño on an airplane, lighting a candle in a cathedral in southern Europe, sitting with friends on a back-garden patio until the sunrise washes over you, drinking vermouth alone, The Exterminating Angel, and cooking for someone you love. 

10/10 could not possibly be rated higher. 

Isidro Escamilla, Virgin of Guadalupe, September 1, 1824. Found on the Brooklyn Museum’s website.

VI ET ARMIS - BEAUFORT

Is there anything more psychically alienating than despising a scent your lover adores? It’s like staring directly at the empty gulf of difference that stretches between all people, and throwing pennies into its pit. It’s the sudden realisation that actually, no matter how hard you try, you will never inhabit someone else’s skin and exist in someone’s mind, and experience their memories, and see the world through their eyes. 

This is how I feel about Beaufort’s Vi Et Armis. 

Now, I have some certain criticisms on the state of British perfumery, and I think Beaufort’s design philosophy exemplifies my critique. There’s a reason there’s not that many famous British perfume houses; we seem stuck in boring nostalgia and a tweeness that verges of nausea-inducing. Take Penhaligons — now I’m not going to criticise the actual perfume construction of Penhaligons because some of the perfumes are genuinely beautiful — but take its ‘brand’. A copywriting style dragged from the depths of a creatively bankrupt flaneur’s diary from 1892, evoking ‘Dandyism’, ‘High Culture’, ‘Style’. It seems British perfume can’t just exist for it’s own creative reasoning, it has to be British. Its the kind of weird luxury patriotism that you don’t find much elsewhere, except in perfume. 

Beaufort takes this approach to perfumery and darkens it, instead choosing to focus on Wars and Power. Without a shred of irony, it’s named after naval officer Francis Beaufort. Beaufort is the other half of the coin of patriotism that Penhaligon’s offers. An uncritical and doggedly nostalgic representation of Britishness that borders on ahistorical. There’s something to be said about how both houses focuses on the 19th century in the core of their design ethos. The time when Britain was ‘Great’. Industry! Innovation! War! Power! Colonialism! Blood! Guts! 

The most famous perfume from Beaufort is 1805 Tonnerre, named after the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar, part of the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century. Now, this scent is actually rather beautiful — smoke, gunpowder, lime, brandy, balsam, amber, salt-water. It’s evocative and violent, unique and metaphorical. However, this isn’t about 1805 but Vi Et Armis. 

On Fragantica, the description for Vi Et Armis writes that it explores ‘Britain’s complex relationships with other nations and its dominance of international trade routes’. Even on Bloom’s website, where this perfume is available for sampling, the copy echoes this idea but goes further, commenting on the use of the East India Company’s main trading materials as a foundation for this perfume’s construction. But on Beaufort’s own website, this connotation is absolutely nowhere to be found. Instead Beaufort describes it as ‘chaos in a bottle’ that is a ‘celebration of that which is smoked’. Interesting. 

The scent is undercut with opium. This is where the allusion to colonialism rears it head; clearly invoking the Opium Wars with the use of the top note lapsing souchong. This is the component that I find personally repulsive to my palate — coming from someone who enjoys plastic, metallic, aquatic, and salt components in my perfumes, finding something so repulsive was almost refreshing to me. The opium smells putrid to me, like bottled death. It feels like wading through gun smoke on the aftermath of a bloody battle. The main components are lapsang, whiskey, dark tobacco, black pepper, incense, birch, and opium. However, for me, the opium note cuts through the layer of smoke and produces a scent I can only describe in Kristevean terms as Abject Repulsion. 

I think I find this focus on death and war frankly distasteful, and seems to utilise this schema uncritically to create provocative perfumes designed as subtle nods and slant gestures towards a cultural history of war and domination. I do think it’s possible to create a perfume that uses this framework but actually creates a sustained and worthy criticism of this history, but I do not think this is Beaufort’s aim.

There are definitely people who this is for, but I am not one of them. Honestly I’d prefer to wear Secretions Maqnifiques. 

Pairs well with: The Imperial War Museum, traipsing around Greenwich in the rain, drinking whiskey late at night, LARPing, re-discovering your old diary entires, and queuing all night to see the Queen’s coffin. 

3/10. 

Find it at Bloom Perfumery. 

JMW Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed, 1844.

WHITE WHALE - MASQUE MILANO

The obvious literary evocation in Masque Milano’s White Whale is Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. However, this scent is not your average 90s water cliche. Nor it is your average ocean inspired fragrance in general. White Whale is alluring, sensual, salty, woody, floral, powdery and peppered. The heart — the ambergris accord — anchors the scent with an undeniable marine sensuality. 

In Melville’s Moby-Dick, the eponymous whale contains a myriad of complex and interlocking allegorical potential. It is the elusive and allusive literary texture of Moby-Dick that compels contemporary readership to look through the folds of it’s form to mine for meaning. This complexity is at the heart of Masque Milano’s White Whale, fusing the marine to the earthly, the sensual to the material, the dreamscape to reality. 

Ambergris and salt dominate the palate on initial spray— awash with ocean slick and foam. As the perfume morphs and undulates, the softer woodier and floral notes flourish over it’s marine bedding. The violet, osmanthus, and orris root provide an earthly rupture — florals, fruits, woods. Whilst the marine element grounds the perfume, it is ultimately a very corporeal and human scent. This combination of marine and earthly only heightens it’s dreamy quality. 

Perhaps this marine-human texture is why when wearing White Whale, I don’t think of Moby-Dick — I think of mermaids. 

Best worn with: Sophie Lewis’ Can the Sirenform Speak?, The French House, standing outside the Turner Contemporary in Margate, lying in bed with your lover(s) on a sun-soaked Sunday morning when sleep still coats your eyes, Surrealistic Pillow by Jefferson Airplane, UNDERCOVER F/W 2003, Mircea Cărtărescu’s Nostalgia — and, of course, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. 

10/10, one of the best perfumes I have ever had the pleasure to wear. 

Find it here @ Bloom Perfumery

‘A Boy Flying in the Arms of a Siren’, postcard (1910?), found on the Wellcome Collection.

SANGRE DULCE — STRANGERS PARFUMERIE

Sweet Blood

Sangre — Jodorowsky’s “Santa Sangre” 

Dulce — Gaspar Noe’s “Climax” 

An ultimately surreal, sweet, animalic, intoxicating scent. The two reference films that inspires the notes of Sangre Dulce come through immediately. 60s horror surrealism meets contemporary horror surrealism. There is an intense corporeality in this scent — it is both apparitional and unworldly, yet physical and material. Sangria and strawberry dance atop a civet and tobacco base, a fusion of sweetness and musky depth. After a while on the skin, the sweet notes from the sangria, strawberry, blood orange, sugar, pomegranate and maple soften into the muskier qualities of this gourmand. The animalic note is subtle, and undercoats the plethora of sugary sweet notes that circle the central musky tone like maypole dancers in astringent heat. On Fragrantica, opinions are divided, but I would say this is a seasonably and occasionally adjustable perfume, meaning it can be worn Summer/Winter, and suits an occasion — perhaps one where you are being kissed by the devil. Although the surreality is a core thematic that underscores this exquisite perfume, it brings me more to a folkish setting. Perhaps it is the civet musk, but something in it’s construction brings to my mind Britt Eckland in “The Wickerman”. 

Prin Lomros, the perfumer helming Strangers Parfumerie, is able to combine his filmic knowledge and his fragrance craftsmanship into a unique olfactory experience worthy of anyone’s try. 

Pairs well with: being pulled by a siren song, backstage at the Windmill Brixton, a Midsommer celebration with fresh baked cinnamon rolls in some meadow blanketed forest clearing, Klub Verboten, Jodorowsky’s tarot readings on Youtube, breaking into the Whitby Abbey ruins at night. 

9/10, one of my personal favourites. 

“i’m deliberate”

Find it here @ Bloom Perfume or on Prin Lomros’ website

CUIR VELOURS EAU DE PARFUM, NAOMI GOODSIR

The leather of an old glove, turned sweet with age and use. Fresh and sticky tobacco that sticks to your fingers. Dark rum that floats in through open windows. A memory of a starlet wafting around a dimly lit club. 

Julien Rasquinet’s perfume for Naomi Goodsir is for me, a pleasure. However, it is undeniably dizzyingly sweet — and mixed with that earthen tobacco, I could imagine this scent would overwhelm some. I think of it as a rather classical in it’s scent composition. The base notes are rum, cistus, labdanum, incense & immortelle, which provide a sweet and floral backing to a highly woody, tobacco, and leathery top note. This is undoubtedly an evening perfume, but I find layering this with one spritz of Acqua Di Parma’s Peonia Nobile (which has rose, patchouli, black pepper accords), softens the intensity of Cuir Velours. 

Pairs well with — Soho (not Bar Italia), a third date, Marge Simpson’s thrifted Chanel boucle skirt-suit, a Laphroaig nightcap, the memory of parma violets.

8/10 

find it here: Naomi Goodsir’s website & Bloom Perfumery