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.