GothicHeart

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

Her name was not Annabel Lee, but the one which exemplifies beauty since antiquity and brought Troy to its knees. And I guess her sparkling aura was the sun missing from E.A.Poe's immortal elegy.

And now she's gone...

The lodestar of five wonderful years of my life has stopped twinkling. And the perfume which was once the epitome of immense tenderness and fearless devotion has now become a lachrymose memento mori.

She was living in Sweden for some years now. I believe she somehow belonged there, for, despite coming from the easternmost part of the Mediterranean, she was a tall blond green-eyed Valkyrie.

I still remember the day when she stormed our tiny appartment some 20 years ago, looking forward to show me her newfound objet d'art. She was like a night witch caught red-handed in broad daylight with a blue sphere of rather questionable intents in her hands. I couldn't help but admit that what she was holding looked and smelled so very beautiful, but still, I asked her what was it that she found so irresistible about it.

"First of all its name keeps my alien heart dreaming. Then, I love the idea of holding a tiny cerulean cosmos in my hand and be its ruly queen. Oh, and this is where I shall be roaming when I'll leave this planet...in a hundred years from now."

She left at 42, 80 years short of her giggling expectation. I guess she could no longer resist the skies beckoning her.

She fought bravely till the end.

I sank in a corner, rerunning the reel of our time together in the theatre of my mind. Drowsy mornings, lazy noons, wistful evenings, tender nights, quirky days, sweet cravings, hilarious fights, all reeking with Sun, Moon, Stars, the perfume she loved the most. I won't label it as her signature, for her true signature was her mere existence, knocking silly my enamoured heart. When I raised my head anew the night had already began to unfold its inky, condoling tentacles all around me. I can't recall another time of my life being spent in such an "idle" way but I guess I can't recall such a cataclysmic downpour of memories either.

I sprayed some of her tiny cosmos on me and hit the streets, melting in the warm Greek summer night that she will never feel again. I'm sure she'd never want me to shed a tear for her, but this is her only wish that I find impossible to grant.

Farewell my beautiful sköldmö. Please don't be sad that hereafter my gothic heart shall always be a little more gothic forevermore. I hope you'll find peace someplace between Mount Olympus and Valhalla. Someplace amongst Suns...Moons...Stars...

Grimoires and wands. Potions and philtres. Enchantments and charms. Spells and incantations. Imprecations and anathemas. Allure and enthrallment. Metanoia and lethe. Arcane and occult. Mesmerising and narcotic. Soporific and empyreal. The nemesis of light, the triumph of darkness.
Pernicious and wrecking for Hermione Granger. Salubrious and hale for Bellatrix Lestrange.
One to pulverise Harry Potter and his likes. One to resurrect Lord Voldemort, only with a full-blown nose this time so as to inhale even the faintest waft of its bewitching nefariousness.
Now kneel before the Queen of Fiends...

1997. You're about to meet the Devil (or Diavolo if you're meeting him in Spain) in order to sign a contract allowing you to wear his newly launched essence. Upon reaching the place where the ceremony is to take place, you realise it's a delapidated, musty mansion, not unlike the ones you believed exist only in old horror movies. You knock hesitantly on its huge ironclad door, thinking that maybe this wasn't such a good idea. The person that "welcomes" you is Antonio Banderas, dressed like having just left the set of "Interview with the Vampire". The whole place reeks with some twisted kind of veneration mixed with fear and muffled screams. You're taken to its basement, where the Devil, sitting in an elaborate obsidian throne, greets you heartily and addresses you his anointed champion. He snaps his fingers and a wickedly ravishing Melanie Griffith enters the scene and handles you the bottle...

2016. You're about to meet the Devil anew. The contract has expired some 10 years ago and you, in your everlasting quest of unearthing thunderous beasts of yore, didn't think of renewing it till now. But since you stumbled on a box including a 100ml Eau de Toilette along with a 150ml body deodorant on your last weekly visit to the super market, you thought of requiring his permission to wear his essence again. All the more that it had a 50% discount. You shamble to the place where you first met the Devil, only to find it derelict and forlorn. A bored doorman gives you the Devil's new address. You enter a shiny high-end office building and you take the glass elevator to the penthouse. Antonio Banderas, dressed in a tuxedo, like he's about to walk the red carpet in the Academy Awards ceremony, welcomes you again. You're taken to a vast airy office, where the Devil is processing fiscal data in a hi-tech laptop. He greets you hastily, and before delving into the screen again, he hits the intercom and Melanie Griffith, all vapid and tired enters the scene and handles you the bottle...

How does transmogrification applies to a monster? What does a monster change into when it becomes a darling? Is "transmogrification" a viable word when we're talking about something lovely, albeit profanely wicked that has turned into a politically correct reverse sacrilege? Why do I have to become a verbal funambulist in order to express my disappointment for the current version of an once mighty handsome beast? Why Antonio? Why did you leave the leather so long exposed to the sun and forget the pepper jar open for years? Why?

Farewell Diavolo. You took way too seriously this "devil in disguise" stuff, to the point of becoming unrecognisable and bleary. Oh, and I guess you grew tired of being in the details for so long, thus you thought that becoming blatantly inept was the right thing to do in order to meet the "brave new world" standards...

Back in 1969 Lancôme decided that the world was not as blithesome a place as it should be. Thus it created Ô and surfeited the air around us with squadron over squadron of tarty citruses. However, these were simply fighters escorting heavy bombers with fancy names like "Vetiver Raider", "Rosemary Bandit", "Coriander Brigand"and "Oakmoss Corsair" painted beneath their cockpits. But this fleet of notes acted rather as a distraction than destruction. What Lancôme actually launched was a neologism the likes of "heterogeneity". You see, I have yet to decide whether its vintage formulation is frolicsome or sexy as hell. Perhaps it's both. Perhaps Ô could replace its uncircumflexed [sic] cousin in "Histoire d'O".

Some 30 years later Lancôme thought it was time to upgrade its fleet of bliss. Thus it created an even more buoyant and feelgood fragrance, although such an endeavour seemed nigh impossible. The newcomer managed to leave all lurking bawdiness behind and set brand new felicity standards. And how could it be any different when an exclamatory enthusiastic affirmation in French is its answer to every question asked, no matter in what language?

Sind Sie der ewige glückselig Königin? Ô Oui!
¿Está la hija perdida del sol? Ô Oui!
Will you marry me, oh my bonnie lass? Ô Oui!
Mi vuoi prendere in tuo cosmo? Ô Oui!

Sometimes I think that some fragrances render the presence of a translater completely useless, for I believe that fragrance is actually some sort of wordless communication and a pretty succinct one for that matter. And what's more, it always lands its message, despite not a word being uttered. For your ears can play tricks on you sometimes but your nose is always dead right. I'm sure that all of you have misheard something at some point. Has any of you ever "missmelled" anything? Yeah, I thought so.

So, given that Ô Oui! is green as a spring meadow, piquant as an early bergamot and waggish as a drunken sprite, what are the chances for any girl or woman wearing it to be of the lugubrious kind? If your perfume smiles then you smile too, simple as that.

As a man of a rather sober mien, I simply love the way it can turn even bleak winter evenings into harbingers of sunny and carefree days, when my only concern would be how not to fall in love too many times. If Ô has been a lascivious frolicker and/or a rollicking lover, then Ô Oui! is a rôllicking frôlicker, never saying no to anything even vaguely reminding of mirth, light and verve. And isn't epitomising the very essence of such things with no words spoken one hell of a feat? Ô Oui!...

Certainly not a scent you would likely smell on a woman frequenting black light-illuminated underground clubs, where wearing sable, purple and burgundy attires bedecked with steel and pewter accessories is a sine qua non prerequisite for entering them. Any woman wearing it in such a place would be most likely treated like a priestess upon stumbling on a undeads' lair, who by the same token were heretics while still alive, with J'adore acting like the holy water in which she bathed before making their acquaintance.

But since I like women who think of the sun as an archenemy which would turn them to dust, if they ever acted foolishly enough to be exposed to its radiant caress, I'll sadly have to pass.

J'adore is jubilant, classy and carefree, mais je n'adore pas. There's nothing wrong with these adjectives, but when it comes to perfumes I dig "dramatic" a lot more. In other words, and given that Charlize Theron was the face of J'adore's campaign at some point, let's say I prefer her tenebrous, heartbreaking solemnity while being "In the Valley of Elah" over her classy and sassy antics while doing "The Italian job". You see, I believe that women of her caliber are always way more alluring when smelling of sulphur and dust instead of smelling like fruits and white flowers. Or to put it in another way, the sun is always there; however it's what it shines upon that really matters. And for me Charlize Theron is very, very desirable under its scorching presence during her rebellious stance and haggard looks in "Mad Max:Fury Road". But that's just me and my febrile gothic delusions again.

Since J'adore carries a tremendous amount of resplendence, it's bottle could be no different than a drop of incandescent amber escaping the sun, with every aspect of sun's essence and symbolisms being more than abundant in even the tiniest droplet of J'adore's soul. In a parallel universe ruled by non-Newtonian physics and Riemannian geometry, when this drop would reach the Earth, it would unleash a nuclear bomb's olfactory equivalent of gaiety and elegance, shaking the very foundations of lonesomeness and melancholia. But for some of us this would mean nothing more than a time to run for shelter in a delapidated bunker reeking with Fahrenheit and Poison.

You can shoot me down in flames now for not liking one of the most adored embodiments of joyousness and panache in perfumery, but I'm ready to take all the flak. What chances would I stand anyway being flanked by its swarm of flankers? But as I always say, castigating a perfume is one thing and reprimanding the ones liking it is another. I don't like J'adore, but this doesn't grant me by any means the right to insult the ones adoring it. All the more that I am usually the one who gets bashed for preferring '80s powerhouses and vintage formulations over modern flimsy launches and "contemporary interpretations" of classics. Maybe it's time for some haters to stop playing hooky from the Latin class and finally acknowledge that "de gustibus non disputandum est" is a very wise maxim.