GothicHeart
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GothicHeart
English tether, not...
The way this early postwar villain left me after first encountering it sometime around the mid 80's, could be summarised in just one (mostly british) word. Flabbergasted!
It was a Christmas gift for my father, by someone who kept ignoring that the only scent my father ever used was a lavender-lemon dirt cheap cologne that was sold not only in pharmacies but even in grocery stores. My father, being the exact opposite of my mother who was a zealot of the perfume cults, passed it to me, without bothering to give it a second sniff. If he had done so, maybe he would have realised that it was not exactly the kind of fragrance a teenager could handle. But apparently, being used to smell archetypical powerhouses like Macassar and Yatagan all around him, he probably didn't think this one could do any harm. He was wrong. For what it should be actually called was English Lewdness.
Before slapping it on my face for the first time, it raised its leatherclad hand and crowned me majestically. As if challenging me in a duel which proved nearly impossible to win. Not at least before I managed to wear the sucker instead of him wearing me. And that really took some time.
The commander of Her Majesty's shock troops came in a wooden box with a wooden stopper, bearing a wonderful embossed label in crimson and gold on its thick glass bottle. I guess it was some kind of a special edition which, as is the case with so many natural things nowadays, is nowhere to be found anymore. Being the first time I saw a fragrance not being in a carton box, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that this one had to be something extraordinary. And it was...
All the more that I love wood more than any other natural material, with the possible exception of emeralds.
In hindsight, I believe that even if someone failed to read the name on the doric bottle, this amount of wood was definitely not a harbinger of vanilla or cotton candy.
Until then it was hands down the dirtiest star ever to shine in my olfactory universe, and it still remains amongst the most prominent paragons of salaciousness. For some reason it turned otherwise cheerful and soothing notes like citruses, lavender and honey into guilty pleasures of which the world should never be aware of. It was as these notes had a dark and secret side that would take an arcane perfumer to expose. Unfortunately it seems that we'll never know who the conjurer behind its creation was, since even Dana doesn't bother to mention anything about him(?).
It seemed like it was enhanced with some shady age-boosting ingredient, for I felt like my years had doubled long before its top notes subsided.
First poured on one of my 16th year afternoons, evening found me flirting with 30 year olds, in places I was not supposed to enter. You know, just because of being 16. And I swear that I got some really funny looks overnight. And they were not of the miffed kind. It was like these ladies were weighing up the odds of making out with a splashy barefaced teen and get away with it. And not because of me being a male jailbait, since the claptrap called politically correctness was still a hazy dream in the minds of some self-righteous, self-appointed, self-centred pricks. You know, like the ones who would banish scents like English Leather if they had the power to do it. No, the ladies' only concern seemed to be how they would succeed in cornering me and being spared the excruciating details and the envious glances to an by their friends. God, how I miss those years!...
After blaring my silly cockiness for what I thought was enough, I went to sleep smiling with what I thought was a huge victory in the battle of sexes. And I dreamt of the leather chesterfield sofas in the House of Lords, where a slightly drunk young crossbencher had accidentally spilled a dram of rare Ardbeg, before escaping the boring meeting and driving with the sun on his back in his Triumph TR3, hastening to meet his concubine in Mayfair. In the morning I pledged to myself that I was going to be this man one day.
I never became a crossbencher or any kind of representative and I never came even close to having such a curvesome beaut (the wheels, not the girl). The successful part of fulfilling my dream was just tasting rare Ardbegs many times and spending some time in London. But I still remain a barefaced teen (although a little less splashy now) even though some 30 years have passed since that night. Especially when English Leather of yore joins me for a ride. Perhaps not in a TR3 but in an equally fascinating vehicle. The time machine that I have built in my mind, permanently programmed to the days of my youth.
It was a Christmas gift for my father, by someone who kept ignoring that the only scent my father ever used was a lavender-lemon dirt cheap cologne that was sold not only in pharmacies but even in grocery stores. My father, being the exact opposite of my mother who was a zealot of the perfume cults, passed it to me, without bothering to give it a second sniff. If he had done so, maybe he would have realised that it was not exactly the kind of fragrance a teenager could handle. But apparently, being used to smell archetypical powerhouses like Macassar and Yatagan all around him, he probably didn't think this one could do any harm. He was wrong. For what it should be actually called was English Lewdness.
Before slapping it on my face for the first time, it raised its leatherclad hand and crowned me majestically. As if challenging me in a duel which proved nearly impossible to win. Not at least before I managed to wear the sucker instead of him wearing me. And that really took some time.
The commander of Her Majesty's shock troops came in a wooden box with a wooden stopper, bearing a wonderful embossed label in crimson and gold on its thick glass bottle. I guess it was some kind of a special edition which, as is the case with so many natural things nowadays, is nowhere to be found anymore. Being the first time I saw a fragrance not being in a carton box, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that this one had to be something extraordinary. And it was...
All the more that I love wood more than any other natural material, with the possible exception of emeralds.
In hindsight, I believe that even if someone failed to read the name on the doric bottle, this amount of wood was definitely not a harbinger of vanilla or cotton candy.
Until then it was hands down the dirtiest star ever to shine in my olfactory universe, and it still remains amongst the most prominent paragons of salaciousness. For some reason it turned otherwise cheerful and soothing notes like citruses, lavender and honey into guilty pleasures of which the world should never be aware of. It was as these notes had a dark and secret side that would take an arcane perfumer to expose. Unfortunately it seems that we'll never know who the conjurer behind its creation was, since even Dana doesn't bother to mention anything about him(?).
It seemed like it was enhanced with some shady age-boosting ingredient, for I felt like my years had doubled long before its top notes subsided.
First poured on one of my 16th year afternoons, evening found me flirting with 30 year olds, in places I was not supposed to enter. You know, just because of being 16. And I swear that I got some really funny looks overnight. And they were not of the miffed kind. It was like these ladies were weighing up the odds of making out with a splashy barefaced teen and get away with it. And not because of me being a male jailbait, since the claptrap called politically correctness was still a hazy dream in the minds of some self-righteous, self-appointed, self-centred pricks. You know, like the ones who would banish scents like English Leather if they had the power to do it. No, the ladies' only concern seemed to be how they would succeed in cornering me and being spared the excruciating details and the envious glances to an by their friends. God, how I miss those years!...
After blaring my silly cockiness for what I thought was enough, I went to sleep smiling with what I thought was a huge victory in the battle of sexes. And I dreamt of the leather chesterfield sofas in the House of Lords, where a slightly drunk young crossbencher had accidentally spilled a dram of rare Ardbeg, before escaping the boring meeting and driving with the sun on his back in his Triumph TR3, hastening to meet his concubine in Mayfair. In the morning I pledged to myself that I was going to be this man one day.
I never became a crossbencher or any kind of representative and I never came even close to having such a curvesome beaut (the wheels, not the girl). The successful part of fulfilling my dream was just tasting rare Ardbegs many times and spending some time in London. But I still remain a barefaced teen (although a little less splashy now) even though some 30 years have passed since that night. Especially when English Leather of yore joins me for a ride. Perhaps not in a TR3 but in an equally fascinating vehicle. The time machine that I have built in my mind, permanently programmed to the days of my youth.
Siddhartha and Odysseus...
My heart lies now like tattered sails in windmills lorn.
Sky, vent your sighs and when the pulse departs the vein,
it will be you for whom I'll live dead and reborn.
Vapour and rain, river and sea...vapour again...
And I'll worship you every night. And I'll kiss your violet lips every morning. And I'll be a pilgrim in your body's temple. And I'll trace the contours of your amber skin with my fingertips. And I'll wash your face with my tears. And I'll treasure every moment of your sandalwood breath. And I'll cherish your image wearing nothing but a golden cincture and a golden anadem to give substance to your diaphanous form.
For you are my golden shackles.
For you are the blood of my dreams.
Can you see me Nausicaa?
Can you feel me Calypso?
Can you touch me Penelope?
Can you smell me Circe?
Can you hear me Cassandra?
I always believed in you...
Sky, vent your sighs and when the pulse departs the vein,
it will be you for whom I'll live dead and reborn.
Vapour and rain, river and sea...vapour again...
And I'll worship you every night. And I'll kiss your violet lips every morning. And I'll be a pilgrim in your body's temple. And I'll trace the contours of your amber skin with my fingertips. And I'll wash your face with my tears. And I'll treasure every moment of your sandalwood breath. And I'll cherish your image wearing nothing but a golden cincture and a golden anadem to give substance to your diaphanous form.
For you are my golden shackles.
For you are the blood of my dreams.
Can you see me Nausicaa?
Can you feel me Calypso?
Can you touch me Penelope?
Can you smell me Circe?
Can you hear me Cassandra?
I always believed in you...
1 Comment
Too Light to be Blue...
My younger brother's relationship with fragrances is quite a strange and rather inexplicable one. Although he looks totally mesmerised every time he visits my house and sprays some antediluvian '70s or '80s powerhouse on him, he has never bothered to buy any. Not even in their current, way less potent formulations. On the contrary, he always falls for trendy and tremendously popular new launches, which I wouldn't buy even if my life was depending on it. So upon my last visit to his place, I found a bottle of Eau Fraiche on his desk and sprayed two spritzes on me just out of curiosity about how "fresh" is interpreted nowadays. The fact that the other two fragrances lying on his desk were 1 Million and CK One Shock should have alerted me like an apotropaic sign, but I ignored the prognostics and went home to evaluate the newly acquired entry in my fragrance encyclopaedia.
There, I took a quick glance at the fragrance's pyramid and I got completely befuddled by smelling something which was growing into something too outrageous to be true as time passed.
10 minutes mark: Why on earth do I smell green apples when the composition has none?
20 minutes mark: Why on earth does this smell so familiar?
29 minutes mark: Why on earth did someone put Light Blue in an Eau Fraiche bottle?
Yeah, that's right. It took me no more than half an hour to realise that this was definitely a hybrid that should be called either Dolce & Gabanna Man Eau Fraiche or Versace Light Blue.
And to get things straight, I'm talking about the original Light Blue, launched as a feminine scent in 2001.
Olivier Cresp must be either a serious case of selective amnesia or a con man. There's no other way to explain how he managed to duplicate one of his creations, sell it as a new one to a large and well acknowledged company, and get away with it. And I suspect that his amnesia falls in the selective kind because I'm sure he didn't forget to get paid.
I wonder whether it's possible that no one in Versace had ever smelled the hugely popular firstborn Light Blue that was launched only 5 years before and less than ten blocks away, since both companies are literally bumping heads in the center of Milan. Cause if that's not the case, then something is rotten in the state of Denmark (or Italy for that matter). And it's not the fragrance. The fragrance is what it claims it is. Fresh. A nice although mundane copycat, based on a concept that was repeated countless times, but fresh nevertheless.
I don't know what part CEOs are playing in the creation of a fragrance. I guess it depends on the house. So if the ones running Versace are not of the kind that's usually involved, I believe they had a helluva WTF moment upon smelling Eau Fraiche, while Olivier Cresp was already away counting his money.
I'm facing great difficulties to evaluate Eau Fraiche, and most of them belong to the ethical kind. I like Light Blue very much, thus I should like Eau Fraiche equally. The problem lies in how I define "generic". The abundance of near clones of an original fragrance that have come to dominate the market and therefore render the way that the said original smelled as "generic" because of its widespread use, doesn't mean that the smell of the original was generic when it was launched. On the contrary it might have been groundbreaking. And this has nothing to do with whether I like it or not. Davidoff's Cool Water might have a story or two to share about how these things work. So all I can say is that Eau Fraiche is quite a nice fragrance, but rather stale and no fresh at all when it comes to originality, since it's yet another example of a concept that was done to death, resurection, and death again. And this kind of karmic wheel will always be a far cry from immortality in olfactory terms.
There, I took a quick glance at the fragrance's pyramid and I got completely befuddled by smelling something which was growing into something too outrageous to be true as time passed.
10 minutes mark: Why on earth do I smell green apples when the composition has none?
20 minutes mark: Why on earth does this smell so familiar?
29 minutes mark: Why on earth did someone put Light Blue in an Eau Fraiche bottle?
Yeah, that's right. It took me no more than half an hour to realise that this was definitely a hybrid that should be called either Dolce & Gabanna Man Eau Fraiche or Versace Light Blue.
And to get things straight, I'm talking about the original Light Blue, launched as a feminine scent in 2001.
Olivier Cresp must be either a serious case of selective amnesia or a con man. There's no other way to explain how he managed to duplicate one of his creations, sell it as a new one to a large and well acknowledged company, and get away with it. And I suspect that his amnesia falls in the selective kind because I'm sure he didn't forget to get paid.
I wonder whether it's possible that no one in Versace had ever smelled the hugely popular firstborn Light Blue that was launched only 5 years before and less than ten blocks away, since both companies are literally bumping heads in the center of Milan. Cause if that's not the case, then something is rotten in the state of Denmark (or Italy for that matter). And it's not the fragrance. The fragrance is what it claims it is. Fresh. A nice although mundane copycat, based on a concept that was repeated countless times, but fresh nevertheless.
I don't know what part CEOs are playing in the creation of a fragrance. I guess it depends on the house. So if the ones running Versace are not of the kind that's usually involved, I believe they had a helluva WTF moment upon smelling Eau Fraiche, while Olivier Cresp was already away counting his money.
I'm facing great difficulties to evaluate Eau Fraiche, and most of them belong to the ethical kind. I like Light Blue very much, thus I should like Eau Fraiche equally. The problem lies in how I define "generic". The abundance of near clones of an original fragrance that have come to dominate the market and therefore render the way that the said original smelled as "generic" because of its widespread use, doesn't mean that the smell of the original was generic when it was launched. On the contrary it might have been groundbreaking. And this has nothing to do with whether I like it or not. Davidoff's Cool Water might have a story or two to share about how these things work. So all I can say is that Eau Fraiche is quite a nice fragrance, but rather stale and no fresh at all when it comes to originality, since it's yet another example of a concept that was done to death, resurection, and death again. And this kind of karmic wheel will always be a far cry from immortality in olfactory terms.
Hush...
Exactly Azzaro! Decibel. Without an "s". Which means singular. Which means one. Which means nearly imperceptible and impossible to be heard. Which means that perhaps the tacky microphone bottle was inevitable in order to make the fragrance audible and amplify its voice, by prompting people to have some fun pretending they are singing in their bathrooms while holding it. Because if you were relying solely on the scent's substance, presence and quality for sales, well, I don't think so...
If volume, performance and bigger than life personae is what you're looking for, don't bother with the backing vocals. Go for the frontmans instead. And erstwhile deafening Azzaro was never in short supply of them till music and perfumery became, for crying out loud, the halfhearted whimpers they are today.
If volume, performance and bigger than life personae is what you're looking for, don't bother with the backing vocals. Go for the frontmans instead. And erstwhile deafening Azzaro was never in short supply of them till music and perfumery became, for crying out loud, the halfhearted whimpers they are today.
Strange world...
-Oh my...! Did you see that? A grapefruit the size of Mount Everest just fell from the sky!
-Yeah. It seems it was hunted down by this even bigger jasmine that's following...
-Do you think we should run?
-Probably, but having just eaten this delicious exotic dish with its slight dose of cummin and all this pepper, I don't think I'll be able to...
-Yeah, me too...The damn dessert was so loaded with cinnamon and cloves, that my stomach debars any thoughts of running.
-So what shall we do?
-I don't know. How about play nonchalant and go pick some juniper berries? I think I can smell some nearby...
-Agreed! They would make a fantastic finale for such a surreal day!
-Yeah. It seems it was hunted down by this even bigger jasmine that's following...
-Do you think we should run?
-Probably, but having just eaten this delicious exotic dish with its slight dose of cummin and all this pepper, I don't think I'll be able to...
-Yeah, me too...The damn dessert was so loaded with cinnamon and cloves, that my stomach debars any thoughts of running.
-So what shall we do?
-I don't know. How about play nonchalant and go pick some juniper berries? I think I can smell some nearby...
-Agreed! They would make a fantastic finale for such a surreal day!
