The perfumed costume...

All Hallows eve is upon us.
Tread not at crossroads tonight but remember to leave out milk for the spirits (and the witches cats).  Scry your fortune in a looking glass but beware what the future may hold!
Remember too that the most important decision of Halloween is: what to wear.
I don’t mean costumes; although, feel free to indulge yourselves as much as you like in the revelry of masking and disguise.
Personally, I favour a costume of velvet and black lace for myself; Vampirella turned up to maximum, Morticia Adams and Angela Carter’s “The Lady of the House of Love” going all Miss Haversham in her wedding dress and sunglasses.
No, I digress, I mean perfumes. Those olfactory statements written in molecules that say so much about us, or about the character we’re acting out on any given day. Whatever your Halloween costumes is, it's just begging to be taken to new heights by the addition of the right perfumes. So, I thought I'd take a little look at a few of the options.
Today, my perfume poison of choice is an old favourite: Ambre Fétiche perfume by Annick Goutal. I’ve raved about this perfume often on Facebook but only because I love it so.

Ambre Fétiche is all the rich, sensual and dark scents of winter and antiquity. No one ever loved antiquity more than the immortal. In his notes for a stage version of Dracula reproduced in Christopher Frayling’s book, “Vampyres” Stoker suggests these creatures of the night can only be moved by artifacts which pre-date them whilst the gramophone and telephone leave them cold.
It's also an intensely seductive perfume with it's notes of incense, amber, benzoin and deep heart of leather and patchouli.  In pure perfume form it's a heavy veil of fragrance with (appropriately) impressive longevity.
If you want to amp up the intensity and the seduction then you could add a light spray of Demeter’s Musk over the top although I confess to finding their musk a little coy when it could be wicked. Then again, what could be more appropriate than than a spritz from a perfume house which shares it’s name with the very ship which bought Dracula to Whitby?
If you’re looking for a Vampiric perfume to finish off your costume then don’t forget too that The Clarimond Project (into whose archives I’ve only recently, and with great pleasure, begun to dip) has given us all sorts of olfactory evocations of that beautiful Vamps story.
As for that most famous of Transylvania Vampires, I have a feeling that the Count (especially Gary Oldman’s tormented, lovesick hero)  would probably wear Blood Concept O Cruel Incense with all it’s delicious connotations.
Of course Blood Concept might work for those hoping to emulate Mary Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein too although not if you’re taking inspiration from the Dr’s creation as I fancy Adam, with his refined taste in literature, would reach for a seriously refined and literary perfume. Perhaps De Profundis from Serge Lutens would appeal to Adam? If unsure, he could always split a bottle with Dorian Gray who I’m sure would lap it up.
But then, I can imagine Dorian that great lover of perfume experimenting with all manner of modern perfumes. Etat Libre d’Orange’s new release Attaquer la Soliel Marquise De Sade might have arrived on his dressing table as a gift from Lord Henry Wooton the one man in London who knows Dorian and his sins so well.  There may even be a few bottles of more innocent perfumes like Penhaligon’s Elizabethan Rose pushed to the back of that same dressing table, gifts from poor Basil Haywood whose tragedy was to see the best in Dorian. Do those bottles still prompt the odd tear to fall from painted eyes I wonder?
I'm afraid my attempts to scent Jekyll and Hyde have failed, they simply cannot, would not agree on a perfume or even a genre of perfume. But that's the danger of having two people share one body I suppose...
However, I can suggest one dark, intense perfume for every fiend and friend alike (especially those on a budget): Brocard's Queen of Spades Modern, it's licorice and Cherry and jet black juice are perfect and what a pretty bottle.

Well, I shall leave you now, for me and for many others, Halloween is but the prelude for something far more terrifying: NaNoWriMo. Yes, for only the second year I’ll be endeavouring to turn out the first draft of a novel in just 30 days…

Capturing a mood...

Once again this week I am wrestling with the short story. No specific short story but rather the genre as a whole. I love reading short stories, don't get me wrong, they are utterly beautiful works of economy which should be more widely available (it's a tragedy how few magazines and newspapers outside of the literary sphere publish short stories these days and an equal tragedy that so many genre magazines which do have to reach out for crowdfunding).

No, my specific problem with short stories is with writing them. I want to, I love to but they seem to either stick firmly on the page and work or swell hopelessly towards a less than satisfactory conclusion before I stick them in the drawer (often metaphorically since so much writing takes place on computers these days) to return to when I am ready. Well, this week, I decided to pull out a few and rework them, clearing the desk before NaNoWriMo begins in November (yes, I do do NaNo but we'll come to that in a later post). I had ideas for endings and plans drawn up. All I had to do now was get myself into the right mood for rewriting, which meant getting myself into the crisp Autumnal mood which pervades so many of my stories, no matter what time of year I write them in. This seasonal repetition may have something to do with the fairy tale influence I spoke of a few weeks ago for in the land of fairy tale it is almost always Autumn or Winter, the leaves or the snow are always falling, the land is in the midst of a perpetual transformation.

Conjuring a mood for writing is not dissimilar to conjuring the mood of a character, after all, when one writes, one writes from within the world ones characters inhabit. The autumn leaves which crunch beneath their feet are leaves from your own memory, the hot spiced tea they drink you drank once; for those elements which one cannot experience first hand, a visit to the Great Exhibition or life in Stuart England one must plunge into research and imagination until you feel confident enough to imagine the scent of smoggy air, the exhilaration of seeing new inventions, the feel of velvet doublet and hose.

Tea is always a good place to start when getting into a warm writing mood, Assam, Chai, English Breakfast: whichever you pick you are bound to need a boundless supply beside you as you write (unless you favour coffee), scent is just as important: but I would say that, with my love of perfume. When I spoke of Gothic writing I said I could well imagine my character's wearing YSL Opium or L'Artisan's Fou d'Absinth because they fitted with their personalities, but the perfume of autumn may be even more subjective, heavy and rich, crisp and spicy, the scent holds the memories of the season or of the season as you've fictionalised it. So, I plucked one story from the pile and tried to imagine what that setting would smell like: a small European village at the end of the 19th Century. A village trying to carve out a place for itself as a desirable holiday destination with a twist.
The perfumes I came up with were: Etat Libre d'Orange's Like This, a perfume of Pumpkin, musk, and Spice inspired by the beautiful Tilda Swinton and designed to capture "a magic potion of home"  . It's a beautiful scent which one can easily imagine wafting through cottage windows, out of inns and from bonfires where sweet treats were roasted and toasted.  The orange spiciness of Chanel's Coco, the incense of Caron's Parfum Sacre and the woody warmth of Penhaligon's Hammam Bouquet added the intense and ancient aroma of the castle overlooking the village. All those centuries of cedar wood fires and ladies arriving for dinner parties in the latest fashionable blend must have sunk into the tapestries on the walls and lingers in the smooth wood floors. Even when abandoned the castle, I imagined, would have been busy accumulating scents, indolic jasmine, lavender from the gardens; all waiting to flood into the nostrils of anyone who opened the door and stepped inside.

A spray of each, a little tea, a moment to absorb the mood and...

The scented spell woven by the perfumes worked and I was soon typing away, weaving new scenes and sharpening others. At the end of all of this, the short stories I was working on are nearly completed and there are ideas for two or three more maturing in my notebooks. Colder winter short stories which will require their own perfumes.

Fragrance Friday becomes Scented Saturday...

Bonjour, I hope everyone is having a lovely weekend as I welcome you to a scented Saturday on the blog. Usually my perfume posts appear on a Friday, but this week a combination of a hectic Friday and having lots of samples I wanted to get through meant I pushed my perfume post back a day but kept the alliteration.

Why so many samples; well, it's a combination of samples ordered from Les Senteurs which I've been trying one by one since they arrived at the start of the week and a charming, generous charity idea on the part pf my local department store. So, this week I ended up with a box of samples and decided to combine them into one post. 

Let us begin then with something rather stunning: Etat Libre d'Orange's Hermann A Mes Cotes. This sample was ordered after I saw The Candy Perfume Boy's recommendation on Facebook and his fabulous review (Candy Perfume Boy's Review). Oh, this perfume is so gorgeous! I'm not even really going to try to review it, I'll leave that to the maestro, what I am going to say is this: if you have not tried Hermann yet then do! It's the deepest red rose with a truffle heart and wonderful longevity. It's dark, mysterious and ideal for winter. I'd also like to add how much Etat Libre has impressed me lately. I have loved a number of their perfumes and I never thought that was going to happen back in the days when I started getting into perfume and their brand was known primarily for the scandalous and highly unsuitable as a Christmas gift, Secretions Magnifique (just an interesting note, I recently chatted with a lady who loves it by the way, described it so beautifully too). 

But let us move on, my second perfume sample was La Religieuse by Serge Lutens. If anything this perfume is the opposite of Hermann, whilst H warms you up, La Religieuse is the chill snowstorm raging outside with only the comforting scent of incense from a local church breaking through the ice to  remind you that the cold of winter will soon pass. Again, this one is beautiful. It captures the story it sets out to convey in a few divine notes of musk, incense and jasmine and lingers beautifully on skin (less so on a blotter but perfume was meant to be worn against the skin, against the pulse). I suppose it was always going to work for me as I adore incense perfumes. Comme des Garcon's intense and beautiful Avignon is one of my all time favourite perfumes, an acknowledged instant classic. 

 However, I think the time has come to explain my other samples of the week a little more. So, I popped into afore mentioned department store last weekend to have a sniff of Anais Anais by Cacharel and noticed they were selling bundles of four samples for £1.00 for breastcancernow.org I have no intention of going into detail here but it's a charity I have good reason to support and obviously I love perfume samples so perfect match. So, I bought £10.00 worth of samples and have found some real gems amongst them: Million by Paco Rabanne turns out to be far nicer than I had expected, Pop by Stella McCartney is a lovely heavy tuberose but my absolute favourite so far has to be: Givenchy's Gentlemen Only Absolute. 

I am a firm believer that there's no such thing as a gendered perfume so the fact that this is marketed as a men's perfume does not up me off in the slightest. Would Marlene Dietrich have walked away from such a perfume? Non.

Gentlemen Only Absolute is a heavy, spicy Oriental with a heart rich in cinnamon, saffron and nutmeg. The cinnamon comes through strongly on my skin entwined with the base notes of vanilla and sandalwood whilst the bergamot top note proves fleeting (fine with me, it's the spices I love most about this composition). It's certainly not a tweeds and brogues fragrance, more of a velvet tuxedo and brocade waistcoat perfume.

I've fallen in love with it! In fact I'm wearing it right now

Finally, my last perfume sample, La Fille De Berlin.

Simple, spicy, rose and pepper that conjures a snowy rose out of simplicity and presents it in a rose jam red juice. I think I may be as in love with the colour of this perfume as I am with it's smell! I'll be wearing this again at the close of the month when the chill of winter begins to bite and a sharp red rose is called for. 

Okay, I'm all perfume sampled out now! I shall be off to a cup of tea and my writing, have a wonderful weekend, a wonderful week and I'll see you all again on Wednesday for Writing Wednesday unless that becomes Literary Thursday? 

Writing Wednesday... Immortal words (hopefully)...

October is upon us, the air has turned chill, the leaves are falling and Halloween beckons to us from months end. 

What better time then to whisper of the Gothic?

I mentioned once before that, although my most recent book was more in the genre of fairy tale it's predecessors were Gothic novels, so let me add a little more detail on that.

Three or so years ago when I was still studying for my degree in English Literature, and taking modules in Creative Writing, I happened to watch a film which will remain nameless in which saccharine creatures of the night emoted boldly. I'd  read Dorian Gray and Dracula by this stage and was beginning to immerse myself in the works of Gautier and his fellow flaneurs of the Parisian dusk. This may help to explain why I emerged from that viewing experience with a rueful shake of the head, certain that these were not my creatures of the night. In the morning I plucked one of my notebooks from the teetering to be written in pile (like a TBR pile but blank) and put pen to paper. I wrote the first four chapters in one day before being pulled away by the task of writing an essay, then of revising. For a few months the novel slept until the years exams were over and I could return myself to it's pages in earnest. 

The rest just flowed after that, as it turned out a large cast of flamboyant immortals living in my head who wanted to make their presence felt. 

Their home was the 19th century, their habits not dependent on the moon and their lust for life and love quite extravagant. Theirs was a Gothic existence complete with stone arches and peacock feathers.

The research was as pleasurable as the writing, books on the Exposition Universal of 1889, the art of the Baroque, the English Civil War, Oscar Wilde and Victorian fashion were greedily devoured. Museums were visited and notes were taken. At the risk of sounding pretentious (always a danger for me) I wanted to immerse myself as deeply as possible in as atmospheric a world as possible.

Spending time reading anything and everything Gothic was no hardship to me. Every book was a delight and the Gustave Dore prints pinned to my notice board for inspiration were (and still are) a pleasure to look at. 

Even my perfume choices took on a Gothic edge with plenty of heavy, musky and alluring scents taking up space on my dressing table; my scent of the day today is Yves Saint Laurent's delicious Opium. Heavy folds of sensual amber, myrrh and vanilla sharpened by  by mandarin orange. It's not a perfume easily overlooked, it announces itself with a seductive fanfare and keeps on radiating. It wants, above all, not to be forgotten. What could be more appropriate for immortals?

The characters I wrote would also admire the scandalous idea of a perfume inspired by the 19th Centuries most mythologized vice: opium itself. I suspect they would also have adored my current favourite: Fou d'Absinthe by L'Artisan Parfumer too, such a sharp tribute to their green tipple of choice (they have a reverse colour wheel thing going on in their drinks cabinets). 

  Unlike other immortals I'm afraid my creations could never make it in the 21st Century, the harsh brightness of electric light has none of the glamour of gas and candle, the car can never be a sensitive or easy to talk to as the horse. They would admire the great steps forward humanity has made, yes. By necessity they long ago abandoned the default prejudices of their own eras and are sublimely glad to see that such shadows are fading, slowly, but fading. However, the 1980's with their plastic fantastic show glamour were their Waterloo. Not for them white powder with red braces; no, they would far rather be sipping Absinthe with Wilde and since that is not an option they have faded back into the shadows. You might see them occasionally, on a winters evening, wrapped in velvet as they scurry from a museum or stroll along the banks of the Seine. The hat of a hipster might make them shake their heads and smile because they remember when such things were new and bold. In many ways my creature are not so different from myself. But that's the nature of the Gothic, it should possess our dreams and our inner selves. 

The book I began three years ago is now the first of a series and currently out looking for an agent to represent them whilst i keep writing and, of course, I'm still reading gothically. 

Fragrance Friday... Balenciaga's Quadrille.

It's no secret that I love 1950's fashion (well it may be if we have never met before and you are new to this blog and to my writing, in which case I shall let you in on my secret now). Wherever I go I go in swing skirts or pencil skirts, faux astrakhan jackets, little clip top handbags and tiny hats. Naturally, being a perfume lover as well I am always on the look out for a perfect perfume to compliment my clothing obsession. This is a harder quest than you might think now that the heady vintages of the mid 20th Century have been swept aside beneath a barrage of sweetly floral and fruity fragrances. The perfumes of the 1950's and 1960's like a roll on girdle or the perfect court shoe screamed maturity and responsibility along with femininity. Their successors in the late 1960's whispered of inviting exoticism and mysticism with wisps of patchouli and honey. Now, however, the emphasis is  firmly fixed on the ever youthful appeal of peaches and strawberries, spring flowers and spring showers. The plastic surgeons glossy leaflet as portable, spritzable promise. 

I'm afraid that strawberries are my limit, I don't want to smell like dessert any more than I want to wear nude lipstick and I really don't want to wear nude lipstick (not sure I own any shade paler than the classic Revlon: Cherries in the Snow).

Don't get me wrong, some of these fragrances are beautiful, I was rather impressed by Chanel No.5 L'eau even though I feared for it's staying power and know in my heart that, whilst classic No.5 has enough silage that fellow shoppers have chased after me to ask what that perfume is and where they too can obtain a bottle, L'eau may prove sadly fleeting. 

However, they are not quite what I would want in a perfume and so one sometimes has to turn to vintage juices for special occasions and when I'm feeling rather 50's (full outfit, black eyeliner wings, red lipstick) one perfume stands out head and shoulders above it's competition: Balenciaga's Quadrille.

Like Balenciaga's dresses of the 1950's this perfume has volume and quirkiness in abundance. It's a powerhouse of amber and musk where the heart and top notes are, fittingly enough for a perfume named after a 19th century square dance, like coy ballerinas just hovering round the edges. After the first dab, one is aware of a rich scent of plum, peach and the crispness of lemon before the cloves and cardamon jump up sharply from the heart and beckon you in to the real party going on deep down in the musk and amber heart of the composition. 

It may have been an invitation to a quadrille but those tame 19th century dances have no place down here in the depths. Someones dropped a jazz LP down on the record player, there's a hint of smokiness in the air and the bar is serving only whiskey and gin. You want to slip into a little black jumper with shoulder pads and a frilly tulle petticoat. The world is on the cusp of a new era, things will be bright up ahead, your rocket cocktail shaker promised you so. 

That's the beauty of Quadrille to me. It's all the things you want from a vintage perfume, depth, complexity, musk and smokiness. It elbows it's way in and demands to be smelt the same way a black high heel demands that you look. 

Writing Wednesday... The land of Fairy Tale

I have always been fascinated by Fairy Tales. Something about them sings to the blood. That might be a strange way to describe it but Fairy Tales deal in the elements of existence, blood, water, snow, woods and shadows. They make our dreams flesh and our fears manifest. When I think of fairy tales, I think of a low hanging apple, bright red and crisp but perhaps when one bites into the flesh one will find a pale little worm writhing away from your sharp toothed kiss.
Strange truth, it has been many years since I last found a worm in an apple. Sometimes I find the thin paths they make. Perhaps the worms have begun to tell fairy tales about people and know to run away in fright.
Like many children of the 20th Century my first introduction to fairy tales was through the bright, wide eyed fantasies of Disney. Like many children of the 1990’s my first princess was Belle, heroine of “Beauty and the Beast”. How I wanted to be her!
Strangely, if I try to recall Belle now, almost twenty years after our first encounter I can call to mind only the rose and the bell jar of the film. A few notes of songs linger but it’s the rose I can see clearly. Year by year, the image becomes a little more steampunk, darker and more Victorian.
Interesting, since my relationship with fairy tales did not end with those flickering cinematic images.
I moved on from Disney to my Mothers collection of Arthur Rackham’s Grimm and Angela Barrett’s Snow White, to a world where Queen’s expressions shift imperceptibly like sweet glaciers as they lean out from their windows and marvel at the contrast of a drop of blood on the snow.
From Rackham and Barrett I moved on to Angela Carter and the reinvention of fairy tales, tracked down editions of Grimm’s fairy tales which included those tales which they included in their notebooks and not in their finished editions for the fear of upsetting the children.
Now, I have moved on to Marina Warner and her marvellous analysis of Fairy Tales: “From The Beast to The Blond”. Since this beautiful tome arrived in the post, my second hand edition from 1994 even came with the delightful bonus of newspaper reviews clipped out and tucked in by it’s first owner, I have been fixed to the page absorbing detail after detail.

 From Anne of Austria and Louis XIV’s adulation of St. Anne and childlike spontaneous spirituality influencing the emergence of Fairy Tale culture in 17th Century France (not to mention womens writing and the Frond) to the symbolism of hair in fairy tale, every page one turns overflows with gems a little like a brush through enchanted hair.
The path into the land of fairy is a strange one, as much in the shadows of the woods as in the clearings and who knows where it will finally lead you.
In my case, it has led me back to my own writing. Whilst my first books were very much the product of Victorian Gothic, Stoker and Wilde ran in their blood, my most recent novel and the ideas in my notebooks have been rather more fairy tale than hansom cab in the fog (of course, some have been a little bit of both).
When I write I often begin with an image I know has drifted down from the vast library of fairy tale knowledge. I begin writing with falling snow, a crisp apple, a fat red rose, a monstrous key or a glass coffin dancing in my head. I have developed a slight obsession with a version of “Beauty and the Beast” recorded by the Grimm's called “The Winter Rose” and find it’s themes dropping like snowflakes into my paragraphs. Perhaps that is only natural, after all we now know that audiences have been delighted by that particular story for over 5,000 years just as Cinderella and her lost slipper have struck a note with thousands of generations and across continents. Something old stirs in these tales, maybe we don’t yet know how old? But I’ve played with that idea before, asked if stories so strange might have roots of truth
Once you begin to pursue fairy tales you risk toppling over and falling headlong, like Alice, down a rabbit hole of imagery and allegory, see I am doing it now. I don’t expect to ever be an Angela Carter, to her alone was left some rare knowledge of the human heart. But I cannot help but follow the thread of fairy tales and ask my own questions: what would have happened if Cinderella saved herself, if Sleeping Beauty were a man, if Little Red Riding Hood had not gone into the woods?
Such exploration can take strange paths but they can pay off well, Terry Gilliam’s Brothers Grimm is far from a conventional retelling of fairy tales or of the lives of the brothers themselves but I adore it’s playful inventions and the way it conjures old imagery into fabulous new forms. Authors as disparate as Tanith Lee, Neil Gaiman and Helen Oyeyemi have all done remarkable things with fairy tale building blocks Nothing is set in stone, the fairy tales are not exhausted as a source of inspiration, please do pick them up and have fun, from ancient lips to our modern ears they are still singing.