Incense as perfume, naughty and very, very nice...

In the beautiful and varied pallets of perfumery, few perfumes are as beautiful and delicious, nor as suitable for this festive season, as the scent of incense. There's something delectably naughty about wearing a perfume which most of us associate with the sacred calm of churches. The notes of these perfumes chime at Christmas with the magic of the three kings; their gifts of Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh; they echo the rich aroma of sensors swung through the chill of a church on Christmas Eve and, like a photograph of the Madonna by Pierre et Gilles, incense perfumes seem to wink to both the wearer and those who savour the vapour trail they leave behind. This is perfume which is both naughty and nice.
     There are so many incense perfumes which I love but, for the purposes of this post, I have narrowed it down to just four. Though it pains me not to include the superb Avignon by Comme des Garcons I feared that I could never find words to do justice to that masterpiece.

So, without further ado, lets see which perfumes incense perfumes I have chosen....

     My first choice: Parfum Sacre is a feast of incense. Capturing the appropriate tone of smoky sweetness in notes of voluptuous myrrh, musk and cinnamon deepened by rich red rose.
     This is the perfume which hangs in the air when first Gautier's Father Romualdo first sets eyes on  Clarimond; the incense of the church hanging heavy in the air, suddenly tinged with the intense sensuality of her presence. Like Clarimond, this is a perfume which burns brighter than flame and dims the glow of candles, it's a dazzling perfume, an exquisite perfume.

Caron's Parfum Sacre
Photo: by Mauveink

Parfum Sacre is intense; but, if you yearn for an even more intense incense perfume then I highly recommend Armani Prive's Encens Satine. This is definitely an incense which balances like sensuous cut velvet between the chasuble and the drapery of a deep four poster bed. It's a rich blend of incense, woods, spices and amber and it feels so gorgeous. It seems to me to glide heavy as satin on the skin, to glow, and to caress. This perfume is a winter star, sharp and glittering in an ocean dark night and yet, still it retains a hint of the cool stone that surrounds it, encapsulates it and contains it like an embrace. On a literary level this is, without a doubt, Charles Baudelaire's grain of incense that fills a church in "Le Parfum"; inhaled slowly, greedily, drunk on the deliciousness of the perfume.

Encens Satin by Armani Prive
Photo by Mauveink.

If your love of incense has not yet been sated, and why should it be, then I will offer two more suggestions: Annick Goutals, Myrrhe Ardente and Ambre Fetiche. 

Myrrhe Ardente is a wonderfully rich perfume, rising from a base of beeswax which conjures the gorgeous warmth of expensive candles flickering against stone, casting rich pools of golden light around them. To me, this perfume is reminiscent of a carefully painted Icon; rich, bright paint spilling a mesmerising pallet of jewel bright colours heightened into celestial ecstasy by the luminosity of gold, pure, unchanging gold.  Here Myrrh takes the starring role, myrrh in the top notes and myrrh in the heart notes. A rich Myrrh, retaining it's slightly bitter edge but warmed and rounded by tonka bean and vetiver so that it's smoky qualities shine through. Personally, I love that that slight hint of bitterness which comes with Myrrh, it reminds me of that most mystical of Christmas Carols: "We Three Kings". In fact, I have always suspected that that carol was, in part, responsible for my obsession with perfume. I used to listen with rapt attention to those lines concerning the gifts of frankincense and myrrh as a child, utterly fascinated by lines such as; 

    "frankincense to offer have I;

     Incense owns a deity nigh"

As far as I was concerned, the Gold sounded deeply unimpressive by comparison.

    Yes, I would definitly describe Myrrhe Ardente as a mystical perfume, Ambre Fetiche, perhaps, even more so. For Ambre Fetiche is a perfume which builds on its seduction on bones of intense patchouli and leather spiked with geranium building to top notes heavy in incense. I love how deeply the  leather and amber dominate this perfume;  they give a deep, earthy, and utterly perfect quality to the perfume. If Ambre Fetiche is anything then it is liquid gold in a bottle, of the earth but rising above it; holding within it sunlight and firelight as perfectly encapsulated as a butterfly caught in amber, whose delicate lines evoke the light and warmth of a single day, a single season long gone but still glowing.  A perfume as eternal as the glimmer of light through stained glass or the glow of a fairy light reflected on the globe of a golden bauble, a perfect moment to be packed away and cherished and repeated again next year with fresh light, on a fresh tree falling on the same cherished bauble. 

Annick Goutal Myrrhe Ardente and Ambre Fetiche.
Photo by Mauveink.

Of course, if you really need a heavy dose of incense then I highly recommend the aforementioned Avignon. As perfumes go its just too perfect for words...

 

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.