The blood is the life. An ever so slightly Gothic perfume review...

 "Come in, I bid you welcome" 

So, here you stand on the threshold of that delightful Transylvanian castle where you are supposed to be drawing up some legal papers for the Count who resides there. It hasn't been an easy journey, has it? Not with the driver kicking you out of the coach and the locals being so unwelcoming. Not to mention the wolves in the woods, how they howl and wail all through the dark hours of night! But you are here now: journey's end, It could be a little more welcoming, there are no warm and comforting lights at the windows, no homely sounds from within and along with the mist which has been almost omnipresent since you stepped from the train a day ago, there is a curious metallic, moist scent here that you are struggling to place. 

I wouldn't think about that too hard, not if I were you. 

No, what I'd do is take hold of that bell pull and... well... pull it? How deeply that bell's sound seems to echo within! But, you have summoned someone, there are footsteps getting closer, and closer and, just as you are about to faint, the door creaks open. There's a blinding sliver of light and then you can make out that the light comes from a candelabra held in the hand of a surprisingly handsome (one might even say, devilishly handsome) gentleman who, it turns out is the Count himself. He might not be in the first flush of youth, but he's cut from the same cloth as a Greek god. A real silver fox, or should that he wolf? 

What the castle lacks in welcome outside, it more than makes up for inside. There are rich velvet drapes, gilded frames (oddly, without a single mirror in sight) and bright, woven carpets on the floor. In the fireplace, a fire crackles and smokes quite comfortingly. From the ruined castle chapel wafts the warm, dense scent of incense swung, long ago, in bejewelled censors.  Ah, and there is wine waiting for you on a table! 

How kind the Count is! 

However, that metallic scent lingers still, although it been joined by such a symphony of other odours that you don't find it at all unpleasant anymore, just one facet of an old house which has stood for many centuries, which has accumulated it's own delicious darkness. 

If you want to get a sense of Bloody Woods by Liquides Imaginaires, than I hope I've managed to impart a slight sense of it with that little sensory picture in prose. This is a gorgeous Carpathian castle of a perfume; a perfume which imbues the skin with a sweet, spicy, blend of violet and woody notes from the outset and slowly deepens and expands to include more penetrating layers of wine (and this is wine that feels as if it has lain long in the cask, soaking up the wood and the centuries) and ripening fruit. It's a late autumnal scent, holding within it some of the golden hour between the sun setting and twilight's blue hours. An hour or two later, the perfume shifts again into a powdery layer of incense, still sweetly tinged, but now taking on just a little more of the metallic edge you realise was always there. No wonder it's called Bloody Wood, you think. This wood's sap runs very red indeed and not just with the wine. And yet all these notes seem contained by a chill note, something crisp and cold, as if  all those other rich notes were reverberating of  cold, creamy stone walls. 

As the perfume dries down and begins to fade the reverberation becomes more and more like an echo, you are descending deeper into the castle now, hypnotised by it. And you don't regret the hypnotism, no, not one bit. Just as you don't regret looking into the Count's dark, albeit slightly bloodshot eyes as he swore he loved you, loved you to death, in fact.

Within a few hours, of course, the fire will have died low, the night will be creeping in, the wolves will be singing in chorus and the perfume will have died down to an echo of it's echo; the shadow of it's shadow. 

Just a few hours and it will have faded away entirely. Oh, say six or seven; long enough. That moment when you just might find yourself standing at a crossroads with the moon high and silver above you and you look around to see that the castle is so far off in the distance, far beyond the woods. Were you ever really there? Was it a dream? And then you put a hand to your throat and realise that there are two little scars just there and you aren't imagining those. And there's a bottle weighing down your pocket, your very own magic elixir in the form of perfume. Just one spray and you'll have made a choice. Just one spray and you'll be right back there at the castle door.

You shrug as you uncap the bottle and lift the spray to your throat. 

It was inevitable, one sniff and you will want to return.   

Perfume du jour: Zoologist's Beaver

The best way I can describe this post is to say that it is a perfume review and a small essay on writing rolled into one, hopefully harmonious piece.
Perfume has strange and wonderful powers, this week I un-stoppered a vial of perfume whose deep, sharp notes inspired me to write not only a review but a little literary musing. It just so happened that when I sniffed this particular perfume for the first time I was writing a historical short story and treading carefully to avoid that great pitfall in writing the past: failing to imagine how different the past really was. I do not mean only the physical difference between horse drawn carriages and motorized cars, washing your clothes in a creak or having a washing machine to hand. What I was thinking of was the mental landscape of living within the past. The opening lines of Hartley’s "The Go Between" may have become a cliche but a note of truth rings there:  the past is a strange place to imagine let alone to visit, It’s customs are not our own, it’s conventions are not our own and for every familiarity there lie in wait a thousand mysteries.
From our vantage point in the twenty first century, however, the behaviors of the past can seem baffling. Not only the broad sweeps of politics and policy but the tiny details. We now know that most people in Medieval times woke during the night. Very probably they woke due to the extreme cold but gradually they came to see safety in these nocturnal interruptions; the midnight hour was the witching hour and a wakeful household was also a vigilant household when witches danced.
These days, the fortunate majority of us sleep through the night, insulated from such biting cold by walls stronger than wattle and daub and witches have become just another Halloween costume slipped on to provide a vicarious thrill. However, if you want to write about the medieval world you need to take these facts into account just as you will need to give the fantastical figures on the margins of maps more than a cursory glance. Omnipods, sea serpents and wolf heads are more than mere decoration they were genuine fears lying just beyond the horizon. The skies were full of ships too, their inhabitants unable to breath earth’s rich air whilst their anchors occasionally caught against the impediments of barns and church towers.
Marina Warner points out in her book, ‘From the Beast to the Blond’ that 17th century fairy tales of wolves and bears were far more terrifying to their original audiences, no matter how regal, because they truly inhabited a world where one wrong turn in the woods could lead you into the jaws of a waiting wolf. Now, the wolves are long gone and so has the visceral fear of them. If we wish to recreate the fear, we often end up re-imagining what it means to encounter a “wolf”.
This is not to say that there was not amusement to be found in fairy tales from their first readings onward, but historical methods for mitigating the fear factor might prove unpalatable to a modern writer. At one court performance for Louis XIV scripted my Moliere, Warner tells how dancing bears from the court menagerie were used, a practice we shiver at now for it’s savage mistreatment of animals but which never gave those audiences a second thought.
The art of historical imagination can be just as difficult when one turns to perfumes.
When we think of the odours of the past we immediately conjour the odours we find most displeasing now, the fecal scents of open drains and unwashed bodies and we wonder how they could bear not only to be around these but how they could possibly hope to cover them with perfumes. How, we wonder, could they even smell the perfumes they wore?  Alas we imagine some light floral akin to the delicate fragrances that fill up our own well lit department stores forgetting how powerful and rich the perfumes of choice a few hundred years ago would have been.
There was as much of the animal on the dressing tables of histories great beauties as there was on their dining tables. Castoreum, civet and musk. The animal kingdoms scent glands of display and seduction were being put to use by Casanova’s and Du Barrys with similar results. Ambergris, the pungent sea washed product of Whales stomach discomforts was sprinkled liberally on bodies and into food (Charles II liked to use a little Ambergris as a breakfast garnish) There are certainly methods for olfactory archaeology  since so many of the great perfume houses (Floris, Penhaligons and Guerlain for instance) started in the nineteenth century. You could start with a few classics like Penhaligon’s Hammam Bouquet (used to such perfect effect in Essie Fox’s The Somnambulist) or Guerlain’s Jicky. However, reformulation has changed these perfumes a great deal over the intervening centuries. Oscar Wilde’s beloved Malmaison by Floris returned briefly a few years ago but is far removed from the volatile natural oriental he would have dabbed on in the mornings.
In any case, it was a powerful sensory experience of luxury that I was struggling to convey when I un-stoppered Zoologist perfumes beautiful, Beaver.
For a second after the first spritz, the scent of this perfume is arresting. It’s warm and bitter, animal and unashamed. However, after a few seconds of olfactory adjustment, a sniff of my wrist bought a smile to my lips.
This was the perfumed key I had been seeking into the boudoir of my protagonist. This is the bitter post hunt perfume, the scent wafting up from a courtiers jabot as you lean in to whisper a few words of gossip. It’s pungent but whilst that could prove overwhelming I found that I liked the smell.
It may not be for the faint hearted but who wants to be fainted hearted when it comes to perfume?
It’s sharp, clear notes of fresh air and citrus serve beautifully to strengthen and refine the powerful hits of musk and castoreum (what else in a perfume called Beaver?) whilst the smoke and undergrowth create a rich imagined backdrop to the perfume story playing out around them. The cold winter air has just been shut out of the party as the fire rises in the hearth and the seduction begins.
Everything I wanted to convey fell into place when I breathed in this perfume, it’s very style of perfume story telling as utterly modern as it’s notes were refreshingly historical. I recommend it, to those trying to recapture the past or find something a little different.

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…