Paris Is For Perfume Lovers: Part 1 - Meeting Lucy Raubertas Of Indieperfumes And Neela Vermeire

Paris is for lovers, or so the conventional wisdom goes. However, as I wrote in my review of L'Artisan's Nuit de Tubéreuse, that is not the Paris I know based on my visits down the years, admittedly mostly for work:

'I know where Bertrand Duchaufour is going with this idea, for Paris is the quintessential setting for romantic trysts in hotels. I can confirm that this is the case, for I have often heard tryst-like noises emanating from the room next door. I am usually awake myself in the small hours, copying up interviews, polishing shoes and trying to identify bus connections from the end of Line C on the RER. So the whole conceptual premise doesn't really work for me, though I daresay my jaded view of Paris nights is atypical.'

But happily for me Paris is also a mecca for perfume lovers, and thus it was that last Wednesday night found me back in the 5e district near the Rue Mouffetard, my favourite base these days. I was relieved to be there at all in fact, as Easyjet had cancelled my flight owing to an air traffic controllers' strike, and I had just managed to bag a Eurostar seat at the eleventh and considerably more expensive hour. But it was money well spent, and with just an hour to go before my 'blind date' with Lucy of Indieperfumes, I quickly got changed at my hotel, one of the top ten budget options in the city according to The Guardian.

The place was certainly quaint and characterful, though not without its quirks: the showers and WC were on the landing, for example, the former on even-numbered floors only and bizarrely operated by tokens costing 2.5 euros for precisely five minutes. After this time the water cut off abruptly like those manual jet wash wands at petrol stations. By contrast, the nearest WC was right opposite my room, however the instructions about the interior light were a) incorrect and b) in German. In hindsight I reckon that the sign must have been one of those vintage door plaques with a purely decorative role, but I bet it has plunged a few Germans into darkness in its time...

By 8.30pm I had made it to the St Michel fountain, where Lucy was already in position.  Even without her characteristic eye mask on a stick ;-), she was easily recognisable from one of her other photos on Facebook. Lucy was also over here on holiday, and I thought it was a good opportunity to catch her, as she is based in Brooklyn. I was aware of Lucy's blog and of her key role in both the Clarimonde and Devilscent projects, but we hadn't had any prior dealings really beyond liking each other's posts on Facebook from time to time. And that is just the point really...for thanks no doubt to her background in fine and decorative art Lucy is responsible for a steady stream of the most exquisitely chosen - nay, curated - images of home interiors, languid models, vintage jewellery, sumptuous textiles, henna-tattooed elephants, in short, beautiful and aspirational 'objects' of all kinds. On a grey day, chance upon any one of Lucy's status updates and it will lift the soul. Even the grey objects will perk you up - no, really.  And then of course we had perfume in common...so say no more...

Three hours, a glass of wine and a bowl of pasta later, sitting at the table on the left (minus the beagle) outside one of Saint-Germain's atmospheric restaurants - specifically chosen because it was near Rue Dante, the name of Lucy's Italian greyhound - we had found out that we had a lot more in common...including a love of SL Un Lys, to which Lucy treated herself later in her trip. In an email exchange following our meeting, we mused about what fun it is to meet perfumistas everywhere in the world, and how 'sympatico' (to use Lucy's word) they all seem to be, such that one can proceed with absolute confidence on a blind date basis!

Parisian florist from Central Casting

The next day dawned overcast and rainy - and cold, and windy. I had omitted to bring an umbrella or any kind of waterproof clothes, so there was nothing for it but to sally forth with a shopping bag over my head. My first stop was an Internet cafe to finish off my blogoversary post. Well, I use the term 'Internet cafe' loosely - it was a Turkish grocer's with a few PCs in a back room, wedged between some gas canisters and fridges, with an uninterrupted view of the bins through the open door to the courtyard. And I use the term 'courtyard' advisedly too.

But the scenery - if not the weather - changed for the better as the morning wore on...for by 12.30 I had arrived at a Lebanese restaurant in the north of the city, where I was due to meet Neela Vermeire of Neela Vermeire Créations. Neela had reserved a table in her name, and we were both ushered to it, however the two members of staff in question had different ideas about which table was the designated one.  This meant that we each waited for the other in splendid isolation for some ten minutes, before I thought to check my phone and found a text from Neela, who was seated just feet away but out of my direct line of sight.  She had - very modestly I thought, for someone so well known in our community - thought to mention her green scarf, in case I was having trouble identifying her.

Comedy musical tables moment over ;-), we were soon seated together in the window and chatting away nineteen to the dozen. I entrusted the ordering of the food to Neela and before long an array of mezzé dishes arrived, upon which I fell with glad cries, having deliberately skipped breakfast to work up a good appetite. Neela was every bit as bubbly, charming, down to earth and funny as I had imagined, if not more so. I had one or two questions for her that I had jotted down in my perfume testing notebook, but nothing approximating to an interview as such. This is partly because there are many excellent published interviews - or 'conversations', as Neela prefers to think of them - in the blogosphere already, plus I am an interviewer by profession, so asking people questions in any other setting is inevitably a bit of a busman's holiday.

We talked a bit about Neela's peripatetic past, her former life as a lawyer, and how she came to set up a perfume house and find an outlet for her creativity and the 'bon vivant' side of her personality.  We also touched on the creative process and her working relationship with Bertrand Duchaufour - upon finalising the upcoming release, Ashoka, Bertrand apparently told Neela that she was his toughest client!  (In a good way, I am sure... ;-) )  Of the three scents currently on the market I explained that I like all the development of Mohur and the drydowns of Trayee and Bombay Bling, but find the opening of Trayee too fiercely spicy, for example. Neela wasn't in the least fazed by the fact that I felt the need to qualify my liking for two of the trio, which just made me warm to her even more. And then I finally got a chance to test Ashoka for myself, which lives up to the glowing reviews I had read and is indeed a milky-figgy-woody dream of a scent. As someone who owns two bottles of PG Bois Naufragé there was little doubt that I would fall hard for this one, and so it proved.

The Ashoka Chakra - source: Neela Vermeire Créations

For much of the time though we chewed the cud about the blogosphere and Facebook scene and life in general - including national stereotypes, death, trouser suits, sensory pleasures, the oil industry, Belgian traffic patterns, 'skin chemistry', yoga, work/life balance, networking, iPhone covers - ie a gamut of absorbing yet random topics. It turns out that neither of us are too keen on honey in perfumes, and guess what? - Neela has a white iPhone like mine. Fancy that!  I make that me, Neela and Pierre Guillaume so far - though his phone goes commando while Neela and I resort to covers of varying degrees of novelty.  Hers is a cute mock up of a vintage leather book, known - I have since learnt, as my curiosity got the better of me - as the BookBook.  Oh, and I have just remembered that my neighbour Darrell also has a white phone. Okay, that's four confirmed owners of the white version.  Still quite a coincidence...!

Lebanese spicy fried liver - source: Flickr

And the most startling thing to report about our meeting was the fact that Neela actually persuaded me to eat fried liver. No one, but no one has managed to do that since I was made to eat the stuff by a draconian school dinner lady in about 1964, but d'you know what, it was really tasty! And then - clearly on a gastronomic roll by now - Neela coaxed me into drinking something that I swear she described as a 'white coffee' (I don't like coffee!), but which turned out in fact to be a wonderfully fragrant beverage of hot water infused with orange blossom.

Lebanese white coffee, but not as we know it

So, after two thoroughly enjoyable social encounters in as many days, I spent the rest of that Thursday hitting the 'grands magasins' - and a couple of small ones - on a solo sniffing expedition, the upshot of which will be documented in Part 2...

Bonkers At 3.6 - Taking Stock And An Odd Giveaway

Post-move chaos! 

At the end of last October I failed to notice the third anniversary of Bonkers.  Or I probably noticed it and promptly forgot again.  I had a lot on my plate at the time, juggling house renovations and a major job that came out of nowhere.  Which was very welcome, mind, having only had five weeks' work in the whole of 2012.  Some seven months later I am still struggling a bit to keep all the balls in the air in my new single life, but I felt that I couldn't go all the way to the four year mark next October without stepping back for a moment and taking stock of where I am at in terms of the blog itself as well as my current stage in the 'perfumista life cycle'.

So, to mark the 3.6th anniversary of the blog (trust me, I've done the maths!), here are some off the cuff thoughts about the view from my small corner of Perfume Land.

The mania is past, but I still love perfume

When I started blogging, I wrote about how my love of fragrance came at me completely out of the blue, prompting me to dub it 'sudden onset perfume mania'.  Over five years on from that day in January 2008 when my obsession was first kindled, I am well and truly over my rampantly acquisitive phase, enjoying the scents I already own and sticking my head over the parapet now and again to explore a tiny subset of the new releases.  The lemming flock has dwindled drastically, in fact I am not sure there are more than a handful of the creatures left in their enclosure, making for much more comfortable living conditions, as you can imagine.  So am I still 'bonkers about perfume', you may well ask?  Well, 'bonkersness' implies madness, so by that strict definition I would have to say no.  As with any long term relationship the crazy honeymoon has morphed into a deep and comfortable attachment punctuated by occasional quests for novelty!  According to my friends, however, my enthusiasm for perfume - even at today's more moderate levels - is still pretty extreme compared to the average person, so by that yardstick I do remain bonkers as charged
...;-)

My collection scares and delights me in equal measure

This is a funny one - I have days when I wake up and revel in the immense variety of my collection, savouring the pleasure of selecting a SOTD and counting myself so lucky to be surrounded by all this perfume.  I feel much the same about my wool collection.  Being 'with wool' or 'with perfume' is deeply comforting and feeds the soul, I'd go so far as to say.  On other days I wake up with crippling option anxiety and/or a sense of the enormity of my hoarding behaviour, and the inevitability that some of my bottles and decants must turn before too long - for I would need dozens of lifetimes to make a serious dent in my stash.  This realisation troubles me deeply, as I cannot bear waste.

Another woolly project!

My curation strategy may be flawed

Staying with this issue of shelf life, I am dogged by concerns that the elaborate lengths to which I have gone to preserve my perfumes (two beer fridges, set at 10C, just like the Osmotheque!), may not be as effective as I had at first thought.  For the trio of enemies of perfume are light, heat and moisture, and the fridge fails on Point 3.  It is positively sopping in my fridges - at the back especially, with ice build up and running condensation.  I do periodically defrost them and start again, but the moisture problem is endemic.  What would be handy to know would be which of these three enemies is the most likely to curtail a perfume's life.  Hmm, a sort of weighted average risk profile for all the different storage solutions would be just the ticket - cool dark dry wardrobe vs cold dark damp fridge etc.  Because if dampness is the No 1 killer of fragrance, my collection is stuffed, basically.

The people matter at least as much as the perfume, if not more so

As my interest in trying new scents plateaus, my curiosity about the various characters in the perfume community seems to be growing exponentially!  My work travels in particular have enabled me to hook up with a number of perfumistas in person all over the world, and I additionally feel a close connection to many of the people I have not met but with whom I interact regularly on the blog or Facebook.  If money were no object, I would take a year off and go on a round-the-world fly/drive trip, joining the dots between fumeheads in every continent. It's a wild pipe dream I know, and meanwhile I count myself lucky to have got to know as many people in Perfume Land as I have.  You could take away some of my perfume collection now and I wouldn't protest, but not my fumie friends, please!

You can't please everybody

As some readers may know, I can't put up links to my blog posts on Facebook, as about a year and a half ago somebody  took it upon themselves to report my blog to the site administrators as 'spammy or abusive'.  This is patently absurd, especially when you consider the ratio of my status updates filled with inconsequential  domestic trivia versus those announcing a new blog post.  If the person had accused me of spamming people with pictures of my pot plants or dining room furniture I would think they had some justification.  What this tells me though is that not everybody will like what you do, and you may inadvertently upset a few people along the way.  The inability to link to my posts on Facebook has hobbled my networking opportunities quite considerably, as would-be readers are used to just clicking through to an article or a video or whatever, and they don't want to have to go into Google and type in the name of the blog to fetch the post up.  But there it is.  Try telling the administrators of Facebook that there has been a miscarriage of justice.  You might as well chuck a message in a bottle in the sea.   I did actually write to their Customer Services department in Dublin - amazingly there is one! - but predictably never heard back.

I am ever so slightly - and selectively - affiliated

Just this week I finally got around to putting up a banner in my sidebar advertising Ormonde Jayne.  I have received a number of approaches from companies asking me to add links to their site - to do with a whole range of items, some of them completely random and off-topic, like hair scrunchies or men's clothing!  I decided to respond to the Ormonde Jayne inquiry because I am a big fan of theirs and have already written a number of favourable posts about the line.  The addition of this banner will in no way change my approach to blogging about Ormonde Jayne or any other perfume house though - no one has asked me to actively promote the brand, and I wouldn't agree to do so if they had.

I am still a bit hazy on matters of 'blogetiquette'

By this I mean both the etiquette associated with being a blogger and a reader of other people's blogs.  In my capacity as blogger there are a few things I am pretty clear on, namely that it is polite to reply to each and every comment a reader leaves in a timely manner.  The protocol is less clear when comments are left on a very old post, though by and large I answer them there too.  I think it is also considered good form to tell readers if you are about to go 'on hiatus', and I do occasionally do this, however, sometimes I find a window to blog shortly after announcing my break, and promptly feel foolish for having so publicly announced my absence!  There are numerous other points of etiquette where I am more unsure, for example whether it is polite to link to a blog post of your own in a comment left on someone else's blog - I tend not to, as it might be construed as self-promotion, which doesn't sit terribly well with me at the best of times, although I recognise its importance.  Let me know if you have any pointers for me here!

Slow blogging and striking a balance

I recently went on a walking holiday with two girlfriends, and it was an illuminating time in many ways.  I learnt that I could cover 30 miles without incurring a single blister, and that it is important to take time out from one's online activities.  This was brought poignantly to a head when my friends caught me trying to get on to Facebook on top of The Ridgeway trail, shortly after having stopped to post a photo of the scenery.  'Are you on the Internet again?' one of my friends asked, a faint note of irritation in her voice.  'I just want to see if I've had any comments from friends about that picture I put up' I replied sheepishly. 'But we are your friends too!' my friend expostulated.  'And we are here!  And if you talk to us we'll comment back to you!'  This pulled me up short and taught me that it is easy to get wholly sucked into a virtual world and more or less live your whole life online.  So at the weekend I took time out to create a herb garden on my patio, and that felt good.  I don't think my blogging frequency is part of the problem - if anything, I feel I am not posting enough! - and I have largely withdrawn from Twitter, but my addiction to the Internet overall may still need to be reined in. ;-)

When reviewing perfumes, there are many ways of skinning the cat

I used to think that because I couldn't readily deconstruct a perfume's development into its constituent notes that I wasn't qualified to review fragrance.  I have since learnt that conveying how a perfume makes you feel or likening a scent to others it resembles are also perfectly valid ways of describing perfume.  Note detection, humour, whimsy, metaphor, synaesthesia, poetry, allegory, what might be termed the 'Arabian Nights' school of perfume writing - bring it all on, if it helps us conjure up and relate to fragrance.

So, to mark this just over the mid-point of my fourth year of Bonkers, I am celebrating with a giveaway of about 3.5 samples, give or take.  These will be either a selection from my newly acquired vintage hoard, or from my regular collection.  I will tailor the prize to suit the winner's preferences when they are chosen.

To enter, just leave a comment by the end of next Friday, 21st June, about your own stage in the perfume 'journey' (oh no, I ended up saying that word!) or any thoughts on the type of posts you would like to see in future on Bonkers.

Post-post move calm!

Geza Schoen Scents Belfast: Jan Uprichard's Odourific Odyssey

Abridged magazine

The other night in a Facebook status update, fellow blogger Danielle de Medeiros wrote that she had been out for dinner and was now going home to read the Iliad.  Fair play, I thought, and a considerable step up from the 'bones-forward' thrillers that are my own staple 'literary' fodder.  And Danielle's mention of Homer's Iliad put me in mind of its sequel, the Odyssey, which in turn reminded me of the latest olfactory project by Jan Uprichard, Odourific Odyssey.  Jan is an artist with an MA in Art in Public from the University of Ulster.  Now based in Bedford, she has exhibited internationally but retains strong links to the province, and in 2011 I wrote a post about one of her earlier fragrance-themed projects - 'Howser's Law'.   

I was alerted to Jan's latest venture by my friend Ruth, who works in the Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast.  Back in February the magazine Abridged released its latest edition, '0 - 28: Once a Railroad', which explores 'the destruction of the dream' through thought-provoking images and texts, and includes this summary by Jan of the Odourific Odyssey project:

'Over two days at the beginning of October 2012 I travelled around Belfast with a perfumer. We were searching for smells that were distinctive, that people would relate to a particular place. We chose 4 smells and each one was made into a scratch and sniff card. The cards are distributed in Abridged 0 - 28: Once a Railroad.'

Ruth sent me a copy of the magazine, together with its single sample card, which immediately piqued my curiosity about the rest.  So she suggested I write directly to Jan, and ask her to send me the other cards and fill me in generally on the background to Odourific Odyssey.

So I did, sending Jan a big wodge of questions about the aims of the project and the mechanics of the creative process itself.  I have edited and intercut my questions with Jan's answers below, followed by my own take on the scents/smells themselves after she had kindly sent me the complete set of cards.

The Odyssey Arena - source: geograph.org.uk

How did you get together with Geza - did you approach a number of perfumers or target him specifically? 

'I met Geza during my MA - I went on a research trip to Berlin and I asked him if we could meet just so I could find out more about perfume.' 

I would also be interested to know where you went, how you decided where to go or whether you just wandered about, following your noses, as it were? 

'So, yes, he came to Belfast for two days, which was great. I had thought beforehand about smells that I think are particular to Belfast and asked people from different parts of the city to tell me what smells they associated with the parts of the city where they lived/worked. I thought it would be useful to have a starting point to make the most of the time that he was here.

Also a lot of the work that I make takes the form of conversations between me and members of the public - in the past I've invited people to sit down and map out their own histories in terms of smell and that's something that I'm still really interested in. If I had more time to spend on this project I would have liked to make the research for it a much bigger part of the work. Although in this instance I wanted to recreate how Belfast smells now, or at least on the two days that we were there, so not for it to be nostalgic, which made it great that Geza hadn't been there before.'

Belfast city centre - source: mapshop.com

Was it a collaborative process or did you let Geza - as a perfumer coming afresh to the city maybe - take the lead?

'I'd say the process was fairly collaborative: we went to all parts of the city, North, South, East and West, and so even though I had done some planning beforehand it was all really open. We discussed the different smells of places in terms of the practicalities of recreating them: sometimes they were dependent on things like temperature, sometimes it was my own nostalgia of how I remembered the smell of a place that wasn't actually how it smells now. So in the end the four smells we picked were a mixture of places I had thought would be good and places that we decided on over the two days.'

Also, were there a number of contender smells which you whittled down to just four, or did you just home in on four from the word go?  

'There weren't really that many distinctive smells to choose from. I think that that reflects the fact that Belfast is a post-industrial city now, so a lot of the smells that we might have associated with it (for instance the tobacco factory that you mentioned) aren't there anymore.' 

And may I know what the smells were?  Is the card in the magazine the same one in all the issues, or are they all mixed up in a random fashion?

'The cards were distributed at random in Abridged and I purposely haven't said what the smells/places are, our smell associations are so subjective that I think it's better to leave that open, it's really up to chance whether or not you recognise or associate them with a specific place.'

Did Geza go back to Berlin to develop the scents or stay in the province? 

'Geza went back to Berlin and recreated the four smells we had chosen.'

Geza Schoen - source: edle-essenzen.de

So far, so very interesting.  On to the cards themselves...  As someone who grew up in Belfast, and lived through the worst of The Troubles, my own perspective on the city and its smells is perhaps inevitably skewed by the 23 years I knew there (1959 - 1982), even though I go over to visit friends every few years, so I am notionally up to speed with how the city smells now.  And that is what Jan and Geza were keen to capture...

A word first on the scratch and sniff cards themselves.  They don't have a defined strip or capsule containing the scent, just an instruction on the flat card saying: 'scratch and sniff here'.  On the first attempt - I also had my poet friend in attendance (she of the perfume bottle earring featured here), as I thought her more literary take on the scents might be interesting! - neither of us could actually generate much odourific material - our odyssey was still firmly at the starting blocks. We had admittedly just eaten curry and so may not have been in the right digestive space as it were to pick up on the smells.  Especially when you factor in the couple of glasses of Chardonnay we had downed by this point.  Both of us mostly smelt card, which we attributed to their minimalist design, also in terms of odour molecules.

Over the course of the next couple of days, however, the cards gradually began to yield a fragrance that transcended the paper medium - quite subtly, mind, and it is fair to say that the base note of card persisted throughout my trials.

Now I can only refer to the cards by the colour of their typeface, and will endeavour to assign them to different compass points of the city, on the offchance that there is one representing each area.  But only if that genuinely squares with my own take on the scents and their location.

Magenta type - a pretty, spring-like floral.  It would be a stretch to say what notes are in here, but it is conjuring up in my mind memories of magnolia trees in the elegant Georgian streets around the university.  This is a carefree scent, evoking a warm, lazy day in that eerie calm before exam season begins in earnest.  (Location - South Belfast)

University Square - source: qub.ac.uk

Green type - I realise the print colour may be a bit suggestive, but I am getting a green scent here.  It isn't forest-y as such, more fresh and bright, citrus-y even.  It doesn't smell like grass at all, but I am reminded of the freshly cut lawns at my first primary school, and the dappled light filtering through the trees. It is another happy scent, but more summery than spring-like.  It also evokes long drinks of lemon barley water and occasional lessons outside.  If I was to shift this scene slightly up the road to a more iconic Belfast location with a similar summery / grassy vibe, I would pick the Parliament Buildings at Stormont and their even more spacious grounds.  (Location - East Belfast)

My old primary school, just as I remember it...

Dark blue type - I am getting spices and a sort of curry aroma here, and the images that come to mind are around the docks, though that are is not a district noted for its curry houses as such.  Indeed I am not sure where the Indian restaurants are in Belfast these days, because back in the 70s they were almost unknown.  This is definitely some kind of exotic woody, spicy number.  I can see the offices of Nambarrie tea, and the narrow alleyways by the harbour.  The Gallagher's tobacco factory in York Street - once the largest in the world - is gone now, but that is the sort of architectural backdrop I am imagining for this smell.  There is a slightly offbeat note which could be curry leaf or tobacco leaf maybe.  Can I also be getting lime pickle / kaffir lime or something?  It is flitting in and out of my nose's eye.  (Location - North Belfast - just!)

Site of the former Nambarrie tea warehouse - source: geograph.ie

Orange type - Okay, so I hope I am not also being influenced by the visual cue of the orange type here, but this smells to me of oranges!  Nowhere in Belfast is there orange blossom that I can recall.  Instead, I am reminded of Spelga Mandarin yoghurt, a tea-time staple when I used to go to my babysitter in Strandtown straight from school in the 60s.  I don't think there is even a marmalade making plant in Belfast, but let's just check that anyway.  Right, I am going to go with Spelga yoghurt and the Orange Order, which are my primary associations with oranges and the province.  (Location - West Belfast)

Orange Hall, Shankhill Road - source: shankhillwelcomesyou.co.uk

It occurred to me that two of my olfactory associations are at opposite times of year to Geza and Jan's autumn walkabout, so I am probably way off the mark with my interpretation of these smells.  But Jan did say she wanted to leave it to chance whether I or anyone would recognise these 'scents of place', and even now that I have nailed my olfactory colours to the mast she may still prefer to play her odourific cards close to her chest...!

NB I note that Jan has been careful to refer to these odours as 'smells' throughout our exchange, whereas my instinct is to call them 'scents'.  I guess this is because they do smell more like actual perfumes than the word 'smell' suggests to me, though I don't believe there are any plans to release them commercially as fragrances.  ;-)

UPDATE - Since I wrote this post, I have had a further email exchange with Jan - here is her response to my experience of 'sniffing Belfast':

'It's really interesting to read about how you perceived the smells.  You guessed some of the locations pretty well, but in a way you couldn't be right or wrong in this situation because what it reminds you of is just as important as the place that I think the smell emanates from. Also it fulfils one of my goals with the work, that is to get people to refocus their senses on smell instead of sight.'

BBC Radio 4's 'You And Yours' Programme - Perfume Interview With Lizzie Ostrom (Odette Toilette) & Kate Williams

Source: bbc.co.uk

I was making lunch unusually early last week (between 12 and 1pm!) when I chanced upon this interview on Radio Four's 'You and Yours' programme with Lizzie Ostrom (Odette Toilette of Scratch+Sniff events fame) and Kate Williams, a perfumer with Seven Scent, a company based in Manchester specialising in functional fragrances.  The eight minute segment kicks off with a reference to the economy and the so-called 'lipstick effect', and how this could equally be said to apply to perfume.  We are apparently spending three times as much on scent as bread, would you believe? - though I suppose a loaf is only about a quid, and some people eat cereal for breakfast ;-).  The discussion moves through into a consideration of the emotional role perfume can play in people's lives and the concept of a scent wardrobe.  Lizzie describes herself as a 'perfume floozy' - hey, we can all relate to that!

The clip itself doesn't appear to be available for embedding here, but you can listen on the BBC site.

You and Yours perfume clip

El Celler de Can Roca: If Perfume Be The Food Of...Er...If Perfume Be The Food!

El Celler de Can Roca 

Owing to the all-consuming nature of work lately, my newspaper reading has been even slower than usual.  At the best of times it can take me a whole week to read the Saturday Times, but sometimes my piecemeal progress with the paper can stretch to a fortnight.   Thus it is that the subject of this post draws on an article in The Times from May 4th about a Spanish restaurant in Girona run by three brothers, which has been named as the best restaurant in the world - El Celler de Can Roca.  As someone who frequently skips lunch in favour of a sort of 'teabrunch' around 4pm, I was alarmed to learn that lunch at El Celler de Can Roca costs a cool 165 euros and consists of no fewer than 21 courses.  And even if I had an appetite to do justice to that number of courses, I would be a bit lairy about some of the dishes on offer.  'A grilled prawn with foam and seawater and sponge cake of plankton' sounds a little ominous, and I wouldn't go a bundle on 'caramelised olives filled with anchovies' hung on a bonsai olive tree, not least because I don't care for olives and anchovies.

Can't be too dwarf enough for me.

But what caught my eye in this extensive and gastrononomically envelope-pushing menu was one of the four desserts.  At least I assume they were all desserts - I am going by the natural break in the text between those four items and 'pigeon with mole poblano sauce and charcoal-grilled strawberries'.  Though with strawberries in there too it really is anyone's guess!.  And hopefully no actual moles, as the poor creatures wouldn't have seen that posthumous pigeon-paring coming, God love 'em.

Yes, the dessert that caught my eye was: 'A fragrance adapted: Shalimar by Guerlain'.

Pardon??  A flurry of googling later, I learnt that the pastry chef, Jordi Roca, has got form for making desserts that conjure up well-known perfumes.  He had a crack at Calvin Klein's Eternity (which wouldn't have been my first pick, I must say), capturing 'the volatile soul of a perfume, deciphering the formula and adapting it to an edible reality'.

Jordi went on to devise a whole slew of desserts based on scents, from houses such as DKNY, Caroline Herrera, Hermès, Lancôme and Bvlgari.  I gather he had a spot of bother replicating Chanel No 5, as well he might really(!), even if he was armed with the culinary equivalent of a gas chromatograph ;-).  Okay, I am being silly - I don't actually know how he went about his fragrance deconstruction.

DKNY perfume dessert - strange but true!

I found this description of a Terre d'Hermes-themed dessert on a Thai gastroblog called Sfreelife:

' Jordi had to distill the earth and pour the clear liquid over the chocolate-orange heavenly combination. The other key elements include patchouli, jasmine, pomelo, shiso and beetroot leaf.'

There's foodie verisimilitude for you...   Jordi's edible perfume creations even include Angel by Thierry Mugler - shudder.  There again, maybe it would be better eaten rather than worn?  And in a nice touch diners are also given a paper cone with the actual perfume sprayed inside to compare against the dessert they are eating.

DKNY perfume sample cones

Then in an intriguing reverse twist, there is also an actual perfume you can buy, inspired by a lemon dessert from the restaurant ie a case of perfume imitating pudding rather than the other way about.  It is called Núvol de Llimona or 'lemon cloud', and the dessert on which it is based is 'Lemon Distillation'.  Bizarre as this may sound - though let's face it, everything about this restaurant is a little left field - the perfume was designed to be sprayed as a mist over diners as they ate the dish.  Now that might be a case of sensory overload, I'm not sure.  Olfactoria recently asked the question about what perfumes you pair with food, but this is taking the notion a step further.

Here is a description from the Roca Perfumes site:

'With the co-operation of perfumer Agustí Vidal, Jordi has captured the essence of the dish, a “lemon muffin soaked in milk”, and has successfully encapsulated its flavour in a bottle of fragrance.

Top notes: bergamot, tangerine
Middle notes: lily of the valley, milk, custard
Base notes: sugar syrup, toasted sugar, musk'

Oh - guess what?  My googling of images uncovered a post by Judith of The Unseen Censer - she has tried the perfume AND met both Jordi and the perfumer in Barcelona!  Seems like Núvol de Llimona gets a thumbs up from her, although she had issues with its longevity.  But she gves props to Jordi and the perfumer for avoiding a 'Lemon Pledge' note - that alone is indeed some feat.

So I have to ask - is there any perfume whose gastronomic interpretation you would like to eat - or any dessert you would like to wear as a perfume?

After all, there are a number of gourmand dessert-y scents around, so the latter route at least is fairly well trodden.

But going back to the Times article that caught me eye, eating Shalimar would be an altogether different matter in my view.  Especially if Jordi managed to replicate the civet...

Finally, here is a photo of the great man himself - a little bit edible himself, you might say.

Jordii Roca: fragrantly - and flagrantly - smooth operator

Photo of El Celler de Can Roca from Wikimedia Commons via e_calamar, photos of bonsai tree, DKNY dessert and perfume cone samples from Flickr Creative Commons via Robert Young, photo of Núvol de Llimona from Fragrantica, photo of Jordi Roca from halfpriceperfumes.co.uk.

Bonkers Interruptus - A Quick Update

I realise it is over two weeks since my last post, so I thought I should write a quick line to explain that I have been uncharacteristically swamped with work lately.  A recent spate of projects has meant a series of early starts, late finishes and lost weekends, and this general pattern looks set to persist till the end of the month, though I hope to regain the weekends at least.  I am not complaining, as I had hardly any work at all last year, but it is hard to find time for hobbies - or even chores.  I have put off a dentist's appointment three times!  I am almost out of kitchen roll!  Okay...so however busy I am, I somehow manage to dip into Facebook still, but that connection with the outside world is helping to keep me going... ;-)

Now I do have lots of posts in mind for when I get the work-life-Facebook balance back again.  Meanwhile, here is a photo of a butterfly garden bench I spotted on the Interwebs.  I would love some vintage style patio furniture as it happens, but I think this might be too overtly flittersniffer-y even for me.

source: burwashsecretgarden.co.uk

Alyssa Harad: 'Coming To My Senses' - A Fragrant Bildungsroman

The best kind of book is one which you simply don't want to end.  Which, when you realise you have just thirty pages to go - or less, if you have forgotten to factor in the acknowledgements - makes you start to slow down and savour every sentence, or even reread entire paragraphs to postpone the inevitable moment when you set the bookmark to one side and close the cover for the last time.

'The Stranger in the Mirror' by Jane Shilling - a poignant and funny memoir about encroaching middle age - was a book which had that effect on me lately.  In the perfume sphere, Chandler Burr's 'The Perfect Scent' was another.  And now Alyssa Harad's 'Coming to My Senses' completes the trio.  So, given my keen enjoyment of this book, you may be surprised to learn that it has taken me at least six months to finish it.  This is because the place I most like to read is in the bath.  However - as some long-suffering readers already know - the vagaries of my hot water system mean that I have only managed a proper soak once every six weeks or so, and my reading rate has plummeted accordingly.  This also explains why there has been a fair bit of rereading of 'Coming to My Senses' well before the end.  Pretty much every time I settled down in the bath I had to go back 20 pages or more to remind myself where I was up to.  And as I haven't read the beginning of the book since last October or thereabouts, I am a bit sketchy about some of the details, hence why I have deliberately not used the word 'review' in the title of this post.  I must say, however, that it is a tribute to the readability of 'Coming to My Senses' that you could read any random section again and again and enjoy it just as much each time - for the understated lyricism of the language as much as the story of Alyssa's 'perfume journey', or the preparations for her wedding, which forms the climactic centrepiece of the book.

Source: dallasnews.com

Yes, this is more of a passionate plug for the book, a heartfelt plea to readers to just go buy it.  I can't remember the exact sequence of events (and it would spoil things to reveal too much anyway), but I do distinctly remember that I relished every word.  For in telling the story of her burgeoning interest in fragrance - of how she fell down the rabbit hole, as we might say - Alyssa is also articulating the stories of so many of us.  The lurking on perfume blogs in thrall to the beguiling writing of Robin, Marina, Victoria et al, the heightened sensibility to ambient scents, the sniffing forays in upmarket department stores (testing JAR Parfums and my beloved and sadly defunct Plus Que Jamais!), the tentative sharing of her interest with friends, the sample packages winging across the globe, the fellowship of Sniffapalooza, the epiphanies, the transformative joy of a scent wardrobe with its infinite possibilities of toggling between selves, the dogged search for a bottle of vintage perfume containing the fragrant quintessence of her mother...There are so many vignettes and little touches which chime with the perfumista reader, though I feel sure the book will have more mainstream appeal.

Plus Que Jamais - missing you more than ever

And while not all of us have been married, there is much about Alyssa's 'coming of age' story - that runs in a seamless parallel to her olfactory awakening - to which the reader can relate.  For there is an endearing girl-next-door quality to Alyssa, with her wayward hair and curvaceous figure that needs to be corralled by 'serious underwear' on her wedding day.  Like us, Alyssa admits in the book to being a bit starstruck by the 'grande dames' bloggers, a number of whom have cameo appearances in the book (including that dainty duo, Victoria and Marina of Boisdejasmin and Perfume Smelling Things).  Since then, Alyssa has gone on to clock up guest writing credits on PST, NST and in magazines such as Marie Claire.  With the release of 'Coming to My Senses' Alyssa puts the lid on her own 'grande dame' status, all the while remaining the friendly and accessible figure she was before her publishing fame.

For it sums up the warm inclusivity of our perfume community that this eloquent conjurer of a perfumed life is still just a mouse click away from liking your photo on Facebook.


Photo of Guerlain Plus Que Jamais from fragrantica.com