Keiko Mecheri - Bois de Santal, the sogginess saviour

As a concept, ‘dry’ is currently highly desirable to me.

Usually, the word dry implies an absence, an emptiness, perhaps a lackluster landscape. But right now, dry means the opposite of damp. And for that reason, it’s a beautiful word.

My new (ancient) cottage is distinctly soggy. Nestling amongst woods at the bottom of a steep scar, it seems to suck the moisture from the land. The cellar is a spooksome little hole, with steps that descend to a mouldy stone room. 5 minutes in the cellar and my hair has absorbed the moisture and achieved the wild manifestation of life before styling products. Not that I’m really complaining. I’ve swopped my trendy city flat for a historic Victorian home and the new walls (despite their often moist tendencies) feel to be enveloping me in cosiness. I sleep well here. And so does Joseph after his errant nocturnal adventures with the neighbourhood cats.

Recently, a friend posted me a decant of a well timed scent, Keiko Mecheri’s Bois de Santal. After a bleak and rain sodden drive over Holme Moor, I made myself a cup of tea and sat down to test the contents of the little package. It soaked up my waterlogged mood.

Bois de Santal is the fragrant equivalent of those little silica bags that you get inside packaging, it’s dryer than an own brand Cream Cracker. Sandalwood rich scents always radiate warmth but somehow Bois de Santal manages to bypass warmth to the point of becoming parched. 

An anorak walk over over Holme Moor

I’ve smelt the perfumer’s synthetic creation of ‘hot sand’ several times, perhaps my favourite interpretation being in Estee Lauder’s summertime rerelease – Bronze Goddess. However, Mecheri’s perfumer has out-beached even Bronze Goddess by adding a bossily dominant ambergris note to transport the salt to this sun bleached olfactory location.

As I sniff my sandalwood infused arm I don’t really smell ‘perfume’. I smell youthful summer skin. As a child I would holiday in North Wales. Usually in a shabby rented caravan. Being a kid, I’d race into the sea, ignorant to the icy temperature and dustbin sized jellyfish that would wash up on the shoreline. I’d spend hours hunting rock pools for soon to be captive crabs and random beach detritus. Back at the caravan, baths were out of the question. I imagine that I probably got away with not washing at all. I remember smelling my arms and marvelling at the way they retained the scent of the sea, I even licked them to taste the salt.

Llanbedrog Beach - site of my salty arms

I imagine that the brief for Bois de Santal was to create an exotic oriental, to conjure a sun scorched picture of India and the 1960s hippie trail. That it certainly does. But for me, the fragrance creates a significantly more valuable olfactory image – autumnal armour. Although Bois De Santal won’t win any awards for innovation, it will certainly keep me dry as the humidity begins to rot the annual leaf suicides.  

Joseph enjoys lurking on my Victorian wall

The personality of scent, essence or armour?

Have you ever considered how your choice of fragrance reflects your personality?

Marketing folk certainly do. There’s a reason why the sultry young Jerry Hall was once chosen to front YSL’s most exotic and decadent scent – Opium. Hall was the epitome of edgy glamour, spandex clad lover of Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry - uber-groupie. She led the life that we could picture only in the most vivid corners of our imagination, far away from the reality of trudging down a grimy high street to our local branch of Boots to pick up a relatively cheap bottle of (albeit wonderful) mass market scent.

From Bryan Ferry to Murdoch, oh Jerry!

This raises a question. Do we choose our scents to complement who we are or who we aspire to be?

I recently revisited one of my favourite scents, Antonia by Pure Distance. Reviewed back in 2015, my first experience of Antonia moved me. It felt like as if it had been created just for me. I described it thus:

“Antonia is a floral of cool intentions. She is an ivy draped ethereal character who conjures a rain sodden landscape of picturesque melancholy. Sap fuelled green florals are my favourite genre, capable of summoning the outdoors in, they evoke in me an otherworldly serenity that belongs far away from my urban life. Opening with the vivid green bite of galbanum, Antonia is uplifting and spiritual depicting spring’s abundant fertility in full force.”

Cool atmospheres and outdoorsy notes dominate many of my favourite scents. I feel both serenity and invigoration in earth goddess whiffs. The forest ritual lure of Ormonde Jayne’s Woman, the mountain stream chill of Clinique’s Wrappings and the mossy earthiness of Guerlain’s notorious Mitsouko, they all echo the experience of existing deep in the countryside.

Holman Hunt captures the rural Idyll 

Nowadays I’m a city dweller, living on the edge of Manchester’s central district, I neither see nor smell trees. The view from my flat features fashionable living in converted Victorian mills, immaculately dressed young urbanites heading off to long hours in offices and a brashly plastic looking tram stop. However, my childhood was one of wellies, cowpats and nature books. I led the country life and I can probably identify most things you’d find in a hedgerow. It’s likely that my passion for outdoorsy scents is filling a gap. Essentially, Antonia and her similarly green friends are taking me home. I’m aspiring to be me. 

Joseph models the view from my window

However, sometimes I need ‘not to be me’. And in those instances, I dress myself up in an alter ego. I am not, not will ever manage to be, a cool and calculating type. I am the polar opposite of a Hitchcock Blonde. There are times in your life when you could benefit from having a personality different to your own.  And right now, I need to be someone else.

I’m currently in the middle of a house purchase. The complexities of this transaction have been stressful. I’m far too passionate and direct to handle the process with the sort of cool and detached businesslike approach required to out-swim the shark-infested system.

One particularly bitey shark is the estate agent. A few weeks ago I had to visit her office to provide mortgage documents. After some testing encounters on the phone, I’d envisioned her as heavily made up with cartoon eyebrows and an air of someone who could throw a good punch in a pub. In reality, I’d got the image spot on. In preparation for our meeting I selected tailored black clothes, properly blow dried hair and ‘business bitch’ perfume. I was masquerading as someone else, someone capable of making a huge financial investment with success. Not, my techni-colour print clad, wonky haired and kindly self. My scent of choice was the Lanvin classic – Arpege. Nothing implies control more than a stern floral aldehyde.

It didn’t work. I’m still haggling my way through the complications of buying a very old house. But at least I felt protected by my formidable scented armour for one day.  If I ever get there, I will be returning to the wilds of the Yorkshire Moors. Perhaps I shall rename myself Antonia?

Joseph, the beginning of a furry scented love affair

 Joseph peeps from the dizzying elevation of the kitchen cupboard

You may have noticed the absence of a Christmas post at Odiferess in 2015. Not even a measly seasonal greeting. I apologise profusely. You see, just before Christmas, my ordinarily calm existence was delightfully disrupted by the arrival of a new and wonderful friend – Joseph Cat. Perfume was far from my thoughts.

Joseph was an inmate at Manchester’s Millstream Animal Shelter, a charity that re-homes pets and provides life long care for the more feral creatures that are unlikely to find a loving human.

Joseph however is dead easy to love. In similarity to the other males I have adored, he's a curious type, a keen adventurer and a tad complicated. He doesn’t particularly like me hanging out with other men, despite those that he’s met so far being either related to me or gay. For the moment, we snooze together in a middle-aged stereotype of cat besotted woman, (plucked) Italian wool blankets and spoilt cat.

The centre of my bed, stolen

My perfume habits have been restricted as I try and get him used to ‘my smell’. At night, I have worn nothing, not even my beloved blends of essential oil remedies that I used to slather over my hands in bed. In the daytime I wear my most cat-like scent. A miniature bottle of Serge Lutens Clair de Musc which has always reminded me the scent of feline fur.  He seems to like it.

Joseph unsurprisingly smells like a cat. A subtle whiff that is barely discernible, given his excellent licking skills and cleanliness bordering on the neurotic. He frequently sleeps next to my face. I gave up trying to keep my pillows cat free about 3 nights in when the joy of being close to this purring pile of affection outweighed the hassle of having to launder my bed linen more frequently. On these wondrous slumbers, I bury my nose into his belly and inhale his smell. The sensation is one of warmth, closest in my memory to the smell of extreme heat on sand and dry stone experienced in the deserts of Oman. A very slight sourness is detectable, not unpleasant, but similar to a trace of fresh human sweat at the point before it stales. Whatever pheromones are contained within Joseph’s fur have an overwhelming effect on me. I’m fiercely in love and feel an urge to protect and nurture him, despite the fact that, as a cat, he won’t love me back with the same unconditional adoration!

Friends in perfume land played a role in influencing me to adopt a pet. Their blogs and Facebook feeds bombarded me with images of beloved companions. Vanessa of Bonkers About Perfume recently adopted the girliest pretty kitten on the internet, Truffle Bonkers. 

Truffle perfects the calendar kitten pose

Liz of Papillon Artisan Perfumes added to her gargantuan menagerie with the arrival of stud muffin Bengal ‘Baby Boy’ who rapidly impregnated Mimi with a litter of exotically spotted kittens (lucky Mimi).  Jicky, her elder feline sister must surely be feeling envious.

Baby Boy (there are more seductive photos of this handsome boy but I adore his squeezable nose in this shot).

It takes a lot of style to live up to a Guerlain inspired name, Jicky has oodles of it.

Undina’s beautiful ginger Rusty has long graced her perfume photos with a whimsical pose adding a uniquely personal touch to her blog. Cats are not known for looking 'kind' but somehow Rusty looks like a compassionate cat. I adore him. Whilst Gaspard, an elegant and comically spooksome black cat not unlike my own Joseph, resides with the equally elegant Alex, AKA The Silver Fox. Gaspard is king of the wild eyed pounce pose.

Undina's Rusty, perfume PR pussy

Gaspard, peek-a-boo 

Perhaps the most photogenic pets belong to my first and greatest perfume buddy, Saskia. Lubbe and Lano are her much photographed Weimaraners who reside with her in the Netherlands. Some years ago she likened one of them to handsome indie perfumer Kilian Hennessey, I think the likeness is detectable in the cheekbones and lithe figure. 

How to look oddly human, Weimaraner style

Perhaps the most famous pet in perfume land, is the black cat featured in the notorious 1960s adverts for My Sin by Lanvin. They chose to feature a moggy rather than a long limbed Oriental or a pampered Persian, a feline symbol of luxury. Maybe it's because this tough looking black cat represents the dangerous life of the street cat, hinting at the perfume's ability to render it's wearer feral and vicarious?

Thank you to my perfume friends for allowing me to use their fantastically characterful photographs.

If you know anyone in the North of England hoping to adopt a pet, please do consider a visit to Millstream Animal Shelter. They are reliant on donations and the hard work of volunteers to provide a safe space for some very vulnerable animals. 

Coming up at Odiferess this year, I have a stash of posts in planning for your consumption. The first of which will explore the concept of 'wearability' and discuss two scents that are impossible not to love, regardless of your tastes. I look forward my fourth year of getting to know my readers all around the world and I wish you a wonderful 2016 full of love and perfume.

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