Fallen Angels

Such incredible fierce desire to re-watch REBECCA: do you remember the dialogue in the first reel when Joan Fontaine talks of bottling up her memories like perfume? Larry grimly reminds her that those little bottles “sometimes contain demons that have a way of popping out at you just as you’re trying most desperately to forget”. I thought Hallowe’en this year was pretty diabolical in the literal sense. It’s become such a massive occasion (commercially second only to Christmas), and on that mad Friday evening when temperatures in London reached 74 degrees things to me seemed frighteningly out of hand; had gone Too Far. Everything was going curiously awry – Tubes packing up, trains running late, tourists losing their way and fainting in the heat. We were all led astray that night: the popular consciousness had frivolously courted evil and boy! did we reap the wild wind.

As we know, goodness and virtue have a beautiful odour – Alexander the Great’s sweat smelled of violets; the relics of the saints give off an immortal redolence of roses. The corresponding perception is that evil smells corrupt, foul and repellent. And, according to old medical miasma theory, what smells bad will make you sick: disease is transmitted not by germs but by smell. This theory was current even a hundred years ago: my grandmother (her father was a health inspector and recognised smallpox cases by the characteristic smell of apples) certainly subscribed to it. I remember being hurried past stagnant ponds with a hanky drenched in iced lavender cologne clapped over my nose.

Satan, the Fallen Angel of Light, smells of sulphurous fires and excrement. Not for nothing were early matches, soaked in bone-rotting phosphorous, named Lucifers. I used to have dreadful dreams about sensing the demonic presence, not by the smell but by a glimpse of the cloven hoof behind a door or curtain. And of course that hoof takes us back to the notorious smell of goats, the farmyard and the pagan world of satyrs. Kilian chooses to eschew a close encounter with the Evil One. PLAYING WITH THE DEVIL is inspired by ideas of the Great God Pan rioting through lush fruity thickets “spreading ruin and scattering ban”; the old fertility god of the ancient world who was proscribed as a demon by the early Church.

But this is an innocent if indulgent scent. Go a shade darker with Nu_Be’s burning lake of SULPHUR which conjures up night’s dark angels with black angelica, cinnamon, the eternal fires of ginger, opoponax and pimento. It’s one of a series of perfumes celebrating the elemental and generative elements of the universe: SULPHUR separates the Creationists from the Darwinians and has a certain theatrical fiery flash to it. Blue flames to light up Christmas and to dress you as the Demon King for the panto matinee.

CUIR VENENUM by Parfumerie Generale has long been an object of veneration and curiosity to collectors of the bizarre. A fathomless abyss of soft musky leather illuminated with burning sulphur and bitter myrrh; and perversely sweetened with innocent orange blossom – Satan before and after the Fall. And finally try the Serge Lutens curiously mesmerising VITRIOL D’OEILLET, which brings out the love/hate metallic sharpness of pinks and carnations hiding beneath their peppery sweetness, as a vitriol thrower conceals her sulphuric acid in a posy of flowers.

Devil take the hindmost: why not come by, come buy?

Miss Host and the Ferret Man: A Note on the Animalic

My late father was a country vet of the old school and a great collector and raconteur of bizarre experience, both animal and human. The eponymous Miss Host was a gentlewoman of some means who in late middle age conceived a passion for the ferret man who controlled the rabbit population on her land. My father said it was the distinctive sour ferrety smell which clung to his person which gave Miss Host’s lover his irresistible appeal.

We might not all of us go to this extreme, but animalic notes in perfumes give them an extremely sexy, carnal and aphrodisiac edge. Animals depend upon smell to avoid danger, find food and to signal a readiness to mate. So (think Darwin!) when we naked apes pick up notes of civet, musk and castoreum in a fragrance we find all our most basic instincts aroused and thrown into turmoil. The animalic scent is all about survival and perpetuation of the species: a heady concoction to keep in pocket or handbag.

Natural animal notes used in Western perfumery have been illegal for some decades now, so we can explore this erotica with a clear conscience. Anyone who still thinks synthetic materials are inferior and ineffectual should spent an evening with a wearer of Musc Ravageur, Cuir Venenum, Knize Ten or Lady Vengeance. The crucial point is of course how the aphrodisiac oils in the fragrance meet, mingle and blend with those of one’s own skin; how they accelerate, develop and take on an individual life of their own so that the wearer appears to be exuding a delicious odour entirely from their own pores.

No wonder that so many perfume fanciers are as Father would have said, “mad for the dumb!” There is a sensual delight in smelling in these scents something akin to the fur of a pet cat or rabbit. Or, of course, a luxurious fur coat: something that Revillon recognised in the 1950’s when they produced Detchemar to wear as a complement to fur. (It is also the scent that Mia Farrow wears in Rosemary’s Baby to drown the reek of witches’ tannis root).

All the dogs of my life have had their own distinctive delicious smell. Dolly the pug was a beautiful ash blonde, with mink-soft fur which smelled delicately of custard creams. If there is indeed a canine Happy Hunting Ground it will be well stocked for her with grated carrot and Marmite toast. Poppy the black lab was redolent of summer hay fields; and Lucy the poodle like a pure white cashmere sweater. They were none of them much meat eaters; a carnivorous diet tends to imbue dogs with a definite meaty odour on hair, skin and breath. Just as vegetarians detect on human consumers of flesh.

So, radiate a little animal magnetism!

Image from Wikipedia