Papillon Perfumery is poised to post a Plum prize in the latest Bonkers giveaway!

So in my review of Hermès Muguet Porcelaine last week I compared Jean-Claude Ellena's craggy looks to a softer, more approachable version of Samuel Beckett. It was one of those random similes that seem to pop into my head all the time, for better or worse.

Imagine my surprise then, when I received an email from Sue Phillips, the CEO of Scenterprises. Scenterprises is the US equivalent of The Perfume Studio over here, of which I used to be an associate. I helped people create their own custom perfume from 'building blocks' in the form of 18 pre-prepared accords / blends, which had in turn been created by a UK perfumer, whose name escapes me now(!), but who had worked with The Body Shop, and whose understated style had garnered praise from Luca Turin himself. And here my blog post about my own experience as a punter, which is what prompted me to become involved as a facilitator.

Sadly, I gave up the job after about a year, because I couldn't make any money from it after the cost of materials and packaging - it was taking me three hours in all, half of which was spent on the session with the client, and half in setting up the room to create a nice ambience, making up their chosen scent afterwards, and clearing away after they'd gone.  We were encouraged to offer the experience for one person at about £40 - having just checked the website, that seems to still be the case.

By contrast, I see that Scenterprises charges $500 for what I take to be a broadly equivalent one-to-one service in the US. This is in New York, mind you, where people clearly have a lot more disposable income than in The Midlands, and where the venue would be be subject to higher overheads. On the face of it, it does still strike me as a big differential between our two continents, though.

Some of the blends as they were in 2010

So that was by way of background...I am getting to the bit about Ellena now...as Sue mentioned in her email:

"I loved your post about Jean Claude Ellena and met him and his wife Susanna (who is the niece of Samuel Beckett), so I got the reference!"

The thing is, the reference was quite fortuitous! Sue elaborated further in the course of our email exchange:

"I worked with Jean Claude when I was at Elizabeth Arden and he had worked on Lagerfeld for Men in collaboration with a US perfumer friend of mine, and when I visited him and Susanna I was overwhelmed at all the Beckett first issues and books."

Well, what a remarkable and satisfying coincidence, for I had no idea that Jean-Claude Ellena had any family connection - even by marriage - to Samuel Beckett!

So that was one surprising thing. But there's more... For while at The Fragrance Shop chatting to the sales assistants about Muguet Porcelaine, I clocked the deep discount on Mary Greenwell's range of fragrances, including Plum,which is the only one I have tried personally. I mentioned it in my previous post, and also on Facebook, where it prompted a small stampede(!) of people worldwide, availing themselves of this offer, partly on a blind basis, which readers know I don't normally condone, haha.

Anyway, Liz Moores of Papillon Artisan Perfumes was one such who took the plunge and found that Plum wasn't in fact quite her cup of tea. And she has kindly offered to donate her bottle to a giveaway on Bonkers, and post it from Papillon HQ free of charge to the winner. So not only do you bag a bottle of Plum - it may even be the 100ml size, I can't recall - but one which has spent a little while in the lively menagerie which is Liz's home and studio, which I am betting will considerably increase its cachet!

So many thanks to Liz for her generosity. Then in order to be eligible for the giveaway you have to be in the UK, alas, after my recent overseas mailing misdemeanours, painfully documented here.

And please also leave a comment saying why you would like to win a bottle of Plum, whether you know it already, and if not, what you plan to do with the bottle if you don't like it when it comes! ;)

The draw will close on Sunday 7th August at midnight, UK time (well, obviously). Liz will mail the bottle at her earliest convenience once I have notified her of the winner's details.

But here's the other funny thing. The perfumer for Mary Greenwell is François Robert, and blow me, if he isn't the new perfumer behind the blends for The Perfume Studio!

I have had a look at the website and the notes in the different blends have changed since I worked with the company, so I would be curious to smell Robert's creations and see how they compare to the ones I remember. In the absence of myself, it seems I would have to go to Manchester, Stratford-upon-Avon or Nottingham to find out firsthand...;)

BEX Londoner SE1 - A spicy tale of wharf-watching

I was introduced to the brand BEX Londoner in the summer of 2012 by Nick Gilbert, when he worked at Les Senteurs.  My first thought was 'Noooo, an opaque bottle!', that bane of MUA swappers and perfume lovers generally, because you can never tell how full or empty it is.  And my second thought was: 'Odd name.'  For BEX is (to my mind) a rather chavvy shorthand for Rebecca, along the same lines as Gazza is for Gary or Gascoigne, or Daz for Darrell. So, you know, an Essex girl kind of contraction is not what I would expect from a niche perfume house. Colour me snobby, but there it is.  And it is only now, in doing a bit of research about the brand for this post, that I have finally clocked that BEX is in fact the familiar name of the founder of the house, Rebecca Goswell, a brand design consultant who has worked for some notable agencies such as Design Bridge and Lewis Moberly.  For someone in the field of beauty product brand identity, BEX is perhaps a curious choice, albeit the suffix 'Londoner' detracts nicely from the first name part.  One never talks of Paul Gascoigne the footballer as 'Gazza Londoner', for example, not least because he is from Gateshead.

I read that Rebecca Goswell is a lifelong fan of London, and decided to enlist her friend, the perfumer Francois Robert, 'to capture the very essence of its most characterful and inspiring places'.  Together they set out to create a series of perfumes each named after a specific postcode, an approach to fragrance creation that brings to mind Jan Uprichard and Geza Schoen's Odourific Odyssey project in Belfast.

Butlers Wharf

I spent five summers working in London as a student, and am familiar with a number of different districts in the city. So I was eager to try these scented postcodes and see if they chimed with my own impressions of that particular area.  One scent particularly caught my imagination, namely SEI, which appealed to me on a number of levels.  The blurb on the BEX London site - note that the brand and collection itself seem to be called 'BEX Londoner', while the company is 'BEX London' - explains the background to SE1:

'Evoking the atmosphere and aroma of the old Thameside spice wharfs, Londoner SE1 is alive with bergamot, citrus, cardamom and pimento balanced with a deep woody base of amber, sea moss, driftwood and finest natural vetiver.'

Now that is a very enticing description, and of interest also for confirming the plural of 'wharf'.  Hold on, a cursory google suggests both 'wharfs' and 'wharves' are acceptable.

So how does it smell?

Well, all the BEX Londoner fragrances are positioned as 'androgynous', but this one leans to the masculine in my view, though I am drawn to it myself.  It opens with citrus, a wallop of mixed spice and a strong planky undertow, supported by the earthy facet of the vetiver.  The scent manages to be both airy yet full-on.  It completely evokes for me images of Long John Silver in Treasure Island, the sounds of creaking timbers and rocking bunks in Spanish galleons - and most crucially and nostalgically, the smell and feel of those dear little toy kegs of rum in the board game Buccaneer...

Source: vintagetoysgames.co.uk

SE1 doesn't really change and remains simultaneously bright, spicy, airy, woody and earthy(!) throughout.  It just gets softer and more blurry as it wears on.  I don't particularly detect amber, never mind the sea moss, though there is a background warmth to the scent that might well be the former. For a more nuanced description, I recommend Freddie of Smellythoughts' take on Londoner SE1 here.  What his nose reads as a 'marine accord' is possibly what I am struggling to connote with 'airy'.  I am pleased to note that SE1 was also his favourite of the bunch!

As it happens, I have a sneaking affection for wharves, and have visited a goodly number in places like Hamburg (which boasts the third biggest banana dock in the world, don't you know!) and New Bedford, MA (where I additionally took a tour of a plant that makes crushed ice for trawlers).  My interest was initially piqued by seafaring ancestors on my mother's side, including a distant great-great-something grandfather who was the captain of a clipper ship that regularly plied the waves between Australia and England.  In his spare time he kept detailed log books of his eventful voyages** and wrote and illustrated a comic strip magazine to entertain his crew during their long weeks at sea.  All of which my mum donated to the Greenwich Maritime Museum, where they may or may not still be on display today.

And thus it was that on a recent trip to London, I legged it down to the Shad Thames area by Tower Bridge to soak up the atmosphere of the SE1 postcode and generally get into the zone of the perfume it inspired. It was a blisteringly hot day and I had my luggage in tow, yet I managed to spend a happy couple of hours ambling through the rabbit warren of streets just behind the riverfront, clocking any vestigial bits of wharf I could discern, as well as the many buildings that have been named after spices and other traded commodities such as tea and wheat.

Yup, forget whales - wharf-watching is where it's at, preferably wearing SE1 for added verisimilitude, which I wasn't at the time. ;-)

And in a satisfying twist to this story, I recently did a perfume consultation for a friend who has never really worn men's aftershave of any kind.  I gave him half a dozen niche samples to try and SE1 came out as the clear winner.  The only perfume of the bunch with which he felt a 'visceral connection' (his words). And guess what...? He happens to live on a boat himself - albeit not one suited to plying the spice trade routes, but still.

**According to family lore, on one trip from Australia my ancestor spied a young boy who had got into difficulties swimming off the coast of Ceylon.  He leapt into the sea and saved the child from drowning.  Said child turned out to be an Indian prince(!), and my great-great etc was given a ruby ring by his father as a thank you for his prompt action.   I have seen the ring, but cannot confirm the rest of the story...

Disclosure: I was sent samples of all four BEX Londoner perfumes by BEX London's PR company, who also offered to send me a bottle of whichever scent proved to be my favourite (I obviously picked SE1). This offer was not contingent on my writing a review, but I wanted to do so anyway.