Happy New Year! Plus flu-induced musings on perfume and life in general, and yet another surfeit of cat photos....

'You're really not very well, are you?'

Getting back to blogging after a month's hiatus is not unlike getting back into exercise after a long absence. Though I wouldn't know about that as I haven't done any exercise yet. Not that I do an awful lot at the best of times. But I thought I'd have a crack at a blog post, even if it isn't overly perfume-themed. My Facebook friends are already aware that my mad work phase in December segued seamlessly into a protracted bout of illness, from which I am only just emerging: I succumbed to a regular cold, which then morphed into this pesky Aussie flu which is doing the rounds. Or maybe it was two separate viruses, not that it matters really. As anyone who has had full-bore influenza knows, it really chops the legs off from under you, such that you would instantly fail the "not too ill to pick up a twenty quid note from the bottom of the drive" test. When the flu was most acute, I stayed in bed for four days straight, drifting in and out of consciousness. As in sleep, sorry - I am not trying to be melodramatic and suggest I was in a coma or anything. Any sound from radio or TV would have been too intrusive, so I just lay there thinking and dozing. Obviously I had to get up periodically to fetch water, or the crispbread bites off which I was largely subsisting at that point. Or to put more crunchies down for the cat.

Before I took to my bed, I took to the sofa.

Oh yes, a special mention is due to Truffle, whose quizzically concerned looks and sustained ownerside vigil were a source of great comfort. On New Year's Eve, a night when I would usually be out whooping it up amongst friends, Truffle lay on my chest with her face pressed to mine, intermittently licking the tip of my nose as if to say: 'You're poorly and I don't like the loud bangs - but we can make our own fun here just as well.' A big thank you is also due to the friends who did 'porch drops' of home made soup, stewed fruit and other nourishing foodstuffs. When you live alone, the good offices of friends are an absolute mainstay.

A change of room is as good as a rest - which we also had!

As the days went by and I felt a bit better, the cat noticed that I was changing levels in the house for a few hours here and there, so she relocated her watch to the radiator cradle in the dining room. At the first sign that I might be tiring and need to lie down again (a daily occurrence over the past week), she would return upstairs and continue her bed sitting duties, whether to one side of me, on me, in the bed, or on the warm spot at the bottom of the bed occupied by the hot water bottle. And eventually, a couple of days ago, Truffle decided that if I was well enough to get dressed I no longer needed constant ministrations, and promptly took up residence again in her cooker top eyrie.

Now although it is customary at this time, I am afraid that there will be absolutely no 'launches of 2017' retrospective from me - and probably never again. I am too far out of the loop to have anything approaching a proper overview of new perfume releases, though I have tested and liked a number of things which were launched last year. In terms of my favourite scented discoveries overall, they might actually be Annick Goutal Songes - in both the edt and edp versions (my only full bottle purchase of the year, and technically a re-discovery!), and House of Cherry Bomb Immortal Beloved. Yep, if you restricted me to just two perfumes - one for summer and one for winter - at the time of writing these may be they. I cannot believe I just limited myself to two perfumes! And of course I reserve the right to change my mind at a moment's notice. I am indebted to perfumers and friends alike for continuing to send me samples, which is the main way I get to try new things these days, apart from my (exceptional) sniffing marathons like the one I had with Undina and Tara last May.

Songes also having a nice little lie down

If I am honest, I would probably not go near the perfume counter of a major department store even if I happened to find myself in one - not without being pushed in that direction. I know how much I already tune out to the fragrance section of Duty Frees in airports these days, albeit their selection is not typically in the same league. I will definitely try new perfumes if they land on my mat or are otherwise put in front of me, but I don't seem to go out of my way to seek things out any more, and a lot of the conversations that go on between perfumista friends pass right over my head. I haven't heard of whole houses, never mind individual scents!

I don't know if this is just a phase or whether my interest in perfume has now muted down to a positively passive level. Given that I already have such a huge stash to use up, it is probably for the best that I don't start developing too many new lemmings.

The night shift

During my time lying in bed all sorts of other random thoughts came to me about my perfume hobby: my attachment to friends is the blogosphere is as strong as ever, if not more so; I am still troubled by cliches in reviews (also from me!), by an excess of flashing, fruit machine-style ads - which to be fair you don't see very often, but I wouldn't like them if I did! - and by unspoken commercial connections between bloggers and perfume houses. As well as relationships that strike me as frankly coercive, whereby bloggers use a degree of emotional manipulation to 'extract' free product from perfumers and/or retailers to use in giveaways, or sell on privately to hapless newbies unaware of the bottles' provenance. I have been that (latter) soldier myself when starting out in this hobby. Nor do I care for perfumes with preposterously blingy bottles and eye-watering price points that cynically target stratospherically rich Saudi princes and Russian oligarchs, though I sense I have a problem with conspicuous luxury in every sphere! I also feel uneasy about decadently swanky perfume launches - apart from anything, the cost of those has got to be going on the price of the perfume...

Some of my sense of detachment from the perfume scene may be attributable to my current difficulties at finding work (notwithstanding the recent overload!). The enforced frugality which inevitably ensues may also have led to an estrangement from consumerism in general. For it is not just the scarcity of work: such projects as I have been offered tend to be pitched at more or less the going rate earnt by Romanian strawberry pickers. It would be unthinkable for a person in full time employment suddenly to be told they will be receiving a third - or even a fifth - of their usual monthly pay packet while doing the same job, yet in the freelance world it is clear that anything goes. So the viability of my current profession, and the need to find more lucrative and/or less stressful alternative sources of income is weighing heavily on me at the moment, such that the notion of buying a new bottle of perfume or an expensive item of skincare feels completely alien. In the event of a fillip to my finances that could of course all change...;)

Purple Christmas gin!

I haven't made any New Year's Resolutions as such, although one or two appear to have made themselves. For example I was very pleased to learn - following a statistical computation worthy of Undina - that in 2017 I achieved my target of an average of 2 alcohol-free days a week, up from 'just over one' in past years going back as far as I can remember. It doesn't sound like much of a lifestyle change, but that still probably equates to 40 days on which I consciously opted not to have a drink when it might so easily have been the default choice before. Thanks to the flu, 2018 has got off to a stellar start in terms of non-drinking: in the first week of the year I have had two days on which I have had a drink, rather than the reverse. So I am well in credit for the rest of the month at least, haha.

(Editor's note: In case I come across as a bit of a lush, I could perhaps add that I do mostly just have one drink at a time, so my weekly units remain within the Government guidelines. ;) )

The other 'not a resolution' that seems to be spontaneously happening - also prompted by my gradual recovery from illness - is reading. I am already 450 pages into the New Year, hurrah!, an unprecedented improvement on my reading rate in past years. I am sorry to report that I read just 11 books in 2017, so didn't quite make my target of one a month. Though work might make a jolly good excuse for December...

Beyond that, I have the usual clutch of vague aspirations: to go to bed earlier, knock off Facebook a bit(!), drink more water, and obey Michael Mosley to the letter and incorporate 150 minutes of medium intensity exercise into my life every week, at all of which I will most likely fail. Inspired by Louise Woollam, I'd also quite like to relearn to crochet...2017 has in fact been a great year for my knitting endeavours, and I have even earnt a bit of money from selling my wares. It is sadly too labour-intensive a hobby to ever become a full-time occupation, but it has its place as a hugely satisfying sideline. Oh, and I am actively considering doing Airbnb, as a friend in the next street makes a tidy living from that, with pretty much zero stress, beyond guests flaunting her house rules of not flushing the wc with the lid up. I have even let in one or two of her clients when she couldn't be around.

'Naja' the scarf

So we will see...2018 is definitely set to be a year of change for me on the work front - it just has to be. I haven't been wearing much perfume while I was ill, but here and there I did dab on a spot of Bois des Iles, which acted as a perfect complementary comforter to the cat. Thanks, Val! There are other perfumes I discovered in 2017 that I fully intend to write about, but simply didn't get round to, so I promise I am still a perfume blogger after a fashion till the fat lady sings. Or the thin lady more like, as I inadvertently lost 9lb over Christmas!

It remains to wish readers near and far a very Happy New Year - I hope your holidays were not characterised by illness or existential doubt. I will be back with perfume reviews in due course, and the inevitable tangential posts on toiletries, travel and Truffle...

Oh, and I am getting a flu jab next year. The requisite tenner is already on the hall table...;)

Super furry animals and the cat's peignoir (including a mini-review of House of Cherry Bomb Immortal Beloved)

Source: Poshmark

Undina's recent 'month of roses' project - in which I have greatly enjoyed participating, even if I did fall off the wagon a few times by testing samples that had nothing to do with the romantic topic in hand - reminded me that 'roses with a twist' are one of my top two favourite fragrance styles. I'll call them 'rosientals', as the scents I like best tend to be a subset of floral orientals. Which is also why I found the task of looking for a rose perfume in that vein for my friend Jessica so rewarding, even if we never came up with a definitive contender in the end.

And my top category of perfumes - or Holy Grail genre, if you will - is those faintly animalic woody orientals that connote furriness and intimations of what a male friend of mine persists in calling 'rude business'. Or 'intimations of intimate business', even. My prim father's slightly more opaque term for this was 'filthy slop'. Now for reasons of semantic sensitivity I am reluctant to talk about my 'louche perfume j*****' - obviously I am more sheepish about the actual journey than the louche bit (eek, it slipped out!) - but you may be interested to learn that there has in fact been one.

My first introduction to the 'WAV-style' of fragrance (Woody-Amber-Vanilla - with or without patchouli) was probably PG L'Ombre Fauve, or Bestial Shadow, as it is amusingly known in English.

PG L'Ombre Fauve

Notes: woods, incense, amber, musk, patchouli

Now L'Ombre Fauve is wonderfully hoochy, but the patchouli lends a rough edge to the scent going in. I don't mean hoochy in a Hooters way exactly, but the opening is certainly not refined. It's earthy and ragged and a bit clod- - as in sod- - hopping. I never reviewed L'Ombre Fauve, because despite being such a fan of woody orientals, I find myself even more tongue-tied than usual in describing what I smell. What I can give you, if you can 'take it' (as all good mediums say), is an image of me sitting on a stool in a moodily lit tapas bar in Hamburg with my Swedish perfumista protegee Louise and several of her friends, while wearing L'Ombre Fauve. The whole party couldn't stop sniffing my wrist, having clearly succumbed to the perfume's animal magnetism, which proved more irresistible than even the dates wrapped in bacon and dainty morsels of chorizo.

Schankwirtschaft, now sadly closed. Source: Yelp

For a good while L'Ombre Fauve stood alone as the exemplar of this category. Bvlgari Black has some crossover with it in note and mood terms, but to my nose it is ultimately more (good) weird than louche. I also tried Paloma Picasso around that time, but it is a retro animalic chypre - a classy face slap with a beaver's business end.

The other scent from my early exploration to provoke a similar sensual shiver was the discontinued Damien Bash Lucifer #3. I am indebted to Louise - by now up and running on her own perfume quests! - for the introduction to this one. Uncharacteristically for me, I did manage to review Lucifer #3, but only because I was reeled in by the association between elemi, one of the key notes in the composition, and boat caulk. However, it cannot be included in 'The WAV files' proper, for it doesn't appear to contain vanilla, or any other note with a vanilla inflection...!

Damien Bash Lucifer #3

Notes: rose, jasmine, frankincense, black pepper, sandalwood, myrrh, labdanum, ylang-ylang, elemi

In these early years I also dallied with PG Felanilla and Le Labo's Labdanum 18, fellow furry numbers - quite literally in the case of Labdanum 18.

PG Felanilla

Notes: vanilla absolute, saffron, orris, banana wood, hay absolute, amber

Le Labo Labdanum 18

Notes: French labdanum, castoreum, civetta, musk, vanilla, birch resins, cinammon, patchouli, gurjan balsam, tonka bean

Source: Pinterest

Both fragrances are sultry, but these days I find the latter a tad too 'out there'. Looking at those notes, I can see why that might be - there are several ingredients that would collectively conjure a resinous and va-va-voom vanilla vibe. Labdanum 18 lacks the mysterious quality shared by L'Ombre Fauve, Lucifer #3 and Bvlgari Black, which is so key to the genre. The same could be said of Felanilla, which is from the same stable as L'Ombre Fauve, and fittingly has a barnyard quality to it.

Fast forward a fair few years to my discovery of Ramon Monegal's Ambra di Luna while visiting Jovoy in Paris with Undina in 2013. We are firmly back on terra furra with that one, and I could best describe Ambra di Luna as a 'roughed up' Prada L'Eau Ambree (insert your own accent):

Ramon Monegal Ambra di Luna

Notes: amber, labdanum, Egyptian jasmine, castoreum, sandalwood

Then last year I discovered yet more prime WAVs: Aroma M's animalic amber Geisha Noire and By Kilian's Amber Oud. Thanks to Undina for the tip off about the By Kilian via her review (from a year ago today!).

Aroma M Geisha Noire

Notes: amber, sandalwood, tonka bean

By Kilian Amber Oud

Notes: amber, oud, bay leaf, cedarwood, vanilla

Of the two, Geisha Noire is the furrier and loucher, and though I didn't review it either, I made reference to my growing attachment to Geisha Noire as a gig-going scent in this rag bag of a post that is also about old books, a dishwasher, and my ongoing battle with eczema. Ooh, leitmotif Louise makes a cameo appearance in it - that was the last time we met, in fact. And I did at least describe Geisha Noire as a 'smouldering, furrily sensuous, ceremonial cupcake of a scent'. Geisha Noire is more sensual and sweeter than Amber Oud. Crucially, it oozes mystery.

Val (who also gave me a mini-bottle of Ambra di Luna she inexplicably didn't need!) has kindly been keeping me topped up with samples and decants of Geisha Noire. But just when I was limbering up to possibly buying my own bottle - eminently desirable on account of the decorative Japanese paper alone! - a sample of Immortal Beloved arrived. Immortal Beloved is the latest release from House of Cherry Bomb, a creative collaboration between Brooklyn-based independent perfumers Maria McElroy of the aforementioned Aroma M and Alexis Karl of Scent by Alexis. And now all bets are off as to which way my cash will fall...Though it goes without saying that owing to my chronic SABLE (Stash Above and Beyond Life Expectancy) situation, I am trying to resist all additional purchases until some of the extant bottles are either used up or go rogue on me, which can only be a question of (not very much) time.

Truffle savaging the bag, eager to access its contents

And never mind the fact that I am smitten with Immortal Beloved, my trusty familiar has clearly marked it out as Her Favourite Perfume Yet. Readers may remember that I featured Truffle's fetishistic reaction to perfume packages in my recent Winter Special post about her, in which she was pictured nuzzling a FedEx parcel sent by Undina. I also showed her mouthhandling the little drawstring bag containing the vials of edp and oil of Immortal Beloved. A feat I filed under Agility, whilst noting that it could equally sit with (Dis)-obedience and Fetishes.

But what I omitted to mention was that not long afterwards I caught Truffle lasciviously licking the bag, which is an absolute first where any possession of mine is concerned. From which I take it that she really, really thinks this is the cat's pyjamas - or 'peignoir' perhaps, to coin a more suitably slinky phrase. Eyeballing that note list, there is a lot going on in Immortal Beloved, but after a surprising start, it settles into WAV-ish territory.

Immortal Beloved

Notes: tobacco blossom, lily-of-the-valley, henna, ambergris, labdanum, vanilla, agarwood, beeswax

Yes, when I applied Immortal Beloved, my first thought was of similarities to Serge Lutens Eau Froide...with its frankincense / lemon accord; that is too extreme a comparison, but it's all I've got! At this stage I wouldn't class Immortal Beloved as an oriental, or any kind of furry animal. It is most unusual and reads on my skin as a soapy, fresh and prickly thing I am going to call incense - which I know sounds like an oxymoron, given the more immediate association of incense with death. But that impression is fleeting in any event, and must be due to some playful alchemy between the LOTV and tobacco blossom. Or even the henna listed in the notes, to which in my perplexed state I have had retrospective course! I have no idea how any of those smell, mind, apart from the LOTV, though it is not quite itself here, conveying a spring-like backdrop rather than a marked muguet scent per se.

When Immortal Beloved reaches its cruising altitude it wears incredibly close to the skin - it is far and away the most delicate and 'barely there' of all the WAV perfumes featured in this post. A WAV-wisp of a scent no less, which you really wouldn't expect from the notes. It's an immemorial murmur like old Tennyson and his bees, which figures, as there is of course beeswax in it. Oops, my bad - it's the elms that are immemorial!

"The moans of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees."

Strange to relate, Immortal Beloved melds with my skin so completely that it feels as though it was telepathically tailormade. Maybe that is why Truffle is so taken with it - as her besotted owner, I like to think she loves me - or any olfactory associations with me - back, hehe. Though perhaps she is merely high on tobacco blossom. ;)

Thinking of the HOCB name, funnily enough one of The Monochrome Set's members used to play in a football team called The Cherry Bombers, named after their record label at the time, Cherry Red. The Cherry Bombers were pitted against a team of jocks from the BBC, including John Peel. Perhaps the Beeb team should have worked 'satsuma' into their name somehow.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

And I note on Wikipedia that a cherry bomb is in fact an 'approximately spherical exploding firework', also known as a 'bangarang', which sounds like an 80s pop group of ill repute.

Also - and this is timely given that it was Shrove Tuesday only yesterday! - "during an episode of The Simpsons entitled 'The Crepes of Wrath', Bart discovers an old cherry bomb among his things and proceeds to ignite and flush it down a toilet at school, resulting in his deportation to a foreign exchange program in rural France."

In short, I can highly recommend a walk on the WAV side. And this compilation of 'WAV files' is by no means exhaustive, so please mention any further furry faves in the comments!