Holly oak nymphs and suntanned satyrs: Papillon Artisan Perfumes Dryad review

Source: Wikipedia

There are many things I like that are not 'me': black leather jackets, Converse trainers, full length low backed Grecian gowns in red or white, and the concept of taking someone a present of muffins in a cloth-lined basket. I am not too sure how I look drinking Vermouth, but I enjoy that too, and persevere. And so without further ado I can announce that as with Salome before it, the next, soon-to-be-released scent from Papillon Artisan Perfumes, a green chypre-oriental called Dryad, is technically not me either. And I like it!

When I sat down to write this post I was fully expecting it to remind me of a magical, Narnia-like forest behind the caravan park outside Killarney where we holidayed every Easter as children...It had mysterious mossy mounds and earthworks at every turn, from which shot up exuberant bushes of curly-tipped ferns. The air was cool and pure and eerily still, save for the occasional call of a hoopoe (the absolute jackpot in I-Spy points!). Dryad might equally have reminded me of some trees much closer to home, namely the 600 sessile oaks in Brocton Coppice, with their distinctive gnarled, skyward-sprawling arms and lichen tattoos. Some are 1000 years old, and there is speculation that they may have inspired Tolkien, who was stationed in a training camp on Cannock Chase during WW1. Or for that matter, Dryad could have taken me back to the sun-dappled forest of tall pines surrounding Liz Moores' house, where Tara of A Bottled Rose (whose own exquisite review of Dryad is up today!) and I were privileged to sniff the first mod of the scent last May.

But a strange thing happened: for when I sprayed Dryad yesterday, my nose headed down a different avenue, and didn't come back. The wood nymphs which inspired Liz's creation were still very much present and corrrect, only they live in a sunnier climate. But before getting into my impressions of the scent proper, a bit of a preamble on the thorny business of dryad nomenclature may be in order.

Brocton Coppice ~ Source: Geograph

A 'potted' dryad digest

My goodness, there are a lot of different kinds of dryad! I haven't managed to find a complete consensus on definitions, but it seems that a 'regular' dryad is a low level goddess aka the entity or spirit of either a specific type of tree (ash, laurel etc) OR a location or area of trees (grove, glen, vale) etc.

"The 'dry-' part of dryad comes from the Greek word for 'oak' and used to refer to only oak tree nymphs, but now it has become the overarching term for all wood nymphs." - Enclave Publishing

Which leads us to a key cohort of tree nymphs called hamadryads - eight in all, the daughters of Oxylus and Hamadryas:

Karya (walnut or hazelnut), Balanos (oak), Kraneia (dogwood), Morea (mulberry), Aigeiros (black poplar), Ptelea (elm), Ampelos (vines), and Syke (fig).

Hamadryad tam ~ Source: Etsy

These hamadryads are born 'bonded to a certain tree', which they inhabit. Some sources have the hamadryads as physically part of their trees. In either case, unlike regular dryads, who are immortal, if a hamadryad's assigned tree dies, they die as well. So poor old Ptelea above must have lived in constant fear of Dutch elm disease, for example. Then I am thinking that it is the Balanos hamadryad that is the particular focus of Dryad the fragrance, for as Liz Moores explains: "the pefume is centred very much around oakmoss".

Also worthy of mention are the Oreiades, a 'branch' of nymphs associated with mountain conifers, and reputedly 'tougher and tetchier' than your average dryad. Oh, and I was especially taken with another dryad 'offshoot': the Maliades - nymphs of fruit trees, and also - in a surprise twist - the protectors of sheep.

And while we are on the subject of random links...the mother's name above, Hamadryas, is also a genus of arboreal butterfly, that camouflages itself on trees and and - unusually for butterflies - lives on sap, rotten fruit and animal dung, as well as making a 'cracking' noise with its wings. Well, the males, anyway. How apt for a butterfly-themed perfume house like Papillon! Though the Hamadryas hails from the Americas, while the more soberly patterned Dryad butterfly is native to Southern Europe and further east.

Dryad butterfly ~ Source: Wikimedia Commons (Zeynel Cebeci)

And at the opposite end of the scale, Hamadryas is also a baboon described as 'one of the least arboreal monkeys', so they are not much use to us and our tree-dwelling preoccupations. And even more bizarrely, in view of my recent review of Vero Profumo Naja, and Liz Moores' well documented set up for in-home snake husbandry, Hamadryas is another term for a king cobra! I did not see that coming. The exegesis of this perfume is getting deeper and deeper, and I haven't even mentioned how it smells yet...

So on at last to my impressions. To my nose Dryad is the scent of woodland - woodland involving oaks indeed - but it instantly transports me 1100 miles from home to the hardy scrubland of the garrigue in the Languedoc Roussillon area of southern France. I am mindful, however, that Your Forest Mileage May Vary.

The garrigue ~ Source: Wikipedia

The garrigue

Wikipedia describes the garrigue as an ecoregion - and even more amusingly as "discontinuous bushy associations of the Mediterranean calcareous plateaus". On closer inspection, these discontinuous bushy associations turn out to be dense thickets of kermes / holm / holly oak. We are clearly in the habitat of a splinter group of Provencal hamadryads...


"You don’t just visit the garrigue. You absorb it and you feel it with every sense that you possess. You feel the Tramontane or the Mistral winds in your hair, the crunchy gravel and stones of the paths under your feet and the hot, Mediterranean sun on your face. You smell and taste the myriad of sweet and spicy flavours as you brush through the undergrowth: lemon, oak, thyme, pine, rosemary, lavender, aniseed and fennels, peppers and juniper, even wild asparagus and the tree strawberry grow here." - The Good Life France magazine

Source: Pinterest

Dryad the perfume

Notes: narcissus, oakmoss, jonquil, clary sage, galbanum, costus, tarragon, apricot, benzoin, Peru balsam, cedrat, bigaradier Orange, bergamot, deer tongue, lavender, orris, vetiver, thyme, styrax and orange blossom

On first sniffing Dryad, I got a bracing burst of a citrus-inflected herbal bouquet. There is oakmoss to the fore and it remains pretty pronounced throughout the scent's development. The opening reminded me a lot of Guerlain Sous le Vent, the (relatively short) note list for which has some crossover:

Notes: lavender, tarragon, bergamot, green notes, jasmine, carnation, iris, woodsy notes

I think it was that association between the two scents that tipped me immediately into my garrigue scentscape. On my skin Dryad is a warm, but not arid scent, rather than one that speaks of damp forest floors with their more rooty, earthy odours, although I know that oakmoss can also smell of that. I haven't tested Sous le Vent in many years, though I do remember describing its texture as 'granular', which may have been something to do with the particular blend of herbs and the petitgrain of my hazy memory - and quite possibly invention! Dryad is not 'granular' and it does have a deeper green dimension as it wears on - a mix of the resinous grassiness of vetiver and the 'Dolby Surround green' of galbanum. If this forest could sing, it would be a soprano, veering to a mezzo soprano, but never descending into the deepest register of a contralto.

Echo ~ Source: hexapolis

Then here and there I catch fleeting hints of recalcitrant flowers, like the dryads themselves (who are noted for their shyness), as they dart in and out of their trees dodging satyrs - and generally darting, as they do. This is where Echo, the mountain nymph, comes into the story, as Liz explains:

"I included narcissus absolute because Echo was a Dryad who fell in love with Narcissus and I liked the full circle with myth and materials. It felt more complete."

And even though the narcissus and jonquil are playing hide and seek with me, it is undoubtedly their presence, together with that of the orange notes and iris, that ensure that Dryad never feels masculine, not even in its more markedly herbal opening phase. Nor is it at all dark and ineffably singular like Ormonde Jayne Woman (though I like that one too!), or like some of those retro green chypres, which I find a touch too acerbic for my taste. As she did with Salome and the 'animalic chypre', Liz Moores has come up with a softer, more modern and accessible interpretation of the 'take no prisoners' green divas of yore. Which is not to say that Dryad is a mere slip of a girl of a chypre - not at all - it sits squarely between wispish and waspish, and that's fine by me.

Holly oak ~ Source: Gerbeaud

Towards the far drydown, Dryad sometimes come overs a little bit all unnecessary - though not on every wearing. This may be due to the costus getting its furry thing on - but we are talking fairly sedate and demure intimations of intimacy. Overall (and please forgive this crude schema) if you were to compare Dryad the perfume to the structure of an oak tree, the bright, citrus and herbal opening would be its canopy of leaves, its trunk the oakmoss, and its undulating branches the floral and other green and slight animalic facets that weave in and out of the composition.

The girl

To return to the theme of something not being me...during my year in the South of France I lived with two other girls, who rejoiced in the names of Dick and Knuckles. Here is the relevant snippet from my 2013 review of Dita Van Teese:

"They were both extremely body-conscious as it happens, with matching eating disorders. One of the duo existed entirely off Granny Smith apples, which she sat munching while devouring the complete works of Emile Zola, I never did figure out why. I once thought of writing my memoirs from that year and calling it 'The Three Thin Women of Antibes' in a homage to Somerset Maugham.

Now my villa-mates may have been thin, but they punched above their weight when it came to relationships - I use the word loosely because they were. Yes, the year was punctuated by a steady procession of hot tempered, arm-windmilling Frenchmen coming and going at our villa, while I stood meekly by, occasionally emptying waste paper baskets full of apple cores."

Source: Chief River Nursery

Speaking of 'holly oaks', it truly was like living in a soap opera, with suntanned satyrs circling round my housemates. Of the two girls, it is the apple muncher whom I would most closely associate with Dryad. I will call her 'L', though she remains completely ungoogle-able even under her full name. L was tall and willowy, with a sleek, jet black Eton crop, that had a dark green Lois Lane sheen to it whenever her hair caught the light. A raven-haired 'Twiggy', if you will, to stay with our woody theme. She was poised and elegant, shy and fey, with a softly spoken Edinburgh accent and a penetrating stare. L also had a knowing glint in her eye that belied her diffident manner. Dryad would have made a perfect signature scent for her, capturing the aromatic pot pourri of the garrigue and teaming it with L's unique blend of inscrutability, vulnerability, and a soupcon of danger. I would never have met someone like 'L' had we not been thrown together by chance, and I was not her usual kind of friend either, but - you've guessed it - we liked each other too.

Hmm, now if Liz Moores would just do a scent inspired by the hamadryad of the Granny Smith tree, that would be an even closer fit for L.  Though I can't recall where she stood on sheep.

A mouton from the garrigue!

I know where Liz Moores stands on sheep, mind. She is the protector of every creature, and her house a veritable mini-Longleat crossed with Noah's Ark. And so the ethical dimension to her creation of Dryad is entirely in keeping with her nurturing, all-inclusive, and cheerfully chaotic menagerie:

"For me, there's a moral tale here also because maybe if we looked at everything and everyone as being intrinsically holding its own spirit, we would care for nature (and each other) a little more."

It's a fine sentiment for these uncertain times. I don't know how we can navigate the creeping approach of another Cold War, if that is what lies ahead, but putting your best foot forward and spritzing the sensuous, warm woodland in a bottle that is Dryad, has got to be a good way to go.

Liz with her latest rescue owl, Ghost

Results of the Papillon-hosted (and -posted) - Plum prize draw!

Source: beachplum.cornell.edu

Last night's deadline for the Plum prize draw has Mary Greenwell and truly passed, and in time-honoured tradition I have had my usual recourse to that trusty number tumbler, Random.org, to pick the winner.

So without further ado, I can reveal that the bottle of Plum is going to:


ANGIE

Congratulations, Angie! I hope you will like Plum, or find a good home for it otherwise. Please drop me a line with your address, which I will forward to the powers-that-be at Papillon Perfumery.

Yes, a big thank you is due to Liz Moores for kindly donating her bottle of Plum to this giveaway. As mentioned in my previous post, it has the added cachet of having spent some time in her 'never a dull moment' home and company HQ.

Daisy may well have had fun taking the top off and putting it on again, or at the very least a Bengal cat will have brushed past it with its tail. It is to be hoped not a snake at least.

PS That plum picture was the closest I could find to those multi-coloured lottery balls. ;)

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...;)

Bengals, birthdays, and blotters galore: another visit with Liz Moores of Papillon Artisan Perfumes

It was my birthday last weekend. Since hitting 50, I have been hopelessly in denial about getting older. If you ask me, your 50s are not the new 40s - they are very much the 'How come nobody ever thought to tell me about (insert debilitating physical or mental malfunction)!' decade. And I just turned 57. Now I am quite sure of this, because I counted the rings on my neck. ;) No really, it's not just trees you can date in this way. Worryingly, turkey necks may turn out to be for life, not just for Christmas, but such gloomy thoughts didn't stop me moisturising that general 'neck of the woods' - or 'woods of the neck', even - for the very first time ever this week.

Speaking of woods, that is also where I was headed on my birthday, to visit Liz Moores in her forest hideaway again, along with my dear friend and fellow blogger Tara of A Bottled Rose. The run up to the big day was full of excitement, though sadly not of the pleasant anticipatory kind.  I stupidly locked myself out of my house the night before(!), but managed to break back in using only a screwdriver and an armpit-swivelling yoga posture I didn't even know I knew. My relief at this cat burgling coup - and yes, the cat flap was also involved! - was shortlived, however, for I spent a near sleepless night thanks to an unholy rumpus next door, the least said about which the better.

So anyway, the plan was that I would pick up Tara from Salisbury station, so we could travel down down to Liz's together. I was just half an hour into the journey, swigging water and munching on flapjack in a bid to offset that dastardly duo of sleep and glucose deficits, when the warnings of tailbacks on the M5 prompted a Gordian knot-type manoeuvre at Spaghetti Junction, and a radical rethink of my chosen route. This was a good call, as I made it to the station with twenty minutes to spare, even though this was not quite time enough to change, buy a compact to powder my nose (the obligatory forgotten item of the trip!) - or to take a photo of the sign for Nether Wallop.

On arrival at Liz's, there was a comprehensive exchange of presents, which would have made for an intriguing and densely plotted graph if you were to draw lines from donor to recipient: there were early birthday presents for Liz, late birthday presents for son Rowan, who turned 10 this week, and presents for Daisy for no particular reason other than that she is the baby, and impossibly cute. Then there were presents for me because it was my birthday that day, and presents for Liz in her capacity as hostess, plus a few extra random items I offered up to anyone who wanted them, including a set of lavender guest soaps and a jar containing what Tara confirmed to be an Indian condiment.

Lemon verbena soap in  a Papillon-themed box!

After I had changed into one of the several outfits I had hastily grabbed on the way out that morning, the three of us repaired to the patio with drinks; Richard E Grant-style, I demanded tea in the biggest mug Liz owned, as I set about addressing my caffeine shortfall - yes, make that a tricky triumvirate, not a dastardly duo of dietary and other deficits.

I should also mention that because of the immense floor plan of Papillon HQ, even though we stayed home the whole time, we hung out in three distinct zones over that time: patio, kitchen, and perfume studio, which felt almost like going to three different addresses. This periodic decamping to other parts of the house created the sense of an 'episodic' day - or of a 'sodding epic' day, as ex-Mr Bonkers was waggishly wont to transpose the term.

And epic it was! Our conversational topics lurched seamlessly(!) from hangover cures to genetic legacies, to the wonders of M & S and the mindset of artists - and everything in between. At one point Liz demonstrated the relative mobility of each of her arms, following her shoulder surgery earlier this year. On the plus side she is now able to rub sun cream into that awkward spot between the shoulder blades that eludes some of the most able-armed amongst us, myself included, however, anything around head height or higher remains a challenge. So no overhead jerks with dumb bells or pinning of fascinators on elaborate top knots any time soon.

The middle phase of our visit took place in Liz's humongously big kitchen - any bigger and we would have needed to have communicated via Messenger. I was delighted to see my friend Gillie's 'big jugs' gracing the long dining room table. It was here that Tara and I installed ourselves, as Liz went about making lunch, deftly navigating her way round the combined no-go lists of ingredients that Tara and I had submitted (of which more anon...).

Son Rowan sat at one end, and in an admirable display of diplomacy, got stuck into assembling Tara's present of a Lego Ninja figure, while simultaneously 'building a burger' out of the jelly sweets I had given him (one of several items of whimsically interactive confectionery that caught his attention).

'Burgers someone built earlier' ~ Source: emmalemmadingdong

In a matter of minutes the Ninja figure was finished, complete with retractable helmet and multilateral weaponry, and before you could say: 'That chap who played Cato Fong in The Pink Panther has just died', Tara and I were being showered with a hail of minute plastic pellets, which we dutifully retrieved from the interstices of our laps and handbags - not least to ensure they didn't stray into the burgers.

My newly Ninja-ed handbag

Apart from the sporadic pellet gathering, Tara and I were by no means idling all this while. No, we had been assigned the important job of testing Liz's pretty much finished mod of White Moth, together with a still 'potentially to be tweaked' one of a new chypre fragrance. Over the course of an hour or two, we would continually resniff our own and each other's wrists and report back to Liz about what the perfumes were doing at that point in their development, and how we felt about them at every stage.

So White Moth is a pretty summery floral, with a bouquet of frangipani and tiare and a tangy, sherbety accord (involving some kind of fruit of which I am sure Tara will have made a note) - the whole thing laid over a gauzy vanilla base. Or so it seemed to me!

Then the chypre has three distinct phases: a bright opening of a very unusual orange that presents as grapefruit(!), which segues into a spicy heart with cinnamon and clove, which Liz may well beef up with narcissus, followed by the most deliciously sweet and sultry musk, the like of which I have never smelt before.

And while all this was going on, family members and friends would turn up in dribs and drabs, starting with Liz's partner Simon and Daisy, zonked from her first swimming lesson, and followed at intervals by the three older daughters and their boyfriends. This drip feeding of arrivals smacked of those cumulative nursery rhymes-cum-memory tests that get progressively longer as they go on - the likes of 'Old Macdonald had a Farm' or do I mean 'The Farmer's in His Den'? So Liz and Ro, and Simon and Daisy, and Lily and C, and Jaz and...Poppy and T...and have I forgotten anyone? - and E.I.Adio, we all pat the bone! ;)

Speaking of farms, in my review of Angelique I have already reported on the eclectic menagerie that also lives at Papillon HQ: the horses and dogs, the Bengal cats (twice as many as before!), the snakes, owl(s) and cockatiels. Turns out I completely missed the tortoises, but Tara spotted them in a terrarium by the fridge as Liz was contemplating what to give us as a takeaway snack for the road (or rail).

Blotter monitor

After a hearty lunch of asparagus risotto (completely free of anchovies, offal, squid, gherkins, onion, sweetcorn and Tiramisu!), followed by birthday cake for me with one(!) tactful candle, we adjourned to our final destination, Liz's perfume studio. I covered Liz's business generally - and the wonders of her studio at every turn! - in more detail in my earlier post, but there were still new things to sniff and see this time around. For example, I was interested to know how Liz handled the alcohol side of her perfume business, not least from a H & S point of view, and she showed me the plastic jerrycans she buys the alcohol in, which reminded me of oversized packs of screenwash, though mercifully not blue.

Alcohol to the right, blotters just about everywhere! ;)

I spied a couple more of those comically named materials on Liz's shelves this time round - there was one that looked like 'Aggression' and another that I read quickly as 'Frank Sinatra'. I think it was in fact something ending in 'Serrata' - a type of frankincense, perchance? ;)

Under Liz's expert guidance, Tara and I sniffed a ton of fragrance materials, from fruity notes like apricot, plum, rhubarb and pear, to florals such as jonquil, narcissus, lilac and tiare, to vanillas and musks of every stripe, as well as black tea, jade, a markedly clean patchouli, and the specific orange used in the new chypre.

At one point we also stared out an unsettling lump of ambergris floating in a murky liquid in a see-through tub. At another, Liz warmed a canister of hyraceum - and one of a Persian rose material - between her thighs(!). Tara captured this 'money shot' on camera and I look forward to seeing it on her post. ;) And as she had done for me, Liz scooped out a generous spoonful of orris concrete for Tara to take home - you get a quality goody bag at Papillon, I can tell you! None of your lame Sherbet Dip-and-balloon combos, oh no.

And all too soon it was time to take Tara back to Salisbury, and drive on to the pub where I had booked in for the night. Many thanks are due to Liz and Tara for giving me a fun- and family- and fragrance-filled birthday to remember!

And I simply can't wait for White Moth and the chypre to see the light of day - I am sure they will be winners. For to reprise the names of Lego figures for a moment, Liz Moores may not be the Ninja of the perfume world exactly - she doesn't have the range of movement in her arm to do all that abseiling business, for one thing - but she most certainly is its Aroma Transformer...

'Between a rock hyrax and a festival': a pleasantly pungent Papillon pitstop en route to Rockaway Beach

Back when I wrote my 'not a review' of Salome by Papillon Artisan Perfumes - which featured the perturbed reactions of my friend Lizzie and her children to the perfume's thoroughly 'unnecessary' behaviour on my skin, to wit, that I shouldn't really be encouraged to wear this, especially not outdoors - Liz Moores expressed an interest in smelling Salome for herself on my skin, to see if I did indeed amp up the skank factor, as Liz's own skin does. And it wasn't long before a suitable opportunity arose, for I found myself bound for Bognor Regis and a 'boutique indoor music festival' called Rockaway Beach, and realised that Papillon's HQ was only a short squirt away up the M27. So I arranged with Liz that I would pop in on Saturday afternoon for a quick pitstop en route to the coast.

It is well documented - also in my own 'okay, let's call it a review for once' of Angelique - that Liz lives in splendid isolation in the middle of the New Forest. Well, isolation only in the sense of proximity to neighbours maybe, for the household is quite populous, comprising a shifting kaleidoscope of up to five children and (extremely) assorted animals.

The first thing to mention about my visit is that Liz gives good directions. Sat nav is positively superfluous when you are armed with such safety-conscious and meticulous instructions - including a current assessment of the degree of obstructive vegetation that might be compromising local signage:

"On this bend you need to turn right (signposted as a dead end IF you can see the sign which is battling with nature). BE CAREFUL HERE as it's a blind bend!!!"

Papillon HQ, where you are never more than 6ft away from a perfume bottle

I forgot to mention that I was a bit late getting to Liz's house, on account of roadwork-related lane closures on the A34 south of Newbury. Consequently, my first words to her after 'Hello' were - in a for me uncharacteristically ungrammatical blurt - 'I have four unreasonable demands I hope that's okay toilet cup of tea may I fill up my water bottle and charge my phone thank you where is the toilet in fact?'

A few minutes later, I was comfortably perched at the island in Liz's vast kitchen, while Liz's partner Simon put the kettle on, Liz cut me a piece of gooey chocolate cake, and my phone charged quietly on a cable reel normally used with the lawn mower. Over tea, I was treated to a smartphone tour of son Rowan's collection of 'monster' images. Well, in fairness some of them may have been his older sisters, but the more we swiped through, the blurrier our definitions seemed to become.

After tea, we adjourned to the living room, which was equally vast and notable for its squashy sofas, comfy jumble of cushions, and occasional stately Bengal threading its way through your legs. At this stage in proceedings Liz sniffed me wearing Salome, whose delicate powdery trail she likened to the way the scent played on her eldest daughter Jasmine's skin. I was quick to point out that Salome had been on me for seven hours already, and promptly reapplied it so that Liz could experience it straight out of the starting blocks in all its raunchy splendour. 'Oh okaay, now that is rather funky!' she laughed. We chatted about some samples I had received lately, and about the different ways natural materials and aromachemicals behave in perfume compositions, eg how relatively predictable a synthetic ingredient is compared to a natural. We agreed that they both have a role to play, and indeed the Papillon range of fragrances seems to gravitate 'naturally' to a 50/50 ratio of each.

Next up, I had a tour of Liz's studio with its floor to ceiling shelves laden with glass bottles and metal canisters of perfumery ingredients. Some of these were thematically grouped according to the perfume they go into, while others were part of Liz's extensive library of materials. A number sported intriguingly oddball names like 'Bornax' and 'Okanaul'. Okay, so I made both of those up, but trust me when I say that the correct names (which I can't immediately bring to mind) were every bit as random. I do remember another bottle that was definitely called Pink Lotus, and which smelt beguilingly of Toffos.

Source: Twitter

I got to sniff a selection of raw materials, including some of the ones that went into Angelique, Tobacco Rose and Salome. I was liberally anointed with African Stone - and not just hyrax, but styrax, castoreum and red bitter orange, mimosa and Turkish rose, plus a foresty number named after the area in France where I accidentally fetched up in a nudist camp. I also had two different mods on my arms of White Moth, a tiare-centric work in progress, and of course the recently refreshed application of Salome! If the truth be told, I was a bit pungent by now, veering to pongy possibly, but I didn't care...

Liz also showed me her stack of notebooks, full of handwritten formulae and jottings about her impressions of different materials, both on their own and in various accords. It was reassuring to see that her work bench bore the scars of battle in the form of numerous marks, scratches and stains(!), as I have managed to strip the polish off my dining room table in a couple of obvious places due to accidents while decanting...;(

'Piccadilly patio': the cat wanted out and the dogs wanted in

Then we were looking out of the window at one point onto a patio area behind the kitchen - specifically because Jicky the cat had escaped and was sloping off towards the clothes line, prompting Liz to ring Simon and ask him to go and catch her (I told you it was a big house!) - and this was the trigger for Liz to tell me a bit about the creation of Tobacco Rose. I admitted right off the bat that while I admire Tobacco Rose, I find a bit prickly/fuzzy and austere, and neither upbeat nor sultry - nor particularly feminine. It's quite haylike on me - and kind of autumnal - and that's as much as I could say about it, other than the fact that I am leaning ever more towards Salome, the surprise grower of the range for a former hater of animalics!

Me being quite haylike on hay, c1974

Liz could understand why Tobacco Rose might not have clicked with me, and explained that it was a perfume with which she had wrestled for a long time, scrapping and tinkering in an endless and at times furious cycle. For by her own admission, she had been in a bad place in her personal life at that time, and the catalyst for Tobacco Rose had been the combination of this inner turmoil and the sight of the trees ranged around her house and the carpet of autumnal leaves on the flagstones of the patio. I think she may have mentioned that it was also windy and/or raining - and even if it wasn't, in the interests of pathetic fallacy I think we can reasonably add some turbulent weather conditions into the mix. So, short story short Tobacco Rose was created in anger, as it were - or an ongoing state of emotional upset - which got me wondering whether the finished scent embodies that conflicted mood at its heart, and whether that is why I didn't bond with it. Liz also lobbed in the observation that if she cooks when she is in a bit of a strop, she reckons that her dishes actually taste different. Which interesting notion is probably fodder for a whole other blog post on its own. ;)

And before we left the studio, because I had been swooning quietly over the scent strip smeared in this, Liz very kindly scooped some flakes of eye-wateringly expensive orris concrete into a plastic bag for me. I have since decanted them into a plastic container that originally had ear plugs in it, given to me some time ago by DJ and blogger Ron Slomowicz of Notable Scents. I knew it would come in handy some day.

Then having retrieved my phone charger, but forgotten to fill my water bottle, I followed Liz on a quick tour of the snake collection, which - in case anyone wants to avoid them - was just to the left of the cockatiels in the hall. They are housed in a sort of filing cabinet system the family refer to as 'racks', and Liz pulled out a few drawers to see which scaly residents were out and who was in - as in under their little platform to the rear of each drawer. Cleo was out but I am very pleased to report that Phantom, the ueber-creepy white Royal Python, was firmly IN, and out of sight. I also noticed a bottle of Hoegaarden on the worktop to one side. Who knew that pedigree snakes are partial to the odd beer?

From Papillon HQ, it was on to Bognor, though not before I had stopped to photograph this wonderfully vintage petrol station in the next village.

The Rockaway Beach Festival is held at Butlins, which has come a long way as a holiday destination since its Red Coat and 'hi-de-hi' days, though if you ask me my honest opinion, not nearly far enough, haha. I was staying offsite in a very traditional B & B, so much so that I got ticked off the next morning at breakfast for inadvertently taking the communal jug of orange juice to my table, and spilling a drop in the process. Meanwhile, the band I had come to see (The Monochrome Set) and its merchandise team had rooms in the two main onsite hotels, memorable for their whimsical touches of nautical imagery and 'towel animals'.

Photo courtesy of Caryne Pearce

The Monochrome Set were playing the Centre Stage, in an auditorium that was disconcertingly reminiscent of a channel ferry, but without the slight rocking motion and dedicated lounge for long distance lorry drivers. But it was afterwards, over a takeaway pizza in the reception area of The Wave Hotel, that the Papillon story continues...For it was here - notwithstanding the fact that we were eating - that I invited the band to smell the remnants of neat African Stone(!) as well as Salome, which was about six hours in now on the second application of the day, and partially washed off by a pre-gig shower. Yes, Bognor may go down in history as the first time I have tried to un-perfume myself before a gig rather than the reverse.

Butlins with its distinctive meringue peaks

The band duly sniffed both the remnants of Salome AND the African Stone, intrigued by my explanation that it was the fossilised excrement of the rock hyrax, an animal I tried to big up by likening it to a robust yet endearing variant on the guinea pig. They continued to chew thoughtfully on slices of the family size pepperoni pizza several of us were sharing, and didn't bat an eyelid - or flare a nostril in disgust.

Now my wearing of actual African Stone may have been a lifetime one off, but in the light of this rock 'n' roll nonchalance in the face of the ne plus ultra of poo, I plan to wear Salome to the next gig without a backward glance...

Segregated scent strips in the festival programme