Musings on LUSH Lord of Misrule, and a big shout out to Tiny Fragrances

Engraving by George Cruikshank via Wikimedia Commons

Sorry I have been missing in action for nearly a month...I have been surprisingly busy caring for other people's pets and gardens, the lush vegetation in one of which has inspired me to write another post entirely, but for the moment I would like to talk about the other LUSH, as in the capitalised perfume house formerly known as Gorilla Perfumes, after formerly being known as LUSH.

Last weekend I had a roadying job up in Sheffield with The Monochrome Set, which I do from time to time when the gig is a little too far out of town to be conveniently reached on foot or public transport - and you try ordering a taxi on a Saturday night in any British city, as we tried and spectacularly failed to do one rainy and windswept night in Hull last winter!  At the sound check I was aware of a delightful sillage following Jane, the band manager, as she flitted up and downstairs between green room and venue carrying out her various duties, most importantly "hunting the rider". The rider wasn't actually tracked down till shortly before the band went on stage, whereupon we all descended on a selection of water, beer and wine with the zeal of seagulls in St Ives swooping down on a bag of chips.

I asked Jane what she was wearing that night and it turned out to be LUSH Lord of Misrule, of which I was quite unaware - which is pretty par for the course for me these days, to be fair. It smelt very familiar and alluring in a vanillic, "barnyard" kind of way, and I vowed to look into it further on my return.

Notes: patchouli, black pepper, vanilla

But first I would like to say a word about the splendid name of the fragrance, Lord of Misrule. Any coincidence between the timing of this post and the exit of prime ministers past, present, or somewhere in between, hehe, is of course purely fortuitous...

Illustration by Spencer Baird Nichols via Wikimedia Commons

From Wikipedia:  

"In England, the Lord of Misrule – known in Scotland as the Abbot of Unreason and in France as the Prince des Sots - was an officer appointed by lot during Christmastide to preside over the Feast of Fools. The Lord of Misrule was generally a peasant or sub-deacon appointed to be in charge of Christmas revelries, which often included drunkenness and wild partying."

Christmas drunkenness and wild partying? Any resemblance between the origins of the perfume name and.........ahem.....moving swiftly on.....!

And I also found this in the blurb to an episode of "Funny in Four" on the BBC website:

"The Lord of Misrule was the ultimate disrupter - his sovereignty gives us a quick burst of anarchy that refreshes and revives."

Hmmmm....well, I guess it depends on your idea of "refreshment", for there is a fine line between a thirst-slaking glass of Perrier - or make that Robinson's Barley Water as we are in Wimbledon season after all (albeit I believe they recently ended their 86 year old sponsorship deal) - and having to knock back 10 pints of lager one after the other without burping or drawing breath. Sorry, mind wandering again. But yes, how inadvertently prophetic that I should discover a perfume of that name in what has turned out to be one of the most turbulent weeks in UK political history. "Febrile" even, which was another word beloved of the media in recent days, along with "tumultuous".

Back home, I soon set about ordering a sample. There are so many more sampling sites out there now compared with the early days of my perfume hobby when I routinely used to shell out the equivalent of a small mortgage every month to The Perfumed Court and Lucky Scent. I quickly lit upon a company called Tiny Fragrances, whose apt and endearing name appealed, and ordered a 2ml sample for £5.50 including free postage. The price apparently reflected the fact that the delivery might be longer than usual, namely up to ten days. To my surprise I received a notification from PayPal the next day with the news that Tiny Fragrances had refunded me 55p, having forgotten to apply the "slow delivery discount", which I of course had assumed was already factored in. And blow me down if the perfume itself didn't arrive two days later in a dear little purple velvet drawstring bag.

I wore Lord of Misrule finally yesterday, and though it goes on quite strong, the drydown does the same raunchy sweet patchouli number on me as it did on Jane. I was greatly exercised as to why Lord of Misrule smelt so familiar yet long forgotten at the same time, till a light bulb suddenly went on in my head - L'Ombre Fauve (or "Bestial Shadow", my preferred translation of the name). I found my short write up of the Parfumerie Generale fragrance from 2015 - here is the full post, if anyone is interested in other scents in similar "super furry animal" vein.

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: eventinc.de

So there we have it, a cheaper, smaller format alternative to the PG at just £25 for 30ml, or £4.95 for a Tiny Fragrance sample. Just remember to behave when you wear it.

Source: Lush UK

And as it happens, the set that night included a song called "Walking With The Beast". ;)

The Scent Crimes Series: No 21 - The lion sleeps today, and sales assistants who are not up to speed

Source: Tony Brierton via Wikimedia Commons

Ooh, it is several years since I last did a post in The Scent Crimes Series - this may be partly due to having covered most of the usual egregious suspects already, and partly because I have been wearing my 'Visor of Ennui' for some time now. It takes a very special perfume to penetrate it, and by the same token a very poor show in some aspect of our perfume scene to make me sit up and complain. And at an undisclosed airport last week, there was a perfect confluence of those two factors...

But before I start, may I interject an update about train and air travel. From my limited experience to date during the pandemic of five trains, one tube journey and one flight, I can announce that it feels safe to use these modes of transport at the moment. Fares are cheap! There's no b****r on them! Moreover, if we don't rise up and use collective means of travel soon, I suspect many of the air and rail companies won't be there when we decide we are psychologically ready to come out from under our Covid-secure rocks and want to use them. So just as the Chancellor urged us all to "Eat out to help out", I would add: "Take the strain off the train/plane" by going on one. End of transport-related homily, sorry(!), and obviously this is very much an individual thing, but for anyone in two minds about the whole conundrum of getting from A to B I wanted to say that these modes of travel still seem to be lightly used and pretty consistently socially distanced. In my post about masks at the end of July I reported a more mixed experience on one leg of a train journey, but I think people are 'getting with the programme' as time goes on and mask wearing becomes more widespread and normalised. I would imagine you might actually be more likely to catch Covid in a gastropub where people are eating in even closer confines than on a three quarters empty train or plane, and with masks off (for obvious reasons).

So on to my Visor of Ennui, that was recently breached by the latest release from Chanel's Les Exclusifs range, Le Lion. Well, slightly released, as it is still a Middle East exclusive. As I know now, it is coming into general distribution in the early New Year, hopefully straight into the January sales, though I won't hold my breath, hehe. I am indebted to Val and Portia for the fact that a sample reached me via a highly circuitous route from Dubai to Australia to Austria to England. We won't consider the air miles involved in getting Le Lion to me, and however many they were, they were totally worth it. Which in these days of climate change concerns, you may rightly infer is praise indeed...

I don't propose to review Le Lion, as I am away at the moment and don't have my sample to hand. Also because Le Lion is a shapeshifter of a scent that skews differently on different people, and even differently on the same person(!); most of its key 'personae' have already been admirably covered by Val and Portia in their reviews (which I did originally link to, but a corrupt bit of blog code means they are not showing, sorry). From memory I can say that on me Le Lion is firstly a leather scent, with a warm hum of amber and vanilla, and the animalic vibe of PG L'Ombre Fauve asserting itself here and there, with which there is significant note crossover. Le Lion is lighter, less earthy, and more 'edible' (I use the term advisedly!) than L'Ombre Fauve, though I am a big fan of that one. Oh, and not forgetting Le Lion's hints of Shalimar thanks to the lemony facet. So yes, I love Le Lion, which has promptly shot to the No 1 spot on on my vanishingly small list of lemmings, along with Nars Audacious for which Val has also fallen hard, and back up bottles of a few things.

Source: Fragrantica

Le Lion

Notes (via Fragrantica): bergamot, lemon, labdanum, amber, vanilla, patchouli, sandalwood, musk

L'Ombre Fauve

Notes (via MimiFroufrou): amber, musk, woods, vanilla, patchouli

No, this post is rather about my experience of the duty free at the unspecified airport in question. Perfume sampling in that excited state of anticipation before your holiday is a thing of the past now...there are no promotions ladies lying in wait with testers, trying to forcibly spray you as you pass. (see Scent Crime Series: No 5 - The Tester as Tommy Gun). You can't even try fragrances unilaterally, for the testers and blotters have long been put away. The perfume hall is more like a supermarket than the sensory playground of yore. There again, for the past several years I haven't been bothered to test things anymore (see Visor of Ennui above ;) ), so it doesn't make much of a difference to me in practice. At best I might have sprayed a familiar favourite to wear that day, having invariably got up too early to apply perfume before setting out.

On this occasion, I made a beeline for the Chanel concession, and approached the SA who was hovering with no role left other than to dispense product information to would-be customers. I asked her when Le Lion was coming to the UK and she said she hadn't heard of that one. "Have you tried 1957?" she countered cheerily. I assured her I had, and that I liked it a lot, notwithstanding its goodly percentage of musk.

The sales assistant inquired how I had come to try this new scent which was not yet on her radar, and I briefly explained its complicated itinerary to me, glossing over the controversial aspect of the homemade sample, hehe. I don't think the details quite registered, for she summoned a colleague over to answer my question, who was in the middle of training a new recruit. "When is Le Lion coming to Britain?"

The more senior SA said: "Next year", before turning in my direction and adding that she had tried it already.

"So has this lady - she was in Dubai", piped up her colleague. I feebly tried repeating a shorter version of the sample's backstory, before swiftly aborting the attempt.

Ignoring the fact that I could possibly have tried Le Lion - in its exclusive sales territory or by any other means - the senior SA proceeded to tell me what it smelt like:

"It's a cross between Coromandel and Sycamore."

Hey, I know I said Le Lion was a shapeshifter, but that is some shifting of shapes to come up with such a startling comparison. I am not sure whether it might have qualified as an additional 'crime' or not, but it certainly left me puzzling over the odd lovechild such a coupling would make.

Have you tried Le Lion? Were you in Dubai? If not, does it sound like your thing?