Thierry Mugler Angel, and my chocolate-sniffing - and eating! - prime

There has been much mention of the designer Thierry Mugler in perfume circles lately, following his death last week at the not very old age of 73. I had never seen a photo of him before, and must confess to googling "What happened to Mugler's nose?", which was on the oddly chunky side. I learnt that it had been reconstructed following a gym accident in 2017. Which only serves to validate my determination not to join one. I must also admit to never really having been a fan of Mugler's perfume line: some of the scents come off as a bit synthetic, though I remember liking a couple of those gourmand flankers from about 10 years ago, the names of which escape me now - the Basenotes site is down or I would look them up. Then I never got to try Aura, though its bottle is pretty amazing. When I see a bottle as intricate as that my inner St Ivel brand manager wants to cry out: "Think of the tooling costs!"

And then of course there is Angel - packaged in probably my most unfavourite blue - a sort of "dirty Man City" colour - but another cracking bottle, and one that I even owned, despite this being many years ago in my stoutly "civilian" days. I remember the year (1992) and where I bought it (Tegel airport in Berlin, which doesn't even exist anymore). It is rare for a perfume to survive while an airport gets discontinued, haha. I gather the site is being turned into a residential area with homes for over 10,000 people, shops, and an office park, while the terminal buildings will be integrated into the Beuth University of Applied Sciences. Never let it be said that this blog is not educational - also to me. ;)

Anyway, I had just finished a work project in Germany - I think to do with accidents caused by fireworks, but don't quote me on that - and decided to treat myself to a bottle of perfume in the airport duty free, as normal people do. I was accosted by a sales assistant brandishing a tester of Angel, and promptly fell for her spiel about it being the latest release blah blah, and bought it on the spot before the top notes had even landed. I do remember suffering a little from buyer's remorse, as I could not quite reconcile myself to this cloying, chocolate-patchouli-vanilla meringue cloud at first. Over the years I came to bond with Angel more, and to appreciate its extraordinarily distinctive and original scent for the time - it is the first modern gourmand fragrance, don't they say? I did end up throwing my bottle away, presumably because it had turned - my perfume curation habits left a lot to be desired back then. Here is a post I wrote about my pre-rabbit hole perfume-owning CV, which formally logs my Angel purchase in the airport category.

I only have a sample now

But there is something more to say about Angel, which has nothing to do with how it smells per se, but rather its ability to connect me with that younger self, in the prime of life and at the peak of my career, such as it was. I have already touched on this topic through the lens of a perfume in another post, namely the rather unwieldily named biehl. parfumkunstwerke mb03. There too it was my many (and often arduous!) business trips that the scent called to mind.

The photo of me above was taken in 1991 I think, in Chicago, after the hardest couple of days of my working life. I had flown out the day before from Manchester on the only plane in the UK whose captain dared to fly due to the extreme high winds - I thought if he is willing to risk it so will I. The flight was massively delayed as it consolidated passengers from all over the country, and I didn't get to bed in my hotel in Chicago till about 6am local time, only to have to get up again at 7am for a presentation at 9am. I then spent the next 13 hours on my feet in the boardroom of my English client's US distributor's offices, defending a report I had written on the North American market for the particular kinds of large pharmaceutical plant the English company made. There were 13 men in the room, including two representatives from the client organisation, who remained mute throughout. With the exception of the Chairman of the company the rest were sales managers for different territories, who didn't like the news I had to tell them of a huge spike in demand of which they had collectively failed to take advantage, especially in Puerto Rico. To make matters worse the area manager for Puerto Rico was the Chairman's son. The sales managers spent the long day querying the findings on every page and generally trying to shoot my report down in flames, while the Chairman also remained mute...till 10pm, when he leaned forward unexpectedly like a living statue breaking its pose, and spoke: "Leave it...she's right." Whereupon the meeting abruptly broke up, and the Chairman, the client team and I went out for an awkward and very late dinner. I do remember the monkfish being spectacular, and strangely at odds with the insanely stressful 48 hours that had gone before.

They had run out of standard length taxis!

Now I hadn't bought Angel at this point, but I very much associate it with that whole period of my early 30s, when my stamina and mental resilience were in another stratosphere compared to my much older self today.

I will end with another chocolate-themed tale - also work-related, but fictional this time! For I entered a short story competition in Good Housekeeping in the mid-80s, back when I actually was that brand manager at St Ivel alluded to earlier. There was a word limit and a requirement to incorporate a box of chocolates - the prize I won (for third place!) was also a box of chocolates as it happens, as the competition was sponsored by Lindt.

Room Service

The phone rang. Julia was surprised such an elegant period piece actually worked. That it might be a reproduction did not occur to her.

"Miss Murray? Could you come down a moment please? The manager would like a word."

Julia replaced the receiver with a bemused air and reached for another of the Lindt chocolates donated by the hotel. The standard of service really was first rate with extra touches like this and the rose, which she planned to press later in her directory of cash 'n' carrys. The only gift she could recall receiving in a hotel was a "Conference Survival Kit" - a useful but prosaic collection of paperclips, drawing pins, pencils and aspirin.

Julia went hurriedly downstairs vigorously crunching a hazelnut cluster.

"I'm sorry Miss Murray, but you have been given the Romantic Luxury Suite by mistake, which is reserved from tonight. Would you mind moving to a single room?"

Julia struggled to conceal her embarrassment. "But I've started on the chocolates." Having accepted these as compensation for the error, she was shown to her new room, with its familiar orange and brown decor and a posy of plastic freesias. The sense of anticlimax was acute. Though she attempted to study her papers for tomorrow's meeting, Julia's imagination strayed back to the other rooms, which, given different circumstances, had such potential...

She put down her work and picked up a competition form which had lain at the bottom of her briefcase for several weeks: "Win a holiday break for two at The Castle Hotel". "For the price of a stamp", she mused, biting into a praline. "Ludlow is my ideal location for a romantic weekend because...(15 words)" Julia scratched the back of her head and began to write.

To illustrate my story, here is the late Charlie Bonkers, grudgingly tholing a Lindt wrapper bauble on her head, "Stuff On My Cat"-style.

Abusive caramel: Musings on Thierry Mugler Angel, and Angel Muse

It's taken me a while to psych myself up to writing this review, to whose imminence I alluded a few posts ago. This is because I was putting off the day when I would try Angel Muse again on skin, a preliminary step to even my own meandering and tenuously on-topic style of fragrance writing. I felt I needed to feel fairly robust before exposing myself to what I can best describe as 'abusive caramel'. This notion of 'toffee as terrorist', 'fudge as felon' etc is not as fanciful as you might imagine, for one of the only two occasions on which I remember my mother crying was when she was making caramel tarts. A tin of boiling condensed milk exploded on opening, splattering the entire kitchen with scalding streaks of toffee, and resulting in her being carted off to hospital with second degree burns to her face, neck and arms. I am a reluctant cook at the best of times, and have studiously avoided trying to replicate that particularly perilous recipe.

Fast forward to 1992, the year the original Angel came out. In a post from 2011 about my pre-perfumista perfume-wearing past, I included my purchase of Angel in the 'SA-driven impulse buys at airports' category, in this case Berlin Tegel in December of that year. I can remember the main thrust of the assistant's sales spiel, in which she set about reeling me in with talk of a novel chocolate note. Team that with a curious blue juice and sparkly festive star-shaped bottle, and in the homeward bound pre-Christmas hustle I must have been an easy sale.

Would you look at that list of notes? There is pretty much every flower, fruit and confectionery ingredient known to man in there, with the possible exception of Rice Crispies and nuts.

Top notes: melon, coconut, mandarin orange, cassia, jasmine, bergamot and cotton candy

Middle notes: honey, apricot, blackberry, plum, orchid, peach, jasmine, lily-of-the-valley, red berries and rose

Base notes: tonka bean, amber, patchouli, musk, vanilla, dark chocolate and caramel.

Now I don't intend to link every review I write of a perfume to memories of a past boyfriend(!), as I recently did in my account of Ruth Mastenbroek's Oxford and the medieval lutinist who forgot he actually was my boyfriend.  But I feel moved to mention that Angel is inextricably bound up in my mind with a tempestuous rollercoaster of a relationship in the early 90s. (Please excuse the 'r' word, but it really is most apt.) I felt intensely alive the entire time, but not always in a good way, and when a potted spider plant went flying across the room one morning, narrowly missing my head, I finally upped sticks and left. At one point I even developed an eating disorder, and recall episodes of binging on Thornton's toffees...and well, you can imagine the rest. But how odd that toffee should yet again show up in the context of 'abuse', however administered.

And years later, here I am trying the latest Angel flanker, and trying very hard to keep an open mind. I am grateful to Liz Moores of Papillon for the sample, which I was most eager to try, having heard that several of my fellow bloggers took an instant liking to it.

These are the notes I could find, which are decidedly sparse compared to original Angel!:

Grapefruit, pink peppercorn, hazelnut cream, vetiver, patchouli

Well, well, I wrote that comment about Angel only missing nuts before I found this list!

And despite having the most sensitive grapefruit radar of anyone I know, the opening salvo of Angel Muse is promptly drenched in a sickly nap of candy floss-cum-gooey Ferrero Rocher innards. It is syrupy, but in a hard, cruel way, like the confectionery equivalent of the lava tide that engulfed Pompeii. The vetiver, such as it is, is keeping its head down, but is horribly aware of its impending fate. There is no overtly chocolate note this time, though the patchouli vaguely hints at it. In this case, its purpose is to ground the goo and give it its malevolent heft.

As Angel Muse wears on, the brooding, discordant hostility lifts, and I am left with a wispy gourmand trail not unlike Dries Van Noten, but less nutty. It manages to be distinctive yet inoffensive, but I cannot bond with Angel Muse in its more benign phase, for the damage is done. So yes, Angel Muse 'speaks' to me, and it has indeed inspired this post, but the 'Angel' bit is if anything even more of a misnomer than it was in the case of the original.

Now with wings!

As a lover of most gourmand scents, I was frankly surprised at the capacity of Angel Muse to serve up such painful memories in this punch-packing poisoned patisserie of a perfume. As I was mulling over how much of these bad vibes to share with readers, I decided to take a quick scan of other reviews to see whether I was out on a limb with my more downbeat take on Angel Muse, and was heartened to read this assessment by Jtd of Scenthurdle, who also detected a jarring quality:

"Muse streamlines the flavors but not the dissonance. Forget Innocent, Angel EDT and the extrait. Muse is the true successor to Angel."

"Muse is different, creepier. It gives me the shapeless fear of sitting through a dogmatic, atonal modernist piano piece."

Yes to 'dogmatic'! The opening of Muse is arresting, in your face, provocative and intentionally annoying. I don't want to be badgered and bothered by my perfume, thank you very much, even if it does settle down later to something the right side of captivating.

Angel or Angel Muse? Better the devil you know? I think so, for the Angel I just met may be wanner than its gutsy gourmand antecedent, but is on balance worse.

And don't even get me started on that horrid shade of blue, an ill-assorted affront to the copper trim. So here instead is the Blue Copper butterfly, a much lovelier creation in the kingdom of winged things.

Source: bentler.us