Papillon Perfumery Salome (not a review): thoughts on my f***h j*****y, eponymous ancestors, and nasal literacy

I'm aware that I've taken my time getting round to not reviewing Salome, the latest - truly skanktastic - release from Papillon Perfumery. I had a sample, tested it a number of times on my own skin, focus grouped it after a fashion with my friend Lizzie and her (over 18!) children - that's their age, not their total number - and took it abroad with me, despite its being the furthest thing imaginable from an 'office appropriate' scent. Well, I suppose it depends where you work... ;) And now, sadly, Salome has gone the way of my mascot Max Rat and the luggage. A light-fingered tea leaf in Tipton may be stepping out on a Saturday night in a cloud of hyraceum for all I know. At the Lyceum, even. No, wait, that's in Sheffield. Anyway, my Salome sample has gone the way of all flesh, 'all flesh' being the operative words.

You might think that it is a bit of a risky undertaking to even not review a perfume I haven't sniffed in a while. I have to say though that such are the indeterminate impressions formed by my nasal receptors even with the perfume actually present(!) that 'an emotion triggered by a scent and recollected in tranquillity', to adapt Wordsworth only slightly, is arguably enough of a basis and certainly as much as there is ever likely to be. Then I was going to call this post something like a 'Fearless Fandango of Filth', but the 'f' word has been well and truly harnessed by my fellow bloggers in their stellar reviews of Salome, and no one but no one can top The Candy Perfume Boy's masterly coinage in his review of the fragrance of a 'trifecta of filth', in reference to the three animalic notes in Salome of castoreum, hyraceum and a rather louche 'tobacco-like facet' .

Source: Papillon Perfumery

What I remember of my several testings of Salome is broadly as follows: a bright, verging on sparkling opening with a citrus and floral bouquet of some kind, which segues within a very short space of time into a phantasmagorical wallop of f***h. Said wallop starts out like the pornolfactory equivalent of a heavy velvet door curtain, but gradually dies down to the texture of shimmying satin camisoles - those very wispy ones whose straps are forever falling down, by no means always by design. Salome is a big production animalic chypre that reminded me of YSL Y and Jean Desprez's Bal a Versailles, yet Salome feels smoother, creamier, more seamlessly blended, and more classically timeless than either of those somewhat dated scents in my view, just as Joy feels 'wrong' to me nowadays. On my skin there's jasmine and there's civet in Joy, and never the twain shall meet, whereas the notes in Salome are impeccably choreographed. Bal a Versailles is also a soprano to Salome's purring alto register, and it feels less substantial, more tinny and watery. Well, in fairness I do have the EDC concentration so it is hardly a fair comparison!

I must point out, however, that on me Salome is markedly more f***hy than on my friend Lizzie and her two children. They all said that I should categorically not wear it. Then, on Lizzie's son, Salome smelt completely different - it had more of a citrus-sandalwood-leather vibe which reminded him right off the bat of Geo F Trumper's Spanish Leather. I must say I was impressed that a young man just turned 18 would even have heard of Geo F Trumper! Then on Lizzie and her daughter I detected a much expurgated version of Salome compared to on me. Even so, there was the inevitable moue of distaste from her daughter, with comments like: 'Oh no, it reminds me of the dreaded halibut eye!', a reference to the legendary coldness of her grandmother's gaze - whether in life or death I am not quite sure - who apparently wore the formidable vintage Miss Dior (as it would have been at the time), so go figure. There were further associations of Salome with fur coats and old people's homes, not all of them printable. So yes, Lizzie and her daughter also pegged Salome as vintage, but not in a way that they cared for, whereas I think Salome is an example of the floral animalic chypre genre which nods towards the past, is firmly rooted in the present, and yet will still feel relevant in decades to come, assuming you like that sort of thing. Judging by the deferred gratification being barely contained on the blogs, I'd say that Salome will most definitely 'hit the spot' (no, I did not say 'G-'!) of many a fumehead who's a fan of f***h.

A hyrax predictably coming over all unnecessary ~ Source: walkthewilderness.net

Now I didn't love Salome, but I could appreciate it as the finest example of its kind I have smelt.** Also on the plus side, I didn't run a mile, even if Lizzie's daughter made a bolt for her bedroom rather sharpish. I doubt very much that I would wear it outside the home - much like Bogue Profumo's Maai in that regard - but I could see myself enjoying the far drydown in crafty lascivious huffs at my desk, say. If I still had my sample, obviously. And coming from someone whose Basenotes handle was once 'VM I hate civet' - nay, still is, though I no longer go on there - that is praise indeed. Not that there is civet in Salome, but I could equally well have called myself 'VM I hate f***h in all its bawdy and scatalogical manifestations' back in the day. And now I am much more open-minded - and open-legged you might say, but I really hope you won't - to the notion. Salome is a cornucopia of carnality, a pot-pourri of pudenda odour, and on that lewdly alliterative note I am going to park this non-review right there.

Source: nyu.edu

As it happens, I lost my sample of Salome not once but twice - for I left it behind at Lizzie's house following that group testing session, prompting mild alarm in the family. She agreed to put it in the porch in a flower pot for me to collect at my convenience. Readers may notice a car key in the foreground, which annoyed the heck out of me when I first looked at the photo, until images of 'car keys in bowls' made me think it might in fact have been a photographic Freudian slip.

Salome sample in organza bag partially obscured by phallic key

And maybe the fact that I feel unfreaked out by Salome's raunchy underbelly - well, I use the term advisedly as the underbelly reaches all the way up to the be-tasselled nipples of my feverish imaginings - is partly due to the fact that the name Salome is very much in the family. No, really. I was the first generation not to be called Salome, at least as a middle name. The belly dancing, head on platter-toting buck stopped (figuratively) with my aunt Rowena Salome, now aged 95. But the Salomes on my father's side stretch back several centuries. And while we are on this earthy theme, I can also reveal that the Salome pictured at the top of the post had a mother who rejoiced in the name of Susan Cock, whose mother in turn was Martha Prickman. You couldn't make it up. None of the Salomes of whom there are extant photos look particularly 'unbuttoned', if you know what I mean, but you never know. They do say the quiet ones are the worst.

Oh look - two Salomes in one screenshot!, although my other aunt, Hilda Salome, sadly died as a baby. Though her aunt Salome Musson (are you keeping up? ;) ) - who married Henry George Coombs and emigrated to New Zealand - lived to be 90 and is pictured below, looking every inch the winsome - and wholesome! - spit of Jenny Agutter in The Railway Children.

And finally, what of 'nasal literacy'? By that I mean that my inability to parse individual notes in scents - or even sometimes to tell you what it makes me think of in the most loosely conjured metaphorical terms - intermittently troubles me. It did so with a vengeance in the case of Salome, because after the initial nuanced but unknown flurry of floral and citrus notes, I was left with a chypre-esque construct that I could evoke in textural terms, but otherwise had nary a clue what I was smelling beyond the catch-all term of a wall of 'f***h'. I mention it here because there are a number of perfumes I have tested lately that I really like, but my inarticulacy with those, should I attempt to feature them on Bonkers, would be even more marked. I would have recourse to the lamest statements about 'a very nice floral blend' or 'kind of masculine leaning, but I like it'. And yet I am so taken with these perfumes that I would like to commend them to you. Maybe I could do a post full of tiny 'unreviews' of unprecedented vacuousness. Because - paradoxically perhaps - it seems a shame not to write about them at all because I am stuck for words.

Source: anmal.uma.es

Anyway, I mention this issue of nasal literacy because I think my nose is getting worse in this regard and I am not sure it is acceptable to do a post along the lines indicated above. And I haven't even got the excuse of nasal cautery, like a good friend of mine. She had a special knack of making her nose bleed on demand to get out of Maths class, and didn't have the bottle to explain that there was really nothing wrong with it, so they went and flame gunned the offending blood vessel before you could say 'Matilda!'.

Spot the Salomes - two more above!

UPDATE: Since I wrote this post, I have become the proud owner of a 'bespoke' kitten - well, one carefully selected to meet a raft of physical and temperamental attributes after weeks spent trawling the small ads on Gumtree. So as a tribute to this strikingly singular perfume and to my near extinct ancestral line of Salomes, I decided it would be fitting to include Salome in the kitten's list of (moderately preposterous) names.

Here then is Miss Truffle Ganache Salome Bonkers at nine and a half weeks(!), practising her Odalisque pose while I endeavour to change the duvet.

PS The term 'j*****y' is an X Factor thing, about which I cannot bring myself to elaborate.

**Salome proved to be a surprise grower in the end!

Turning Japanese and a filthy anomaly: Bogue Profumo MAAI review

'On guard!' ~ Source: Wikipedia

It is seven years this week since I was struck down by sudden onset perfume mania, and began tentatively buying samples of designer fragrances on eBay: DKNY Cashmere Mist was amongst my very first purchases, as the name sounded fuzzy and romantic. I quickly formed a preference for light and feminine scents, eschewing - nay, running a mile from! - the few diva perfumes I inadvertently stumbled across. The tuberose fright wig that is Givenchy Amarige was one early traumatic encounter, Caron Narcisse Noir another. I soon developed a twin aversion for bombastic florals and animalic notes. I gave myself the Basenotes handle, 'VM I hate civet', and was known 'on the scene' for my sanitised and lily-livered tastes. The only exception to that was my sneaking - and ongoing - affection for Jean Desprez Bal a Versailles, whose flouncy underskirts were steeped in this unsavoury secretion.

Fast forward seven years and the 'Best of 2014' posts are all in - I didn't compile one myself, for the reasons explained in my New Year stocktaking post. One of the recurring names that lodged in my mind was MAAI by Antonio Gardoni, the founder and perfumer of the Italian house, Bogue Profumo. There was a real buzz around this scent, and arguably it doesn't need any further comment from me, as the reviews are already 3-4 pages deep in Google. Left to my own devices I probably wouldn't have got as far as seeking MAAI out, but Liz Moores of Papillon Perfumery kindly offered to send me a sample of MAAI and its predecessor Cologne Reloaded. She has a bottle, and is as taken with it as so many in the blogging community.

Source: Bogue Profumo

I'll be honest, based on my cursory reading of reviews, I was a little apprehensive about trying MAAI, fearing that it would be an animalic horror - I noted that the photos of Antonio Gardoni mostly show him wearing a little (fencing?) mask on a stick. I took this as an omen that protective clothing - over the nose at the very least - might be in order. Looking back, it may have been a reference to the Japanese derivation of the name: MAAI is a martial arts term meaning 'engagement distance' ie the distance between you and the attack surface of your opponent. Hmm, I thought, it all ties in - both the (shouty!) capitalised name of the fragrance and its associated imagery were telling me to approach this one with caution...***

But I needn't have worried. Which is not to say that MAAI is not a challenging, epically singular scent that packs an animalic punch when it gets into its stride, but it was precisely that part that was strangely to my liking. As with Bal a Versailles, MAAI is another bonkers filthy anomaly.

But let me try it yet again and take it from the top. Here are the notes from Luckyscent:

Notes: tuberose, rose, jasmine, ylang ylang, civet, castoreum, hyraceum, dried fruits, sandalwood, oakmoss

Source: luckyscent

On first spraying MAAI on skin, I get a jumbled impression of a citrus-herbal - quite masculine leaning - cologne, which gets progressively mossier and sort of dank undergrowth-y over time. There is a pronounced earthy aspect, as in soil, I mean - the 'earthy' / raunchy notes come later! I even thought I detected a fleeting hint of spearmint. Notwithstanding the extensive list of heady florals, I would never call MAAI a floral perfume at this point. There is a cool sensation to the opening, as though a breeze was whipping across a freshly dug grave in a forest glade. In terms of airiness, I was immediately reminded of Le Labo's Ylang 49, albeit that is floral from the off and nowhere near as mossy, though it has oakmoss in it.

And whereas Cologne Reloaded was composed almost entirely from vintage materials - following a tip off, Gardoni acquired a collection of bottles from the 1940s that were gathering dust in an old pharmaceutical laboratory - MAAI is a modern construct, though with a high proportion of natural ingredients. That said, it is a modern spin on an old school genre: the animalic chypre, but one that is way more herbal than you might expect. And as I say, the dirty quality remains firmly of the 'wipe your feet' / 'great outdoors' variety for some time to come...

In an interview with Basenotes, Gardoni explains the starting point for MAAI:

"When I started MAAI I wanted to do an oriental incense perfume with a lot of smoke and sandalwood sawdust; parallel to that I was trying to grow a better relationship between me and what I always considered a difficult flower, tuberose."

Tuberose looking deceptively easy ~ Source: Swaminathan / Wikimedia Commons

Now that is interesting, not only because I also have a tricky relationship with tuberose, but because tuberose can present itself in intriguing, non-obviously floral ways. Serge Lutens Tubereuse Criminelle has that strong camphoraceous note to it, for example, and MAAI's take on tuberose has more in common with that scent than Amarige or Giorgio Beverly Hills, say(!). Tuberose can sometimes just be hunkered down in the background of a composition - more 'badass' than 'big ass' (as with the likes of Giorgio). So yes, the tuberose is certainly playing peek-a-boo at best, but I don't mind that.

And then, 2-3 hours in, a (to my nose) non-specific floral bouquet finally pokes through the damp ground, and it is only now that I actively start to enjoy MAAI. This soon segues into the honeyed, creamy, animalic drydown which is my favourite part of the scent's development. This reminds me of a similar (but briefer) stage in Rozy edp. It is faintly floral but more about the honey and plushly soft filth. Tangy (ylang-ylangy?) and faintly urinous in places, but not objectionably so. Oh MAAI! Whoever would have thought it?! The animalic facet is also evocative of Bal de Versailles, though Bal lacks the juicy, honeyed facet I'd say. The civet in Bal de Versailles is soft and diffuse - and unmistakably fecal, as here - but is more of a bass hum. There are also echoes of retro chypres such as La Perla, Paloma Picasso and L'Arte di Gucci. However, La Perla has more of a plasticky, soapy quality, while the other two are in a deeper register and are heavier hitters generally - the front end of MAAI is cleaner and more breezy than those two, but is murkier and mossier than La Perla.

You can't see my spectacular overbite! ~ Source: wikipedia

Eyeballing the list again, what a veritable menagerie of animalic notes that is! Musky secretions of the civet cat and the badger (castoreum) are teamed with hyraceum, the petrified and rock-like excrement (composed of both urine and feces!) of the Cape Hyrax, a little creature akin to the guinea pig to the untrained eye. Hold the snot and sweat, why don't you? The mucky melange should be way too much, yet I am lapping it up, nasally speaking. I don't think I would wear MAAI in company when it is cycling through its forest floor phase, but I would be curious to get friends' opinion on the deliciously skanky stage - even if it is only to be told to go away.

Oh, and out of curiosity, I used one of those Internet pronunciation apps to see how to pronounce MAAI correctly - with three consecutive vowels it wasn't immediately apparent to me - and the answer is 'Muh-eye'.

***Editor's note: further research has uncovered the fact that that mask on a stick is in fact an ingenious portable aroma diffuser designed to scent whole rooms!

Also, I had quite forgotten that the song that inspired the title of this post is rather fittingly by a band called The Vapors. There is even a bit of light fencing in this video: