Insomnia, headaches, and the 'blue light' rescue services: No 1 - Our Modern Lives by 4160 Tuesdays: Blue Screen/Blue Horizon - Perspective review

Visualisation of Blue by Sarah McCartney - even the picture is therapeutic!

For all that people say your fifties are the new forties, I beg to differ. As someone now nearer to the end of this troublesome decade, I would say the fifties are about the body's desertion and malfunction in all its manifestations: knees and hips start to protest or even give way, arthritis raises its ugly bone spur, the collagen has eloped with the muscle tone, moods are all over the place - like the fine fur slowly colonising your face - and to add insult to injury your teeth are yellowing like piano keys, and you appear to have unaccountably developed a need to spit. But worse than all of these intimations of mortality is the fact that despite years of practice you suddenly lose the ability to sleep. And of course I am only speaking for myself in all of the above - your midlife mileage may vary, and I jolly well hope it does.

Hey, even the dry cleaner is having a laugh at my expense!

Going back to the sleep issue, dwindling levels of progesterone are probably the main culprit in women of a certain age, because the problem became acute as soon as I hit 50. That said, I accept that I have only myself to blame for compounding the problem by my 'poor sleep hygiene', as it is properly termed, namely a bedtime regime that is not conducive to a good night's rest. This 'unexhausting' - and by no means exhaustive! - list of offences includes eating late, drinking alcohol, and consuming sugar and caffeine in various guises - all in the run up to bedtime. Then chuck in ruminating aka 'mind wandering', which occasionally escalates into full blown episodes of anxiety - and a compulsion to check my phone last thing at night. You know how it goes...you'll have your pyjamas on and be about to get into bed when you suddenly feel an overwhelming urge to google 'how to sew up a knitted leg', 'shrubs for shady walls', or 'cat that looks like Olivia Coleman'. And it simply cannot wait till morning. And of course in our digitally dependent age, phones and tablets are known to give off a blue light, which in turn affects the levels of the sleep-inducing hormone, melatonin. As a concession to this I have now banished my phones from the bedroom when I finally do settle down to not sleep, but I have probably already blown my chances of nodding off by that last minute Internet search or several.

So as a result of hormonal hoo-hah, combined with my bad behaviours, I am no stranger to the completely sleepless night, and have had two in the last week indeed, interspersed with a couple of Night Nurse comas that lasted a mere four hours each.

Our Modern Lives sample pack courtesy of 4160 Tuesdays

And here, quite fortuitously is where Sarah McCartney, founder and nose behind indie house 4160 Tuesdays, hoves into view with her timely new concept collection, Our Modern Lives, which is being backed by a crowdfunding project. The collection neatly unites Sarah's twin loves of making perfume and teaching yoga (on a Wednesday, as I now learn!), yoga being of course the very pursuit I should be taking up in a bid to achieve inner calm and outer bendiness.

Sarah's latest fragrance venture was born out of consumers' requests for two specific styles of perfume: one that contained no synthetic allergens such as linalool (but which would otherwise be 100% made of aromachemicals), and one that was 'all natural'. The latter style caters to those for whom 'natural' has unfortunately become a byword for 'harmless' and 'best' - when it is of course possible to kill yourself by ingesting just 30g of wild foraged death cap mushrooms, and even drinking water can be fatal in sufficient quantities. So while Sarah personally believes that the best perfumes combine a judicious and complementary blend of natural and synthetic ingredients, 'the customer is king' as they say, and she relished the challenge of creating these two sub-collections.

The synthetics

There are two different synthetic blends with (to quote Sarah) a 'quiet sensuality', and which are 'so benign you could bathe in them'. Of these one is stronger (OML a) and more Paul Newman along the sensuality spectrum, while my preferred scent of the two (OML ß) is pitched somewhere between Hugh Grant and Gina McKee, say. Then the seven natural scents are named after 'seven shades, moods and atmospheres' that span the whole rainbow of colours and also go from morning till night in terms of timezones. The naturals and synthetics may be layered (in an 'add your own base' Betty Crocker kind of a way) or enjoyed on their own.

I have to say I liked all seven of the naturals, with the possible exception of Green - Leaf - New, but only because I am not a fan of the vegetable notes involved. I have lots more testing to do, as the permutations are legion - or 'incorrigibly plural', to quote my favourite poem by Louis MacNeice - so I will home in for now on just one scent from the naturals line: Blue Screen/Blue Horizon - Perspective.

The headache remedy

Now I happened to message Sarah around the time of one of my sleep deprivation headaches:

Vanessa: "Currently trying Yellow over OML ß, which is a cheerful combo. Hoping it might help this headache shift."

Sarah: "To remove headache apply Blue to your temples. Not kidding."

Vanessa: "Will do that, thank you! Added a drop between the eyes like a bindi..."

Sarah: "Good. Fingers crossed."

Vanessa: "Yep, that worked. Just feel whacked now. 4head eat your heart out."

I should interject at this point to say that the mentholated cologne, 4head, had previously been my topical weapon of choice for headaches. It was over its application to my forehead in a Starbucks in Covent Garden in 2009 that I first met and bonded with the now legendary Nick Gilbert!, who worked for Boots at the time and recognised a fellow user...;) But now it is a case of 'roll on and roll over 4head'...

I am happy to report that on two further occasions the application of Blue cured a headache within a matter of minutes. There was another instance last weekend - as the cumulative toll of the insomnia really took hold - that it didn't manage to shift, but it was in good company with a whole strip of Solpadeine Plus that couldn't touch it either.

So yes, as a headache remedy I am impressed - and were it not for that serendipitous conversation with Sarah I would never have thought to deploy Blue in that way.

The perfume 

Sarah sets the scene in the accompanying notes to Blue Screen/Blue Horizon - Perspective:

"A sense of balance. We spend too much time looking at screens,not enough at the horizon. This is a scent to help you meditate. Materials include frankincense essential oil, lavender absolute, vetiver absolute, eucalyptus mint essential oil, patchouli essential oil, hyacinth absolute, organic English lavender essential oil."

I have worn Blue a few times - mostly on my forehead, it must be said(!), where it is that little bit more difficult to smell it - but on the occasions I wore it on more conventional body parts, I picked up a fragrance that comprised about 40% frankincense, 40% patchouli and 20% lavender and vetiver in an unspecified ratio that is neither here nor there. I didn't detect any mint - which is good as I am not a mint lover - or the hyacinth particularly - but the blend of incense and rooty, chocolate-y patchouli was nicely grounding. Lavender is of course traditionally supposed to be good for headaches, though it only played a cameo role in the composition. There is no development to mention, as Blue is not a classically structured perfume as such. I did also try it layered over OML ß, but I cannot begin to tell you how that changed it overall, other than possibly giving it the feel of a fuller-bodied fragrance with its bustle on.

NB In a future post I will be featuring another 'blue light' rescue service - a face cream by Dr Sebagh that is actually marketed on that unusually specific premise!

Oh, and in another of life's little ironies, given that 'anxiety is the new cardio', my old Zara jeans fit a treat now. Doh! And some readers may find it another irony that perfume should be able to cure, rather than cause a headache, but it worked for me...;)

Perfume-themed pratfalls - could fragrance be a hazchem after all?

Could the label be more admonitory?

I have been quite disparaging in the past about the new postal regulations. These prohibit the sending of flammable liquids - including perfume - overseas, while allowing shipments of fragrance within the UK, as long as they bear an ID8000 label, declaring them to be 'exempt from requirements for dangerous goods transport document'. If they are exempt, and not considered risky to transport in this country, you have to wonder why they even have to carry such a label. Why not put one on everything from CDs and books to clothes and Interflora? After all, these things aren't dangerous either, unless you stab yourself with the roses or swallow the buttons on your Boden Henley top...

When sending perfume, it gets more tricky when you have a package full of homemade samples or decants, as is frequently my - and other fumeheads' - wont. The Post Office doesn't have a category for these, so you have to pretend they are the manufacturer's carded samples or the clerk could refuse to accept the package altogether. And because of problems with these grey areas of classification, I tend to flit from PO to PO in the hope that I will find more accommodating staff the further I roam - or staff who have yet to brand me as an awkward and deviant customer at least. I am reminded of those people who are addicted to over-the-counter painkillers, and travel far and wide to supermarkets and chemists out of their normal area, scoring a couple of packets of their analgesic of choice in each outlet.

So up till now you will have heard me speak no ill of perfume, other than to note that a few all-natural scents occasionally brought me out in a rash, prompting me to desist from wearing the stuff for a while.

Could I construe this as the 'Serge Lutens shroud'?

And then the other week, I was making up a swap package comprising lots of little vials of precisely the unorthodox type the Royal Mail cannot contend with, when I accidentally spilt a couple of ml of Serge Lutens Un Lys directly on my dining room table. It is sod's law that if such a mishap were going to happen, it would be with a Paris Exclusive of which I had very little left in the first place. However, it was not so much the wasted perfume that troubled me as the fact that old Serge fetched the varnish / colour right off a small patch of a beloved piece of furniture. Seemingly it is a case of redoing the whole top for a proper even finish, though I did have a tentative go on just the affected area with a selection of materials from olive oil to Pledge. There are some really random restorative agents cited on the Internet, would you believe? - I am sure salt and ammonia, white spirits and vinegar were amongst them. Maybe I will eventually come to think of the pale patch as yet another characterful sign of the table's great age (it dates from 1790), along with a number of other dents and black rings it has sustained down the years - presumably from flagons of porter and the like.

Resin crystals - 'myrrh trouble than it was worth'...;)

So that was one incident of perfume behaving badly...The next also occurred in the dining room, though it wasn't directly caused by perfume. Still, perfumery materials were involved and were the immediate trigger for what was to follow...

A little while ago - ever on the lookout for new ways of experiencing scent - I had a go at burning some myrrh crystals that my friend Gillie had given me around the time of the We Three Kings joint blogging project in 2010. The procedure involves igniting a charcoal disc and dropping a few crystals on it once it starts to smoulder. The crystals are supposed to emit a fragrant smoke - we are back to the very origins of perfume and its name indeed ('per fumum') - from the days when ancient Egyptians would burn incense as a sacrifice to their gods.

Except that the overriding scent I got from my own experiment was of the burning charcoal - I was strongly reminded of barbecue fuel, while the myrrh scent was undetectable. I wondered if I had set the crystals on the disc too soon, before it had settled down to a quieter burn rate - a case of 'premature incineration', if you will. Anyway, Gillie offered to come over this weekend with her own resin-burning tackle, and show me how it should be done. Accordingly, Saturday lunchtime found us sitting at my dining room table, rubbing our respective crystals in our hands to see which ones were properly fragrant. It seems my myrrh crystals had pretty much lost their scent for whatever reason, so we decided to burn a blend of Gillie's, containing frankincense and myrrh.

Before getting stuck into our pyrotechnical antics, Gillie suggested we open a window. I should mention that my windows are the old-fashioned sash style - I have since learnt that their full name is 'vertical double-hung box-framed sliding sash windows', which I find oddly amusing. I don't open my windows very often, and sometimes they are quite sticky when I try to do so, on account of a fairly recent paint job. You have to push the bottom pane up from the top with all your might, basically. We did eventually get the bottom pane to shift up, but somehow - and it is all a queasy-making blur now - I managed to trap my finger between the two wooden frames. Gillie responded with lightning speed, yanking the pane down again and freeing my rather limp and lifeless digit. An afternoon in A & E later, we established that it wasn't broken, but crushed and cut, and I will lose the nail in due course. Which is a bit ironic, as after years of nail biting I had just kicked this childhood habit for long enough to paint my nails. A purple colour to boot (Chanel Paradoxal), which is also ironic, as the injured nail is doubtless that colour naturally now, though I couldn't bear to look - not even at the X-Ray! For the rest of yesterday and all last night I had to keep the finger elevated above my heart, but I think the bleeding has stopped now, so I can do a few more things with the hand. Though not peel carrots. Or change the bedding. Or type properly.

So this one-handed post has taken rather longer than usual!

And Gillie and I agreed to take a rain check on the incense burning, possibly opening the front door instead next time. I will report back if I crack it some day and would recommend this presumably more intense fragrance experience. Meanwhile, it's back to joss sticks and matches for me. And I shan't be sporting a full set of painted nails any time soon...

We Three Kings: Gold, Frankincense & Myrrh - Frankincense

Three Kings Icon ©2010 Megan Ruisch

FRANKINCENSE: Diptyque – Eau Duelle (“ebony and ivory”)

Notes: bergamot, cardamom, pink pepper, elemi, juniper, saffron, calamus, frankincense, cypriol, black tea, vanilla, musk, amber

I love the word “frankincense”. It rolls off the tongue in the same satisfyingly clunky manner as the name “Blenkinsop”. I may in fact love “frankincense” as much as my other favourite words: “gutta percha”, “tangerine”, “susurration” and “kibble”. That said, I had to trawl pretty widely to find a perfume featuring frankincense with which I had a particular rapport. I was initially going to choose Flower by Kenzo Oriental, but on checking the notes found that the incense in that one is “Chinese”, which, like that country's livelier styles of fireworks, is something else altogether. A blend of agarwood and sandalwood I believe, whereas frankincense (and myrrh) are of course both fragrant resins.

Then I remembered my newest fragrant squeeze, Eau Duelle by Diptyque, which I am quietly confident of Sibling Claus giving me for Christmas this year. Classed as a woody oriental and created by Fabrice Pellegrin, it has a number of my favourite notes in it, notably saffron, but also pepper, which was in the Kenzo that failed on the incense technicality. And while Eau Duelle is primarily a soft, cosseting scent featuring not one but two types of vanilla – the lighter firnat and the darker bourbon – its beguiling appeal is also due to the smoky tendrils of frankincense in the base.

The duality of Eau Duelle works on a number of levels: the internal light and shade of the vanillas themselves, and of the vanillas versus the incense, all echoed by the contrasting monochrome livery of the Diptyque brand. And beyond the frankincense connection, there are other tie-ins with the Christmas theme: Eau Duelle is both comforting and mysterious, like so many aspects of Jesus's life, if that is not too crass a comparison. And as the Son of God, Jesus embodied the duality of the divine in human form – “by flesh embound”, indeed.

Moreover, the wise men are traditionally depicted as being both black and white – well, one or the other, I mean, not both colours in the same Magus. That would give a very different spin to the term “Bah! Humbug”...

Then I guess there is the uneasy duality of Christmas itself, for somewhere buried underneath the groaning mountains of food and presents there is a religious festival struggling to get out, though every year it slides a little further into secular oblivion. Which brings me to that other, politically correct, duality of “Christmas” versus “the holidays”, a phrase I heard countless times during my recent trip in the States - it is standard usage over there but still sounds strange to British ears. There are holiday cards, holiday trees, holiday pies, holiday feasts, holiday wines, holiday gifts, holiday traffic and (presumably) “holiday holidays” - as distinct from “holiday holidays” - which as their name suggests are at a completely different time of year. Intriguingly, I heard on the news the other day that President Obama is planning to take a “holiday vacation”.

So yes, Eau Duelle would have been a good choice for the baby Jesus all ways round. Perhaps, in the next edition of the Good News Bible - or whichever one is the latest update of the original King James version – we will read that the wise men brought gifts of shares in an Emerging Markets Technology Fund and a £10 mobile phone top up, a bottle of Eau Duelle and....er....some myrrh.

But then again, nothing has quite the ring of frankincense. And a word that is at once a perfume and an object lesson in the beauty of the English language – why, that is a very precious gift indeed.

The other participating blogs are listed below - we have all chosen different scents, so every post will be a different interpretation of this theme!

Redolent of Spices

Scent of the Day

EauMG

Parfumieren

All I Am - A Redhead

Chicken Freak's Obsession

Notes from Josephine

The Perfume Chronicles

My Perfume Life


Photo of Eau Duelle from the Diptyque website, photo of the Magi from Wikimedia Commons