New Year, New Perfume
Starting out the new year I make some of the same resolutions like drink more water, work out more, eat healthier. This year I really want to learn more about perfume than my self-taught knowledge. Whether that’s taking a class or something else, I’m not sure but I’ll figure it out.
Something else I’d love to do more of is hear from you! What else should I be writing about in this lil newsletter? Do you have questions I can answer? Hit me up and I’d love to hear it.
What I’m Wearing
Memo Marfa: I don’t remember how Marfa came on my radar. Either I read about it somewhere or I saw Marfa and thought of the Prada Marfa sculpture which I’ve only seen via internet image. I know I’ve mentioned my love for the fragrance before, and my inability to afford it, but I’ve been wearing it again after purchasing the Memo Discovery Set. It just really is a perfect fragrance in my eyes (or nostrils?). It has white musk, orange blossom, and tuberose which melds into this intoxicating scent that feels like wearing the night sky during the spring.
Tam Dao Diptyque: There’s nothing I love more than a sandalwood based fragrance, so when I smelled Tam Dao while “shopping” with a friend at Barney’s I knew it was something I wanted to try. Luckily for me, it’s a scent my friend wears and she had an extra sample—a perfume miracle! It feels like a really great every day scent in the vein of Bistro Waters—something you can just spray on to go with anything. It’s a wonderfully warm scent with cedar, cypress, and coriander as well. While it doesn’t have tea notes, I think I’m drawn to it because, at least on me, it has a wonderful tea smell to it.
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer—A “Review”
I hadn’t seen this Ben Whishaw, Tom Twyker film since I was in college and had been thinking about it since well I write this newsletter about perfume now and Whishaw was in one of my favorite films of the year, Passages.
Whishaw plays Jean-Bapitiste Grenouille, an orphan born with an incredible nose. After working in a tannery for years, he finally makes it to the city and meets Giuseppe Baldini (Dustin Hoffman who looks like an elderly lesbian) a renowned perfumer and begins to train under him. Before meeting Baldini and being taken under his wing, Jean-Baptiste becomes enamored of the scent of a young woman following her and accidentally killing her. When he smells her dead body and can’t keep the scent, he becomes haunted by trying to figure out how to be able to do so. This leads him to Grasse to further train about perfume and there he finds another young redhead whose scent attracts him. Once he figures out how to capture the scent of people, he goes on a spree of killing young women to capture their scents to create the ultimate perfume.
The thing I liked the most about revisiting this was watching it through the lens of smell and Twyker makes everything look smelly evoking the senses through visuals. In the first half of the film, everything looks dirty and gross with montages of muck, fish, maggots. It is set in the 18th century after all. But it also shows Jean-Baptiste’s curiosity about scent, my guy literally will smell everything including a dead rat. He’s feral about it.
When teaching Jean-Baptiste about fragrance, Gisueppe tells him that “the soul of beings is their scent,” which as the film progresses clearly Jean-Baptiste leans into too much with the whole serial killer thing. As they create perfumes together and when Jean-Baptiste goes on his scent crazed killing spree, Twyker creates gorgeous interludes of what things smell like with close ups of plums and oysters, fantasy scenes when Gisueppe smells a concoction that Jean-Baptiste makes filled with flowers and a Shalom Harlow look-alike.
While watching, I thought about what scent I would associate with the film. Perhaps as of late, I’m Memo-pilled (Memo if you are reading this I’m available!!!) but I had just tried French Leather which is a mix of lime and rose with suede accord. It’s delectable. It feels fitting with a nod to Jean-Baptiste’s time working at the tannery and a gorgeous scene where he learns how to make rose oil with the red blossoms spilling out everywhere.
The whole film feels like an even more twisted Grimms’ Fairy Tale and if you want to see Whishaw making perfume in a slutty little knit outfit this is the film for you. Plus, *spoiler alert* there’s an orgy! The power of scent!
Perfume Ad of The Week
We used to live in a proper country where you could just see a commercial with Cher hard selling her fragrance on television. “Bottled but not contained” is just chef’s kiss perfect.
Extra Credit
If you are in the perfume trenches you might know that Gumamina, the fragrance house collaboration between perfumers Marissa Zappas and Courtney Rafuse, is the hottest ticket in town. They released two scents late last year, Odette and Odile, references to Swan Lake. The girlies went mad about it, especially because samples of the scents weren’t being sold. Later, they hit LuckyScent and immediately sold out. The writer Marlowe Granados, who wrote Happy Hour, one of my favorite novels of 2020, recently profiled Zappas and Rafuse for her Substack. She also brilliantly brings into it the history of Swan Lake, Naomi Klein’s recent book Doppelganger, and artistic partnership. It’s a must read!