Mirage Oriflame 2010

I love fairy tales. To be honest, especially the dark, sinister, and abyssal ones. Less so the happy-ending versions. They are, of course, nice - for children…

Who knows, for example, the tale of the singing little ankle, in which the flute-carved bone of a poor, slain young man accuses his murderer after years?

Or the story of the robber bridegroom, in which a stranger one day courts the beautiful miller’s daughter. When she visits his house in the deep, dark forest, she is warned by an ancient woman that she is in great danger. But it’s too late: noise announces the robber bridegroom and his men. The young woman hides - and witnesses a cannibalistic feast ritual as the band of robbers slaughters a naked young woman.

Or the tale of Allerleirauh, a king’s daughter who was unfortunate enough to resemble her beautiful mother too closely: when the mother passed away, the father desired his daughter. Thus, she was forever on the run from her incestuous-minded father, living in the forest and dressed in furs, like a wild animal.

And then there’s the little-noticed but bestially evil ending of Snow White: at her wedding to the prince, the wicked queen had to dance in red-hot shoes until she fell down dead!

And always alongside are the innocent girls in the deep forest, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and Rose Red, Sleeping Beauty - all always just a hand’s breadth away from death by bears, wolves, wicked stepmothers, or the happiness of life "until the end of their days" with frogs that turn into princes, king’s sons who marry them from glass coffins (by the way, the prince fell in love with a corpse he found so beautiful that he wanted to possess her - let that sink in! So much necrophilia in a children’s fairy tale!) or similarly colorful fates.
What a rich world of images, what abysses!

Mirage is, for me, the scent of this colorful world. The advertisement for Mirage (fr. mirage) already announces a fairy-tale scenario: a young beauty in an enchanted garden holds the key to a mysterious gate in her hands. The bottle is also beautifully sinister: it looks like a little vial from the evil queen’s poison lab.
The contents, however, do not smell like witch’s kitchen poison, but rather balsamic and mysterious: a dense, dark, mysterious odor, certainly heavy, but in an elegant way, sweet and woody, spicy and precious. As white as snow, the bittersweet jasmine joins the noble woods in the dense, dark forest, and as red as blood, the rose shines in the midnight moonlit forest. The elemental resin spreads the spicy aroma of closely standing trees (even if it is not the resin of native conifers, but rather quite exotic broadleaf trees).

I am drawn magically into this forest, and unknowingly to what end I hurry, a fragrant shadow among dreaming trees, towards my fate.