DasguteLeben

Luca Turin gives 5 stars for the ingenious reverse engineering of Alaia - Vorsprung durch Technik. I still find Audis as ugly as a pot and can't take any pleasure in Alaia either. I think the bottle, as well as the designer's designs, are great, but the attempt to transfer this aesthetics into the olfactory doesn't work in my eyes. This is, as so often, less due to the perfumer's talent than to the miserliness of the accountant. After the violent pink pepper prelude we glide into the banality of underfinanced floral chords. Are scent engineers just sitting in neon-lit labs in front of their PC and juggling with algorithms and GCM readouts of the competitor's scent, which they are supposed to fake, or are they allowed to smell real flowers in a garden to remind them what that triggers? Do they ever go into a stable or do they smell at least vintage Jicky or does the smell of Pokemons mean animalistic now? And the air chord probably refers to the atmosphere of an open-plan office? Perfume as a self-referential prison, yet postmodernism has long since come to an end. Nevertheless, Alaia ultimately succeeds in creating a convincing virtual scent dream: ladies/men's hairdresser in a small German town, hair, hair dryers and a gibberish of various functional and care products of medium quality, which together create a typical scent ambience that sometimes irritates the nose, right up to slight headaches - just like Alaia. The banality of everyday consumer-capitalist cosmetics with its profit-driven false promises of eternal beauty, filled into a beautiful vessel - Alaia can still be read as critical art in this sense. And it doesn't have to be pretty.

I bought Ulysse on ebay exactly ten years ago - at that time there was quite a hype about the sun oil and care products of the small company that was founded on St. Barth by a German emigrant and her French husband who had deep roots there. If you look at the website, the company still seems to be flourishing. The branding narrative at the time was about Roucou oil, which was used by the indigenous Caribbeans as a remedy, but the fragrances were not local natural products, but professional industrial perfumery of European design, although according to the bottle produced on St. Barthélemy.

Ulysse, well, is, as the name suggests, a world wanderer, insofar as he does not use Caribbean T(r)opic, but devotes himself entirely to lavender. The intensity of the note is impressive, the Provencal herb is not airy, light and clearly orchestrated, but musky and ambry, while the Hesperides remain rather discreet. The spicy-herbaceous wood - artemisia, vetiver, cedar - reinforces this aspect of lavender and thus results in an almost narcotic fragrance: absinth-impregnated Provence dreams in purple fields. That is quite charming and also wearable by men, even if I like Pour un Homme de Caron more at the bottom line.

But this perfume has already been the subject of this revision, because years ago the visual and olfactory design of the fragrance line was more focused on the Caribbean and wellness, and Ulysse unfortunately fell victim to this revision as well. The life of fragrances is "unsteady and fleeting" (Homer).

On the one hand, the most classic Fougère, so very old school that one might not believe it is a current natural perfume, especially as the durability is phenomenal. The powerful moss notes (up yours, IFRA! ), lavender, cistus rose, vetiver, frankincense and tonka coumarin create an intense, wafting wall of green, hay, dry and herbaceous mist - really impressive. In the middle of this jungle Dr. Livingston sits in a hipster outfit and sips an espresso. This perfectly fitting portion of zeitgeist saves the fragrance from an irony-free retroness despite its genius and makes it a Fougère sister in the spirit of neoclassical chypres like Ma'ai from Bogue - truly impressive. Although I have now brought the jungle into play myself, the Conrad association of the title is actually not coherent for me: this is no Or Black (a really dark Fougère), no place of disinhibited ferocity like Conrad's colonialism-saturated African phantasmagoria, but rather what Gentleman Joseph C. would have worn to the flawless suit in the early twentieth century. But perhaps that says something about the state of our synthesized fragrance culture, in which Axe's soup is "male," cotton candy perfume "sexy," and every touch of physicality is "ihhbääh. Be that as it may: Heart of Darkness, no; Heart of Fougère: yes - really impressive!

Sensual, almost erotic, but quiet and subtle.

Nothing is superficial: Benzoe without Buddhakitsch, incense without church, honey without cardboard, rose without soap.

Everything is perfectly balanced into a wonderfully edgeless whole that rests within itself, but acts like a physical magnet, resonant, attractive, stimulating.

And no note too much: a scented haiku like a Picasso sketch: a few strokes on paper say it all. Inhale two syllables: baise-moi!

Amouage Jubilation XXV is not an oriental, but a fragrance. Bertrand's handwriting is so large and concise that he would actually need his own classificatory genre. And D. is not a genius artist, but a declared genius craftsman who, like van Dyck, Rubens and Rembrandt's picture factories, produces in series, which is why many of his creations, no matter under which branding, can appear like self-plagiarisms because they are variations on the same theme. Jubilation xxv is an evolution of the 2006 Paestum Rose fragrance from Eau d'Italie, the basic structure is an axis of a dry fruity rose note and modern frankincense reinvented by Duchaufour and Buxton for the Comme des Garcons Incense series. The typical olibanum scent is massively embedded in velvety woody components such as Iso-e-Super and Cashmeran, which produce a diffuse dry-woody spicy aura that can almost be described as the basis DNA of 21st century niche perfumery, so characteristic is it across all the brands that buy their components and recipes from the three major fragrance and taste multinationals. XXV was quite a hype at the time, it was clearly aired and from the beginning it was too synthetic, although more bearable than the even more violent Paestum. I sold the flacons in the old design that I caught at the Harrods sale at a profit and invested them in vintage Tabarôme, among other things.

Now one can of course ask oneself what is the point of pasting over the most precious Omani frankincense essence with standardized industrial scent chords, if the former were more than PR clatter. Or you could ask which normal earner spends more than €200 on a now ubiquitous type of incense, if perfume consumption was rational. Or one could ask how Duchaufour comes out of this creative impasse, when he once reached the perfect equilibrium with Timbuktu, who had been reformulated in the meantime. However, all these questions make me feel a little melancholic. As well as the fact that XXV, in comparison to what Amouage & Consorts are doing today, is being pushed inflationarily onto the market as if the perfume industry had collective bulimia, still recognizable substance and aesthetic programmatic (if not mine). I can't tell whether this fragrance has been cheaply watered down in the meantime, like Memoir Man. Anyway, there are more important things than (such) perfume. Vintage fragrances, for example, and perfumers who still practice their art free of the knack of relentless profit maximization. A Duchaufour on it!