Efey

It is always on the lookout for energy. Even at rest, it takes around 250 breaths per minute. During sleep, it can lose up to 15% of its body weight in a very short time and if it remains motionless for too long...the little hummingbird dies.

If I were spiritually inclined, I would call this smallest of all birds my "spirit animal".
Yes...I am a big hummingbird fan, I have a small hummingbird dangling from my key ring, a glass hummingbird hanging from the ceiling of my living room and one pierced into my skin.
For me, it stands for hedonism, for the fear of missing out and the urge to live and experience, for wildness and the fleeting beauty of life's honeyed moments (which are often over far too quickly).
And this fragrance embodies exactly this feeling for me. Images flicker and race past me behind my eyelids at crazy speed.

A memory:
"There really is a hummingbird dancing behind your eyes, isn't there?" she told me "If you don't flutter...you'll die," she said to me as we sat in her garden.
The empty wine glasses from the previous night are still on the small wooden table.
The scent of honey from my herbal tea caressed my nose and mingled with the scent of the lilies of the valley around me. It's only mid-morning, but she's wearing a white dress. She sips her Nordic-style black tea. The taste of thick cream lingers gently on the insides of her unflattering summer cheeks. I feel at home. She kisses me. Cream and honey mingle as the scent of flowers wafts around us. She wears a fruity perfume.

Back to the here and now:
It is difficult for me to give a purely objective assessment of this fragrance.
For me, it is a memory bottled in a bottle.
It is a moment of honey and flowers. A midday in late spring made of flowers and countless different impressions.
An appeal to joie de vivre and warmth. To the wish that a moment should never end.

I was full of incredible anticipation when I ordered a small bottling of Cape Heartache
It was supposed to be woody...like a mixture of damp moss, forest floor, morning dew-covered berries and pine needles.
I was looking forward to retreating into a woodland dream world with this fragrance, mentally walking barefoot over damp moss.
Especially the fact that Cape Heartache was my first "Imaginary Authors" fragrance, I had high expectations and was already mentally sampling my way through the other fragrances in order to breathe in their stories and wear them on my skin.
Unfortunately, things turned out differently than expected.
I spray "Pfffft".
"Wait a minute...what's that?" I thought to myself and furrowed my brow.
I was literally suffocated by a surge of very dominant, powdery strawberry.
Yes...suffocating is the right word, because the scent was like a veritable powder mist that enveloped me directly and was perhaps going to draw me into its forest paradise the next moment...I sprayed again and again, that should be enough.
At that moment, I was the Strawberry King, wearing a crown of...yes...there was something...there was something moist, tannic, completely hidden...
Maybe I wasn't wearing a crown of pine needles after all, but at least a tiara.
Unfortunately, the dominant strawberry overshadowed this very pleasant and somewhat darker fir note quite a bit.
I got used to the fragrance and kept it to myself at first...came to terms with it...after that, unfortunately, shockingly little happened.
The dominant strawberry left something resinous behind...sweet resin, powder resin? Sweet, fluffy and not very sticky at the same time.
After about 4 hours, my trip to the strawberry field, which I hoped would be a forest, was over.
Somewhat disillusioned, I left the sample to rest for a few days before trying it again.
Maybe then I would experience the forest.
But again, nothing. Dominant strawberry, powder, powder, strawberry powder and a hint of fir. Then everything settles and disappears somewhere between invisible roots and fox holes.
Since this disappointment, I have been reluctant to try the other "Imaginary Authors" fragrances...and although I would be extremely tempted by a "A City On Fire | Imaginary Authors" or a "Memoirs Of A Trespasser | Imaginary Authors", I am keeping my distance for now...not out of fear of the fragrance, but of disillusionment.

[Very intimate review / All names (except my own) of the people appearing in this text have been falsified]

It was a cold afternoon in late November last year when I received a message from a number I didn't know. I wasn't really interested in perfume at the time and didn't know that this short message would be my personal key to the door of the fragrance world.
"Hey Efey," it said, "we haven't heard from each other for almost ten years now and I just wanted to ask you how you've been. Best regards - Marie."
I closed my eyes. "Marie...", I thought to myself "...my God, it's been a long time."
Images played out in front of my closed eyelids.
Time jump: 2014.
I saw myself descending a long stone staircase and heard familiar, sombre sounds coming closer to me with every step down...until I entered the first hall of the underground.
A dreamy-sounding violin mingled with the buzzing of an electric guitar. Men in black velvet shirts and women in floor-length, black lace dresses danced a wild round dance. I walked on, looking for someone, feeling a little unsure but cozy as I walked through the corridors of this underground, when suddenly a 17,000BPM boom beat rattled around my ears behind a corner, while a distorted voice yelled something into the microphone. I saw glowing neon lights and a small group of people stomping away uninhibitedly to the beat. I carefully squeezed my way through the steel-capped figures with their dreadlocks glowing in bright neon colors and entered the last hall.
A gentle but invigorating guitar sound kissed my eardrums, accompanied by a smooth 80s synth. There was a certain melancholy in the air. "Pictures of you" by "The Cure" was playing.
People danced here with their eyes closed. Marie was standing in the middle of the dance floor, almost floating from one leg to the other. Her long blonde hair with black strands fell down her dress. She glanced at me and smiled.
I smiled back, breathed in. And smelled that scent...that one scent...sweet...soft...behind it that familiar gothic, but not penetrating, but cuddly and there was still...there was still...there was still...

"Hey Dad, what are you dreaming about right now?" - I was startled and pulled out of my daydream by my daughter: "Oh, I just remembered something," I said, somewhat irritated.
There it was again, still lingering in my nose...that smell I noticed in that gothic disco in the early 2010s...I had to find it.
An incomparable ambition suddenly took hold of me. I wanted to find it, the scent that reminded me of my time in gothic discos, that I associate with black kohl around my eyes and with such familiar sounds.
Patchouli was definitely there, I was sure of it... Maybe just any patchouli scent.
In the days that followed, I was obsessed with the thought of finding this scent...I stormed drugstores and perfumeries endlessly in the hope of somehow smelling that familiar scent again. I raided the Christmas market and sniffed countless patchouli oils until I felt sick and even visited several incense hippy stores in the hope of finding the object of my desire.
No such luck.
Frustrated, I shuffled through the wintry city, with more different samples of patchouli on my skin than an entire gothic disco, but without the smell I remembered. People gave me a wide berth and my silage tore a patchouli chasm in the ground behind me.
"I think I'll go for a swim tonight," I thought to myself... "Maybe I'll find something at LUSH that comes close to the right direction."
Numb and smelly, I entered the store. I was immediately approached by a (very attractive) sales assistant who asked me if I was looking for anything in particular.
"Something with patchouli," I replied.
The sales assistant grinned at me briefly.
"That's what I thought," he said with a grin, "As a bath bomb or as a perfume?"'
"You have perfume?" I asked, irritated and raised my eyebrows.
"Yes, of course!" he replied, turning around and pressing a small bottle into my hand, filled with an amber-colored liquid.
Lord of Misrule Perfume I read on the small bottle in the salesman's hand.
"It's something for you. You can see that straight away," he said confidently, "May I?"
A little embarrassed, I presented him with my forearm. He sprayed once.
Synapses were firing. Swirls of memories formed into intertwined images of light, darkness and cigarette smoke, as if a movie was being played far too quickly in front of my closed eyes. Broken fragments of glass were combined in the tinkling pepper that tickled my nose to form a sweet mosaic of vanilla.
When the movie ended within a fraction of a second, I saw a still image. Marie stood on the dance floor and smiled at me. Then a cloud of sweet patchouli. Not overwhelming, but soft. Everything blended into a gentle, wild mix. Prickliness, sweetness and heaviness. Dominant without being overpowering. Sweet without being really edible and peppery without being too harsh.
Marie reached out for me in my head.
A tear rolled down my cheek.
"Yes...", I gurgled out of my dissociation to the sales clerk, "I'll take it."
I didn't need a receipt.

Lord of Misrule Perfume was therefore the fragrance that led me into the world of fragrances through a wonderful and at the same time sad memory of my youth.
So it is perhaps difficult to evaluate it objectively, but for me it makes the best of what these three simple ingredients are capable of. It reminds me of times when everything was simultaneously melancholy and yet light, when we bought a bottle of whisky, threw away the cap and felt like the kings of the world. For me, it has a youthful royalty, melancholy and connection.

Today, I apply Lord of Misrule Perfume to my skin on cold rainy days and breathe in memories. Then I dance with Marie through the underground, to "The Cure", while we grin at each other and are sure at that moment that we are exactly where we belong.
Rest in peace old friend.

"I've been looking so long at these pictures of you
That I almost believe that they're real
I've been living so long with my pictures of you
That I almost believe that the pictures are all I can feel"
-The Cure - Pictures of you

I have loved and breathed vanilla for as long as I can remember.
I sweeten my coffee with vanilla syrup, have a weakness for vanilla crescents and vanilla sticks, could sometimes eat a packet of cold vanilla sauce from a tetra pack for breakfast.

The first fragrance I bought and opened my interest in the world of perfumes was the Lord of Misrule Perfume a wintery vanilla patch scent.
When I met a young woman who told me in an aside how much she loved vanilla (and vanilla fragrances), I set out to find the purest, purest vanilla fragrance possible. I was pretty bare at the time and was delighted when I saw Vanilla Touch in my trusted drugstore.
The first time I sprayed it, I was convinced. THAT was the closest thing to an intense, sugary vanilla.
Unfortunately, the fragrance wore off after just 2 hours...which frustrated me a little.
So I started layering Lord of Misrule Perfume with Vanilla Touch: Lo and behold - the fragrances blended incredibly well together and added a long-lasting vanilla to the patch base of one of them!
I kept experimenting...and soon I realized that Vanilla Touch may not be a particularly powerful fragrance on its own, but for the small money, it really comes into its own when you mix it with other fragrances, if you (like me) are a vanilla fanatic for whom there can't be enough of that soft, creamy sweetness.
This is a fragrance to layer, to try out and to experiment with.
Vanilla sugar to go, so to speak.
We will be spending a lot more time together.