Art and Commerce: Fumerie Turque by Serge Lutens (eventually)

Last week it was tobacco and this week it's tobacco again and I have a feeling that, since winter is setting in fast, it's going to be mostly reviews of warm things and comfort scents and Orientalia for the next three months or so.

Do you read News of the Weird? It updates every Sunday and it’s generally just a whole lot of fun: strange, awful, or ridiculous news stories, encapsulated and presented for your weekly amusement. That plus PostSecret are the first things I read when I fire up my computer on a Sunday morning.

However.

This is a 2009 “News of the Weird classic” from the most recent issue:

People With Too Much Money: In April (2008) the Swiss watchmaker Romain Jerome (which the year before created a watch made from remnants of the Titanic) introduced the "Day&Night" watch, which unfortunately does not provide a reading of the hour or the minute. Though it retails for about $300,000, it only tells whether it is "day" or "night" (using a complex measurement of the Earth's gravity). CEO Yvan Arpa said studies show that two-thirds of rich people "don't (use) their watch to tell what time it is," anyway. Anyone can buy a watch that tells time, he told a Reuters reporter, but only a "truly discerning customer" will buy one that doesn't. [Wall Street Journal, 4-25-2008]

And naturally, contrarian that I am, I need to make an argument as to why a $300K watch is not worthy of ridicule.

I mean I wouldn’t buy one, no matter how much money I had, and you probably wouldn’t, either. But people who could afford a $300,000 watch are not like you and me. If you were say worth more than $10 billion dollars, and over a hundred people currently are, then your perspective on what’s doable and purchasable would necessarily change. Once you’ve given away countless millions or even billions to charity and created a bunch of companies to employ tens of thousands of people and bought some houses and some cars, you’ve still got more money than you could reasonably spend in a lifetime. Maybe you take up watch-collecting. Maybe you have dozens of beautifully worked examples of the art form, and then you see this kind of ridiculous and ridiculously expensive but also strikingly beautiful watch: well, why wouldn’t you buy it if you could afford to? The thrill of the limited edition, of something that only a small number of people will be able to own, is not nothing.

You could argue that anyone with that kind of money to blow on a watch has too much money. But what if it were a painting? Is there a painting out there that’s worth $300K to some collector?

If you were an acclaimed sculptor whose work was in demand around the world; if you made a small, intricately detailed sculpture which was being cast in bronze, limited to nine pieces, after which the mold would be destroyed; if you thought that each of those sculptures was worth $300,000; if nine extremely wealthy art collectors agreed with you and bought those beautiful objects to own and enjoy: would anybody think there was anything wrong with that?* Naysayers might grumble that art prices are ridiculous, that some people have more money than brains, that the money could better have been used for charitable enterprises: but in the end, most people would agree that if you have the (legitimately acquired, let’s stipulate) money, then you get to buy more or less whatever you want with it.

So how is a watch different from a sculpture? Because art isn’t supposed to be practical but a watch is? I don't think so: I think a watch can be an objet d’art as much as anything else can. So can a fountain pen: I adore fountain pens and have a bunch of them, most extremely cheap (a clutch of the joyous $3-ish Pilot Petit1 pens) and a few nice ones, nothing more than $50, but if I had a whole lot of money I would unhesitatingly buy

the jade-panelled Graf von Faber-Castell 2011 Pen of the Year, which I think is a profoundly beautiful piece of art. I’d use it all the time, too. It’s currently £3000, VAT included, and, if I had that kind of money, so worth it. 

All of this is relevant to people who love perfumes, of course, because high-quality perfumes serve little practical purpose and are often expensive well beyond their actual cost to produce, but they inspire the collector’s passion and are considered by their devotees to be well worth the price.

My own personal mania is for Serge Lutens scents, which I think are a form of olfactory art. I have I think thirteen full bottles of his scents, and every one of them is something I love and wear as often as I can. Three and a half years ago I was in Paris for a single day, made a pilgrimage to the Serge Lutens boutique, and, on the assumption that I would never be there again, bought two 75-mL bell jars: Fourreau Noir and Fumerie Turque**. I think I paid €125 each, which was about $175 at the time, the most I have ever spent on a scent and worth every penny: I have gotten endless pleasure from those two bottles.

Fumerie Turque means "Turkish smoking-room", and unlike last week's Le Tabac, which was mostly just a pouchful of cherry tobacco, Fumerie Turque is the story of what happens when a roomful of men are smoking it. It smells not only of tobacco but of its pungent smoke; of dried fruit and of honey-and-rosewater baklava for snacking; of leather upholstery; of good clean sweat. Later on, hours and hours later, most of the smoke has drifted away, the men have left their hookah den, and Fumerie Turque smells mostly of the honey in Miel de Bois, which to my mind is an awfully good thing to smell like.

If you would like to read a completely contradictory review, you ought to head over to Kafkaesque, whose writer is one of those people who can fractionate a scent down to its precise elements and timings (I can't) and who loathes Fumerie Turque as much as I love it. And maybe you'll hate it as much as he does; it's not accessible and loveable, that's for sure. But it is astonishing and complex and wondrous, and that is good enough for me.

* And, in fact, this is not far from being the case with the Spanish sculptor Miguel Berrocal, who produced a number of sculptures — some small enough to be worn on a chain around your neck — which were also fiendishly difficult puzzles, such as the Goliath sculpture seen here.

You see that fig leaf covering his groin? Deep inside the piece as two of its puzzles elements are buried two sets of genitalia, one circumcised and the other not, and you can assemble the sculpture (which comes with an instruction book — these puzzles are difficult) with any of the three options showing and the other two tucked away. To the best of my knowledge, none of Berrocal’s pieces ever sold for three hundred grand (and a few of them are available on eBay for between $600 and $16,500), but the principle is the same: relatively rare artwork that doubles as something else, intended for a small coterie of knowledgeable collectors.

** In truth, I didn't know at the time that Fumerie Turque was also available in the 50-mL spray bottle: it I had, I would have bought it in that format, because I like spray bottles and also because I can't quite imagine emptying a 50-mL bottle as it is and  I'll definitely never use up 75 mL of anything. Mais je ne regrette rien. Every Lutens enthusiast should have one of these gorgeous, gorgeous bottles.

Carried Away: Encens Lavande by Compagnie de Provence

Not that you could tell from my until-now-punctual postings, but I have been away for a few weeks. What follows is part travelogue, part what-we-bought, and part exhortation for you to buy some stuff, too. In a complete reversal of the way I usually do these things, I'm going to start with the review, so if you like, you can just read that and ignore the rest rather than having to scroll all the way to the end. You're welcome.

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One of the things I bought on the trip was a bottle of Encens Lavande (Incense Lavender) edt by Compagnie de Provence. They make two other scents, Jasmin Noir and Anis Patchouli, both of which I found not to my taste at all (I thought they were kind of gross, to be honest), but Encens Lavande is very me.

Serge Lutens makes an Encens et Lavande, one of the Exclusive scents that you can buy in Paris and hardly anywhere else in the world: I tried it in a somewhat evaporated and therefore likely compromised state, and even then I liked it very much, but it is not better than the far less expensive Compagnie de Provence version.

Encens Lavande opens with a little sparkle of citrus notes and an expansive, soapy lavender, burning down into sweet sandalwood incense. And that is really just about it. What makes it wonderful is its strangely polymorphic personality: while staying true to itself, it seems to keep presenting facets that are by turns sudsy, gourmand, thick, attenuated, herbal, dry, hazy, and dense. It's a kaleidoscope of scents packed into a very small olfactory space. It reads as masculine — a barbershop in a Buddhist temple — but obviously that is not going to stop women from snagging it, too.

I paid $69 Canadian for a 100-mL bottle, and for niche that's a bargain, but you can probably do even better if you shop around: I saw the line in the US for I think $46, and online it's €25 or so.

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This time last year we were getting ready to head off to Tokyo: it was our twenty-fifth anniversary, and I chose the destination, so this year, my fiftieth birthday, I said to Jim, "You get to choose this time. Anywhere you've ever wanted to go." And after a day's mulling, keeping in mind the cost and the time restrictions we were working with, Jim said, "San Francisco." And so it was.

Big cities like London, New York, and Tokyo are — if you love big cities — immediate: they grab you by the throat and force you to experience them head-on. You don't really have a choice. San Francisco, on the other hand (and compared to those), underwhelmed us at first, but after a couple of days we began to understand that instead of seizing you, it took you by the hand and gently guided you into its mysteries. By the end of the first week, we said the same thing we have said of any number of cities: "Yeah, given enough money, I could live here."

We did all the usual touristy stuff: Alcatraz (self-guided audio tour, very cool), riding the cable cars (UNBELIEVABLY cool), the California Academy of Science and Golden Gate Park and the Aquarium and Fisherman's Wharf and The Castro. And we just walked around and drank it all in. The weather was nearly flawless, only a few hours of rain one morning.

We walked a lot. Most of San Francisco is uphill from wherever you happen to find yourself, and people who think Halifax is a hilly city are in for a bit of a shock at just how diagonal SF is. I think if you lived there and walked everywhere, you would develop a terrific lower body, because just getting from A to B is a workout. Jim actually lost weight on the trip, despite the fact that we were eating kind of a lot: they are very proud of their sourdough bread and you are not going to get out of the city without having some, perhaps repeatedly. (I maintained the status quo, weightwise.)

The Golden Gate Bridge, though, is, I am sorry to say, a massive disappointment: yes, it photographs well, and yes, it was a marvel in its time, and yes, I expect this is heresy, but as an object it is a very dull thing. We took a bus across and walked back, as we like to do, and it was drudgery: even the vaunted view of the city didn't lift our spirits. The Brooklyn Bridge is glorious: crossing it is like walking through an enormous cathedral. The Millennium Footbridge in London is a magical piece of pontine architecture, like walking along a giant spiderweb. The Golden Gate, on the other hand, is just a bridge. If you're going to do a tour of Bridges of the World, I would honestly have to suggest you skip that one.

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And now, the shopping.

If you don't knit or otherwise work with spun fibres you can also just skip the next bit, which is going to go on, but I can't help it: there is a place in San Francisco called Artfibers (for the time being 266 Sutter Street, 3rd floor, mere blocks from our hotel, although they're closing up shop in January and selling only via the Internet) which has the most astonishing yarns, and you are doing yourself a disservice if you don't visit them in person (if possible) or go to their website (of course that's possible — you're on the Internet).

Like most retail in SF — we didn't understand this at all — it opens at 11 a.m. instead of the usual-in-Canada 9 or 10, and what you will find when you walk in at or after that late hour is a huge, airy loft illuminated by a wall of windows (it may not surprise you to learn that San Francisco has a lot of natural light) and what seems like a mile of slanted display shelves bearing hundreds upon hundreds of knit swatches that you can fondle, arranged by weight, lace-fine to rope-bulky, atop bins of thousands of cones of irresistible yarns.

The yarns are sold by the yard (they're wound onto heavy cardboard cones), and non-yarn people may not recognize just how amazing this is: it's as if perfumes were sold by the millilitre, and you could just have as much or as little as you wanted in serviceable little bottles instead of having to buy a whole 100-mL flask of something. The prices are beyond reasonable: everything's on sale right now, with some yarns going for as little as 3 cents a yard, and $3 for a hundred-yard skein is no more than you'd pay for many craft-store yarns. But these are nothing like what you'd find in a craft store.

They have a yarn, Man Ray, that is 30% stainless steel: objects knitted with it have a weight and a slinkiness that you have never experienced before. They have yarns made of nylon paper, of silk ribbon, of recycled jeans. They have chainettes, bouclés, slubs, vrillées, and everything else you can imagine and some things you can't.

In the end I bought eight cones of yarn, all between 200 and 300+ yards, and all in a fine weight suitable to make gloves, because I love to knit gloves for myself: I have about fifteen pairs and in the next six months I expect I am going to have six or eight more. And would you like to know what yarns I bought? Go on, say yes.

The number-one find was Shush #4 (smoke grey: the colours are numbered rather than named), a blend of mohair and Lycra, and you glove-knitters, just order some for the love of god. Stretch mohair! And super-stretchy at that! It is going to make some soft, comfortable, warm gloves that fit like gloves ought to. It'll be awesome. Knit double, this yarn would also make a pretty spectacular hat, because it would fit so snugly and it would be so warm.

Yaqui #5 (inky greens, blues and purples) is yak down; Camuse #3 (coloured like the Yaqui only brighter) is camel hair and cashmere; Carezza #1 (blue-black) is merino/alpaca/silk and OH MY GOD PEOPLE SO SOFT. And, let's see: granite-coloured Peruse #8 is half alpaca, half cotton (what? really?); ink-black Tsuki #9 is mohair and silk (luxury, and I am going to knit it so tightly); sapphire-blue Sylph #7 is silk and mohair (the same thing with the emphases reversed, nearly triple the weight of the Tsuki for the same yardage, and SO SQUISHY); and Tantra is 100% silk (probably nothing but trouble when it comes to gloves, but the green-and-ochre colour, #13, seduced me).

Nobody is paying me to say that Artfibers is pure fibre bliss, just the most sublime, gorgeous, wonderful yarns, and you need to check them out right away: even if you don't knit, maybe this will make a knitter out of you, and if it doesn't, find a grandmother or a co-worker to make something for you. These yarns will make you so happy.

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Jim needed some heavy felt for a project, so we went to Britex Fabrics one day, and HOLY COW. I don't sew and I don't have any real interest in learning how, to be honest, but if I did, I would probably spend all my available time and money there. THE LAST THING I NEED.

Jim and I both like to write things down, and if you're going to do that in any kind of style, you need the right pen and ink and paper. If you are completely out of control, then you need a lot of inks (every colour tells its own story) and pens (one per ink, ideally) and papers, and as a consequence, we are both very fond of stationery stores, of which San Francisco has a few. Flax Art and Design is a massive art-supply store with a lovely selection of pens and inks: the young woman who served us both times we were there works only in that section, which means selling people pens and inks is her job, and can I just say that it sounds like a dream job to me? Jim is very, very particular about his writing instruments: one of our quests in Tokyo last year was to find the perfect ball-point pen, and it took almost the entire two-week trip but we did find it, the Pure Malt pen

made of wood from decommissioned whiskey casks (yes, really). Earlier this year I found the matching mechanical pencil online, so he has that, too. The only thing he didn't have was the perfect fountain pen, but we found that at Flax: the Faber Castell Basic Carbon

which is made partly of carbon fibre and looks like a tactical weapon. I can hardly exaggerate how excellent this pen is: perfectly balanced, weighty, smooth-writing. If he hadn't bought it, I would have.

And Maido is a small chain that specializes in Japanese stationery items, of the kind we saw all over the place in Tokyo. Still an essential visit.

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After San Francisco we spent a few days in Montréal, and uh-oh: STATIONERY STORES. One in particular: Nota Bene (3416 Parc Avenue). Their website is a travesty which doesn't do them justice; I thought they might be the kind of "stationery store" that mostly does greeting cards and scrapbooking paper, but they carry hundreds upon hundreds of different kinds of journals and notebooks, in addition to terrific inks and pens and so much more. A pen store called Stylo has many, many pens and inks, and I would be embarrassed to tell you how many of each I bought there, or on the trip as a whole, so I won't (except to say that among other things I got some awesome, inexpensive Noodler's flex-nib pens

and plenty of Herbin ink cartridges);

a small chain called Essence du Papier is likewise well-stocked with everything a diarist could need, and they got some of our business, too.

The fragrance department at The Bay on St. Catherine Street is kind of astonishing. In SF I went to Macy's and Nordstrom and Bloomingdale's, and I was so bored by the fragrance departments I could hardly stand it. The Bay, on the other hand, has a department the size of any two of those put together: it is massive, and the scope and scale are very exciting.

Nevertheless, I didn't buy anything at The Bay because in the end it's mostly mass-market stuff, very little niche, and what niche there is not that interesting, to my mind. But I naturally ended up at Ogilvy, because they sell Serge Lutens; they don't have a huge selection, but it's a good thing I don't go to Montréal that often, because I can hardly ever walk out of Ogilvy without getting something Lutens, which is exactly what happened.

Among the dozen or so things I sniffed was Serge Noire, which I have already reviewed, and not in the most positive way. But here's the thing: Lutens himself has revealed the dirty secret of the perfume industry, that scents are reformulated on a regular basis, his own not excepted, and I am quite, quite certain that the Serge Noire of five years ago is not the Serge Noire that I bought a couple of weeks ago. When I smelled it at Ogilvy, I was struck by its leatheriness, something I didn't detect before. It still has that incense brutality and that Lutens sidewaysness, but now it's much more interesting than I once found it. I find Cuir Mauresque kind of boring, but Serge Noire is now a terrific, manly kind of leather scent that I am happy to own.

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We took the train back home from Montréal, because I love train travel and it is becoming increasingly likely that we will never be able to do this again: train service in Canada has long been a tricky proposition because, unlike the spiderweb hubs of the UK, Canada is mostly stretched out in a straight line (a very long straight line), and with flight being so comparatively fast and airfares becoming ever cheaper, train service is ever more cut back.

We had supper before we boarded but ate breakfast on the train: the breakfast consisted of orange juice, toast, an "omelet" which was really a block of cooked eggs studded with what might have been red and green peppers, a heap of leaky salsa, some undercooked potato chunks, and two slices of dry bacon, the whole of it unseasoned and flavourless, every bit as tempting and nuanced as a ream of typing paper. "Airline food," Jim sniffed, but he was wrong: it was worse than any airline food I can imagine — by far the worst meal I have ever eaten in a vehicle. I don't expect a four-star meal on a train but surely they can come up with something better than this wreckage.

However. The train car we were in was apparently a European model with ten double bedrooms, and each one has its own shower. The bathroom is tiny, no larger than an airplane's lavatory, and when you shower, everything gets wet and you have to towel off the walls and the floor before you can use the other facilities and even then it's all still kind of damp. But still, you get to have a shower before reaching your destination so you arrive all clean and fresh and happy, and how cool is that?

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In between San Francisco and Montréal we stopped off in Toronto, and we managed to avoid buying any pens, ink, and paper, thank god, but I did find myself at a skincare-and-fragrance store called Jacob and Sebastian, and I was not going to buy anything, but dammit, I did anyway. Two things, actually.

One was a tube of Marvis toothpaste in Amarelli Licorice, and yes, $11 is a ridiculous price to pay for a 75-mL tube of toothpaste, even if it is imported from Italy, but two things: 1) it is so yummy you could eat it with a spoon, and 2) you need only a tiny little pea-sized squib to get your teeth shiny and fresh. I may never use any other, although they do make some other intriguing flavours, such as Cinnamon, Ginger, and Jasmine, and I will probably end up trying those some day. If they made a Rose toothpaste I would be lost.

The other thing was the Encens Lavande, which brings us back to the beginning.

And now we are home and I am SO not buying anything else for a long time: we have to pay off this trip and start saving for the next one, wherever and whenever that might be.

Rose's Turn: Serge Lutens La Fille de Berlin

As Serge Lutens had already done two roses before, the bright soprano Sa Majesté La Rose and the dark contralto Rose de Nuit, one might think he was done with the theme, but there is always room in the line for a rose soliflore, and La Fille de Berlin is it. (I am not sure what roses have to do with Berlin girls specifically – it seems to have something to do with 1920s style – but then I am often baffled by the names Serge applies to his perfumes, so perhaps we can assume it's a typically French flight of fancy.)

La Fille de Berlin starts out with a brilliant, fresh, wet tea rose, and gradually introduces a daub of honey, a grating of pepper, and what might be a wisp of incense. Otherwise it's just roses through and through, roses all the way down: they get darker as the scent evolves, but never truly dark. If I am not in a rose state of mind — hey, it happens — then it's just too much rose: but if I am feeling the roses, then it is charming, beguiling, endlessly enchanting as only roses can be. If anything could brighten a dark mood it's a sunshine-on-dewy-petals scent like this. I absolutely think a man could wear this: in fact, I think a lot of men ought to wear it instead of those drearily repetitive aquatics I can't get away from.

These pictures are slightly misleading regarding colour: the liquid is a startling magenta-pink that I suspect might stain clothing badly, so if you are the kind of person who likes to spray perfumes on your clothing, rethink that.

Rerun: Serge Lutens Santal Majuscule

This won't take long.

A while back, I wrote about a trip to Tokyo during which I briefly sampled the then-new Santal Majuscule. I mentioned that it reminded me a lot of Santal de Mysore: a commenter noted a resemblance to Jeux de Peau, and I said I thought there was some of that, too (partly because Jeux de Peau has a sandalwood note that seems very, or completely, Santal Blanc).

I finally got a sample of Santal Majuscule, and after a week of wearing it I can report that it smells essentially like a combination of Santal de Mysore and Jeux de Peau, in approximately a 20/80 mix, which means that it is very nice indeed —warm and lush and slightly strange, pure Lutens — but completely unoriginal: if you already own either of these scents, it's entirely unnecessary, and if you've tried them both but were unimpressed, then this one isn't going to convince you, either.

Floribunda: Three Last Lutenses

Back from Christmas break. Yeah, I know, it's pretty much the end of January. I didn't go anywhere, but it's a long story, and I'm back to finish off the last three Serge Lutens samples that I have, which entirely by coincidence are florals, sort of.

Some people, myself included, may have been wondering why I was even bothering to review samples that were possibly compromised by imperfect packaging, and the main reason is that I owned them and I wasn't going to just throw them out, I was definitely going to wear them, and I figured I might as well write about them. Maybe you just buy new things off the shelf, but perhaps one day you'll stumble across a twenty- or fifty-year-old bottle of something vintage, and it isn't going to smell as it would the day it was bottled. Not every scent you smell is going to be from a fresh bottle, and so I think it's valid to look at fragrances that have taken a few punches.

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Rose de Nuit is, as advertised, a rose scent, starting out bright and crisp, almost brittle, with a tinge of that stewed fruit without which it would hardly be a Lutens, and gradually turning dark and crepuscular while never actually becoming to my nose particularly appealing: it's just about the polar opposite of Lutens' high-flying, voluminous Sa Majesté la Rose, which is one of at least a dozen rose scents I like better than Rose de Nuit.

I smelled Vitriol d'Oeillet when I first got that big batch of Lutens samples over a year ago, and it may have evaporated a bit but it's still the same scent, which is to say a disappointment. It's attractive, mind you, but despite a name redolent of vengefulness and cruelty, it is a very tame thing. It's nice: a polite, friendly carnation, placid and drifty, no vitriol to it at all. If you want a carnation with some blood in its teeth, you need to try Comme des Garçons Carnation, which is all pinpricks and venom.

A fresh bottle of Encens et Lavande might smell of more than just its namesakes, incense and lavender: but it probably would not smell better than my little sample, which starts with a bright-green lavender with that desirable soapy-barbershop facet and gradually transitions to a pale, smoky incense, not absolutely unlike Lutens' Gris Clair, but this one is a much fresher, greener lavender. Lavender may be a flower, but by itself it doesn't have what one would call a floral character: it's usually very dry and herbal, which is why it's a featured player in so many men's scents. Accordingly, I think a lot of women would find Encens et Lavande to veer masculine, but I think most everybody else would find it austere and efficient, just the ticket for those overcast, moody days when there's work to be done.

Noble Wreckage: Four More Lutenses

I'll dispose of El Attarine in one sentence: post-evaporation, what I have left consists entirely of bitter-orange marmalade and maple-syrupy immortelle, no top notes, no complexity, and yet despite this fantastically beautiful, which I think can only be a testament to the quality of the ingredients Lutens uses, so one day I shall have to get my hands on a fresh sample and see how much better it (presumably) is.

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A year or so ago I wrote about Bois et Fruits, one of a collection of variations on Feminité du Bois, the other three being Bois de Violette, Bois et Musc, and Bois Oriental. As I wrote of the four variations at the time, "it is probably the case that you can't properly understand them until you have experienced them all in context": each variation takes the core of FdB, cedar, and dramatically overloads the scent with one of FdB's other elements — fruit, violet leaves and petals, or the oriental or musky base notes — letting everything take a back seat or disappear entirely. But as we know, scents are being rejiggered all the time for various reasons, and it seems to me that the newest iteration of FdB which I bought a month ago has been changed enough that the four offshoots that I have don't seem as closely allied to it as perhaps they once did: there isn't much violet in FdB any more, at least to my nose, making the violet-intensive Bois de Violette seem an outlier in the collection.

As with the El Attarine sample, there seem to be pieces missing from two of them, specifically the top notes, just what we would expect when evaporation has occurred. The sample of Bois de Violette is essentially a ton of candied violets on a cedar base, while Bois Oriental is equal parts cedar and a pool of warm, sweet base notes with a suggestion of the usual Lutens spice. Doubtless Bois Oriental is the sort of thing I would love intact, and even in my possibly damaged version it's glorious and durable, lasting for hours upon hours. Bois de Violette is laden with sugary violet, which makes it the most conventionally feminine of the four, and yet violet is such a mainstay of men's perfumery that I don't see why a brave man mightn't wear it either: the cedar keeps it from being merely pretty, and it is fascinating to see the two disparate elements, soft sugary flowers and sharp angular wood, in juxtaposition.

My sample of Bois et Musc is clearly the most intact of the lot: a trace of violet, a hint of spicy cooked fruit, and the expected cedar and musk, the latter much more restrained than the bedsheets carnality of Muscs Khoublai Khan. I've never been a serious fan of musk-heavy scents, partly because I'm surely anosmic to certain musks, meaning the scents dominated by them are never as interesting as I think they ought to be.

Of the four Feminité du Bois offshoots, my favourite, predictably, is Bois Oriental: I've been enslaved to oriental scents since I can remember, and this one gets it exactly right — dry cedar and sweet balsams to seduce the senses.

Prize Fighter: Serge Lutens Boxeuses

A heads-up about the batch of Lutens samples I'm determined on reviewing. And with that out of the way…

My favourite reaction to a scent is an agog, drop-jawed "OH MY GOD!" It is rare: it happened with Ambre Précieux, my gateway into niche scent, and Parfum d'Hermes, I think the first extrait I ever bought, and with Lutens' Jeux de Peau and a very few other things besides. Something in my psyche or my olfactory setup steers me toward big lush heavy things, warm sexy orientals and chypres, leathers and woods and balsams: they are my drug of choice, and every few years I encounter one that has all the right elements in the right proportions and the right order, and then I am helpless within its steely velvet grip.

And that is precisely how I reacted to Boxeuses (this version of Boxeuses, I feel compelled to add, this slightly evaporated and possibly altered version that I find myself with). Everything about it is exactly right, every box checked. It is leather, and it is glorious.

I have always found Lutens' first attempt at leather, Cuir Mauresque, kind of boring — nice enough, but inoffensively, almost cringingly nice — and his second, Daim Blond, not much better, too restrained and also too irisy (irises and I do not get along so well). Boxeuses is the unexpected pairing of capital-L leather, warm and sultry, with piercing black licorice, garlanded with a little of that dried fruit we expect from Lutens (plums, I think, this time). True to its name ("boxeuses" are female boxers), the two main notes are big, and they duke it out for supremacy, neither getting the upper hand for hours: despite this struggle, they get along so well, leather and licorice, and who would have thought of that until Christopher Sheldrake and Serge Lutens put it in a bottle?

As you can tell from the bell-jar bottle above, Boxeuses is not an export but an exclusive, which means you can find it at the Lutens boutique in Paris and probably nowhere else: you can't get it in the tall, slender 50-mL spray bottle. Yet. (Lutens does release one or two exclusives a year to the export market and then withdraws them again, to give us commoners a chance to get our hands on them without diluting the brand too much.) If Boxeuses is one of the 2013 export releases, or if I should get to Paris next year (we're hopefully planning a trip in celebration of my birthday, the big 5-0), then I will try it again to see if it still affects me as my sample did, but I have complete faith that it will and then I am getting this, or rather it is getting me.

Versions of the Truth: Serge Lutens Chêne

Some time ago I ordered I think fifteen or so Serge Lutens samples from an online sampling company. Two of them had leaked badly in the mail, and the company cheerfully replaced them: all the rest were fine. I stored them with my other samples and occasionally pulled one out to write about, but most of them just sat in their plastic bags in their lightproof box, patiently awaiting my return.

Or so I thought! They weren't merely waiting for me: they were transforming themselves, or being transformed. The bottles that had leaked in transit were trying to warn me: they were inherently flawed in some way, as I discovered this week when I decided to choose another Lutens to write about. All of the remaining Lutens samples from my purchase have evaporated to an extent, some more than others. (They were sealed in zippered plastic bags, which are not, I now know, air-tight: the tiny spray bottles certainly weren't.) They're not dregs, some thick oily muck adhered to the bottom, but they're not intact, either. The top notes might have fled, but Lutens perfumes, with their preponderance of woods and balsams and orientalia, are never about the top notes anyway. At any rate, they have almost certainly changed: to what extent I can't say, because I have nothing to compare them to.

A clock is ticking: I didn't know it, but it's been ticking for a while, and now that I can hear it, I feel the pressure of time. So here's what's going to happen: I am going to rocket through nine Serge Lutens scents in the next few weeks, I am going to sample them all before they depart their little spray vials completely, and I am going to write about all of them, but these reviews are going to be untrustworthy. All reviews are untrustworthy, because they're subjective, but these are going to be doubly so because the vials of scents that I have are transformed by their partial evaporation and so they are presumably not going to be exactly what you would get if you opened a fresh bottle and spattered some of its contents on your skin. This is true anyway of any scent that's more than a year out of the factory: perfumes are active things, they change over time, and they are deliberately changed as well by their manufacturers. Perhaps the Chêne-that-I-have is from an earlier or later batch than the Chêne-that-you-have and even in its intact form wouldn't have been quite the same. We'll never know. All I can tell you about is what I have in front of me and on my skin: it may be the truth, it may be some half-truth, or it may be a complete falsehood, but it's all I have.

Chêne is the French word for oak, and so if you didn't know anything about Lutens you would assume that Chêne smelled of oak, sturdy and imposing. You would be wrong, however: Lutens can tell the truth (Miel de Bois smells of wood and honey) or he can lead you wildly astray (Cèdre smells mostly of tuberose), but he will generally not deliver exactly the thing you expect. And so Chêne smells of wood, yes, but it, or the reduced version that I have, the version that may or may not smell like your version, is thick and soft, with a suggestion of fruit (nearly inevitable in a Lutens), in this case pineapple, and a puddingy texture, creamy, only lightly sweetened with immortelle. Presumably unisex, as most Lutenses are, Chêne does in fact smell like a men's fragrance with its huge quantities of wood, but there's no edge to the wood at all, nothing freshly sawn or piercing: recognizably wood, but, perversely, wood as comfort food, wood as dessert.

Long Distance Love Affair: Serge Lutens Feminité du Bois (eventually)

You are going to have to scroll a very long way down if you want to read about Feminité du Bois. Just so you know.

All my posts for the last month were written in advance and auto-scheduled to appear on Fridays. I wasn't able to post because I WAS IN TOKYO. Seriously. I HAVE BEEN TO TOKYO AND I CAN PROVE IT.

That's a receipt from the Apple Store in Shibuya, Tokyo, dated October 17th, 2012. I bought an iPod nano, this tasty little morsel right here:

My old one was on its last legs: it was a second-generation nano, six years old and very much the worse for wear. This new one had been on the shelves for less than a week, and it seduced me with its vividness: it is SO RED! (You can also get an iPod touch in the same colour, but that one, to my surprise, is too red: there's just too much surface area and it's kind of overwhelming. This one is just exactly right.)

Flying to Tokyo from Toronto, unless you do it first class, is a real slog: twelve hours of sitting upright and being completely unable to sleep. (I watched five movies on the in-flight entertainment system. What did people do before those things? I really want to know, because without it I would have gone mad.) They do feed you every couple of hours, to distract you from the awful slogginess of the voyage and also to give the flight attendants something to do.

And then when you get there, you're twelve hours ahead in time zones, which means that 1) you haven't slept in quite a while, even though you're exhausted, and 2) you left at 5 in the afternoon and it's still 5 in the afternoon, but 3) your brain thinks it's 5 in the morning. AND YOU STILL CAN'T SLEEP. It took us a solid week to shake off the jet lag, and I am not kidding. (And then we had to do the whole thing again in the other direction, so there's another week that it took to shake off another bout of killer jet lag. And we both caught colds, too: a twelve-hour airplane trip, as it turns out, is a great incubator.)

Japan is years ahead of us in vending-machine technology. Everything you may have heard about that is true. Vending machines are everywhere, and most of them serve cold beverages in cans, hundreds of different brands and flavours, which is why I became addicted to Suntory Boss Café au Lait (milky, barely sweetened, and absolutely perfect): some of them also vend hot beverages, also in cans. From the same machine! You pay with change or bills: some of them also allow you to pay with a transit card called a Suica. Less commonly you might find machines that vend frozen ice-cream treats, snacks like Pocky, and children's toys. In Japan, one doesn't walk around eating and drinking and smoking (in fact, quite a few Tokyo sidewalks have something like this spray-painted onto or set into them):

(That's a sidewalk and not a wall.) So the custom is to buy a drink from one of these ubiquitous vending machines, stand there while you consume it, and then toss the empty can or bottle into a recycling container attached to it.

Those are outdoors. Most of the vending machines are. (The recycling slot is over to the left of the photo.) We never saw a single machine that had been damaged or vandalized in any way except very rarely a graffitied sticker or two slapped on the side. Can you even imagine anything like that in North America? They'd be spray-painted and kicked to death within days. Hours, maybe.

Japan is also years ahead of us in toilet technology. This is the control panel for the toilet in our hotel room:

Yeah, a toilet with a control panel. The leftmost button is to stop the water from spraying. The next one is labelled "Shower", and it cleans the back passage with a continuous jet of warm water. The next one is labelled "Bidet" and since it has a picture of a lady with her undercarriage being sprayed, you can rightly surmise that it moves the spray a little closer to the front. (I guess a man could use it too.) Over on the right is the dial for choosing the strength of the spray. Sitting on the commode was a slightly disconcerting experience, because as soon as you do, a pressure sensor detects that you're there and begins heating up some water for you: this trickles into the toilet and makes it sound as if you're peeing.

It is impossible to drop the toilet seat or lid: they hydraulically lower themselves, which is nice. More advanced toilets than this one — and we saw these in public places like malls and subway stations — also have a deodorizer spray button and a sound-generator button, which makes the sound of a flush (not very convincing, actually, but loud enough) to cover up any unfortunate sounds you yourself might be making. Apparently, Japanese women used to flush the toilet continuously to cover up sounds — walls in Japan tend to be pretty thin — and these devices help them stop wasting water.

The Japanese have a reputation for cleanliness and discretion, and I guess their toilets are a pretty good indicator of that, but I would like to note that twice during our stay, a young Japanese woman (not the same one each time) got onto an elevator absolutely stinking of body odour, so clearly not everybody knows how to use soap. I would also like to note that whatever the fragrance people say about differing Asian versus Western tastes in applied scents, we smelled a fair number of young men wearing loud, modern fragrances like Calvin Klein or Axe (aka douchewater).

You will be disappointed to learn that I promised Jim I would not be doing any fragrance shopping while I was there (not because he doesn't want me to try them but because he usually ends up standing in some public place waiting for me), and I didn't, either. Okay, one tiny exception. We were in Ginza (more about that below) and there was a Shiseido boutique which I figured would have the newest Serge Lutens, Santal Majuscule, so Jim graciously consented to wait around the corner by a vending machine and have a quick sip while I popped inside. And they did have Santal Majuscule, but there were two problems: 1) at first sniff it didn't seem all that different from Santal de Mysore except with a chocolatey note, and 2) it was like ¥13,600, which is almost $170, and I just couldn't. So I left. And other than that, no scent shopping until the very very end.

I did, however, go ink shopping. Boy howdy did I ever go ink shopping!

Tokyo has the most amazing stationery stores possible. A chain of stores called Tokyu Hands always has a stationery department and some of them are HUGE, with literally hundreds and hundreds of different makes of pens (I didn't count). There's a store in Ginza called Ito-Ya, nine stories of every single thing you can possibly imagine a stationery store ought to have: an entire floor of Japanese paper and calligraphy supplies, another consisting entirely of 2013 calendars and journals and diaries. We went to Ito-Ya on Day 2, still jet-lagged but in a shopping mood, and what I ended up buying there was not ink but a clutch of these little beauties:

That is a disposable fountain pen called a Pilot Petit1. It's tiny, but when you put the cap on the end it's almost as long as a standard pen. There's an ink cartridge inside in a colour that matches the pen: you impale it on the post inside the pen and the ink passes through the feed and into the nib, which is amazingly smooth for a pen that cost less than $2.50. The ink, though, is not particularly good, nothing special (you don't expect much at that price, I guess), except for the blue-black, which is really nice. You can buy replacement cartridges, but I had something else in mind: I got a syringe from a 100-yen store (like North American dollar stores, but much much better, sometimes four or five stories of wonderful things) to empty out the ink, flush the cartridge with water, and refill it with better ink. Specifically, Iroshizuku.

Remember Iroshizuku? I knew that they would be cheaper in Japan so I made up a list of 9 colours (out of 21) that I thought might be interesting, and figured I would choose a couple of them if I could find a source in Tokyo. The retail price in North America is $35, though you can buy it online for $28 a bottle. (After the trip we spent a week in Toronto to decompress, and the owner of Laywine's told me that after taxes and duties and so forth, he would have to sell Iroshizuku inks at $50 a bottle to make any money from them.) In Japan, you can buy it for 1500 yen, which is like $18 a bottle. So I bought eleven.

Not all at once! I was the very model of self-control at first, picking up only two (Fuyu-syogun, a cloud grey, and Syo-ro, a dark teal, in case you were wondering). But those inks are everywhere. A couple of days later I ended up buying three more (Asa-gao, pure blue; Yama-budo, dark magenta that I thought was more like burgundy; and Tsuki-yo, tealish blue-black). And then four days later another (Shin-ryoko, pine green). And then the next three more (Chiku-rin, bright bamboo green; Ku-jaku, bright peacock blue; and Fuyu-gaki, bright persimmon orange). And I really thought I was done with ink, but then the day before we left I found myself at one last Tokyu Hands location and by god didn't I buy two last Iroshizukus (Kon-Peki, bright sky blue, and that one up there, Murasaki-shikibu, killer purple)? And I loaded them all up into Petit1 pens (I ended up buying seriously about twenty-five of those things at various stationery stores all over Tokyo) and I just wrote and wrote and wrote (filling up almost two thirds of a Rhodia staple-bound journal in just over two weeks) and it is the most colourful thing you ever saw — it looks like a clown exploded all over the pages. But I got every single colour on my list and two more besides (the persimmon and the purple), and I am writing writing writing and it is wonderful.

So that is kind of a lot of shopping (there's more besides that could not possibly interest anyone), but when am I ever going to get back to Tokyo?

Before we went through the security gate at Narita airport, I went into a little drugstore/convenience store to get something to drink and maybe use up some of smaller change: I had a whole lot of it and too much was ¥5 and ¥1 coins, which vending machines won't take. And they had this:

Breath Palette, little 25-mL tubes of toothpaste in the most insane flavours, 31 of them. Yes, you can see Grapefruit and Pumpkin Pudding on those tubes, and that's just the start of it. I thought I had read about them before but I wasn't 100% sure that they were even toothpaste, so I asked the very nice clerk, "Toothpaste?" And she spoke no English, so I mimed brushing my teeth, and she responded by laughing and fake-brushing her own wide smile. (You can get by in Tokyo without much Japanese if you are willing to act things out, point a lot, and say "arigato" (thank you) and "sumimasen" (excuse me) a lot. And you bow a lot, too, and you will get the bowing wrong because there are different depths and durations of the bow depending on you and on them and your status and age and so forth, but they cut foreigners a whole lot of slack, and so it is all very civilized and polite and wonderful.)

The toothpastes, as it turns out, are extremely peculiar: don't have any detergent to make them foam, and they don't actually taste like their namesakes (which include Indian Curry, Yogurt Freshness, and Lavender). They sure as hell do smell like them, though, and they don't actually make your breath smell like chocolate or green tea or whatever: it's an evanescent experience. At ¥200 each, almost $2.50 Canadian, they're expensive for toothpaste but cheap for novelties. And so I added up my change and bought ten: Monkey Banana (!), Tropical Pineapple, Rose, Honey, Café au Lait, L'Espresso, Caramel, Cola, Blueberry, and Darjeeling Tea. If you're used to a toothpaste foaming up and making your breath severely minty, then these are a weird, counterintuitive experience, but they're fun as hell.

After the security gate at the Narita airport there is of course duty-free shopping, and so I decided that since I had been unexpectedly restrained and virtuous in Tokyo, I was going to see what they had. And the answer was, not much. I am mostly over commercial fragrances, and there were lots of those, of course, and some travel exclusives and sets of miniatures, but not one single thing grabbed my fancy. There was, however, a Serge Lutens display, complete with a very aggressive saleswoman (possibly on commission) who decided that I was going to sample, and buy, Daim Blond, which is nice enough but nothing I'd own. A quick skim of the contents — there were maybe a dozen scents there — revealed either things I already owned or things I wouldn't ever want to own, with one possible exception: Feminité du Bois.

When it was first launched in 1992, the bottle looked like this

and I really did not like it: I didn't think much of the scent, either, and even if I had liked it, I wouldn't have bought it, because of the bottle and also because of that name. In what I now know to be typical Lutens fashion, the scent itself isn't feminine or gendered in any way: but it was part of the Shiseido line, and the scent was so woody, so dominated by cedar, that the company had to take the curse off it and assure women that yes, it was a wood scent meant for them, that it wasn't masculine at all.

At Narita I sprayed some on a blotter and then wandered off to think about it. It didn't take me long to circle back and buy a bottle. Bois et Fruits is one of a series of variations on Feminité du Bois, and the family relationship is immediately clear: cedar and dried fruit, but in very different proportions.

Feminité du Bois opens with the briefest flash of soap, for some reason, and then it's immediately off to the main feature: a little dried fruit (mostly peaches and plums, lightly spicy, plus some orange peel) and lots and lots and lots of wood, mostly cedar but also sandalwood. It leaps off the skin at first, but once it settles down (which it does quickly) it's mostly a cozy, intimate scent: people are going to have to lean in to smell it on you.

Despite that name, there is nothing remotely feminine about it, at least not now: Lutens might as well have called it Un Bois Unisexe. It's been reformulated since its launch: that's no secret. (In fact, Lutens has said that all scents are reformulated repeatedly, sometimes every couple of years, and his are no exception.) Some people who know both say that the wood is considerably attenuated in this newer version: I have nothing to compare it to. I am willing to bet that if I could go back in time and smell the original Shiseido version, knowing what I know now, I would adore it. But the Lutens reformulation is what I have, and luckily for me, I adore that, too.

Not a Prayer: Serge Lutens De Profundis

If my scanner were working properly, I would post a scan of a Lynda Barry cartoon, but instead I will just have to describe it for you: in one of her early autobiographical cartoons she tells of hand-knitting while in high school a lime-green maxi skirt, which she is wearing as she stares dubiously into the mirror and thinks, "Maybe this is really cool and I just can't tell."

I have that problem all the time and I don't suppose I'm alone. Not the lime-green maxi skirt: the not quite knowing if something is good or not. It is enormously difficult for me to distance myself from my opinion of something — which is generally strong and immediate and unalterable — and try to imagine how other people would react to it or how it might be perceived in an objective manner.

And so it is with De Profundis, Serge Lutens' most recent scent. I am disposed to like Lutens: I love or at least appreciate most of his fragrances, because they are interesting and thought-through and unlike other things on the market. But I really dislike De Profundis, and I can't tell if it's because it's objectively bad or because it's just not the sort of thing I like. I dislike it so much, in fact, that I'm not wearing it right now but just coasting on memory of the last half-dozen times I wore it to try to get a handle on it. Maybe it's terrific. Maybe it's even genius, as so many Lutens scents are. Maybe I just can't tell.

De Profundis is supposed to be inspired by death — the name is from Psalm 130, traditionally recited at funerals — which I guess explains the funereal look of the amethyst liquid and ink-black label. The scent itself is, if nothing else, a lesson in the uselessness of describing a fragrance as "floral", because it's floral, all right, but if you think of florals as cheerful or feminine or airy or innocent or romantic or fun or any combination of those things, well, De Profundis will disabuse you of that notion quickly enough. It is tinged with incense and bitter greenery but mostly it's a floral inspired by the chrysanthemum, a flower without a particularly strong scent of its own (and not a very agreeable one in any case). There is a hint of carnation to it; otherwise the flowers are not really identifiable.

If you packed a barn to the rafters with flowers bred for longevity and not a lovely scent, held a funeral service there, and then emptied it out and scrubbed it down with an industrial-strength cleaner, what remained would be the scent of De Profundis. I cannot imagine wanting to smell like that.

The Great Divide

I am slowly ensnaring a co-worker in my heinous web of scent addiction, and I don't feel a bit sorry.

A few months ago I gave her a half-dozen Demeters that I wasn't wearing much any more: at one point I had something on the order of 60 of them (mostly the wee half-ounce bottles), so I figured I could part with a few. Last month she ordered some for herself. It's only a matter of time before I've got her hooked on Serge Lutens* and vintage Hermes and the like; just you watch.

Today for fun I brought in the first two Demeters I ever bought, Gingerale and Graham Cracker. As I had guessed she might, she instantly fell in love with Gingerale: how could you not, with that unbelievable carbonation effect? (And why hasn't Demeter done a whole line of carbonated scents — Sprite, Orange Crush, Hires Root Beer, Coca-Cola? I'd buy every one.)

On the way out the door tonight I let another co-worker smell them both, and while she was surprised at the accuracy of the Gingerale, she didn't get it, or Graham Cracker either. "Why would anyone want to smell like ginger ale?" she asked, and then, "Why would anyone want to smell like a graham cracker?"

Because they smell nice, and are therefore nice things to smell like? Because they're fun? Because they're unexpected?

I've been wearing scents for so long that it is normal for me to smell like a jar of olives in a forest fire or sambuca or the coast of Newfoundland and to expect other people to want to do so as well. I have to remind myself from time to time — because this knowledge does not come naturally to me — that not everybody thinks the same way as I do or has the same experiences as I've had, so to most people, fragrance is aftershave or a fruity floral and not some baffling concoction that makes its wearer smell like a Dadaist hootenanny.

*I have already given her a start down the Lutens road: recently I gave her a couple of spray vials, including Louve, which she likes (although if I can find my sample of Rahät Loukoum I think she will like that better), and a booklet of wax samples including the irresistible Un Bois Vanilla. She's bound to succumb.

Kaboom: Serge Lutens Fleurs d'Oranger

If you wrapped an armload of orange-flowers, a bushel of tuberose, and a tiny mandarin-orange pomander around a stick of dynamite and then detonated it, you would have the approximate effect of what Serge Lutens accomplishes with his Fleurs d'Oranger, a massive white floral which effortlessly and explosively occupies whatever space you care to give it. It's beautifully done if you like massive white florals. Otherwise, beware.

Hide and Seek: Serge Lutens Cuir Mauresque

One of the nice things about reviewing brand-new scents is that everybody is on the same page: what I'm smelling when I open the bottle is what you're smelling when you do the same. We may interpret the molecules differently, but at least they're the same molecules. Writing about established or vintage scents, though, is problematic: age (of the scent) and reformulation mean that what's in my bottle may be literally nothing like what's in yours.

Cuir Mauresque — the name means "Moorish leather" — was created in 1996. My little decant is probably not of that vintage, but if it was from a bottle sold in 2006, it could still be different from what's being sold today. There's no way to tell.

I suspect that, Serge Lutens scents being what they are, Cuir Mauresque may have been typically daring and off-beat, but it sure isn't now. Mind you, I may have been a little hasty when I once called it "possibly the dullest leather I know of", and that's my fault: I had never had it on my skin, but had only sniffed it from blotters a few times. Now that I've had a chance to wear it, I have to upgrade that to "a competent if not thrilling leather."

It's undeniably a Lutens, opening with his usual spiced-fruit notes (in this case a clove-and-orange pomander) before segueing almost immediately into a smooth warm leather, which is where it mostly stays for quite a long time. Eventually it turns into sweet amber musk. It's very warm, very leathery, and very nice. I don't wear Serge Lutens for nice, though: I wear him for things that nobody else is able to do. I wear him for interesting, baffling, visionary, astonishing.

If you want a strange and fascinating leather scent, you are going to have to look elsewhere: there are plenty of decent leather scents out there, but in particular the majestic Knize Ten is well worth searching out. (Mind you, it was launched in 1924 and might not smell anything like it used to, or even anything like what I have. But if they haven't messed with it too much, it's brilliant, and at $70 for 50 mL they're practically giving it away.) For something more refined but still inimitable, you could also try Chanel's Cuir de Russie, also launched in 1924 (apparently a great year for leather scents).

On the other hand, if you don't have a leather scent in your collection, Cuir Mauresque is a good place to start, because it is completely unisex and inoffensive. It's not a fashionable leather jacket that makes you feel daring and stylish: it's a leather key fob that nobody will even notice.

I'll Drink to That: Serge Lutens Santal de Mysore

Another year gone! Another thousand or so new scents have whirled past us, and even the most determined of us properly sampled — wore and re-wore and thought about — what, a couple dozen, half a hundred of them? (I didn't even manage that many, I think.) And still they multiply in mad profusion, a few worthy new releases lost in the sea of flankers and copies and reformulations, while all the thousands of old scents remain to be, if we and they are lucky, discovered or rediscovered.

Serge Lutens' Santal de Mysore turns 15 in 2012. It is an old, established scent that is certainly a reformulation (because true Mysore sandalwood is virtually unavailable in any quantity at any cost), probably in large part synthetic, possibly not worth the price being asked for it ($200 for a 50-mL bottle). But it is also pure unadulterated Lutens, as immediately identifiable as a Mozart symphony or a Francis Bacon painting.

It was almost exactly a year ago that I wrote about Lutens' other essay on sandalwood, Santal Blanc, which I loved at first sniff and still love, because it is as beautiful and as rigorous as a mathematical proof. But where Santal Blanc is meant to intrigue and maybe baffle, Santal de Mysore is simply out to gratify: it's much closer in spirit to the luscious, boozy Idole de Lubin, although Idole is a sweet sandalwood liqueur where Santal de Mysore is a slug of spiced rum in a sandalwood cup.

Most Lutens scents defiantly resist classification by gender. Some people consider Santal Blanc to be a women's scent, but it is so strict and austere that I fail to see how it could possibly be assigned a sex: it seems to exist in some rarefied space where gender simply doesn't exist. Santal de Mysore, though, really does seem like a men's scent: it is enormously suggestive of a men's club, all pipe tobacco and wood panelling and suit-and-ties sitting around a cozy fireplace with drinks in hand. There is plenty of spice in it (how Lutens), a little ribbon of caramel sweetness to take the edge off, and much less sandalwood than you might expect (not the only time Lutens has played this joke: Cèdre isn't a cedar scent but a tuberose with a shaving or two of wood at the bottom of it).

As usual — as ever — one of my New Year's resolutions is to not buy any new scents until I have reviewed every single one of the samples and bottles I own, and that is a preposterously large number of which I am both ashamed and pleased. There is, however, a small possibility that I will be going to France next fall, and if I find myself in Paris, and find myself at the Palais Royale, and find myself at the Serge Lutens store, then by god all bets are off, and one of the things I may find myself buying is a bottle of the gorgeous and infinitely wearable Santal de Mysore.

Aglow: Serge Lutens La Myrrhe

A while ago I was talking about one of the mysteries of perfumery: how something simple could be made to seem complex, or vice versa. La Myrrhe is one of the vice versas.

If you have much experience with commercial perfumery you already know that a list of notes is not likely to be of much use to you when deciding if you would like a scent. It may be outdated. It may name things that aren't there: "carnation" in a list may simply indicate the presence of clove oil or eugenol, to make you think of carnations. It may mislead you by emphasizing unimportant notes and omitting others: it will definitely be incomplete. The almost useless (and at any rate in no particular order) notes for La Myrrhe are "mandarin, myrrh, lotus, bitter almond, woods, sandalwood, honey, amber, jasmine, musk, various spices, pimento." But you don't need to know that, because you probably aren't going to be smelling all those things anyway: whatever is in La Myrrhe is there to flesh out a very simple idea.

It starts, as do so many Lutens scents, with a brief whoosh of something that vanishes quickly: in this case, a billow of bright aldehydes which will make many people think it's inescapably a women's scent (though like most Lutenses it doesn't care who wears it). After that, the whole scent consists almost entirely of one radiant thing: candied orange peels soaked in bitter myrrh.

It is, of course, more than that, but it's all there to accent the myrrhed oranges. Bitterness comes and goes unpredictably, cutting through the candied sweetness and giving the illusion of Seville oranges; a hint of floralcy adds fullness and makes you think of orange blossom (but is actually upon examination jasmine); a shaving of dry wood underscores the incense quality of the myrrh. If you are not one of those who think that incense has a funereal quality, then La Myrrhe would make a perfect Christmas scent: it's certainly ideal for winter.

My first brief experience of La Myrrhe didn't do it justice: I was in the temple of Lutens, overwhelmed and awed (and on a real time budget), and my nose was too full of other things to appreciate its glories. As the bell jar above will tell you, La Myrrhe is an Exclusive, which means that it isn't available through the normal channels and will only be available to you through decants or on a trip to Paris. Worth it.

A Real Dish: Serge Lutens Bois et Fruits

Bois et Fruits is part of a set of four variations on Lutens' cedar-heavy Feminité du Bois (the others are Bois Oriental, Bois de Violette, and Bois et Musc), and it is probably the case that you can't properly understand them until you have experienced them all in context, which I haven't, yet.*

Once you know that Bois et Fruits is true to its name and also classically Lutens, you can guess what it is going to smell like first thing: wood and fruit. After the briefest flash of Lutensian weirdness that occasionally opens his scents (notably Jeux de Peau) comes a dense plummy-figgy scent reminiscent of Christmas fruitcake, mouthwatering and lightly spiced. Lutens uses fruit notes a lot, but he does not really deal in fresh fruit: it usually shows up cooked in some way, stewed or candied, or, as here, dried and then baked into something else. (Even Mandarine-Mandarin, which begins with a bright fresh orange, rapidly deepens into marmalade.) And yet there is something even odder going on: because there is plenty of cedar, and because I often get a whiff of wood-smoke from cedar, the overall effect is arresting and utterly novel — a wooden bowl full of smoked fruit.

The bell jar up at the top signifies that Bois et Fruits is an Exclusive, available at the Lutens boutique in Paris, but that rectangular Export bottle lets you know that it was, as most of the Exclusives are sooner or later, made available for a time to the rest of the world. A few places still have it in stock: The Perfume Shoppe has it for $200, which seems to be the going rate for the Exclusives-turned-(temporarily)-Exports.

I think that if you own a bunch of Lutenses, then Bois et Fruits, lovely though it is, is not an essential addition to your collection: it has a lot in common with many of his other scents, from the cooked-fruit opening to the austere wood in the base. (It suggests elements of Chypre Rouge, Santal Blanc, Fille en Aiguilles, and others besides.) But if you are new to the line and not afraid to spend a few bucks to get your hands on some, Bois et Fruits would be an excellent starting point, because it is quintessential Serge: strange, and clearly not like mass-market scents, but charming and friendly nonetheless — an ambassador from a country you'll want to visit some day.

*I will, though: I ordered a bunch of samples from The Perfumed Court, which was having a sale, and I got vials of just about every Lutens I hadn't tried yet, fifteen in all. It's like Christmas!