On Thursday 11 October I got the
opportunity to sample some of the latest Gorilla Perfume launches as their
hand-painted Gorilla Bus (by the bonkers Plastic Crimewave) set up scented camp
in Edinburgh. It was a grey, damp and
muffled day, but the slow falling rain always highlights the depth and beauty
of Edinburgh City stone. A suitably melancholy backdrop as it turned out for
some of the peculiar aromas I touched to my skin.
The Perfumed Goddess herself, Ericka Duffy,
friend, Top Banana and fragrance obsessive, had invited me; she suggested I go
down and visit the Gorilla Bus when it came into town. I have been really excited to sample the new
scents since Lushfest 2012 and following the buzz surrounding some of the more
unusual fragrances on the blogosphere. Ericka had swung by recently with a
bottle of The Voice of Reason and I
just loved the weird smoky barbecue thing it billowed across my skin. Bacon, Laphroaig,
lichen, fuggy sexed up cars humming with hash smoke. Damn, it was beautiful. So
obviously I was rather excited at revisiting The Voice of Reason again
and the other new creations from Mark and Simon Constantine.
The new collection was debuted as part of the
big Lushfest celebration in July 2012 at Holton Lee in Dorset. A massive
scented Lushy jamboree for the employees of the brand and some public days for
mere mortals to swing by and sample new Lush products. Always done with wit and
verve, music and tremendous passion, the event is incredibly well diffused
across the electronic ether via blog sites, twitter and Facebook. Lush have a
huge and diverse following and this dedication explodes their message and love
of this seriously eccentric brand across the world.
Perfumers have become unlikely stars in
recent years with perfume buyers becoming much more fascinated by the actual
artistry and inspirations of the niche or marginal inspirations of the
fragrance world. Mark and Simon are so
intrinsically linked to their olfactory creations, from the era of Be Never too Busy to be Beautiful up to
Simon’s innovative unveiling of the new creations on stone megaliths at Lushfest
2012. A small stone circle was designed to showcase six diverse and incredibly
evocative fragrances, inspired by myths, landmarks and folkloric beliefs. Each
one has a very distinctive legend for
want of a better term. Some of them are among some of the oddest things I have sniffed
in quite a while.
It’s no secret how much I love Gorilla’s The Smell of Weather Turning; it is an
extraordinary Heathcliffian scent and it is still one of my blog posts I
enjoyed writing the most. I wore it down to the Gorilla Bus, mixed with a layer
of my other favourite the weird and wonderful Ladyboy.
The Bus was fab, it did look a little
forlorn on Castle Street with Edinburgh Castle looming overhead and the weather
was somewhat dreich and shuddery. But it was a bright green spot of colour on
such a shadowed day. The Bus murals and the new artwork on the bottles are the work
of Plastic Crimewave, aka Steven H. Krakow, the multi-talented and quite
possibly totally nuts musician/illustrator/writer based in Chicago. An underground
legend in a various mind-boggling musical sub-genres, he has created very
distinctive visual identities for each of the new fragrances and also
illustrated the Gorilla Magazine to accompany the new launches, explaining
their inspirations and some of the notes and overall vibe.
The Gorilla Bus itself is a simple concept.
Fill it with perfume, hit the road with like-minded people and spread the
scented word. However this being Gorilla, it is a much more than this. There is
music, poetry, soul and art, all tied to the development and diffusion of the fragrance
thematics. Inside the Bus you are 100% immersed in a Gorilla world, printed
matter, doodles, shelves and boxes of bottles in all shapes and sizes,
phrenology heads, books, vintage vinyl, herbs, plants and spices. Dotted amid
the bottles and assorted Gorilla paraphernalia are little votive offerings from
visitors to the bus. If the Gorilla guys like your gifts… they might swap you
for some perfume.
The interior felt like the fantastic
marriage of a centuries old gypsy caravan and the wares of travelling snake oil
salesman, walls rattling with lotions and potions as he works his way from city
to city, dispensing his words of mysticism and slick showmanship. Maybe, just
maybe something he sells might work in the heat of city night. If not, he ‘s long
gone before morning. Pioneer fragrance, this is how I felt as I stood
surrounded by a very carefully constructed idea of pagan influenced scent and
sensibility.
Gorilla may play at simplifying the world
of perfume and demystifying the claptrap and hi-faluting nonsense of normal
haute-parfumerie, but in actual fact they are deadly serious, not only in their
mission to alter the way we perceive fragrance but also the stories and
inspirations behind the scents. This commitment to their audience is paramount
to their success and dedicated following.
The new selection of perfumes is seismic in
its comparison to the existing range. These new perfumes feel substantial and
concrete. I did not like them all, some feel a little unfinished and hollow,
there are gaps between the notes, asking for clarification. A couple have
accords that are a little too distinctive and take too much time to coalesce
and when they finally do, the magic of the original sensation has escaped.
However… and it’s a very big however, some of them are magnificent. Utterly
original, unsettling, haunting, persuasive and emotional, retaining a Gorilla
aspect while at the same time exploring new and sometimes challenging olfactory
fields.
This is no mean feat in a somewhat sterile
British perfume world. And Gorilla do have a uniquely British slant; Simon and
Mark Constantine are not afraid to look at our pagan past, the druidical
heritage, ancient music, mystical plants, folklore, the classic hippie
traditions, baby boomer aspirational values and channel all this into
atmospheric and resolutely odd skin scents.
I am always amazed how ignorant people are
of Gorilla Perfume and their connection to Lush. I enjoy educating them in the
delights to come. I have been honest before that Lush is not really for me,
however I admire the ethics and incredible verve and ambition of the brand. It
is rare to find a contemporary brand that inspires such devotion and passion in
its customers and its employees. I was one of the biased ones who passed the
stores by, but after sampling the delights of the original Be Never Too Busy to be Beautiful in Covent Garden on a visit to
London years ago, I was converted to the compulsive beauty and landscaped
charms of what was re-launched as Gorilla Perfume through the Lush stores. I always recalled the fervent reality of the
fragrances, their ability to marry to skin and senses, manipulating the brain
along long forgotten (and sometimes new…) scented pathways.
Like all fragrance, the juices are of
course subjective and everyone will have their own very take on Gorilla. The
original collection does have a signature personality, an underlying earthy
green shrubbiness, married to jasmine, orange blossom and tonka, these notes
run through the collection like river dreams.
The Set in Stone fragrances are diversely
peculiar. Varying from sensual and ethereal to downright skanky and looking
over your shoulder weird. (I didn’t
sample Lord of the Goathorn or Burning Rosemary, as they did not have
them to try.) Mind you I have heard soooooo much polarising opinion about Lord of the Goathorn, it will be a very
interesting scent to try. It varied from loathing to baffled acceptance from
some of the Lush peeps I spoke to. Oh, I do love a controversial smell.
So…. Hellstone
first. This is the only one of the fragrances in an oil base, jojoba to be
precise. Inspired by an ancient stone
megalith used as a burial mound created as the devil himself flung the ancient
stones into place. The scent itself hurtles mightily out of the bottle like an
uncontrollable spell escaping into the air.
A thick swathe of beeswax is threaded with rooty vetiver and a very
powerful cumin note. Combined with the warm smoothness of the base oil, the
scent reeks of storm wrenched thunderstruck tree roots and ravaged eerie
landscapes. There is a very unsettling smokiness rolling through it like the
aftermath of cannon fire after a battle. One can imagine splintered trees,
exploded mud and the metallic tang of blood in the air. It unsettled me
tremendously. I’m not sure I want to wear it actually, but it smelt addictively
incredible, a vision of something coming in the darkness.
Furze was instantly gorgeous, a lovely lick of vanilla, custardy, drawn
across the back of a wooden spoon. Very
soft and ever so mohairy in the background, Furze
was inspired by gorse and its hardy little creamy flowers. Simon added a
vanillic facet; a delightful soft touch of mimosa and a really swooning coconut
framework, lending the composition a delicious milky cocktail feel on the skin
as it dries down. I found it very
persistent too, wearing it to bed and still loving the depth in the morning. It seems a simple scent, but the weirdness and
alien prickliness of gorse pokes through the vanilla as it settles, reminding
you this is not all that it seems. It will be a huge success for Gorilla I
think striking a very clever balance between sweet, clever, soothing and
unpredictable.
Flower’s
Barrow has blackcurrant in it, one of my least
favourite notes in fragrance. I did a stint at Space NK for my sins and a scent
I loathed was L’Ombre dans L’Eau by
Dyptyque, a rose and blackcurrant leaf scent, purportedly worn by Kristen
Scott-Thomas. It made me feel so ill, the cat-pissy acridness and sickly
off-bloom note was just dizzying. To this day if I smell it on anyone it makes
me feel as if I am standing on the deck of a boat in rough seas. So you can
imagine I wasn’t really jumping for joy at the thought of more blackcurrant.
But this leftfield brew inspired by an overgrown Iron Age hill fort has
tremendous presence and atmosphere. If
you can imagine ruins tangled in briars, echoing with a tremulous history, a
sense of something haunted in the stone, wrapped with very British weeds and
leaves, you will have a inkling of how Flower’s
Barrow might smell. The blackcurrant is mixed with sage, thyme and geranium,
reminding me of reading The Go-Between by
LP Hartley as a teenager, the most painful essaying of teenage love and
betrayal set amid exquisitely rendered countryside and buttoned-up seething
English sexuality. The opening line –‘The past is a foreign country: they do
things differently there. "- is one of the most resonant in literature.
I have worn Flower’s Barrow for a couple of days now and it has grown on me
immensely. Something I did not expect at all. It goes perversely sweet in the
drydown, the dreaded blackcurrant leaf becoming more Rowntrees fruit pastille
in tone as it drifts through the closing stages. I got whiffs of marshmallow
and jelly baby sugar powder mixed with a distinctive calendula note too. Most
odd and strangely comforting. I put drops on cold radiators too and as they
warmed up, the rooms filled with the most delicious scent of tangled briars and
sweet vanilla dust.
The final fragrance I sampled in the Set in
Stone sequence was The Devil’s Nightcap,
inspired by a stone megalith in Studland. Local folklore claims Old Nick hurled
the stone in an attempt to hit nearby Corfe castle. Whatever the story, the
scent itself is one of the most un-fragrance like of the whole collection. It
reminds me a lot of herbal tinctures with its bitter oakwood note and raging
facets of clary sage and oakmoss. An
uncomfortable counterpointing of ylang-ylang and orange flower doesn’t quite
work on my skin, the composition tipped into ashen thinness. Sniffing it after a couple of hours made me
shudder, just not for me at all. One of friends loves it though; he thought it
smell warlocky…… like something you’d
drink at creepy magic ceremonies. Hmm.
The very oddness and wavelengths of these
Set in Stone fragrances demonstrate the strengths of the Constantine men as
perfumers. Despite some of the floral and herbal tones, these are spells cast
by wizarding fingers. (Even Furze has barbs as it rides out the
vanilla….). They feel masculine,
brooding, stormy and introverted. There are moments of subtle femininity but
they hark back to a harsher time when druids spilt blood and pagan
superstitions held sway across darkened lands. Stones cast shadows and the
goddess slumbers under the earth. Nature swells and dies, the seasons bloom and
wither. These scents have something of the oracle about them, an echoing of
ceremonies and tongues. A smell of ritual.
For more Gorilla-tastic info, please click the link below:
For part 2 of this post, please click here:
I am crazy about Furze and Sikkim Girls, and they compliment each other actually. I intend to buy both and use them together :) Thanks for the stunning read.
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