Grandma
my sleep is narrow
Bid you
bring me some strong drink
Strain
out the pulps and set them close outside
For when
my belly
For when
my little belly speaks..
From Belispeak
by Purity Ring
The olfactory landscape of
Hans Hendley is that of luminescent hinterland: edges, lines, washed walls,
torn metal sheeting and sun drenched roadways burnt around the carefully
balanced edges. His flowers are sunlit in vintage opalescent glass. Gardens are
overgrown, closed in and secretive, tucked away behind graffiti-tagged fences.
The mix of urbanity and wilderness dream is beguiling and partly real, an echo
of Hans’ wandering childhood and his present roaming of New York’s looming urban
enormity.
Photography by Hans Hendley
(Reproduced by kind permission of HH)
He has a large artful portfolio
of photographs smeared through with glare and echoing mournful vignette. He was
worked devotedly in lomotography with its foggy attributes of cross processing,
spontaneity and shoot now think later
artistic ethos. Hans’ lomo work is a soothing assembly of saturated stills,
pulled from a film-set of a mind, places and atmospheres stylised to
relentlessly pursue a deeply personal view of Hans-life. He worked in a
lomotography store in NY for a while, passing on his skills to others and
honing his visual acuity. His Flickr page is quite different in style, calm and
studied, images of elegant air, cut with colour-blocked architecture, gardens
and composed lines. Any people inhabiting the spaces are immobile, vacant, at
rest.
Lomotography by Hans Hendley
(Images reproduced by kind permission of HH)
Hans has a BFA in Photography
from the University of North Texas School of Visual Arts, a subject he actively
pursued after an reasonably unconventional upbringing in North Texas. Born in
Dallas, his parents re-located to wilder climes and young Hans was kinda home-schooled
by devoutly craft-loving inventive and artistically inclined parents. This kind
of free-wheeling nurturing of a young person’s psyche will allow for a more
far-reaching connection to surrounding elements be they sounds, scents,
textures, images or a sensual coalescence of them all.
I was raised abroad for the
early part of my childhood in the Middle East and West Africa by parents who
believed passionately in travel, experience and exposure to everything, good or
bad. Home-schooled for years, my imagination was glutted with history,
archaeology, poetry, classic literature, ancient mythologies, Arthurian legend
and a bizarre obsession with Aztec death rites. You learn skewed methods and
eclectic fact, have passions for the obscure and arcane. Words and emotion
matter, either demonstrating or masking them.
Hans has said in interviews
that he always harboured secret perfumery desires, mixing leaves, bark and
petals as so many do when they are young. I sense though, with Hans, there was
probably a more determined searching for effect and result. If you look at his
perfumery with an artistic eye, there is a chromatic bent and innate sense of
pared down structure and composition similar to that of his photography.
Pigmentation and saturation sit happily alongside olfactive effect and Han’s
dense and wondrous capture of light, berry, smoke, resin, petal, sheath, pod
and bloom.
His perfume house is joyously
simple, hand-crafted, hand-poured and labelled and yet the edges and selvedge
seem hidden. His website is an exercise is minimalism, with carefully chosen
words used to precisely capture emotions regarding his work, persuading us to
listen and crave the odours. Auric is
described as ‘Rush. Honeyed Bloom.
Bitersweet Radiance’ and Gia as ‘Silk Road. Manifest Destiny. Opulent Plume.’
Massively simple but achingly decorative phrasing. This skeletal presentation
works, it creates honest enigma, an oxymoron of sorts, but one that is rare in
perfumery. You want to sample, blind buy even, tempted by simple poignant
phrasing. At the same time, Hans' workings remain veiled, at a remove.
Images by Hans Hendley
(reproduced by kind permission of HH)
There is no denying Hans
considers his work a personal art form. He communicates this through his images
and presentation of bottles, juice and working practices, be it cutting labels,
filtering, decanting or just capturing sunlight blazing through his
multi-coloured formulae. Everything is carefully considered before
presentation. I like his sense of control. It’s how I am too. He has set up a
very simple website platform with minimal fuss and frou-frou. As a business
launch it works because the scents shine. He stands back. Sometimes a little
modesty is a good thing; you can step into the light later.
Images by Hans Hendley
(Reproduced by kind permission of HH)
There is both restraint and
labyrinth in Hans’ odours, a melding of old-fashioned alchemy and modern
perfumed reflection. His natural perfumed pages glow with olfactive
calligraphy, illuminated with petals, leaves, buds coiled and reaching over
thorns, mulch, herbs and fuming stalk. I do smell glimmers and echoes of
Gorilla, D.S.& Durga, Aftel, Slumberhouse and OLO Fragrance in the
medicinal apothecary raw materials but also softer smears of Caron, Guerlain in
his handling of boudoir resins, rose and vanilla. So much oddity and mystery
for one so early in his scented career.
His perfumes celebrate the
careful craft of assembly and Hans’ perception of the sensual world. His
raising, eye, vision and photographic leanings have created a perfumed skill of
acute precision. His palette may be restrictive but it vibrates with intent.
There is glow from the hinterland.
Hans very kindly sent me
samples in the post from New York, via Paris (he was worried about delivery and
piggybacked a friend as courier..). I was kinda wowed by the sexy/casual way he
arranged the sample cards in artfully torn parcel paper (did he know how much I LOVE the look of buff, crumpled parcel paper…?),
sealed and tucked it inside a heavy duty plastic zip bag. Each stage of the
unfolding resembled an art project. There had been tiny leakage onto the tumble
of cards, smears of green, rust and autumnal serum. The mingle of low smell was
beautiful and alluring.
I was gifted Fume, Bourbon, Rosenthal, Auric, Tama, Gia
and something rather special entitled Jade,
an arresting minted pea-green scent Hans has been working on. It’s an imminent
launch; he wanted to make a fresh formula with no citrus. Anyway, more on that
later. All of these odours have a powerful, alchemical draw to them, they feel
private and a little runic. There is sensuality and raw calling, subtle
enchantment and good old-fashioned limpid olfaction. As with so much artisan,
home-brewed scent, gender is fluid, the sex of scent flowing freely in out of
Han’s handsome array.
As always with any
collection, some speak to me louder than others. None of them bored me per se
but I found myself musing over some more than others, captured by elements of
base notes or trailing the juices on my skin to re-in hale the heady rush of
pungent opening salvoes.
Fume is
Han’s haunted forest, smoked, tenaciously brutal with conifer resins, vetiver,
oakmoss and the delicious loamy tread of galbanum. I smell a hit of
Slumberhouse’s satanic Norne in the
tainted edges, but the vetiver is sweet enough to hold its own against the
medicinal slide of malachite coppice brooding. The murk and shade of Fume is beautiful, nuanced and balanced
enough to allow variation of tonality in the drydown. On card, the lingering of
Fume is amazingly long, with a
drawn-out fermented fruitiness I think is sadly impossible to produce on skin. I
want to revisit Fume this winter as
the icy cold sets in and terrorises Edinburgh; I’m not sure its quite the right
weather just now for me to fully appreciate it. It’s a slow-burn aroma, you
need time for the mossy smoke to go from chilled to heat to open up the
nuances. You could of course just fuck in it.. this would be incredible
sex-scent. Just saying.
Fact. The Fox is obsessed
with vanilla. So I had to kinda hold myself back from hurtling at Bourbon, knowing it was rich in woozy vanilla,
benzoin and tonka, three of my favourite notes in scent. It was one of the
vials that had oozed onto card in transit, so there was a delicious,
Guerlinade-type aroma wafting up from the samples. I love the sweet booziness
of expert vanilla perfumery. I’ve mentioned it before, but my signature scent
for years now has been the sadly discontinued Vanille Absolument by L’Artisan Parfumeur, created by Master
Perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour. It reeks of heady, swooning, rum soaked vanilla
with tobacco and narcotic narcissus absolute. For me it is the benchmark vanilla. Interestingly, Hans has used cognac oil to
influence his composition; this umber-toned effect saturates the bourbon
vanilla, resins and bittersweet whiff of animalic sugar in the slightly
unstable base. Bourbon is sexy
vanilla, rich and clandestine, the way I like it, wearing close to skin, yet
occasionally throwing off subtle tendrils of vintage Guerlain-esque charm. The
more is wear it, the more I recognise echoes of Jicky and L’Heure Bleue
in the fatty, animalic rendering of the final stages. Intentional or not, the
echoes are there, buried in the genetic code of expertly handled vanilla.
Rosenthal
was one of my immediate loves. It’s a dirty rose, wreathed in claret-tinted
smoke and a patchouli note that Hans has enhanced with the fennel chew of
angelica. Juniper in the top chills the rose a little, almost like dew on
petal. I love my rose perfumes, my collection is filled with rosaceous compositions.
Rosenthal has a curious feeling of
darkness about it, there is no lustrous celebration of queenly bloom, instead we
have a moody complex rose, married to a unctuous sandalwood wash in the base.
There is a momentary rush of Nahéma
in the ashen spill of opening bloom, that terrific shattering of colour and
reformation that the Guérlain composition pulls off with startling sensual
violence. Hans interprets this French high drama in a lower US indie key, but Rosenthal is still a lingering essay in rose
from bud to falling extinguished petal.
Auric is
crushed and smeared vintage Caron, a peppered leather sweetness that underpins
a raw bouquet of jasmine, orange blossom, ylang ylang and rose. This lovely mix
of flowers and chocolatey timber is the scent of homespun weddings, intimate
gatherings of close friends and family over worn wooden tables set with wild
and reaching seasonal flowers./Blooms and stems in jam jars, old botanical
glass, apothecary ware; the air embroidered with honeyed, leafy joy. The scent
of table linen, a mingle of perfumes, the bride’s beloved orange blossom woven
into tumbled hair. For a moment, a sudden rush of powdered antiquity floods Auric as the floral heart liquefies,
creating the Coup de Fouet Caron echo
I mentioned earlier. Auric is at its
most beautiful in the twilight stages, the notes ghosted on skin. The
petitgrain in the top is a little too strident for my liking, but necessary perhaps
to announce and mask the joyful pungency
that ensues.
I will admit to not liking Tama very much at all at first, this has
more to do with my love/hate relationship with frankincense rather than Hans’
actual composition. I go through tortuous phases with sacred, glassy olibanum;
it is one of those aromas that gnaws at me, worries my senses. I am in no way a
lapsed Catholic, despite desperately wanting to be one during my wanton
obsession with all things Brideshead
Revisited (that hasn’t quite departed btw…) so I can’t lay claim to
memories of mass and tortured faith. I did spend some student years in Paris
and occupied a lot of my time with crumbling neighbourhood churches, the more
isolated and cold the better. Part of me though associates frankincense with
the sandy heat and searing stillness of my Arabian childhood. Many of the
objects we owned had the reek of resins and spice, woods impregnated with balms
and unguents. To me these odours of faith and offering, frankincense, myrrh,
galbanum, oppoponax etc have the weight of shifting melancholia. As it so is
with Tama, the blend smells
sacrificial, unsettling. The arid expanse of textured resin over a glittering
mirage of amber and barely flickering agarwood smells like sombre fuel. It has grown
on me with repeated applications, but for now frankincense and I will continue
to glower in the dark at each other, musing over rapprochement.
On paper Gia reads like a recipe for a pungent siren to decorate herself with
before setting off to hunt a mate to fuck and devour. A huge oppoponax note
brazenly struts out of the bottle, trailing ginger and rose otto behind like a
train of ragged drama Ginger is generally a note I prefer in cake and biscuits,
I find it tediously overpowering in scent. Hans has managed however to harness
its naturally juicy sweetness to counterpoint the crimson commotion of the
rose. The skin adaption of Gia is
dramatic, more verdant, more foody oddly, the vanilla bean tincture reminds me
of Japanese azuki bean cakes. The settling is one of sharp clovey powder with a
touch of vegetal hangover from the oppoponax. Hans has used an orris root CO2
extraction and ambrette to dust a particular kind of chalkiness through the
mix. The overall sensation is one of abandoned rooms, rococo boudoir tables
coated in dust, a vase of dead roses placed near a shaded window. Gia is fascinating to wear, at once
dirty and soft, masculine and feminine, Hans has thought carefully about the
sensual ambiguity and impact of the blend, realising I think that this is scent
for night time, beds and skin on skin on sheets.
Finally to Jade, a unique and rather dazzling
interpretation of green. I worked for some time with the National Museums of
Scotland, specifically with Chinese, Japanese and Korean fine art. One of my tasks
in a week of accessing objects was to check over the collection of jades we had
in storage. There were magnificent pieces on display but as with all such institutions;
tip and iceberg. That intense, eye-straining afternoon in the chilly cellars,
poring over drawer after drawer of jade was extraordinary. I was simply
astonished by the dazzling array of tonality and texture of green, white, blue
stone lying in the shadows. The flecking, striations, veins and cloudy details
were so beautiful. Jade of course compels touch, the surface cold and oddly
greasy. Some pieces feel like skin, others like petals of flowers.
Whenever I hear the word
jade.. my mind floats back over these trays of multihued nephrite and jadeite
pieces. I’ve said before how wary of mint I am in scent, it took the
magnificent Russian Tea by Masque
Milano last year to demonstrate how a full-bodied mint effect could be blended
with virtuosity into a complex and arresting formula. I realised Jade wasn’t on the Hendley Perfume site
and contacted Hans. It’s new, something he has been working on for a while, an
ambitious desire to create a fresh dynamic scent with no citrus notes involved.
He has also used spearmint, which is very difficult to handle I think as it
often lends fragrances a distinctly chewing gum aroma if you’re not too
careful.
Jade is
Hans’ beauteous ode to geranium, an often overlooked note in perfume as a pure,
spot-lit note. It is used as a supporting note for its leafy texture and
perfumed atmospherics. It has a beautiful affinity with rose, lavender,
bergamot and pepper. Dominique Ropion’s Geranium
pour Monsieur for Editions Frédéric Malle is pretty much the benchmark
geranium scent in terms of the masculine soapier aspects of the application.
Ropion used rhodinal, a highly aromatic concentrate facet extracted from
Chinese geranium. A massive dose of ambroxan whitens the formula, allowing the
layers of green to filter carefully over the skin. For a softer, more
comforting, garden-inspired take on geranium there is Geranium Oderata,
released in 2014 by Diptyque. It is a pungent, creamy scent, rubbed and
sensual, with a lovely trail of leaf and stem. I personally have a weakness for
Miller Harris’ Geranium Bourbon with
is mucky rush of peppered rose and vanillic musky base. It was particularly
addictive in its solid format, smeared and bloodily waxen as the battered tins
wore down.
Jade is much
sharper and more alert than these, a snapped pea-pod green, cut though with a
delicious lemon bay note replacing the usual citrus effects. Some star anise
and violet add an unusual relationship in the middle of the scent, a sensual
disharmony allowing the resinous benzoin time to warm up and provide a robust
spiky base for the more ephemeral myrtle and sap verdancy. It is to Hans’s
credit that the geranium note he has obviously worked so hard to personify
lasts as long as it does on skin; the spearmint is pretty full on and bolshy.
But the two notes play together with beautiful ease and comfort, there is
little sense of deliberation and coerced effect. Jade could easily have been a wan, vegetal Gorilla rip off, but
Hans’ steady hand and respect for his bright materials has produced a rather
unexpected portrait of mint-tinted brightness.
Hans Hendley
I have been anointing myself
in Hans’s illuminated palette throughout the writing of this piece. For a debut
artisan perfumer, he packs quite the olfactory punch. His precise manipulation
of outstanding and glittering materials works beautifully alongside his obvious
predilection for delicacy and allure. His lovely photographic eye has served
him well, translating aromatically into a series of tonally shifting odours
that belie their relatively constrained origins. You can smell the circumspect
methodology of filtering, cutting, blending and maceration in the formulae. The
juice smells personal. This is important, this batch-made potency, delivered to
our skins with love and fervour. I’m so glad to have discovered Hendley
Perfumes and Hans, the lovely guy behind them. They’re made in small amounts
and sell fast, such is the nature of his work and the scale for now of this
operation. But if you are interested in scent and the way in which materials,
ideas and imagination are assembled with sweet and intimate care you need to
sample Hans’ fragrances for yourself. His world is filtered with wonderful,
life affirming chromatics.
©The Silver Fox
23 March 2015
Disclosure – Samples kindly
sent by Hans Hendley. Thank you.
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