“The long black nights, when
the moon hides her face, when the stars are afraid, are not so black. The
silence that dwells in the forest is not so black. There is nothing in the
world so black as thy hair.”
Oscar Wilde ‘Salome’
A year ago, Liz Moores launched Papillon Perfumery with three
extraordinary fragrances, Anubis,
Angelique and my beloved sluttish Tobacco
Rose. Blended with masterly and sensual precision it was almost impossible
to imagine how she had pulled off such a feat of smooth and decadent
engineering. Then I had the pleasure of getting to know her through social
media, messages, e-mails and electronic chatting. Liz is a very canny user of
social media, she is genuinely delicious and honest, fun and deadly serious
about what she does. She is her brand, Papillon is Liz, the two are savagely,
sexily and magnificently inseparable.
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| Liz Moores, perfumer. |
Liz’s approach to her scented work is deeply committed and
tempestuous. I love the meld of earned graft, home-school aromachemistry and
drama she brings to the mixing table. She is a perfectionist with a lovely
ability to still acknowledge the eroticism of flaws, she uses the multifarious
facets of her charming and layered personality to bear dramatically on the
materials and techniques she requires to render her ideas redolent with
biography and brio.
She worked insanely hard to get to the point last year when she
was ready to launch Anubis, Angelique and
Tobacco Rose. Along the way there has
been much stress and heartache, temper tantrums, hurling of formulae, diva
hissy fits, packaging issues, endless modifications, tears, lot of smoking and
vino (hahahaha…) but also much love and support from her ridiculously gorgeous
family, daughters Poppy, Lily and Jasmine, son Rowan, cute as a button baby
Daisy and dashing hubby Simon. This tight skein of love and coalition from her
floral-monikered kids, spouse and the astonishing menagerie of animals that
surrounds her in the new forest where she is carefully secluded away has
allowed Liz to fulfil many roles all which had fed into her fiercely beautiful
work. Mother, artist, perfumer, sensualist, free spirit, friend, bitch, queen,
voodoo temptress, lover and glorious generous woman.
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| Liz & Phanta the ghostly python |
The wrapped surround of trees, her semi-wild garden, horses,
cats, pythons (including a singular marble toned albino one called Phanta) and
owls seems to lend Liz a curious sense of chthonic, oracular, priestess. Ok,
one that swears like a docker maybe, but she is profoundly grounded in her
details and preoccupations. As I’ve gotten to know her better and we have
chatted about different things; her powerful kindnesses and unerring sense of
reality and belief in kinship have made me value her friendship like the rarest
orchid in the last glasshouse at the edge of the world.
I met Liz through Twitter after a friend gave me samples of her
work with me. I contacted her and she sent me more samples. As I said earlier,
Liz is great on Twitter and Instagram, a lovely mix of personal and industry
stuff, mingled to demonstrate her particular reflections on the perfume
business. I sensed a driving combination of vitality, vice and ambition that I
felt drawn to. I knew the fragrances were inherently a reflection of Liz
herself, the different facets of her complex vibrancy poured into a collection
of reflective and powerful aromas.
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| Liz & lippy.. |
While she has the kind of beauty that burns like a lantern in a
window drawing the lovesick homeward, you can sense splashes of darkness. It
can be felt in the gathering of floral and fauna around her; she needs contact
with the elementals in order to create. Yes, there are flashes of urbanity, but
Liz Moores is a woman of earth, seed, stem and storm. I recognise a fellow
reckless lover and consumer of life. All or nothing. Age tempers us, not completely,
but enough I guess to channel the potential recklessness into something more
productive.
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| Wilde's 'Salome' illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley |
I don’t think the choice of Salome as a name is accidental, even
on a subconscious level; the multitude of myths and interpretations is wide and
colourful. Salome is not actually named in biblical sources and there are
conflicting and contested opinions as to her various methods and intent.
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| Nadja Michael as Richard Strauss' 'Salome' in David McVicar's 2008 production, Covent Garden |
Whatever the reality and actuality of Salome’s truths, her
binding dance for Herod Aptias and the demand for John the Baptist’s head have
proved dark and fertile inspiration for artists and writers throughout the
history of western art. The lure and power of Salome is the dichotomy of desire
and lust vs innocence and sacrifice. A woman must use her veiled charms to
arrest and mesmerise an enemy in order to achieve her aims. This is a perfect
metaphor of beguilement and lends itself beautifully to Liz Moore’s corporeal
relationship with her olfactive palette.
The superlative blending of her work is due partly I think to
hard graft and years of instinctual attention to detail, but also I believe to
Liz’s inherent comprehension for robing flesh in aromas that enhance our
desirability. She is after all a woman of immense sensual presence and charm,
unafraid to ally her own personality with her oeuvre.
Salome is a mirror of its maker, a weapon if you
like of controlled seduction. The variations of the Salome myth are legion but
the most important message is the erosion and challenge of traditional
masculine tropes - kingship, sword, and patriarchy with feminine subterfuge,
music, dance, skin and sex. My favourite rendition of the Salome story has
always been L’Apparition by the
French symbolist artist Gustav Moreau, painted between 1874-76. I went to the
Musée D’Orsay in Paris some years ago expressly to see Moreau’s dazzling
pastels. They were displayed in a very low light in a contagiously
claustrophobic room. The works glittered like vibrant coral and anemone in a shocking
blue sea.
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| 'L'Apparition' by Gustav Moreau |
L’Apparition portrays Salome encrusted in jewels like
armour, her skin pale and erotic, barely covered by her precious stones, gold
and silken threads. She stands in Herod Antipas’ court, her demeanour a defiant
stance of sensual icon and powerful enchantress as she seemingly conjures out
of thin air a horrific image of John the Baptist’s head, halo-wrapped, eyes
wide and staring, neck trailing tendrils of blood like red velvet ribbons. It
is an image of extraordinary power, all the more so for the fact that none of the
painting’s protagonists seem aware of the floating horror head. Herod seems
lost in reverie, a musician and seer staring out at us, frozen in the moment of
butchered holy light. Salome herself looks beyond the light, face down, arm
outstretched as if caught in the moment of terrible conjuring. Yet her foot is
ballet-poised, deliberate, turned to catch the eye of the beholder. Salome is
enchantress, witch, sibyl, innocent and whore. Moreau was one of the greatest
of all symbolist artists, his world littered with ethereal necrophilia, sadism
and morbid glittering imaginings.
L’Apparation is a highly decorative work of pornographic
embellishment and conjured texture. Once seen, it cannot be unseen, Moreau’s
bold melding of erotic intent, metaphor and chromatic intensity is hard to
shake off. He revisited the theme of Salome a number of times throughout his
career, but nothing ever really matched the power and effect of this singular
work of art.
For me, it is this darkness and ambiguous feminine rage that
defines the Salome myth, the bewitching shift back and forth between temptress,
mother, virgin and reckless whore. With her new carnal and enslaving scent, Liz
Moores has made a pelt of sensual persuasion that we ache to wear. It is mucky
and salacious, an immoral funk of jasmine, orange blossom and patchouli lording
over the battered senses with sneering porny majesty.
Liz allowed me the privilege a few months back to sample an
earlier mod of Salome. I evaluated it
blind; it allows me to formulate my landscapes without the distractions of
olfactory maps. I had a sample too of White
Moth, a stunning white floral of delicate tiare absolute, beeswax and
jasmine with immense ghostly transparency that Liz was battling to balance and
harmonise. That was due this year, but will now launch next in 2016, allowing
Liz time to breathe and re-design, re-love her haunted bleached ode to night
wing and pale bloom.
My original notes opened with:
‘Mod I Leather Floral (….Tack, Lash &
Bracken..)
Opens with intent to beguile. Big visceral
opening salvo of verdigris leather and mildew bloom.
Can already sense a depth, a rutting smear of
animalic (hyraceum..?)in the low bass/base.. I like the pungent verdancy, the vegetal
asparagus tone running over copper and mossy stone…..The dampness, the hint of
aristocracy and smutty forbidden you have embedded in its code?..
Jan 2015.
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| Carnations |
I was aware then how
much I loved the imminent drag of Diorling and Caron mousse de saxe style of
leathered weather, skins buried and marked by countless forest mammals. Reading
the notes now, I love that Liz has used carnation, a much neglected bloom,
sullied by its garage forecourt and bucket reputation, which used correctly
with bravado can be both slut and debutante. The seductive haze of druggy
eugenol can sometimes be overpowering and a tad whorish, but in Salome it has been allied to a
blistering Turkish rose and burnished patchouli that allow the much maligned dianthus caryphyllus to glitter like
blushing lanterns.
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| Hello Mr Hyrax |
This boudoir Wildean
reek of carnation lends a perturbing pallor to the early vampiric stages of Salome, a dusty, throat-catching grapple
that rises again and again to chime with the styrax in the swelling base. There
is a knowing lilt of depravity in the mix, a carnal star. This is hyraceum or
African Stone as it sometimes rather euphemistically called. The odour even in
trace amounts is pretty unmistakable, faecal, urinous, queer and
confrontational. Only someone truly liberated in the art of not giving a fuck could
hunker down and relish the abandonment of hyraceum is such a blatant dosage as
this.
The substance itself
is fascinating; Liz very kindly sent a decant of hyraceum absolute at 10%
dilution to Mr E and myself, saying it smelled like pissy fox fur. Ha! How
could I resist? Hyraceum comes from the Cape hyrax (Procaria Capensis) a bizarre,
rubber-footed, tiny-tusked rock-dwelling native of African drier regions. Its
little oddball tusks are the only indication of its distant connection to its
nearest mammal relation the elephant. Their odd little feet are rubbery and
designed in such a way to ensure they can cling brilliantly to rocks and twist
and turn to outrun predators.
Over time, family
groups of Hyraxes urinate and defecate in the same collective midden. Over time
this petrifies and then this über-weird night-black stuff is excavated and tinctured
in perfumers alcohol. How we got to his stage is anyone’s guess but the effect
of hyraceum on scent is unparalleled. (Last year’s magnificent Tango by Cécile Zarokian for Masque
Milano had the most gratifyingly charismatic howl of hyraceum mixed with
jasmine, cedar, cumin and Turkish rose.)
It lends an
addictive feral underpinning to scents, an odour of piss on hot mucky fur that
may sound unsettling on paper but in epidermal actuality has the tug of
forbidden sexual desire. It can have dry tobacco facets and an earthy sweet compost
bloom of its own. I think it is a key component to Liz’s sensual building of Salome, the furry scat skank hints at
the dangerous seduction beneath the innocent apparel. This is scent as
challenge, as weapon.
Salome’s rose is smeared in the African Stone, the effect is that
striking, petals furred and avant-garde. There is something a little
unwholesome in Salome, but surely
that is the point, Moreau’s bejewelled monster was salacious, conjuring up her
bloody head, suspended like a glittering terrifying star for all to see. Salome has magnificent tonality and
develops very carefully into a lingering leather chypré with echoes of rutting
vintage Diorling and the original un-violated
Mitsouko. Tendrils of old fumy Caron
formulations whisper around the edges too, hints of Tabac Blond and Nuit de Noel,
phantom echoes across time to suggest reverence and acknowledgement of
technique.
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| Siegfried Enkelman (1905-1978) Lydia Wieser in the 'Dance of the Seven Veils 1954 |
As I drift around
the apartment in Salome, I detect a
curious briny effect on my skin, bright and textured that helps support the
sticky indolic slide of the central floral section into the fearless animalic base.
Liz is a woman reflected in this febrile vocation, her menagerie of animals,
her fierce love of family and friends, her beauty, non-negotiable passions and
allure all mirrored subconsciously in Salome,
an external projection of her emotional reactions to herself, her critics and
her olfactive development since she first decided to become a parfumeuse.
The original trio
are of course exceptional and it’s hard to imagine they’ve only been with us for
just over a year. But Salome is a
portrait of the perfumer as woman, wanton, desired, powerful, alchemist and
siren. The capricious layers of classicism and dirty modernity capture the
unique essence of Liz Moores’ talent, an ability to beguile with watchful
spirit and masterful bending producing unashamedly sensual formulae that quite
simply transform skin into gilded, alluring art.
It was always going
to be a tough ask to follow her debut scents, they have been so successful and Liz’s
fans are violently loyal. The tapestry of Liz’s social media is stitched and
embroidered with colourful, passionate
posts and messages of support, reviews and feedback on her work. People seem to
live her perfumes, feel the vitality
and graft that has been poured into every bottle. Salome is luscious, dark alchemy, reeking of sullied retro years
and bold seduction. Overtly and unashamedly animalic, it has a true
understanding of coy versus want, that eternal struggle within us all to remain
pure and good, but secretly we crave loss, abandonment, disarray and the
gratification of sexual control.
Now, all we need do
is close our eyes and inhale.
For more info on Papillon Perfumery, click on the link below:
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| Fuck-me heels... obvs.. |
©The Silver Fox
21 July 2105
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