‘What’s left is palimpsest – one memory
bleeding into another, overwriting it.’
Natasha Trethewewy
My recent months on
a continual diet of opiates have seemed at times like a kind of Traumnovelle, my nights a woozy roaming of
page upon page of my fears, past and coruscating anxieties. My memories erase
and rewrite themselves in a seemingly endless shadowed vellum of curative
process. So many friends and lovers rise and talk, touch and vanish during
these unnervingly inscribed hours. One of my meds seems to grant a particularly
heightened creation of olfactive recollections; I wake from fraught tangled
dreams with blurred and fading catches of perfumes, rooms, skin, hair, kisses
and sexual echo.
To be honest, I
dislike reverie but interestingly such sonorous cathartic dreaming is a form of
psychic palimpsest, partially erasing vintage recollections and meanderings,
musing over them in the hinterlands of sleep. I have become so much more aware
of odour in dreams, waking with imagined traces on skin, fabric and sheets like
phantom love, vanishing as the light dissolves darkness.
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| Foxy Hospital I (2016) |
As long as I can
remember I have been fascinated by the concept of paintings and drawings created
over erstwhile work. In my own artworks I use a lot of mixed media on tough
cartridge paper; it takes quite a battering and I think I’m aware when I’m
working of how the pigments, textures and effects adhere and conversely fall
out and fade if I choose to reuse or force the paintings through a palimpsest
process.
It is an oddly
satisfying process, the removal of one’s carefully applied techniques, hues,
observations and imagination. I wash the work in a bright white bath until they
have almost dissolved, watching the colours bleed away down the drain and then
I re-stretch them on battered, savaged boards that have absorbed everything
over the years from ink, wax and watercolour to spots of blood, soot and plant
matter. Each work inherits genetic material from previous work from the
embedded shadows, lines and scarification of paper to the absorption of
detritus from the boards.
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| Windowtax 2012 ©TSF |
As the papers slowly
dry, tightening in their gum paper surrounds, ghostly lines, blooms and phantom
chromatics reveal themselves. I work over these, sometimes ghosting them too,
creating more histories. Photographing over lightboxes and then using these
images to create further work just deepens the strata. I write on everything,
use collage, magazine text, pieces of old sketchbooks and found photographs.
Our skin is a
manifestation of memory-paper, absorbing odours and stimulating the limbic
system in the brain to recall the filmic moments, good or bad associated with
certain notes, accords, odours and fragmentations of jolted aromatic
perception. Throughout our lifetimes we write and overwrite upon ourselves a
manifold and intricate anthology of aromas; perfumes, oils, blood, mud, rain, saliva,
semen, lipsticks, sweat, pets, tobacco, grass, ink and soaps. These layers
become virtually erased over time but there are faint indelible psychological
traces that are triggered occasionally and the skin comes alive with bursts of
remembrance flaring like watchfires in the night.
If perfumes were
coloured in some strange dye and visible only under special luminescent viewing
conditions most of us would glow spectacularly like splashed and graffitied
letters of love and obsession, lines, doodles, jottings and equations of
desires scrawled across us in mingled, multi-traced olfactive missives. We are
our private perfumed palimpsests. This is important to remember.
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Palimpsest by Aftelier Perfumes
Image created by TSF
|
Spraying Mandy
Aftel’s Palimpsest onto my skin each
time is utter bliss, the creamy indolic rapture of ylang and jasmine exploding
beautifully, throwing the most enticing light upwards, illuminating the
shimmering, blanched florality of the cedrat-blessed yuzu in the skylight of
the scent. Mandy has created a superlative overture of glistening, demanding
intricacy, laying down the archaeology and suggestion of memory archives.
Added to this
complex top are Phenylacetic acid and Gamma dodecalactone a natural isolate
derived from apricots. This gorgeous unique material is an amazing and transformative
addition to the perfumer’s palette, lending compositions a distinctive smeared
and luscious fatty peach/apricot facet. It can be overused and dominate, but
used judiciously it provides a sense of unparalleled beauty, an enticing orchard
quality of stone fruit, fuzzy skin and ripe juice. The original majesty of
Guerlain’s Mitsouko before the
soulless reformulation lies in a luminous central peach core wrapped in ylang,
rose and jasmine on a dangerously beautiful chypré infused base. Mandy has handled
the Gamma dodecalactone with incredible finesse; it has all the required
peachiness and blush of its regular lactonic personality but there is an
undeniable edge to it, a metallic oddity under the ripeness like lime rubbed
along rusted iron. It is a clever conjuring that removes any potential overt fruitiness
that might have occurred.
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| Aftelier sample set.. Image ©TSF |
This edginess is due
I think to the delicate calibration with Phenylacetic acid, a striking material
usually found in a white solid (or crystal) form that generally has an
attractively disturbing odour that perturbs and entices simultaneously. It has
a reputation as a particularly tenacious material. I have sampled it on
mouillettes and it remained alive and calling
as it were for days. In lower more controlled concentrations Phenylacetic acid
suggests the odour of warmed, civetty-suffused honey with spikes of snarly cat
amid the eccentric smoulder. It brings with it just enough dirtiness; nothing
obscene or confrontational, instead a kind of sweet purring animalism, a hidebound
nearness that smells increasingly compulsive as Palimpsest heats up on skin. There is a
seductive corrupted narcissus facet at play in the background and this works so
well with the ylang and jasmine that Mandy has utilised in the heart of the construction.
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| pretty peachy... |
Peach, while very
pretty and instantly recognisable in fragrances, is a tough fruitball to keep
aloft in the perfumed air. Yet despite its fleshly quirks and flagrant over use
in recent years in cheaper high street wares (Beyoncé Heat I’m looking at you…), it remains one of the most atmospheric
and delicious notes in perfumery, partly I think because peaches seem like our
own skin, plush, delicately furred and cosily erotic. The original Mitsouko by Guerlain is the obvious
benchmark for any discussion of peach-toned aromatics but there are other
exceptional fragrances that use the peachy/apricot milkiness and lactonic stone
fruit booziness to beckon and seduce the senses.
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| Foxy Rush... Image ©TSF |
I would always
mention the neon hooker scream of Gucci’s 1999 Rush made by the quixotically talented Michel Almairic when Tom
Ford was lashing his über-successful porno gloss over what had been up until
then a relatively straight-laced and rather dull euro jet set brand. The
plasticised clatter of shrieking abstract florals and overexposed druggy
peachiness is more grenade than perfume; but I have always loved it. The weird
collision of hairspray and ripe, glaring fruit is stunning. So many haters
hate. Boys smell divine in this by the way, like filthy sugared androids.
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| Foxglove by HYLNDS/DS & Durga Image ©TSF |
The other one, which
couldn’t more different in tone to Rush
is Foxglove by HYLNDS composed by
Brooklyn wunderkind David Seth Moltz of DS & Durga. HYLNDS is David and
wife Kavi’s more spiritual, mythical line set in the hinterlands of Celtic
storytelling. Influences include poetry, bardic utterances, grey stone, rivers,
beaten iron, mist, blood, battles and the pale thin veil between our world and
the darkness of gathered phantoms. Foxglove
is inspired by the story of Oisin, the Irish
warrior poet, his lover Niamh and the mystical land of Tir Na Nog, the tempting Land
Of Youth and a gorgeous mix of wild carrot, bone-dry iris, immortelle and a
sensational peach skin note than smells so real you imagine for a moment your
skin has transformed into golden furred fruit. The key to Foxglove actually lies in the top, a sublime citron note that
explodes the top notes like fingernails in the flesh of the knobbly fruit
itself. It seems to illuminate the rest of the materials like fireworks.
Mandy has used the Gamma dodecalactone at the very edge of
respectability, barely fresh, there is something perhaps a little unsettling in
her portrayal of bruised, over-pressed flesh. It adds just the right dosage of
porno-sap to edgily lacquer the timbre of Palimpsest’s
enigmatic proceedings. Other perfumers would have been a lot more careless, but
when you have trained yourself the way Mandy has and have an instinctual
understanding of raw materials and their personalities you will always know how
they love, live and play within formulations.
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| Firetree montage ©TSF |
All of this lush,
dexterous complexity is scene setting and sensual prep for Mandy’s
extraordinary (and unique) Firetree essence that glows in the base with her
trademark smoky vanilla absolutes and poignantly wrought ambergris notes. It
starts low and inexorably rises to effloresce like aurous fire reflecting in
many ways the flaming foliage of this iconic native Australian tree when the
vital essence originated from. Mandy thinks and she’s probably correct that’s
she is the only perfumer to be using the Firetree essence in this intense and
undiluted form. And I for one am very glad.
She originally came
across it during one of her insatiable and intensive global forays for raw
materials; always looking for the best, the highest quality and the most
textured and gourmet if you like, materials that speak to her years of intuition,
experimentation and personal interaction with repeated variants of ingredients.
The batch she found was diluted with DPG something she doesn’t use in her line
so she contacted the supplier who kindly put her in touch with the original
source of the Firetree essence. She told me it took a year of asking (begging
would be a more accurate term I think..)before they finally relented and sold
her a kilo of pure unadulterated glowing essence.
It was absolutely
worth the persistence, the material is unique and multi-layered appropriately
enough and extremely complex as befitting such a strange and perplexing tree.
The odour is described variously as milky-rose with hits of bitter green
leafiness. Others mention a soft warm boozy quality as it warms through, a kind
of bush amber with wooded aspects that melt with skin. The only trusted word on
this really belongs to Mandy; I wrote and asked her what the raw material
smelled like and she replied:
‘..the essential oil is harvested under
special permit form dead or fallen trees. It has a complex aroma, highly
diffusive with lilac/rose notes and milky undertones that give way to a floral
sweet spiciness. This morphs into a more woody, earthy, slightly leathery note..
ending finally in a smoky oud-like drydown.’
With that in mind I
want to talk about the Australian Firetree (nuytsia
floribunda) that is particularly native to South Western Australia and is
actually classified as a large mistletoe. It lives a strange semi-parasitic
existence, its odd white roots reaching out underground in the moist darkness
for other root systems to tap into. It is sometimes known as The Christmas Tree
as between October and January it produces a spectacular efflorescence of vivid
orange and yellow flame tinted blooms.
Nuytsia floribunda
is a sacred tree to the Noongar (or Nyungar) people of the South Western
Australian territories; there are several sacred and folk medicinal
associations with the tree and parts are in fact edible. The tree gives. The flowers can be eaten; the
leaves are sharp enough to cut and slice through meat and the flower stems can
be fashioned into spears. Beliefs have sprung up around the flowers; using the
blooms in wedding bouquets will only bring misfortune to the bride and
harvesting the flowers before Christmas supposedly brings bad luck. I think
it’s interesting that the exhilarating clouds of flame-blooms seem like a
portend or echo of the deadly bushfires as their shocking colour often stands
out so vividly against the flat brush landscape around them. They are such amazing
trees above the ground and then you must remember the unnerving rooty vampirism
taking place in the soil for hundreds of yards from the original tree.
In a letter to
Captain James Mangles a Royal naval officer and dedicated early botanist,
Georgiana Molloy (1805-1845) an early Australian settler, keen amateur botanist
and seed collector wrote:
‘I have been out four times in quest of
Nuytsia and send you the very small harvest. They are difficult to obtain, if
not there the very day they ripen.’
(From Portrait with Background: A Life of
Georgiana Molloy by A. Hasluck, Oxford University Press, Melbourne)
Mangles asked
Georgiana to collect seeds on his behalf, something she did assiduously despite
the evident hardship of settler life and the traumatic death of her son. I came
across a poem entitled Nuytsia Floribunda
by Alan Alexander that inspired by and celebrating Georgiana’s memory and work.
This excerpt is quite shattering.
The parasite Floribunda for
My drowned son.
How delicate they are, these
Stars at random.
It is the
strangeness of this haunting arboreal essence that adds such beauteous layer of
meaning in Mandy’s profound gathering of Palimpsest.
She can undoubtedly create aromatic images of stained glass brilliance but for
me it is this unerring sense of narrative that sets her apart from so many of
her peers. Her learned alchemy, her fingers and mind of honed craft and almost
wiccan, application and practice have laid down a powerful body of olfactive
text for us to read. Her experiences, memories and erudition are given freely
in order for us to decode our own senses and odours.
The strength and
vitality of Mandy’s materials on skin causes us to revaluate our perceptions of
how aroma evolves; the shards, curlicues and spills drop deep and re-emerge,
re-writing themselves on our bodies. There is truth and bare-face honesty
inscribed in repeated odours that when inhaled reveal voices, places, lovers,
joy, loss and shadow.
Skin as canvas,
paper and vellum is hardly a novel concept, however skin as palimpsest, the
repeated act of erasure of past olfactive memories, cadences, touches, fucking,
gifting, transgression and epiphany; layering under years of other odours, this
perhaps is more complex, melancholy and dangerous.
Mandy was originally
inspired to create Palimpsest while doing research for her book Fragrant: The Secret Life of Scent,
which looks at key materials such as mint, jasmine, cinnamon, frankincense and
ambergris and places them in powerful historical, social and aromatic
timelines. The chapter on jasmine is a dazzling read.
‘At once voluptuous and delicate, earthy and
ethereal and elusive to those who would render these qualities immortal,
flowers are not only beautiful, but embody the paradoxes of Beauty that we
embrace when we are drawn into her arms.’
(From Fragrant: The Secret Life of Scent by Mandy Aftel,
Chapter 6, Seduced by Beauty - Jasmine)
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| Fragrant: The Secret Life of Scent by Mandy Aftel |
When she decided to
pursue this life of obsessive scented pathways and scented alchemy Mandy
carefully amassed a detailed and eclectic collection of books on the subject of
perfumery through the ages. These tomes seemed like recipe books, not as we
recognise them now but guidance to medicinal preparations, simple elixirs,
lovecraft, poisons, animal husbandry, midwifery, poultices, herbal remedies,
but all demonstrating an instinctual awareness of odour and its effects on
spirit and miasma. Noticing a variety of repetition in many cases, an essence
of hand-me-down telling of herbal lore and craft, Mandy realised that ONLY by
practicing, following and echoing this powerful layered set of histories was
she able to make sense of her own place in the continuum.
‘I wanted to capture the feeling of how the
past is alive in the present but transferred into beautiful, shadowed feeling
of layered richness and sensuality.’
Mandy Aftel
The word palimpsest comes to us from Greek via
Latin; palin, meaning again and psēstos, rubbed smooth. In the middle
ages manuscripts, parchment, vellum etc were immensely valuable, time-consuming
and costly to fabricate, involving the repeated straining of various pulped
plant fibres into fine layers, dried, ground smooth and treated with various
gums and unguents. Papermaking was an art form.
Today’s throwaway
culture would have had no place in medieval monasteries, courts and
apothecaries. If pages were to be used again, the texts and any illumination
and inking would be carefully scraped or washed off until the pages could be
realistically used again. Of course,
traces and shadows of the previous words and imagery might linger, remaining
defiantly ghostlike under new prayers, gospels, edicts, tithes, laws and
recipes, thus creating the palimpsest. In other cases the church would order
Christian texts to be overwritten onto what it considered be pagan or
blasphemous writings, thus rendering the words cleansed and sanctified.
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| prepping...notes... Image ©TSF |
I have always
considered a life of scent an act of palimpsest. As with the discussions on the
merits of pop music and classic repertoires, jazz and opera, some might argue
that in terms of memory that scent should be stunning, iconic and classic. This
is rubbish, people always want to be thought of as better educated, more
stylish, more esoteric; that’s why given time to think they tend to edit and
curate their favourite books, movies, designers, songs etc to give the world an
outward appearance of erudition and oddity. Essentially it is one-upmanship and
covert snobbery. The bulk of our most immediate memory triggers are populist in
tone or directly connected to family and lovers. This applies equally to scent;
first perfumes bought (we are not all led by plush bourgeois mothers to
Guerlain counters…), spritzing in department store beauty halls, the smell of
kissing crushes, wearing a lover’s scent, break up scent. All these things
layered on our skin, replaced and veiled, remain in our memory, carefully
stored, the odours mingling in the shadows of time.
During this last
year of illness and on-going recovery, I have become increasingly enamoured
with natural perfumery and the complex aroma-therapeutic effects on my spirit
and senses, it is these emotive essences, oils and recipes that for me embody
the palimpsest ideal. They seem to suggest an arcane awareness of things done
and things to come; connecting to sky, water, flesh and being alive. And that
it is undeniably, profoundly moving.
Mandy’s background
steeped in honest self-regard, fearless accumulation of knowledge, weaving,
collecting natural ingredients to dye her own threads, in essence, imparting
herself in processes. This allied with her training as a therapist has enriched
her ability to understand our studious, recondite intellect who has achieved a
very particular sense of personal status and worth by understanding the
lessons, words and fugitive layers of the past. If you read her books and I
urge you to do so, you will realise how connected she is to flesh, spirit and
mind and our place in this increasingly fucked up surreal world.
She does not shy
away from sex and its pungent moreishness and the role that odour and perfumery
play in the carnal dance of desire. We are all too aware, whether we like to
admit it or not of a certain lascivious fleshly palimpsest, an underpinning of
phantom depravity, ghostly sex acts, loving, random, brutal, desired, desperate
and craved, played out on beds of stained, reeking sheets that rock with
laughter and grappled love.
Over this is written
the alchemy of Mandy Aftel, never forget this is what she does, transmuting
memory, essence into experience. Her received and practiced knowledge; handling
and illuminated biographies of materials are exquisite. She instinctively
comprehends the syncs, loops, shifts, nuances and seasons of her palette. Dilution,
mood, profanity, sensuality and behaviour; all instinctually calibrated.
When Mandy
originally contacted me and asked me to choose samples she could send me I knew
the ones I wanted alongside her latest wonder, Amber Tapestry, a hymn to her love of time spent among woven
threads and chthonic yarns. I chose Cocoa
and Vanilla Smoke to complete my
quartet with Palimpsest. I have worn
Cèpes and Tuberose in the past and
the haunting Cuir Gardenia, a perfume
that really obsessed me when I discovered it. It felt like Mandy was
hybridizing flora and creating sci-fi petals and brave new stems.
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| cocoa montage... Image ©TSF |
In a now distant and
bitter job, I needed cocoa bean nibs.. to be honest I can’t quite remember what
for now.. I think it was to tincture gin for cocktails. My friend Ali Gower
runs the Chocolate Tree, one of the few certified bean to bar chocolatier
enterprises in the country. He travels to South America and the West Indies to
source his cocoa beans, importing them to roast and grind at his wonderful set
up outside Edinburgh. Ali dropped off a bag of shucked and shattered cocoa bean
nibs and I opened the bag… OMG, the scent was astonishing. Sweet earth and
jungle dust, an arid booze aroma poured over torn, splintered woods. Not chocolate
as such but the roots of chocolate,
mucky and moreish.
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| Cocoa nibs... (image ©TSF) |
Mandy created her
own chocolate alcohol for the indulgent and distinctive base of Cocoa, tincturing organic Costa Rican
cocoa beans with high-grade Tahitian vanilla. Now I love my chocolate scents,
the Foxy collection has quite a few, like the stuff itself, some sweet and
milky, others darker, mulchier. The best for me are Pierre Guillaume’s creamy
bold Musc Maori, Sarah McCartney and
4160 Tuesday’s limited edition Over The
Chocolate Shop, smooth and oozing with warm comforting choccy fumes and
hazelnut. Mandy’s has more in common I think with Il Profumo’s Chocolate Amère, which mixes nutmeg,
ginger and a thrilling swoosh of galbanum around the bitter cocoa core.
Ultimately Mandy’s Cocoa is on its
own, her handling of what could have been a difficult and generic theme is
transformed by the halo of chocolate and vanilla thrilled alcohol base.
Interestingly Cocoa is strictly
speaking a jasmine perfume, a swooning marriage of both grandiflorum and sambac
blooms offset by the sweeter citrus tones of pink grapefruit and a noticeable
dash of sanguineous blood orange at the top. This arrangement of white over
dark with sunrise glow across the opening moments is deeply addictive, swaying
between a sophisticated gourmand treat and something more complex, a sombre
inhalation of bitter caprice.
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| Amber Tapestry montage with 1970s embroidered sleeve Image ©TSF |
Amber Tapestry is Mandy’s latest work and really very
special indeed, you can sense as soon as you smell it how personal this perfume
is, it radiates out of the materials with a retrospective thrumming aura. It
was odd having Cocoa in the same
collection as I felt smelling it alongside Amber
Tapestry they seemed like subtle echoes of one another in the use of double
jasmine in their swelling hearts. This aurous glittering thing is about Mandy’s
past immersion in the hands-on world of dyeing, threading and weaving I
mentioned earlier; a tapestry of recollection and materials, stitched over and
under a huge emotive heart.
The top has gauzy
heliotrope and sweet mandarin, avoiding any potential bitterness arising from more
traditional lemon/citron oils. That grandiflorum/sambac heart is augmented
interestingly with pear and cinnamon; these seem to add curve and gold-flecked
eau de vie to the body of this beautifully orchestrated scent. The base uses
the glistening charms of ambreine and caramelised maltol blended with coumarin,
castoreum and resins to fill in the heavier stitching and touches of contrast
to bring the composition to life. As with actual tapestry, a little time is
needed for the details to wed and the threads and colours to pull into focus. Amber Tapestry is exceptional perfumery,
something I think I will need to have in my collection; my skin seemed to come
alive in it.
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| Vanilla Smoke montage Image ©TSF |
Vanilla Smoke got amazing reviews when it launched and
quite rightly so. So many purported vanilla scents come and go it is hard to
keep track or even care anymore when the word vanilla pops up in things. Even as a diehard vanilla lover, I
sometimes succumb to fatigue. I noted the launch and the word smoke and thought must try. I used to be very casual re vanilla scents, buying lots
of different ones, enjoying the variety from cakey patisserie fun and baby
powder softness to sensual sheath extract textures. But as time passed I have
become more ruthless in my expectations, wanting the vanilla in my perfumes to arouse
and transport me.
There are a few
perfumers who really understand the low feral anima of vanilla. One is Bertrand
Duchaufour whose Vanille Absolument by
L’Artisan Parfumeur (originally entitled Havane
Vanille) was a signature scent for me for five or six years. Bertrand
soaked the Mexican vanilla pods in rum and this deep, booming booziness was
played off against a beautiful duet of narcissus absolute and smoky tonka in
the central section. All this rests meltingly on his lush, creamy vanilla.
Every batch I had, (sixteen bottles and counting)… smelled different, all
dependent of the harvest quality of narcissus, tonka and vanilla. L’Artisan
Parfumeur decided to axe the scent from the line up citing cost issues with the
raw materials. I obviously bought up bulk-discounted bottles, but the loss of
such an exemplary portrait of vanilla, riven with warm tobacco tones and the
contradictory sweet floral pornography of narcissus is immeasurable.
The other great
vanilla creatrix was Mona di Orio, her Vanille
from 2011 is part of the iconic Nombres d’Or collection, a gathering of perfect
and profoundly personal interpretations of classic perfumery tenets such as musk,
tuberose, oud, rose, vetiver and amber. They are among my most precious scents;
I wore Mona’s fragrances from very early on (Carnation, Nuit Noire and Chamarré)
and connected with her work in a visceral, emotional way. She was the same age
as me and her sudden death from surgical complications in December 2011
darkened my skies. After my own experiences in the last couple of years during
surgery I feel the need to wear her perfumes more and more. Her Vanille resembles Mandy’s in its
unorthodoxy, a defiantly discordant voyage of a drifting boat, loaded with
spices, oranges and bundles of burnished vanilla sheaths from island
plantations all lying on sun-hot timbers soaked in spilled rum. I’ve sampled
people with Vanille and they often
recoil from its audacious physical presence. Sometimes I think…this vanilla is strange weather and I am
buffeted by its beauty. It is a benchmark perfume, an elixir that many
other perfumers should sample and marvel at. As with so much in her work and
something she has in common with Mandy, Mona had trained repeatedly and
exhaustively with materials until she could capture the essence of something, reflecting
and refracting its beauty and oddity back through the prism of her own
experiences.
It obvious to me,
obsessively wearing Vanilla Smoke
that Mandy Aftel is another one of the perfume world’s great vanilla
manipulators; you know by the particular feel of the Madagascan vanilla that
she doesn’t just settle for a any old vanilla absolute. Why would you? Like a
colour tone or lux of light, it is about the search for personal
interpretations of materials. The more time I have spent inhaling Mandy’s work
I have noticed the dedication to quality and charisma in her absolutes,
isolates and oils. She does of course sell some of these, they read like spells
and incantations; flouve and poplar bud, cepe, fir and ambreine, elemodor,
patchoulyl acetate, tobacco, mitti attar, vetiverol and the all important
vanilla. Everything created by Mandy is free from synthetics, parabens,
glycols, and petrochemicals but she will often many different variants of a
material before deciding which one is the right one for the olfactive task at
hand.
The vanilla absolute
in Vanilla Smoke is very rich and
chewy, with an oily, wood-panelled back-taste to it. Its beauty has been
dramatically enhanced by a blueish Lapsang Souchong note, the tea smoked over
pine needles. This has imparted a faint yet discernable terpenic nuance to the
mix, counterpointed by saffron and a lovely soft touch of yellow mandarin at
the top of the scent. The sensual joy of the perfume is to be found in the
glorious drawn out fade of the vanilla on your skin. There is a little touch of
vanillin in the formula, this seems to both stretch out and light the absolute. It is well nigh on
impossible to stop smelling your skin while you are wearing Vanilla Smoke, it really is. The ambrosial
dusk of the materials make the wearing moreish and sexy.
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| Mandy Aftel (original image Aya Brackett) (Jasmine palimpsest TSF) |
I knew as soon as I
smelled Palimpsest it was something
extraordinary, a perfume that would alter me, mark me and add another detailed
layer to my olfactory experience. I was honestly quite moved when I wore it for
the first time and that flickering frisson has never left me. I will wear it as
long as I can obtain it.. and then when it is gone, I will have the memory of
it laid down under something new.
It wears so
beautifully as time passes, the notes rising and falling like muted music in
distant rooms. The lush private indolic jasmine and ylang hung with peach
gauze, Mandy’s velveteen fumed vanilla swelled by the civetty radiance of the Phenylacetic
acid. This wonderful stuff leaves it own mark, an ephemeral narcissus aroma as
it works its magic on the other notes. It took me a while to notice it, but
it’s there in the spaces, verdant and smeared, just suggested enough. Despite
the graceful harmony of composition, Palimpsest
glows with Mandy’s precious Firetree essence, it is the acutely satisfying
heart of an affective singular perfume. It’s own intriguing strata of tainted
floral ambience, oudy pall and milky leather make it ambiguous and universal,
blending beautifully with the other materials and yet still retaining a force
of character that demonstrates both its oddity and Mandy’s expert handling of
the original essence.
In its elegant final
flourish of warm magnificence, Palimpsest
seems to echo the blaze of Firetree blooms under an Australian sunset. Skin
smells loved, manifold and if you look closely you will see my loves and lives
written there upon my body in layers of redolent prose.
For more information
on Aftelier Perfumes, Cook’s Essences© and perfumer’s materials, please click
on the link below:
Disclosure – samples very kindly sent by Aftelier Perfumes. Thank you Mandy. Opinions and interpretations very much my own.
©TheSilverFox
January 2017
