A perfume is a mixture. A mixture like a collection of things that collide between words and materials, explaining just a little, without explaining too much, why a perfume is the way it is. Frustration.
One summer a few years ago, while walking down the Ramblas in Barcelona, I heard a song by Rare Bird, an English progressive rock band from the 70s. The song was called "Sympathy," and the chorus went, "And sympathy is what you need, my friend, and sympathy is what you need, my friend, 'cause there ain't enough love for everyone, no, there ain't enough love for everyone..." And suddenly, with the richness of an entire psychoanalytic past (according to Lacan), this past that sometimes transfers my strength to others or sometimes transfers my great weakness to myself, a word emerged from the chorus that was stronger than sympathy. It planted its black flag of melancholy in the heart of my mind and uttered a word of greater accuracy, greatness, truth, sincerity, and usefulness, as it was forged in the experience of life: FRUSTRATION. And then I sang the replaced chorus in my head again "... And frustration is what you need, my friend, and frustration is what you need, my friend."
Frustration, the eldest daughter of renunciation and the sister of perfume, since perfume, like frustration, proceeds in the game of love.
By taking, it gives a never-satisfied fullness, a pleasure begun but never achieved, an infinite movement of desire without completion, without apotheosis, an instillation that irritates, seduces, lulls, dominates, and, like Ravel's Bolero, annoys. Frustration.
So take a vanilla pod, a garden rose with swollen red petals, some old rum that explodes with amber wood, a bourbon vetiver, bring each of these materials to your senses. Frustration.
Breathe, taste the cycle of beans never heard before, delicious fermentation, but never enough, leaving you craving more, all noses out... "More, more, let us take your blush deeper and become that animal with the dull mind of a child who wants to enjoy and devour even more of that chestnut wood, that cinnamon or that vetiver until it bursts, and then bathe satiated in the poetry of the scent." Frustration.
This is the love game of perfume, this is the love game according to Musset, Shakespeare, or Racine. And it is all the better because satisfaction kills, while desire keeps you alive by creating movement through the ever-renewed distance, so as never to consume like a murderous ogre. Frustration.
Fragrance notes
- Top notes: Cumin HE, Cinnamon HE, Pure Rum Jungle Essence™
- Heart notes: Pure Vanilla Jungle Essence™, Vanilla Absolute, Cistus Absolute
- Base notes: Chestnut Wood Accord, Bourbon Vetiver HE, Vinyl Gaiacol – MANE Biotech
