2017-07-27 The Dry Down #13: Rose Is A Rose Is A Nose
Hello dear Dry Downers,
It has already been a very long week, and we don't know about you, but we are doing whatever we can to get through it. Helena and I have spent late nights texting each other about rose scents, which are bringing us an odd amount of comfort during this long, hot, anxious summer. There is something about the rose that feels flung out of time, like it is a scent that stretches all the way back to the beginning (and indeed, perfumery as we know it was basically invented by humans trying to capture roses in perpetua). So this week, we wrote about some of the rose scents in rotation this summer (a tip: roses tend to smell best in sweaty seasons; when they can rise off your skin like heat from the pavement). Also, at the end of the letter, we jotted down quick recommendations for six more rose scents -- there are as many rose varietals as there are ways to bottle them, and this should just be the beginning of your experimentation. You could try on a rose scent every single day of your life and still not exhaust the options on the market, so the truth is, as ever, you should trust your nose. There is a rose out there for you. We promise.
Also: thank you to everyone who came to Dry Down Live this month! Our second event sold out, and we are so grateful and had the best time meeting all of you! We are learning about these events as we go, and we are dreaming up new ways to make collective perfume smelling/mingling as joyful and surprising as possible. There is much more to come. Our wonderful photographer, Sylvie Rosokoff, shot some lovely images from the night -- you'll find a few below.
Ok, go play. Smell the roses. Literally.
xo, Rachel
Elizabeth & James, Nirvana Rose - RS
Last year, I wrote a profile of Jodie Sweetin as she returned to the small screen for Fuller House (which I am still basically proud of if for no other reason than I got to trace the etymology of “how rude”), and I will never forget the look on her face when I asked her about the Olsen twins’ decision not to rejoin the Tanner clan on Netflix. She was in the middle of waxing cuddly about how much of the cast had continued to cosplay a family since the show went off the air -- she had regular dinner parties with Uncle Joey, D.J. became a surrogate sweet aunt to her children, and she even stayed text-message close to Kimmy Gibbler. But then we hit upon the Olsens, and Sweetin stared off into the distance; Mary Kate and Ashley, she said calmly, well, they had “gone off into fashion, and that’s their world now.” She had the soundbyte down, so down that it sounded almost nonchalant, like we all knew that’s where they were headed, what they were destined to do. But I detected a hint of sadness underneath it, a little gulf between what she was saying and what she wasn’t. Because when a child grows up spending most of their waking hours on a television set, it makes sense that lines would start to blur. That they might start to think, maybe these girls playing my sisters really are my sisters; we already spend more time together than most families, our dreams are aligned, my stakes for joy and success are entangled with theirs. And then the cameras stop rolling, and the bonds become mushier. Sweetin was hit especially hard by the Full House ending and the dissolution of her primetime nuclear unit; she became an alcoholic by 14 and was spending thousands of dollars on crack cocaine before her 21st birthday. The chance to return for Fuller House was, for her, more than a cheesy reboot -- it was a returning to the fold, to loving arms, to what made sense. And I have to think that the Olsens’ decision not to take part in the group restoration project felt raw, for a while. But of course, they were never going to come back.
The Olsens occupy a strange position in pop culture, one that approaches opacity, a near impossibility in the digital age. Though they branded themselves ceaselessly long before everyone had a personal brand -- they were on lunchboxes, trapper keepers, keyrings -- when the twins turned 18 and took over full ownership of Dualstar, they started to slowly and deliberately erase their digital footprints. No Twitter, no Instagram, all mystery. They are so notoriously social media averse that their first selfie together (posted on the Sephora account) made international headlines. And even in that picture, they look like matching Joan Didion bobbleheads, disguising half their faces in giant black sunglasses, turtlenecks pulled all the way to the jaw. The Didion comparisons are too easy and too perfect in some ways -- the twins don’t write (well not really; they did publish a coffee table book called Influence in 2008), but they do seem to keep circling Joan’s image as aesthetic ancestry: the feline wrists, the oversized shades. Magazines often compare them to little old ladies, shuffling along in gauzy magpie garments. Their style has also been called “ashcan,” which is a glib way to say they look like grubby Dickensian urchins (they were not the first to draw runway inspiration from bag ladies; Rei Kawakubo and Bill Cunningham also saw glamour there). This is all to say that the twins went a...different way than the rest of the Tanner gang, and made far more money-- and graduated to a different level of fashion-world prestige--as a result. When they launched their own line, The Row, in 2006, it was an immediate industry darling (it won the CFDA award...twice) and hovers in that sweet spot of sleek cool where Acne and Wang and Mansur Gavriel tend to congregate. Elizabeth and James is their “diffusion” line, which is a loose description, as the average E&J t-shirt costs upwards of $200. When Sarah Jessica Parker did a line for the people (RIP BITTEN), her shirts cost $15 and you could only buy them at Steve and Barry’s. Parker’s perfumes are a bit more high-end than Bitten was (and I would argue, some of the most thoughtful celebrity scents of all time, but that’s another Dry Down for another day), but even now, you can snag a bottle of Lovely online for the low low price of twenty bucks (and if you don’t own one yet...what? It’s a glorious powdery rice milk vanilla lilac violet spritz that will make you feel like a kitten before bed. You deserve it).
MK + A launched their first scents in 2013 under the Elizabeth & James brand, because they were meant to be accessible, though they still cost more than a lot of designer scents (a bottle will run you $85-90 depending on the retailer). They called their first two bottles Nirvana Black and Nirvana White -- emphasizing the duality of their brand, the light and the dark, the symmetrical doublemint pleasure of it -- and hired Pierre Negrin and Honorine Blanc, two legendary perfumers, to make them (Negrin signed Polo Black, Amouage Interlude Man, and David Beckham’s cologne; Blanc signed Ralph Lauren’s Midnight Romance, YSL’s Black Opium, and Lanvin’s Rumeur 2 Rose, among others). These were meant to be serious perfumes, for serious consumers -- they were packaged as such; big, bevelled rectangular bottles that look like deco skyscrapers on a vanity. The scents were legit, if not original -- White is a musky floral that smells sort of like Tom Ford’s White Patchouli, and Black is a berry-violet-sandalwood that smells sort of like Tom Ford’s Velvet Orchid. One might go so far as to say that the E&J fragrances are Tom Ford’s whole seductive deal skewed for young femmes (and far easier to afford) and so they absolutely demolished sales records at Sephora. Trust: every fragrance salesperson I ask at Sephora about bestsellers always mention the Nirvanas; they do gangbusters business, even after 4 years. They just seem elegant, in a way, when you hold them, and a little mysterious and elevated. Which is, after all, the Olsen’s entire project. It is also why they could never make a return to Fuller House. The Olsens know branding perhaps better than anyone else on earth; they speak it like mother tongue. Their perfumes at Sephora, as popular and available as they are, don’t dent their brand. But saying one-liners on Netflix would. The Nirvanas are an item that looks great on the shelf, effortless chic, an answer to a question that shoppers didn’t know they were asking. They look like gateway drugs into high-fashion, and also a little bit like disco mirrors in a nightclub. They gleam golden and new, and if the twins have given away any of their marketing strategy while remaining mostly inscrutable, it’s that they never, ever look back.
And now, they have made a rose. Nirvana Rose, which came out last year alongside a butterscotchy teak-bomb called Nirvana Bourbon, is a spicy geranium-forward “noir” rose, which means that it is not a gentle, teatime spring floral but a nighttime party scent, the kind of perfume you smell a lot if you have ever been on a rooftop bar that requires a cover charge for the elevator. Rose and Bourbon are not as refined as White and Black, and so reveal bit of slippage, of what tends to happen when flankers pop up to capitalize on the success of an original hit (maybe one day I will write about satellite scents that are as good as their planetary mothers -- here’s looking at you, Coco Mademoiselle). On some people, Olsen Rose really works. It has a pepper kick on the bottom, which can be dangerous (I have smelled this on a wrist and it was mostly just sriracha), but when it works, it gives the rose oil a staying power that lasts throughout the night. It’s sort of a trashy scent -- not in a gauche way, but in a spiritual way, like the idea of what the Olsen twins are like when they decide to cut loose for a night. I imagine this involves a lot of French cigarettes and maybe courtside seats and maybe a magnum of Malbec. What I do know is that we can never know. All we have to go on is this Rose for a hint about how it feels to be that controlled, and then, for a brief moment, to let go of the reins. As Didion wrote, “the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake ...but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. Is is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one's own rules.” The Olsens are free agents, not available for any reboot but their own. They’ve bought themselves privacy and freedom, and now they sell it back to us by the bottle.
Isparta, Parfumerie Generale - HF
Everything is dangerous if you know how to look at it, if you consider the geometries and relationships in even the things that seem sweetest. There are a lot of associations around roses, but maybe the one we talk about least is disappointment. It’s easy to say you dislike roses because they’re cliche - fairy tales, bad dates, the Bachelor and the Bachelorette, a basic flower for basic people, people uninitiated into the secrets of exotic nightblooms festering and running a riot of unpronounceable names through gardens under the cover of twilight, rooting up polite and ordered rows of flowers. Roses are someone who doesn’t know or care know about the kind of bouquets and decorations that can look like violence, spilling over tables, out of hands, the hope to recapitulate flowers as horror. Roses are for squares, for good kids, for people who watch reality television sincerely, for people who take pottery classes and are hoping to find “the one.”
Everybody’s heard of roses. Roses are a language everybody knows, a word for simple romance, for the only Shakespeare play you read in junior high. Roses for virginity, roses for prom, roses for cheesy dates, roses for apologies, roses for sexless marriages and Hamptons houses. The great dumb buttery roses of heteronormativity, heavy with bees in the neat row gardens of the British middle class with their tea and their beloved inbred royal family.
But this is a false, revisionist rose history. What many people don’t realize is that the rose as upper middle class, the rose as heteronormative, the rose as basic, the rose as white people - all of this is a scam. Roses grow in France, sure and in England, although the flowers there are mostly colonial transplants, just like the majority of everything else good and wild and lush and interesting that country has to offer and claims as its own. Most of the roses used in compelling rose perfumes are a far cry from polite English gardens or French girl romance film stills. Turkish, Moroccan, and Bulgarian roses are three of the most popular rose types for perfume - roses come from elsewhere than a polite Northwest European garden, and are a far stranger and subtler than their reputation often gives them credit for being.
Rose as feminine is also a revisionist history. Roses have throughout history been a masculine flower, a virile, aggressive, swaggering signal. The rose was for centuries a marker of masculinity, with its bold look and smell, its associations with chivalry, with violence, and with blood. The idea that a rose stands for a delicate, virginal woman is a fairly new association, and one that clashes extremely with the flower’s whole history.
Isparta is Pierre Guillaume (the upsettingly attractive perfume savant behind Parfumerie Generale)’s ode and homage to the Turkish rose. The name, Isparta, refers to the province in Turkey highly valued summer roses grow - these coveted roses have an aggressive, spicy scent, and grow in mountain soil. Roses from Isparta are neither accessible nor friendly, neither cute nor delicate, not easily had or understood. The rose at the center of Guillaume’s creation is an angry rose, a rose that heard what you said about roses and has some objections to offer. This rose is upset about how its name has been associated, how its mystery and charisma has been tarnished. It’s a rose that wants to get you drunk and yell at you, a rose that might kill you but you might like it, a rose you should be careful around but let’s be honest probably you wouldn’t be, because that wouldn’t be nearly as fun. Isparta is a rose looking for a fight.
It’s also worth noting that this gorgeous, angry Turkish rose is the only floral note in the entire, nominally floral, perfume. Guillaume encases his rose in a wooden box, surrounding the flower with heavy notes of benzoin, agarwood, balsam, and intoxicatingly sticky ambroxan and musk to hold it all together. But the box is really more like a sprung trap, one into which you are happy to place yourself as a willing victim. This is a rose that is in the same gesture unfriendly and irresistible, a rose that maybe doesn’t particularly like you. That’s the appeal - Isparta reminds that we always want what we cannot have, that sometimes it is better to want and not get, that sometimes we long for failure and for rejection as much as for love and success, that we like romances because we like loss, not because we like happy endings, and that Romeo and Juliet, with its famous line about roses, is after all a play about catastrophes, failure, and death.
And that’s what I mean about roses as disappointment - any cliche, anything as well known as a rose, builds up expectations that it cannot ever meet. The best these big expectations can ever really offer is the exquisite pain of refusal and disappointment - the knight doesn’t save you, your date doesn’t go well, prom is not like a movie and love is not like poetry. The lovers die at the end; all of the grand plans fail and flare out to nothing. The people we want most are the people we want because they are most likely to refuse us. Isparta’s rose is the scent of love scrambling for a foothold on an unyielding mountainside. It’s the torment of the unrequited and the strange, underhanded pleasures of unreturned love. It refuses to answer to you, to embrace you, to give you any of the comforts you thought you were owed by roses. If the most interesting thing about roses is pain, then this is that pain distilled, taking up the entire room, glowering and irresistible.
Amouage Opus X (aka The Red Violin perfume)- RS
Hollywood in the nineties was a factory of epic films, sagas that spanned the centuries, full of giant set pieces and glistening poultry on long tables and nosegays full of lilacs and billowy, fey period costumes. The fabled “end of history” had arrived -- looking back, this assumption was fully ridiculous and entitled on every level -- and so the studios threw their money at looking back, at re-sinking the Titanic, at retracing the steps of the Silk Road, of resetting the tea tables from E.M Forster novels and clicking the porcelain cups together for cinematic effect. Of the ten films that won Best Picture that decade, eight were big-budget exercises in summoning up the past (Forrest Gump was, I suppose, set in the present, but some might argue that its sole reason for existence was a gauzy, jingoistic nostalgia). Shakespeare fell in love, an English cartographer crashlanded into a beatific Kristin Scott Thomas, Mel Gibson spawned a decade of lazy plaid Halloween costumes, and Spielberg finally got his Oscar by acknowledging his past instead of running full speed away from it. The more broad-sweeping, the more sumptuous, the more grandiose and ambitious (i.e. big-budget) a film was, the better -- audiences were ready to cover huge swaths of time, to look out over the millennia like Shelley’s travellers surveying the desert for a hint of Ozymandias. Titanic was three hours long and could easily have kept audiences rapt for four; there was a collective hunger to sink into antiquity like a warm bath.
I think a lot about these maximalist cinema spectacles when I think of rose perfumes, because most rose perfumes are basically trying to be Merchant-Ivory films shoved into a bottle -- they nod at the Edwardian English obsession with roses as the basis for all finery, but are actually complex, global affairs that would not exist without centuries of colonialism and violence and mythology. Most Merchant-Ivory movies were written by a German-born, Delhi-based Booker-prize-winning novelist named Ruth Prawer Jhavbala, and it is her voice that resonates most in the adaptations of Henry James and Forster, it is her prose that sparkles off the tongue in A Room With A View. As legend has it, the first time Jhavbala met James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, who approached her to adapt one of her novels to film, she pretended to be a housemaid so that she wouldn’t have to speak with them. In the end, though, they collaborated on over 20 films, and Merchant and Ivory acknowledged that Jhavbala’s contributions were invaluable when it came to making their films expansive and odic to history. Merchant once said, “I am an Indian Muslim, Ruth is a German Jew, and Jim is a Protestant American. Someone once described us as a three-headed god. Maybe they should have called us a three-headed monster!"
Rose perfumes are also many-headed monsters; they tell stories of romance and manners and adventure and love and deceit and war and blood and wealth and bankruptcy and time, and they carry with them the (literal) crushing weight of all the effort required for roses to make their way from thorny stems into each bottle. Most of the rose oil that goes into fine perfumes these days is either from the Damascus Rose (which is harvested in Bulgaria, India, Turkey, China, and Syria) or Rosa Centifolia (which hails from Morocco and Egypt, and in rare cases, the south of France) -- if you are smelling a rose perfume with real rose in it, then you must know that the flowers that died for your bottle have already endured an epic worthy of an opera, a history full of theft and terror and desire and compulsion. Humans have been cultivating roses in gardens for over 5,000 years. The Romans used them as confetti at lavish parties; the Plantagenets and Lancasters fought a brutal war in the 1400s in which they killed each other at close range in armor bearing a red or white rose; in the 1600s rosewater was so prized that it became legal tender. Napoleon’s bored wife Josephine staged her own mini-floral offensive while her husband was slaughtering people abroad; she cultivated the largest collection of roses ever seen in France from 1804-1810, bringing in at least 250 new varietals (being An Empress With A Hobby had its advantages: the French navy was encouraged to confiscate rose seeds from foreign soil and bear them to her over the seas). Roses contain within their velvety folds the story of most of human history, and I am frankly surprised that no industrious 90s filmmaker made a multi-generational saga about the journey of a single bud across the ages, because it would have probably killed with the Academy (and I mean, American Beauty did, in fact, use well-placed petals and the name of a pillowy, hot pink rose strain to win the Oscar -- in that film, roses became a pungent metaphor for the gap between longing and fulfillment in middlebrow American life; the rose is the “I will sell this house today” of flowers, the ceaseless perfectionist dream that then withers and crumbles to dust).
But, back to the rose perfume at hand: Amouage’s Opus X is a fragrance inspired by another opulent, far-reaching nineties saga film, Francois Girard’s gushy valentine to fiddlin’, The Red Violin. Opus X was dreamed up by Christopher Chong, the creative director of Amouage, the (comically) expensive, over-the-top line with headquarters in the Sultanate of Oman (though it really spans the world: Chong is Hong Kong born, raised in New York, and now lives in London). When the scent came out in 2016, he told the press that he designed Opus X (the tenth and final scent from the ornate Library Collection, in which, according to marketing speak, “Each fragrance has been given a ‘code', an Opus number, reflecting its status as a completed work within a greater collection”) with this film, and only this film, in mind.
For those who haven’t seen The Red Violin, allow me to summarize its overripe wonders for you: it is two-hour rococo tone poem that spans five countries and four centuries and is all about the travels of a rare violin that was varnished in the blood of a fictional young Italian woman who died in childbirth. I know, the viscera varnish is the big reveal, and I do apologize for spoiling it, thought I will say that there is also a breathless, twisty heist element to the film involving a snooty Canadian auction that I will not ruin and which you can only truly appreciate if you watch the film all the way through. But I had to mention the blood dye here, because it is so essential to what makes the red violin red, that glossy lacquer of death, the crimson shellac of a ghost. The dead woman whose platelets stain the instrument was named Anna Bussotti, the wife of a master strings craftsman in 1681, and the film follows the odyssey of his most precious violin after it leaves his shop. This is all told through a somewhat convoluted, very 90’s-era structure of a creepy tarot reading that Anna conveniently gets from an old crone on the day of her death. The wheezy eld pulls card after card, and we zoom into the future of the violin based on her predilections: the instrument falls into the hands of a Mozart-like orphan prodigy in twee little knickers in 1790s Vienna, a roving band of Romani troubadours, an opium-addict virtuoso in 1890s England who is basically Dirtbag Percy Shelley with a bow who literally fucks his mistress while composing solos because all Romantics were Dirtbag Lotharios, and a woman in 1960s China who attempts to hide her love of Western music from Communist authorities (The Red Violin is also an homage to Western culture as the Best culture, which is very nineties and does not hold up well; see: Forrest Gump). These stories all converge in the aforementioned present-day Montreal auction where a bunch of loosely connected randoms want to buy this funky faux-Strad, including Samuel L. Jackson, who we are supposed to believe is a renowned appraiser of violins (sure, why not) who knows everything in the world about glaze.
When I was 15, I was absolutely undone by this movie, for all the reasons that 15 year old girls are undone by movies: it had handsome men sweating out concertos, it had sweeping shots of meadows and medieval lore about Great Art, it had a haunting score that, when you listened to it alone late at night, made you feel immediately melancholy, which is a key find for a teenager all up in her emotions.
These days, The Red Violin is mostly remembered for that score; the main theme still pops up on symphony bills as a way to showcase young violinists with something to prove. It was the only aspect of the film to win an Oscar -- in 2000, John Corigliano’s suite beat out Thomas Newman’s bouncy one for American Beauty, practically the only award American Beauty lost that night. And with good reason; the way Joshua Bell played his solos (written in a swirly Baroque style called “chaconne,” for what it’s worth) made him a national name, and for a brief besotted period in tenth grade I (and many girls I knew) bought every Bell recording I could find in the classical section of Sam Goody. I can remember tearing up behind the wheel of my station wagon when he played “Anna’s Theme,” thinking in my mushy adolescent brain about how she died so that music could live! and how poignant that was and how important and selfless. Of course, I now see all of the narrative manipulations that got me there, but, like Titanic, The Red Violin is a film explicitly made for teenagers, no matter how old you are when you first see it. It taps directly into the most maudlin, plable self, the part that thinks that being drawn naked on a doomed ship is the most romantic thing that can ever happen.
Opus X taps into this same sapling self; the yearning without object, the yearning just to yearn. This perfume is the biggest, fluffiest, most overblown rose concoction I have ever smelled in my life -- it contains four different types of natural rose smushed into one bottle, plus an added metallic rose (they call it a “blood” note), plus a huge glug of varnish accord, which smells like acetone and tempura paint, plus a bunch of other notes crammed into the bottom including oud and ylang-ylang (aka butter with flowers fried in it) and weirdest of all, an aromachemical called ambrarome, which is a very expensive ambergris simulacrum. There is So Much Happening in this perfume that it is almost obscene. It clobbers. It whacks your nose off. The first time I smelled it, I laughed out loud. Maybe because all of a sudden, I was 15 again. Maybe because this perfume is the olfactory equivalent of all those grand movies in the nineties that tugged right on the heartstrings of a numbed monoculture; of all of the crane shots of ancient city squares and velvet capes and brutal deaths that we were taught were worth it because they affirmed some vague poetry of our existence. This perfume attempts to be an epic, but it is really a backlot creation made with splash tanks and flood lights. It is a teenager’s idea of walloping beauty. It is kissing on a ship’s bow and being caressed by a violin bow. It is schmaltz and bathos and sentimentality. And, yet, it is still one of my favorite perfumes of all time. Here’s what I suggest: wear it when you know you will be alone for an entire night. It is a melodrama bomb and will unleash every trite, cornball, immature feeling you’ve ever had. You might want some privacy for that.
Rose & Dragon, Carnier -HF
Sex is objectively embarrassing, and always uncool. Although often coded as the thing that makes some people cool and others uncool (consider the popularity of calling over-earnest fake journalists on twitter “virgins,” for example), and seen as a signifier of grown-up sophistication, sex is actually the opposite. It is among the most childish, perpetually teenage, absolutely cringe-worthy things that we do. Sex disallows both the formal patina of manicured small talk and the cynical, frictionless, lol-nothing-matters pose of carelessness. Something has to matter; someone has to care. Even the most vanilla, lights-out-eyes-closed missionary sex is physically abject, completely objectively disgusting, and a form of role-playing. The most joyless, nameless, one-hour-stand is still unavoidably sincere, a split-second of buoyant willingness to believe entirely in something, to give yourself over to something, to want, and therefore be vulnerable.
Sex is embarrassing in the same way that fairy tales and romance novels and Renaissance Faires are embarrassing. All of these very embarrassing things are associated with roses, and this are the kind of rose - writ large, in a stupid LARP-y faux-medieval curlicued font, with cartoonish thorns painted around it - that Carnier’s Rose & Dragon smells like. It smells like wanting to fuck in a corset, wanting to be the princess in the tower. It smells like saying something incredibly stupid and suggestive about roses and their thorns. It smells like those Anne Rice erotica stories about sleeping beauty that many of us read as teens because we were willing to read anything that had sex in it.
From a young age we talk about sex in euphemisms and in silly voices, in vulgar and avoidant jokes. We do this because we are afraid of the way in which sexual desire forces us to face ourselves, the way in which it leaves us unarmored, how it reveals us to ourselves. Who we are when we want, who we are when we’re in bed with someone, who we are unguarded and sweaty and sticky and naked, is rarely a person we would claim in daylight, People make up contortionist excuses, both awkward and elegant, to try to disprove this essential embarrassment, this equation that never comes out clean, bending a whole identity around submission or dominance, around pain or pleasure, around type and turn-ons, fetish and accessories. But all these are in the end more avoidances, more ways of talking behind our hands, looking for codes, for anything to avoid resolving our sexual selves with our public selves, for anything that allows us not to admit that doing so might not be possible.
Online discourse talks a lot about shaming around sex - slut-shaming and kink-shaming and other shamings around sexual identities. We should certainly fight and fight relentlessly to make sure that our sexual identities can never be used against us legally or socially in a larger sense. But in our interpersonal relationships, and in our relationships with ourselves, perhaps there is something to be said in defense of shame. There’s something to be said for failing to resolve our most private selves with our public declarative identities, giving up on elegant language to tell the world in definitive terms exactly how we like to fuck. Perhaps we gain something when we refuse to turn these confessions into information as blankly unremarkable as what neighborhood we live in, our hair color, or where we grew up. Shame is the thing that makes us squirm, the small and gory-eyed horrors we carry around in secret, the ways in which we are still capable of surprising ourselves. If we can be embarrassed, then we can stop being bored; if we can be afraid to admit something or unable to articulate something, then we can feel certain we are sincere and original, not formed by committee or suggestion. Perhaps the parts of ourselves that we find most profoundly shameful, the parts that it is impossible to share beyond sickeningly intimate moments are our truest selves. Maybe. But maybe, instead, sex shows us that the self is mutable, and the strange embarrassments of sexual desire remind us that self-definition is murky, and belongs to no one but ourselves, free of the marketplace of public definition.
Rose and Dragon smells like these flailing and laughable attempts at sexual self-definition, like the cosplay-nerd idea of The Sex, knights and dragons and princesses and sexy vampires, like suggestive drawings of thorns and the heaving bodices of women on the cover of romance novels. This might sound like I’m saying that Rose & Dragon isn’t good. That couldn’t be less the case at all. It is incredibly good, a gigantic, over-the-top chameleon of a rose, a swooning blood-stained love letter. It’s really embarrassing. It’s embarrassing in the same way that the things it is embarrassing to talk about are also often the things that are far and away the most enjoyable. The center of the perfume is thick, heady Bulgarian and Turkish roses - similar in their swaggery wildness to Isparta’s roses, but giving and effusive where Isparta is elusive and withholding. Around this rose center, it wraps scents of leather and resin and spice. It wants to smell like danger, but what it really smells like, right underneath its dressed-up exterior is - with notes of cumin and cinnamon and strawberry - food, and warmth, and home. The way it smells is like someone you love, someone entirely safe and familiar and known, dressed up in a silly costume, pretending to be someone dangerous. No one is fooled, and the whole thing is incredibly embarrassing, too much, too sincere, too on-the-nose. But it’s also, of course, exactly what you wanted. So often what we want is the pretense of things, the game, the imaginary within a small and homely set of boundaries. We say that we want danger, but really we want tiny, adorable obstacle courses, not wild adventures but little scavenger hunts that give us time to get home before dark, a moment of mediated fear and then a long evening of sharing warm, spicy food with someone we have known for a long time.
This perfume pretends to smell like big violent tales about dragons and princesses, but what it really smells like is curling up in a warm apartment and binge-watching a popular television show about those things. There’s a very very popular TV show on Sunday nights that’s mostly about sex and dragons, one with a staggering viewership so large that it’s nearly impossible to argue that it’s just “for nerds.” Nevertheless, the show is deeply nerdy, and extraordinarily embarrassing, and absolutely capacious in its appetite for violence and fucking. There’s a family (a “house”) in the show whose sigil is a rose, and the script wastes absolutely no opportunity to talk in really stupid and obvious metaphors about how the rose only looks delicate, about how the rose has thorns. The family’s son is also one of the few gay characters on the show, another coded association common for roses throughout history. All of these things are supposed to be edgy and violent and dangerous, but the show airs on Sunday at 9pm, when what we want most from television is for it not to scare us but for it to ameliorate the fear baked into Sunday night, a thing much darker and more terrifying than zombies or dragons or a bunch of dressed-up kings and queens murdering each other. Often what we think is danger is actually comfort; often what we think is fearsome is actually adorable. This is a perfume that’s meant to smell like a rose with all its thorns suggestively dripping blood. And it does smell like that, sure, but it also smells like a warm, safe apartment where someone you love is cooking you dinner.
AND SIX MORE!
Rachel's Recs:
Hi Wildflower, Dusty Rose: A brand new launch from the brilliant Brooklyn perfume Tanwi Nandini Islam, Dusty Rose is a partnership with a Greenpoint vintage dealer of the same name, and it is designed to smell like hunting around in a consignment store for a treasure. Tanwi and Maresa Ponitch (aka Dusty Rose) launched the scent at Dry Down Live this month, and we immediately fell in love with it. The cedar note smells like a sachet in an old closet, and it dries down to the powdery softness of old lace.
Roses de Chloe: This is an example of a flanker (the perfume equivalent of a sequel) that I like better than the original. It smells like roses ground up with the leaves and stems left in -- there is something funky and vegetal about it, and not at all proper, even with the prim little pink grosgrain ribbon on the bottle. It smells like roses chilling inside a flower shop refrigerator.
Roja Dove, Rose: Roja Dove, likely England’s best perfumer, or at least most decorated (go read this profile, now) spent years and years and years working on this soliflore, trying to capture the rose in isolate in its purest form. And guys, he did it. He really did it. This is 100% verisimilitude single red long stemmed rose translated into a liquid you can wear. That’s what it is, that’s all it is, and it is a marvel tbh, and you can cop a sample at Surrender to Chance, because you deserve at least one nice thing in this hellscape of a news week.
Helena's Recs:
Hippie Rose, Heeley: Hippies smell like money. The name of Heeley’s Hippie Rose makes you think it should smell earthy and dirty, but it’s actually clean and beautiful, a big house in Laurel Canyon with a garden getting in over the walls, with the long doors thrown open to the view, and then the smell of the ocean just out of sight. It’s expensive loose clothing, bare feet, and sunsets that feel like they were ordered up bespoke to match the dinner settings.
Rrose Selavy, Maria Candida Gentile: The afternoon of the Drydown’s Roses event a few weeks ago, I had sprayed every one of the rose perfumes in our sample packs, and a few others, on some part of my arms - I ended wearing about twelve different rose scents at once. When I walked into the event, someone asked me if I was wearing this perfume. This is apt - Candida’s celebration of rose, named for Marchel Duchamp’s tongue-in-cheek alter ego, is rose in excess, a piling on of every type of rose at once, an explosion of roses.
Tobacco Rose, Papillion Artisan Perfumes: Roses in buried in the dirt, rose petals ground into the floor of a smoky bar at the end of the night, the smell of a rose mingling with the smell of the end of autumn in France when old-fashioned farms still burn the fields. This is an earthy, hands-on fragrance, a dirty rose, a rose that stains your clothes and lingers, stinking up your hair the next morning, a rose reminding you of the dark earth out of which it grew.