Sufficient Reason Beneath the Stutters (ROUND 2)
scent of the day: Journey Man, by Amouage
Here we have a terpenic-tobacco fougère with the fresh-aromatic imprint of Morillas and the compositional-balance imprint of Negrin. Dusty tobacco, thrown in a big and airy ambroxan scent bubble, mixes with an impression of citrus-soap cleaner (bergamot, bigarade, neroli, lemongrass geraniol) sprayed on a copper basin (rosey-metallic from the geraniol and belt-buckle metal from the castoreum) in a Sichuan restaurant (the numbing combination of zesty Sichuan berries and cardamom) that has attached to it a Chinese medicine shop (cypriol, frankincense).
For all its various non-fougère notes—leather, limone-pinene frankincense, boot-polish cypriol—it is definitely a fougère in its fresh aromatic feel (very close to the arid-barbershop vibe of Epic Man) and in its central ingredients (bitter-oily citrus, metallic-rose geraniol, almond-hay tonka). Tobacco is a bridge note, since the tonka in traditional fougères already gave tobacco impressions, but juniper berry serves that bridge function as well, since the metallic glint and aromatic freshness of traditional fougères already anticipates something like juniper berry, which carries an icy-gin aspect to its aromatic freshness.
As a tobacco fougère, then, it definitely finds a family member in Tabac Vert—both holding, in fact, a spicy-green and bitter-citrus aura at all times. The resemblance only goes so far, though. Tabac Vert is like a time machine back into oakmoss heaven before fragrances got so bloated with ambroxan that it blinds everyone. Journey Man leans hard, very hard, into ambroxan, on the contrary. For that reason, it is much louder than most people realize. You can tell it is loud because they feel it in their mouth. But it is hard to tell by smell because, even for people who can smell ambroxan (many are blind to it), the brain tunes it out, its intense persistence notwithstanding. And that is why reports of Journey Man being weak go back right to the year of its release.
This ambroxan overload is unfortunate because Journey Man, in what it is trying to be if only you could reliably smell it, is one of the best tobacco creations in perfumery ever. Tabac Vert is so ordinary in comparison. But at the same time, I prefer Tabac Vert because of its oomph of mossy naturalism. Best would probably be to avoid putting your nose to the spray spot. One good news is that it does not go into the super-amber territory of Boundless, which is also stunning in its note combination but is not only sweeter than I like but fails big-time because of its amberwoody thrum. Although not as pleasant to me as Iso E Super, and although I do much prefer it in its natural form as nested with all the other ingredients one typically finds in ambergris, ambroxan is not one of the bad super-ambers that have destroyed perfumery.
Piney plus cypriol tobacco—yes, that is what we get here. Brighter and fresher than many tobacco scents, largely because of geraniol boosted into a sea-breeze haze by overdosed ambroxan. And yet it still has an earthiness largely rooted in cypriol. One of the best cypriols (dry woody, oud-mimic scent), along with Silver Oud. Because of the cypriol industriality, some see this as a distant cousin of Gucci Guilty Absolute (both created by the legend Alberto Morillas, along with legend Pierre Negrin). If they are, they are very distant cousins, their commonality rooted in transparent leather with a green-herbal-medicinal aspect, but very different still because (1) Journey Man does not go in the phenolic—rubbery, Band-Aid—way of GGA, and (2) the leather in Journey Man is that synthetic castoreum we get in various leathers, from Cuoium to Overture Man, and this makes it more metallic than GGA, which uses that lovely wood-leather aromachemical that we find in Bull’s Blood and Opus XI.
There is a closer connection, rooted in tobacco, to Tom Ford’s Tobacco Oud. The tobaccos—an herbal-spicy, dusty tobacco—are the same, despite the variety of other things going on. But still, they are distant cousins: Journey Man is a firebender scent, largely because of the Sichuan and bitter citrus, whereas Tobacco Oud, largely because of its oud accord and brown booze and patchouli, is an earthbender scent. Yes, Journey Man has cypriol, which—known by many as Persian patchouli—does tie it to earth like patchouli. But patchouli is darker and gives a damp earthiness of mulch, whereas cypriol has an industrial edge: black boot polish with a peppery-vetiver nuance. That industrial edge, plus all the ambroxan, throws the dusty tobacco into the air—a haze lit on fire by Sichuan.
This could be a reference fragrance for how cardamom can be done in perfumery, carrying subtle body-odor animalism to it, not just eucalyptus menthol (sort of how beeswax has a halitotic animalism to it, not just sweetness). This could even be a reference for a unique spin on leather. Indeed, it was hard for me at first ever to grasp that there was leather here. But really, it is the benchmark for Sichuan berry. You get this dusty tobacco and menthol leather underneath a fresh and fiery spiciness that the Sichuan gives, reminiscent in intensity, although not too much in profile, of Big Red gum.
Journey Man has absolutely grown on me, like most Amouage scents. At first, my brain was hyperfocused on cleaning-spray citrus pungency that, in my mind, covered both the tobacco and the leather. I did not understand how it was a tobacco. But now I see it in all its tobacco glory. And I see its leather now (cypriol plus synthetic castoreum)—a cardamom leather not too different from African Leather, albeit with a sour-stale side reminiscent of Sawlaj, as you will see if your brain is good at breaking compositions down into parts.
Like Tabac Vert, it gives you an unsweet, dry tobacco that is rare nowadays. For those who cannot stand the sickly sugary sweetness of Mancera’s Red Tobacco, this is a nice dry alternative. It is not super tobacco-forward at the opening; it develops slightly later, especially for a young nose. I find this very dry—nearly Epic Man dry, which I feel is one of the driest. I think it has a mass appeal, and yet without stooping to the super-amber extremes of Naxos, whose lavender-honey I still love but that I now see as too sweet and definitely too amberwoody.
*Let's workshop this poem about how the quantum foam view (which says subatomic particles enter and exit reality like beer bubbles) confirms, despite its chaotic surface, reality’s ultimate smoothness.
*Small tweak of ending this morning
Sufficient Reason Beneath the Stutters
Even if some particles materialize from and vanish into literal nothing, such that space
seems quantum-frothy rather than Einstein-smooth, still a panoptic smoothness remains
tacit in the rule that the greater the materialized particle’s energy the faster it vanishes.
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
