Endgame Wegovy (ROUND 1)
scent of the day: L’Heure Exquise, by Bortnikoff
L’Heure Exquise (2018, Dmitri Bortnikoff)—a champaca-oud fragrance, objectively one of the best Bortnikoff has ever created and likely the best exemplar of his DNA, that bridges the boozy-fruit tobacco of Tabac Doré and Sayat Nova with the fermented-chocolate tobacco of Oud Monarch and Lao Oud and the bubblegum vibe of Oud Loukoum to make a chewy composition with a balsamic class rivaling Ormonde Jayne’s Tolu and yet with a naturalism rivaling the best artisinal houses (from Olympic Orchids all the way to Ensar)
—opens with a fleeting but forceful burst of Christmas-hay Indonesian oud (perfectly captured in Areej’s History of Indonesian Oud) before a flickering radiance of citrus-eucalyptus greenery (Earl-Grey-like bergamot better then Unknown Pleasures, bitter-honey neroli better than Teatro alla Scala, lemon-camphor cardamom better than Tobacco Vanille) alights a bouquet of waxen florals (apricot-cream champaca, honeyed-tea jasmine sambac, musky-green Indian jasmine),
a Juicy-Fruit bouquet—quintessential Bortnikoff, although here the magnolia comes in the form of champaca (a benchmark champaca, up there with Fiona)—dusted with bittersweet cacao and shrouded in the medicinal haze of tolu-balsam-varnished driftwoods (cedar mainly, but also pine and camphorwood) now charred in an earthen pit along with patchouli-dirt roots and resins (clove-and-camphor-reinforced styrax, fungal-mossy myrrh, briny-mineralic ambergris, and a burnt-rubber trio of smoked-honey Vietnamese oud, smoked-clove Indonesian oud, and smoked-leather cypriol)—
the overall result being a gourmand-leaning floriental fragrance that, perfect for its dusk-and-dawn-hour name, perhaps best out of all my Bortnikoffs balances ethereal immortality and carnal decay (less purely otherworldly than the aqueous spectrality of Santa Sangre and yet not as dankly terrestrial as the compost-laden Lao Oud), a balance that (as many have reported) smells up close more like musty-minty tobacco and at a distance like the juicy-fruit gum of Jubilation XXV (and sometimes even the pink bubblegum we get in ELDO’s Archiv 69 or Lush’s Tank Battle) in what makes in my mind almost for a sprayable version of Yaaseen’s Thai Melange (its jasmine-neroli morning-time sibling);
the overall-result being, in other words, resinous-floral animalic that really does bring me to that twilight time on an early spring day when, as the Earth twirls toward night and a paused feeling seems to overtake everything (including squirrels and trees and even cars), the kinetic blue of the sky yawns into lazy pink and the oblique angle of light, highlighting the peaks and sharpening the veins of leaves, conjure cinematic shadows that plump foliage into juicy life from the washout of a higher sun, machine and organism alike (not so much enlightened as perhaps simply too tired to keep clenched any longer) stretching free from the choppy staccato of noon and from the me-me-me (scamming, gathering, manipulating, eating) perhaps to behold in their own way the cotton-candy clouds (a perfect image for this fragrance, even when sliced by city power lines too gold-dusted not to feel like an intentional part of the painting).
*Let’s workshop this poem about corporate opportunism as Hollywood's praise for obesity, "one small battle against white supremacy," slams hard into the reality of blown-out knees and blown-out hearts.
Endgame Wegovy —For my perfume pal, Abayomi Siffre
Fat praise (“Werk!”), Oscars recruitment jingle for graveyards, is not all gross calamity:
just think of big medicine, squirmy as a diabetic denied a toilet, waiting in the wings—
the bariatric wings—for the craze to blow out like knees so it could drop its control-Z.
