Fuckable Cheekbones (ROUND 1)
SCENT OF THE DAY: Dia Man, by Amouage
Dia Man (2002, Bertrand Duchaufour) opens with a citrus-spice spritz (green cardamom, Herod-like cinnamon, and bitter orange merging into something as delicate as a rose-water hydrating mist) and an unexpectedly ebullient combo of musky labdanum and limonene olibanum
that serves as a low-resin red carpet for the aerated heart of petal-fresh florals (plum blossom imparting a silken-aqueous nuance of dewy berries, a faint fruitiness that reads like a watered-down version of what we get in Jubilation XXV; orris adding the creamy waxen presence of a near scentless candle, a creamy feel not too far from Honour Man; ylang-ylang, boosting that cream, setting the tropical location with its whispers of banana-cream depth; peony sprinkling the bouquet with a powder of weightless elegance),
these florals—even the peony (the prima ballerina despite her shocking petiteness)—never weighed down by the chypre-adjacent backbone that only on paper violates the watercolor glow of the flowery-incense whole (a glow soft and precious enough even for me to still characterize this fragrance after a year of experience as the smell of baby Christ’s breath, Jubilation XXV perhaps being the smell of the adult Christ’s breath):
vetiver, peony’s male co-star here, delivering (not too far from Cowboy Grass or is it Saint Vetyver?) a smoky vegetable-root feel (a more-carrot-bay-leaf-than-fresh-grassy feel that comes out especially if you layer a new dose on top of a dry-down spot), earthen but still light and nimble as a forest elf;
rosewood adding a violet-tinged velvetiness that amounts to a soft allusion to another dandy scent in the Amouage repertoire (the much louder, and much more Oscar-Wilde appropriate, Portrayal Man);
patchouli, woody-green rather than earthy-olive, adding depth without heaviness—or at least a signal of depth, which to creatures such as ourselves (Pavlovian, vulnerable to illusion, happy with simulation);
leather, supple and almost sheer, reinforcing an aura (especially with the help of vetiver, which is probably the main sour of leather impressions here anyway) reminiscent of a watercolor version of the spicier Bel Ami Vetiver;
the amber accord, bereft even of the slightest hint of benzoin-vanilla sweetness, presenting itself much more in the salty-mineralic manner of lab-simulation ambergris—
the overall effect being one of the rare Amouage releases (and perhaps more so than Lyric Man, Reflection Man, Beloved Man, Silver Man, and even Ciel Man) that sidesteps boisterous ostentation in favor a radiant restraint that could easily be seen as an Ormonde Jayne if it were blasted our with the some of Shoen’s iso-e-super variants;
the overall effect being, in other words, a floral-vetiver fragrance that makes me picture, because of its peony tinkle and delicate whisper, the baby Christ and yet oddly at the very same time, because of its really masculine clean vetiver and the surprising smokiness of the drydown, makes me picture a well-mannered aristocrat, an older Connery, in an breezy linen suit (perhaps a Panama hat shading his face and a white dress shirt still carrying the ghost of last night’s celebration) out on a dawn veranda looking out at a Thai lawn of expansive greenery, his magnetic presence of effortless luminosity seeming to draw even counterfactual others closer to catch any whispers of wisdom as he holds a spent pipe.
*Let’s workshop this poem about how humanitarian spectacle manufactures empathy by selecting victims whose helplessness is legible not just as need but as beauty coded through chimp-like mating desires.
Fuckable Cheekbones
Those who dunk seagulls in oil sludge to snap that cha-ching, that beach-scum struggle
to lift a wing, know it well: to stir telethon empathy into fury, the starving kid must be
cute—close as possible, beneath our self-deception, to what we stone others for seeing.
“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)
