The Last Vestiges (ROUND 9)
scent of the day: Sunshine Man, by Amouage
Marzipan tobacco, plus flambeed orange brandy on the rocks, plus herbal mint burned into an ash—that is what I get here. i suspect all midnight collection (this, Beach Hut and Bracken) have mint in some form—although here it is lavender giving mint mainly. Hay tobacco settles in after more gourmand opening that is a sort of sweet lavender parallel to what we get in Naxos—and luckily no nasty amberwoods like in Naxos.
Maruyama has a nice connection to this. The connection has to do primarily with sotolon, a sweet-savory chemical. In Maruyama the sotolan comes priomarily from loveage root whereas here it comes from immortelle. At high concentrations, sotolan smells intensely of curry, fenugreek, and celery. At lower concentrations, it transforms into maple syrup, burnt sugar, and tobacco. Maruyama is more toward the former—the celery especially loud there because lovage framse its sotolon with phthalides, a chemical family responsible for the green-earthy savory aroma of celery and angelica root. Here in Sunshine Man the maple syprup and hay comes out—big autumn vibes (big enough that I might also suspect that liatrix is in here) because immortelle frames its sotolon with neryl acetate and beta-diketones, these providing a honeyed-tobacco and baked hay feel. Both frags, via sotolan, give an herbaceous warmth. Neither goes curry but in Maruyama one thinks of hot soup and here one things of sunwarmed hay. Beneath the savory exterior of both lovage and immortelle is, rooted in sotolan, a syrupy sweetness or torched sugar vibe.
There is a butter-melted in hot syrup vibe here. But weirdly this is more like margarine than butter in smell and texture. I get straw, straw desiccated by sun, and yet margarine overlay. no marine notes at all in the beginning, except what comes from the suggestion of water from the vacation vibe. Juniper berry struggles to cut through the syrup but does so enough to impart an iciness thst gives this otherwise warm orange brandy, warm in itself and warm with the feeling of having been flambeed, the feel of being on the rocks.
I almost get, and this might be a perfect way to capture this fragrances divisive weirdness, a bulletproof brandy on the rocks. But bulletproof I mean it in the coffee sense: spiked with butter. Except here it is not butter but margarine—melted margarine dumped inside and quickly coagulated on the ice. That is a queasy, nearly disgusting image. It would be disgusting just with butter. But margarine takes it to the next level. Do not take this to mean I do not like this fragrance. I do. But that does capture things pretty precisely.
*Let’s workshop this poem about a pocked-marked meth head (eyelashes loaded up on mascara like one of those NASCAR redneck slores) out for cash from her mother, who watches her toddler each day
*Worked over especially the first stanza.
The Last Vestiges
Happy Meal box battered (fries stiff, having clocked a night’s share of miles), the Stage-1 meth-mouth mom sighs at the door. Into her childhood she whirlwinds (“Heyyy my big boy!”), scooping up the TVed toddler in a centrifugal hug that streaks away her prom gaze dusted on the mantel. Unlike that pit reek cartoonified by curbside Febreze, that fluttering cheer cartoonified by curbside mascara (and by a toke, coughs held back, in the visor mirror) wilts in on itself mid breath. Cash must be coaxed out of Granny, shifting kitchen items.
She does that teen sway, one foot behind the other— men, smoking against the car, framed in the window, crank-cricket vigils etched in scorched-earth craters surfacing on her too: “Mom, it’s an allergy. I told you.” Too fast the day approaches when—against the fixity of that reek, too contagious to stand—the transience of that cheer, no less contagious, will flower so florid that the boy, little fingers fretting the toy’s contours, will understand the necessity of becoming immune to hope at a level of consciousness before his time.
