The Unbearable Whiteness of Hiking (ROUND 1)
scent of the day: Narjis Noor, by Elkhaldi (and Tauhid)
Stunning springtime scent of yellow flowers mating in the sun—think: artisinal daffodil soap. Absolutely stunning doughy nectar and tobacco vibes from the narcissus. I love when flowers go doughy like heliotrope and here the narcissus does just that. It is one of the best in the line. Vegetal pollen musk that many will associate with soap because this is exactly what at least nonartisanal soaps are trying to capture. Osmanthus provides as suedy body and ramps up the yellow floral feel with subtle impressions of peach.
My partner hates this fragrance with a passion: said I smell like an old man in an old-age home who has shit and pissed himself repeatedly. It was a visceral reaction. This—unfortunately, in light of that—is in running for my favorite Elkhaldi and is vying for my top 20 of all time. It makes sense that it would. It has musk—check. It has yellow florals, which I really like for the nectar and sun and even weediness and leathery they can show. It has a variety of ouds—check. It is animalic (female-taint jasmine, and the furry-pelt kashmiri musk)—check. It has Persian-style shamama spices—check.
I am tremendously smitten with this one. It brought me back to the first Elkhaldi’s I smelled, which are remain at the top: Civet Regale and Ghazali Finale. The star of the show of course are the florals: fuzzy-peach osmanthus; narcotic-grundle jasmine; shag-tobacco narcissus; spiced-herbs shamama (saffron and bay leaf and definitely cinnamon). But these are grounded in ouds: fermented plum Cambodian; unsweet-tar Burmese oud (very similar to what I get in Mongolian Mriga); woody-incense Vietnamese Oud.
The closest fragrance I have to this is Jinx’s Rayong Fleur (a decant). Both are spicy-soapy yellow floral fragrances anchored in oud (especially cherry-tobacco Cambodian) and musk (especially creamy-leather Kashmiri). Rayong is a nice scent but Narjis does the job better. Rayong goes a bit more weedy and waxy (hipster-arthouse vintage) whereas Narjis Noor goes more petals and musk (authentic-musky vintage)—both things I like. Both go into the territory of grandma dress gentrifier whites (yes, even the “males”) on fixed gear bikes and cowboy boots smelling of yellow floral soap with a sort of vegetative costus-like rootiness. But—with maybe how the spices work with the musk (I don’t know yet)—Narjis goes more like biological woman in that same situation whereas Rayong feels like a trans woman on that same bike—a trans woman ready to ruin the career of any comedian or professor daring to dead name or misgender or state facts and statistics “unsettling for vulnerable populations”; a trans woman bearded to all circus hell and yet dying to use the girl potty at any establishment (if not to ruffle some pedophile juices, then at least to ruffle some political feathers).
The difference comes down to the floral accord that rising from the melange of yellow floral ingredients. The Jinx is more like dandelion whereas the Elkhaldi is more like daffodil (narcissus, narjis). While both dandelion and daffodil are iconic spring florals that share green and yellow floral accords and a mating garden impression buzzing with bees in the sun, their scent profiles diverge in texture and intensity. Dandelions are defined by their bitter weedy edge (which is why the Jinx seems more like a garden overrun by weeds and thereby more in the direction of Parfum d’Empire’s Mal-Aime, Mal-Aime mixed with a bit of that alluring cigarette-ash-pesticide I get from Rasasi’s Tobacco Blaze). Daffodils, on the other hand, are characterized by a more elegant floral sweetness with hay-like undertones. The difference are small between the two fragrances but you can really divide them by the difference between dandelion and daffodil. Dandelion is more bitter and milky and smoky whereas daffodil is more sweet and floral and haylike. Dandelion is more herbal and rugged whereas daffodil is powdery and sophisticated. While dandelion does have honey vibes, the stemminess is font and center. Daffodil on the other hand is much more the petals: honeyed and full of sunshine.
Another way to put it is like this. It is like the difference between the look and feel of real 70s cinema vs the contemporary hipster odes to that era whose flannel and crab fisherman beanies, whose opiod problems and deckhand Navy tattoos, make them—no matter how real their penchant for eating Vienna sausages and corned beef hash right from the can—just about as blue-collar as Springsteen. The Jinx is the Platonic shadow cast though a hipster lens whereas the Elkhaldi feels closer to the real deal, closer to the eidos. The cinema analogy really does apply to the differences between the two fragrances. The authentic 70s cinema had erratic and organic grain whereas the modern homage had a digital overlay to emulate grain and give that throwback gritty vibe (but which often comes off to perfect in some sense to be authentic: too evenly distributed or whatever). While a real 1975 film might look a bit dusty or washed out in color (desaturated earthy palette), a Tarantino homage to that era will often have hyper-vibrant yellows and reds that look like a 1970s magazine ad rather than a 1970s movie. The modern homages are try-hard (not necessarily bad) and so use all this stylized lighting to scream: this is the 70s: heavy yellow and orange filters with a toss in of audible pops and anamorphic lens flares here and there to mimic the film flaws of the era. And yet because the underlying digital image over which all these 70s-makign filters are overlaid is so sharp, the superimposed “softness” can sometimes feel like a blurry filter rather than a natural optical limit like in the case of the real thing.
Yes, that is the key difference between Rayong Fleur and Narjis Noor. Narjis comes off like the original Shaw Bros Kung Fu film (say, Five Deadly Venoms) whereas Rayong Fleuer comes off like a Tarantino homage or 70s exploitation (say, Kill Bill). That makes good sense in general. The whole Jinx style is that arthouse throwback aesthetic.
If Narjis had more of the civet of the Jinx I think it would be even better. But, despite my impressions of the fragrance (artisanal soap sitting under sun in a yellow floral dominated garden),several people have told me that this already comes off as fecal as it is. So that could be overkill. I have Elkhaldi’s civet paste, though. I could just layer—and yes, that needs to be done.
*Let’s workshop this poem about a moment in the woods where close attention to what surrounds us begins--almost unbidden--to press against the exceptionalist assumptions concerning where we stand.
The Unbearable Whiteness of Hiking
How deep must delusion run to stand among fallen trees, trunks splitting into decay,
and fail to grasp that, beneath the differentiating details (causal ripples to and from),
you share not just their fate (death) but their ultimate significance, their whole point?
“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)
