Although the results are terribly inconsistent, I can't fault the imaginative and sometimes elaborate stories and inspirations behind the 'alternative' French fragrance house Etat Libre d'Orange's scents. Fat Electrician is based on the imagined tale of a beautiful mid-Western boy seeking his fortune in New York, only to find himself old, overweight and unfulfilled. The resulting vetiver may be unexciting but the bittersweet inspiration is quite beautiful. Jasmin et Cigarettes fares better, truly encapsulating the smoky glamour of Hollywod's Golden Age and screen sirens and the notorious Secretions Magnifique truly, shockingly smells of human bodily fluids.
My favourite in the range, and my current scent obsession, is the heady, heavy Vierges et Toreros - virgins and matadors, if you will. I discovered it at one of Odette Toilette's marvellous Scratch+Sniff events (where I came second in the evening's competition with the haiku that I wrote about it - a tasteless imagining of Princess Grace's last moments, prompted by the fragrance's car interior notes).
The inspiration for the fragrance (which is printed on a lovely little booklet accompanying the bottle) is the tale of a matador deflowering a virgin and then taking the bloodied bed sheets into the heat of the bullring the following day. A bullring somewhere in Spain, rather than Birmingham's shopping centre. The tale is no less tasteless than my Princess Grace story perhaps, but imbued with more of a brutal romanticism, I think.
And the scent itself is both brutal and romantic at the same time. It's supposed to encapsulate the nature of both characters with rich, virginal florals alongside dark, masculine leather and spice. The fleshy tuberose and ylang-ylang gradually seep up through the blast of nutmeg, pepper and cardamom and the whole effect is deliciously, deeply animalic - like a sweaty, leathery old beast with a garland of blooms around its neck, I suppose.
But what may sound strange or forbidding really isn't at all. Vierges et Toreros is exciting but very wearable - neither masculine nor feminine but warm, enveloping and curiously comforting as well. It's probably a bit too powerful for the office and a little certainly goes a long way. Yes, it's a raging bull that needs to be approached with some care but befriend it instead of stabbing at it with spiky sticks and you'll soon be skipping through fields of flowers together.
[by ANDREW]
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