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Post by Ainslie Walker

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Hello APJ-ers!

I hope you all had a great festive season and were surrounded by/heard from those you love. Also, that you found time to remember those who did not make it to this New Year. A reminder to ensure those you hold dear always know that you do. It’s too easy to be caught up in the “busy” and never stop to touch base.

I took a day to switch off and read a book that wasn’t about scents or perfume. This only seems to happen once a year and if I’m 100% honest, it did actually make mention of Dior’s Eau Sauvage! Last year it was Vivienne Westwood’s autobiography and this year it was Patti Smith’s Just Kids.

Book Deporitory

The book describes Patti and her soul mate Robert Mapplethorpe’s artistic lives and their evolving relationship from the late 60’s through to the late 80’s, predominantly in New York. Tenants of the infamous Chelsea Hotel – the heart of boundless bohemian ingenuity. Names of individuals who went on to become well known artists, poets, models, drag queens, playwrights, muses and musicians are bountiful throughout the pages. What a moment in history! The book runs in chronological order and references pertinent deaths and historical highlights of these epochal years. It’s easy to imagine being there as it is such a personal account. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, William Burroughs, Lou Reed/The Velvet Underground, Candy Darling, Edie Sedgwick, Allen Ginsberg, Vali Myers all get a mention, just to name a few.

Not mentioned above is of course Andy Warhol. His friends, work and The Factory scene weave in and out of the storyline and this led me to think about what fragrance I would scent him with.

Silver Musk by Nasomatto 2007

Silver Musk by Alessandro Gualtieri

Fragrantica

Parfumo gives these featured accords:
Top: Citric notes
Heart: Powdery notes
Base: Musk

I chose Nasomatto’s Silver Musk. Its clean, quirky and fuzzy, futuristic scent seems to fit Andy’s avant-garde style and pioneering ideas of the time. The scent creates an ambience of what people thought things would be like in the 2000’s when looking towards them from the 70’s/80’s. Remember the cartoon, The Jetson’s? Lifestyles like that. There is an ethereal and earthy beauty to this fragrance, which is only described on fragrantica as “musky.” To me there is white and grey ash, oak-mossy ozone, aluminium filings, lavender herb soap on clean skin, light tobacco and something coniferous like spruce, fir or pine. The drydown sweetens and smokes. Humming. Spacey. Aquatic. Elfin. Elegant. Volcanic. Mercurial. Otherworldly. Musky enough to have me imagining Warhol’s pale skin sweating gently under his polyester skivvy.

Flickr

I really love this one and gifted it to my dad last Christmas. Anyone who enjoys the eccentric molecule series and pheromones concept should try this clean musk…think Andy with his scruffy hair – the silver mop, wrapped in some sort of neat yet particular flared suit combo. Silver musk is like a polaroid, a snapshot of just one moment in the journey Afternoon of a Faun by Etat Libre d’Orange takes us on…. if the faun was trotting along somewhere silvery, mercurial and out in space.

Further reading: Nathan Branch and Scent For Thought
Libertine Parfumerie has $230/30ml with FREE Australian Delivery
LuckyScent has US$185/30ml + Samples

Tell me a celebrity or book character and a fragrance you’d love to douse them with!