1- my photo, 2 - miss b muses
There is something about the nature of European greenery - it is so, so much more green than their Australian counterparts. Down under we do blue and orange very well, but it has to be said that England and France and Italy have the monopoly on lush, swollen, over-ripe green. They just have more water over there. When October begins to wind down and the weather takes on the kind of oppressive heat that engenders laziness and copious tall glasses of cool, cool water, the only thing you want is green. You long for green and everything that it means. Green is the perfect refuge from heat, it is something to stretch out and recline under, a respite from blazing heat, a reminder that not everything in summer is sun and sand and surf.
That's why I love Diptyque's philosykos so much. If a perfume could be described as a colour, then Philosykos is green. It has a top note of ripened foliage, watery and fresh, and the dry down reveals that bloom of fig that adorns the fragrance's label. The scent is milky and white, with hints of coconut (B so aptly remarked that it has a touch of the suntan lotion to it) and cassis adding depth to the endless green, punctured by hits of the fig throughout. It's simple, deceptively so. There's nothing tricky going on, no fussy citrus or spice. This fragrance is nothing more than it proclaims to be - a study of green in all its forms; tall trees, short grass, ripe figs, crisp leaves. It's clean sheets, freshly-washed hair and rolled up sleeves. Philosykos has nothing to prove. Its lightness and clarity and simplicity do not reflect a lack of imagination but rather an understanding of desire. Philosykos is a Vermeer painting, a girl with creamy skin standing next to a window where the light is streaming in and the sky is stretching out, endless and blue. It is the perfect fusion of green and fruit, the natural progression from leaf to bulb, the base notes rounding out the belly of the fragrance until all you can smell are the white-washed walls of Crete and a bowl of figs. Even the slight sourness, the acrid notes that creep in during the dry down are okay. They have that bitter, chalky flavour of greenery that was never meant to be eaten; grass and some leaves come to mind. They are so wrong that they are right.
The thing about perfume - good perfume - is that no matter how ephemeral and how visceral the scent in its physical form may be, it lingers on. Nothing good lasts. We know that. How many times have I mourned for necklaces, flung across rooms at parties and lost forever, shoes with the soles worn in? Perfume is the same, but heightened. Fragrance is only the mere essence of a thing and not the thing itself, despite everything. And yet good perfume (and we know there is a distinction) does endure. It is in the hint of it that lingers over clothing, the jolt in your memory when you smell it again, the picture in your mind that remains, always, after the first spray of a scent that you truly love. Even though I don't wear it anymore I will never forget Stella by Stella McCartney. My first fragrance, it was sensual in a way my converse-wearing self was not, but it had a whiff of nostalgia to it - of fields of roses and cows that needed milking and a freshly baked loaf of bread. It was the perfect marriage of youth and sophistication, a teenager wearing her mother's shoes. I loved it. And today, on the way home, I got a strong hit of it as a teenage school girl sat down on the bus in front of me. Nothing good lasts. But a great perfume will do a damn good job of trying.
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