Luca Turin changed my life

Way back when, I would go to my favourite second-hand bookshop and then browse the second-hand magazine shop, before going for coffee. That was how I spent most Friday nights, because by the end of the work week I am usually tired and grumpy, and a little belligerent. One of my finds was The Emperor of Scent, a biography about Luca Turin. It is an A5-sized hardcover with a swirling dark cover that was hidden between the larger books in the Science section. I can't now remember what interested me about the book when I bought it but I am not exaggerating when I say it changed my life.

Luca Turin is a biophysicist turned chemist after following his interest in fragrances into the science (and industry) of scent. He has a delicate and trained nose, with an almost poetic style of writing that matches his liveliness. For example, take Angel, a perfume I wore in my late teens. I would maybe have said it was sweet and if pushed that it had a saltiness that reminded me of seawater. Says Turin:

"Angel certainly is a joke... a handsome resinous woody patchouli straight out of the pipes-and-leather-slippers realm of men's fragrance... in a head-on collision with a bold blackcurrant  and a screechy white floral. These two halves... share a campherous smell, which kills the possibility of cloying sweetness. Buy the perverse, brilliant original, but wear it only if you know how to tell the joke properly.

Now you are thinking, well, this is a bit like wine tasting. In a blind taste test, experts can rarely tell the difference between certain estates and vintages. because our senses are subjective.(Yes and no.) Honestly, I don't care. My nose agrees with his - when I need a pick-me-up, I visit a perfume counter, then describe and rank five perfumes before looking up his reviews. I rarely disagree, even when I seem to disagree. For example, Balmain's Ambre Gris. The bottle is innocuous and not publicised. The name is the name of a generic sandalwood base, so the scent is rather predictable. As Turin notes, in making a scent dominated by a single base, the result is diluted and disappointing. On the other side, you get what it promises: a single sandalwood note that lingers without changing.

Turin can break down scents into their ingredients so effortlessly I am tempted to call him a savant. (He says the skill only takes a few hours to learn. Maybe a few of his biophysics, chemistry-dabbling savant hours, yes. I bet you anything he plays a musical instrument and can cook.) Half of his review is usually devoted the technical details: the elements, the notes, the construction, history, even price. The other half is flowery comparisons that make you want to track down that fragrance immediately and never wear anything else - or track it down and then pour it down a drain.

On his five-star review alone, I asked my mom to pick up a bottle of Bvlgari Black on her flight back from Australia. I had become interested in darker scents via citrus. Luckily, it was love at first breath. I remember sitting at a small breakfast table next to the kitchen, in front of a window. Wrapping paper and ribbon higgeldy piggeldy on the table. I sprayed the perfume on my left wrist and smelt something so purple it may as well be black, with a smooth skin, that smelt like sweetened liquorice.  Now, having worn it sparingly for eighteen months, I would agree with Turin, who calls it "hot rubber" (in a good way). He continues:

"At different times, Black will strike you variously as a battle hymn for Amazons, emerald green plush fit for Napoleon's box at the Opera, or just plain sweet and smiling." 

He always explains his choices, making you feel like an expert by degree. The perfumist, he says, went one step closer than using a pair of contrasting bases to using trio. The result has no "top notes", so the scent does not change, only your perception of.

Bvlgari no longer makes Black and Bvlgari's Jasmin Noir makes me smell like a bog monster, so I am always on the hunt for another bottle (mine is dangerously low) or a new favourite. I already wear Cool Water (not the diluted women's version) by Davidoff. My shortlist includes:

• Balmain's Ambre Gris
• Gucci's Intense - I have 'blind' smelt this twice, having forgotten the brand; both times I could still smell a trace of it this morning and it still had the sweet darkness that is slightly sweeter than Black
• Michael Kors' Signature - the clean top note reminds me of a sharp herb or aloe; like Intense I smelt the perfume and forgot the name
• Yves St Lauren's Opium - legendary
• Issey Miyake's Limited Edition - which predictably is sold out

Trusting Turin and various Internet forums hosted by fan girls and boys of Black, I am awaiting a delivery of Patchouli 24 by Le Labo via my sister. Said fan girls swear that this is a good (although not complete) replacement for Black, although they said the same of Khorous by YSL, which (yes, me of Cool Water) find too much like a cologne, with occasional, more muted notes.

See how much fun this is? For me, at least. Maybe you should try it yourself.

Once upon a time, I said I wanted to become an Epicurean, thinking this might ground my nihilistic shades. Something outside of myself to get me to stick a forefinger in the air and feel the direction of the wind (does that even work?). This hobby of identifying and describing scents - nevermind wearing them - is that wind. They need words and I have many (not as many as Turin, but reading and comparing his descriptions is cathartic, too). These words as well as the scents helps me find and steady the parts of myself that find themselves here, and on and on.

Luca Turin changed my life. Perfume changed my life - and sometimes saves my life. My bookshop is in Jo'burg and I am in Cape Town now, where there are few second-hand bookshops and none as well-stocked or organised, leaving space on Friday nights for my new hobby.

This is what I wearing as I type this

PS. I have eight fragrances, most of them cheap knockoffs, most of them interesting:

• Black
• Cool Water
• Issey Miyaki's floral - magic
• Le Occitane's Magical Leaves - given to me by sister, with a soap; heady and rich; one of my winter daytime scents
• A knockoff of Cacharel's Anais Anais - although the base fragrances argue among themselves like most knockoffs, I enjoy that and I but can't say why
• DKNY's Be Delicious - sickly sweet, repeats on me and gives me a headache
• A knockoff of Lacoste's Play - I once had the original, given to me by a friend; makes it good for casual days
• The Body Shop's Sun Kiss - me summer daytime fragrance; like colour-dyed sugar water

I wish I were a fashion designer or scientist or...

Proenza Schouler

I am writing this post for this blog now, when I should be working, because a waitress in the restaurant I frequent asked if I am a fashion designer. I keep Pinterest open for when I take breaks. And I said, "I wish." And I thought, "I do wish."

There are two things I wish I had done: studied a science degree and found a way into fashion. I don't wish I had studied fashion or become a designer or become Dion Chang (I really truly do not), but I wish I had found my niche in the industry.

Flaming stars and captions to the lines of "You can do anything" flash overhead. No, no, you cannot do anything. Apart for things that are physically impossible, so much relies on luck. Being in the right place might be at the wrong time and vice versa.

People who can do something are often lucky: the right parents, right degree or internship, the right people and the drive. You can try for anything but you will only get somethings.

I am disillusioned. I have the dreams, the drive and I have spent the last ten years learning to be the best at what I do. I am pretty damn good, I get on with people and I try to be everywhere at all times. I am also pretty screwed up and Bipolar - thanks family tree.

It's not a deal-breaker, but it requires at least another person's worth of drive to get up in the morning, answer my phone or check my email. What I have left goes to eating properly and maintaining a routine - and that routine includes waking up at 10.00 and working until 1.00. What I want to do is curl up on my couch and read or draw or make origami mobiles.

Thanks, therapy. Before, my drive kept my head above water. I packed my distress away in literature and various self-destructive behaviours. I thought myself existed outside those shelves, but as it turns out it was mostly inside. We let that me loose and I made up for lost time. "Feel the fear," I pushed, because that is what I do. I do.

Lanvin

For a while it worked. Until it didn't. Until the distress and fear grew into utter despair and I couldn't do anything. Couldn't answer my phone or check emails or read or get excited about things. Depression isn't sadness; it is despair. It is being in a dark basement and knowing that this is your past and will be your future. Why bother answering phones? Why bother?

So, thanks Bipolar; thanks heredity; thanks therapy.

With one gesture of a magician, my drive is gone. I have to believe that being alive means that I have something to live for. Guilt? Fear? Fear of failing? FYI, I am failing, miserably. Congrats, therapy!

Fashion distracts me, as does learning about science and technology. I want to absorb it all. I want aesthetic and the satisfaction of making something and some sense of identity. I don't know that this, even if accumulated, is enough to make me want to live. It's something to do, while I fail at failing to live.

I meant this to be a gung-ho post: life is a series of planned and unplanned coincidences and we persevere. I wanted to say these things make living worth the darkness. But nope, they don't. They are a distraction and maybe this is as good as it gets so let's be glad for small things. I want my drive
back.

Alexander McQueen: post 1 of many

Only Alexander McQueen could be the subject of this first post. Because only Alexander McQueen anything. The man and the fashion house, the second his legacy. I imagine his ghost, freed on Halloween, trawling the archives of the last four years and nodding his head. (Not smiling. This man could convey emotion with a deadpan stare.)

This is my blogpost, so I won’t spend time on his background, influences blah blah. That is why Wikipedia exists, quite literally. What that site doesn’t tell you about is why I pin his dresses on to my Pinterest board ad nauseum.

Patrick Demarchelier | Vogue

It was love at first sight: women dressed in hundreds of golden butterfly wings, over variations of tight-fitting dresses – emphasised shoulders, ragged hems, excessive ruffles. Every dress is an in-joke: elegant and demure but self-conscious, constructed and confrontational.

When you pledge allegiance to the brand that is McQueen, you pledge all or nothing, bad with the good. Future lines use the bird feathers and butterfly wings, all dancing the dance of our in-joke. Full dresses of gold or silver and a suffocating chiffon veil, a bird’s wing stretching from the model’s throat, a fabric Mohawk. Soft scraps on tight leather bodices. Bad to the bone, not preacher bad.

The meaning of those first dresses hit me like a ton of bricks, to fling the hackneyed expression at you, like a Chagal painting once did. Like a song by Perfume Genius does or a James Meek novel or Hamlet. The meaning, to me? Devastation. The pretty face of everyday life with a nod to its true brutality. Horror laughing at us. No, forcing himself into our homes and sitting silent in our living rooms.

Except, in my home, he has a key and is annoyingly chatty.

My meaning, not his or yours, I get that. Still, part of me insists McQueen also lived with this sense of desolation in conflict with living and sewed it into every creation.

As evidence, perhaps, his suicide in 2010. He had tried overdosing twice before, but killing yourself is more difficult than most realise (more than 90% fail). Go big or go home. Don’t try, but do. He combined four methods: he overdosed, slit his wrists and hung himself. The fourth? There are rumours of asphyxiation. I’ll leave that to you to figure out.

Alexander McQueen in Vogue Italia

I get it. I see his suicide as an act of courage, not cowardice. In Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, he says “conscience makes cowards of us all”. Our tragic hero is more of a coward than we thought. He is saying that killing yourself is scary: even though living is a series of traumatic moments, there isn’t any guarantee that death is better than life (frying pan, fire). (Remember this next time someone uses the first line as some motivational slogan.)

My own words now: there’s some fear in failing to kill yourself, too. Of having lived that moment when you make the decision and carry it out, and have to remember it. That moment is one of pure desperation. Distress. Despair. Pure darkness that briefly has a pinprick of respite. Remembering it is worse than having to live. I am a coward, too.

Discovering that someone else has thought the same reviled thoughts is a shot of relief. These thoughts can’t be faked: when Hamlet talks about “the thousand natural shocks / that flesh is heir to…”, I hear him describe the daily traumas that are the return on investment of being alive. (Did you notice my euphemism? I am trying to avoid saying “being bloody meat”.)

The work of Alexander McQueen brings me out of myself. I recognise my awful secret in the world outside myself and see how beautiful the awful can be. A jolt of sublime pain. To step out of myself, my thoughts, my rabid emotions for a moment. To acknowledge that the world maybe might possibly exist. To take this into ridiculous depths now, to suggest that there is something that is just beautiful out there.

For me, clothes are one way of telling you how I feel and who I am, because I don’t have the language to tell you and because I have to censor what I can explain. My internal struggles become something I can wear and that others can appreciate, without necessarily knowing what those struggles are or staring at me slack-jawed. It is a way of saying the world is horrible and so am I without upsetting anyone. (Well, I just gave away the secret…)

McQueen is a constant reflection of the locust infestation that is my general interior. For example, their collections have a regular motif of a cowgirl-gone-Goth or a disillusioned former socialite. A woman who sees the awful but channels it into being strong. Someone who doesn’t let the awful define them and who can turn inwards themselves without breaking. Like Wonder Woman, but with more material.

Style is identity, not fashion. The creations of Alexander McQueen sum up the million avatars of who I have been, who I am and who I want to be.

People say the value of art is subjective, but I think art first talks to how I feel rather than what I think. And my feelings are fluttering all over the place, so pinning them down is a quest on its own. Alexander McQueen’s pieces went on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art after his death. Every time I see one of his dresses, my breath catches. In them I see vulnerability and courage, because being vulnerable is more terrifying than it should be.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Why oh why, you Epicurean you

My profile needs to be updated: “Considering becoming an Epicurean.” Not that I am an Epicurean now, but my nose could pick up things Sherlock Holmes missed and my tastebuds could root out poison for paranoid kings. I wrote my profile about two years ago, after a wine and nougat tasting. I had just become interested in perfume and suddenly I could smell all the things Luis Turin had promised. My soul was peeling outwards. Therapy was what done it. Therapy and the desire to be healthier that had brought me there.

I have since cursed therapy for opening me up to a world that I did not want to live in; cursed it for making me more aware of my behaviour and triggers, and therefore less content ignoring the consequences of being self-destructive. Sometimes it feels like swearing off ice cream and then relocating to an ice cream factory. Usually, though, a good perfume is like anaesthetic and I remember what drove me to therapy in the first place.

This is meant to explain the shift of this blog from squishy blogposts to some aesthetic sampling that I hope might lead me to something to do with the next twenty years of my life and an emotional landfill. Warning: there will be no lifestyle spreads or trendy made-to-look-DIY recycling, no styled pictures of food, no tight jeans or bundled scarves in summer.

This is my soul, people. My soul in the sense of some weird thing that thinks it is ‘I’ (knows it is ‘I’ and rolls its eyes at my denial? Or stupidity). I do not believe in, well, anything, very very literally and honestly I do not care to. Very practically, I am looking for healthy, at least occasionally. Sensual things tell this seething soul that for all intents and purposes this world exists. And sometimes sensual things interrupt the erupting volcanoes of my emotions and teach me some geology.