Release Date:  2012
Perfumer: Mathilde Bijaoui
Description: Malaise gives off the metallic smell of the Lead Years: underground activists, urban guerrillas, plane hijackings, bomb attacks. Malaise gives off the metallic smell of the Iron Lady tearing down British society – “There’s no such thing as society” – to sell off the rabble and rubble to the City. Malaise gives off the metallic smell of guitar strings being tortured in London squats, of safety pins stuck in cheeks, of razor blades slicing through the skin of pallid chests. Malaise gives off the metallic smell of the spaceships that will carry us “anywhere out of this world,” as Baudelaire once said. “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away” with Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. Aboard the musical mother-ship of Close Encounters, led by François Truffaut, whose generous gaze will soon go out. In the bowels of the Nostromo freighter where a vitriol-blooded Alien, thrust into the body of space proles like a monstrous reverse-pregnancy, bursts out in a gut-splattered howl. Malaise gives off the metallic smell of blood, yes, but also the burn of pepper spray in our noses… Ah… ah…ah… nar… CHY! And a strange sweet softness we sink into like we’d grind the flesh of an overripe fruit in our fist. And the pungency of the leather armour we slip on to scare off the hippies. “No More Heroes,” the Stranglers growl, but Luke and Leia give us the Force. We hold out our hand to Spielberg’s mildmannered aliens. We butcher the bug that’s eating us up from inside with Ripley, the kick-ass androgyne. We don’t care about the future, any more than Trainspotting’s antihero, who doesn’t know yet he’s a dead ringer for Obi-Wan Kenobi: “Choose your future. Choose life… But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?” So we’re going back to our first loves. We choose heroin. Whether she’s called Leia, Ripley or Sister Morphine, she’s still the White Lady who can blast us out of the world bequeathed by the Baroness Thatcher. An act of resistance: like perfume, an ill-bred lout that gets up your nose as soon as it’s released from the bottle – you can’t keep it out of your body, any more than you can stop breathing. Malaise of the 1970s is what today smells like. Not so bad, actually.

Fragrance Family: Dry Woods • Fresh
Notes: Lemon, aldehydes, black pepper, ambrette seed, leather, patchouli