Herbal Harmony hits the spot...

Since the age of 13, when Mother Nature decreed I was ready to breed, I don’t think I can remember a day when I didn’t have a spot of some kind somewhere on my body.

Ok, I’ve never actually had what might be called acne, just well-placed spots. Usually cropping up just in time not to be left out when I have a date, or a party to go to, and where they’re impossible to cover up (like bang in the middle of my left cheek). I’ve tried everything: pills, creams, sun on my face to heal the scars. As soon as one heals, another one arrives to take up the baton.

My mother used to tell me to be grateful, as oily skin meant I was unlikely to become lined in middle age, and true, she was right to a certain extent. I will soon turn 51, and am still frequently mistaken for a woman in her mid-30s, but to be frank, after nearly 40 years of this, I am exhausted.

I don’t believe in miracle cures, but I have to say I’m close, waiting to exhale, because for over a month, since I started using Herbal Harmony’s Lavender soap to wash my face, I haven’t had a single breakout.

Owned and run by Gwent based, certified medical herbalist, Catherine Marshall, I stumbled upon the Herbal Harmony stall of fabulous preparations, shower gels, moisturisers, lip balms, and lip glosses at The New Forest Show about 3 years ago. I have been bee-lining it to her stand in Craft Tent B every year since – but mainly just to buy the Hibiscus lip-gloss.

The Herbal Harmony Stand - New Forest Show - 2015

This year, however, I decided to blow my show cash and buy a load more stuff. Soap, Geranium Bath Melts, moisturisers, and a pot of Cinnamon & Orange lip balm as well – simply because it smells insanely wonderful.

“Basically, it’s Neal’s Yard without the crazy price tag” I told my friends, who have been joining me, one by one, to try, buy, and rave over Catherine’s fabulous preparations too.

I now, and finally, have what could actually be called a ‘beauty routine’. Following bathing with the Lavender Soap, I use the Frankincense moisturiser (for mature skin) as a night cream, then in the morning, on goes the Rose & Apricot moisturiser (for sensitive skin) for daily hydration, and all is topped off with Calendula Balm on any unhappy patch that has thus far resisted healing.

The effects have been almost instantaneous.

As if all this were not enough, everything Catherine makes is cruelty free, which, if you’re anything like me and don’t want anyone, or anything, else to suffer for your own vanity, is pretty darned important.

For further information, and to order online, visit: http://www.herbalharmony.co.uk/

© Emma Blake – 2015

Modern muck...

Floris' Malmaison Encore - a flagrant, infragrant contravention of the Trades Descriptions Act

When I returned from a trip to London recently, I couldn’t decide whether the banging headache I couldn’t shake for days was down to the ‘flu virus I picked up on the Piccadilly Line, or the ‘perfumes’ I had been testing all day.

I had been invited to tea by my friend, Roja Dove, who knows a thing or two about whiffs, and makes up utterly beautiful pong confections for the discerning that may be found on sale for rather more than most can afford in his Haute Parfumery at Harrods. As we sat down with our drinks in the splendid comfort of 5 Hertford Street, I stuck my left wrist under his nose.

“This”, I announced with bottomless misery, “is what Floris have done to Malmaison.”

The diplomatic Roja did not say a word, but the heartbreak on his face spoke for him. Floris’ Malmaison was the scent my mother wore for the last 8 years of her life, usually purchased in bottles the size of Jeroboams for relatively little outlay and smelling of the most perfect English Carnation that has ever been created. Roja and my mother had been firm friends. Bottle Buddies. They talked scent over dinner and into the early hours, time without number at our flat in Regent’s Park. Malmaison was her scent. Malmaison was what filled the house every day after she had bathed and set her beautiful salt and pepper hair.

At first, Floris simply discontinued it, sending a great many like myself into mourning, not least because following my mother’s death in 1999, I would have given anything to smell her scent again.

Then in 2013, they decided to bring it back under the name “Malmaison Encore”.

After a trip to Chinatown to get myself a slinky Cheongsam to wear to work (and why not?), I headed to Jermyn Street, the Floris flagship store, to try it.

It is a travesty. A hard slap in the face for anyone who ever associated Floris with subtlety and beauty. It smells of anything BUT carnation. In fact, its ingredients are given as:

Top notes: bergamot, black pepper, cardamom

Heart notes: clove, nutmeg, rose, ylang ylang

Base notes: amber, cedarwood, frankincense, heliotrope, tonka bean, vanilla.

Call me a pedant, but I don’t see carnation in there anywhere, which rather suggests they should call it something that doesn’t imply it’s an ingredient. Even in French. When I questioned the girls in the shop as to the reason for changing its winning formula into this sickly nondescript rubbish, I was told that it was in response to requests from a “younger” audience.

Surprise sur-bloody-prise.

This, I took it, was the same “younger audience” who apparently insisted on synthetic chemical “fixatives” in perfume so they could continue to smell it on themselves long after it should have been noticeable only to others.

A good scent rapidly fades from one’s own nose as you become accustomed to it. That is the time to have faith that it is continuing to work its magic on others around you, not to go embalming yourself in another couple of buckets full, and certainly no excuse to make all scents smell exactly the same, delivering a kick to the head nobody within 10 miles will forget. That’s not seduction, that’s assault.

Penhaligon's - current range. Stick to Elizabethan Rose if you don't want to spend your salary on Nurofen...

I was further assaulted when I moved on to Penhaligon’s in the Burlington Arcade. Bearing in mind I had worked in the Wellington Street branch as an Assistant Manager in my early twenties, I was desperate to have my faith restored. Surely darling Penhaligon’s would not disappoint?

It did.

Woefully.

Everything I tried smelled almost exactly the same, and with the same vulgar, insistent putrescent chemical punch that made my head start to pound almost as soon as I walked through the door. In vain I asked after Night Scented Stock (the most beautiful scent they EVER made). I was told it had been discontinued. Wasn’t “popular” enough (funny, it’s still up on their website – for £110 a pop…). Blenheim Bouquet was still lovely, but I wasn’t really up for smelling like my Dad that day. Hammam Bouquet, ditto. Lovely, but as I have grown older, I have more confidence as a woman than to want to smell more exotic than I already look (besides, I didn’t want to smell like Penhaligon’s former fire-breathing dragon CEO Sheila Pickles either). I searched for a single note floral. The more innocent the scent (my mother had told me), the deadlier the woman. Whilst many had liked to kid themselves that Wallis Simpson Windsor had bagged a king with Estee Lauder’s putrid “Youth Dew”, it didn’t even come out until 1953, so it was more than likely she used “Joy” – the best jasmine in the world.

I wanted something like that, please.

I was presented with either Orange Blossom or Gardenia. In the shop, and compared to all the other recent overbearing pushy offerings such as Juniper Sling (favoured by Millie Macintosh – poor Pro Green…), Malabar, Empressa and Artemisia, they both seemed lovely. I was determined to buy something, so I plumped for Gardenia, remembering how disappointed I had been when trying to buy Chanel’s version only to find they’d desecrated the formula and it smelled about as much like a Gardenia as what I picked out of my (late) horse’s hooves every day.

I took it home in triumph (via Charbonnel et Walker for a chocolate haul, where I had also worked in my heyday, and where a lovely girl gave me 20% discount for my stories of what the place was like back then). When I sprayed some on the next day however, I thought I would pass out with nausea. It was simply horrible. My head began to throb. I scrubbed at my wrists to get it off, but all to no avail. Now I am stuck with it. I should have gone to Harrods to get some more Tabac Blond from the Caron stand. Not only would it have smelled reassuringly weird but divine, it would have been about a tenner cheaper too.

You live and learn. My mother always said that if you bought something you regretted, you just have to think of it as 3 or 4 dinners out or something. It’s an excellent philosophy.  

I will be donating the Gardenia to my local Conservative Club raffle as a back-handed gift.  

We have come full circle. My perfume expert mother was raised in an age where no respectable lady ever smelled of anything more than a hint of Palmolive soap. The choice of perfume worthy of the name is getting even narrower as time goes by. Soon, there will literally be nothing left but a few brave standard bearers such as Chanel, who can afford to keep a few loss leaders in their boutiques for nostalgia’s sake, or Roja who has to charge the earth for his creations because it costs the earth to make the stuff properly.

It always was a luxury. Or at least it was supposed to be. The stuff of dreams. “Tread softly” my mother was fond of saying: “for you tread upon my dreams.”

Modern perfumers not only tread upon them, but they do so in hobnailed boots. 

Thank God for Caron. Tabac Blond. Still the dog's nads...

At present, I am surviving on Miss Dior Original (a reasonable 5 on my partner’s “offensive stink” scale) with what’s left of my Tabac Blond, Bellodgia, and Guerlain’s Vol de Nuit. Unless I win the Lottery soon, I will not be able to replace any of them when they’re finally gone. I will then switch to Superdrug’s baby lotion and leave it at that.

I think we’ve seen the best of perfume in the western world. I guess I just have to be grateful I am old enough to know what it used to smell like. 

Emma Blake
March 2015

Bottle interlude...

Some bottles from Sally Blake's collection - and me. Photographs by Simon Jones:

'Jasmin' from the 'Les Fleurs' series created by D'Orsay. This one is dated with a Duty Stamp (Montevideo) 27 May 1916.

Left to right: Jasmin (D'Orsay), Golliwogg (Vigny), Shocking (Schiaparelli), Les Anemones (Forvil - bottle Lalique), Le Narcisse Bleu (Mury), Liu (Guerlain), Ashes of Roses (Bourjois), Liu (Guerlain)

A Practical Woman

No matter how many times you caught them at it, and yelled, and clapped hands, and chased them out of the dining room, successive generations of cats had literally shredded my mother’s beautiful Chesterfield sofa.

She decided to get it recovered, but when she discovered how much this was likely to cost, she pulled out her old Reader’s Digest book on how to do just about everything, and reupholstered it herself. It took her about a week or so.

She found some brocade and got to work. It was transformed. Magnificent. A professional upholsterer could not have done a better job.

Me on the famous Chesterfield. Hanover Gate, c.1988 - Pic Gerald Blake

But it was not the sort of covering the sofa had been expecting. It was supposed to be leather. It was supposed to live in a stately home, or at a Gentlemen’s Club in St James’. Instead, it was covered in a capricious dark green and blue brocade, bulleted with buttons meticulously covered in the same fabric, and found itself next to a space-age 1970s white formica and glass ‘occasional’ table piled high with copies of 1950s Vogue. Our gracious Edwardian flat was a mass of contradictions. In the drawing room, the mantelpiece was covered in the sort of antique fripperies one might find in a Victorian parlour: two domed bisque figures (a gentleman and lady in Regency garb) at either end, a Meissen dog figurine snuggled with a cheap sixpenny china puppy with glittering green eyes (that I had bought at the seaside so Meissen Dog could have a friend), shoved up next to an early 19^th Century black French slate clock, beneath a gold leafed Victorian fish-eye mirror crowned by the figure of an eagle with a ball suspended from its beak. The original ball had long since dropped off, but a little toy ball from my dolls’ house, painted gold with some of my brother’s Airfix enamels did the job just as well. It was “alright from the front”, as my mother was fond of saying, echoing a phrase from the theatre that meant that a prop or a set looked fine if you didn’t get closer than the front stalls.

This magnificent display presided over a scene that included a knackered gas fire (circa 1972), a cheap denim covered 3-piece suite, a violent pink Casa Pupo rug with half the tassels torn off by successive cats playing “the carpet game”, a Heal’s coffee table, and what had been a top of the range television for its time (a gift to my father from the BBC), that had since decided that whatever button pushed would bear no relation whatsoever to which channel actually showed up on the screen.

In the entrance hall, a gigantic mahogany and mirrored overmantle was somehow bolted to the wall above the telephone bookstand on which stood a vase full of mummy’s enormous, crazy, tissue paper poppies, whilst a harmonium with collapsed bellowes stood in the corner. You could pull out the stops and bash away like mad, but all you would get was a long, low E flat. It provided a handy surface for books and hats, however, and had a little compartment above the keyboard in which to store gloves.

I learned early on however, that this was not a house into which I should take anyone whom I did not completely trust, and certainly nobody from a ‘normal’ background.

When I invited a gaggle of the girls from my class at school over for tea, they wandered from room to room in gaping awe. I felt less like a host than a tour guide. My two best school friends at the time, Jenny and Gillian were polite and respectful, and delighted in it all, but others in the group went back to school the next day full of scorn, sneering that “Emma lives in an old junk yard.” Not for these modern misses antiquities, curios, or “old furniture” like a recovered Chesterfield or a perfectly round Walnut table “how do you have dinner at it?” (you don’t, you play cards...). The dust was also mentioned. Living sandwiched been the busy Park Road, the mouth of the main artery to the North, and Marylebone Station, it was a labour of Hercules to keep on top of the dust. It got everywhere. As did cat hair.

Later on, I introduced my first serious boyfriend into all this. He was a respectable young businessman I had met when I was working at Charbonnel et Walker. Sadly allergic to dust and cats, he tried his best to muck in with it all, but ended up simply fetching and depositing me for our jollies together.  

When I was 17, Mummy had given me a bottle of Caron’s Tabac Blond. It became absolutely my signature scent. My boyfriend however loathed it. “That old woman’s smell” he called it. This was the scent that had sent my father into paroxysms of rapture when he had woken up wondering what film star he was in bed with having been sprayed by my mother with some on one of his visits. A glorious scent, created by Ernest Daltroff in 1919 and worn by screen legend Mary Morris before me.

Mary Morris. Tabac Blond was good enough for her anyway...

My usually laid-back, don’t-interfere, and mind-you-own brother was appalled. “If you smelled of Dettol, he should love it because it would be YOUR smell” he told me (a wise 27 he was at the time).

In spite of this, I changed my scent. I started to experiment with others more to my then fiancé’s taste. He bought me a bottle of YSL’s Paris when we were in the South of France, following up with Opium for the evening. They were lovely scents, but there was a part of me that hated wearing something I knew millions of other women wore.  The exclusivity of wearing an old Caron or Chanel was something I never ceased to crave.

Somewhere around this time, Mummy had made friends with a young Persian boy called Shah who ran a vintage stall in Alfie’s Antiques Market on Lisson Grove, and he had found her a three bottle Chanel sampler from the 1950s. It contained 15ml bottles of Cuir de Russie, Gardenia and Bois des Isles. I fell madly in love with Gardenia, so when my Godmother passed away and left me some money, Mummy and I glammed up, and went to the Chanel boutique on Old Bond Street to buy some.

Not a bad consolation prize. Chanel 22...

We were devastated to find they had altered the recipe into something completely unrecognisable. Not only as Chanel’s Gardenia, but as any sort of Gardenia. What had been an utter song of a scent was now a clanging cacophony of synthetic and stomach turning stink. Desperately disappointed, I settled on a 30ml bottle of No 22 parfum instead. We retired to Richoux for tea, cheering ourselves up with some scones and Darjeeling, and a dab on our respective wrists of the 22, before getting on the number 13 bus back to Hanover Gate.

We didn’t realise it then, but it would be one of the last of such outings for us.

Emma Blake

October 2014