Douleur! by Bogue, a collaboration between Freddie Albrighton, a tattoo artist and erstwhile perfume blogger, and Antonio Gardoni, the beloved beardie of Bogue Profumo, has already garnered quite a bit of reaction on the fragrance scene. So, on a scale of one to Sécrétions Magnifiques, just how terrifying is Douleur? Well, it’s definitely quirky, but you won’t a fainting couch or anything. Actually, I kind of love it. And that’s coming from someone whose taste lies somewhere on the scale between ‘deeply conventional’ and ‘willing to experiment on occasion, albeit briefly, and in very small doses’. Last week, I allowed myself to be talked into attending a performance by the Armenian experimental jazz pianist, Tigran Hamasyan, at the Rome Jazz Festival. For the first hour, I sat in silent rage as he jabbed at the ivories like an unsympathetic gynecologist (the fact that he seemed to be wearing diapers didn’t help), but by the end of the performance, I had realized that, under his hands, the piano was not a piano after all, but an oboe. Mind, if not blown, then opened a crack.
While I won’t be listening to experimental jazz or wearing Douleur! every day, I’m genuinely glad to have experienced them. The smell of Douleur! – strawberry erasers on crack mixed with toothpaste and sports aftershave, essentially – is both fizzily exciting and weirdly nostalgic for me. I’d never buy or use a bottle of it but I’d love to smell it every now and then. Does that make sense? A friend of mine mentioned that he’d like to smell it on a handkerchief or blotter rather than on the skin, and I get that. As it turns out, I managed to get a bit of Douleur! on the sleeve of my trench coat, so there it will live in perpetuity, sending up a nuclear cloud of sour, rosy toxicity every time I pull it on.
Mind you, you have to like rose oxide to like Douleur! I have a real thing for it. But you might not. With its uniquely high-pitched ‘castrato’ tonality, rose oxide feels more like a whine from an electric saw than a smell. Think pear-scented nail polish remover or geranium leaf or those hard-boiled rhubarb-and-custard sweets that people in Ireland and the UK will remember for their porny balance between the creaminess of fake custard and a bright pink streak so sharp it peels your taste buds back from your tongue. This sharp, metallic smell is as chemically exciting as a pure aldehyde. Have you ever smelled Opus X by Amouage? That’s rose oxide.
But stuff like Opus X wears on you very quickly – rose oxide can drone on somewhat unless you temper it with something. In Douleur! the rose oxide has been mixed with a seaweed note, which introduces an aquatic fougère note, a bunch of toothpaste-y mint, and a strawberry cotton candy accord that smells like, well, Maltol. All this makes for an admittedly grotesque opening. You smell everything separately at first – the metal, the candy, the mint, and the melony aftershave note – and the effect is jangly and cacophonous, like an orchestra warming up.
Past the opening, though, the notes jostle into place and the whole thing settles. The cloud of semi-poisonous rose oxide remains but softens into the smell of those strawberry erasers we girls used to huff at school. There’s also a rubbery cedar or oak note in the mix here that reminds me of the milky juices that you could work out of a pencil if you chewed on it long enough. I know that Freddie Albrighton is a fan of rose oxide and strawberry, but I wonder if the innocent, almost child-like air in Douleur is coming from Antonio? If he’s anything like me, then he spends a lot of his time trying to wrest those strawberry-scented, rubber knickknacks like Shopkins, LOL figurines, and My Little Pony from their packaging, and maybe this drydown is his smoke signal to other parents of girls. Or maybe a cigar is really just a cigar.
Anyway, all you need to know is that the minty, rosy bitterness of the acid rain opener eventually melts into a big, pink marshmallow, and there’s just something about this trajectory from unsettling to fluffy that is compelling. It makes me want to smell it again and again. There’s a nutty, rosy loukhoum accord in the drydown that smells like a cross-section of Sweet Oriental Dreams by Montale and that makes me smile. In execution, Douleur! reminds me of a limited edition indie oil from Arcana called Strawberries Crave Waterfalls, which features notes of rain, woodland strawberries, fresh water, petitgrain, osmanthus, clover, and smooth amber, and despite a more amateurish finish, arrives at a similar result, i.e., artificial strawberries over an aquatic fougère base. But Douleur! has something that the Arcana oil doesn’t have, and that’s a sense of humor. I don’t know how it’s possible for a perfume to have that, but Douleur feels very playful.
So, is Douleur! weird? Yeah. Quite a bit. But plenty of things are weirder to me than the smell of Douleur. Like, it’s weird that people talk about Xerjoff perfumes like they are blown into bottles by virgins in an Amalfi lemon grove when most clearly have more in common with an ‘after’ photo of Thierry Mugler than a piece of fruit. Dior Sauvage is weird and metallic but also vile-smelling, and bafflingly, men seem to love it. And it’s super weird that, more and more, people are praising perfume for being ‘inoffensive’ and ‘mass pleasing’ as if those are not both words that mean ‘blah”.
Fuck me. I’d much rather smell a charming little weirdo like Douleur! than 99% of the insta-niche I get sent to write about – and I hope I’ve conveyed just how normal and boring my personal taste is. Douleur! is an anachronism. Smelling it makes me realize just how much we’ve sanitized every corner of our perfume to drive out any sign of eccentricity or nonconformity. Modern niche perfumery seems locked in a race to the bottom of the aromachemical sludge jar to find that single, all-pleasing, common denominator scent that sends out the unequivocal signal that we are freshly plucked, powdered, and ready to be mated with.
I’m not interested in writing about the depressing and seemingly endless parade of $300 niche perfumes whose only provocativeness or shock factor is in their marketing. (Tom Ford is releasing a new perfume called – wait for it – Rose Prick. A dildo-pink bottle of (likely) ‘meh’ juice that you know in your heart of hearts is aimed at people more interested in penis-related double entendres than in perfume). But something like Douleur? Yes, now that is worth writing about. Something that wears its weirdness as an artistic badge of honour rather than a sales ploy always is.
Photo by Daniel von Appen on Unsplash