If you saw the movie Crazy Rich Asians you got a glimpse of Singapore, the setting for the story. It hinted at the vibrancy of this modern city, referred to fondly by locals as The Red Dot, and although only five times the size of Manhattan it packs a great deal of diversity of cultures and experiences into its small footprint on the map. Chinese Lunar New Year is an exciting time to be in Singapore when the streets of Chinatown are festooned with decorations, savory treats symbolic of the holiday are offered for sale, and parades and fireworks offer amazing punction marks to finalize the celebration. It has been a little over a year since my husband and I left Singapore which was our home for fourteen years. During Chinese New Year the large population of expats leave the city to take advantage of time off from work to experience one of the myriad vacation locales nearby, emptying the city and leaving it to the locals for the holiday. My husband and I always stayed, enjoying the space that the exit of a couple of million people brought to the streets, and enjoying the colorful festivities. This will be my second year to miss the festivities but there are certain scents that bring thoughts of my time spent in Singapore back.
If I was looking for a specific perfume to recommend to capture the sights and smells of Chinese New Year it would contain the smell of gunpowder which hangs heavy in the humid air as the fireworks explodes in a dazzling display and as the small red strings of firecrackers sold all throughout Chinatown release their acrid smell with a pop, pop, pop. I don't have any such perfumes in my collection, so instead I will talk about some of the scents that bring me back to the many happy years I spent in Singapore with just one sniff.
Buddah Tooth Relic Temple, Chinatown, Singapore. Https://cityseeker.com
First up is Chang Chang by En Voyage Perfumes. Perfumer Shelley Waddington created this perfume in 2012 as part of the Cosmologie Collection. My recollection is that this was part of a joint project between several indie perfumers to make perfumes based on the various elements of fire, water, air, earth, but I don't see any mention of this so perhaps I am remembering this wrong. On her website Ms. Waddington says that Chang Chang was inspired by the element of fire, specifically the sun, and is meant to express the bold elements of summer.I own several En Voyage creations: Poete de Carmel, Fiori di Bellagio, and the whole Souvenir de Chocolate collection, but I only have a sample of Chang Chang. My sample is several years old and down to the last drop and because of its age I think it has lost the opening note of blood orange that I vaguely remember. The other opening notes are marigold and solar notes, heart notes of summer blossoms in sweet cream, and base notes of white wood and musk. I am not sure what "solar notes" are but the effect they impart to my nose is a certain warmth. This warm effect is heightened with the very distinct smell of marigolds and a sweet cream richness. Marigolds are a much more revered flower in all parts of Asia than in the Western world, where prettier, more delecate flowers seem to get the attention. The bright colors of marigolds grace the alters of both Buddist and Hindu temples and their smell, which I believe mostly comes from their stems, is sharp, pungent, and slightly acrid. They also smell dry and a little dusty.
The way Ms. Waddington combines the scent of marigold with the very strong scent of sweet cream is a very unusual combination and brings one of my sharpest scent memory moments in relation to Singapore. When I smell Chang Chang I get an immediate image of visiting the Chinese temple, and even more so the Hindu temples in Little India. As you approach you would see a thousand little flickering flames from tiny candles. Some were tea lights but often they were little stubby candles which formed molten puddles of wax as they shrank into a waxy pile beneath the flame. Around the flames would be flower offerings of jasmine or marigold, but the marigold in particular had the more pungent aroma in this setting. Chang Chang brings this image to life for me, the creaminess of the melting wax and the pungency of the marigolds carefully placed by the candles. It is such a strong image that I don't think I could ever comfortably wear this scent because I am so overcome with this visual. However, other reviewers comment on the feelings of the warmth of sun, summer blosssoms, and an exquisite creaminess that the perfume gives them. It is an extremely unusual scent, and the one that has the most specific memory tied to it for me.
Bond No. 9 Chinatown is a romanticized version of a stroll down the crowded lanes of Chinatown in Singapore, or any other city where their is a Chinatown. I love its peach opening which is plush and sweet but before it can turn to candy Chinese five spice powder notes give some spicy feistiness to the scent. Gardenia and tuberose notes enter to give a floral sensuality but peony will eventually overpower these flowers and merge with the peach to give an exuberant and joyful fragrance celebrating the revered place peonies hold in Chinese lore.
From a Singapore-based artist, www.Louise-Hill-design.com
Chinatown was the very first scent I wrote about on this blog, in part because it was a perfume that catapulted me into a serious love of scent. This perfume keeps transforming into something new on my skin, and really captures the sensation of strolling by the stalls of a Chinatown market. Here are some ripe fruits, here are some plush peonies, now we have a shrine with candles burning and dissolving into waxy trails with scents of paraffin and honey. Rosewood boxes emit a rich scent of wood and mystery. All these scents meld together to form a thread of scent that I can only describe as Asian and which instantly reminds me of all the years I lived in Singapore and other ports of call in Asia. Chinatown will always be a top perfume love of mine, not just because I love the scent but because of how it takes me on a time travel trip through chapters of my life that I longingly remember.
Another part of my scent memory of Singapore involves the beautiful scent of flowers from the many beautiful green spaces. Twice a year the jasmine bushes on my street would burst into bloom and an evening stroll was likely to turn into a euphoric smell experience. We lived in close proximity to the Singapore Botanic Gardens and in season after the sun set and evening dusk fell, the scent of jasmine would drift through the air like a stealth cloud of blissfulness, leaving gorgeous but fleeting scent trails in its wake. It was the very fact that this scent was hard to capture that made it so alluring. You could walk right up to a bush and bury your head amongst the tiny star like white blooms and smell....nothing. But two hundred feet away you might be surrounded by a cloud of green-jasmine-laced scent so strong that you wanted to sink to your knees in a swoon. One scent that has come close to capturing the beauty of these moments is Grandiflora's Madagascan Jasmine.
Grandiflora Fragrance is the brand of Saskia Havekes, Sydney-based florist and perfumer, who teamed with Perfumer Michele Roudnitska to present this realistic interpretation of Madagascan Jasmine. Technically this is really stephanotis, a jasmine varietal, but here it is a fresh and sweetly innocent representation of the jasmine bloom. It begins with touches of green, like the tender stem and stamen of the blooms. The white floral scent is creamy and sweet, and really does smell as if of nature. I have other realistic jasmine scents but what makes this one really special is it holds on to that opening beautiful jasmine note and doesn't let go. When I smell this I'm carried back to walking down my Singapore street. It was less than a quarter mile from busy Orchard Road with its tall modern buildings full of designer stores, yet our street was like living in a little village. It had a quirky Chinese grocery shack, a dirt floored 7-11 if you will, with his chickens roaming down our street and behind the high iron fence was a hidden gambling den for local taxi drivers. One building housed a small nursery school with the pleasant chatter of children playing within its confines. Small modest homes siddled up to the home of a millionaire. Even in the midst of the city we were surrounded by towering green crowned trees and tropical birds that would do fly bys from the nearby Botanic Gardens. The warm temperate night, the crescent moon hanging in the inky sky, the ever present humidity that seemed to amplify the scents of the night; all these images flow back when I smell Madagascan Jasmine.
From www.inkandadventure.blogspot.com
When I first saw Singapore in the late 1980s it seemed to me an exotic and foreign place. There were wet markets where one bought groceries in outdoor stalls, Sunday puppet shows on street corners, and higgledy-piggledy laneways lined with Asian shophouses. The Raffles Hotel, which today can cost $1000 a night, was a crumbling relic with screen doors and falling-apart lawn furniture where one could sit and order a Singapore sling. It reeked of faded granduer, but Singapore was in the early stages of a metamorphis. Historic buildings were being torn down to make way for modern skyscappers. Along the river little hawker stalls and huts gave way to a polished new mall area of restaurants and bars to attract tourists. Through the 1990s it seemed that all traces of old Singapore would disappear. I wasn't there at the time but at some point the powers that be must have realized that they were loosing the hodgepodge of historical buildings that made Singapore unique and charming. Today there are still pockets of Singapore where you can find narrow shophouses converted to restaurants and boutiques, with their long shuttered windows and hanging lanterns speaking of a bygone era.
The perfume that perfectly encapsulates this experience for me is Tom Ford Fleur de Chine. Although Fleur de Chine is a limited edition that came out in 2013 and is mostly sold out online -- Sephora had it up until about six months ago but doesn't seem to now -- I still see it on many counters such as Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus, but it is becoming increasingly scarce. To avoid ever having to worry about running out in my lifetime I sprang for the big 250 ml size. I tried this when it first came out, and to date the four in this Atelier d'Orient collection remain my favorite limited edition line ever released by the brand.
“For Fleur de Chine, I imagined the romantic and mysterious
women from Asia’s cinematic past – from the ’30s femme fatale in a cheongsam
and dark lipstick, to the ’60s Hong Kong heroine of In the Mood for Love. I
wanted to capture that fascinating, exquisite and slightly scandalous
feminity.”
– Tom Ford
The perfume feels large and dense at first but quickly becomes something more manageable and with a scent cloud contained to my direct vacinity. There are creamy florals, in particular magnolia. Plum and peach add a rich deep fruitiness that is dry in texture. Styrax influences the oriental feel of the perfume, lending a spicy note that is further amplified by the benzoin and amber. Hyacinth adds to the feel of green notes that wash through Fleur de Chine. There are so many notes: tea, hinoki wood, peony, rose, wisteria. Most of the notes blend together in manner of fine French perfumes and in structure Fleur de Chine wears like a momento from the past, but perfumer Rodrigo Flores-Roux, who just may be my favorite perfumer, managed to impart a thread of Oriental mystique that makes me reimagine my Singapore home every time I wear Fleur de Chine.
These are just a few of the perfumes that remind me of my many years spent in Singapore and in particular, the festivities celebrated there.
Top photo: www.China-family-adventure.com. Perfumes are from my own collection.
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