I Need My Hit

Further to my last post, I can’t help mentioning that, at the airport, en route to the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, I actually sampled some of what’s being passed off as YSL’s Opium. Words cannot express the shock I experienced.

We all know that many scents undergo less than sympathetic reformulations, but this new beast is a very curious creation indeed. Fortunately, I was able to compare it with the older version and, as far as I could tell, the main alteration has been to flip the background and foreground of the top and mid notes. Opium has always been a spicy, resinous oriental – one of the classics of the genre – but if you examine its heart, you can detect a fair bit of dry, galbanum-like greenery. In the new ‘interpretation’, the green notes are made more prominent, whilst the familiar headiness isn’t allowed to do more than hover in the distance. The result is that the juice that is now being called Opium is a) not Opium and b) borderline repugnant. I almost wished they hadn’t bothered to include any of the original notes at all, because what I could smell of them just made the sense of loss more acute.

Unable to believe what my nose was telling me, I rushed across to M7, about whose transformation I’d also heard horror stories. Sure enough, the bold, hairy-chested, fiendishly woody-citrus-animalic opening has vanished and been replaced by something depressingly thin and airy. And if this new juice contains oud, I’m Edmond Roudnitska’s uncle! How very, very sad indeed.

I sought consolation in a mightily liberal dose of Chanel’s Cuir De Russie… and I drowned my wife in Coromandel, just for good measure.