The aurora borealis: Intangible and impossible to describe
Luctor et Emergo means I stuggle and arise. That's more or less how I feel after trying to review it. Where do I begin? In all honesty this is what Luctor et Emergo smells like: Smokey. Bit of aniseed or maybe liquorice. Pencil sharpenings. Is the pencil sharpening bit meant to be woody? It’s sort of forgettable. I’ve read that it smells just like play-do. Not sure what play-do smells like. But I suppose it is sort of reminiscent of school classrooms. After a few hours the smell reminds me of an old wooden box that I recently bought. I don’t know what had been stored in the box before I bought it, but the smell inside was musty wood with a bit of a chemical tinge. I’m underwhelmed and am shocked that Luctor et Emergo could be so expensive. The thing about perfume is that, funnily enough, I want to smell good. I don’t want to waft down the street with a strong ‘ladies perfume’ type smell. But I want to smell clean or sexy or fun or something. I don’t just want to smell of something that is nothing. It’s impossible to remember smells until you smell them again – and then it’s like — That’s IT! I’m fairly sure, it’s just because we don’t have the vocabulary of smells that we need. For instance, a lot of what my children seem to do in the first year or two of school is look at a square and say, ‘Square’. Then they look at a circle and say, ‘Circle’. Then they progress on a bit and say, ‘Red square’ or ‘Blue circle’. And that’s fairly how much how they seem to spend their first year. Okay, there’s a bit of learning to read and numbers and stuff. But a lot of the time is spent identifying and learning shapes and colours. However, the olfactory sense is completely ignored. It’s treated as a bit of a second class citizen in many ways. Of course you can smell things, but why would you need to? Surely it’s only because of that lack of education that for a lot of the time we just can’t identify smells. If nobody had ever taught us the word ‘blue’, then we’d probably see the colour blue, and have to say, “You know, it’s a bit like the sky. Well how the sky is on a sunny day. And it’s a bit like that flower. You know, the one we see in the woods at a certain time of year. You don’t know the one I mean? Well it’s like your eyes. Look, there’s a mirror over there. Yes, that’s the colour.” I’m labouring the point, but that’s what smells are like. We don’t have the words to describe them. We’re never taught to identify them and categorise them. The result is that they seem elusive, intangible, impossible to describe. But it’s a chicken and egg situation. If we had the vocabulary, then smells are all too identifiable. So, back to Luctor et Emergo. It’s all very clever. POTL have identified some fragrances that don’t usually come in perfumes and voilà – made a perfume that smells of them. Well, that’s great, but I’m actually okay with the fruity florals and the oriental chypres and all the rest of it. I don’t want a fragrance that reminds me of my first teacher. But I guess maybe some people do.