“She isn’t even beautiful”
Women, a few of them friends, and some men say.
“That isn’t the point.” Others counter in a knowing way.
“She’s so… attractive, enticing, those curves, that… hell she’s irresistible!”
So explodes one more man she’s made her unconscious prey.
She starts a little prickly: a smiling rebuff, a comment just tetchy enough to incite a little interest.
The verbal equivalent in a modern day format of a puff on a cigarette blown into an admirer’s face made thirty feet high on a forties silver screen.
She’s a leading lady from a different era, a heroine from women’s pictures transplanted to a post-feminist age.
If a man tells a joke she’s not averse to laughing at it funny or no. It’s not the humour that elicits the chuckle but whether the guffaw will get her ahead.
It’s not even as though she’s calculating, cerebrally speaking: she was simply born and raised with an attitude to please in a manner best suited to her own advantage.
Some people scream…
“It’s so old-fashioned!”
Somehow they feel she demeans, her own sex, perhaps both.
Yet when it comes to sex, it’s where she harks back to past decorum most.
For though she fulfils the ideal of many men’s desires, she knows far better than to allow these urges to be translated to the physical too often than would be good for her and her reputation.
For she is known as a flirt.
She is the ultimate tease.
Knowing silk stockings and suspenders in a world of leggings and skinny jeans.
And what If she has a PhD?
So do hundreds of historians. They simply can’t or won’t play the coquette in a cocktail dress!
If they’re not prepared to sandwich themselves between the lugubrious professor and the oleaginous tv producer, cheer one and charm the other’s ego then they mustn’t cry to her to when she’s promoted, or published or appointed to an expert panel.
Because, she isn’t beautiful, and hasn’t ever claimed to be.
But she is astoundingly attractive and clever, enticing too.
She has worked at those curves and, if she’s irresistible, it’s because she’s made herself that way.
L’Agent by Agent Provocateur is no masterpiece perfume.
It is however an adult, sophisticated, well made, pretty and pretty damned alluring scent of the sort modern fragrance manufacturers seem to have so much trouble making.
For producing such a solid not to say seductive, hard-working and wearable piece of perfume, hats off to all concerned!
The opening is interesting: an unusual twist of spice, set against a slightly off key ylang ylang, which is rather pleasant and then a left field note, the angelica listed perhaps? All of which leaves one little unsettled, in a good way, like adjusting to the conversational style of someone who emphatically does not do small talk after an hour at a cocktail party.
The heart is more familiar territory: a smoky, resinous, floral, amber with a touch of powder.
As befits a lingerie manufacturer this is a scent with a distinct tang of the boudoir.
What is unusual is the just how well done, how balanced and poised this familiar accord is. There is depth to the smoke with has a blue, thick quality no doubt heightened by the myrrh which is sweet but not too much so.
The same goes for the amber, which though not sea-like does retain something of salt about it. The patchouli, thankfully, remains very much in the background.
As for the florals, they never really come to the fore, but are always present, especially the rose, which has something of the quality of that aroma one associates with certain fine face creams. The effect again, is just-so, adding a lightness and frivolity to a fragrance that might otherwise be too deep and dark for everyday wear.
All of which brings me back again to notion of well-executed, thought through and thoroughly well balanced perfume.
L’Agent is self-aware without being self-conscious, self-assured but not arrogant, self-possessed but anything but up tight.
It’s an excellent scent for anyone with a personality to match!
A quick aside, I feel this perfume works particularly well on male skin.
Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that if Agent Provocateur had, with the tiniest tinkering to the opening, marketed this to men they might have had a rather large hit on their hands.
Not that I think in any way it’s not lovely on women. It is.
That’s all.
Yours ever
The Perfumed Dandy.
Starting with a lily, not in the least funereal but as innocent as lace trim on a summer linen dress, this is a sweet contrivance of a scent: a fugue on youth’s pleasures made fragrant.
Then on an instant a teenage girl at the cusp of adulthood swirls on an English lawn, her skirt and arms trail across a bush of prize roses.
Rose flavoured ice cream and deluxe antique scented moisturiser are equal partners in the next part of the performance; a little vanilla here, some sandalwood and clean musk there.
Pretty In Pink, conjures with olfactory accords that are the equivalent of the Edwardian images familiar from Forster’s novels made film and television costume dramas.
Pell Wall Perfumes is a very small British producer, so small in fact that some of the petals for this perfume are picked in the perfumer’s own Shropshire garden.
The Perfumed Dandy. 