La Belle et l’Ocelot

Tall rectangular frosted bottle, a striding wildcat (with magnificent whiskers) in clear bas-relief, with faceted cap and gold signature.

Fruity at first, an hour long, and loud, citrus and plummy osmanthus sharpened with witchy rose thorns. Slowly softens with jasmine and some smoky-sweet amber into personal space–up close it’s bright on cotton cuffs and syrupy on the skin–and lasts all day, fading to a dab of luxe benzoin on the wrist.

La Belle et l’Ocelot could almost be a Chanel, rich incense resins and balsamic roses (though there’s oddly no civet) if the wormwood at the top didn’t turn it weird.

I don’t love it–I’d prefer more purring and fewer claws–but there’s something intriguing about it, opulent yet off-kilter, and the bottle is an objet d’art.

*

Salvador Dali’s pet ocelot was named Babou. He never seemed happy in photos, aside from the one where he is biting the artist’s nose.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.