In the realm of essenses.

Essenses is my indulgence shrine, and I pay
obeisance at each and every shelf and mass product display in it. For the
holidays, they’ve made sure that I will part with my money like any blank-eyed
devotee, by launching Keiko Mecheri.

Her Eau de Parfum line makes me think
of Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair, each perfume a
poignant story, and yet the stories intertwine like the lives of men and women
in a city of garden mazes, bazaars brimming with silk and incense, will o’ the
wisps floating in thin sunlight, elegant whispers barely covering the deepest
desires of the heart.

Hanae, a creamy
white floral underpinned by crystalline musk, is a woman whose lover cannot
sleep for wanting her. Grenades is a fruity floral declamation, a muse of
theater and dance. Sanguine walks by, and murmurs arise in her wake of blood
oranges and musk, light and dark in beautiful balance. Damascena is the rose of
a woman on a pedestal, the allure of the distant. Myrrh et Merveilles only
leaves her house at night, and steps on the flowers suitors leave on her
doorstep. And this outpouring of personification and poetic fallacy must stop,
because self-indulgence does have its
limits.