Les Jeux sont Faits Jovoy

Les Jeux sont Fait. The bets have been placed.

Damn, this is a boozy opening and a loud one too. Rum, lots of it, reminding me of my mother dousing the Christmas fruit cake with rum, starting in September, so that when it is taken out of its container come December, the smell of rum soaked fruit fills the room. The cumin battles with the rum in the opening, but the tussle doesn't last long and they agree to a truce, living in relative accord with a dry, semi sweet, woody base (patchouli, dried fruit and tobacco present and accounted for).

Dark, luscious amber all tanked up. I smell incense in the base but it's not listed in the notes. Les Jeux sont Faits reminds me of a mix between Serge Lutens' Arabie, Chergui and Ambre Sultan, but not as honeyed, darker...more brooding. Feels more masculine initially but becomes sweeter and warmer with time, a woman could carry this off, a woman like Marlene Dietrich with her smoky, hypnotic voice.



Trivia: I stumbled upon a book by the same name, Les Jeux sont Faits, It was originally a screenplay, written by Jean-Paul Satre(part of the philosophical movement interested in existentialism) in 1943, in which two people, Ève and Pierre who have never met before, are destined soulmates, both dying in premature and violent deaths before meeting in the afterlife. They are given a second shot at life for 24 hours to prove their love, in order to keep that second chance. However both are distracted by unfinished business in their previous lives and that keeps them from concentrating on their love and they fail in their quest, dying once more. The story backs Satre's belief in determinism, i.e the philosophical position that for every event and action, there exists conditions that could result in no other eventuality, whether good or bad intentions abound, that destiny will always win over the power of life. In this play, Satre also shows that it is near impossible to know if a choice is the right one even if backed by the best intentions and that there really isn't an absolute truth or morality.

*An English translation is available to read on openlibrary.org (not affiliated, just read it there!)

“Say not, ‘I have found the truth,’ but rather, ‘I have found a truth.’- Khalil Gibran.

Ambre Sultan, Serge Lutens

Feeling nostalgic tonight and decided to hang out with the one that started it all. Or the last few millilitres of my first bottle of niche perfume, my first Serge Lutens, my first Amber. Quite a few firsts. 

Up till now, Ambre Sultan is still the watermark when it comes to amber scents. It's like Goldilocks would say, it's just right. Some ambers tend to turn powdery like Calypso's Ambre, although that is a very good amber patchouli for its inexpensive price-tag. Some are too sweet and sedate for my taste like L'Artisan's Ambre Extreme which is anything but extreme, it's soft, polite and a tad boring. 

Ambre Sultan smells like ages past in a land that no longer exists or all that remains is a decrepit pile of rubble of past grandeur and a civilised life...its dryness makes me think of hostile, arid deserts that stretch as far as the eye can see, its spices transport me to multiple places at once, following my mother when I was about the height of her knees, to the market and watching the seller selecting various spices of burnished ambers, a myriad of reds and mounds of yellows, pouring the eye-watering blend into a cone fashioned out of old newspaper.

Or travelling in the Middle East and North Africa, experiencing multitudes of foreign smells and flavours that I never came across before and falling in love with newfound exoticism. The balmy coziness of Ambre Sultan that calms and reassures...it takes me back to around the time we first met, using the scent on rare, precious free evenings spent with friends or just chilling alone by a water's edge, watching the sun in it's last dazzling performance before it goes to say hello to another part of the world. 

This is the potent power that Lutens' have on me, that trigger a slew of memories and create dreams where I surf the olfactory waves to different lands. There's something pleasurable yet poignant about each Lutens' scent that I meet and Ambre Sultan is no different. Yes it is a French interpretation of the Orient but by someone who is not just familiar with it but understands it as well. 

“Some of my old memories feel trapped in amber in my brain, lucid and burning, while others are like the wing beat of a hummingbird, an intangible, ephemeral blur.” 

― Mira Bartok