Love Bomb Perdrisât
"The summer of love is here, mumbling sweet nothings through rotten teeth."
Rita Hayworth in MISS SADIE THOMPSON (1953)
Love Bomb Perdrisât
Raspberry, sugar, rose: Love Bomb is an invitation to suffer sweetness. After the rose open fades — pretty, and a touch powdery — it turns to a rich, cloying raspberry, steeped in notes of burnt sugar, almost candied and crystalline. It’s not the fresh, fructose ripeness of a summer raspberry, almost squished into a jammy blur at the slightest touch, but something faintly medicinal — descriptive of the fruit rather than a realistic account of it, drawing out tart stickiness. Out of the strong floral and fruit notes comes forth sweetness. Between burnt caramel and fairy floss, a slight depth and heat.
Perdrisât’s Callum Rory Mitchell has a knack for both tongue-in-cheek naming and dizzying spins on fruit fragrances. Take Fuck Boy, a musky, pineapple heavy scent that allegedly features top notes of cocaine, or Sycophant, a coldblooded green fig that turns soft and milky. Love Bomb is aptly named. Powerful, syrupy, alternately delicious and difficult, toying with overweening emotions, a cloud of spun sugar dissolving in a storm of tears. It begs comparison with another explosive floral: Viktor and Rolf’s Flowerbomb, that all-too-literal grenade shaped bottle filled with rosy fruit syrup. But where vanilla softens any threat that sweetness may carry, Love Bomb is unrelenting and self assured, projecting with grandeur and conviction. The summer of love is here, with added sugars and existential cavities, mumbling sweet nothings through rotten teeth.
Careless, hot nights, pink drinks. Raspberry lemonade, red cordial, red lollipops, red 40. Consider your blood sugar levels. The sweetness of medicines. White chocolate. Blue-eyed soul. The “Sweetest Girl.” Rita Hayworth as Miss Sadie Thompson: a redhead in pink dresses and red skirts, falling in love with a marine. She’ll hit this island like a bomb!
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Loqui Paatsch is a writer and student of art history, with a focus on Australian abstraction, post-object art, and alternative histories. She lives in Melbourne/Naarm, where it is currently summer’s peak.
