Charogne by Etat Libre d'Orange, 2007

JUICY FRUIT chewed at an open-casket viewing.

Utter perdition and detritus mixed with the most tongue-smacking, sweet, candylike, smiling gustatory deliciousness.

Remember when British Saatchi artist Damien Hirst came up with his collection of paintings celebrating medicines, hospitals, capsules, flasks, pills, colored elixirs, medicine labels? This is the milieu to which CHAROGNE takes me.
But we must never forget that CHAROGNE is about Death. That Big Thing. By giving it that very name, it appears ELD'O makes no bones about the fact that there is a Death allusion underfoot. Some reviewers have even given CHAROGNE the nickname "The Exquisite Corpse". Not rotting--- but caught just in time....freshly embalmed with formaldehyde, powdered and cosmeticized. Pretty as you please.
It's kind of like Tim Burton's CORPSE BRIDE. She's so beautiful, so gracious, so sweet, so charming, so lovable, so attractive. But there's just one thing: She's Dead. Dance with her, caress her, court her, kiss her even.... but you can't marry her.
That's how CHAROGNE operates: Sweet, mixed- fruit-flavored CERTS scrounged from a kidskin purse, plastic toys, cellophaned flowers, and.....uh.......Death. Like Damien Hirst's genuine human skull, encrusted with thousands of real diamonds. It's beautiful, it's Art, it's precious... and it's Dead.
This, to me, makes CHAROGNE even more taboo and outrageous than ELDO's other bad-boy, SeCReTIONS MAGNIFIQUES. Yet it is anything but a dark or emo or Goth scent. Au contraire.
Do I love this Post-Modern fragrance? Like you wouldn't believe. Going on my third bottle of it.

It is difficult to cut to the chase, because each Etat Libre d'Orange fragrance comprises a name, a concept, a drawing, a narrative, a scent, and a cultural reference. If the word "Charogne" [carrion] does not inspire trepidation, then the association with Baudelaire's poem "Une Charogne" will give most scent samplers pause. In Baudelaire's 12-stanza memento mori, the poet recalls a warm summer day when he and his lover came upon a creature rotting in the afternoon sun. The poet points out that one day his lover will be just like that carcass, devoured and decomposed by the kisses of vermin; yet her divine essence will live on in the poet's immortal compositions.

The sample package of "Charogne" features a rose sketched in black and white with a drop of red blood at the center: perhaps a nod to Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil, or to the theme of death, beauty and the printed page.

But on to the fragrance.

Does ELO's "Charogne" smell like the putrid carcass described in the poem? Not at all. It is, like Baudelaire's verse, oddly seductive. Bergamot and ylang ylang provide an almost too sweet initial impression, soon tamed by the softest leather. Vanilla and incense emerge over ambrette and undefined "animalc notes". These are not the heavy doses civet or castoreum I would have expected. There is an undeniable warmth to the base, but it has the strange yet familiar indolic freshness of jasmine. The overall effect is that of layered fragility and earth. Like all of the ELO fragrances I've sampled, Charogne lasts a long time, without loud sillage.

I leave it to you to enjoy the little narrative in the sample package and on the web site. To me it reads as a metaphor of the scent's development over time on the wearer. I am nearly convinced by the last line: "How could one do without it?" But the scent in itself, without all of the words and images it evokes, would be pretty. Not striking. That's right, the "divine essence" that makes this fragrance transcendent depends upon the art of language.

Despite the beauty of the scent, I shudder when I think of the name, and in this way , too, "Charogne" echos "Une Charogne."

For a truly delicious and decadent experience, read the poem as you inhale the scent from your skin, or from the skin of another. You will be transported.