And frustration is what we need, my friend. For vanilla, I remain. A perfume is a mixture. A mixture like a miscellany of words and materials colliding to explain just a little, without explaining too much, the reason for a perfume. Frustration. One summer a few years ago, while strolling along Las Ramblas in Barcelona, ​​I heard a song by Rare Bird, an English progressive rock band from the 1970s. The song was called Sympathy, and the chorus went: “and sympathy is what you need my friend, and sympathy is what you need my friend because there's not enough love to go 'round…” And there, suddenly, with the richness of an entire psychoanalytic past (according to Lacan), that same past that sometimes imposes my strength on others or sometimes my great weakness on myself, a word stronger than sympathy emerged from the chorus. It planted its black flag of melancholy in the heart of my mind and gave rise to a word more correct, broader, truer, more sincere, more useful for having been forged in the experience of life: FRUSTRATION. And then the replaced chorus rang in my head again: “…And frustration is what you need my friend, and frustration is what you need my friend.” Frustration, the eldest daughter of renunciation and sister of perfume, since perfume acts as frustration in the game of love. It snatches away, a never-satisfied fullness, a pleasure begun but never completed, an infinite movement of desire without culmination, without apotheosis, an instillation that excites, seduces, lulls, dominates, and annoys like a Ravel Bolero. Frustration. So take a vanilla pod, a garden rose with puffy red petals, an aged rum bursting with amber woods, a vetiver bourbon, and bring each of these materials to your senses. Frustration. Breathe, savor the circulation of these unprecedented beans, a delicious but never sufficient fermentation, where more is demanded, with open nostrils… “More, more, let us take your redness deeper, and become that animal with the numb mind of the child who wants to enjoy and devour even more of this chestnut wood, this cinnamon or this vetiver until bursting, and then bathe satiated in the poetry of the smell.” Frustration. This is the love game of perfume, this is the game of love according to Musset, Shakespeare, or Racine. And so much the better, because satisfaction kills, while desire makes you live by creating movement through ever-renewed distance, so as to never consume like a homicidal ogre. Frustration. Happy are the consumers of desire, unhappy are the consumers of enjoyment. Frustration, a perfume to awaken the strong child in the fragile adult or the fragile child in the overly strong adult, a perfume for a regressive journey towards the mastery of vanilla, rum and vetiver. An extraordinary Orange Free State, one that must be reached to live passionately between the child and the adult with the memory of what is missing.