When I bought M/Mink, I had no idea it was supposed to be difficult or strange. I had been down in London for a spectacularly dull work thing, so sloped off to Liberty for a happy drift around the perfumes before my train home. With a great fan of blotters, and scent daubed on every accessible patch of skin, it came down to this, Avignon, or Iris Silver Mist.

M/Mink won, because I thought it would be the easiest to wear–I liked the cool, mineral abstraction, the shining white smells of polished metal and new linen laid over a memory of incense and sea air and empty cities.

Jerome Epinette’s scent for Byredo is rather lovely, and when I later got round to reading reviews I was baffled by the horror. Adoxal is funny stuff, and man, there is a lot here but M/Mink is mostly well-behaved on me. Almost too clean to bear.

Sure, if I wear way too much on a hot day, it feels a little like the docks. I build this up to a complicated scene from a night out in a Tom Waits song, staggering about in piss-drenched streets, and falling over briny heaps of mouldering old nets on the wharf, because hyperbole is fun, but that’s just building another layer of nonsense on a fairly innocuous fragrance.

I wonder: how far do preconceptions affect what you actually smell or perceive? If someone tells you a particular note is in there, can you smell it even if it’s not there? If you tell yourself it’s one thing, can you ever smell another? For all the complicated backstory–with a fold out leaflet of PR guff in a precisely-cut niche in the box–I still can’t smell “ink” in this. It just doesn’t connect at all with the smell of any ink I’ve encountered: bottled or solid, not even toner cartridges. And yes, yesterday I was going back and forth between blotter and bottles to check, because I started to wonder if this was just another story I’d told myself. What I did rediscover, however, was the massive variations in smells between different makes of ink. And that one of my favourite colours has gone off badly, with an ammoniac reek, damn it.