Byredo - Bal d'Afrique
The Wrong People are Wearing Bal d'Afrique -- Are You Wearing It Wrong, Too?
We might not say it outloud, but we all know the Bal d'Afrique aesthetic: a polished all-neutrals palette, as if a contouring compact had Voltron-stacked itself onto Kim Kardashian's wardrobe:
beige, greige, grey, bone, buff, stone, sand, etc etc, all polished to the high gloss nude of a Glossier lipgloss.
Bal d'Afrique can't get any glossier, and we KNOW it lives in a world where things glisten beneath warm-glow lights, cushioned by suede, velvet and only the very softest leathers. People here drink expensive water.
All of this can be lovely, especially if your vibe is "successful white collar careerist," "heir/heiress," or whatever other liver of the lifestyles of the clean and safest you might be.
The thing is, *I* am not that woman.
For a long time, I couldn't escape getting that concept of conservative, rich maturity from this perfume, AND IT MAKES ME UNCOMFORTABLE.
It makes me feel weird, because of the fact that it smells good and *I like it* and, yet, I am not that woman.
When I first sampled Bal d'Afrique, my conceptual mind immediately painted pictures like: private-pay doctor's offices, luxury hotel service desks, the younger wives of retired rich lawyers. None of that is my world.
But the fkn thing just kept smelling so good! I felt such a disconnect between me and it:
My beautiful, put-together doctor wears Bal d'Afrique to earn 220k a year and save lives...
*I* wear it to re-watch "Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets" for the 13th time while I eat Taco Bell on the floor of my living room.
And I know -- full well! -- that "common people" don't always care about or have the means to pay for things like Byredo, but sometimes we become successful, subculture genius artists or just trade free samples and tiny decants with strangers on the internet (like me). We like pricey perfume, too.
And we aren't all independently wealthy influencers (nor do we all care to be) but we do all have noses -- and mine loves Bal d'Afrique, but doesn't wanna wear it like a Charlotte Tillbury model would.
I like to wear it with my Doc Martens, Parisian clowncore jeans (I coined it) and any item of oversized outerwear.
The thing is, to me, Bal d'Afrique smells dusty, foggy, muggy and like I'm listening to Suede in my headphones as I walk through a neighborhood of abandoned housing complexes.
You know that feeling when you let one eye go a little lazy and rest the other one on a distant spot, and it lets you hyper-focus on something your hear? No? OK, maybe that's just me, but if I do that with a scent, I can drop the excess baggage of its popular image and just experience it for what it is. That's where you find your own personal connection with a scent, regardless of the rest of its labels or what I or someone else said it feels like.
And I'll bet anything that there are LOTS of you out there who feel the same way i do about Bal d'Afrique -- who go, "wait, I like this and I don't wear SKIMS…"
To you I say: Sod the marketing execs, we can all wear the fk out of expensive perfume, in our own unique ways. If it smells good, wear it. Make it yours and embrace that weird feeling when your Manic Panic-ed self locks eyes with your doctor and you both know that you're both wearing Bal d'Afrique, but on entirely different planets. You can be gentlemen about it.
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Bal d'Afrique legitimate smell impressions:
Mamey sapote, plum, and just a tinge of iris-like makeup.
Powdery, melony, peppery marigold.
Passionfruit ghosts.
Creamy, musky cedar from new construction.
But does it *actually* have those notes in its profile? Not really, a couple maybe, but the blackcurrant + marigold + amber + musk + wood, which ARE in it, make like a jammy plum. Violet + jasmine make like a purple flower accord.
And, yet, you likely won't even get a fruits or florals image in your mind when you smell it -- someone, somewhere rigged it so you'll get images of rich car interiors, aesthetician's waiting rooms and other very safe, very clean things...
...unless you're up for subverting that image and reclaiming Bal d'Afrique for the severe Euro-punk, rain on asphalt, industrialist underdog that it actually is. Try it. I'm not lying: in that bottle there's anarchy, melancholy, rebellion and the kind of cool you cannot buy.
Also, you heard it here first: You thought punks only wore skintight, ripped up jeans, but #ParisianClowncoreJeans have always been there, you just didn’t have a name for them until now.
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Calvero and Keaton Routine
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Copyright :
Roy Export Company Ltd.
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small size
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