Wilde carnations, World Food Day, and the scent I’d take to the grave

Happy Almost Friday and happy World Food Day. I’m celebrating with something unapologetically edible-adjacent, a carnation that smells like lipstick kissed a spice drawer. If you are going to toast Oscar Wilde, let it be with clove and a smirk. The mind wanders to Père Lachaise, to stone angels and the monument of Dominique Vivant Denon, and suddenly the air is powdered with eugenol, pepper, and memory.

If I could, I’d be wrapped in Floris Malmaison. It is the phantom every carnation lover chases, a satin glove of spiced rose and clove that feels equal parts salon gossip and chapel hush. It is discontinued, which only sharpens the ache, a perfect Wildean flourish, beauty made more desirable by its absence.

Since my bottle is long gone, I reach for Aedes de Venustas Oeillet Bengale. It is a modern carnation that refuses to curtsy, a blaze of pepper, cinnamon-tinged heat, and rosy embers that fans out like a silk fan snapped open at midnight. There is a savory thread here that nods to World Food Day, a reminder that the most thrilling perfumes often begin at the market stall, not the jewelry counter. Oeillet Bengale eats light and throws shadow, the kind of presence that turns a quiet elevator into a small theater.

Birthdays today stack the deck for maximal drama. Lucy Stanton, Oscar Wilde, Eugene O’Neill, Günter Grass. Writers who understood appetite, transgression, and the way a single detail can haunt you for decades. Carnation is that detail for me, the clove-bright flicker that cuts through powder and romance and leaves teeth marks.

Tomorrow I am playing the morbid little game, the one where you choose the perfume you would be buried or cremated in. My heart says Floris Malmaison, a true red carnation pinned to a black coat. My reality, for now, is Aedes de Venustas Oeillet Bengale, and I am not mad about it. If World Food Day teaches anything, it is that spice is survival, and carnation, when it is good, tastes like defiance.