Scent and Subversion Page 3
Named after a plant with no smell, Fougère Royale (“Royal Fern”) spawned a whole perfume category: the fresh-aromatic, lavender-accented fragrance accords with oakmoss and woody notes that are still referred to as fougère. Fougère Royale was the first fragrance to use synthetic coumarin, one of the main components in tonka beans with a rich sweetness that rounds off other perfume notes.
Top notes: Lavender, clary sage, spikenard, bergamot, petit grain
Heart notes: Geranium, rose, heliotrope, carnation, orchid
Base notes: Oakmoss, musk, tonka, hay, vanilla
Jicky by Guerlain (1889)
Perfumer: Aimé Guerlain
Unless you are blessed with an adventurous nose, Jicky is not a love-at-first-sniff scent. Between the blast of citrus, lavender, and herbs, followed by the glorious stink of Guerlain’s famous overdose of civet, this icon of modern perfumery is the olfactory equivalent of difficult listening music. But if you acquire a nose for it, particularly the vintage, it will pay you back in spades. A rich animal warmth rises up to meet the herbaceous citrus/lavender opening, warming down to a vanillic smoothness. By turns frisky and indolent, Jicky has the personality of a cat.
Considering Jicky’s longevity—it is considered the oldest continuously produced perfume since the advent of modern perfumery—you realize that sometimes with perfume, more is more.
Top notes: Lemon, mandarin, bergamot, rosewood
Heart notes: Orris, jasmine, patchouli, rose, vetiver
Base notes: Leather, amber, civet, tonka, incense, benzoin
Phul-Nana by Grossmith (1891)
Soft, musky, animalic, woody, and balsamic, with a medicinal and herbal edge, this review of Phul-Nana, or “lovely flower,” is for the twilight phase of this over one-hundred-year-old perfume that was originally inspired by Indian flowers. Touted as a “rare marriage of the herb garden with the flower garden,” its rich woods and spice base is prominent to my nose because its top notes have dissipated.
Notes not available.
Cuir de Russie by Lubin (1900)
Upon first application, Lubin’s Cuir de Russie (Russian Leather) smells like Tabu and Youth Dew mixed with Secret of Venus, rubbed on an old leather club chair—sweet, spicy, dark, and ambery. The unmistakable leather scent, curiously, arrives at the beginning with a pronounced ylang-ylang/jasmine floral bouquet and a spicy balsamic base. An hour into the drydown, this century-plus perfume settles its creaky bones down, and I can get a glimmer of what it might have been once everything settles into place: a velvety dose of dark leather.
Notes not available.
Peau d’Espagne by Santa Maria Novella (1901)
As far back as the sixteenth century, Peau d’Espagne (“Spanish Leather” or “Spanish Skin”) was a scent made of floral and spice essences designed to mask the stinky smell of animal hides, which were traditionally cured with animal urine, pigeon and dog feces, and animal brains. It evolved into scented leather sachets, cooking spices, and women’s perfume. A search of Perfume Intelligence (an amazing online perfume encyclopedia) shows us that in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, there were already over forty brands of Peau d’Espagne, including a Roger & Gallet and L.T. Piver.
If you want to experience a naturalistic leather, look no further than Santa Maria Novella’s Peau d’Espagne, one of the few to survive into the twenty-first century. Even though this is not a review of the vintage version, (one of just a few in this book), the currently available formula is about as close to a true living vintage as any perfume around. It is challenging, difficult, gorgeous, and captivating all at once—definitely one of the strongest leather perfumes I’ve encountered. Herbaceous, anisic, meaty-smoky, and then incongruously sweet and ambery. This stuff is so strong you can almost taste it.
In Studies in the Psychology of Sex, twentieth-century sexologist Havelock Ellis claimed that Peau d’Espagne was “often the favorite scent of sensuous persons,” in part because of its use of “the crude animal sexual odors of musk and civet.” Mysteriously, he also believed it was one of the only perfumes that “most nearly approaches the odor of a woman’s skin.”
Notes from SMN’s website: Linaloe (Linaloe berry has some similarity to bergamot, mint, and lavender), birch, saddle leather
L’Origan by Coty (1905)
A circa 1950 advertisement for Coty’s L’Origan
Perfumer: François Coty
Although L’Origan by Coty was said to have influenced Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleue, it seems less melancholy and more sensual/gourmand, like a licorice-flavored biscotti with floral, clove, and amber notes. Rich, ambery, and powdery, L’Origan’s gentle softness is aided by the addition of methyl ionone, a synthetic note discovered in 1893 that smells like the powdery, orris aspect of violet.
Top notes: Bergamot, mandarin, coriander, pepper, peach
Heart notes: Clove, clove bud, ylang-ylang, orchid, rose, orris, jasmine
Base notes: Sandalwood, cedarwood, labdanum, musk, benzoin, vanilla
Après L’Ondée by Guerlain (1906)
Perfumer: Jacques Guerlain
A century before Christopher Brosius of CB I Hate Perfume evoked nature with his perfumes Soaked Earth and Violet Empire, Jacques Guerlain sought to express in perfume form the scent and mood of nature after a rainstorm. In Après L’Ondée (“After the Rainshower”), the scent of earth, woods, roots, leaves, and flower petals washed by rain and warmed by sunlight radiate from its diaphanous violet/orris heart. Spicy, woodsy, and lightly sweet, Après L’Ondée’s simplicity is in the service-restrained expression rather than minimalism for its own sake, the scent of fragrant things behind a veil of water.
Notes: Violet, anise, orris, carnation, vanilla
Narcisse Noir by Caron (1911)
Perfumer: Ernest Daltroff
Black Narcissus … the name suggests nighttime, malignancy, eroticism. Famously dubbed the “film noir perfume” for expressing in perfume language that genre’s contrast between light and dark, white flowers and animalic musk, Narcisse Noir, like a femme fatale, gives the impression of being both beautiful and dangerous. Just as thick, honeyed florals rise up, the darker animalic base provides the necessary edge—the “noir” of the perfume.
In Black Narcissus (1947), Michael Powell’s hypnotically beautiful film, nuns relocate to a convent in the Himalayas only to become haunted by the earthly delights of their pasts. The film’s namesake Narcisse Noir signifies an enticement to the world of sensuality that contributes to one of the convent dwellers’ undoing. Its outré personality led Chanel No. 5 creator Ernest Beaux to describe Narcisse Noir in one of his notebooks as un parfum d’une vulgarité tapageuse—a perfume of the most striking vulgarity.
Top notes: Narcissus, orange blossom
Heart notes: Rose, jasmine
Base notes: Sandalwood, vetiver, civet, musk
Styx by Coty (1911)
Moody and dark, Styx combines L’Origan’s creamy gentleness with an incensey, spiced base. Its brooding quality befits a perfume named for the river that snakes between Heaven and Earth.
Notes from Octavian Coifan: Orris, vanilla, carnation
L’Heure Bleue by Guerlain (1912)
Perfumer: Jacques Guerlain
Jacques Guerlain is said to have been influenced by the blues used by Impressionist painters when creating the melancholy L’Heure Bleue (“The Blue Hour”). L’Heure Bleue refers to the twilight hour between late afternoon and evening, when it is neither totally day- or nighttime. This liminal hour brings out extremes in flowers: “the blue hour” is when they smell their sweetest. Composed two years before the outbreak of World War I, L’Heure Bleue also evokes a prewar, romantic Paris, before darkness descended upon the city.
Sweet, spicy, and soft, with a warm base hinting of leather, L’Heure Bleue suspends a host of intense and suggestive scents in an uneasy but beautiful balance, just as the blue hour of the perfume’s name holds together, in a melancholy moment, the waning of day’s hope
s and the beginning of night’s uncertainty. The almost confectionary sweetness of the perfume is balanced by the spice and sharpness of bergamot, clary sage, an herbal tarragon, and a prominent clove note.
Top notes: Bergamot oil, clary sage oil, coriander, lemon, neroli, tarragon
Heart notes: Clove bud oil, jasmine, orchid, rose, ylang-ylang
Base notes: Benzoin, cedar, musk, sandal, vanilla, vetiver
Quelques Fleurs by Houbigant (1912)
Perfumer: Robert Bienamé
A bouquet in a bottle, Quelques Fleurs modernized the nineteenth-century soliflore by combining so many floral notes into a bouquet that it is difficult to pick out the individual flowers. Not quite abstraction, but complexity and artistry. Citrus oils and leafy-green notes accent this bouquet, civet adds a touch of eroticism, and woods and vanilla and sandalwood add warmth and texture. Quelques Fleurs is a complex, fresh floral whose synthetic-smelling reformulation ironically smells more dated. (Because of its novel use of aldehydes, this is the perfume that Ernest Beaux studied before composing the multiple versions of perfumes that culminated in Chanel No. 5.)
Top notes: Citrus oils, orange blossom, leafy green
Heart notes: Rose, jasmine, lilac, ylang-ylang, carnation, violet, orris
Base notes: Sandalwood, musk, civet, honey, heliotrope, vanilla
Houbigant lays out the case for matching perfume to “frock” in this 1927 ad. I’m also intrigued by the “Things Perfumes Whisper” booklet of perfumes, beauty secrets, and Houbigant-perfumed sachets that you could get just for writing to them.
Drawn by artist Raphael Kirchner, this 1913 ad for Lubin’s Chrysanthème was the first luxury perfume brand to advertise in the nudie mags of the time, including La Vie Parisienne. Lubin targets men with “kept” women in this ad campaign for Chrysanthème perfume.
Bouquet de Catherine by Rallet (1913)
Perfumer: Ernest Beaux
It has been argued quite convincingly that Bouquet de Catherine is an earlier version of Rallet No. 1 (1923), which itself is an earlier incarnation, give or take a few notes and the quality of ingredients, of Chanel No. 5 (see pages 35 and 32).
Notes not available.
Rosine Nuit de Chine by Paul Poiret (1913)
Perfumer: Maurice Schaller
In Paul Poiret’s heartbreakingly beautiful Nuit de Chine (“Chinese Night”), a milk-fed peach rests on a spicy, animalic base to produce sensuous, carnal beauty. Persicol (a peach lactone base that was also used to stunning effect in Mitsouko) is overdosed in Nuit de Chine, according to perfume historian Octavian Coifan, and it creates an aromatic and milky peach that could teach some of the cloying fruity notes in today’s perfumes a lesson or two in restraint. (Persicol is also known as aldehyde C-14.)
Notes from Octavian Coifan: Jasmine, rose, cinnamon, clove, amber, musk, sandalwood, Persicol or Chuit Naef (special bases at the time)
Chypre de Coty (1917)
The perfume that launched an entire perfume category, Chypre de Coty, advertisement c. 1949
Perfumer: François Coty
The chypre that started it all, François Coty’s Chypre was named as an homage to the scents that perfumed the island of Cyprus—an aromatic mix of woods, moss, and citrus. Henceforth, thanks to this groundbreaking perfume, all perfumes in the chypre category have sparkling citrus top notes (usually bergamot) balanced atop a mossy base, with oakmoss and often vetiver, labdanum, and patchouli.
Some classic, early scents can be enjoyed only for their historical notoriety, as the first perfumes that opened the door for later, superior incarnations. But for me, Coty’s Chypre stands alone as an incredibly beautiful and complex scent. At once fresh and herbal, warm and woodsy, and softly floral, Chypre dries down into a powdery, buttery softness. I keep inhaling my wrist for the almost milky richness of what’s left behind, combined with a disquieting hint of civet.
Top notes: Bergamot
Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, lilac, orris
Base notes: Vanillin, coumarin, oakmoss, patchouli, vetiver, sandalwood, labdanum, styrax, civet, musk
Mitsouko by Guerlain (1919)
Perfumer: Jacques Guerlain
A sign of its Orientalism-inspired time, Mitsouko is a French olfactory fantasia named after a character in Claude Farrère’s novel, The Battle. Mitsouko falls in love with a British naval officer while married to a Japanese fleet admiral, and decides who she will be with by waiting to see who returns to her alive. But something burns at the heart of Mitsouko that belies its romantic namesake; it’s a perfume that lives in the spiritual as well as the carnal realm.
La Parfum Idéal by Houbigant (Advertisement from 1911)
With a sublimely subtle, milky-soft peach heart (courtesy of the rich Persicol note) and spicy cinnamon, clove, and oakmoss nipping at its tail, Mitsouko reminds me of the Japanese incense that burned during meditation sits I did at the San Francisco Zen Center. It is as delicate as spiced tea with a drop of milk.
Meditative, sophisticated, and subtly sensuous, Mitsouko is considered by many to be the holy grail of chypres. Compare the peach in vintage Mitsouko with the fruity cocktails out now if you want to understand how fruit notes in perfume can be sophisticated instead of vulgar.
Top notes: Bergamot, lemon, mandarin, neroli, peach
Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, clove bud, ylang-ylang
Base notes: Oakmoss, benzoin, sandalwood, cistus, myrrh, cinnamon, musk
Tabac Blond by Caron (1919)
Perfumer: Ernest Daltroff
Ernest Daltroff seems to have specialized in creating perfumes for minxes gone wild. Tabac Blond paid homage to the scandalous bad girls who smoked cigarettes in the 1910s and 1920s, and in its heart is the rich, toasted-caramel smell of rolling tobacco.
Unlike Lanvin’s Scandal, a tobacco scent whose sweet floral notes could be said to reveal that it doesn’t have the courage of its tobacco convictions, Tabac Blond’s tobacco and leather notes aren’t upstaged by florals. It starts off with ylang-ylang and leather, and moves into a wonderful, powdery, yet sharp smoke note that continues to sing through to the vanillic, clovey, spicy, and warm drydown.
Habanita has a comforting, more-legible tobacco presence, and if you want a shocking tobacco scent, look no further than Bandit’s badass wet-ashtray-meets-leather-and-isobutyl quinoline. But in terms of projecting dark, sultry, and yet refined, you can’t do much better than Tabac Blond.
Denyse Beaulieu of the wonderful perfume blog Grain de Musc has written that historically, Tabac Blond for women was “meant to blend with, and cover up, the still-shocking smell of cigarettes: smoking was still thought to be a sign of loose morals.”
Top notes: Leather, carnation, linden
Heart notes: Iris, vetiver, ylang-ylang, lime-tree leaf
Base notes: Cedar, patchouli, vanilla, amber, musk
Notes from NowSmellThis.com.
The colonial figure of the “blackamoor,” usually depicting an African man in a turban as a servant, flourished in popular ads, films, and even decorative items like lamps up until the 1970s. In this 1927 advertisement, two highly stylized blackamoors carry a bottle of Shalimar on their backs.
Fragrance Fantasias
Shalimar, Emeraude, Chanel No. 5 (1920–1929)
Luxe and decadent with a hint of the disreputable, the feminine fragrances of the 1920s join the Eros of floral notes with the Thanatos of animal-sourced notes, along with tobacco notes evoking the woman of questionable morality who smoked. In short, they redefined femininity outside of the innocent floral. This was the decade of Lanvin’s My Sin; Molinard’s Habanita, originally made to perfume cigarettes; and the groundbreaking Chanel No. 5, created so that women could smell “like women,” and not roses.
A 1920s advertisement for Un Air Embaumé (“Balmy Air”), by Rigaud
Chanel No. 5 by Chanel (1921)
“A woman must smell like a woman, and not a rose.”
—COCO CHANEL
Perfumer: Ernest Beaux
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Perfumer Ernest Beaux got many directives from Coco Chanel for the design house’s first fragrance. Among the qualities Chanel No. 5 was to have: tenacity, versatility, and abstraction. “On a woman,” Chanel said, “a natural scent smells artificial. Perhaps a natural perfume must be created artificially.”
For the other requirement—that it should be a perfume no other perfumer could copy—Beaux complied by using ingredients so expensive that few could have copied them even if they had wanted to; for example, jasmine from Grasse, France; Rose de Mai; and superior ylang-ylang.
What marks Chanel No. 5 as a landmark perfume, however, is its 1 percent overdose of aliphatic aldehydes, the chemical that lends sparkle to fragrances and has been described as fatty, watery, tallowy, like the scent of a snuffed candle. Beaux wanted to use such a strong dose of aldehydes “to let all that richness fly a little.”
Bathed in the golden light of musk and civet, with the crisp edge of aldehydes like the faintest touch of cinnamon or burnt caramel, the florals in Chanel No. 5 come alive, alternately spicy, gourmand, and sensual. Vintage Chanel No. 5 is draped in fur: feminine elegance and restraint plus an animalic extremity. Who knew that an animal lurked beneath its elegant exterior? (See Rallet No. 1 on page 35 to read about its influence on Chanel No. 5.)