Not a Prayer: Serge Lutens De Profundis

If my scanner were working properly, I would post a scan of a Lynda Barry cartoon, but instead I will just have to describe it for you: in one of her early autobiographical cartoons she tells of hand-knitting while in high school a lime-green maxi skirt, which she is wearing as she stares dubiously into the mirror and thinks, "Maybe this is really cool and I just can't tell."

I have that problem all the time and I don't suppose I'm alone. Not the lime-green maxi skirt: the not quite knowing if something is good or not. It is enormously difficult for me to distance myself from my opinion of something — which is generally strong and immediate and unalterable — and try to imagine how other people would react to it or how it might be perceived in an objective manner.

And so it is with De Profundis, Serge Lutens' most recent scent. I am disposed to like Lutens: I love or at least appreciate most of his fragrances, because they are interesting and thought-through and unlike other things on the market. But I really dislike De Profundis, and I can't tell if it's because it's objectively bad or because it's just not the sort of thing I like. I dislike it so much, in fact, that I'm not wearing it right now but just coasting on memory of the last half-dozen times I wore it to try to get a handle on it. Maybe it's terrific. Maybe it's even genius, as so many Lutens scents are. Maybe I just can't tell.

De Profundis is supposed to be inspired by death — the name is from Psalm 130, traditionally recited at funerals — which I guess explains the funereal look of the amethyst liquid and ink-black label. The scent itself is, if nothing else, a lesson in the uselessness of describing a fragrance as "floral", because it's floral, all right, but if you think of florals as cheerful or feminine or airy or innocent or romantic or fun or any combination of those things, well, De Profundis will disabuse you of that notion quickly enough. It is tinged with incense and bitter greenery but mostly it's a floral inspired by the chrysanthemum, a flower without a particularly strong scent of its own (and not a very agreeable one in any case). There is a hint of carnation to it; otherwise the flowers are not really identifiable.

If you packed a barn to the rafters with flowers bred for longevity and not a lovely scent, held a funeral service there, and then emptied it out and scrubbed it down with an industrial-strength cleaner, what remained would be the scent of De Profundis. I cannot imagine wanting to smell like that.

The Great Divide

I am slowly ensnaring a co-worker in my heinous web of scent addiction, and I don't feel a bit sorry.

A few months ago I gave her a half-dozen Demeters that I wasn't wearing much any more: at one point I had something on the order of 60 of them (mostly the wee half-ounce bottles), so I figured I could part with a few. Last month she ordered some for herself. It's only a matter of time before I've got her hooked on Serge Lutens* and vintage Hermes and the like; just you watch.

Today for fun I brought in the first two Demeters I ever bought, Gingerale and Graham Cracker. As I had guessed she might, she instantly fell in love with Gingerale: how could you not, with that unbelievable carbonation effect? (And why hasn't Demeter done a whole line of carbonated scents — Sprite, Orange Crush, Hires Root Beer, Coca-Cola? I'd buy every one.)

On the way out the door tonight I let another co-worker smell them both, and while she was surprised at the accuracy of the Gingerale, she didn't get it, or Graham Cracker either. "Why would anyone want to smell like ginger ale?" she asked, and then, "Why would anyone want to smell like a graham cracker?"

Because they smell nice, and are therefore nice things to smell like? Because they're fun? Because they're unexpected?

I've been wearing scents for so long that it is normal for me to smell like a jar of olives in a forest fire or sambuca or the coast of Newfoundland and to expect other people to want to do so as well. I have to remind myself from time to time — because this knowledge does not come naturally to me — that not everybody thinks the same way as I do or has the same experiences as I've had, so to most people, fragrance is aftershave or a fruity floral and not some baffling concoction that makes its wearer smell like a Dadaist hootenanny.

*I have already given her a start down the Lutens road: recently I gave her a couple of spray vials, including Louve, which she likes (although if I can find my sample of Rahät Loukoum I think she will like that better), and a booklet of wax samples including the irresistible Un Bois Vanilla. She's bound to succumb.

Kaboom: Serge Lutens Fleurs d'Oranger

If you wrapped an armload of orange-flowers, a bushel of tuberose, and a tiny mandarin-orange pomander around a stick of dynamite and then detonated it, you would have the approximate effect of what Serge Lutens accomplishes with his Fleurs d'Oranger, a massive white floral which effortlessly and explosively occupies whatever space you care to give it. It's beautifully done if you like massive white florals. Otherwise, beware.

Arms and the Man: Juliette Has A Gun Vengeance Extreme

Rose and patchouli are two of the most important notes in perfumery: it's actually sort of a challenge to find a scent that doesn't have one or the other, there are hundreds upon hundreds that have both, and a fair number are built around the pairing. Tommy Hilfiger did a duo, Loud, based on them (mostly patchouli for the men, mostly rose for the women), Dior's Midnight Poison is hardly anything except fresh clean patchouli and a big clear rose, ELO's Rossy de Palma is the same only dirtier and darker, L'Artisan's Voleur de Rose the same but dirtier and darker still (so much so that I can't wear it), Guerlain's Idylle Duet is an Idylle flanker named for the conjunction of the two notes, and Clinique's Aromatics Elixir, to the extent that its wall of scent can be said to be dominated by anything, is a floral chypre dominated by roses and patchouli.

So I understand why niche house Juliette Has A Gun wanted a rose-patchouli scent of their own, Lady Vengeance, which softens the blow with a hefty dose of vanilla. I am just not sure why they thought they had to do it all over again five years later with Vengeance Extreme.

Okay, that's not quite true: I'm reasonably sure they made Vengeance Extreme because they wanted to make a version of Lady Vengeance for men. Perhaps they didn't want to call it Mister Vengeance because they wanted women to buy it, too, but make no mistake: Vengeance Extreme is a thoroughly masculine rose scent.

Like its ancestor, it's simplicity itself, starting out with a huge wallop of prickly rose and grimy patchouli with a suggestion of men's-cologne citrus atop it. The rose gradually fades, leaving the patchouli which is eventually supplemented with a whisper of vanilla. That's it, really.

To my surprise, the more I wore it, the more I liked it. It's not something I have to own, because it's probably too simple for its own good (I don't see how you wouldn't get bored of it after a while), but if you've been looking for a good men's rose scent and the bottle doesn't scare you off, Vengeance Extreme is probably just the thing.

Hide and Seek: Serge Lutens Cuir Mauresque

One of the nice things about reviewing brand-new scents is that everybody is on the same page: what I'm smelling when I open the bottle is what you're smelling when you do the same. We may interpret the molecules differently, but at least they're the same molecules. Writing about established or vintage scents, though, is problematic: age (of the scent) and reformulation mean that what's in my bottle may be literally nothing like what's in yours.

Cuir Mauresque — the name means "Moorish leather" — was created in 1996. My little decant is probably not of that vintage, but if it was from a bottle sold in 2006, it could still be different from what's being sold today. There's no way to tell.

I suspect that, Serge Lutens scents being what they are, Cuir Mauresque may have been typically daring and off-beat, but it sure isn't now. Mind you, I may have been a little hasty when I once called it "possibly the dullest leather I know of", and that's my fault: I had never had it on my skin, but had only sniffed it from blotters a few times. Now that I've had a chance to wear it, I have to upgrade that to "a competent if not thrilling leather."

It's undeniably a Lutens, opening with his usual spiced-fruit notes (in this case a clove-and-orange pomander) before segueing almost immediately into a smooth warm leather, which is where it mostly stays for quite a long time. Eventually it turns into sweet amber musk. It's very warm, very leathery, and very nice. I don't wear Serge Lutens for nice, though: I wear him for things that nobody else is able to do. I wear him for interesting, baffling, visionary, astonishing.

If you want a strange and fascinating leather scent, you are going to have to look elsewhere: there are plenty of decent leather scents out there, but in particular the majestic Knize Ten is well worth searching out. (Mind you, it was launched in 1924 and might not smell anything like it used to, or even anything like what I have. But if they haven't messed with it too much, it's brilliant, and at $70 for 50 mL they're practically giving it away.) For something more refined but still inimitable, you could also try Chanel's Cuir de Russie, also launched in 1924 (apparently a great year for leather scents).

On the other hand, if you don't have a leather scent in your collection, Cuir Mauresque is a good place to start, because it is completely unisex and inoffensive. It's not a fashionable leather jacket that makes you feel daring and stylish: it's a leather key fob that nobody will even notice.

Somebody Explain This To Me

This is a candle. Obviously you're not going to light it, right? So it's a decoration, a sculpture made of just over a pound of wax, which isn't even scented: it just sits there, collecting dust, unless you put it under a bell jar. That base looks a little teetery to me, and if the sculpture falls over, it's going to be damaged, because wax is fragile.

Aedes de Venustas is selling this for A HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE DOLLARS.

If that's not rich enough for your blood, you can get one of Napoleon Bonaparte, looking perhaps a bit more stable and made of just under three pounds of wax, for $175. They're both from a French candle-making company called Cire Trudon, which says they are "wax busts....to be collected rather than consumed," in which case why do they have wicks?

I really just don't get this at all. At least perfume them or something.

Getting Things Wrong: Omnia Profumo Oro and Argento

I swear I am not trying to be difficult about this but I cannot understand how Omnia Profumo came by the names of their newest scents, Oro and Argento.

"Oro" means "Gold" and "Argento" means "Silver", and of course you may name your scents after precious metals, and you may do it without any indication of sex. There are lots of women's scents named after gold: Estee Lauder did it, and La Prairie, and Donna Karan, and I bet you can find fifty more if you try. A hundred. Likewise there are men's fragrances with silver in the title or just flat-out named Silver, and I have no problem with that.

If you are going to specifically assign genders to your metals by launching a pair of scents, though, then you don't really have a whole lot of choice: in Western culture (and some others besides), gold is associated with the sun and both are male, and silver is associated with the moon and both are female. Ask anyone. Ask Marge Piercy. Ask Oscar Wilde, whose "Salome" is drenched with references to silver and to the silvern moon, which is likened to a princess with feet like white doves, a dead woman looking for dead things, a virgin who has never defiled herself with men, a madwoman seeking lovers. Ask St. Francis of Assisi. I honestly don't much care what you call your scent and I honestly don't care either who wears it (my collection would be a miserable shadow of itself if I limited myself to the masculine side of the aisle), but if you're going to make a specific point of gendering metals, then the sun is gold and gold is male and the moon is silver and silver is female: they just are.

But no. Omnia Profumo has released two scents, one for women and one for men, but the women's is called Oro and the men's is called Argento, and that is not right.

And neither are the scents, as it turns out.

Oro is amusing in small doses, say a pinpoint on your skin, but when you apply it with abandon you find that you are wearing a big floral, and not really a very pleasant one, dominated by a huge cyclamen note joined by a bunch of lilac, and I have yet to meet a lilac scent that I think works. The base is oriental, and unfortunately rather cloying.

The men's doesn't even have amusement on its side, though. The top is an aquatic-spicy-citrus accord that will recall a hundred other modern men's scents, only not as good. After that it gets very ugly very fast, with more of that spindly, aggressive spice (it doesn't even have the grace to be warm and inviting) and some of the least appealing leather I can imagine. There are a pile of other things in there (you can read the list here if you like), but what you are getting is a slightly orientalized variant on a standard ozonic-fresh-spicy men's scent, and it is really not a pleasant thing.

As I always do, I wore them repeatedly, despite wanting to wash them off, to be sure I wasn't missing anything. I wasn't. I actually started to feel kind of bad for the copywriters at Luckyscent (from whom I got my samples), because they have to make everything sound equally glorious and desirable, and I love the idea of working with scents but if I had to lavish rapturous praise on the likes of Oro and Argento I would probably just quit and find myself a hermitage.

And now I have thrown the remnants of the vials into the trash can, and I am going to try to scrub these off my skin and wear something decent.

The Centre of Attention: Etat Libre d'Orange Nombril Immense

There is real, hard-core patchouli, the kind that smells a bit dirty, the kind that people associate with hippies and head shops. I can't wear that stuff at all. And there is the new, sanitized, molecularized synthetic patchouli, the kind that smells very fresh and clean, the kind that has been showing up in many fragrances for years now. I loved it for a while but now its ubiquity has begun to bore me.

And then there is Nombril Immense, which has somehow found the middle ground between these two. A mix of various patchoulis? A recent synthetic which combines the best of both worlds? No matter. It's completely dominated by the note, which is neither dirty nor hygienically steam-cleaned, a sort of lived-in smell, friendly and approachable.

There's a little bit of citrus and some black pepper in the top, and a bit of sexy balsamic warmth in the base, but otherwise Nombril Immense (the name means "Cosmic Belly-Button" and suggests countercultural navel-gazing and also the centre of the world) is all about the patchouli, so simple yet so colossally appealing. It does what fragrances are supposed to do: it makes you smell good. (I had two people tell me exactly that last week, despite the fact that I wasn't wearing very much of it: it has a presence.) The middle of the scent also has a chocolatey overtone: I can't wear Serge Lutens' Borneo 1834 despite its being a patchouli-and-chocolate confection, because it's that strong-and-dirty patchouli allied to a dusty-cocoa chocolate; Nombril Immense is the same idea but done, if not "right", then in a way which I can wear.

The website for Etat Libre d'Orange has this to say about their scent:

Exotique et précieux, ce bois indien subjugue ceux qui le respirent

which means "Exotic and precious, this Indian wood captivates all who inhale it," which is untrue at least where it claims that patchouli is a wood: the plant is an herb, not a tree, and even if it were a tree, its wood would be irrelevant since the oil is extracted from the plant's leaves. But the French have certainly never let the facts interfere in their perfume advertising.

Et Cetera: L'Artisan Parfumeur Santal

L'Artisan Parfumeur launched six fragrances in 1978 under perfumer Jean Laporte (who left ten years later to form Maître Parfumier et Gantier), if you can believe Wikipedia on the subject. One of them, Vanilia, is a magnificent essay on the floral genesis of vanilla, and therefore of course was discontinued in favour of the syrupy, inferior Havana Vanille. Another, Mure et Musc, remains one of their most popular scents, though I don't see the appeal. A third, L'Eau D'Ambre, I thought was an incompletely worked-out idea that Laporte brought, perhaps after a decade's maturity, to its full fruition in MPG's 1988 Ambre Précieux.

The remaining three are gone. I never smelled Tubereuse or Vetiver, but I do happen to have a vial of Santal (which is to say Sandalwood), and perhaps it hasn't aged well — though it doesn't smell damaged or "off" in any way — but it suggests that Laporte spent all his artistic capital on Vanilia.

When I smell a really good fragrance, I am torn between wanting to write about it immediately while still possessed by the thrill of the new and wanting to wear it repeatedly and think about it so I understand it. When I smell a really dreadful fragrance, my mind teems with wicked turns of phrase: it can be fun to write a truly scathing review. But a mediocre, neither-here-nor-there scent like Santal: that's just depressing. I've had this review, if I can even call it that, open in a browser window for five days now, and I just don't know what to say about Santal that's worth saying, except that I'm not sorry it was discontinued.

It starts with a burst of lime cologne, once a standby in men's toiletries, which is nice enough but not what you expect from a niche house like L'Artisan. And then it just stays men's cologne for quite a while, nothing of any real interest, nothing you couldn't find in a hundred other bottles. Eventually a little slab of thin, pale sandalwood bobs to the surface, that creamy-pudding sandalwood note that I found in Molecule 01, which consists entirely of the sandalwoody synthetic Iso E Super. A bit of amber rounds out the base. And that's it. Think of a run-of-the-mill late-seventies men's scent and you've got it.

I suppose Laporte felt he had to have a men's fragrance in his lineup, but did it have to be this one?

Taming the Dragon: Comptoir Sud Pacifique Vanille Pitahaya

Pitahaya, since you must have wondered if you didn't already know, is also called the dragon fruit, which is named for its looks, and if you had been the first to run across something that looks like this

you would probably name it after a dragon, too. In taste it is very mild; if I remember correctly it tastes something like a Chinese pear (though with a much softer texture), with the caveat that I would have tasted both of these fruit imported to Canada, which probably has a deleterious effect on their flavour. Perhaps they taste fantastic right off the tree.

2004's inoffensive Vanille Pitahaya is pleasant enough, but it consists only of a vague pearishness for a top note with a suggestion of floralcy joining it in the middle, and a dollop of that CSP vanilla for a base. There is quite literally nothing else. It's like one of those teenagery fruity florals with all of the flesh stripped off its bones. It's practically a test case in how minimal a fragrance can be and still be called a fragrance.

It may be churlish of me to criticize Vanille Pitahaya when I am a fan of so many other CSP scents which are no more intricate, but my justification is that the successful ones smell more complex than they are, or at least smell interesting. Amour de Cacao, for instance, while being little more than chocolate and vanilla, has an intriguing saltiness and the depth that cocoa can have, while Vanille Ambre benefits from the multifaceted quality of amber, including a pleasant briny note. Comptoir Sud Pacifique scents are generally so simple that they come down to a binary judgement: yes or no. Vanille Pitahaya is a no.