Reaction

Reader Anita writes regarding yesterday's post about my strange new dysosmia:

So sorry this is happening to you! I sincerely hope it gets better soon, if only because I selfishly enjoy your reviews. :)

I've never worn Poison but always admired it on others, so I swapped for a bottle on MUA not long ago. There is a horrid grape Koolade note on me that I really can't stand. Maybe it's been reformulated?

The whole nose thing is more of an annoyance than anything else. I think it's like getting cataracts or something, except I'm just going to have to live with it. I can still smell things; it's just that they're changed, sometimes. Even someone walking past me wearing the wrong perfume can send that scent element up my nose, and then that's it for a while--it's almost all I can smell. But it's not always there, fortunately, and some of my favourite new scents and old standbys are still unaltered by this new scent universe I'm forced to inhabit.

As for Poison, I would imagine it's been reformulated over the years; virtually everything is, sooner or later, it seems, as ingredients become expensive or medically suspect. This is nothing new: lots of the original synthetic musks are no longer considered safe for human use, and nobody uses unadulterated bergamot because it can stain your skin brown if exposed to sunlight.

A lot of people find that vivid purple-fruit note in Poison objectionable. It was never particularly overwhelming on me; it sat primarily in the top notes and was very pleasant. Mostly I got a sweet, spicy, ambery concoction that worked really well on my skin (which thrives on dark oriental scents, though I have very pale skin, which supposedly--ridiculously--is thought to mean you can't wear dark scents but must stick to fresh ones). At least I used to get that scent from it: now there's that note. The aspect of Poison that you (and others) think of as grape Kool-Aid is from an aroma-chemical called beta damascone, which (theoretically, and not to you) smells of blackberries, honey, and warm oriental notes. (Poison actually uses an offshoot of beta damscone called Damascenone, which supposedly smells of roses, grapes, plums, and sugared raspberries.) Beta damascone was a mainstay of mid- to late-eighties perfumery, and it's also found in large quantities in Montana Parfum D'elle, which I also must write about some day.

Unfortunately, the only version of Poison still on the market is the EDT, which is the least wonderful of the three versions they launched. There was at the outset an Esprit de Parfum which was richer and lusher, and a few years later came an Eau de Cologne which was brilliant--fresh and light, with the essential character of the scent remaining while the heavy, potentially cloying aspects were minimized. They're both long gone, though you can buy the Esprit online at some stores. You probably wouldn't, not without trying it first, but it really was a better scent than the EDT.

It's worth remembering how extraordinarily subjective the sense of smell is. Luca Turin loved Paco Rabanne's La Nuit, but it's one of only two scents in living memory that actually made me recoil from the tester (the other was Lancome's Miracle). One man's must-have is another woman's get-away-from-me.

Recently I reviewed the newest Creed Scent, Virgin Island Water. To my nose, it has a synthetic aspect to the top of it which pretty much wrecks it, but others--many others, I think--don't get that, as one anonymous poster noted:

I didn't smell any Play-Doh notes. The top notes smell like coconut and pineapple on me. The whole drydown retains the same tropical / piña colada feel.

See? There you go. And I don't get that fakey grape note in Poison, whereas many others do. Just read the reviews over on Makeup Alley some time. So much hatred! ("Poison reminds me of sickly-sweet grape cough syrup with overly ripe, semi-rotting sweet berries.") So much love! ("The Grapes of Wrath...I agree, Poison has a very grapey, wine-like quality...I am a convert.")

Oh Nose!

I certainly do apologize for not having posted anything in a whole month, and I feel bad about it, but there's a reason.

It's not for lack of trying! In the last few weeks I've written bits and pieces about the following scents: Phat Farm Atman, Chanel Allure Sensuelle, Azzaro Pour Homme, Amouage Dia Pour Homme, CSP Bois de Filao, YSL M7, and Miller et Berteau Green, green, green and green. I expect there are others that I've forgotten in the interim.

I do what I always do: I put on a scent, sniff it, think about it, sniff it some more, write down some ideas, do a little research, sniff yet again, write some more. Eventually the thing gets written.

But there's something wrong. There's something wrong with my nose.

It's been building for about six months, I suppose. I ordered some things from Sephora about a year and a half ago, and one of them was Poison, the fantastic limited-edition Amulet bottle. I had worn Poison for years not long after it came out; it suited me incredibly well (I intend to write about it properly one day, as I promised a few months ago), but I hadn't had any for quite a while, and I just couldn't resist that amazing bottle, which looks like a lethal dagger made of amethyst. See?
I put it away and didn't try it for a whole year, which I do sometimes. A lot of the time, actually: I have at least thirty things--mostly miniatures, but a few full-sized bottles--which I have never opened, and don't get me started on the samples. When I broke it out last summer, I was shocked to discover that it didn't smell at all the way I remembered it: at the very top was a sharp, greenish, synthetic note that I was quite sure hadn't been there originally. I thought the bottle must have gone off, so I went to a department store to try their tester, and it had exactly the same note at the top; something disagreeable and in-the-way. A couple of months later I got a sample, and that smelled the same way, too.

What was the story? Was that note there all along, with me simply incapable of smelling it? Was the formula changed?

Whatever's going on, it's not just Poison. There seems to be something (or somethings) in a lot of commercial scents, and soaps and lotions and the like, which I was never aware of before, but which now simply leaps up at me. It's the dominant scent in anything which contains it, and worse, it takes up lodging in my nostrils and it won't go away; it seems to stick in my nose, and for hours it overlays nearly everything I smell. I'm not "allergic" or "sensitive" to synthetic fragrances, but there is something in some of them--a lot of them--that suddenly is omnipresent: it launches itself at me and it won't let go. It's like trying to watch television and, every now and then, your eyelids take on a life of their own and flap and flutter and get in the way. You can still see the television, but what you're seeing is distorted and diminished.

It's not inevitable, it's not everywhere, and it's not predictable. One day last week before work I put on a couple of shots of Coup de Fouet, and it smelled as it ought to. As I sat down at my computer about twelve hours later (it was a long day), at 1:30 in the morning, I put the back of my hand to my nose, and the long-lasting drydown smelled as it ought to, too. My nose isn't permanently busted, at least not yet. But if I had smelled something with that element in it, the CdF would have been ruined for a while, maybe for the rest of the day. Something's going on, and it's really a drag. I have somehow been wrecked by modern perfumery.

With any luck, I can still get enough proper nose time to write about the things I love. Keep tuning in.

Up There: Serge Lutens Ambre Sultan

I have, predictably enough, a bunch of books about perfumes and perfumery which I like read, and also to refer to when I need to know something about a scent. What is it, exactly, about fragrance that sends so many writers completely over the top? Have they spent so much time sniffing that their limbic systems are in a continual state of hyper-excitation, rendering them unable to think and write straight?

This is from the description of Serge Lutens' Ambre Sultan, from Susan Irvine's "The Perfume Guide":

Every so often a scent is launched which is supposed to smell of the odorata sexualis of a woman. This actually does. Remarkably--to some, repugnantly--it reeks of a woman's sexual juices.

Now, the last time I was within sniffing distance of a lady's private region was the day I was born, and I had other things on my mind, so I can't say I remember what it might have smelled like, but I am fairly certain that this wasn't it. If Irvine is right, when I wear Ambre Sultan, I smell either like I've just done the deed with a lady, or I am in fact a lady myself, and I'm willing to bet that neither of these things is true.

According to Irvine, the scent is composed as follows:

Top: Oregano, bay leaf, coriander, myrtle.
Middle: Angelica, patchouli.
Base: Labdanum, styrax, Tolu balsam, benzoin, sandalwood.

One of the first things off the skin is the warm glow of vanilla-scented benzoin: it sets the stage for what's to come. (And since benzoin is such a tenacious base note, you know that if you smell it at the beginning, it's probably going to be around until the end, and it is.)

You can tell from that list of notes that you're looking at a classic amber-based oriental, and you are. The top is a crisp little fusillade of herbal notes, almost immediately swamped and overcome by that benzoin, and then begins the long, slow, sighing ascent into ambergris heaven. There's a lot more than ambergris: other notes seem to appear and disappear from time to time, including a dark wisp of incense.

As do all good Oriental scents, Ambre Sultan lasts forever. Twelve hours after putting it on, I can still smell it clearly if distantly, a haze of benzoin and amber. I don't put fragrance on clothing, but I'm pretty sure that if you did, you'd still be able to smell it in a day, or two, or three.

Ambre Sultan puts me in mind, naturally, of Maître Parfumeur et Gantier's Ambre Précieux, my Holy Grail of ambergris scents and, really, of all fragrances (it's the one I would save from a fire). Ambre Sultan is more complex: it has those little filigrees and curlicues of incense and patchouli and herbs, suggesting the tracery of Islamic art. Precisely because it's so busy, I don't find it as magical as the MPG scent, which seems purer, somehow. But make no mistake: they're both spectacular.

Survivor: Guerlain Shalimar

When people--ordinary, normal people, not scent-crazed addicts such as myself--think of a classic fragrance, they usually think of either Chanel No. 5 or Shalimar, the two great standbys of twentieth-century perfumery.

Some people love the perfume form of Shalimar, but to me it's just chokingly strong. (Many people think that "perfume" automatically equals "stronger than EDT", and that isn't necessarily true: a perfume usually has more base notes and so lasts longer, but it doesn't have to be more potent than other versions. In this case, though, I find that it is. My mother used to put a droplet of Shalimar on a tissue and tuck it into her clothing: she couldn't stand the overpowering quality of the perfume, but when it was reined in, she loved it. For all I know, she still does this.)

The old, pre-reformulation eau de toilette was a better scent, I think. The newest version of the EDT isn't as good, because to my nose it presents the same problem that Youth Dew does: that hesperidic top note--lemon, bergamot, and mandarin orange--just doesn't seem to fit into the rest of the structure, and I find it unpleasant in its context. (Susan Irvine says it "opens quite violently", and I couldn't have put it better. It is violent.) It takes a while to leave, too: Shalimar takes some time to get down to business, and the lemon note lingers for (in my opinion) much too long as the middle notes are rising to the surface.

The centre of the scent is that classic pair of flowers, jasmine and rose. As I find with a great many oriental scents with a floral heart, the flowers are more or less placeholders: they never take centre stage, but fill out the composition. They're there, particularly the jasmine, but they aren't strong enough to propel the scent into the floral, or even the floral-oriental, category. The flowers are damp and sticky with balsams and resins: Shalimar is an oriental, beyond a doubt, and in this case, it's all about vanilla.

It isn't just vanilla. There is a torrent of other classic oriental notes as well: patchouli, of course, and orris-root, a little of Tabu's civet, and lots of sweet notes to bolster the vanilla; opoponax, tonka bean, Peru balsam, and benzoin. But the vanilla takes centre stage, and it's nothing like the bakeshop vanilla that so many modern scents have: it's bracing, almost severe. It never has a chance to become really sweet; in addition to the patchouli and orris, there's a little eddy of incense twined around it to keep it under some sort of control. (The vanilla in Shalimar, in fact, is very reminiscent of the vanilla in a much later Guerlain scent aimed at men, Habit Rouge, which was launched in 1965, forty years after Shalimar made its debut. You could certainly guess that they were made by the same perfume house if you didn't know.)

Oddly enough, my favourite version of Shalimar is the body lotion, or, as they like to call it, Sensual Milky Veil (it's hard not to love that over-the-top French perfume writing and naming): the creaminess of the lotion damps down the top notes, which don't seem so strained, so piercing, and they don't last nearly as long as in the EDT before surrendering to the lushness of what is, really, the über-oriental, the first vanilla scent, the one that started it all.

Fruit Punch: Dalissime by Salvador Dali

It seems as if the huge majority of new launches in women's fragrance these days are fruity florals. There's nothing necessarily wrong with this. Every age has a scent that speaks to it: late-fourteenth-century Europe was mad about perfumes made of lavender and herbs, a breath of fresh air in an age when bathing was infrequent, and women in Napoleonic France adored the scent of patchouli, an exotic leaf from India which was used there to moth-proof the cashmere shawls which were fashionable among French ladies. For the past ten years or so, the fruity floral has meant young, fresh, and vibrant. The real problem is that as new fragrance launches have accelerated, there are literally hundreds of these scents on the market, and they sometimes seem to be driving out every other sort of mid-range perfumery. You can hardly turn around nowadays without smelling some cheap concoction of lichee and orange-flower or apple, pear and tuberose.

But the fruity floral isn't new. Every since chemists learned to synthesize molecules with fruit odours, they've been used in perfumery. Rochas Femme has a heady top note of peach and plum over a bed of roses and jasmine, and that was created in 1944. Peach and plum also star in Van Cleef & Arpels Gem from 1987 (which is probably more oriental than floral). Brosseau's Ombre Rose from 1981 also employs peach and rose (to very different effect), as does Lancome's 1990 Tresor. There are dozens more, maybe hundreds, that predate the current rage for fruit notes.

After the extremely successful launch of Salvador Dali in 1984, Cofinluxe began launching new scents at the typically accelerating rate of the modern era: a men's follow-up, Dali Pour Homme, in 1987, a new women's scent, Laguna, in 1991, the men's fragrance Salvador in 1992, and then, starting in 1994, one or two a year up to the present day.

It's a miracle they haven't issued a series of eight scents based on the eight cubes in Dali's famous tesseract crucifix: maybe they're working on it.

Their 1994 launch was called Dalissime, and it is without a doubt one of the most purely charming fruity floral scents I've ever smelled. It has an oriental element to it, but there's nothing heavy or cloying about it: it's joyous.

The top is a fresh burst of citrus notes (bergamot and, I think, lemon) which arrives just moments before the warm bloom of peach and apricot, plus berries and... cantaloupe? It may be fruit cocktail at this point, but not that cold canned stuff: it's freshly made, and warmed, and there's vanilla sugar sprinkled on top.

The floral notes are not as distinct; according to the various lists of official notes, they include rose, jasmine, and freesia. The warm fruit notes remain the dominant force in Dalissime, and they hang around through most of the life of the scent, until finally the oriental base notes--ambered vanilla, grounded in sandalwood--take over.

You can't talk about Dali scents without talking about the bottles, because they're always showstoppers, based on elements from his paintings. The first scent was famously based on a disembodied nose and lips from his "Aphrodite of Cnidus", and so is this one, from "Christmas"; in peach-coloured glass, an advertisement of the contents, it's a sort of Greek column made of the same sort of nose and lips, but sitting on a rounded plinth, all surmounted by a capital carved with leaves and vines in the Corinthian style. It's mesmerizing; it practically forces you to hold it and examine it from all angles.

Barking Up The Right Tree: Method Cinnamon Bark Hand Soap

The new round of Christmas-themed Method hand soaps has hit the market, more or less. There are three of them: last year's Peppermint Vanilla, plus one called Hollyberry (probably as uninteresting to my nose as last year's Frosted Cranberry) and another called Cinnamon Bark. Unfortunately, only the lattermost one has shown up locally, for reasons I can't guess. I'm very sorry not to be able to get last year's Spiced Pear again, because it was lovely--I'm just about using up the last of it now--and I don't know why the Peppermint Vanilla isn't available here; I would buy a couple of bottles for sure, because I finished up my one bottle months ago. But the Cinnamon Bark is exceptionally good, so I should be thankful to have that.

There were exactly two bottles in the Superstore--a Canadian supermarket chain--the other day; I noticed them because, unlike the other Method soaps in their clear bottles, the Christmas releases are a pearlized bottle, very festive. (Also, the Christmas bottles now have a little stylized snowflake just below the embossed Method logo. And also the bottle was brown, a colour I'd never seen before in the Method line.) I bought one; perhaps I'll have to go back tomorrow and snap up the other, if it's still there. Or perhaps, in a spirit of Christmas generosity, I'll leave it for some other lucky soul.

Is there a leak in the bottle? I can't find one. Is there some sort of technology that makes the bottle smell like its contents, or did someone smear some of the soap onto the bottle, or is it just so strong that it penetrates the plastic? Because Cinnamon Bark soap is so strongly scented that I can smell it without even using it. An hour after I put the bottle into the bathroom, before I even tried it, I walked in and was puzzled--astounded, really--by the intensity of the scent. It's still there every time I walk in.

It doesn't smell like ground cinnamon; that's a Christmastime cliché. It smells more like wood than spice, and although it's clearly a cinnamon scent it smells more like mixed spices than specifically like cinnamon; there definitely seems to be a clove note in there. In fact, it seems like some gorgeous, complex men's scent--not any particular one, but a mélange of the sort of notes you'd usually find in a spicy-woody scent such as Calvin Klein Obsession for Men or Halston Catalyst for Men.

And it lasts forever! The scent soaks into your pores and stays there; you can still smell it on your hands a couple of hours later. For a soap, that's a hell of a feat.

You can mail-order this stuff, but damn, the shipping is expensive: at best, it doubles the cost of the product. I'll take my chances with finding it locally. Sometimes the universe is telling you to put the brakes on.

The Superstore had, in addition to the Method soap, a house brand (President's Choice) in a very boring apothecary-styled bottle; that one was called Honey Cinnamon Kitchen Hand Soap. I bought it despite the boringness of the bottle: I'm not sure why it apparently ought to be in the kitchen, but it's going in my bathroom. It's nothing like the Method Cinnamon Bark soap, for two reasons; first, it smells not of honey or cinnamon but, bafflingly, of Obsession bar soap (the women's version), and second, it leaves no trace of scent on the skin once you've washed it off. Neither of these is a bad thing.

Sugar and Spice: Demeter Honey, Caramel, and Black Pepper

Demeter is proof that a good scent doesn't have to be complex or expensive: it just has to have a solid idea and masterful execution.

Not all the Demeters are good, of course: there are a couple hundred scents in the line, minimum, and they couldn't all be winners--it just isn't statistically possible (regression to the mean and all that). But there are some gems out there if you're willing to wade through the entire pool of them.

A few days after I tried, and immediately adored, Serge Lutens Miel de Bois, I tried Demeter Honey, having sampled it (briefly) a few of years before and dismissed it: it wasn't to my taste at the time, and it didn't smell like what I thought honey ought to smell like. But years go by, your nose changes, you've smelled more things, you become a little more knowledgeable and sophisticated, and suddenly things to which you wouldn't give the time of day smell very desirable. The Demeter scent is unexpectedly good, a sort of stripped-down version of the Lutens scent, because rather than smelling like a spoonful (or a plastic bearful) of honey, it smells like raw honey, with suggestions of honeycomb, pollen, and wood. It isn't as complex or as magical or as difficult (yes, that's a good thing) as Miel de Bols, but for that price (about $20 an ounce, versus $110 for 1.7 ounces of the Lutens), who cares? It's delicious.

Demeter Caramel isn't as good: it does smell of caramel, but not quite the fresh milky caramel I had been hoping for--there's a slight synthetic edge to it. It isn't as intense as I would want it to be, and it doesn't last as long, either, which is not a surprise in the generally evanescent Demeter line but still a disappointment.

Demeter Black Pepper is also not everything I could have hoped for: it isn't really biting enough. What I wanted was the exact smell of freshly ground black pepper, and it isn't that, because it doesn't smell ground--it's more like peppercorns themselves, without the intoxicating fierceness that's released when they're crushed.

But.

On an instinct, I thought, "You know, Caramel plus Black Pepper would probably be smashing", and even though I hardly ever combine commercial scents, I threw on a splash of each, and it's true: together, they're much more than the sum of their parts. They have a synergy: the pepper carves through the synthetic sweetness of the caramel, which bestows a richness on the pepper, and there's a strange and mesmerizing glimpse of pipe tobacco amidst it all. Where did that come from? I don't know, but I love it. I mixed the two half-and-half in an atomizer, and I wear it all the time, because it's cheerful and just a little strange.

There are three lessons here:

1) Cheap is not bad.
2) Sample everything repeatedly, just in case.
3) Mix and match, because you never know.

Making Waves: Creed Virgin Island Water

Coconut, as I have noted before, tends to have one of two characteristics in perfumery--to my nose, at least. Either it's warm, sweet, and edible (think coconut cream pie, or a pina colada), or it's biting, greenish, and raw. If I had to wear a coconut scent, it would be the former and not the latter, which I find disagreeable but which some people obviously love.

When I first put on Creed's new Virgin Island Water, I smelled bright, sparkly citrus notes (lime, mostly, with a little mandarin and bergamot, all thoroughly delightful), with a baffling, rather industrial undercurrent that, I realized with a shock, smelled remarkably like Play-Doh. This may be a valid commercial scent, since a lot of people have fond memories of the smell of the stuff, but it seems like an odd note for a high-end scent of the sort that Creed produces.

The Play-Doh scent welled up and became stronger and stronger, and soon resolved itself into coconut, the harsh green sort I detest. Of course, I thought, fresh coconut: it's meant to smell like someone's holiday in the Virgin Islands.

It's not just coconut. There are the obvious island flowers (ylang-ylang and hibiscus) wrapped around it, too. The scent does eventually warm up and smell a little more like the coconut I prefer--not quite toasted, but creamy-sugary--which may be attributable to the sugar-cane note.

Once it's past that hideous raw coconut smell, Virgin Island Water isn't a terrible scent. Whether it's worth the stratospheric prices that Creed charges ($185 for a 75-mL bottle) is a matter of personal opinion, but it's not something I would ever consider investing in: it just isn't worth waiting though that baleful opening to get to the good stuff. There are lots of nicer tropical-island scents out there, if one must have one.

It's worth noting that Virgin Island Water is enormously popular at the moment; you can find many positive reviews of the scent all over the Internet. I'm just paddling my boat against the tide.

White Hot: Caron Coup de Fouet

The sense of smell is an extremely subjective thing: what smells like a field of white flowers to someone else might as well be an open septic system to me. There's hardly any agreement at all about what constitutes a beautiful scent, or what makes it beautiful: teenage girls seem to love fruity floral perfumes, while more sophisticated noses might prefer a bone-dry chypre or a slightly bitter green scent. (The one thing pretty much everyone on Earth agrees on, it seems, is that vanilla is beautiful. Otherwise, all bets are off.)

I love carnations. Nowadays, as is the case with a great many flowers intended for sale to the general public, they're being created to be as visually beautiful as possible, which usually has the unfortunate side effect of diminishing their scent if not obliterating it entirely, but I've smelled enough of them to know what they ought to smell like. One of the wonderful things about them is that they distill exceptionally well: carnation essential oil really does smell like carnations, whereas lilacs, roses, and various other flowers, if they will give up their scent at all, often do so only grudgingly, and are changed in the process; they need some tinkering to make them smell like the real article.

I had read so much about Caron's Coup de Fouet in the last few years that I was desperate to try it. I knew beyond a doubt that I would love it, the certainty of the obsessed. I finally came face to face with it in London last month, and it was everything I had hoped for; I bought it on the spot. But something baffled me and continues to do so, and it's tied into the pure subjectivity of the human nose.

Susan Irvine, in "The Perfume Guide", wrote the following:

Will keep you as warm as a fur coat in winter. It's what Cruella de Vil would have worn. Wear it when you're feeling similarly vicious.

Vicious? Really?

Coup de Fouet, which means "crack of the whip", smells like a dazzling burst of sunshine to me. It does have a certain sharpness, but so does the sun, which can feel like little needle pricks on the skin (to me, at any rate, but I concede that I am an odd duck where sunlight is concerned). It's warm, but not like a fur coat: it's warm like a fireplace.

CdF opens with an overdose of spices, the better to underscore the clove scent of the carnation. Black and red pepper fly off the skin, followed in short order by an armload of spicy carnations, softened (but only a little) with ylang-ylang, which bolster the floral aspect of the carnation without muting its spiciness at all. Underneath the flowers is an equally warm base with notes of sandalwood and vetiver, sweet opoponax, and a little oakmoss, giving it a slightly smoky, incensy character (which, I think, is what makes me think of that fireplace), a dreamy haze that lingers on the skin for hours. It's an ideal winter scent--not a powerhouse oriental, but an extremely sophisticated floral-oriental which is as much at home on a man as on a woman.

I know some vicious scents; Givenchy Indecence is perpetually in full attack mode, and there are some men's scents (YSL's M7, for one) that have a murderous cast to them. But this Caron is nothing like that to my nose. It's radiantly warm; it's generous.

De Luxe

They say travel broadens your horizons, and that certainly is true in my case. Here are three things I learned--really got--from my recent trip to the UK.

1) I finally understand why the British are so attached to their monarchy. Canadians experience the monarchy at one remove: occasionally a royal comes over to grace us with their magnificent presence, and most people just yawn and go about their business. I think most Canadians would just as soon have the institution done away with. Those under sixty, anyway. But in England, you're surrounded by history--there are lots of buildings still standing that are older than my entire country--and a lot of them bear the unmistakable stamp of royalty, such as the Tower Bridge. Even if you become inured to it, it's all there, a constant reminder of the history of the country, which is inextricably tied up with the monarchy. They don't get rid of the monarchy (or at least they haven't yet) because it's visibly, perpetually a sign of who they are and where they came from; it represents continuity.

2) I finally get the Full English Breakfast, which seems on the surface of it excessive even by North American standards. You sit down to an enormous platter containing most or all of the traditional breakfast fare: toast, grilled tomatoes and mushrooms, baked beans, sausage, eggs, ham, fried potatoes, and of course tea or coffee, plus possibly more besides (black pudding, for example, or cheese). There's just so much of it! But we spent most of every day in the UK walking around, and after eating one of these breakfasts, we'd be good for hours. Around noon, the usual time for lunch, we'd look at each other and say, "You hungry"? "Nope" was the invariable reply: the breakfast kept us going until three o'clock, easy, and often later. Despite eating such a massive load for breakfast, we both lost weight on the trip. So the Full English Breakfast is real fuel for a day's exertions; it does its job with remarkable efficiency (and deliciousness). It's probably not very good for you in the long run, but a bowl of bran cereal and yogurt is not going to keep you running for most of a day.

3) This doesn't have anything to do with the trip, exactly, but it happened on the trip, so here it is. I finally understand why skin-care products have scents in them. I hate anything that contains a scent that I didn't specifically ask to be put there: a shower gel that smells like Tsar or Egoiste is fine if that's what I want to smell like for the day, but a sunscreen that smells of cheap florals is something I very much want to avoid. (My skin-care routine, if you can even call it that, consists of washing in the shower with whatever shower gel or shampoo I have at hand, and then putting on some unscented sunscreen after I've dried off, every day, without fail.) It's hard to find "unscented" or "fragrance-free" sunscreens that really are scentless, and it pisses me off that I have to waste time doing so.

When I bought my bottle of Midnight Poison at Debenhams, the saleswoman was very nice and very apologetic that she didn't have any samples of scents for me. (I asked, because I always ask, and I thought that maybe she'd pop over to another counter or two to rustle some up, but perhaps she wasn't allowed to.) Not wanting me to leave empty-handed, she loaded a bunch of Dior skin-cream samples into my shopping bag instead, and they aren't the sorts of things I'd ever use, but all the little tubes and tiny pump vials in their shiny boxes were so beguiling that I tried a couple of them. Once. They didn't make my skin magically radiant or perfected (maybe I need to keep using them for that to happen), but by god were they ever scented! They had a potent rosy floral scent to them that swirled around your face as you applied the products; the scent was inescapable, and surprisingly appealing. It was like applying an expensive scent that just happened to be a skin cream. Most of the drugstore lines, of course, are also scented, and it's the same thing, I think: women in general clearly don't just want to put on a cream and be done with it--they want a reminder that they're using a product. The unstated message must be that that if they can smell it, it must be effective because they know it's there.

So finally, I know why these potions and unguents are so highly perfumed, and why the expensive lines clearly put a huge amount of time and effort into concocting a particularly good scent for their products. They want consumers to feel that they're getting something more than just an emulsion in a bottle, and without a doubt they succeed. The Dior creams may not work any better than cheaper lines, if they work at all beyond helping keep your skin from drying out, but they give the almost subliminal sense that they're expensive, and worth the expense. They smell like luxury.

+

But what is luxury, really?

Is it a fifty-thousand-dollar handbag? Is that handbag really five hundred times better, more desirable, than a hundred-dollar purse?

Is it a $245 scent in an unattractive bottle which goes by the name "Luxe"? It is a $2350 perfume in a lead-crystal bottle set with a diamond, one that unabashedly announces itself "The most expensive perfume in the world"?

Someone has written an entire book on the subject, which I haven't read. Doesn't mean I don't have some thoughts on the topic, though.

Over on Now Smell This there was a rousing discussion of the idea of luxury as it applied to fragrances; many of the writers felt that the idea of luxury as it applies to commercial fragrance is a dead one, and I am more or less forced to agree. There are many very expensive scents on the market nowadays, but are they truly, meaningfully luxurious? I am beginning to have my doubts.

For something to be truly luxurious, I think, it has has to have three qualities:

1) It must be hard to come by. This can be a result of organic scarcity, as with caviar, or it can be because the item is difficult and/or time-consuming to produce, as is a Mercedes-Benz.
2) It must be significantly more expensive than a comparable item: a disposable ball-point pen is not luxurious, but a Montblanc pen (or, as they prefer, a "writing instrument") is. Can a pen be worth $1600? If it gives you pleasure every time you use it, or if it increases your status, or if you have more money than brains, then perhaps it can.
3) It must in some way justify that increased expense. A mink coat--whatever your feelings about the animal-skin trade--is a luxury because it is extremely time-consuming and difficult to create.

That third thing is crucial: the luxury item must seem to be worth whatever it takes to own it. And this, it seems, is where the notion of luxury is disintegrating in the world of fragrance.

Part of the problem is the flood of perfumes. A generation ago, there were maybe a thousand fragrances on the market. Even then you had an embarrassment of choices. Now, there are seven to eight hundred new fragrances launched every year--two or three a day, every day, day in, day out. Even at the high end of the market there's a glut: Tom Ford launches a collection of twelve all at once; Chanel, a series of ten which they call Les Exclusifs. The established perfume houses each churn out dozens of scents a year, and celebrities attach their names to anything in a bottle as a way of increasing their brand equity. It is not possible to keep up: you couldn't try them all and form intelligent opinions about them, any more than you could read and review seven or eight hundred books a year.

Books, in fact, are a good parallel to the world of fragrance. They're churned out in ever-increasing numbers, and you can't meaningfully experience more than a fraction of them. They're just another aspect of the blitz of media that dominates our lives. Where they used to be an art form, they're just another commodity.

This commodification isn't destroying perfumery, but it certainly is diluting it, and it's eroding the sense of luxury that only fifty years ago dominated the scented world. Estee Lauder had to market her Youth-Dew as a bath oil, because women wouldn't buy a perfume for themselves--it was too luxurious and therefore frivolous--but they would buy a prosaic bath product. Nowadays, every product has a smell, everybody can afford some sort of fragrance, and perfume as a category is no more luxurious than hamburger or plastic shoes.

Merely charging a huge amount of money for something doesn't make it a luxury, because, according to my rule #3 above, the scent has to seem to be worth the extra money. I don't think an $885 bottle of Clive Christian #1 for Men is luxurious: I think it's ridiculous. Even if I loved it (for the record, I haven't tried it, though I could have), I wouldn't think of paying that much for a scent. I have a threshold--I expect everyone does--beyond with a scent couldn't possibly be worth the cost. If you'll pay two thousand dollars for a diamond-inset bottle of perfume (most of the price is for the bottle, obviously), will you pay three? Or five? Or thirty thousand for a bottle inset with pavé diamonds? Five million for perfume in a tiny bottle carved from an entire diamond? Where does it stop? And at what point does it become meaningless--not about perfume, but about insane extravagance?

Having said that, though, the fact is that more expensive fragrances often are better. As any regular reader will note, I will sample any scent, and I don't disdain cheap ones: I think Tabu and Old Spice are wonderful, and on the right skin, Coty's Emeraude is lovely. But though more expensive scents may not be true luxuries, they tend to be better thought out, more artistically constructed, and made with better ingredients; they can be worth the higher price. Within reason.

Back when I was just getting properly obsessed with scent, I obtained a bottle of Comptoir Sud Pacifique Vanille Amande in a swap, and I treasured it, because I had never seen it for sale anywhere: I couldn't easily get it, which gave it that sense of scarcity that luxury requires. When the line became available in a local drugstore, I bought a bunch of CSP scents, and while I love them, they no longer feel luxurious, because they're too easily available. Familiarity really does breed contempt!

When I look at my collection, I see that the ones I treasure the most, the ones I'd save from a fire, are in fact the most expensive. Not only that--they're ones it was most difficult for me to get, the ones I yearned for the longest. I desperately desired Ambre Précieux after trying a sample of it, and I still love it madly, partly, I'm sure, because I still remember that desire; it colours my experience of the scent. The same is true of the L'Artisan Épices trio (I waited years to own it) and of Coup de Fouet (I had to leave the continent to get it).

Perhaps, then, that is the soul of luxury: the sense of yearning for something rare and difficult to obtain, eventually brought to fruition by possession.

Simplicity: Yves Rocher Rose Absolue

Sometimes, it turns out, you really can get a good idea of what something is going to smell like just by reading about it.

Last year, Yves Rocher launched the delectable Voile D'Ambre, the first in their line of higher-end Secrets D'Essences fragrances. The new scent, Rose Absolue, has just recently been made available in Canada, and as I said before, it didn't sound like something I'd wear, but it did sound nice.

It is, too. The ingredient list is

Cinnamon, apple, Turkish, Bulgarian and Morrocan rose, cedar, patchouli and tonka bean

and that's pretty much exactly what you get. The top is a little sweet and a little spicy, but it doesn't, thank goodness, smell like apple pie with cinnamon; the apple note is actually more of a generic modern fruit scent, and in any event it doesn't last long. The roses are very pretty; lush and petally, full-bodied without being cloying (the problem I have with Givenchy's Very Irresistible). It doesn't last as long as I think it should, particularly given those durable base notes, but that's probably a minor quibble; it's very well-crafted and appealing. (It also suggests, though it's in no way a copy of, a very good and now discontinued Yves Rocher scent, Cantata, another inexplicably failed gourmand oriental scent. The rose, the cinnamon, and the caramel overtone of the tonka bean all call Cantata to mind.)

Rose Absolue is not for me, for three reasons. I already have my rose scent, Midnight Poison, and I don't have any great interest in wearing something that's so single-mindedly rosy, and if I did, I'd wear Joy, the summit and pinnacle of all rose fragrances. But the price is reasonable: Yves Rocher is always having a sale of some sort so you can easily get a 50-mL EDP spray for 40% or 50% off the list price of $64, and for the holiday season there's a half-ounce spray for $12.50 in an attractively solid little chunk of a bottle (the one at the right, above), so Rose Absolue is probably a must-buy, or at least a must-try, for rose lovers.

Now I suppose we have to wait a whole year for the third in the Secrets D'Essences line, the recently announced Iris Noir. I'm not the world's biggest fan of the iris--I don't have a single iris-based scent, not even Dior Homme--but it sounds fascinating. It doesn't sound like the description, "a floriental scent over an iris-chypre base", because there's none of the requisite oakmoss in it (the notes are bergamot, coriander, ambrette seed, iris, patchouli and tonka bean), but I'm willing to give it a shot.

Haste Makes Waste: Tokyo by Kenzo

There are three ways to buy a scent.

1) You can buy something you already know. Maybe you were lucky enough to get a sample or a decant, or maybe you've worn it before, but you've had it on your skin long enough to know that you like it and want to own it.

2) You can sniff it in the store, be immediately pleased with it, and decide on the spot that you ought to have it.

3) You can decide without ever having had a chance to smell it that you want to own it anyway.

The first, of course, is the only way to be sure you're going to get your money's worth. All of us fanatics have bought something unsniffed: it was just a great bargain ("Even if I don't like it, I can give it away, and it was only a few bucks!"), or we'd read good reviews and decided to take a chance. But flat-out buying a whole bottle of an unknown quantity is rarely a good idea; I think it leads to more disappointment than joy.

When in London, I had a rather limited time in a department store called Debenham's. They had dozens and dozens of things I'd never smelled before, and I pretty much wore out my nose sniffing them. I had smelled Midnight Poison a couple of days previously and was pretty sure I wanted it, but took a second sniff to confirm this. Wandering through the store, I didn't find anything else that really screamed "Buy me or regret it for all eternity!"

Then I stumbled across the new Kenzo release, Tokyo. I had found Kenzo scents to be a mixed bag in the past: some real winners (the original Kenzo, FlowerbyKenzo, Jungle for Men) along with some so-so scents (Été, Kenzoair, Kashaya). I sprayed some Tokyo on one of the blotters--all of which were folded up like little paper airplanes!--and sampled it. I liked it quite a lot: it started out fairly fresh, but there was a darkness to it, an incensey undertone, that I was quite sure would work well on my skin. I carried the blotter around for about ten minutes, and liked it more and more, and decided to buy a 30-mL bottle of the stuff.

When I got it home and finally had a chance to wear it a couple of weeks later, I couldn't understand what I had bought. It bore almost no resemblance to what I had smelled, or thought I had smelled, in the store. Had my nose simply been overtired and playing tricks on me? Was the blotter contaminated with something else?

Tokyo is aimed at a very young market (18 to 25, the young men who are just outgrowing monstrosities like Axe), and it shouldn't be any surprise that it's a fresh, bright scent; most of the new releases these days are, particularly those aimed at a younger demographic. It's meant to suggest the colours of the city at night: yellow electric lights suggested by bright notes of grapefruit, citron, and ginger; red neon evoked by bitter orange and pink pepper; green trees conjured up with maté, shiso, and green tea; and the blackness of night with dark spice and wood scents--nutmeg and clove, gaiac and cedar.

Well, that's the theory, anyway. What it really smells like, unfortunately, is most every other young-men's scent released in the last five years. It isn't offensive, but it isn't interesting, either. It opens up with brilliant citrus notes underscored with green, all of which soon burns away to leave a rather generic clean freshness, with a lightly spicy undercurrent, on the skin. It dies quickly: a few hours later, there's a ghost of a scent, but what it is and whether you liked it are irrelevant.

The packaging, however, is smashing; it takes that Tokyo-at-night theme and interprets it beautifully. The box has a satin matte finish; it's white, and wrapped with a picture of a tree at night radiating streaks of bright colours, The bottle is likewise satiny matte, a deep black with streaks of colour representing city lights as seen from a speeding car. It's very touchable. A photo doesn't do it justice. The shape is a minor variation on the curved bamboo bottle that Kenzo has used for previous men's scents.

Tokyo by Kenzo isn't a terrible fragrance: I'll probably wear it from time to time, until I swap it away. It just doesn't have much to recommend it. If I had had a chance to wear it on my skin and really get to know it, I wouldn't have bought it. The best thing I can say about it, apart from that gorgeous bottle, is that it wasn't very expensive.

Raspberry Smoothie: Lacoste Elegance

A lot of the time I've read about a scent before I ever get a chance to smell it, so I have at least an idea what I'm getting myself into: I know the general category the scent falls into, and I probably know at least some of the notes.

That wasn't the case with the newest Lacoste scent, Elegance. I had read about it briefly at Now Smell This, which said only that

The oriental fougère fragrance features aromatic top notes around a spicy heart, and a dry chocolate accord at the base. Additional notes include thyme and mandarin zest.

Not much to go on, but it did sound like the sort of thing I would like. Then I promptly forgot about it. When it showed up at the local hyperdrugstore, I managed to get a sample (so rare these days). I splashed on a little and decided that, at the top, it was very nice. A few minutes went by, and upon smelling it again, I was completely floored, because all I could think was, "Good GOD that's raspberry and lots of it!"

Raspberries are probably my favourite fruit: definitely in the top three, anyway (alongside pineapples and pears). Waverley Root, in his enchanting, encyclopedic book Food (subtitled "An authoritative visual history and dictionary of the foods of the world"), has this to say of the raspberry:

          "There is a harmony among all things and the places where they are found," I wrote twenty years ago in 'The Food of France'. "Would you need to know the name of the Pekinese to realize that it was originally China? The peacock, and for that matter the common hen, are obviously natives of India. Where could the eucalyptus have come from except Australia?"
          Similarly the flavor of the raspberry stamps it "Made in Asia". It breathes of the Orient--rich, exotic, spice-laden and with a hint of musk.

It is exactly those qualities that make it such a fascinating note around which to base a scent. I know of only two raspberry-dominated scents that preceded Lacoste Elegance. The first was Byblos, launched in 1989, a veil of dark flowers rent by the bite of even darker, musky raspberry; I had to have it, of course. Then in 2000, I was similarly forced to buy Givenchy's Hot Couture, a peculiar, minimal thing: an uneasy balance between conventionally masculine (black pepper and brittle vetiver) and conventionally feminine (magnolia blossoms and that same musky raspberry). On my skin, the peppered raspberries took over: it wasn't flowery, with the magnolia just a suggestion of petaled warmth lurking underneath.

Even the most commercial of perfumers seem to understand that men's fragrances have already incorporated every possible variation of the usual notes, and so they're opening the doors to more and more possibilities. Nothing could please me more. This year saw not one but two men's fragrances based on orange blossom, Fahrenheit 32 and Fleurs du Mâle, and some recent men's scents such as Dior Homme and Bois D'Argent are dominated by iris. With the standard citrus top notes completely played out, we've also seen scents with other fruit notes playing a major role: the recent Arpege pour Homme contains nectarine, and DKNY's Red Delicious contains, naturally enough, apple. Without a doubt there'll be more and more of these in the future: as men increasingly understand that they don't have to smell only of woods, spices, and grasses, they'll be willing to take more chances.

Lacoste Elegance starts with a whiplash of fresh, vivid notes: juniper berry and peppermint are the most evident, but the scent also contains pennyroyal and thyme, according to the official list of notes. Muscling up beneath them in short order are a batch of spice notes--nutmeg, black pepper, and cardamom. These spices dance around the core of the scent: a huge quantity of ripe, luscious raspberry juice. It isn't, thank goodness, jammy or sticky: it's fresh and liquid. It takes over the entire scent: every other element becomes a doodle in the margins.

The lightly spiced raspberries last for hours, and what eventually replaces them is a relatively standard base of sandalwood, amber, and (as seems to be de rigeur in raspberry scents), musk. There's supposedly that "dry chocolate accord" as well, but it doesn't show up on my skin, which is just as well: I enjoy smelling like raspberries, as long as they're done with a certain sophistication, but the idea of chocolate raspberry is just too strange even for me.

The only real problem with Lacoste Elegance is that it isn't elegant. (The bottle is, mind you. The front is flat, the rest of it is a cylinder with "Lacoste" in raised print on the back--in reverse, so you can read it properly from the front--and it's wrapped in tactile brushed aluminum, with a cap to match. The juice is a peachy colour.) True elegance suggests a sort of restraint, and this scent is far too exuberant for that. It's brash and high-spirited: it's fun.

Cast a Spell: Dior Midnight Poison

Christian Dior's Poison is one of the landmark scents in modern perfumery, and I mean to write about it one of these days, but not yet.

Once you have an established brand, you leverage it: that wasn't particularly common in 1985, when Poison was released, but it's entirely unavoidable nowadays as companies launch an endless stream of flankers, scents that refer to an earlier, successful scent in much the way that movie sequels refer to their predecessors. In the case of Poison, the flankers had nothing to do with the original scent except the name and the bottle; this is extremely common in the world of perfumery, where companies throw out new fragrances like sparks off a fire, hoping at least one of them will set the world ablaze. (As an example, Givenchy launched the men's scent Insensé in 1993: there have been twelve other variations of it since then, and that doesn't even include the women's versions.)


The first Poison flanker was Tendre Poison, which appeared in 1994 in a bright-green bottle: entirely unrelated to the original fruity-ambery Poison (except in its strength), it was a fresh, pretty green-floral scent.


Hypnotic Poison followed in 1998, and you could say that it captures the spirit of the original: in a rubber-clad blood-red bottle, it smells of bitter almonds (finally, some real poison!), vanilla, and jasmine. It, too, is extremely strong, and while I get it, I can't wear it--it's ferocious, and a few minutes after smelling it, I want it to go away.

In 2004, Dior launched Pure Poison, and while I'm sure it must have its fans, it strikes me as dull and uninspired: the bottle is striking, in its brilliant opaline white glass, but the scent is not much different from all the other clean floral scents out there.

This year, Dior released Midnight Poison, and just from hearing the notes I was dying to try it: a scent made of rose, patchouli, and ambergris is clearly right up my alley. I didn't assume that I'd be able to wear it, or that I'd even like it, but it showed promise. The minute I smelled it, a few weeks ago in London, I knew I had to have it. It was the rose scent I've been looking for for years. It's what L'Artisan Parfumeur's rose scent for men, Voleur de Roses, ought to have been on my skin.

Midnight Poison starts off with the patchouli, and there's a lot of it, a monolith of the stuff; but rather than being the dense, earthy, rather mucky patchouli of Voleur de Roses, it's clean and fresh. (Most everything with patchouli in it nowadays uses this version, and I can't complain; some people smell good in the dirty head-shop patchouli, such as a co-worker of mine, but on my skin it's disgusting, another tribute to the strange metaphysics of body chemistry.) Wedded to it are the usual citrus top notes, a mere fillip, because scents are supposed to have them; they're quickly gone, and what replaces them is the deep bloom of the rose (supposedly a black rose, but I couldn't tell you how it differs in scent from a regular red rose). The patchouli remains: in fact, it stays right to the very end of the scent, when the rose, hours later, dies away and is replaced by a warm, vanillic, almost buttery ambergris. Despite its pervasive warmth, it's dry rather than sweet: it seems like a deliberate step away from the sugary scents that dominate the market these days.

The exceedingly lovely website is full of the usual nonsense about Cinderella and femininity and suchlike, but trust me: Midnight Poison doesn't smell out of place on a man. It could almost be considered Poison for Men, and is without a doubt the most unisex of the five Poison scents.

When the original Poison was launched, there were two bottles.


The esprit de parfum came in an apple-shaped bottle (how appropriate!) with sinuous ridges suggesting the vapours from a poisonous cauldron snaking up the sides, while the eau de toilette


came in a taller, less apple-like shape. (There was also a later version, an eau de cologne, in the same bottle as the EDT only in a clearer, more transparent amethyst glass. I believe it's been discontinued, more's the pity.) Tendre Poison also used the taller bottle, but with the introduction of Hypnotic Poison, the taller bottle was retired; I suppose that in the larger sizes, the tall and slim bottle was easier to hold, but the apple bottle is iconic, and I'm glad to see that it's being used for all the scents now.

Although I loved the original Poison EDP bottle, the Midnight Poison bottle is the most beautiful of all of them; in a medium blue glass with a pitch-black cap and a silver collar, it looks like something that would appear at midnight and entice you into untold wickedness. (The front and sides of the bottle are perfectly clear, but the top and the ridges are subtly speckled with a dark-blue pigment, making it seem as if it's hiding in the shadows.

The perfume bottle, which you can read more about here, is even better: it has wisps of darker blue threaded through the blue glass, giving the whole object a feeling of mystery and danger.)

Sparkle: Yves Saint Laurent Champagne/Yvresse

I bought a bottle of Yves Saint Laurent's Champagne not long after its launch in 1993. How could I not? Ever since I began wearing scents, I've been helplessly addicted to chypres, which start out bright and fresh (classically, a citrus note, but nowadays nearly any fruit notes) and gradually deepen into the abyss of oakmoss and patchouli--dark, lustrous, secretive. Every chypre tells a story, and for all their variety, it's always the same one; the story of the passage from innocence to worldliness. Orientals start out smelling sexy, but chypres bury the sexiness deep inside; they make you wait.

+

The bottle for Champagne was of a piece with its name. Meant to evoke a champagne cork, it had a cork-shaped cap and a curvaceous bottle wrapped in twisted wire and crowned with a beaten-gold dome.

As you may have read, not long after the launch of Champagne, all hell broke loose. What baffles me is that there have been scents named Champagne before, and nobody ever complained, as far as I know. Caron had, and still has, a scent called Royal Bain de Champagne, playing on the decadent idea of taking a bath in champagne: the bottle is shaped like a champagne bottle, and you can't get much more obvious than that. Were there riots of grape-growers, demanding that government Do Something? Not as far as I know. And Germaine Monteil launched a scent called Champagne back in 1983, and...nothing. (It's been discontinued, through age, not controversy; you can have a bottle of the EDT, 50 mL, for $349 if you want.)

What made YSL different? Were the champagne producers reluctant to be associated with a company that had caused such a stir with Opium two decades prior? Had they simply not noticed the other scents?

At any rate, the courts found in favour of the growers, and Champagne had to change its name or perish. It did change its name, of course. Yvresse is almost better, because it's such a smart little pun; "ivresse" is the French word for "drunkenness" or "inebriation", and changing the initial letter recalls the name Yves Saint Laurent, which is a bonus for brand recognition. The controversy no doubt did the fragrance a world of good--all that free publicity!--and they got two names out of the deal. I'll always think of it as Champagne, whatever the bottle says.

+


Yvresse isn't carbonated-smelling in the way that Demeter Ginger Ale is; that would probably be too obvious. But the top note has a shimmer to it; it's fresh and vibrant. It begins with a burst of juicy nectarine, cut through with sharper notes of mint and anise. The middle develops rapidly; alongside a touch of violet, a rose note blooms, allying with the nectarine for a bright variation on the rose-peach accord that perfumer Sophia Grojsman had already used in Lancôme's Trésor a few years prior.

It isn't long, maybe an hour, before the classic chypre base begins to push through. To my nose, the honeyed languor of oakmoss has been played down, dampened by the earthiness of patchouli (and, to a lesser extent, the spiky vetiver), although it's still unmistakably a chypre. A splash of vanilla keeps it from getting too earthy, as if you need to be reminded that, despite the darkness, you're still wearing something celebratory.

Despite its giddiness, Yvresse is a sophisticated scent. I'm a little surprised it's still on the market, to be honest; there doesn't seem to be a lot of call for sophistication these days. I was delighted to find a bottle of it in London; after having worn it for a couple of years, I traded it away--I'm fickle like that--and was surprised to find over the years that I was pining for it. Naturally, I snapped it up. I'll never let it out of my sight again.

The Sacred And The Profane

Perfumery--this is not a new insight or a great revelation, but it may come as a surprise to some people--is entirely about sex. It is about altering your perception of yourself, and other people's perception of you, to make you sexually appealing, whether the scent you choose to apply to yourself makes you innocent or worldly, brash or shy, commanding or retiring, strong or delicate. What, after all, is a light floral scent but a subliminal indicator that the wearer is a fragile flower? What is a rich ambery oriental scent but an amplification of the smell of hot, sweaty skin and genitalia?

+

On the way back from London, at Gatwick Airport, I was awed by the size and scope of the duty-free shop. The airport itself, once you're past the international gate, is really a shopping mall, and the duty-free store, dominated by its fragrance department, is astounding, like nothing I'd ever seen before.

As I strolled through it, though, I became more and more disenchanted. The prices didn't seem to be that much better than I could find anywhere else. The products were the same as I'd seen throughout the UK: there were a few travel collections, sets of miniatures or special editions of things, but nothing genuinely exciting. Scents make me happy, and the prospect of finding something new, or a real bargain, make me even happier, but there was nothing here to thrill the soul. (Clearly I had been ruined by another fragrance-shopping experience a couple of days previously, about which more in a bit.) As I walked through, becoming more dispirited by the minute, it struck me: if fragrance is about sex, then this is its government-sanctioned red-light district, everything out in the open, no mystery, no secrets, just product product product and sunshiny procuresses willing to sell it to you.
(I did find one thing I hadn't seen anywhere else, Dior's limited-edition Eau Sauvage Fraicheur Cuir, but at £35 (about $80), I couldn't justify it, not after all I'd spent already. Was I going to use up even a reasonable fraction of a 100-mL bottle? Never. Did I need another leather scent, nice though it was? Not really. Bye-bye, Fraicheur Cuir.)

+

If the Gatwick duty-free shop is a whorehouse, then the Harrods fragrance department is a temple of sex, a holy place.

On entering Harrods, you walk through a vestibule and into the cosmetics department, a brilliantly lit warehouse of white walls and mirrors, the better to show just how awful you look without its products. Once you're through that gantlet, you enter its polar opposite: a large room, but as dark as the previous room was light, black floors, black walls, low lighting, and a large staff of salespeople; if they're not all clad in black, they give that impression nonetheless. Harrods is a temple, and they are its votaries. They want you to submit to the mysteries of the sex they have to offer, and you will, because you must.

The room is not brightly lit, but there are bright lights: they're focused on the scents themselves, which seem to glow with a mysterious power. They compel you to stop and sample them. I found myself sniffing things I already knew, just because they were there. I sniffed everything. I wore my nose out.

The votaries do not undersell their deities. I saw one of them pick up a bottle from his counter and spray the air in front of him a half-dozen times; for his own pleasure, or to lure another worshipper? As I sampled Serge Lutens (Chergui! Rousse! Daim Blond!), with each new scent the priestess would pick up a fresh blotter and spray it front (psst psst psst) and back (psst psst psst) before handing it to me, the better to overwhelm my senses.

And there, in a far corner of the store, was the Caron counter, and there in the middle of it was my holy grail, the object of my adoration: Coup de Fouet.

I didn't need to smell it, but I did anyway. Took the blotter, wandered away, my eyes a little glazed, my heart beating a little faster, sniffing again and again. Finally, satiated, I made my way back to the counter and bought it--the price was irrelevant at that point--and can finally worship at its pedestaled, perfumed feet.

England Swings

If you're reading my other blog--no particular reason you should, but you might be--then you know I'm in the UK for a couple of weeks.

They take fragrance very seriously over here. It's wonderful. Even small drugstores in smallish cities such as Bath have large and varied selections of scents, and not all the usual Calvin Klein or celebrity stuff you find in any old drugstore, either (though there's plenty of that); older scents are fairly easy to come by, particularly in the larger cities.

A great number of people wear fragrance: you can be walking down a street almost anywhere and catch a ribbon of scent from a passer-by. I walked into a restaurant a couple of days ago in Cardiff; a young woman was sitting near the door, and I was intoxicated by the scent of Byzance. Just this morning, in Edinburgh, a tiny old woman crossed my path and I was delighted to smell something young and fresh on her (I think it was Guerlain Insolence, but I wouldn't swear to that in a court of law).

It isn't just the women, either. A free daily newspaper called Metro has a style section, and here's a quote from today's issue, in a piece about what the well-dressed man will be wearing this fall, from a stylist named Thom Murphy:

Chanel No. 5. I kid you not! This big nan's blouse perfume is only for the truly hard boys. It's such a familiar smell but, on a man, the fragrance changes and leaves people confused--which is always good.

I would have to agree with that. I used to wear Chanel No. 5 (the extract, or perfume, which is the densenst and most interesting version), and on my skin it was dark and strange and fascinating, not anything like you'd imagine on Marilyn Monroe. I can't see myself wearing it any more; my skin, and my nose, have changed. But I'm glad I had the chance to once.

I have been shopping, of course, and I've been extremely good, managing to limit myself to 14 scents. On my second day in London, I bought a bottle of YSL Yvresse and a tiny bottle of Thierry Mugler Alien. The next day, at a high-end department store called Debenham's, I got 30-mL bottles of Dior's new Midnight Poison (rose, patchouli, ambergris, vanilla) and the new Kenzo for men, Tokyo (spicy-fresh, woody, incensy). And then a couple of days later in Bath, I bought a couple of different sets of 5 Salvador Dali miniatures, including the astounding original scent, the men's scent, Daliflor, Rubylips, Laguna (which I used to hate--have I changed enough to love it?) Dalissime, Eau de Rubylips, and a couple of others. Add in a bunch of samples, and I have lots to write about in the coming months. In theory.

What didn't I buy? Lots of things. Today I was in an Edinburgh store called Jenner's, and was much tempted. Tom Ford's recent Black Orchid was exceedingly tempting, but the price was way out of my league. Likewise with Caron's Tabac Blond: it seems like the sort of thing that would sit well on my skin, but I couldn't justify the price tag (£80 or so for a 50-mL bottle if I remember correctly). If they had had Poivre or Coup de Fouet, I think I would have bought, regardless of the price, because of my mad love for carnations. They also had a bunch of Serge Lutens, but I thought it was wise to steer clear. There will be other trips and other temptations....

Curves: Le Classique by Jean-Paul Gaultier

Jean-Paul Gaultier's scents, on the whole, don't work for me. Fleur du Mâle was a gigantic misfire, I thought; Gaultier² was boring (ambered vanilla musk with no development whatever), and Fragile was a hideous blast of tuberose (in a really fantastic bottle). I wore his first men's scent, Le Mâle, for a while, and while I can appreciate it as an objet d'art, it doesn't suit me, at all. But his first scent, Le Classique, is a women's floral-oriental that manages to be both classical and modern. It's a wonderment.

How about a couple of lists of notes to start? They have nothing to do with one another, and neither of them seems to be entirely correct, but I'm not a trained nose, so what do I know? First, from Basenotes:

Top Notes: Rose, star aniseed, orange, mandarin, pear liqueur.
Middle Notes: Iris, orchid, plum, ginger, orange blossom, ylang-ylang.
Base Notes: Musk, vanilla, woody amber.

And from Susan Irvine's "The Perfume Guide":

Top notes: Cyclamen, freesia, lotus, rosewater, bergamot, lemon, mandarin, plum, peach.
Middle notes: Carnation, peony, lily, ginger.
Base notes: Ambrette seed, woody note, musk, osmanthus, cinnamon, tonka bean.

Not much overlap there!

I once called the scent "rosy-sherbety", and that's the overall effect for me, despite the fact that Gaultier famously (and worrisomely) said, before its launch, that the scent was concocted to remind him of his grandmother's dressing-table, with the scents of face powder and nail polish remover. No acetone in here, though.

It starts out sweet and it stays that way for its entire life, which is a long, long time, thanks to the preponderance of base notes: Le Classique is a floral oriental, but as it dries down, it's most definitely an oriental. The top is a compote of sweetened fruit (peaches and plums, reminiscent of Gem by Van Cleef & Arpels) with a little frisson of citrus and anise. Immediately underneath this is a bouquet of flowers: primarily rose, de-thorned, softened, and powdered, and orange-flower, though rose is still the predominant note, if anything can be said to predominate in this seamless blend of flowers. (If there's carnation in there, I can't find it. )

The flowers soon sink into a vat of durable oriental notes, still sweet and perfectly smooth; mostly ambergris, tonka bean, and vanilla. Gaultier's clothes might be modern, but this scent, without being old-fashioned, is comforting and extraordinarily pretty.

You can't really talk about Gaultier's scents without talking about the bottles, since they were clearly designed to be conversation pieces. This one, which caused a sensation when it was launched, is based on Schiparelli's Shocking


(which was supposedly modelled after Mae West's torso), but more so: Gaultier's version is exaggerated, with its big bosom and tiny nipped waist, an homage to his famous corset couture (also alluded to by the bottle's frosted clothing). Over the years, he's rung any number of changes on the bottle, too: it's always that same curvaceous, holdable shape, but the clothing is designed to appeal to women who once played dress-up with their dolls. One version came in a removable metal corset, and another was wearing a tiny peach-coloured fabric corset. Yet another had the underwear applied as red flocking, and every year there seems to be a new version depicting the clothing as filigree, handmade lace, or an elaborate tattoo. At least he's had the good sense not to mess with the juice inside, and why would he? It's a classic.

Death By Flowers: Gaultier Fleur du Mâle

When I wrote about Fahrenheit 32, I wondered what Gaultier's Fleur du Mâle smelled like, because both of them, released at about the same time, were men's scents built around orange blossom. Someone sent me a couple of spray vials in a swap, and now I have my answer: FdM is essentially Gaultier's Le Mâle tucked inside the hugely amplified orange-blossom note of his Le Classique.

The first thing you smell in FdM is a massive quantity of orange blossom, just as in Fahrenheit 32, but--and there's no way around this--in FdM the floral note smells as feminine as Fahrenheit 32's smells masculine. I'm not happy with the idea that we segregate smells by gender, but we do, and where the Dior masculinized the flowers with assertive aldehydes, the Gaultier makes them overwhelmingly flowery--creamy-sweet yet strident at the same time.

I used to wear Le Mâle, and though I know FdM isn't merely a copy of it with orange-flower added, it seems very much that way: the two scents seem to have a lot of the same elements: those aromatic barbershop notes, the crispness of lavender, vanilla in the base. The official list of notes for Le Mâle even mentions orange blossom, but if it's there, it's subtle. In Fleur du Mâle, it's front and centre, and it grabs you and never lets go.

I could never wear Fleur du Mâle, not because it smells like a stereotypical women's scent (I wear women's scents all the time), but because it really isn't very attractive. The orange blossom is assaultive; it possesses the scent like a demon, and it wears out its welcome very quickly. Fahrenheit 32 cuts through the orange-flower quickly with sharp vetiver and warm vanilla, whereas FdM is simply bogged down in a swamp of the flower.

The bottle for FdM is the same as for Le Mâle, a rather exaggerated male torso, but this time in shimmering white glass instead of sailor-striped aquamarine. Gorgeous, but not enough to make me want it.

The Real Thing: Demeter Licorice

Most commercial scents smell like whatever the perfumer or the company want them to smell like. Realism--whatever that means in that context--isn't particularly relevant, though nowadays, with the domination of sweet gourmand scents, it's a plus if something "smells just like chocolate" or whatever. Still, most scents don't have to smell real: Chanel No. 5 smells like itself and not like a particular flower or bouquet, and likewise with most other scents you could name.

Demeter, though, is in a class by itself. Nearly all of its scents are named after, and based on, a single recognizable thing--a plant, a food or drink, a place, an object. If they don't smell real, if they aren't accurate, then they've failed. Not all of Demeter's attempts at realism are successful, but when they are, they're amazingly, almost unnervingly lifelike.

Last month I got a whole slew of Demeter scents--22, to be exact. I've been trying a lot of them, and there are some real winners and some that I'm at best indifferent to, which is what you'd expect when you order a whole bunch of scents unsniffed. A few of them are real standouts, scents that give me enormous pleasure, and one of them is Licorice.

It doesn't smell quite like licorice root, though it has a rooty-earthy sense to it. It doesn't, thank goodness, smell like that cheap plasticky "licorice" candy such as Twizzlers. What it smells exactly like, instead, is the candy cigars and pipes we used to get when we were kids--and which, amazingly, are still available--see?


The candy has a soft but not malleable texture that resists the teeth the way cookie dough does. It has a rich, intoxicating smell of sweetened licorice root that's perfectly captured by the Demeter scent, which has a brief anisette smell before the alcohol burns away, after which it's pure licorice cigar, a scent that lasts an hour or so before fading away to reveal an unexpected glaze of sugared vanilla. It's the smell of childhood happiness, and to find it so accurately reproduced in a bottle is one of the unexpected delights of life.