I Didn't Have To Have It But I Bought It Anyway: Covet by Sarah Jessica Parker

Last week I mentioned the love that fragrance mavens have for categories, using Le Feu D'Issey as an example: it's a baffling, near-uncategorizable scent, and I never did assign it a family, but I suppose it's an oriental, or, with its roses, a floral-oriental: the milky thickness and the ambery base notes make sure of that.

Today I have another scent that defies easy categorization. Sarah Jessica Parker's Covet seems to occupy a number of spaces simultaneously. It mostly seems to want to be a fougere, that mainstay of men's perfumery, but at the same time it has a warm, glowing undercurrent (supposedly chocolate in the top note, though it doesn't smell like any chocolate I'd put in my mouth), and there really isn't any centre to the fragrance at all: it seems to transition from the fougere top to a woody, almost oriental base with nothing in between.

You might as well watch the commercial for Covet, which has something of the unhinged operatic intensity that made the one for Chanel Egoiste, which is insane, absolutely the greatest thing of its kind that has ever been. (In fact, the music in the Covet commercial is the opening notes of the aria "Pace, pace, mio Dio" from Verdi's "La Forza del Destino". The Chanel music is the Dance of the Knights from Prokofiev's ballet "Romeo and Juliet".) Parker got a lot of flak for the ad, partly because she seems so demented (which I personally love, because a perfume-maddened Maenad who'll kick the shit out of a window to get what she wants is a woman I want to know) and partly because she has the temerity to not be classically, or at least surgically, beautiful, to which I say good for her--she's more striking than lovely, to steal a Simpsons line, and she looks just fine to me, like a normal human being and not, as most Hollywood types seem to do these days, carved from a bar of Ivory soap (as Pauline Kael put it in her review of "Beaches", referring to Barbara Hershey). (In a nice coincidence, today the Project Rungay gents posted a blog entry about Parker, noting accurately that "The bitch knows. How. To. Wear. Clothes.")

As for the scent itself, I'm a little less enthusiastic. It's pretty good; it's much better than most everything a celebrity slaps her or his name on these days. Obviously Covet took some time and money to make, and apparently Parker herself had a hand in it, which is almost unheard of but which is believable--the scent is offbeat, not one of the usual fruity-floral monstrosities that the celebs put their names to. It doesn't smell focus-grouped and safe. I like Covet, and I wear it and will continue to wear it. But I wish it were more interesting than it turned out to be.

The upper register is the most enjoyable part of the scent. It's a flurry of activity; sharp green lemons, leafy greenery, and lavender, rather dry, pretty much the definition of a fougere scent, except for that would-be chocolate that reads, to me, as some indefinable warmth. What I like about it is that the lemons are so brightly green as to be almost shocking; the first blast of the scent is dizzyingly blatant. The long-lasting base is nice, but nothing particularly special, a durable wood-amber scent of the kind that most men's fragrances nowadays are built upon. (Very durable; it will last through a shower, no problem.)

The list of notes, which tells you very little that's of any use:

Top: Wet Greens, Geranium Leaves, Lemon, Chocolate, Lavender. Heart: Honeysuckle, Magnolia, Muguet, Michelia. Base: Musk, Vetiver, Cashmere Wood, Teakwood, Amber.

Michelia is a relative of the magnolia. Despite all those flowers supposedly in the middle, there isn't really any floral presence to the scent at all. Any man could wear this and nobody would bat an eye.

The bottle is a squat cuboid thing full of brightly chartreuse juice with a peculiar top--not even a cap, just a ring of dark-brown imitation topazes that clicks smartly onto the sprayer. Everyone seems to hate it, but I kind of like it. It doesn't resemble anything else on the market. Like the contents and like SJP, its public face, the bottle seems to be saying that it takes orders from no one.