One Thousand Scents

Somebody Explain This To Me

2012-02-02T11:58:00.000-04:00

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

2012-02-01T11:18:00.000-04:00

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

2012-01-24T20:05:00.000-04:00

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

2012-01-20T09:44:00.000-04:00

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

2012-01-16T18:12:00.000-04:00

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.

Party Girl: Vraie Blonde by Etat Libre d'Orange

2012-01-13T11:25:00.000-04:00

Vraie Blonde is so much fun! It smells like a box of milk chocolates full of aldehydes. There may be a peach-flavoured cream centre in one or two of them, but otherwise it's aldehydes and chocolate. And it's vivacious and charming, bright and cheery and effervescent, the centre of attention. The life of the party! And the fun doesn't end! Vraie Blonde just keeps being bubbly and madcap, and even if you beg it to stop it's still dancing a couple of hours later, and you try to sneak away for hot shower and a bit of peace and quiet but you can't escape.

A few hours after that it dies of exhaustion.

Who Are You: Bois 1920 Vetiver Ambrato

2012-01-11T03:46:00.000-04:00

I think nowadays most people like to know what the notes to a scent are so they have an idea of what they're getting themselves into, so here they are:

Top notes are bergamot, lemon, petit grain, cloves, geranium and artemisia; middle notes are patchouli, vetiver, sandalwood, cedar and lavender; base notes are tobacco, vanilla, amber, musk, benzoin, french labdanum and galbanum.

Sure, whatever. Here's what Vetiver Ambrato smells like to me: a very brief whiff of vetiver cologne, and then a massive heap of sweet powder. It isn't bad — it calls to mind a number of other ambery-sweet men's scent's like Lagerfeld and Stetson — but it is very sweet, and it is very powdery, and that's practically all there is to it. The list of ingredients sounds like a men's scent, and at first, when those citrus-green notes are still in the air, it suggests being freshly shaven and powdered in a barbershop; but then the volatile notes disappear and all you're left with is sweet powder, though from time to time, not often enough, I thought I detected a bit of tobacco. At the end — a long time coming, since it's almost entirely base notes — there's a bit of that sourishness you sometimes get with ambers, and some vanilla.

Luckyscent, echoing the packaging of my sample, says that "Vetiver Ambrato is a decidedly masculine fragrance that embodies all the power and mystery of modern man," which is hilarious, because if you added a few drops of violet water after the top notes burn off, you would smell like a little old lady crocheting an antimacassar. The sample's text also calls it "virile" and "provocative", and I can't understand why the company is so obviously desperate to promote it as something it is not: it is as virile and provocative as a desk lamp.

Mountainous: Old Spice Denali Deodorant

2012-01-06T07:12:00.004-04:00

I am not what you would call a high-maintenance person when it comes to getting ready in the morning. Shower, shave, deodorant, sunscreen/moisturizer, I'm good for the day. I consider those things (maybe not a daily shave) to be an absolute minimum for everyone. Soap and water are cheap, and there is no excuse for smelling of body odour these days. As for deodorant, some lucky people (Jim is one of them) don't need to wear it; if I don't, there are consequences, and I figure for pretty much everyone with armpits it's better safe than sorry. As for moisturizer, I don't know why it's considered unmanly: men have skin, skin dries out (especially in winter), ten seconds of smooshing a bit of lotion on your face every morning solves the problem. And it isn't vain to not want to look like an old leather briefcase before you hit fifty, so some sunscreen in your moisture is a good idea for most people.

I always use Mitchum gel deodorant, which is unscented and gets the job done. But every now and then I sniff around in the men's deo department just to see if anything smells interesting, because you never know, it just might. Last year Old Spice had a Fresh Collection of four scents, and I sniffed them because that's what I do, and three of them weren't me at all but one of them, Denali, intrigued me. So I bought it. And then didn't wear it for over a year, because let's face it, I'm going to be wearing a fragrance most of the time, and if I'm not it's because Jim's around, and since he is a foe of commercial fragrances in general, I don't want to smell like scented deodorant or scented anything.

But on Wednesday morning as I was getting ready to go to work I looked in the storage closet to get some new contact lenses, and I saw the Denali and sniffed it — not too bad — and put some on, and goddamn is it ever strong!

On the way to work (with my arms by my side and my heavy winter jacket on) I put on some Jo Malone Black Vetyver Café, not because I adore it but because I found the vial and figured why not. It isn't a particularly strong or long-lasting scent, so I figured I could reapply it if I needed to. I didn't need to, because once I got to work and unjacketed myself I could smell the Denali all day: when you wear a scent under your shirt, air is forever being pulled in through the neck- and arm-holes, scented, and whooshed back out again. The scent wasn't overwhelming, but it sure was there. And it sure was durable: it hovered around me all evening, and I could still smell it that night when I went to bed, though it had diminished enough that I was pretty sure it wouldn't bother Jim, who didn't comment on it, so I guess it didn't.

Yesterday morning I showered as usual. When I lifted my arm to put on my usual (unscented) deodorant, I could still smell the Denali! That stuff is tenacious as hell.

Denali is the name of a mountain in Alaska, so you might reasonably think that it would smell outdoor-fresh, brisk and cold and ozonic; the website says it smells like "wilderness, open air and freedom". What it actually smells like is quite a lot of patchouli (which is why I bought the stuff — it tricked me into thinking it was a chypre), and a bunch of other men's-cologne things: the list given in Basenotes is

Top Notes: Fresh Air, Mandarin Splash, Crisp Fruits, Spearmint, Fresh-cut Cilantro
Middle Notes: Fresh Spices, Rosemary, Armoise, Lavender, Licorice, Freesia
Base Notes: Creamy Vanilla, Rich Amber, Sandalwood, Patchouli, Sweet Musk

and hell, I don't know, it might be accurate or it might be complete bullshit. I mean, it's deodorant. It does have a fruit-salad top and there's a pile of spices in there along with the patchouli, but otherwise it could be anything: they could throw Rhubarb Pie and Wisteria and Larchwood into the list and who would be able to say differently?

I don't see the point of mass-market perfumed deodorant, because if you're the kind of person who wears a fragrance then you're going to want to really wear a fragrance and not risk having your toiletries clash with it, and if you're not the kind of person who wears a fragrance then you sure don't want anything that smells as strong as this does. But it's still on the market, so I guess men are still buying it. It isn't a mistake I'll ever make again.

Disciplinary Action: Le Labo Rose 31

2012-01-05T06:27:00.000-04:00

The main thing you need to know about the names of Le Labo scents is that the number is the number of ingredients in the scent (although in perfumery any such contention is usually suspect), and the word is the core note around which the scent is constructed (although from what I've read this is not necessarily the case, but that is also true in the world of perfumery in general: a scent named after tree whose flowers are said to smell of milled flour might smell instead mostly of pretzels dipped in iris cologne, while the delicious-sounding Peppermint Sherbet could smell like hatred and bile).

The main thing you need to know about Rose 31 is that it's pretty horrible. It's an attempt at making a masculine rose scent, which in this case means removing everything that makes a rose the most beloved of all flowers — nothing creamy or plush or honeyed, nothing beautiful, nothing that might, god forbid, be associated with a traditional rose scent, as if the very suggestion that men want to smell good would somehow be insulting — and keeping only the sharp and sour elements (not even a citrusy sour but a damp-kitchen-rag sour), supplementing that with a whole lot of pointy cedar, astringent vetiver, and rough-edged spices, none of it pleasant, all seemingly chosen for unimpeachable masculinity rather than attractiveness. It's masculine, all right, in the same way that a punch in the face is masculine.

I was going to say that it's a rose scent for people who don't like roses, but there's too much rose in it for that. It's a rose scent for people who think that the enjoyment of fragrance deserves some sort of punishment.

I'll Drink to That: Serge Lutens Santal de Mysore

2011-12-31T21:10:00.000-04:00

Another year gone! Another thousand or so new scents have whirled past us, and even the most determined of us properly sampled — wore and re-wore and thought about — what, a couple dozen, half a hundred of them? (I didn't even manage that many, I think.) And still they multiply in mad profusion, a few worthy new releases lost in the sea of flankers and copies and reformulations, while all the thousands of old scents remain to be, if we and they are lucky, discovered or rediscovered.

Serge Lutens' Santal de Mysore turns 15 in 2012. It is an old, established scent that is certainly a reformulation (because true Mysore sandalwood is virtually unavailable in any quantity at any cost), probably in large part synthetic, possibly not worth the price being asked for it ($200 for a 50-mL bottle). But it is also pure unadulterated Lutens, as immediately identifiable as a Mozart symphony or a Francis Bacon painting.

It was almost exactly a year ago that I wrote about Lutens' other essay on sandalwood, Santal Blanc, which I loved at first sniff and still love, because it is as beautiful and as rigorous as a mathematical proof. But where Santal Blanc is meant to intrigue and maybe baffle, Santal de Mysore is simply out to gratify: it's much closer in spirit to the luscious, boozy Idole de Lubin, although Idole is a sweet sandalwood liqueur where Santal de Mysore is a slug of spiced rum in a sandalwood cup.

Most Lutens scents defiantly resist classification by gender. Some people consider Santal Blanc to be a women's scent, but it is so strict and austere that I fail to see how it could possibly be assigned a sex: it seems to exist in some rarefied space where gender simply doesn't exist. Santal de Mysore, though, really does seem like a men's scent: it is enormously suggestive of a men's club, all pipe tobacco and wood panelling and suit-and-ties sitting around a cozy fireplace with drinks in hand. There is plenty of spice in it (how Lutens), a little ribbon of caramel sweetness to take the edge off, and much less sandalwood than you might expect (not the only time Lutens has played this joke: Cèdre isn't a cedar scent but a tuberose with a shaving or two of wood at the bottom of it).

As usual — as ever — one of my New Year's resolutions is to not buy any new scents until I have reviewed every single one of the samples and bottles I own, and that is a preposterously large number of which I am both ashamed and pleased. There is, however, a small possibility that I will be going to France next fall, and if I find myself in Paris, and find myself at the Palais Royale, and find myself at the Serge Lutens store, then by god all bets are off, and one of the things I may find myself buying is a bottle of the gorgeous and infinitely wearable Santal de Mysore.

Cleaning Up

2011-12-25T18:59:00.004-04:00

I love being really clean. If I could manage and justify it, I'd shower two or three times a day. I don't care that it probably wouldn't be good for me: I'd do it anyway.

As a consequence, I love soaps. Bar soap will do, and I've made enough of it myself: not made from scratch with fat and lye (I wouldn't trust anything I had made with lye), but the melt-and-pour kind that you colour and scent and mould, which may be the saponological equivalent of paint by numbers but at least won't dissolve the user's skin. Last year I brought my mom and stepfather at least six pounds of the stuff on a visit: flowery and fruity things for her, sandalwood and almond for him. Then a few months ago in a two-week fit of creativity I used up all the plain soap that I had and made at least fifteen pounds, sixty-plus four-ounce bars. The first six batches were named after London subway stops such as Green Park, a jade-green eucalyptus-and-citrus blend; Blackfriars, an inky-black* brick confusingly scented with orange and orchid; and of course Mornington Crescent, a shimmery yellow lavender-and-lemongrass wakeup call. After I ran out of likely tube stops I started mixing the colours and inclusions (mostly pearl powder, aka shimmer, which comes in different colours) and then deciding the scents and names based on that: an opaque pale-orange soap of course became the orange-and vanilla Creamsicle, while a flashy green-glittered soap became the minty Live Wire, and an unexpected sandalwood and coconut blend went into dark tan with thick swirls of gold shimmer called Bronze Age.

But liquid soap is what I mostly use, because, being a man and having very short hair, I can use it head to toe. I understand that some people might like to use specialty shampoos, but for most guys, a liquid soap that they can use for everything — shampoo, shower gel, and hand soap — is ideal. It certainly is for me.

A good source for soap is the local discounter, which in Canada is usually going to be Winners, our equivalent of the U.S. chain TJ Maxx. A couple of months ago I bought three bottles of liquid soap that looked promising and were gratifyingly cheap; I couldn't open one of them to smell it, and that should be a lesson to all of us.

Though the package of hand soap and lotion in a metal holder was completely sealed in plastic, I thought something called "Peppermint Kiss" by Simple Pleasures might be nice for Christmas, maybe a nice creamy confectionery vanilla-mint. It isn't; it is without a doubt the worst soap I have ever used, because everything about it is wrong, every single thing. Some liquid soaps are too fluid (Yves Rocher is a particular offender in this regard), but this has the opposite problem: it isn't even a gel, but a jelly, so it doesn't spread out as you rub your hands together, but breaks up into clumps. Adding water doesn't do much to improve the situation, because even if you can get it to behave in water between your hands it hardly lathers at all, however much you use. I tried to convince myself that it couldn't have been manufactured that way, that maybe it got frozen in transit and was damaged as a result, but even if the texture wasn't deliberate, the scent must have been: it was cheap and fruity and disappointingly short on peppermint. The lotion was acceptable in texture but burdened with that same scent. I tried to use the soap for a couple of weeks, but I hated it, so into the garbage it went, a lesson learned.

The other two I bought were from a company called Olivia Care. They smelled nice enough in the store, but of course you can't really tell until you get them onto your skin.

One of the soaps is called Apricot Honey, and it is an astonishingly accurate rendition of apricot. Not so much the honey, but when it smells that precisely of apricot, it doesn't matter. It is a big, potent scent, and it stays on your skin for a while, a good half hour or so. (It's so long-lasting that I use only a tiny amount as a hand soap and never use it as a shampoo/shower gel, because Jim, unfortunately, hates the smell of peaches and apricots.) I got a great big vat of the stuff, not the bottle pictured above but a tall 25-ounce pump bottle with a really nice label, for $6.99; so worth it!

The other is Mandarin, and once again the fidelity is just astounding: fresh out of the bottle, you can smell the whole fruit, pulp, peel, bitter white pith and all. It isn't as durable as the Apricot Honey, but of course it isn't, because citrus smells almost never are, and in truth what remains on your skin after you've washed it off is clearly synthetic. But for one brief moment, it's utter joy, and at $5.99 for an 18.5-ounce bottle, I got my money's worth.

So what have I (and I hope you) learned? That soap is one of life's little pleasures. That you need to haunt the discount chains for soapy bargains. And that you should always, always sniff before you buy.

* Paste or gel food colour, the sort you use for icing, makes excellent soap colour. Wilton black food colouring makes a beautiful black soap and won't stain your skin, but when it's diluted in a whole lot of water in the shower, it isn't black at all: it's actually blue-green, which is startling at first. You may want to warn recipients if you decide to do this.

Gutted: Eau d'Epices by Andy Tauer

2011-12-21T14:16:00.000-04:00

I'm sure there are reviewers who are so confident in their mastery of their subject and so sure of their taste that they can unhesitatingly proclaim something to be excellent or dreadful, but I am not one of those people.

When something is undeniably good, or when I just plain love it despite any flaws, I'm fine: I can rave about it to the point of exhaustion. But here are a few of the questions I ask myself when I'm on the fence or I actively dislike something:

• Is it actually good and I just can't tell?
• Do I dislike this because I dislike one specific element of it?
• Have I just smelled this kind of thing so many times that I'm jaded?
• Is it me? Is it my nose or something?

I do have the courage of my convictions, but I also want to be fair.

Andy Tauer's Eau d'Epices has a gorgeous top: effusively spicy, mostly cinnamon and cardamom, brightened with a citrus sparkle; it makes you think of Christmas orange-and-clove pomanders and mulled wine. It also has a gorgeous base that calls to mind a Christmas tree, woody and resinous, but slightly sweetened with tonka bean. It's the middle that's the problem: a soapy orange blossom that yanks me right out of my cozy winter's reverie and plonks me down in a barber shop.

I am not a big fan of orange-flower, but even if I were, I think I would be bothered by the middle, because it just doesn't seem to go with the rest of the scent. There is nothing of Christmas or winter about the orange blossom, so why paste that in the middle of an undeniably wintry fragrance? If it's to have a floral core, why not a Christmassy "Es ist ein Ros entsprungen" rose, or a fantasy red-and-green floral accord meant to suggest poinsettias?

I honestly can't tell if it's the scent or just me, but to my mind and my nose the disconnect between the middle and its bookends is just too great. I wanted to like this — it has elements of the discontinued and lamented Aqua Allegoria Winter Delice — but I cannot get past that incongruous middle. Maybe it makes sense to the perfumer, but it doesn't to me.

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Speaking of Andy Tauer, there are still four days left to try to win something in his annual Advent giveaway. He has a lot of great things to choose from, should you win. Good luck!

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Speaking of orange flower, over on Perfume Shrine there's a list of the supposed top 10 fragrance notes for the coming year. They are:

1. Ginger Orchid
2. Orange Flower
3. Tart Guava
4. Gold Amber
5. Green Pear
6. Spicy Bergamot
7. Root Beer
8. Pink Pepper
9. Leather
10. Tomato Leaf

Awful lot of low cards in that hand if you're me. Pink pepper has been all over the place for quite a while now, I'm completely done with tomato leaf if I ever liked it to begin with, and there are at least a few things in there that can't be anything but cheap synthetics ("tart guava" and "green pear" do not sound very promising) which will be heavily ladled into everything.

I like the idea of root beer, mind you (though that complex smell can't really be called a "note", can it?). And I approve of leather: you can never have enough leather scents. If only the perfume houses would buck against the IFRA and start using buckets of oakmoss again: then we might see a revival of the classic leather chypre, one of the old mainstays of men's perfumery (and women's, too), and perhaps the inescapable and ever more horrible fresh-aquatic-ozonic category would die a fitting death.

I can dream.

History Lesson: Miriam by Tableau de Parfums

2011-12-14T07:24:00.000-04:00

The Christmas season is rocketing towards us, but you still have eleven chances to win a present from perfumer Andy Tauer, whose annual Christmas giveaways make the season even brighter (or at least more bearable if you're not the Christmas type). It's an Advent calendar for grownups: each of the first 24 days of December gives you a chance to win a sample set, a bottle of his newest Cologne du Magreb, or even the bottle of your choice from his oeuvre.

Naturally, I'm entering every day, because who doesn't love free scents? And I have already been a winner. The first year of the Advent calendar, I won a my choice of a full bottle: I was waffling, but Andy himself (he seems so friendly and chummy that nearly everyone seems to call him by his first name) said, "You should choose something you've already tried and know you like, rather than taking a chance on something you might not," so I got Lonestar Memories, which I adore.

Andy's recent Miriam is based on a short film of the same name, the first in a projected 10-year series called "Women's Picture". It's a slightly modernized aldehydic floral, the kind that dominated the first half of the twentieth century; it doesn't feel vintage, exactly, certainly not old-fashioned, but it clearly references vintage scents. It opens with a brilliant show of citrus, aldehydes, and that eighties standby violet leaf, making for an almost radioactively bright and expansive scent which calls to mind Chanel No. 5 (of course), but just underneath is a comfy rose-and-violet accord which is a dead ringer for the 2002 relaunch of Givenchy's L'Interdit, itself a much updated reference to the 1957 original. It's not a fusty floral, though, because there is also a very modern sugar-candy quality which provides a brittle edge. Later — much later, because this is a durable scent — Miriam relaxes into a haze of vanilla and sandalwood, all rounded surfaces and warmth.

Andy's the perfumer, but he doesn't sell the fragrance on his website: you can buy it here, though, or at Luckyscent, the source of my sample. It's $160 a bottle: not cheap, but not out of line for a niche scent, and absolutely worth checking out if you're one of those lucky people who can wear vintage clothing and not look as if you're wearing a costume.

Changeling: Parfumerie Generale Indochine

2011-12-07T13:21:00.000-04:00

The odd thing about amber-heavy fragrances is that more than any others they seem to change character from wearing to wearing. It's unpredictable: I don't know if it's my mood, or whatever I've been eating recently (which is said to affect one's odour), or even the weather. But yesterday I sloshed on some of the newest Parfumerie Generale scent, Indochine, and was startled to notice a distinct cardamom note that hadn't been paramount the first few times I'd worn it. Then later I put on another dab, just a small amount, and was annoyed by a certain sourness that occasionally seems to surface in ambers. The day before that, I was inundated with Indochine's powdery vanilla character. Like some other ambers I own, it seems to be any number of things, and you can't tell which one you're going to end up wearing.

Despite the fact that perfumer Pierre Guillaume is said to be a master at gourmand scents (two of his recent concoctions are Praline de Santal and Tonkamande, which are probably self-explanatory), somehow I have managed to never smell a single Parfumerie Generale scent before now, but Indochine makes a pretty good starting point.

The list of notes ("Siam benzoin resinoid, Kampot pepper, Ceylonese cardamom, Burmese tanakha, Laotian honey") sounds exotic, but the truth is that Indochine doesn't smell profoundly amazing: because of its reliance on sweet vanillic benzoin, it calls to mind any number of other sugar-bakery gourmands, most particularly Serge Lutens' Jeux de Peau but also Guerlain's Gourmand Coquin and CSP's Vanille Amande.

What makes it appealing, though, is that it isn't the monolith it easily could have been. Guillaume takes that small cluster of elements (with presumably other things we're not being informed of) and makes something suggestive of them. It rarely smells precisely like one particular thing at any given time: there are little wisps and tendrils coming off of it. Is that anise? Do I smell a pinch of bitter chocolate? A wisp of lavender — can it be?

I have so many ambers and so many gourmands that I'm not pining for a bottle of Indochine, but I can see how it could become an addiction for someone relatively new to the genre. It's really something.

F: A by BLOOD Concept

2011-12-02T06:42:00.000-04:00

I have tried, I have really tried to be fair to these four scents, but they are ridiculous. The packaging is excellent, but that's where all the money for the project seems to have gone. I don't understand what the thinking was behind them; there's no cohesion to them as a collection (not even the vaunted metallic-because-blood-has-metal-in-it concept) and as individual fragrances they don't make any sense.

A opens with a lot of that tomato-leaf note that started showing up all over the place in the late nineties: I didn't like it then, and I don't like it any better now, because I love gourmand fragrances but anything that smells like it ought to be in a bowl of salsa is not something I want on my skin. It is very tomatoey, and there is basil in there, too, I guess because you put basil in tomato sauce. Married to this juicy greenness is a licorice-jawbreaker candy-store scent and a bathroom-cleaner-and-toothpaste abrasiveness, and seriously, what? What were they thinking? What is this slumgullion supposed to mean? Do they really expect people to buy and wear this?

Aglow: Serge Lutens La Myrrhe

2011-11-30T21:48:00.096-04:00

A while ago I was talking about one of the mysteries of perfumery: how something simple could be made to seem complex, or vice versa. La Myrrhe is one of the vice versas.

If you have much experience with commercial perfumery you already know that a list of notes is not likely to be of much use to you when deciding if you would like a scent. It may be outdated. It may name things that aren't there: "carnation" in a list may simply indicate the presence of clove oil or eugenol, to make you think of carnations. It may mislead you by emphasizing unimportant notes and omitting others: it will definitely be incomplete. The almost useless (and at any rate in no particular order) notes for La Myrrhe are "mandarin, myrrh, lotus, bitter almond, woods, sandalwood, honey, amber, jasmine, musk, various spices, pimento." But you don't need to know that, because you probably aren't going to be smelling all those things anyway: whatever is in La Myrrhe is there to flesh out a very simple idea.

It starts, as do so many Lutens scents, with a brief whoosh of something that vanishes quickly: in this case, a billow of bright aldehydes which will make many people think it's inescapably a women's scent (though like most Lutenses it doesn't care who wears it). After that, the whole scent consists almost entirely of one radiant thing: candied orange peels soaked in bitter myrrh.

It is, of course, more than that, but it's all there to accent the myrrhed oranges. Bitterness comes and goes unpredictably, cutting through the candied sweetness and giving the illusion of Seville oranges; a hint of floralcy adds fullness and makes you think of orange blossom (but is actually upon examination jasmine); a shaving of dry wood underscores the incense quality of the myrrh. If you are not one of those who think that incense has a funereal quality, then La Myrrhe would make a perfect Christmas scent: it's certainly ideal for winter.

My first brief experience of La Myrrhe didn't do it justice: I was in the temple of Lutens, overwhelmed and awed (and on a real time budget), and my nose was too full of other things to appreciate its glories. As the bell jar above will tell you, La Myrrhe is an Exclusive, which means that it isn't available through the normal channels and will only be available to you through decants or on a trip to Paris. Worth it.

Or Not To: B by BLOOD Concept

2011-11-25T20:03:00.000-04:00

I've tried three of the four BLOOD Concept scents repeatedly and I don't know if they're actually dreadful, or if they have some merit but I just don't like them. But like them I don't. O was very odd and not actually horrible, but it didn't have much to recommend it unless you can't find the perfect combination of raspberry and bizarre. AB was appalling. And B is a fruity mess.

The top and middle are a lightly spiced fruit accord that won't make you think of Serge Lutens, who uses such a concoction in nearly every one of his scents, because it is thin and plasticky, with no depth at all, with a metallic undertone that will make you think of a tin of artificially fruit-flavoured soft drink. Specifically,

Tahitian Treat in an old-school steel can. And then there's some patchouli and the olfactory equivalent of a buzzing fluorescent light bulb, and my god, it lasts for inescapable hours and hours, buzzing away at you but never turning into anything good or wearable.

Melting: Vanille Ambre by Comptoir Sud Pacifique (eventually)

2011-11-22T19:31:00.000-04:00

I would have posted more in the last few weeks — I was all ready to — but I spent a week and a half in Ontario with my mother, who is now a widow. Her husband of thirty-five years, my stepfather, Hans, died a few weeks after his 77th birthday, on October 29th, of various complications of lung cancer and cardiac disease. He emigrated to Canada from Germany at the age of 23, speaking literally no English; he learned quickly enough, mostly from television and wrestling matches, but kept an unmistakeable German accent until the day he died. He was quick-witted, unhesitatingly generous, personable, stubborn, charming. He adored my mother. He was an excellent man and the world is a smaller place without him in it.

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Over the last thirty years I have given my mother many, many scents: full bottles, many miniatures, uncountable samples. I guess she got others by herself along the way, but most of it was my fault. She has kept pretty well all of them, even if she doesn't wear them, and a good thing, too, because during my visit I reclaimed a few of them from her — borrowed them back for a while, though she knows she may never see them again and doesn't care. I now have a tiny bottle of vintage Montana Parfum de Peau, thank god, and an ounce of Lancôme Magie eau de cologne (she didn't get it from me and has never opened it) from what seems to be the seventies. Or maybe the sixties!

Another thing she had that I didn't take but did wear a couple of times for the memories was a mere few drops of vintage Trésor, and if you could smell it alongside what Lancôme is now marketing as Trésor your heart would break. It's baleful stuff now, thinned out, brightened and freshened in the modern style, where it used to be ravishing, a dreamy cloud of apricots and roses with just the barest hint of bite, honeyed, with that warm-skin smell that perfumer Sophia Grojsman calls "cleavage". (She used this in an even higher dosage in her astounding Spellbound two years later: I smelled it while out shopping with my mom and, I am delighted to report, smells just as it ought to, because nobody seems to resist reformulation of the classics quite like Lauder.)

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On returning from my mother's in Penetanguishene, I had an hour in Toronto between the bus and the airplane, so I checked my bags at the bus terminal and headed over to the Eaton Centre. I poked around in the fragrance department of Sears, not really expecting to buy anything but wanting to see the Christmas gift sets, and I was plagued by salespeople, despite wearing visible earphones and plainly minding my own business. (One of them continued to stand expectantly by my side after I said, "I'm fine," forcing me to elaborate: "I'm fine, I'm just browsing, thanks.") After about eight interruptions I gave up and left, so mission accomplished, Sears, if your mission was to drive a customer away.

I moseyed up to Sephora, where I was completely ignored, thank goodness, and where I discovered to my surprise that they carry Comptoir Sud Pacifique; I hadn't really paid any attention to the line since they stopped carrying it locally five years ago, and the couple of them that I had tried since then (including this one) hadn't impressed me. So what did Sephora have? Not much: Vanille Extreme (I have enough plain-vanillas already), Coco Extreme (yuck), Vanille Abricot (of course, the top seller), Coco Figue (new, and really yuck), and...what's this? Vanille Ambre? Gimme!

I sampled it. I bought it, of course. Vanilla plus amber? For me? I think so.

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When packing to head up to my mom's place I brought a bunch of little vials and decants of scents, some old favourites and some new things that I thought I'd have time to review. (I managed one.) Among the things I brought was a little decant of Vanille Abricot that I had made up a few years ago so I could have it with me all the time, but had forgotten about when other things moved in to fill its niche in my backpack. And an amazing thing had happened to it: exposed to a small amount of air in its bottle and left to its own devices, it had ripened into something glorious, a deep apricot-brandy scent, boozy and heady, underlined but no longer dominated by that cooked-vanilla-sugar scent that the fresh version still has (I checked). It is magical, alchemy, and I couldn't duplicate it if I tried, but I am going to enjoy that little decant for as long as it lasts.

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Once I got to the Toronto Island airport, I took the Vanille Ambre bottle out of its box and transferred it to the one-litre bag we have to fit all of our various liquids into: better that than risking it in checked luggage. Once in line for check-in, being a clumsy sort, I predictably dropped the bag. The Vanille Ambre bottle, being very heavy glass, survived the experience intact, but two of those dozen or so vials I'd brought didn't (because I suppose the CSP bottle landed on them), and one of the demolished vials was AB, which fortunately I had already written about but unfortunately I despise, meaning that everything in the bag now smells like that, and who knows how long it will take to fade away.

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You do not sample a Comptoir Sud Pacifique scent expecting classical constructions of depth and subtlety. They are without exception simple, often minimalist, expressing a single idea: chocolate-chip cookie, red fruit, briny seaside. I love them: they're mindlessly fun.

Vanille Ambre is more or less exactly what it says: that warm rich CSP vanilla drizzled all over a chunk of warm amber. There's a slug of patchouli, just enough to give the scent a pleasantly musty old-book smell from time to time. And that's it. It lasts twelve hours without flinching. Unless you have gingerbread fantasies at this time of year, it is hard to imagine a better winter scent than Vanille Ambre.

Mirror Image : AB by BLOOD Concept

2011-11-14T21:42:00.000-04:00

It doesn't matter if you smell AB first or start by reading the list of notes (aldehydes, aluminum, slate, pebble, water, cedar and metallic notes): you are going to think of Comme des Garçons, in particular the second half of Odeur 71 and the Synthetic series, especially Dry Clean, because AB is a more or less exact copy of the idea behind these scents.

If you've never smelled these CdG fragrances before and have felt a gap in your life that can be filled only by an overpriced scent that is harsh, unattractive, obsessively clean, viciously synthetic, and metallic the way chewing on tinfoil with a mouthful of fillings is metallic, then BLOOD Concept AB may be just what you've been looking for.

A Real Dish: Serge Lutens Bois et Fruits

2011-11-08T21:07:00.001-04:00

Bois et Fruits is part of a set of four variations on Lutens' cedar-heavy Feminité du Bois (the others are Bois Oriental, Bois de Violette, and Bois et Musc), and it is probably the case that you can't properly understand them until you have experienced them all in context, which I haven't, yet.*

Once you know that Bois et Fruits is true to its name and also classically Lutens, you can guess what it is going to smell like first thing: wood and fruit. After the briefest flash of Lutensian weirdness that occasionally opens his scents (notably Jeux de Peau) comes a dense plummy-figgy scent reminiscent of Christmas fruitcake, mouthwatering and lightly spiced. Lutens uses fruit notes a lot, but he does not really deal in fresh fruit: it usually shows up cooked in some way, stewed or candied, or, as here, dried and then baked into something else. (Even Mandarine-Mandarin, which begins with a bright fresh orange, rapidly deepens into marmalade.) And yet there is something even odder going on: because there is plenty of cedar, and because I often get a whiff of wood-smoke from cedar, the overall effect is arresting and utterly novel — a wooden bowl full of smoked fruit.

The bell jar up at the top signifies that Bois et Fruits is an Exclusive, available at the Lutens boutique in Paris, but that rectangular Export bottle lets you know that it was, as most of the Exclusives are sooner or later, made available for a time to the rest of the world. A few places still have it in stock: The Perfume Shoppe has it for $200, which seems to be the going rate for the Exclusives-turned-(temporarily)-Exports.

I think that if you own a bunch of Lutenses, then Bois et Fruits, lovely though it is, is not an essential addition to your collection: it has a lot in common with many of his other scents, from the cooked-fruit opening to the austere wood in the base. (It suggests elements of Chypre Rouge, Santal Blanc, Fille en Aiguilles, and others besides.) But if you are new to the line and not afraid to spend a few bucks to get your hands on some, Bois et Fruits would be an excellent starting point, because it is quintessential Serge: strange, and clearly not like mass-market scents, but charming and friendly nonetheless — an ambassador from a country you'll want to visit some day.

*I will, though: I ordered a bunch of samples from The Perfumed Court, which was having a sale, and I got vials of just about every Lutens I hadn't tried yet, fifteen in all. It's like Christmas!

Timeless: Myrrhiad by Huitième Art

2011-11-04T06:55:00.001-03:00

First, the name, which is excellent, the sort of thing you can't believe nobody thought of before.

Second, the bottle, which you can't quite figure out. Is it referencing an Egyptian canopic jar?

A Chinese white-jade snuff bottle?

A twentieth-century opal-glass lampshade?

An electric shaver?

Ancient? Modern? Functional? Decorative? Plastic, glass, porcelain, stone? The Huitième Art house bottle could be almost anything, from almost any time period (well, maybe not the Baroque), and that's intriguing.

And finally of course the fragrance, which at first sniff seems like a fairly standard-issue variant on an amber scent, all base notes, but gradually unfurls itself to reveal a heart of sugared myrrh, simultaneously sweet and bitter but not too much of either, with a dose of black licorice candy and a comfortingly milky-sweet vanilla base. What it calls to mind is a highly simplified version of Serge Lutens' Douce Amere, and if that scent is just too strange, if you like the idea of Lutens but not the execution, Myrrhiad may be just the thing to warm you up on a cold fall day.

Not My Type: O by BLOOD Concept

2011-11-01T10:43:00.001-03:00

Be honest, now: if you were presented with a lineup of a dozen fragrances of which you knew nothing, each named after a sign of zodiac, even if you knew that astrology is a load of complete nonsense, wouldn't your first instinct be to reach for the bottle that corresponded to your own sign?

Maybe not you. But I would, and I think most other people would, too. And likewise, if you were confronted with a line of fragrances named after blood types, wouldn't you first want to try the one that matched your own blood type, just to see if it really suited you in some mysterious way?

So that's what I did. I have boring old type O-positive blood, the most usual in most parts of the world, at least here in Canada, but type O-positive is the universal donor, so anybody can get a transfusion from me, so there's that. Therefore, out of the four BLOOD Concept fragrances, I naturally chose O to try first.

Not two weeks ago I was writing about Bond No. 9's Bryant Park, which is dominated by raspberry, and a few years back I raved about Lacoste Elegance, a men's scent with what I thought was an unusually potent raspberry note. O, too, is dominated by raspberry, and in all three scents that note lasts an uncommonly long time. That is one hell of a synthetic.

O doesn't just smell of raspberry — there are other things in there, and if you just want that one thing there's always Demeter's enchanting but very short-lived Raspberry Jam — but raspberry is clearly the entire point of it in the end. Straight out of the bottle it's a mishmash of frankly unconnected things, an odd wild-mushroom-earthiness and a dab of synthetic rose (which allied with the raspberry calls to mind CdG's Rose but is weirder than that) and some cedar, all of which gradually drop away over the course of four hours or so to leave hardly anything but that durable raspberry. There's supposed to be a metallic note, because blood is full of iron and is said to have in quantity a metallic smell often compared to copper, but I don't smell anything particularly metally about it. O is very strange, and I can't say it's very good, but it isn't quite like anything I've ever smelled. It certainly isn't me, blood type or not.

The packaging, though, is splendid: an apparatus that wouldn't look out of place in any hospital, a frigidly clean-looking metal-and-glass bottle with a vaguely alarming spindle of red, like an automated phlebotomy from the future. (The eau de parfum is packaged as a 60-mL spray for $155: the parfum, as a 40-mL dropper for $185.)

Girls' Night Out: Fan di Fendi

2011-10-28T10:32:00.001-03:00

Fan di Fendi looks like hot stuff. Sephora has written or unearthed a rather frantic bit of ad copy for it:

Fan di Fendi is the fragrance you just adore to adore. Like a hit refrain, it's insistent, addictive, and irresistible. Electrifying you, possessing you, haunting you. Getting under your skin, inhabiting you.

A radiant floral scent resting on a leather base, this wildly exciting eau de parfum pays tribute to Fendi's expertise with materials such as fur and leather—plus the arty, rock and festive spirit that defines Fendi. It diffuses Roman sun and electric nights, leather and roses, luxury and seduction.

And the print ad has three women writhing in the throes of passion in a nightclub:

But don't you pay any attention to that. Fan di Fendi starts out with a pleasantly sweet mélange of fruit, mostly citrus and blackcurrant, with a dairy undertone, a bowl of sherbet. After that, a charming, well-behaved floral bouquet, mostly smooth jasmine (no filthy indoles here) and tidy rose (every thorn and edge rounded off), wells up; a few hours later, the whole thing is seen to be sitting on a piece of buttery-soft suede, slightly musky in a warm and unobjectionable way.

Fan di Fendi is a perfectly nice and well-behaved fruity floral which would not smell out of place on a twelve-year-old girl. And isn't that sort of a problem, even ignoring the vast chasm between the way the fragrance is presented and what it really is?

There are already hundreds, maybe thousands, of fruity florals on the market already, with varying degrees of acceptability; most of them have that ghastly, inescapable synthetic freshness that makes you want to retire to a deserted island where you never, ever have to smell such things again, and the Fendi people should be given credit for avoiding this. But still: Fan di Fendi is a fruity floral, and there is nothing at all to mark it as different in any way from all the other hundreds like it. Many of them are being aimed at the very young: the childlike Mariah Carey Lollipop Bling scents clearly are, and you can imagine most of the other pop-superstar fragrances being clamoured for by twelve-to-sixteens. Many of the others seem to be aimed at women who want to be very young: I don't know how else to explain Marc Jacobs Lola.

What they all have in common is that they have no signature, nothing of any interest that could distinguish them one from the other: they're just another product to be churned out on an endless conveyor belt and spoon-fed to the ignorant. They have been engineered to produce a single unvarying response: "Oh, you smell nice." They don't smell good, exactly, not in any meaningful way, certainly not interesting, or great, or novel, or compelling, or intriguing: they smell nice. You can't ever imagine them as signature scents, because they don't even know how to write their own names.

Sweet 16: Jean-Paul Gaultier Le Mâle

2011-10-25T10:34:00.001-03:00

Some things, as they say, get better with age. Cheese, for example.

Since I embarked on the South Beach thing, I've been eating a lot of cheese. Too much, probably: after losing 30 pounds in three months, I've sort of stalled, which I guess is normal, but still frustrating. But cheese! Last week I bought a chunk of eight-year-old white cheddar for what I thought was a ridiculous price, but I needed to see if it was different from regular old cheddar. And it is. The texture, for one thing: the internal structure has changed into something vaguely crystalline, and it is very hard to cut into cubes because it just crumbles — shatters, almost. The flavour is deep and complex, salty and rich and slightly bitter, with a goodly dose of what James Joyce called "feety savour", not absolutely pleasant (in the way that, say, a smooth creamy-buttery Havarti might be) but still wonderful. And the taste stays in your mouth for literally hours after you've eaten it. There are a lot of cheeses that I like better, but it was pretty spectacular.

Fragrances, though. Two bad things can happen over time: they can spoil (many fragrances can last for years without spoilage — I have a bottle of Molyneux Fête from the mid-1960s which hasn't aged a day — but others just seem to rot in the bottle), or they can be reformulated so that what was marketed in 1980 or 2000 is not what is being marketed in 2011.

I received a bottle of Gaultier's Le Mâle in a swap when it was launched sixteen years ago. I loved the idea of it: the packaging seemed very cheeky and avant-garde to me, innocent that I was, and since I couldn't get it locally, it had an aura of rarity. I wore it a little, but it never took hold of my brain, and so I in turn swapped it away to someone else. I am sure it has been reconstructed since them; it can't always have been quite this single-minded.

Le Mâle, after its opening herbal freshness dies down, is disconcertingly monochromatic: a barber-shop fantasia of soapy lavender and orange blossom blanketed with sweet powdery vanilla, to the point of dullness. It is unexpectedly loud (you could easily overdose on this and choke everyone around you) and quite sweet and as persistent as you would think an oriental should be, lasting for twelve hours without breaking a sweat. But when something is so unchanging, so essentially uninteresting, do you want it to last twelve hours? Do you want to spend twelve hours in a barbershop? I don't.

Unfinished Business: Bond No. 9 Bryant Park

2011-10-20T12:03:00.007-03:00

A month ago I wrote that I had signed up for Google Adsense, that they put little ads at the top of my blog for a theoretical payment at some point down the road depending on how many people clicked on the ads, and that I didn't expect to ever see any money from it. And then a week ago I got an e-mail from the Google Adsense people saying they were about to send me a cheque if I gave them my banking information.

Wouldn't you be suspicious? I would! So I left it to stew for the day (I had to go to work) and then I poked around a little, and unless someone has constructed a very convincing but poorly thought out phishing scheme, it looks like the real deal. I didn't disclose my banking information, of course: I asked them to send me a cheque instead. We'll see how that turns out.

And just over a month ago, I wrote that I had gotten an e-mail from Bond No. 9, since I am on their mailing list, asking if I would like samples of their three newest scents; I said yes, but I didn't expect to actually receive them, because I have not uniformly adored all the Bond scents as I'm sure they would like me to. (Fashion magazines are in the business of flogging whatever samples they receive from advertisers, and have an active disincentive to ever say anything bad about anything. Bloggers, on the other hand, have the freedom to say what they think. Money changes everything.)

I haven't gotten them, either: I might, but I doubt it, which is a shame, because I would like to try them, and I was also hoping to maybe score a sample of their newest scent (they sure do crank them out!), New York Amber, which has a gorgeous bottle

and a thoroughly appealing-sounding list of notes (even if it does contain a typo, "magestic rose").

But that's probably not going to happen, especially if they should happen to read this.

Bond No. 9's Bryant Park isn't great, but it sure is fun. It is completely dominated by two fruit notes, rhubarb and raspberry. The rhubarb is pointy and astringent, as rhubarb will be, and amplified by citrus, probably bergamot: it actually suggests Mugler's B*Men a bit, except that there appears to be a dose of that inescapable modern air-conditioner freshness as well. The raspberry is dry and tart, not at all sweet or jammy, and this is a bit of a surprise.

Underneath it is a bit of floral, a smidgen of rose but mostly lily of the valley, and some very clean modern patchouli. It doesn't seem to have an ending point, no real finish: there's a sort of a base that is neither here nor there — amber, I guess — but the whole show is about the raspberry and the rhubarb, which stick around for a surprisingly long time (they're still noticeable 12 hours later — modern aromachemistry is a wonderful thing) and then just trail off.

I give Bond No. 9 credit for making a fruity floral that isn't sticky-sweet, but still, it's a fruity floral that isn't exponentially better than so many others on the market (although a lot of people on Makeup Alley just adore it), and I don't know how they can charge $160 for it. Some of their scents are absolutely worth their indie-niche prices: I would probably have to retry them to make sure they haven't been reformulated, but Great Jones is retro-terrific, if I didn't already have a bunch of coffee scents I would have a bottle of New Haarlem in a heartbeat, and I adored Lexington Avenue when it was launched. Bryant Park, though: is it really worth that kind of money? Really?

Garden Variety: Estee Lauder White Linen

2011-10-18T06:24:00.005-03:00

A little while ago I said that Samsara, whatever its actual ingredients, smelled of three things, and this is an interesting aspect of perfumery: an artistic perfumer can make a fragrance smell more or less complex that it actually is. A single element of the scent might be extremely complex, with many overtones — tobacco, say, or sandalwood, or tuberose — and seem to have many facets depending on how it is employed: such a scent can be more than the sum of its parts. But the opposite is also true: a complex scent might be engineered to seem very simple, to have many of its components balanced and arrayed so that they don't have a strong character of their own, but complement and enhance the scent's main focus.

Estee Lauder's White Linen, created in 1978 by the genius Sophia Grojsman as part of her quest to execute every possible variation on the theme of the rose, like Samsara consists of three elements. At the top is a mighty tempest of aldehydes, big, clean and soapy-fresh, like the opening chords of Wrappings (also a Lauder scent under the Clinique brand) and Guerlain's Vega and of course the emperor of aldehydes Chanel No. 5. It isn't that noxious, ozonic-aquatic freshness that everything seems to have these days, either, or at least my little bottle isn't (it may have been reformulated since to make it even fresher, which would not surprise me): it's just breezy, freshly washed laundry hanging on the line. Just underneath that is a big rosy rose. And underneath that is a big bright spike of vetiver. There are certainly other things in there — a grating of citrus peel, a few petals of jasmine, a shaving of sandalwood — but they don't matter, not a whit: White Linen is all about aldehydes roses vetiver, and every element is put into the service of a single idea, that of sitting in a sunny garden with the smell of good clean laundry soap hovering about you. Like so:

Quite a while ago I wrote that while I could imagine a man wearing White Linen, I was not that man, but I was being unnecessarily evasive: I did in fact wear White Linen quite a lot, back in the late eighties when I was discovering and wearing everything I could get my hands on. I wouldn't wear it now: it no longer suits me, though I still don't see why a man mightn't wear it.

Old-Style: Bois 1920 Sutra Ylang

2011-10-14T08:03:00.004-03:00

Let's start with names. Apparently, Bois 1920 has nothing to do with wood ("bois" is the French word for wood), but instead is an acronym referring to creator Enzo Galardi's grandfather Guido, who opened a perfumery in Italy in 1920 called Bottega Italiana Spigo, "Italian Lavender Boutique". Sutra Ylang seems designed to make us think of, well, what exactly? "Sutra" is a Sanskrit word from India which brings to mind for most North Americans the Kama Sutra, which is not exactly the sex manual that most of us seem to think but more of a guide to sensual living; the word "sutra" more or less means "aphorism", but it literally means something like "connecting thread" and is the ancestor of the word "suture", a thread used to sew things together. "Ylang" is a Tagalog word from the Philippines which most of us known as "ylang-ylang" and is generally accepted to mean "flower of flowers", although the word "ylang" itself apparently means either "wilderness" or "rare", depending on which etymology you believe.

India and the Philippines are a few thousand miles apart and neither is really the home of what Westerners think of as oriental perfumery, so I assume that Bois 1920 was going for some sort of generalized and far-flung orientalia or at least Asiatica in the name of their scent, and they succeeded. Sutra Ylang is a somewhat scaled-down version of a big ambery eighties-style floral oriental, and thank god for that, because there aren't nearly enough of them around, the market having been crowded with disgusting perfumes that smell like decomposing fruit salad or floor cleaner or automotive air freshener. A blissful shot of crisp fresh citrus in the opening stages; a rich carnation-rose middle; a big chunk of sandalwood and cedar; all tied together with tons of amber, which manages not to be cloying as it was in their Real Patchouly.

The bottle, of course, is gorgeous, and you men may safely ignore the apparent pinkishness of the box, because there is nothing girly about Sutra Ylang: there have been plenty of warm sweet men's scents over the years, and this one, with its woody-amber base, fits right in. Bois 1920 considered their first eight scents to be unisex (they later launched some scents aimed specifically at women, in extremely pinkified versions of their house bottle), and there's no reason on Earth a man couldn't wear this.

More Than Meets The Eye: Odori Tabacco

2011-10-04T12:42:00.004-03:00

It is, I suppose, like one of those movies in which a man is searching for the perfect woman and doesn't realize until the last reel that she's been right there in front of him all the time.

Tabacco by Odori is not exceptional at first. The opening has a bit of orange-pop fizz to it and a short-lived gasoliney herbal mélange quickly overwhelmed by the smell of tobacco leaves, which is where it stays until the very end, when a warm vanilla takes over. Nice enough, but not really special, and certainly not worth $200+: in truth, I was beginning to wonder if I had wasted even the $12 I paid for it.

But the more I wore it (and I've worn it a lot in the last few weeks), the more it revealed itself to me. The vanillic bottom is laced with oakmoss, not enough to make it a true tobacco chypre, but enough to give it an earthiness and a dollop of that honey that sometimes accompanies oakmoss. The middle isn't a monolithic block of compressed tobacco leaves: it has nuances, a bit of the fruitiness that you often find in pipe tobacco, the occasional wisp of incense smoke, and a complex interplay of notes that suggests now autumn leaves at the cusp of decomposition, now freshly tilled soil or just-unearthed roots. A woman could of course wear it, but it is instantly recognizable as the smell of masculinity, of a pipe-smoking farmer or a tweed-jacketed gentleman with a humidor on his desk.

The bottle overall looks better than it is. Out of the box, it has a supporting wedge of cardboard jammed between the bottle and its wooden frame, because the bottle doesn't actually fill the frame: it's suspended within it (as you can sort of see in the larger image). The cap is made of leather and is beautiful, and the bottle is heavy, solid glass. But the text is badly, blurrily etched into the glass, and the frame itself, though it looks nice enough, feels kind of cheap and knocked-together: it's so lightweight as to seem hollow when you tap it, and perhaps it is. These little details matter, I'm afraid.

But perhaps you are not overly concerned with trifles such as packaging and concern yourself only with the contents, and you are looking for a truly excellent (if appallingly expensive) tobacco scent, in which case I have saved you the trouble of looking any further. Tabacco is a wonderful thing.

Finishing Touches: The Smell of Freedom, Tuca Tuca, and Vanillary by Gorilla Perfume

2011-09-23T19:52:00.004-03:00

I was naturally going to spin this out over the next week or so by doing these one at a time, as I've been doing, but what the hell. I don't have that much to say about them, so I might as well get it over with.

Before we get started, here is an article from New Scientist magazine about the sense of smell, which naturally you will want to read.

The Smell of Freedom is, like most everything at Lush, louder than you'd think it needs to be. I don't even know what category it might fit into, because it doesn't seem to have any structure: it's just a bunch of things — green citrus, mild spices, vague wood — chucked into a bottle. I guess it's meant for men. I guess?

Tuca Tuca, on the other hand, is for girls, because it smells like a fruity floral, but one made after you'd forgotten to refrigerate the ingredients: it smells overripe and on the verge of spoilage. It's not terrible, certainly not the worst in its category, but it isn't very good, either.

I like vanilla scents a whole lot, and I have nothing in particular to say against Vanillary except that it changes very little over its life and is so minimalist that it eventually overstays its welcome and becomes a bit obnoxious. Otherwise, it's an even more simplified (and, it cannot be denied, cheaper-smelling) variant on Serge Lutens' already stripped-down Un Bois Vanille, a strong, sweet vanilla with cooked-caramel undertones and a splash of jasmine, really quite nice.

So that's the boxful: three florals (one great, one indifferent, one HUGE), four messes, and a decent vanilla. Not a great average, but at least there are worthwhile things in the line, which is not a given these days.

Intermission: Biting the Hand

2011-09-20T14:05:00.006-03:00

I don't know how comprehensive the ad-blocking software in your browser is — you do block most ads, don't you? — but you may see a discreet little ad at the top of this page: this is because some time ago I signed up for Google Ads, which puts them there, calculates how much money is made from people clicking the ads and (they hope) buying things, and eventually cuts me a cheque for $100, which hasn't happened yet and probably never will.

Earlier today I checked my blog to see when my last posting was, since I try to post two or three times a week, and noticed an ad for a product called "Primal Mist", which immediately made me think of the over-the-counter asthma remedy Primatene Mist, so I think we can all agree that it isn't perhaps the best ever name for a perfume company. That's strike one.

We expect a certain amount of nonsense in fragrance advertising; perhaps in all advertising, but most especially in the marketing for a product that is pretty much by definition a pure luxury and also impossible to properly convey in words. But here is what the Primal Mist people have to say about their two fragrances:

Our scientists identified two sensuous aromatics decoded from a 3,300 year-old Mesopotamian cuneiform tablet. The ancient text was authored by a perfume maker named Tapputi, long ago. We searched for and found these extremely rare scents and created two new sensational and alluring perfumes. Primal Mist was born. Experience the seductiveness of the only fully hand-crafted, upscale perfume in the world. Perfume so perfect that it spans the boundaries of time.

I wouldn't even mind that so much if the lists of notes didn't include "white musk" for the first scent and "cashmere musk" for the second. Both of these are synthetics. Did the Mesopotamians invent synthetic odorants? Are commercially available synthetics somehow hand-crafted? Their advertising is even more full of it than most, so that's strike two.

Now, here's the page containing their two scents (click on it to make it bigger, if you like):

Yeah, that's "Formulae Alpha" and "Formulae Beta", which might be acceptable if it weren't for the fact that "formulae" is plural. Formula: singular; formulae: plural. Just like "nebula", "antenna", "vertebra", and other Latin words absorbed intact into English. One fragrance can logically have only one formula, so it looks as if they're using "formulae" instead of "formula" because they think it looks classier (it has a ligature and everything!), which is just ignorant and pretentious. So that's strike three.

Now look at those bottles. They may be crystal, but they sure don't appear very expensive, because they're not. In fact, you can buy them for $12 each ($9.60 in lots of a hundred). See?

I freely admit to knowing nothing about the economics of independent perfumery: maybe it's prohibitively expensive to have a bottle designed and manufactured. But still: strike four.

I haven't smelled these scents, and I know nothing about the people behind them: all I can go on is the advertising, and it's dreadful. I swear I can't even imagine the nerve it takes concoct something which is at least partly (and probably largely) synthetic in the guise of an ancient recipe, name it badly, tip it into a cheap mass-market bottle, and then charge $300 for a quarter ounce of it.

There It Is: Orange Blossom by Gorilla Perfume (eventually)

2011-09-16T09:31:00.009-03:00

Let's see how long it takes me to get to the point today. A while, I'm thinking.

James Jorden, who as his alter ego La Cieca (Italian for "the blind woman" and a character from the opera La Gioconda) heads up the splendidly bitchy opera blog Parterre Box, also writes reviews under his own name for the New York Post, among others. He recently wrote a review of the revival of Stephen Sondheim's "Follies", and if you aren't interested in reading it (you should), here is a divagation a few paragraphs long that resounded with me:

...When you start writing reviews, or, rather, when you start writing reviews that people actually read, very early on you run into the Siskel and Ebert Dilemma: The realization that potential audiences may be making the decision to see or not to see, to buy or not to buy, based on your published take on the entertainment in question.

Even when the reader feedback is very positive indeed (“I went to see Satyagraha based on your rave review, and it was amazing!”), there’s this little inside-the-head voice nagging at you: “Who the hell are you to be persuading this guy to be spending his money on a Philip Glass opera?” And, when a critic has an inflated sense of his influence, the voice amps up the volume to such absurdities as “Too bad the Met didn’t have you around the last time they did Billy Budd, because that show didn’t draw flies.”

But the real worry here for a reviewer (again, assuming anybody cares what he writes) is this: If I write a mixed review, with maybe a little more focus on the negatives, am I going to scare somebody away from what is, on the whole, a worthwhile experience, or anyway an experience that somebody might find worthwhile?

Luckily, I don't have that kind of influence, but it still nags at me. People are creating works of art — in this case, perfumes — and sending them out into the world, where they have an independent life of their own, and I and others get to experience them and judge them. Where does any reviewer's obligation lie: to be as fair as possible, or to express their opinions as truthfully as possible? This is why I forever find myself saying things like, "I hated it, but I'm not you, and maybe you'll love it."

We may be past the days when New York Times reviewers were able to shut down a restaurant or a play with a single scathing review, but that may only be because the Internet is replacing newspapers, so there are ever more opinions in print. Still, that kind of power is worrisome. It's good to be able to steer the public away from the truly awful, but not to be able to destroy people's honest livelihood with a few carefully honed words.

I think, or at least hope, that people are becoming more sophisticated when they read reviews: they know that what they're reading is still just an opinion, however educated and sophisticated it might be. It's a guideline rather than a diktat. The more you read a particular reviewer, the more you get to know their tastes: if theirs happen to coincide with yours, then you can place ever more faith in their opinions.

This is an easy task when it comes to book and movie critics, but I've never yet found a fragrance reviewer whose opinion I agree with more than half the time. Luca Turin, probably the most well-known, is opinionated to a degree that occasionally borders on the vendetta: his disdain for Mona di Orio seems positively unhinged, well beyond a mere disdain for her fragrances (none of which I have ever smelled), forcing one to wonder if there is some personal animus behind the professional drubbing he gives her. He is not as fond of Serge Lutens as I am (though we occasionally agree, as on the dreadful eighties men's-fragrance rehash Un Bois Sepia, which Turin called a "dim-witted sport fragrance"). His two-out-of-five review for Lutens' Rousse calls it "bizarre" and "one fine mess": would you like to know what I think?

When I wrote about Rousse last year, I noted that I was using a rollerball version that had a base of silicone oil rather than alcohol, and therefore would almost certainly smell different from the actually, commercially available scent (silicone usually means no top notes), and I was right. I got a proper sample earlier this month and I finally got around to trying it as it was meant to be worn. Today is the first properly cool day of the fall (well, the pre-fall, I guess), and Rousse is just the kind of thing you want to be wearing: a thrilling blast of mandarin and spices with all the familiarity of a men's fragrance but taken in a slightly strange and thoroughly Lutensian direction (this is not a clove-studded orange), the autumnal, spicy-woody angularity of cinnamon and cloves dominating the opening and middle, gradually modulating into a warm, dulcet ground bass of amber, sandalwood, and still more spice. I loved the rollerball version but I love the eau de parfum even more, and I strongly suspect that I am going to be owning this in the foreseeable future.

A few years ago, Bond No. 9 sent me an insanely huge press pack containing press releases and samples of all their current fragrances, about thirty in all. I was on their mailing list for a while, and got a few more press kits and samples (which I duly reviewed), and then the largesse stopped coming; I figured they had revised their press strategy and were downsizing the number of kits they sent out, though of course in the back of my head was the less charitable assumption that I wasn't playing by the rules — I was saying what I thought rather than just giving the sort of breathlessly uncritical coverage that fashion magazines are known for — and therefore had been banned. But I'm still on their e-mail list, because e-mails cost nothing to send out.

A few weeks ago I got a notice of a new upcoming line; the e-mail asked if I would like samples and a press pack for the three new scents. Yes, I said, I would. And I still don't have them. Will I? Don't know. In the spirit of fairness I provided an e-mail link to all my previous Bond No. 9 reviews, though of course they could have easily just looked them up. It may be the case that someone there read my reviews and figured they're not wasting the postage on me, or maybe the post office is slow these days. But just to prove that there are no hard feelings, here's a shot of one of their new holiday offerings:

Now just look at that! Ten perfect 5-mL miniatures in a gorgeous gift box. (The scents included are I presume their best sellers: Andy Warhol Union Square, Bleecker Street, Bond No. 9 Signature, Chelsea Flowers, Chinatown, Eau de New York, Hamptons, Nuits de Noho, The Scent of Peace, and Wall Street. For the record: hated Union Square, disdained Wall Street, liked Bleecker Street, loved Nuits de Noho, and haven't tried the rest.) I think the price, $250, is a little steep; $150 would have been closer to the mark. But that is still a terrific gift idea. They do really great seasonal merchandise.

Also in time for the Christmas insanity is a new version of Clinique's Aromatics Elixir called Perfumer's Reserve (stoppered perfume bottle, no sprayer, 25 mL, $75). The press release refers to the original's restrained savagery with such adjectives as "visceral", "intellectual", "unorthodox", "severe", "complex", "uncompromising", and "formidable", all perfectly accurate. And then it tells us that the new version will be "a fresher, smoother, modern interpretation," and that can only mean one thing: no oakmoss. You can tell without reading the ingredient list that it will be a "modern chypre", which means lighter, less assertive, bottom-loaded with clean molecularized patchouli but with none of the earthy-dirty oakmoss that makes true chypres compelling. as the press release says:

• Rose, jasmine, myrrh and patchouli notes are cleaner, lighter, with a contemporary transparency.
• The addition of orange flower absolute and peach lends a creamy luminosity.

I think it's inevitable that there are elements of perfumery that one just doesn't like: I can't stand large quantities of iris, straight-up patchouli is impossible on me, and as far as I can tell, lilac, ravishing though it is in the wild, never translates well into a composed scent. But then there are elements that one just doesn't get, and one of them for me is orange blossom. I don't hate it; I would just usually rather it not be there. Even when it indisputably works (as with Dior's Fahrenheit 32), it never translates into a really wearable, compelling scent for me. Adding orange blossom to Aromatics Elixir seems like it would be a step backwards, although I suppose that if you're already wrecking it by de-chyprifying it, orange blossom is not going to make the situation any worse.

Lush's Orange Blossom by Gorilla Perfume is hardly anything but its namesake, and as usual, I don't get it, but at least you can't accuse it of false advertising. If you like orange-flower, then you will like this; otherwise, you may safely steer clear and be missing nothing.

Red Alert: Lust by Gorilla Perfume

2011-09-12T05:53:00.006-03:00

One of the problems with a very stripped-down scent is that there's only so much you can say about it. A big constructed scent can make you think: it has multiple meanings that change and reverberate over time, because the more elements there are in a scent (within reason), the more they interact with one another, conjuring up associations and complexities. Simpler scents are more likely to have just a single idea in their heads: "fun", say, or "manly", or "pretty". The idea of Lust is "va-va-voom", or possibly "climb on top of me RIGHT NOW," as if the name didn't already tell you everything you need to know.

Lust is big fat sexy jasmine and that's just about it. It's fairly sweet, candied at the top with some vanilla in the bottom, and floral, with a slug of rose and ylang to keep it from being too monochromatic. But mostly it's jasmine, and huge, and really very nice for the price, as long as you understand that you don't wear it, it wears you: like all the Lush/Gorilla scents, it is minimalist perfumery on a large scale.

It is also dyed dramatically red: my sample leaked and stained the box that the sample set was packaged in. I expect it would do the same to any clothing it happened to touch, so beware.

Try Again: Karma by Gorilla Perfume

2011-09-08T14:20:00.004-03:00

Now, I do not particularly love patchouli most of the time, although sometimes I will grudgingly admit that a patchouli scent can be excellent, even if I can't wear it, and on occasion in the right company it can sneak up on me, so you will have to keep that well in mind when I am discussing a scent that consists of little else.

Lush's signature scent, Karma, is constructed almost entirely of orange and patchouli: there are a half-dozen notes listed but those are the only ones that matter. Karma starts out as orange peel and patchouli and it remains orange peel and patchouli for a very long time. Whatever novelty that combination might have had at the outset — and its novelty value is considerable, because at first whiff I find it charming and unexpectedly cheery — is exhausted long before the scent ever fades away. There's no development: it just keeps going on in that singular mindset, and on, and on. An hour or so of it is all I can take before I start looking around for an escape hatch. It is relentless.

Karma, unfortunately, is what a bad idea smells like.

Intermission: Somebody Stop Me!

2011-09-07T23:57:00.002-03:00

The Sunday before last, as I was heading off to work, it occurred to me that Monday the 5th of September was a holiday, I had Saturday the 3rd off, I would probably have Sunday the 4th off, and I would be able to switch my schedule around so that I wouldn't have to work on Friday, so I could theoretically have a four-day weekend, and I said to Jim, "This is a crazy idea, but how much would it cost to take a little trip?"

Not much! By the time I got to work, Jim had already booked flights and hotel and texted me with the details, and that is how we spent the Labour Day weekend in Montréal, flying up on Friday afternoon and returning Monday midday.

When I was a child growing up in Newfoundland, I swear — and my mother confirms this — that on the first day of school, it would be cold enough that there would be frost glittering on the ground, and you could see your breath in the air. Well, climate change, or different geography — Newfoundland is after all dangling in the Atlantic ocean like a piñata awaiting the weather's merciless beating — but the first week of September in eastern Canada was pretty damned hot. Fortunately, Montréal has an underground city; you can live and shop and work without ever breathing unprocessed air, if you have a mind to do such a thing. After seeing the weather forecasts, then, our plan of attack was to go out in the mornings and do whatever we needed to do, and then retreat to the underground and just kind of shop and mosey and whatever, only coming to the surface when we had to.

I did a little research and discovered that Ogilvy carries Serge Lutens, my one and only, so I e-mailed their customer service department to see if they had any Vitriol d'Oeillet in stock. Not only didn't they, I was told that it wasn't available in Canada, which is just wrong. But I figured I would go there anyway to see what they did have, and I promised Jim that 1) I would spend no more than five minutes there (as I had done at Hermes in New York) and 2) that it was the only scent shopping I would do on the trip. And I was almost as good as my word, too.

We popped in on Saturday afternoon and Jim headed downstairs to the café while I made a beeline for the Lutens counter. After eyeballing their selection and confirming that they unaccountably didn't have Vitriol d'Oeillet, I tried a few things on blotters to see if there was anything I couldn't live without. Cuir Mauresque is still as boring as I remember: maybe I have to smell it on my skin, but it just doesn't do anything for me. I was sure I had smelled Borneo 1834 before but I didn't remember its being so overwhelmingly patchouli-laden; absolutely not me. And then I tried Chergui, and it all came rolling back in a wave of memory: how I had loved it and disdained it, used it up and forgotten it, and now somehow couldn't live without it. So I bought it. I bought it! Why did I do that? What was I thinking? I am out of control and Serge Lutens runs my life.

Of course I asked for some samples: the somewhat confused saleswoman (who did not speak a colossal amount of English) was going to wait for another salesperson to help her decide which Lutenses were for women and which were for men, as if such trivialities matter in his world, and I said, as I usually do, "I don't care: I'll wear anything as long as it smells good," so she grabbed a bunch of them and chucked them in the bag. You can never have enough free samples, even when they are things you have already tried, or already own. Chypre Rouge? A spare for my knapsack! Louve? Have to give that one away! Rousse? High time I tried that in its original form!

And that really was going to be the end of my sniffing, but we ended up in The Bay on Sunday afternoon (underground!), and Jim was doing some clothing shopping, so of course I headed to the stench department to see what was what. Did you know that Mugler has done a series of food-related flankers, called The Taste of Fragrance, for Angel, A*Men, Alien, and Womanity? They're the same formulae but dosed with bitter cocoa powder, chili pepper, salted butter caramel, and fig chutney, respectively. I tried the A*Men and Alien; they weren't different enough from the originals to make me even think about buying them. (Now, if they had mixed a large helping of salted butter caramel with A*Men, I think I would have been helpless to resist.)

Then as I was waiting for Jim, the woman at the Gaultier counter started talking to me about the Gaultier exhibition at the Musée des Beaux Arts, which we had seen that very morning. I had a little card which we had gotten when we bought our tickets but hadn't looked at; it entitled me to a sample of, not the latest men's Gaultier, but the first one (had they given all the new ones away?), which of course I took, because, again, you can never have enough free samples.

Oh — the Gaultier exhibition! In June we went to New York where we saw the legendary Alexander McQueen exhibit, thrilling, a real roller-coaster ride that takes you to any number of dark places. The Gaultier, though, really has only one mode: giddy amazement, pure happiness. When I said a while back, "What fun it must be to be Jean-Paul Gaultier," I wasn't kidding: his sense of childlike joy (coupled with his absolute mastery of couture and the human form) shines out through the entire exhibit. Mad corsets with dozens of panels of lacing everywhere except the one place you'd expect to find it (the front has two rows of fake lacing with a zipper between them); demented beadwork depicting Paris as the city of lights, or an entire faux leopardskin pelt (a thousand hours' worth of hand-sewn bugle beads in the most finely gradated colours you can imagine); punk jackets re-created with lavish applications of beads and rhinestones; a mermaid dress of hand-made gold lace, mother-of-pearl bra cups, and a corset of narrow, delicate, bepearled piano hinges. It was such a pleasure: you couldn't leave the museum without a smile on your face. (I was a little surprised that the gift shop didn't have the fragrances: various incarnations of the Classique bottle were rightly part of the exhibition. As curator I would have insisted on it, and as attendee I would have bought something. Perhaps there were licensing or environmental issues.)

As for the Chergui, I wore it yesterday morning before showering, and I briefly thought that I had made a huge mistake in buying it, because all my doubts and misgivings about those unpleasant facets of its dual nature that I had perceived before were there in abundance: its oversweetness, its slightly spiny aggression. Today I put it on again and I found it breathtaking, and what's more, durable beyond anyone's expectations: a couple of sprays before noon, and now, twelve hours later, I can still smell its drydown clearly. And I see upon re-reading my first description of it that I managed to write an entire fragrance review without actually saying what that fragrance smells like, so here goes: a leathern pouch of best pipe tobacco, a curl of smoke, a dollop of honey, one bite from a sugared date, a single rose, a puff of incense, a fragment of amber heated until it glows like a coal. When Chergui behaves, it is beyond beautiful.

Coming Up Roses: Imogen Rose by Gorilla Perfume

2011-09-04T08:24:00.005-03:00

In a nutshell, I am as overwhelmed by Imogen Rose as I was underwhelmed by Breath of God. Imogen Rose is an armload of bright, fresh, dewy roses wrapped in a sheaf of greenery, dusted with a puff of baby powder, laid on a bed of ambery tonka, the whole gradually warming and sweetening as it develops but never becoming especially sweet, and always a rose scent from start to finish. Enchanting. Actually perfect.

A New Angle: Breath of God by Gorilla Perfume

2011-09-01T08:28:00.007-03:00

I was reading an article a couple of weeks ago about how men and women speak differently and what this means for transsexuals, who have to basically learn how to be a different sex:

...in a loud Starbucks, a man will just speak with greater volume—so he’ll speak louder—and a woman will tend to speak higher, tend to raise her pitch higher to be heard over the din.

This creates the arresting image of a pre-show Mary Kay seminar full of women pitching their voices up and up and up until they're all squeaking like bats, but regardless of the strategy people use in large groups to make themselves heard, the quotation made me think of the batch of Lush scents I was going to review (in alphabetical order, because I have to have some sort of structure).

Have you ever been in a Lush store, or just walked by one, or even been within twenty feet of one? Because it is loud, olfactorily speaking. A huge din of fragrances, not especially pleasant: I don't know how people work there without a lot of Imitrex. Creams and soaps and bath bombs and shampoos and such, all intensely scented and all competing for a shot at your nostrils. How could you possibly sell a perfume in such an environment? How would people be able to smell it among the racket?

There's only one way: you have to make the fragrances at least as loud as their surroundings, and the Gorilla line at Lush is every bit as loud as the store itself. I have a set of samples which, in case I needed a quick fix on the road, I was lugging around in my knitting bag (actually a MEC travel bag

which I use to lug around my current pair of socks or whatever I'm working on when I'm on the go: it's small enough to be unobtrusive but big enough to hold a small project plus the usual electronics — Kindle, phone, iPod — and a few other things as well, so it's perfect for travel), and the box itself was so radioactively fragrant that the project I started yesterday, and which was in a separate compartment from the scents, already smells like jasmine and patchouli.

You would think that a fragrance called Breath of God...well, what would you think of it, knowing nothing about it beforehand? I think of this exchange from The Simpsons:

Bart: So, Homer, you saw the big cheese? What'd he look like?
Homer: Perfect teeth, nice smell, a class act all the way.

And obviously something called Breath of God should evoke perfect teeth and a nice smell. The perfumer's intention was a scent that was neither masculine nor feminine, or both, something that combined a light freshness with a darker smoky wood-incense. It starts with a cucumbery-aquatic brightness but then the smoky-resin note starts to drift in, and I swear that for the next while, Breath of God strongly resembles this:

Yeah, smoked fish. We used to eat these all the time when I was a kid: I haven't had them in years, but I still remember the agreeable briny-smoky smell of them. It seems like an odd thing to put into a perfume, though, because among other things it calls to mind an exchange from the movie Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (I have it on DVD and I like it, and DON'T JUDGE):

Patty: Seems to me it's all this cheap little tart's fault.
Elvira: Cheap. Who are you callin' cheap? What's that perfume you're wearing, catch of the day?

It doesn't smell exactly or only like smoked fish (there's a sort of floralcy in the middle), but that is what I think of every time I smell it. If that's the breath of God, then God needs to find a better toothpaste.

Animate Objects

2011-08-30T08:26:00.004-03:00

Here's a still from the animated spy spoof "Archer", season 1, episode 4, with a European secret agent in the bathroom of wealthy spy-agency head Mallory Archer preparing to kill it doesn't really matter, does it, because we're here for the perfume bottles:

That's self-evidently Chanel No. 5 there on the marble countertop, and behind it what looks like one of the Guerlain beehive bottles, and what's that tiny squarish black bottle next to them?

Why, it's Nombre Noir,

the legendary and extremely unavailable Shiseido scent that kicked off Serge Lutens' career. You can have a droplet or two for a not insignificant sum of money, if you want,

or you can have a tiny bottle for a whole lot of money, if you're lucky. (And there is only that one bottle available on all of eBay. Compare it to other recent, hard-to-find scents; there are gallons of Le Feu d'Issey and Fendi Theorema and Kingdom by Alexander McQueen, pricey but relatively plentiful still. Nombre Noir isn't the rarest, though: not one single person has any of Clinique's first men's scent, Tailoring, for sale, and The Perfumed Court doesn't, either.)

Nombre Noir is just the kind of thing a woman like Mallory Archer would own, if not actually wear. Whoever was doing the art direction for that scene put a lot of thought into it. Or is just a perfume hound.

Complexity / Simplicity: Guerlain Samsara Eau de Toilette

2011-08-29T14:55:00.004-03:00

Samsara was launched in 1989, and I don't know how I failed to include it in the list of things I was wearing that year, because I bought it very shortly after its debut in my part of the world, I liked it a whole lot, and I'm wearing it at this moment, so clearly it has some sort of grip on me.

Now, this is going to be very confusing, because Samsara has been changed, packaging and contents, so often that it's hard to keep track or to know exactly what you're smelling, but I'll try to lay it out as clearly as possible.

I was instantly seduced by the Samsara parfum bottle

which came in this little lacquer-look box

and is that not gorgeous? But for some reason — the cost, I suppose — I didn't buy it. I couldn't really warm up to the eau de parfum bottle

which was, let's face it, rather dreary compared to the parfum, however much I liked the contents. Instead I got the body cream

which seemed like a lot of bang for the buck, and emphasized, as creams will do, the potent base notes (or note, in this case, but I'm getting ahead of myself). The jar was approximately this shape but the lid didn't have that broad gold edge: the whole thing, not just the top, was that solid jewel red, a sort of a mutated version of the parfum box, and I liked it a lot.

When I used it up, I cleaned out the jar and set it atop my dresser to hold change and such. Then I broke down and bought an ounce of the EDP, boring though the bottle was. And I wore it and wore it and eventually got tired of it, like the fickle slut that I am, and traded it away to someone and lived without it for years.

Eventually, someone at the company took notice of the bottle's extreme and unsuitable boringness and reworked it in dark red glass with concave shoulders, essentially turning it into the larger version of the parfum that it should have been all along:

I think the EDP had the gold cap and the EDT had a red cap, as you see here:

But then a couple of weeks ago I noticed that the local hypermart was getting rid of their entire high-end fragrance section; there wasn't really a lot left to it by this point, as they hadn't been replenishing it for at least a year and probably more. They had marked most everything down to $9.94 or $19.94, and so there was not much left but the dregs, though by god there was an ounce of Samsara EDT for less than $10 (there was also a 50-mL of the EDP for $30, not worth it: the only other thing that interested me was a bottle of Eau de Star, Mugler's fascinating attempt to make Angel wearable in the summer by wetting it down with Calone and freshening it up with peppermint). I managed to resist for a few days, but then I thought, well, hell, I really used to like it (the EDP, anyway) and for $10 I can see if I like it again, and if I don't, no great loss, so I'll go see: if it's still there I'll buy it. And it was, and I did (and the Eau de Star as well). For someone who made a New Year's vow to buy nothing in 2011, I am not doing very well.

The Samsara EDT that I bought is in the updated bottle (the bottommost one), but it's in the old box (next one up), so I have absolutely no idea what the vintage might be. Not the very oldest, obviously, but also not the very newest, or it would be in the new box. Why is there not some sort of law dictating that fragrances have to have the year stamped on the bottle, like wines?

One more thing about the packaging: the EDP in both the above pictures has a removable cap, as you would expect, but the EDT has a cap that is also a sprayer, that rotates one way to lock it and another to permit it to dispense the contents. I am not sure why companies persist in doing this, but it's not a great idea, because the sprayer/cap invariably looks like a cap/cap, and so there are going to be people who try to pull it off. Most of them will succeed. (How many displays of Bulgari Black did you or I see that had the sprayer wrenched off by people doing the obvious, but unfortunately wrong, thing?) The bottle I bought had a little card-stock hang-tag around its neck showing how to rotate the cap 180° to use the sprayer: it seems to me that if you have to instruct users how to open the bottle, then the fault is not with the users but with the package design.

Now, you can go hunt down a list of the putative notes in Samsara, but it would be a waste of your time, because it won't be telling you the truth: it might be an old list from the origin of the scent, or it might be from one of the various reformulations over the years, but either way it will put ideas in your head that do not belong there. Samsara may have ten ingredients or fifty, but it smells of three things only: a trumpet-blare of bergamot, a load of slightly dirty jasmine, and a big chunk of sandalwood. That's it. These things have been tinkered with to make them surprisingly bright and radiant, but they're still pretty much the sum of Samsara. Oh, there may be some rose in there (there always seems to be rose when there's jasmine), there may be some vanilla or amber at the bottom (who could tell with all that sandalwood?), but really: bergamot jasmine sandalwood. It has always been this way; the proportions are different, as always, but the essential structure is the same. In my bottle, the bergamot is very strong, the jasmine is unpretty, and the sandalwood is potent and solid, so if someone told you that this was Samsara Pour Homme, you wouldn't see any reason in the world to disbelieve them. It's not masculine, specifically, but it's not feminine either: it's just Samsara.

At its inception, Samsara had enormous quantities of Mysore sandalwood, considered the best in the world and said to have comprised nearly a third of the perfume's formula, but these days Mysore is an endangered species — we used it all up by doing things like putting it at 30% concentration in Samsara — so the wood is certainly a cocktail of Australian sandalwood and various synthetics such as Polysantol and Ebanol. Nevertheless: bergamot jasmine sandalwood. If you like these things, then there is every chance you will like Samsara, of whatever vintage, in whatever incarnation. I suggest you go hunt some down.

Both Ends Against The Middle: Gilded Lily by Ineke

2011-08-25T06:06:00.005-03:00

Last week on the A.V. Club I read a piece called Didn't like it, would still recommend it, and even after reading the article and the ensuing comments I am utterly baffled by the very idea; how can you recommend something you don't like? Isn't your own taste the benchmark of your recommendations to friends? I can understand "I didn't care for it, but I know you like this sort of thing so I thought you'd enjoy it," or (and all of us scent hounds have done this) "Here: I can't wear this but maybe you can, and if not maybe you know someone else who can," but to just flat-out say "I hated this but I think you should experience it anyway" — how is that possible? Is there an undertone of "I want you to be as unhappy as I was"?

I will give Ineke big points for making what she calls a fruity chypre and meaning it, putting an interesting array of fruit into the top (pineapple, grapefruit, and rhubarb, she says) and oakmoss into the base, but there is a big noxious gorilla in the room and that gorilla is a lily — to be specific, "Goldband Lily of Japan", which is almost immediately evident and comprises the entirety of the middle. I don't know what a goldband lily of Japan is and in all honesty I couldn't even be bothered to look it up, but I don't like it at all, and I don't want it in my chypres.

It is a waste of time to second-guess an artist once their work is completed and unleashed upon the world but all I can think about is what might have been. As ever, the bottle is stunning, and most of the fragrance inside works: the top of the scent is inventive and the base is classic oakmoss-patchouli-labdanum chypre, although it should have been more evident earlier on (which is to say not drowned out by that massive lily). Had she constructed a slightly more conventional middle with a bouquet of flowers instead of that one gigantic cultivar — there is nothing wrong with roses and jasmine! — then this could have been an enormous success and I would be singing its praises, because nobody is making proper chypres any more. Instead, here is what I am left with:

Didn't like it, would still recommend you sample it if you are the kind of person who likes oversized and not especially attractive lily scents, but please don't wear it around me.

Memory Lane: Field Notes from Paris by Ineke

2011-08-22T07:09:00.004-03:00

"Your manuscript is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good." — Not Dr. Johnson, apparently

That's the second thing I thought of after smelling Field Notes from Paris, which is not entirely fair of me, because it is actually good. Really good. Certainly the best of the first six, and by a considerable margin.

But the first thing I thought of is that it's mostly a simplified and stripped-down copy of another scent: Escada's Casual Friday. I don't think it's a deliberate copy — there is after all a finite number of possible aromachemicals and combinations, however large that number is — but so many of the elements are the same that it's impossible not to compare them if you know both scents.

They're both spicy, masculine floral orientals. Their similarity is obvious from the first instant: they both start with a big shock wave of bergamot and coriander, though Casual Friday ups the ante with cardamom and anise as well. They diverge in the middle, with the bite of Casual Friday's clovey carnation replaced by a creamy orange blossom, but reconverge an hour or so later, sharing a base of soft, woody patchouli, vanilla, and tonka bean with plenty of the earlier spice still evident.

Since Casual Friday is long discontinued, if you've been looking for a replacement, here you have it. I prefer the snarl of carnation to the refinement of orange blossom, and I much prefer the complexity of the Escada scent (modern fragrances on the whole are just too minimalist for my taste), but Field Notes from Paris is beautiful for all that, and I think it finally shows what Ineke Ruhland is capable of.

Almost Worth The Wait: Evening Edged in Gold by Ineke

2011-08-18T10:51:00.005-03:00

Well, finally.

A commenter from my entry on the fourth Ineke, Derring-Do, said,

I have the same issues you do with Ineke.... Relieved to hear you call it like you smelled it, though sorry you wasted your money on the set.

I was starting to feel like I'd wasted my money, too, and wondering who I could foist the batch off on, when I tried Evening Edged in Gold, the fifth in the line, and my instant impression was a loud and simple "Yes!"

The opening of Evening Edged in Gold is glorious, a huge, rich, fruity osmanthus with a complexity I found lacking in the previous Ineke offerings. It briefly made me think of those yummy, oversized eighties floral orientals with hundreds of ingredients. There's a spiciness to it which is presumably saffron and cinnamon, although it doesn't smell exactly like either of these: it's mostly just a little halo of crispness and bite around the big plummy-fruity osmanthus.

It doesn't last: the middle of the scent is not as good as it ought to be, with that very same synthetic quality that I perceive in all the others coming to the surface yet again. After the osmanthus in the top, the main floral notes in Evening Edged in Gold are angel's trumpet and midnight candy, which, in a clever choice by the perfumer, are flowers which bloom and release their perfume in the night. (I have always been a sucker for these perverse night-blooming flowers, and used to grow night-scented stock, which can handle the cold of eastern Canada.) I couldn't tell you what either of these flowers are supposed to smell like, but I'm guessing that those notes are created in the lab: there's nothing wrong with that, but I wish it didn't smell so laboratorial, because it makes me think of a scented product like garbage-bin liners or deodorizing room spray rather than a high-end niche perfume. I want to stress that it's not terrible; it's just not as good as it ought to have been. The base, which starts making its appearance early on (as is fairly usual with orientals), is a lot of leather and a bit of creamy wood to ground it, and it's very pleasant. If only the middle were up to the same standards as the top and bottom!

Once again I have to mention the packaging. I mean, just look at it. Dazzling. If you weren't completely convinced by Evening Edged in Gold, that box and bottle might be enough to push you over the edge into buying it.

Don't: Derring-Do by Ineke

2011-08-16T12:27:00.003-03:00

I am trying to like these, I swear I am, but the best I can say about the line so far is that each scent is better than the last, as if the perfumer, Ineke Ruhland, is improving over time. But I still don't think Derring-Do is particularly special.

As you can tell from the packaging, this is meant to be a masculine scent, and it is, I guess; a fresh fougere with a neutral floral heart. (The notes: citrus blend, rain notes, cyclamen; magnolia, fougere notes; guaiacwood, cedarwood, musk.) It smells just as synthetic as the rest of her scents do to me, and in fact all four of them that I've tried so far have the same palmprint, so perhaps she's concocted a mostly synthetic accord that she uses in all her scents as a sort of not-very-good Guerlinade. Derring-Do isn't terrible; it's just not something that I would even consider wearing. It just is, that's all, and that's not good enough.

Were you perhaps wondering where the term "derring-do" came from? Wonder no more.

Not My Cuppa: Chemical Bonding by Ineke

2011-08-12T09:57:00.003-03:00

I want to like the Ineke series but I'm trying them in order and I'm still waiting for the big revelation, the fantastic scent: Chemical Bonding, the third in the series, is not it. Part of the problem is my nose, I guess: the scent just doesn't smell uniform, but presents itself in an unpredictable way. Sometimes it smells like a lot of synthetic peonies with a faint overlay of citrus tea, which is not for me, and other times it's a cup of citrus tea with a few peony petals in it, which is nice enough although not really unusual or special: tea scents are a dime a dozen, alas.

Some people dislike the name but I think it's clever: it doesn't make me think of synthetic chemistry (though it wouldn't bother me if it did, because everything is chemicals, water's a chemical), but of the mysterious attraction that fragrance can generate between two people.

And of course the packaging is stellar, with periodic-table symbols etched into the bottle (they spell the word BONDING*) and echoed on the box.

When the packaging is better than the scent, though; isn't that a problem?

*The pedantically precise and the science geeks (how much overlap there is between those categories of people) will have noticed that it is not possible to spell the word BONDING using elements from the periodic table. You can start with boron, oxygen, neodymium, iodine, and nitrogen, but there is no way to get that terminal "g", unless you are willing to put up with an extra letter; germanium will give you BONdINGe, sort of like Monty Python's "Ministry of Housinge".

'Til You Drop

2011-08-11T19:48:00.005-03:00

Tomorrow, as it happens, is my birthday. Today, as it happens, Jim had to go to Dartmouth to teach a seminar, so I went along to keep him company during the drive (about two and a half hours each way). At nineish, Jim dropped me off at the Mic Mac Mall and headed to his gig. I wasn't going to buy myself any birthday presents, but I'm sure you can guess what happened when I was set loose in a mall with a credit card and a couple of hours on my hands: I spent hardly anything, really, and came away with a whole bunch of stuff.

First stop was The Bay, because they carry the Mugler scents and I was wondering if they might perchance have A*Men Pure Havane, which I had not had the opportunity to smell. I own Pure Coffee and Pure Malt: I wasn't seriously considering buying the third one, but if it was tobacco-heavy as I thought it could be, it might have been able to seduce me. They didn't have it, so I snagged a few samples (nothing really compelling) and ducked out.

At some point after that — it's kind of a blur — was Lush, which, I had heard, had an interesting line of scents called Gorilla. I usually steer well clear of Lush, because they emit a nearly visible cloud of stink: Jim wonders how you could possibly focus on smelling a fragrance in there when there are so many competing aromas battling it out in your nostrils, like trying to hear a particular song when forty people are singing different ones at the same time, and he's got a point. I didn't really try very hard to smell anything once I had discovered that there was boxed set of eight two-mL vials of the current Gorilla scents (the seven you see above plus Breath of God), so I got that ($19.95) and got out. You can't tell from the picture, but the vials, or rather their closures, are most clever: the cap comes off to reveal an insert with five tiny, tiny pinpricks in it which dispense just a film of the liquid inside, the perfect dose. I tried on some Vanillary once I was safely outside and it is just my thing: rich, luscious vanilla with a sharp spike of jasmine.

After some to-ing and fro-ing which is not relevant to the topic at hand, I made for the bus stop to head into Halifax but was distracted by a Winners, which is Canada's version of T.J. Maxx if you're American, T.K. Maxx if you're British, and I don't know what if you live anywhere else. They usually have fragrances, and I'm not usually that interested in them, because we're talking mostly celebrity stenches and other mass-market dreck (although the one near my workplace did have several of the D&G tarot series and a whole bunch of Laliques, including Encre Noir, none of which was priced low enough to tempt me.) This one had two things in the clearance section that piqued my interest, though. The first was a 100-mL bottle of Black Pearls by Elizabeth Taylor

for $11, which I remembered reading about a couple of months ago on Now Smell This; it wouldn't seem like my kind of thing except that the review made much of its heavy dose of leather. But I put the box down and moved on to something I had never seen before, two scents from a line called Odori.

(In order those are Leather, Lavender, Tobacco, Saffron, Iris, and The Odours, which is not really a very good name for a scent; even Italian can't mask that.) They seemed kind of cheaply boxed, and the unpromisingly titled Gli Odori did nothing to attract me, but the other was Tabacco,

and hadn't I just been looking for a tobacco scent not an hour before? One of the boxes was open — it really was — and so I took out the bottle, a heavy glass thing in what appeared to be a hand-made wooden frame. I gave it a spritz into the air and it was really, really nice, dark and luscious without being heavy or sweet. I don't yet know how it will smell on skin, but in the air it's pretty spectacular.

And then you know what I did? I said to myself, "I don't need any more scents, and I'm not buying this," and I walked away.

And then I said, "But you know, it's only $12*, and it's really nice, and my birthday is tomorrow," so I turned around and walked back and picked it up. And then I figured, hey, if I'm going through the checkout, I might as well get the Black Pearls as well, so I picked that up, too.

So: ten new scents, $42.95 plus tax. Can't beat that.

And in Halifax I went to Biscuit General Store but they didn't have anything that interested me (they stock some Tokyo Milk, I think, and also L'Aromarine and a few other lines, not that you can tell from their unfortunately useless website), so I went to Mills Brothers, which when I first lived in Halifax in the eighties was THE place to buy scents, and it's turned into just a colossal disappointment. They have a very few L'Artisan scents, none of the new ones as far as I can tell, which means it's probably old stock that just keeps hanging around, and they have L'Occitane and not really anything else that you can't get most other places.

By that time, Jim was done with his seminar and heading into Halifax for lunch with me, so that was the end of my sniffing and shopping for the day.

And here is the punchline. When I got home I looked up Odori Tabacco online to see what I could find out about it, and the first link to come up was Luckyscent, whom I trust, so I went there: they sell it, for TWO HUNDRED AND TEN DOLLARS.

So listen to me and listen closely: if you live in Halifax or Dartmouth or anywhere within driving distance and you like tobacco scents, go to that mall and go to that store and buy yourself one of the three remaining bottles of this stuff. DO IT.

* The original price sticker says that it sold elsewhere at $225 but was available at Winners for $59.99. Then there are five markdown stickers layered one on top of the other, and they're called stickers because they are SUPER sticky and tore apart into all kinds of pieces as I did my best to pry them apart to sate your curiosity, but nearly as I can tell they read $51, $36, $25, $20, and finally $12.

Sunday Driver: Balmy Days and Sundays by Ineke

2011-08-07T22:02:00.001-03:00

It is as true of the second Ineke fragrance as it was of the first that the packaging is fantastic, devised and executed with considerable imagination. And it is likewise as true of the second as of the first that the scent inside is not particularly good. Balmy Days and Sundays is pleasant enough, and better than After My Own Heart, but it still appears to be composed largely of synthetics which smell synthetic — grassy greenness and freesia dominate — and in fact it smells precisely like a small and carefully selected batch of automotive air fresheners.

But Not Mine: After My Own Heart by Ineke

2011-08-02T14:41:00.005-03:00

As I mentioned when I was discussing my last trip to New York, I bought a set of seven Ineke samples because "the packaging is so ludicrously beautiful and thought-through that I couldn't resist." And it is.

Here's the sample box I got:

A little slide-out drawer has the seven tiny slide boxes nestled in a black foam liner, along with a an attractive leaflet describing the scents and listing their notes. The little boxes, as you can see, have their names printed on the top, and Ineke is naming them in alphabetical order: After My Own Heart, Balmy Days and Sundays, Chemical Bonding, Derring-Do, Evening Edged in Gold, Field Notes From Paris, and Gilded Lily. On the right side of each boxlet is a little sliver of artwork: on the left is a description of the scent. And there's more!

When you slide out the liner, you see that the sides of the box are decorated in some apropos pattern: clusters of doodled lilacs for the lilac-based After My Own Heart, dotted pinstripes for the masculine Derring-Do. And the vial is wrapped in a tiny square of beautiful textury paper in a coordinating colour: grassy green for Balmy Days and Sundays, copper for Field Notes From Paris. Some graphic designer, or perhaps Ineke Ruhland herself, put a lot of work into devising the look for this line.

The packaging is gorgeously conceived and executed and I'm sure Ineke is charming and well-educated in perfumery, so I feel like kind of a churl when I say that I just don't think After My Own Heart is very good.

The official notes:

Top: Bergamot, Raspberry, Crisp Green Foliage.
Middle: Lilac.
Base: Sandalwood, Heliotrope, Musk.

The raspberry-and-greenery top note just doesn't fit with the lilac that follows. I tried convincing myself that it could work if I thought of it as, say, sitting in a summery garden among the lilac bushes eating raspberry granita, but I couldn't lie that thoroughly to myself. The raspberry is, of course, synthetic — virtually all berry notes in perfumery are — but this one feels particularly so, like melted gummi bears. I have never been a great fan of lilac soliflores: I don't think lilac translates especially well to composed perfumes, because it never smells like the real thing, bright and creamy at the same time. (It can be done: Demeter's Lilac is for a little while a nicely convincing lilac soliflore.) The lilac in After My Own Heart is recognizable, but it's not authentic: you could never mistake it for a gust of the real flower. When composing a perfume as simple as this one is, I think, you have to take one of two tacks: either the scent must be perfectly realistic, or it must be completely abstract. If you're going for realism, as Ineke is here (and, I would guess, the entire line, based on the descriptive text), that sense of reality is paramount, because there's nothing to hide the seams: but After My Own Heart is all pieces that don't come together.

Departure: L'Artisan Parfumeur Oeillet Sauvage

2011-07-27T22:21:00.001-03:00

Now that Serge Lutens has a new carnation scent, Vitriol d'Oeillet, on the shelves (though of course nowhere near where I can get my hands on it), I have had carnations on the brain, so it was high time I dipped into my vial of L'Artisan's discontinued and much-lamented Oeillet Sauvage ("Wild Carnation"). And what do you know? I finally found a carnation scent I don't like!

One of the things I love about the carnation is that it's so protean; depending on the company it keeps, it can be languorous (Voile d'Ete) or aggressive (CdG Carnation), needle-sharp (Coup de Fouet) or slutty (Tabu), or, by itself and unadorned, just breathtakingly gorgeous (Roger et Gallet's Carnation soap). It's a mainstay of men's scents because twined in with its complex floral heart is a bold spiciness that reads as thoroughly masculine: it's a star player in Oscar de la Renta Pour Lui, Tsar, Old Spice, and Boucheron Pour Homme, to name a few.

But of course like any perfumery element it can also be girly as hell if you treat it right, and this is the tack taken by Oeillet Sauvage: sparkle up the top notes with once-ubiquitous pink pepper, drench it in ylang-ylang and rose, and bolster the ground floor with powdery vanilla and benzoin. Any of these things by themselves aren't enough to make a carnation feminine: Voile d'Ete is steeped in ylang for that tropical feel, Old Spice has plenty of vanilla, and Carnation has buckets of rose. Oeillet Sauvage, though, has been deliberately engineered to read as a women's scent.

That's not why I don't like it, though. I wore it repeatedly and was having the hardest time articulating why it disagreed with me so thoroughly until finally I realized what the problem was. L'Artisan, always willing to take chances and to make interesting, off-centre fragrances, isn't the most expensive niche line: it's pretty middle-of-the-road, actually, with 50-mL bottles currently running about $95-$115, not horrifically more than the department-store brands (most of them $50 to $70), and as Robin of Now Smell This likes to say, $100 is the new free. The trouble with Oeillet Sauvage is that it smells cheap. Whether as cause or consequence of this, it's dreadfully unbalanced, the top clangourous with pink pepper, that and the ylang taking up far too much space, rudely elbowing aside what ought to be the clean floral spiciness of the carnation. (Voile d'Ete works its alliance of carnation, ylang, and vanilla much more gracefully.)

I mean, it's not atrocious; a fair number of people, as usual, seemed to like it just fine when it was available. But I had higher expectations from the house. My sample vial is empty, and I'm not sorry to see the last of it. If you had a yearning to try this completely unavailable scent (something which I understand all too well), you have my word that you haven't missed much, and that there are many, many better carnations out there for you.

Right The First Time: Serge Lutens Rahät Loukoum

2011-07-22T09:20:00.003-03:00

If you ever want a lesson in how the same basic elements of perfumery can combine to produce drastically different effects, you need look no further than Rahät Loukoum and Louve.

I wrote about Louve a couple of years ago and could hardly restrain my revulsion for it: a sweet, powdery cherry-almond scent sounds enticing, but it was a horror show, squally and disastrously urinous. I'm sure I have a sample of it lying around somewhere, but I can't bring myself to try it again.

And yet when I put on Rahät Loukoum — the name for a candy not unlike what we call Turkish Delight — for the first time, my brain was whipsawed by the memory of Louve, because the two are the same scent, but where Louve is horrifying, Rahät Loukoum is gorgeous.

Mind you, it's sweet. Sweeeeeeeet. Dear god, is it ever sweet. Right on the verge of being unwearable. Fat red maraschino cherries in heavy syrup drizzled with honey are the first thing to charge off your skin, followed by thickly sugared almonds and vanilla baby powder. That's just about it for a couple of hours, until a dreamy, drifty musk slowly takes over; still sweet, but not quite as dramatically. I suppose it's vulgar — unsubtle and insistent — but it's appealingly vulgar: that cheerfully loud, slightly over-refreshed party animal with the big irresistible laugh.

There is one thing I can't understand about the pair of scents. Rahät Loukoum was launched in 1998; Louve, nearly a decade later, in 2007. Why did Lutens and Christopher Sheldrake feel the need to revisit the idea? What did they feel could be said by Louve that they hadn't said nine years earlier, except, "We're going to take something fun and add a bunch of stuff to make it nasty, just because we can"?

Old School: Badgely Mishka

2011-07-20T06:10:00.008-03:00

There's nothing inherently wrong with the category of the fruity floral: it's been around for quite a while, and some of its inhabitants are very nice. But the huge majority of scents released in the last decade or so, possibly longer, have been fruity florals of a very specific style. If you pass a teenage girl and she's wearing a fragrance, it's probably some artless decoction of cheap synthetic fruit (never lush and juicy, always bright and astringent, a sort of high-pitched whine in olfactory space), vague indefinable flowers, and sticky-sweet musk. Like so:

Mandarin, Juicy Pear, Wild Berries, Jasmine, Creamy Florals, Vanilla, Soft Musks. (Justin Beiber)

Natural Raspberry, Grapefruit, Pear, Violet, Wild Rose, Apple Blossom, Musks, Cedarwood, Plum. (Marc Jacobs Daisy Eau So Fresh)

Alphonso Mango, Blood Orange, Watery Blossom, Sweet Primrose, Raspberry, Coconut Cream, Musk, Sandalwood. (Escada Taj Sunset)

Pomegranate, Orange And Green Leaf, Rose, Freesia, Lily, Cedar Wood, Sandalwood, and White Musk. (Burberry Summer)

That's four chosen at random from Sephora's best-seller list, four scents released in the last few months. (I really did choose them at random, though I just checked and most of the others are in a similar vein.) The details are a little different, but they're all essentially the same, as if they were all dispensed from a gigantic vat somewhere in, well, somewhere. Does it matter where? (And "natural raspberry"? Really? Raspberries don't release a fragrant oil in response to the arts of perfumery. It's synthetic, like nearly all fruit aromas used in fragrances.)

But 2006's Badgely Mishka, whose alarmingly chic and slightly dangerous bottle you can see up there, is not really a fruity floral, not in the usual sense of the term, because the emphasis is reversed so drastically. It starts with a joyous tumble of plump, ripe, almost fermented-into-brandy fruit dominated by peach and blackcurrant, with the apricot scent of osmanthus just beneath the surface, and though the scent gradually evolves into a sort of a floral, the fruit — still full and rich, more drinkable than eatable — stays and stays and stays, and dominates all the way through. It's like a magic trick, and how was it accomplished?

Badgely Mishka is something you may have thought was extinct or impossible, a fruity floral for grownups: it's sweet, yes, but sweet in the service of something grander than mere teenaged prettiness.

A Keeper: Estée Lauder Private Collection

2011-07-15T07:43:00.005-03:00

The mythology, straight from the Estée Lauder website:

In her private office, Mrs. Lauder kept a collection of the rarest, best and most expensive fragrance oils, extracts and essences from every corner of the globe. Over several years, she created a parfum from these precious ingredients that was deeply personal and for herself alone.

Uh-huh. Unless Mrs. Lauder also had a big collection of aldehydes and other synthetic aromachemicals in her private office, she sure didn't make Private Collection, at least not without a lot of outside help.

But never mind. People like their mythology.

Or maybe the scent has changed over the years. Who am I kidding? They all change over the years. I strongly doubt that the miniature bottle that I have is exactly the same as the stuff Lauder launched in 1973, and for all I know it's different from the bottle you would find on the department-store counter today: mine is a few years old, at least, and doesn't have a date stamped on it (although I am starting to think that they all should).

Whatever its origin, whatever its current state, Private Collection (my own personal batch of Private Collection, anyway, and how sad that I have to spell it out like that) has four aspects: a celadon-green version of the aldehydic radiance of Clinique Wrappings (also a Lauder product); a big soapy clean that is a dead ringer for a freshly unwrapped bar of Ivory; a lush white floral that doesn't make me want to brick up my nose (a rare thing); and a reserved chypre base that, if it doesn't contain actual oakmoss, does an excellent job of imitation. Terrific from start to finish.

Through and Through: Etro Mahogany

2011-07-13T10:01:00.000-03:00

There are a lot of "transparent" scents on the market these days, and by this we generally mean light, gauzy, inoffensive: that's how I use it. But Mahogany really does smell transparent, like this

which is an LED clock made of wood fronted by a veneer thin enough that the light shows through when you plug it in. Etro's Mahogany gives the impression that if it were an object, light would show through it, too. It's woody: I doubt that it's identifiably mahogany (it seems too lightweight for such a dark wood), but it does smell abstractly of sandalwood, with its transparency amplified through a big dose of bright, breezy vetiver and a scattering of pepper.

Some people think it smells highly synthetic, but it doesn't to me: the sandalwood is surely a synthetic, but it's a good one, and well supported with fresh outdoorsy top notes and a warm but unsweet vanilla-amber base. Most online retailers list it as a women's fragrance, which never means anything to me but makes even less sense in the context of what to anyone's nose must be a dry, woody scent in the masculine mold. (Not, obviously, that a woman couldn't wear it.)

I suppose if you put this in a lineup you wouldn't find anything particularly special or novel about this, nothing to make it stand out from the crowd, but I went through my sample pretty quickly and enjoyed every minute of it. Etro Mahogany is a good thing for a man to smell like.

What Is Love: Kenzo Amour

2011-07-05T07:01:00.003-03:00

Given the stunning bottles which reference everything from early Art Nouveau ceramics to fifties Melamine kitchenware (with I think a cheery nod to the original Shiseido Feminité du Bois bottle) and the novel note of "rice steam" (one source lists frangipani, cherry blossom, white tea, frankincense, thanaka wood, rice, and vanilla), I wanted to like Kenzo Amour, so help me I did, but it smells exactly like Hypnotic Poison sprayed over a dish of rice pudding, and therefore is unendurable.

Celebration: Oh la la by Loris Azzaro

2011-07-04T11:33:00.004-03:00

Loris Azzaro's Oh la la, smelled from a distance of almost twenty years, feels like a bit of a throwback. It was launched in 1993, a big, voluptuous floral oriental that feels more like something from the eighties (it shares DNA with some of the big florals like Salvador Dali and Montana Parfum de Peau), or perhaps even a few decades earlier.

A list of notes, for those who like olfactory detective work:

Top: fig leaf, musk vodka, mandarin orange, raspberry, peach, karo-karounde and bergamot.
Middle: orange blossom, cinnamon, osmanthus, jasmine, yellow rose, ylang-ylang and narcissus.
Base: sandalwood, tonka bean, amber, patchouli, vanilla and vetiver.

That, unexpectedly, tells you most of what you need to know. Sharp bergamotty-fruity opening, big fat bouquet of a spicy-floral middle, expansive oriental base. Lasts for hours. Lusciously beautiful. The only way it could have failed is if big extravagant floral orientals were on the way out, and I guess they were; by this time, scents were beginning to thin out a little, or a lot. (1992's big niche success story was the explosively pale L'Eau D'Issey; in 1993, it was the whispery citrus Eau Parfumée by Bulgari; the biggest scent by far of 1994 was CK One, a floodlit unisex.)

Still, Oh la la was in production for a fair while — they didn't give up so easily on a scent in those days — so it can still be had at some of the usual online discounters if you're willing to do a bit of sleuthing. And I really think you should if you like big floral orientals with a lot of presence; not only do you get a really terrific scent that is better than most anything you'll find in a department store these days, you also get that bottle!

The box gives you a hint: streamers and confetti in gold on a bright-red background. A celebration! And if you're celebrating in style, you do it with champagne. Gres' Cabaret shower gel alluded to it, and Yves Saint Laurent came right out and said it with the sparkly Champagne (later renamed Yvresse — arguably an even better name — for legal reasons), but Azzaro did them one better by putting the scent in a baroque champagne glass. You don't have to invert the whole thing to use it: you can just pluck the bottle and its golden cap out of the stand, and in fact you could just buy the bottle without the frou-frou. But why would you? (As a refill, I guess. But the stand can't add that much to the price, surely?)

If you do an image search online, you will discover that a significant number of people do not get the point of the bottle, and depict it sitting "upright", the curvy frosted stem poking helplessly into the air like a misguided antenna. But then, inverted bottles have always confused some people, probably the sort who don't know which way up to hold a book.

Last week I mentioned that the only problem with the Claude Montana Just Me bottle was that the zipper pull was at the top of an opened zipper, which makes no sense, but that there would have been a way to rescue it, and Oh la la shows us the way: turn the bottle upside down. Just look at the bottle for the upcoming Pulse by Beyonce:

Now imagine that that's the Just Me bottle tucked into a similar metal sleeve (only symmetrical), with the zipper pull at the bottom where it belongs. Piece of cake.

In English, "ooh la la" means "sexy", but in French, the phrase is "oh la la", which is an expression of surprise, whether good or bad. It can mean, "Why, what do we have here?", or it can mean, "Oh my god, what just happened?", and you can intensify it by extending it: "oh la la la la" usually means "Oh, NO!" As a fragrance name, "Oh la la" is doubly clever, because it not only suggests the desired reaction to the scent, it alludes to the initials of the house's name: "Oh, Loris Azzaro, Loris Azzaro!"

The tagline in the ad at the top reads "Sillage d'une femme imprévisible," which means "Sillage (perfumed wake) of an unpredictable woman." To be honest, there isn't anything unpredictable about Oh la la; it doesn't stand out dramatically in a field of big floral orientals (despite such notes as the African flower karo-karounde). But it is an undeniably gorgeous scent, and there are never enough of those in the world.

Bright Sunshiny Day: Montana Just Me

2011-06-30T09:38:00.006-03:00

As you know all too well if you are one of the obsessed who is perpetually scouring the Internet looking for information about scents, descriptions and lists of notes are a dicey proposition at best, a complete curse most of the time.

After I had smelled Montana's 1997 Just Me a few times and jotted down some observations, I naturally wanted to see what everyone else had to say about it, so I went hunting for the lists of notes. The sort of thing that comes up most frequently when searching for these things — stop me if you've heard this — is the boilerplate

Just Me Perfume by Montana. Launched by the design house of montana in 1997, just me is classified as a sharp, oriental, woody fragrance. This feminine scent possesses a blend of oriental fruits and woods. It is recommended for daytime wear.

I don't know how many thousands of times I've read that sort of nonsense. Classified by whom? Recommended by whom? Who says so?

In case you don't know anything about how computers work, that's basically a form letter, with little placeholders inserted into the string of text:

(nameofscent) is classified as a (adjective1), (adjective2), (adjective3) fragrance. This (sexadjective) scent possesses a blend of (note1) and (note2)....

Then some poor drone just fills in a database with the relevant — and, I think, often randomly chosen — words, and it's done. The web page has the boilerplate text hard-coded into it (as they say), and then the empty spots are populated (as they also say) from the database.

Someone else uses a different database, because another site has this to say:

Launched by the design house of Montana in 1997, MONTANA JUST ME by Montana is classified as a flowery fragrance. This feminine scent posesses a blend of: oriental fruits and woods, an alluring scent. It is recommended for casual wear.

Well, what is it? Flowery or sharp-oriental-woody?

Sometimes the database for a particular scent is empty, which gives the hilarious

Perfume. Launched by the design house of in, is classified as a fragrance. This scent possesses a blend of. It is recommended for wear.

Even worse is this boilerplate (this one for the original Montana scent), which you also must have seen at some point:

Oriental, Spicy, Sweet. Created in 1986, Montana is a refreshing, woody, mossy fragrance. It's fragrant nature explores essences of peach, cardamom and ginger. Blended with notes of vetiver, amber and musk, Montana is recommended as an evening fragrance.

"It's fragrant nature explores essences of". I would like to find whoever wrote that horror and smack some sense into them. (That description is also multifariously wrong, as these things almost always are. The original Montana was a sharp-clawed animalic chypre with a radius of at least one city block, and it was most certainly meant for daytime wear, to complement those neon-coloured, shoulder-padded suits that Montana was making at the time, and god I wish I had a bottle of it right now, because it was fantastic.)

And then there's the bludgeoning type of description, which just tosses in as much information as possible, sometimes to an almost unbelievable degree. A site called Pink Fragrance seems to have just cobbled together a bunch of descriptions of random scents; here's less than a quarter of a massive paragraph of bafflegab:

An elegant, floral fragrance with top notes of rose, clementine and honeysuckle. Features tiare flower, jasmine and peony as the heart notes. Finished with sandalwood, veil of musk and patchouli as the dry down notes...Fragrance notes top with fruity, floral fragrance and a lively notes of Italian mandarin essence infuse the fragrance with zest and energy. Quince flower highlights emphasize dewy and sweet, fruity notes. Ceylon tea and iris is blended with a luminous woody accord giving the fragrance its unique, signature perfume...With top notes of Italian lime, icy pear and crisp, green almond. MONTANA JUST ME by Montana fragrance has heart notes of sugared almond and white peony and dry down notes of amber, mahogany wood, tonka beans and vanilla.

If any one scent had all that, it would probably be lethal.

Lists of notes, of course, often aren't any better. They're never particularly complete, for many reasons, one of which is that the company that makes the scent wants you to think it smells like something, not that there is necessarily any of that actual note in the product. And lists can be wildly misleading: the notes listed in that Montana nonsense up there may actually appear in the scent itself, but they tell you literally nothing of how the scent will smell, because you know nothing of their quality or proportion.

And of course there is never any guarantee that the list you're reading actually belongs to the scent it's attached to. Someone at Basenotes thoughtfully included this in their review:

Just Me was composed by Francoise Caron and included topnotes of grapefruit, ginger, caramel and pepper; heart of jasmin and ylang ylang; basenotes of musc, vanilla and amber.

Don't know where they got that from, but unless Just Me underwent a drastic reformulation at some point in its very short life, that is not at all what the scent in my bottle is.

A few other pages suggest that Just Me is instead a

spicy oriental fragrance with pineapple, honey, jasmine, chocolate and leather notes

and that is more on the nose. No pun intended.

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Recently I found this and had to have it, mostly for the Just Me, which I, despite having read good reviews, had boobishly passed up on ordering a few years ago and had been regretting ever since:

Not my photo, but a borrowed one: you can tell because in my set, the Le Dix was half-empty, having leaked, dissolving the name stencilled on the bottle while giving the coffret a deliciously plush and expensive smell and some untoward stains. The Cabochard was likewise half-empty, but had demurely evaporated rather than staining the box (which had never been opened). Otherwise everything was in perfect condition, which means it held up well, considering that, as far as I can determine, the box is over a decade old.

(By the way, if you Google "les meilleurs parfums de Paris", you will get many, many hits, hardly any of which are this particular collection, though they all look pretty tempting. I don't know if anybody has a trademark on that title or if it's just used for any old batch of miniatures that someone wants to unload: at any rate, I rather doubt that these five are or ever were "the best perfumes of Paris". The back of the box says it's a product of "Vendôme Cosmetic Laboratories", but a Google search just left me befuddled and bored, so I gave up. I don't care that much.)

I had read many good things about Just Me and as soon as I saw it on the box cover, I had to have it. It did not disappoint. It opens with a madly cheerful dish of fruit cocktail dressed with citrus zest and dominated by sugared pineapple, a radiant burst of sunshine. Pineapple more than any other fruit, any other thing, is sunshine you can smell, bright and angular, penetrating and caressing. If this sort of thing doesn't make you happy, then I don't even know how your nose works: the smell of pineapple always brings a smile to my face.*

The top seamlessly flows into a warm jam-and-chocolate floral with an emphasis on "warm": this is practically tropical, with the spiny, pineapple-y brightness lingering well into the heart of the scent, and has "summer day" written all over it. Eventually the radiance vanishes altogether and the scent segues into a smudgy, salty, vaguely leathery drydown that lies very, very close to the skin. You wouldn't call Just Me a proper leather scent, because the leather doesn't appear until very late in the game, but a fragrance has to end with something. That doesn't even matter: from start to finish, Just Me is gorgeously proportioned, charming, and most of all, so much fun!

Oh, and here's the packaging of the full-sized bottle:

Despite that fact that the box has it right — the zipper pull is at the bottom of a teasingly undone decolletage — and the bottle necessarily has it wrong (and quite properly so, because doing it the other way around would have looked stupid), that is a terrific bottle. Actually, there would have been one way to salvage it, to put the zipper at the bottom where it belongs, but we'll get to that next time.

*With one exception that I've encountered: I bought a small bottle of Dawn dishwashing liquid in Hawaiian Pineapple scent and it was horrible. I couldn't bring myself to throw it away — I'm just that cheap! — so I used it up in little increments, putting a tiny squidge of it into a sinkful of proper lemon-scented Sunlight Liquid, which smells as dish soap is meant to smell. It didn't eliminate the horrible artificial pineappleness of it, but it brought it down to bearable levels. In retrospect, I don't know why I didn't throw it out; it was less than a buck. Sheer stubbornness, I guess. If you haven't met me, you have no idea how stubborn I am. It runs in the family.

Summer Cool: Comme des Garçons Series 5, Sherbet

2011-06-28T07:24:00.004-03:00

But first, he rambles endlessly, and talks about heavy, unsummery oriental scents from a few decades ago.

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I was idly thumbing through Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez' "Perfumes: The Guide" when I chanced upon this opening sentence for her review of Caron's Le Troisieme Homme:

For eye candy, both men and women look at women: men are simply not decorative, as everyone knows.

Everyone knows no such thing. What a stupid, mindless assertion that is.

Either she means that men do not decorate themselves in Western culture, which is a commonplace and so obviously true as to be not even worth mentioning (although throughout history of course they did, and in cultures other than our own of course they do), or she means that women are inherently decorative and men are not, which is insulting to both men and women as viewers and as the viewed, and also completely wrong, as a quick tour of the Internet would demonstrate. Clive Owen is much more decorative than Juliette Lewis, whatever they happen to be wearing.

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Having said that, though....

When we were in New York recently, Jim and I saw the movie L'Amour Fou, a documentary about the lifelong relationship between Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé. "Amour Fou" means "mad love", but this was the least mad thing you can possibly imagine: dull, placid, stodgy, napworthy (unless you consider expensive furnishings to be pornography).

The movie of course had to make a mention of Saint Laurent's sensational 1977 perfume Opium, so it showed this ad:

Well, perhaps it hasn't aged well and is a silly thing. But I have always found its star, Canadian model Linda Evangelista, to be impossibly beautiful, quite possibly the most beautiful woman who has ever lived, in no small part because she was perpetually changing her look, and no matter what she changed it to, she always looked extraordinary — she could and did wear any hair colour or style and make it look good, and you know how rare that is. I mean, just look at this:

So if someone wishes to claim that women are somehow simply more decorative than men, I'd say that person is an idiot; but if someone wants to claim that Linda Evangelista is more decorative than mere mortals, I'd have to give them that.

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And speaking of old perfume commercials, you must have at least heard of the infamous quartet of Obsession TV ads from 1985? For the longest time there was, as far as I knew, only one on Youtube, the one with the boy:

Last night, on a mission, I hunted a little harder, and found two more. Here's the first in the series, with the older man:

Here's the second, with the younger man:

(I never have found the fourth ad, with the woman; perhaps it's carefully hidden away, or perhaps it just isn't there. Yet.)

And maybe you're choking with laughter, maybe they are ridiculous and overwrought, but they still give me a shiver. When Obsession was launched, a local department store had the four commercials playing on a loop on a TV screen, and I am pretty sure I watched them over and over again for half an hour; it might have been more.

There is something fearfully oneiric about these ads: the way they are trapped in a little isolated fragment of the universe, the arch, elliptical speech, the symbols so full of meaning to be teased out (the flower, the chess piece, the little book of secrets). Perhaps they are ridiculous and faux-Freudian, but I love them nonetheless, because for me they capture not only a time and a place, but a smell.

I put on a little spray of Obsession this morning, a recent vintage, and shouldn't have bothered; it has been altered nearly past recognition, not remotely what it used to be, and what a shame that is. It was once great, in a vulgar, deliciously trashy way, and now it's just cheap.

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Since it's summer and the days are warming, I assume we've all put away our winter fragrances and broken out the bright, cooling scents that make the heat more bearable. I recently discovered in my box of samples all three of the Comme des Garçons Sherbet scents, and couldn't believe I hadn't tried a single one of them. What could be summerier than sherbet? (If you pronounce it "sherbert", you will not be able to tell but I will be wincing inside. It's "sherbet", please, from Arabic "sharbat", only one "r".)

In North America, sherbet is a frozen dessert based on fruit, with a very small dairy content that gives it opacity and a slight creaminess, distinguishing it from sorbet, which is the same thing except without the milk. I was therefore expecting the CdG Sherbets to be fresh and a little creamy. I was not counting on the fact that Japan is not big on dairy products, and so the unisex Sherbets are not remotely sherbety or even sweet, but fairly clean, stripped-down fantasy scents, an alien's idea of Earth sweets.

Peppermint is a nasty thing, a combination of the bright fresh synthetics that CdG seems to do so often with a sharp muddle of peppermint, spearmint, undefined spices, and an indiscriminate greenness that suggests someone walked into an herb garden and began whacking everything with a stick. It is genuinely horrible, with overtones of industrial soap, scrubbed tile, and possibly insecticide or herbicide or at any rate some sort of cide. After a while the generalized awfulness fades away and is replaced with a soft, not altogether unpleasant minty woodiness, but it's not enough to erase the memory of the horror that preceded it. Some people love this, though I can't imagine sitting through that opening, even once, ever again.

Cinnamon, on the other hand, is delightful, a soft little cloud of spices and wood, and though "inoffensive" sounds like damning with faint praise, it is inoffensive; an ideal summertime scent when you want to smell like more than yourself, without projecting at all. Someone would have to get close to you to smell this, and I think they would want to. It smells like your own skin, cooked a little in the summer sun, only better, of course.

Rhubarb is certainly the best of the lot, with a real charm — a unisex fruity floral (there is such a thing) done right: a little zing of citrus, a freshly snapped rhubarb stalk, a dreamy haze of unnamed flowers, a blurry warmth that never overpowers. (If you told me it was the newest of Guerlain's Aqua Allegorias, I wouldn't be at all surprised, although I can't imagine what they would call it.)

The official notes, for whatever that's worth to you:

PEPPERMINT: Curly Mint, Peppermint, Bay Rose, White Pepper, Cardamon, Amber, White Musk.
CINNAMON: Cedar, Bergamot, Cinnamon, Saffron, Carnation, Benjamin, Vetiver, Teak Wood, White Musk.
RHUBARB: Bergamot, Rhubarb, Litchi, Orchid Sap, Japonica Flower, Vanilla Cream.

Have Your Cake And Wear It Too: Jacomo Art Collection #02

2011-06-24T10:37:00.010-03:00

As I mentioned, when I was at Bergdorf Goodman a few weeks ago, the nice saleswoman, when she discovered that I liked leather scents (or at least was interested in buying a specific leathery scent, which is not exactly the same thing, but she was on a mission), started plying me with all the leathers she could think of. The first was Jacomo Art Collection #02, which is meant to smell like leather and modelling clay and bubble gum, so I guess that means it has heliotrope in it, which a lot of people think smells like Play-Doh, and birch tar, which stands in for leather in fragrances, and possibly ethylmaltol or one of the other candy-note aromachemicals. But here is what it smells like:

A leather birthday cake. Tons of leather at first, lots of birch tar. Then cake. There are sprinkles on top, plenty of vanilla in the frosting. And birthday candles, smoky-waxy. Over a few hours, the sweetness of the cake gradually drowns out the leather, but it's never overpoweringly sweet, and the leather never quite goes away. Late in the game, there is a sprinkling of vanilla-laced baby powder over the whole thing, for some reason.

And really that's it. Not terrible, but too simple for what it's supposed to be, which is art.

Since this is a collection, there are several scents, all apparently gourmand — I didn't try either of the others — and packaged in arty boxes that I find sort of hideous, so I'm not going to show them to you (you can look them up yourself if you must; that's what the Internet is for), but the bottles are attractive:

If they add to the collection and do some blues and greens, and then sell the whole bunch of them as a set of half-ounce miniatures, it would make a nice little arrangement on your dresser, cluttery and charming.

Speaking of miniatures: maybe the bean-counters at the fragrance houses know something I don't, but why don't all scents come as minis? I personally love them. I would never have bought a full bottle of Ambre Narguile at $200 or whatever it's vending for these days, as much as I love it, but I did buy a set of four 15-mL bottles of the first four Hermessences for $135 or so; the company didn't lose money on the deal, because they got me to buy something I wouldn't have, even if they earned less money from the transaction. At Bergdorf Goodman, I would have laid out $85 or $90 for a 50-mL bottle of Je Suis Un Homme which I'll never see the bottom of, but instead I paid $150 for a batch of 16 10-mL bottles, so everybody wins. I could be wrong about the economics of it, but I am reasonably certain that if everything as a matter of course were launched in 15-mL sprays, or collections of miniatures once a year, a lot more scents would be sold. People who can't justify buying a full bottle will spring for a smaller one. People who just want to try a scent will buy the smallest size and maybe finish it and then spring for the big bottle. Completists will buy sets of minis just to have them. Addicts who have to have everything a particular house releases will clamour for them: I'm thinking specifically of Guerlain and Chanel here. And just think if Serge Lutens or Parfumerie Generale did sets of miniatures! Honestly, it's win-win all the way down.

Carbo Loading: Serge Lutens Jeux de Peau

2011-06-19T12:15:00.004-03:00

I often feel at a disadvantage when pondering the names and descriptions of French scents, because the descriptions are often so big and flowery that I know a translation is not really going to do them justice, and the names often force me to suspect there is a secondary meaning to them that only a deep knowledge of the French language and culture would make clear. Why is Etat Libre d'Orange's Rossy de Palma scent subtitled "Eau de Protection"? Does that mean something to French ears that is lost to English speakers? (Or is it just weirdness for its own sake?)

Serge Lutens' recent Jeux de Peau literally translates as "Skin Games", but can that really be what's intended? Does it have some other meaning? Is it a reference to something, a novel or a TV show? It is a pun or other play on words somehow? Aren't all fragrances skin games, really?

As I said about my first encounter with Jeux de Peau, my immediate reaction was, and I quote, "Hmmm, interesting OH MY GOD." The "Hmmm, interesting" part is because the scent starts with a flash of typically Lutensian strangeness, bright and trinkety, so brief I can't even tell exactly what it might be: it's just sort of odd, metallic and spicy, maybe the cast-iron pans in a rundown curry-house kitchen. It is the sort of thing we expect from Lutens, and I reasonably enough thought that the opening of the scent would establish this oddity more fully, play it out and develop it.

But no, it is a trick, a ruse; it simply vanishes, and like magic the scent opens up into a massive "OH MY GOD" spread of baked goods, all at once, dark and mouthwatering. A thick layer of hot butter on grilled bread; waffle cones, cooked almost until burnt; toasted hazelnuts, maple glaze, croissants. Ridiculous. Extreme. Over the top. So gorgeous that when I wear it I cannot help but smell my own skin, over and over again. I wore it every single day last week; I almost forgot I owned any other scents.

After a couple of hours, most of the baked goods have been eaten, and what is left is, perversely, Santal Blanc. Not just "sandalwood" or even "Serge Lutens sandalwood", but actually Santal Blanc (I own it, so I know). It is not out of place; austere, bone-dry, it is a welcome counterpart to the buttery richness of the bake shop.

But there is another trick, one more game to be played in these skin games, hours and hours later: the baked goods return. Perhaps they were there all along, merely drowned out by the sandalwood, but at any rate, that drifts away and the bakery reasserts itself. It's subtler now, and sweeter; less brioche-and-croissants than pecan pie, caramel sticky buns, maybe molasses cookies, undeniably yummy. It lasts for hours and hours, of course.

There are a great many gourmand scents on the market, with more arriving every day; I just discovered that Mugler is launching an EDT version of the proto-gourmand Angel with some altered notes but (it sounds like) the basic gourmand structure intact. But nobody ever thought of doing a gourmand so resolutely peculiar and commanding as Jeux de Peau, because only Lutens is Lutens.

Trompe l'Oeil Coq

2011-06-13T11:34:00.003-03:00

Okay. This is the packaging for the original Jean-Paul Gaultier scent for men, Le Male:

Now, this is the packaging for his upcoming men's scent, Kokorico:

In case it is not absolutely clear, the front of the bottle is a man's head in profile, and the edge of the bottle is the profile of the original bottle. Dazzling!

The packaging is also a clever play on the original's audacious tin-can outer package.

"Cocorico", in case you didn't know, is the French version of what we render in English as "cock-a-doodle-do"; the sound, in other words, that a cock makes. Just joke laid upon joke, isn't it?

The scent, which I have not tried yet but will at the first opportunity, is meant to smell of fig leaves (another joke!), raw cocoa beans, and wood (yet another joke!).

What fun it must be to be Jean-Paul Gaultier.

How is it that I've never actually reviewed his original scent? Must be because I don't own a bottle of it. I used to own it — got it in a swap, wore it for a couple years, swapped it away and haven't really regretted it — but I do have a sample; maybe I'll take a crack at it one of these days. (I had a go at his follow-up; sure didn't like that very much.)

Helluva Town

2011-06-09T15:18:00.004-03:00

Aaaaaaand I'm back from New York. It was pretty effing hot the first day we were there, last Friday; the weekend was nice, rainless and temperate, and then it just started getting hotter and hotter, until yesterday, our last day, it was in the neighbourhood of 30-feels-like-40, and today, right now, it is 34-feels-like-44, which is just wrong, and thank god we're not there is all I can say, because we would be spending the whole day in the hotel room sitting about six inches away from one of the air conditioners.

Oh! The hotel room! You have to see this, because we didn't quite believe it when we walked in. We always stay at the Salisbury Hotel (123 W 57th Street), because it is one of the few privately-owned hotels in the entire city, reasonably priced, not what you'd call luxurious, but nice enough, and located ideally — less than a block from two different subway stops, within easy walking distance (if it is not 44 degrees out) of restaurants and theatres and drugstores and many, many other things, and I am giving them some free publicity because they are awesome. When we arrived on Friday just after noon, the hotel was pretty full up, so they didn't have a room for us; we went away and came back a few hours later and the two men behind the desk had a little confab and presumably there still weren't many empty rooms because they decided that they would give us room 1010, which you can find in the picture below (click to embigulate, if need be):

See that big red dot? That's where we were. Our room. IT WAS HALF A CITY BLOCK LONG. For two people. The bedroom was at one end, the inner-edge-of-58th-Street end, so it was nice and quiet; in the middle was the bathroom and the dining room; and at the other end was the living room, with a TV and a sofa-bed and some armchairs and a desk and some other things, probably. There was an air conditioner at each end, and also a TV. We always get lots of exercise when we travel because we walk pretty much everywhere that's close enough to not need public transit, but on this trip we got a fair portion of our exercise just walking from the living room to the bedroom and back.

On Saturday we took the subway to Brooklyn and walked back into Manhattan along the Brooklyn Bridge, which was an excellent way to spend a morning, and then Jim went back to the room for a bit while I went shopping. Of course I did! For a trip more than 24 hours but less than 7 days, a Canadian can bring goods worth up to $400 into the country, and I made a valiant effort to use up my entire allotment within 24 hours of arriving. I failed, but not for lack of trying.

First I went to Henri Bendel, which is the place in the city that sells Etat Libre D'Orange; I figured, hell, I could mail-order it but I'm here, Bendel's is a couple of blocks from the hotel, I might as well get Je Suis Un Homme, which is my favourite of the line so far (of the ones I've tried). And I walked in and was attacked by a very friendly, very determined, possibly Polish but certainly Eastern European saleswoman who had definite ideas about what I was going to walk out of the store with.

The first thing I snapped up was a set of Ineke samples, $25 for the first seven in the line, and I haven't smelled any of them yet, but the packaging is so ludicrously beautiful and thought-through that I couldn't resist. After I expressed my interest in the Etat line and made it clear, as ever, that categories such as "masculine" and "feminine" have no meaning for me, that I wear whatever smells good, the saleswoman had me try Like This, which is pretty spectacular (carroty spiced pumpkin, citrus and immortelle), but she didn't have a sample and I'm not going to buy it based on a quick sniff. I told her about my idea that Je Suis Un Homme is as close as I'll ever come to the limited-edition Fraicheur Cuir, and she decided that therefore I loved leather and started hunting down all the leather-based scents they had, and spraying like a madwoman. I tried at least a dozen things, including three of the SoOud line, all of them beautiful (one, though I can't remember which, particularly smoky and delicious), and one of the Jacomo Art Collection line, No. 2 ($89, I think, for 100 mL), which is meant to smell like leather and modelling clay, and it is really outstanding. And here was the odd part; I noticed that Bendel had the Etat coffret, 16 10-mL bottles, for $150, and since I had passed it up in Paris last year I decided to get that instead of Je Suis un Homme ($80 or so, if I recall correctly), and the saleswoman tried to talk me out of it. Tried really hard! "But it's only 10 mL of the one you wanted, and you will run out of it! And what if you don't like most of them? What will you do with them? And if you want to spend the money, you could buy the one you want and the Jacomo for hardly more than the cost of the set, and have two things you really like!" I'll never use up 50 mL of anything any more, I said, and if I don't like any of the little Etats, I'll just give it away. And that satisfied her, and she rang me through. She tied up the Etat box, which was not wrapped or sealed in any way, in a great length of wide brown ribbon decked with white polka dots, found me a sample of the Jacomo and a couple of Je Suis Un Homme ("because you like it so much, and so you will be able to carry them with you"), and tucked everything into a big heavy Bendel shopping bag of dark-brown-and-white stripes.

My next and last stop was Bergdorf Goodman, where I had bought my first-ever Serge Lutens a year and a half ago, and where I was, as I have mentioned, going to sample and presumably buy Jeux de Peau. I asked the salesman standing guard at the Lutens zone (it isn't a counter, just two imposing glass shelving units against a wall) if they had it; he sprayed a blotter and handed it to me, and my first reaction was "Hmmm, interesting OH MY GOD." (We will delve into that next week.)

I told the salesman about my ridiculous Lutens collection (nine and counting), and he tried to get me to sample a few more things that he thought might be to my taste, but I was already a step ahead of him; he proffered the Cèdre bottle, and I said, "That's the one with the tuberose, right?" "Well, yes, but it's not just tuberose," he said, reaching for a blotter to spray. "No, really. I've tried it. Tuberose and I are not friends," I said, and he relented. He made a gesture towards L'Eau Serge Lutens, I disdained it, and he said, "Well, Lutens made it as a joke." Then he picked up the new Bas de Soie, and I said, "That's the one with all the iris, right?" "Yes," he said, perhaps a bit warily. "Iris and I are not friends. But I'll try it anyway." He sprayed, I hated: face-powder florals, iris, uck.

I did, though, buy the Jeux de Peau. Of course I did! And now it's ten and counting, and if I ever smell Vitriol d'Oeillet, god help me.

Drink Up: Gres Cabaret Shower Gel

2011-06-06T05:49:00.002-03:00

Even though I am on a self-imposed moratorium and am trying manfully not to buy any scents in 2011 (I will probably fail before the year is up), I have given myself a little bit of wiggle room: any bottle of fragrance that I buy is going to be around for a long, long time, given how many bottles I own, but shower gel gets used up at a pretty fast clip, so I can judiciously buy that, if I really must.

I was at Winners the other day, the Canadian version of TJ Maxx, and in the soaps-and-lotions section they had four boxes of Cabaret shower gel by Gres. They were all sealed, so I couldn't test one, but I vaguely remembered having smelled it when it was launched in 2003, and thought I recalled a lush, seducey oriental; a bargain at $5.99, so I talked myself into buying one.

As it turns out, Cabaret is not an oriental at all, or at least the shower gel isn't; it's a crisp, brilliant citrus rose with a vague, almost subliminal wood note underneath. There is certain to be more going on in the eau de parfum, but the shower gel is simple, stripped down, and immodestly cheerful; just lemons and roses, and lots of both. It is also very big; probably best not to use this one at the gym, because it is highly perfumed and very, very diffusive, although very little of the scent clings to the skin after towelling off, and what remains doesn't last long.

The box is splendid: festive red and gold in a sawtooth pattern laid transparently over an iridescent metallic. The bottle, unfortunately, is cheap; a mere tube, with a pleasant-enough matte finish, capped with a cheap, trinkety gold-plastic screw-on cap, which is maddeningly inefficient — unscrew the cap, and then what? You have to set down the cap somewhere in order to squeeze out the contents, and then you have to set down the tube somewhere to use the product, and it's a tube, so it's teetery and hard to balance. Very poorly thought out.

But the gel itself is a real surprise; that's where most if not all of the thought went in this product. It's a pale, translucent apricot colour, bejewelled with tiny iridescent particles of shimmer and studded throughout with little spheres in white and gold, also iridescent. These globes aren't full of moisturizer or whatever such things are usually loaded with; they're solid (but easily crushed) clumps of that same shimmer that the gel is laced with. After pouring it into my hand and examining it for a minute, I finally realized what the total effect was meant to be; it's champagne. And of course it is; what else would you be drinking at a festive cabaret?

The Element of Surprise: Comme des Garçons Odeur 71

2011-06-02T16:16:00.000-03:00

There are a great many things to loathe about spring. Early on, the snow begins to melt, leaving behind all the garbage and detritus and dog leavings and rotting leaves deposited during the fall and winter. Later, it is a preview of summer, that most loathsome of seasons, when sunlight hits your skin like millions of poisonous, cancer-bearing needles and the heat and humidity and insects make daily life a misery. Those of us blessed with pollen allergies begin taking the various medications (mine is cetirizine — Reactine here in Canada, Zyrtec in the US — for birch-pollen hay fever) that, although we are glad to have them, do not quite block the itching and sneezing and runny noses that plague us for a month or more.

But there is one good thing to be said for spring, at any rate, and that is that the flowers begin to open. And here in the Maritimes, it is lilac time again; just a few days ago the trees were barely budding, and now they have exploded into bloom. Walking down the street on the way to the gym this morning, I was wrapped in an eddying cocoon of perfume, though the nearest lilac tree was at least fifty yards from me. As I write, little ribbons of lilac are twirling through the window. It is everywhere, and it is ravishing. It almost makes the season bearable.

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I will be going to New York shortly for just under a week, and since I am a slave to Serge Lutens, I decided that despite my resolution not to buy a single scent this year (a resolution which I have so far managed to keep), I was going to go after, and I think very likely buy, his recent Jeux de Peau, which sounds like a return to form and just the kind of thing I love, a gourmand oriental based on toasted bread. (I bought my first ever Lutens, Chypre Rouge, in New York, at Bergdorf Goodman, and although I could easily buy Jeux de Peau online, or get a sample of it likewise, I love the idea of buying it at the same spot I got my first one.) And now I discover that that malicious bastard Lutens is launching a carnation scent, Vitriol d'Oeillet, in July, a month too late. He knows (I assume) that I am insane about carnations, and that I am almost certainly going to have to own this. Why would he do this to me? Why couldn't he launch it now, so I could at least sample it in the store?

He is a cruel, cruel man.

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I was in the local hyperdrugstore today seeing if there was anything worth sniffing (there wasn't) and listening to an audiobook on my iPod when a saleswoman came and stood beside me and asked if I needed any help. It was, of course, obvious that I didn't, and that I was otherwise engaged, because I ignored her as thoroughly as it is possible to ignore her: I ignored her like a cat ignores people. I continued audio-reading and browsing, and she repeated her question, or at least I assume she did, because I couldn't quite hear her, being engrossed in my book (The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester) and trying very, very hard to be left alone. But she wasn't having any of that. She put her hand on my bare arm, and when I snapped my head around to look at her, she asked me if I needed any help. A complete stranger commanded me to pay attention to her by grabbing me.

If I were the sort of person who is capable of thinking on my feet in such situations, I would have said, "What do you think you're doing? I couldn't make it any more obvious I don't need any help, and I'm just trying to browse, and you won't leave me alone. And how dare you touch me? What if my religious beliefs prohibited contact with women? You don't know!" But I freeze up, so I just said, "I'm fine, thank you," and continued what I was doing. But I was seething inside.

I work in retail. I know how this works: we are ordered to interact with all customers. But if a customer is making a point of not seeing you and hearing you, then you cannot force that customer into an interaction; it has to be a two-way street. And you absolutely positively cannot under any circumstances compel them to pay attention to you by touching them. Her purpose, or at least the corporation's purpose, was to make me feel at home, and thereby loosen up my purse-strings. Did it work? No. I just wanted to get the hell out before someone else could wander along and manhandle me.

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Comme des Garçons' Odeur 53, and the very next day I started reading John Waters' most recent book, Role Models. There's a chapter in there about Rei Kawakubo, CdG's designer, whom Waters admires and wears. And right in the middle of the piece is this paragraph:

Only in Manhattan do I dare wear a fragrance. And that’s Odeur 53, Rei Kawakubo’s scent that to me smells exactly like Off! insect repellant. The best thing about Odeur 53 is that the smell doesn’t last very long. “Rei doesn’t really like perfume for men,” a salesperson needlessly tried to explain. I love the idea of a perfume that disappears—you don’t need to convince me! Designed to “confront the nose”—the press release’s copy for this “anti-perfume” was art in itself—“a memory of smell…entering the world of abstraction by way of a feeling…the future, the space, the air.” With astonishing seriousness Rei listed the inorganic ingredients: “the freshness of oxygen, wash drying in the wind, nail polish, burnt rubber and the mineral intensity of carbon.” That’s exactly what I want to smell like! How did she know?!

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Odeur 71 is the follow-up and in many ways the opposite to Odeur 53. They are both deliberately, proudly synthetic: but while 53 starts out smelling manufactured but has little wisps of real-world perfumery tucked into it (vetiver, cedar), 71 starts out smelling very much like a standard fresh cologne and only later takes on its synthetic quality. It does this with a determination that is positively alarming.

The predictably daft list of notes provided by the company:

Electricity, Metal, Office, Mineral, Dust on a hot light bulb, Photocopier toner, Hot metal, Toaster, Fountain pen ink, Pencil shavings, The salty taste of a battery, Incense, Wood, Moss, Willow, Elm, Birch, Bamboo, Hyacinth and Lettuce Juice.

There are lots of green things in half of that list, and the opening shot is green and fresh, a fougere cologne that could have come from anyone. There is a little jolt of synthetic freshness with a sort of electrical charge to it, almost like biting on a piece of tinfoil, but it is lightly done.

And then as the scent develops (and it develops much more than Odeur 53 does), the greenery dies off and it becomes more and more artificial; although it doesn't specifically call to mind most of the things in the list of notes, it does smell very laboratorial, electrochemical, like the sorts of things a mad scientist might cook up in between building death rays and resurrecting the dead. It smells of recently oxidized metal that has been aggressively scrubbed, much like Dry Clean, brightly metallic and brittle.

In fact, I find it increasingly unpleasant as it progresses; it just gets cleaner and sharper and more intensely synthetic to the point of hostility, and finally I can't stand it any longer. If you guessed that it defies being scrubbed off, then you guessed right; one of the (usually) desirable properties of modern synthetics is that they can make scents last much longer than they otherwise would, and that is true with a vengeance here. Showering won't remove it: you couldn't take it off with an industrial sandblaster.

Odeur 71 has been in production for over ten years, so someone must be buying it. In truth, I can see how it would appeal to some people; it presents the illusion of a classic men's scent and then strips away the outer shell to get at the wiring beneath, and that is perversely fascinating. Not pleasant, exactly, but undeniably interesting.

Psychology Today: Comme des Garçons Odeur 53

2011-05-19T20:26:00.001-03:00

I started writing this on the 1st of May, and I just could not get into it, partly because sometimes a scent just eludes pinning down by words, and partly because Blogger was down for a couple of days, and partly because I got a Kindle and I have been distracted by reading.

But the real reason, it finally occurred to me, is an increasing feeling of pointlessness. Who, I kept asking myself, wants to read about a scent that was released three or twelve or nineteen years ago? (I mean, I do, but I'm not everybody, to say the least, and it is getting harder to convince myself that other people want what I want.) What people mostly want to know about is the newest scents: that's why Now Smell This is such a huge deal. And I am cut off from all but the mass-market scents: I live in a very small city, where "niche" is a meaningless word, and I am in the middle of a self-imposed year-long moratorium on new fragrances--I have a completely insane quantity of them, and I can't justify buying any more, not even samples. So I look through my collection or fish through my samples, and I think, "Eh, what's the point?"

But I'm working through it. Writing is its own pleasure.

Now.

People may be pardoned for having thought that Comme des Garçons' Odeur 53 was a colossal Dadaist joke when it was launched in 1998. It was said to be composed of the following notes:

Freshness of Oxygen, Flash of Metal, Fire Energy, Washing drying in the wind, Mineral intensity of carbon, Sand Dunes, Nail Polish, Cellulosic smell, Pure air of the high mountains, Ultimate Fusion, Burnt Rubber, Flaming Rock...

"Ultimate Fusion"? "Flaming Rock"? What?

Keep in mind that although this was well into the Age of Calone and the bright ozonic freshness that entailed, it preceded the current era in which the seeming majority of commercial scents, men's and women's alike, have a fresh, aquatic, or clean-scrubbed quality. Although Odeur 53 does have that clean freshness, it's not the jumped-out-of-the-shower clean you can't avoid these days, but an industrial and slightly scary rigorousness, like a dishwasher factory or an atomic death ray.

In a surprising coincidence, Odeur 53--named for the 53 scent elements which comprise its formula--shares that "burnt rubber" note with Bulgari Black, which was launched the same year and is also strange in a very different way, though if you had to adjudge one of them as "conventional", or at least "less unconventional", it would be the vanilla-drenched Bulgari, for sure, which moved from the avant-garde into, if not the mainstream, then the acceptable during its lifetime. Odeur 53 still carries a whiff of the bizarre, even if you hadn't read its list of notes.

Everything about Odeur 53's public face screams "synthetic", and it and its successor, Odeur 71, were pretty obviously test runs or at least inspirations for CdG's Synthetic series in 2004: Odeur 53 is very reminiscent, in part, of Dry Clean and Skai.

But Odeur 53 is not just synthetic. It is multi-faceted, and some of the facets are invented versions of natural scents: there's a gust of vetiver in there, with to my nose the celery note that sometimes attends vetivers, and a dry woodiness that could be (but isn't) cedar--more like the spirit of wood than wood itself. (Perhaps that's the "pure air of the mountains".) This is all rather confusing--with its bizarre list of notes and its mad jumble of real-fake and fake-fake, it seems at times like a psychology experiment--and what is more, it is not absolutely, uniformly attractive: occasionally I will get a little whiff of something unpleasant, perhaps aggressively clean or overly fresh or teeth-grindingly synthetic, that makes me wonder why I put it on my skin. But most of the elements are, if not beautiful, then fascinating, and that's better, sometimes.

Object Lessons: L'Artisan Parfumeur Havana Vanille

2011-04-19T16:49:00.004-03:00

Lesson 1: Be organized.

I don't know why--maybe its name came up in one of the many and varied scent blogs I read--but a few days ago I was idly thinking about L'Artisan's Havana Vanille, which was launched in mid-2009 and which was pretty obviously the sort of thing that I would love: vanilla, of course, but also tobacco and rum and tonka and and spices and a great many other things that bring me pleasure. Even though I have vowed to not buy any scents this year (a vow which I am going to break in a couple of months, about more which anon), I put it on my list of samples to order on January 1st, 2012. Later that day I was digging through a shoebox full of samples looking for something interesting to write about, and to my shock--I think my jaw fell--there was a vial of Havana Vanille which I have had for certainly a year and didn't know I owned.

Lesson 2: Don't buy more of something than you can reasonably use.

I went through a phase where I was ordering lots of tempting samples from The Perfumed Court and Luckyscent. In fact, just last week I had to stop myself from buying the newest Luckyscent sample pack, eight vials from a line called SoOud, many of which sound gorgeous. But I have got at least a hundred vials that I haven't even tried yet (see Lesson 1), and there is no way I can justify spending a single cent on more fragrances, so I exhibited an uncharacteristic strength of will and closed the web page.

Lesson 3: Don't buy full bottles of scents unsniffed (unless they're really cheap and you can live with the possibility of making a mistake).

So I put a big healthy glug of Havana Vanille on my skin and kind of hated it. I gave it some time, and my dislike was not much diminished. Imagine if I had gone by the list of notes and bought the bottle online!

Havana Vanille--already renamed Vanille Absolument--smells, obviously, like vanilla, like blond tobacco crushed together with vanilla beans in spiced rum, and even though that is a peck of glorious scents right there, it's all too much, big and heavy and sweet in a damning, overbearing way. There is a floralcy to the middle and a dusky woodiness at the base, and when you've gotten to that point the sweetness has tapered off somewhat, but it really is far too late by then: the thing has outstayed its welcome for hours. I note that some other people find Havana Vanille relatively light, and fine, everybody's nose is different, but that to me is incomprehensible: I own some fairly heavy, strong, and/or sweet scents, and Havana Vanille is right up there with them in weight and texture.

Lesson 4: Nothing lasts forever.

Vanille Absolument is replacing Vanilia, which I own, have worn for at least 15 years, and still adore (I wore it just last week, and it has never palled over the years). That's vanilla done right: stylish, graceful, perfectly unisex, a luminous concoction of vanilla pod, vanilla orchid (officially ylang-ylang, but orchidaceous to my nose), and spice, wreathed in feathery smoke. Vanilia is discontinued and is no longer on the company's website, but some online retailers still have it (you may have to hunt around), as does The Perfume Shoppe. If you love Vanilia or you just adore amazing vanilla scents (and can ignore Lesson 3), I'd snap it up if I were you.

Regarding Lessons 2 and 3, I am taking a little trip to New York in June and I am determined that the latest Serge Lutens export, Jeux de Peau, will be mine; it's meant to smell like buttered toast, and the list of notes ("Bread note, spices, licorice, apricot, immortelle, sandalwood, woody notes, amber", says Luckyscent) suggests that I will not be able to live without it, since Lutens is my obsession of obsessions. I will smell it first, just in case. But I'll do so with my credit card in my hand.

Coherence: L'Artisan Parfumeur Bois Farine

2011-04-14T09:41:00.005-03:00

First of all, an interesting article on not El Bulli itself but its imminent closing and on the many articles that have been written about it, relevant because near the end the author says,

The Washington Post's Andreas Viestad summed up the chasm between the uninitiated and the proselytizers nicely: "This food tastes wonderful, but it is hard to find words to describe it … How can you convince someone who has never tasted tuna marrow that it is delicious?" It's a problem inherent to writing about any kind of sensory experience, of course, but at least with less experimental food, critics can assume their readership has a baseline familiarity with most of the flavors they're writing about.

That is a problem: how do you describe flavours and smells without reference to others? You have two options, I think: go off on poetic flights of fancy, or root your description in the familiar (and hope that readers are familiar with your references). I'm not a flights-of-fancy kind of guy: I can't go on about unicorns and magic-carpet rides and whatnot. I'd rather say that something smells like a tuberose wrapped in warm wool, or like Joy only not so good, and assume that you can figure out what I mean.

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Now. If you have not heard this, then you ought to.

It isn't really called "Death Waltz", which is an actual, though deliberately unplayable, parody of sheet music containing such instructions as "with pesto" and "bow real fast (slippage may occur)" and "balance your chair on 2 legs". That thing up there is a synthesized-piano transcription of a piece of video-game music, and it recalls Conlon Nancarrow's player-piano music, though it seems clear that no physical instrument could play it: certainly no human being could. And this is what astounds me the most, what I find the most puzzling and incomprehensible: the sheer number of notes on the page, which is the thing that makes it physically unplayable, ought to, you'd think, render the composition increasingly unlistenable, because it seems as if it should dissolve into a mere blur of notes, and yet it never does. Midway through there's this alarming mass of notes

and then a bit later there's this

which soon gives way to this

with fifteen or more notes being sounded simultaneously and in frighteningly rapid succession, yet to my amazement, you can always understand exactly what is happening musically: the parts of the music, the left and right hands, the glissandi and arpeggiation, all of it perfectly clear and obvious. How can this be? Is it the orchestration, my brain, or some combination of the two? I don't know enough about music to know how this is possible, but all of the pieces fit together into a whole.

I wish that were true of L'Artisan Parfumeur's Bois Farine, but it is a jumble to me, a thoroughly incoherent and unlikeable scent. Bois Farine--"flourwood"--is based on a tree which grows only on Reunion Island and whose flowers smell like flour. The scent doesn't smell of flour, exactly, but it does start off smelling much like unsweet baked goods, no gourmandise here: the top note is suggestive of peanut-butter cookies without nearly enough peanut butter, and soon after that of stick pretzels. It isn't bready, because there isn't any yeastiness to it, but it does smell like flour-based food. And then someone goes and smashes a bottle of cheap iris cologne on the floor and wrecks everything.

There's cedar, too, and eventually some sweetness in the form of benzoin, but that men's-cologne iris: what's that doing there stinking up the bakery? It would have been possible to build some sort of bridge between the bake-shop opening and the sweetened-wood base, and it might even have been possible to do it with a floral middle, but this was not the way to do it.

Bois Farine doesn't smell like anything else, and if you like iris, then you might like this. But I just wanted it to go away. I wore it four times so I could think and write about it, and each time I felt as if I couldn't scrub it off fast enough.

Beauty and Brains: Serge Lutens A La Nuit

2011-03-23T05:06:00.001-03:00

Oh, the crap you inadvertently see when you're on an elliptical machine at the gym in front of a bank of televisions.

Yesterday, the crap was The Marilyn Denis Show, which I take it is the Canadian version of whatever crap American housewives boredly half-watch at 10:00 on a weekday morning. (Tomorrow's episode features thoroughly debunked and shameless communicator-with-the-dead John Edward, which tells you everything you need to know.) On yesterday's show was some expert who was presenting a segment called "Busting Beauty Myths", myths on which the audience was invited to vote by means of little paddles with "True" on one side and "False" on the other. And the first proposition was that you should never, ever, EVER spray scent on your wrists and the rub them together, because you will bruise the scent. Everyone knows that!

Except that it isn't true. How can anyone even think that's a possibility? It's a liquid. You can't bruise it: it's already been processed and compounded and bottled and shipped and toted hither and yon and finally applied to your personage, so it's been banged around in uncountable ways before it arrives on your skin. You can't bruise it. If you really get some friction going with one wrist against the other, you'll heat it up and drive off the top notes more quickly, but you're not going to alter the scent in any olfactorily noticeable way: you won't somehow rearrange the notes or cause the scent to morph into something else. You spray on some Jovan Wild Musk or Byredo Pulp and it's going to smell like that whether your smush it around on your skin or not.

The expert goes on to say that you must spray the scent on and then leave it for eight minutes. Eight? Not six, not nine? Where did she come up with a number like that? And what are you supposed to do for those eight minutes, sit there rigid and unmoving for fear of damaging your freshly applied perfume? It's not nail polish. It's on your skin, and it's going to slowly evaporate, and nobody will ever be able to tell what you did in the eight minutes after you applied it, unless maybe you subsequently cleaned the toilet and didn't wash your hands.

I don't know where people come up with these stupid ideas, but it's high time this one was laid to rest. Do what you want with your scent. Spritz it, dab it, splash it: leave it there or rub it in, put clothing over it or don't. None of these things matter. Promise.

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Spring is here, really here (at least in my part of the world), and so it is time to think about boxing up the dark, sultry fall and winter scents for a spell and digging out the fresher, brighter things that herald the new season.

It is a pleasure for many of us to divide scents up into categories, and we don't all use the same ones, of course, but in addition to such groupings as men's/women's/unisex, spring/summer/fall/winter, and floral/oriental/chypre/fougere/whatever, I am fond of, for lack of better terms, intellectual versus emotional, or brains versus beauty. The two aren't mutually exclusive, of course, but often you can immediately say of a scent, This one is just flat-out gorgeous, or This one isn't the most beautiful thing I own, but it makes me think.

Some scents just seem brainier than others: they're the ones that aren't immediately accessible or beautiful, the ones that put your cerebral cortex into overdrive before engaging your amygdala.* Many classic chypres for me fit into the intellectual category, because thanks to the general strangeness of oakmoss, a lot of the time you can't be absolutely sure that they're even attractive. A couple of days ago I wore Serge Lutens' Santal Blanc and was struck yet again by its almost mathematically rigorous quality, the naked, bitter stringency of its sandalwood: it's like wearing algorithms on your skin. A lot of Lutens' scents have an intellectual cast to them, because there's almost always at least one element that seems strange or unexpected or out of place, and this may be why his line resonates so strongly with me: I tend to analyze and possibly overthink everything, so his oeuvre fits right in. Some of his scents, of course, consist mostly of strangeness, such as Miel de Bois, which is a linear, relentlessly analytic working through of the life cycle of honey; naturally, I love it.

A La Nuit aims for the "beauty" side of the divide and is jasmine, basically: a huge, lush bower of jasmine petals. There is greenery in the top, and not only that but, because there has to be an injection of Lutensian strangeness or intellectuality, what seems to me the peculiar, inimitable scent of a green banana. The massively floral top also seems to have an overtone of lilac to it, which is like adding corn syrup to sugar because the sugar wasn't sweet enough by itself: I might be imagining the lilac because I'm suffocating in jasmine, but if it's there--the official notes don't mention it--it's a nice touch. The base is mostly benzoin, and not much of that.

Other than that, though, jasmine unto death. I don't like it at all, because I can't handle that much jasmine, but if you like jasmine, or if you want to know what it smells like, then A La Nuit is just the ticket.

*The cerebral cortex is the seat of higher brain functions such as thought and language: the amygdala is responsible for emotional reactions.That was probably clear from the context, but hey, if you didn't know for sure, now you do.

Questions and Answers: Ormonde Jayne Ta'if

2011-03-07T17:39:00.000-04:00

Why do I update so much less frequently than I'd like?

I dunno. Maybe I'm just a lazy sack of crap.

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Why has it taken nearly two weeks to write this?

In part because for the last five days or so I have been clotheslined by a hideous, unending cold or possibly the flu or more likely both at the same time, maybe even some lab-grown strain of superflu. I've actually taken two days off work, which I never do. I'm really sick.

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Kevin over on Now Smell This has an essay on a subject that is ever swimming around in the brain of every olfactorily inclined man: can I fearlessly wear "women's" scents?

I worry about this a lot less than most men, since easily half my collection is from the women's side of the aisle. I figure, if it smells good, I want to smell like it, and I don't much care what other people think. I worry a little, sometimes: I've made up little scripts including fake, masculine names for scents in case someone asks me what they're called. "Oh, it's Debonair by Truqué et Fils. Yeah, it's French. I bought it in Paris. No, you can't get it here. Very limited-edition." I have never had to use this.

Ormonde Jayne Ta'if is a jewel of a rose scent, and that alone is going to make most people respond to it as a women's scent only, but I could wear it. I do wear it, and not just around the house: I've worn it to work over the last couple of weeks because I usually do when I'm thinking about a scent, and nobody has noticed or said anything. This is because it smells quietly astonishing.

The opening is a bright, peppery eruption that cleverly makes a nod to its Middle Eastern provenance (Ta'if is a town in Saudi Arabia famed for its roses) with a few morsels of dates; it's not quite edible but it is delicious. There is supposedly saffron as well, and sometimes I have convinced myself that I can smell it, but I could be imagining that, just knowing it's supposed to be there.

The middle is of course the rose: it is decked all about with other florals, mostly orange-blossom and jasmine, but the rose is front and centre, like a diamond which has been cut and set to show it off to maximum brilliance. And yet for all this, it is understated, close to the skin, and there are facets to the rose: now thorny, now fruity, now soft, now bold. It changes in the light.

The third act is not as good: a rather uninteresting vanilla amber, that's all, nothing you haven't smelled before. It is an unfortunate ending to something so promisingly beautiful, but the first few hours of Ta'if are ridiculously beautiful. I don't know if I have a favourite rose, because I like so many of them, but this is near the top of the list, for sure, and worth what they're asking (a 50-mL EDP spray is currently £70, about $100, entirely reasonable).

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There is a tremendously interesting piece over on Slate about wine, and wine-tasters, and the eternal question of whether they're just making it up. And I sort of think they are, usually. After all, when wine is presented in black wineglasses, a significant number of people can't even tell if they're drinking red wine or white.

This proposes all sorts of interesting questions when it comes to perfumery, and anyone who's thought seriously about it has come up with these questions. To what extent is our appreciation of scent bound up with our knowledge of their provenance? Do we generally like expensive scents better than cheap ones? Can we reliably tell the difference between cheap and expensive scents?

I am certain that if you put some really insanely expensive scent like Clive Christian or JAR into a mass-market celebrity-fragrance bottle, then connoisseurs would think less of it, and conversely if you put something cheap but well-made into a costly-looking bottle and said the price was $225, people would think more highly of it than if it were dispensed it from the drugstore bottle.

This isn't universally true. I haven't liked several recent Serge Lutens scents, though I adore his line as a whole, because they seem to be attempts to go mainstream, and therefore they smell like things I've smelled all too many times before. At $60 they'd still be too expensive; at $120 or whatever they're currently going for, they're outright thievery. (I wouldn't wear L'Eau Serge Lutens if you paid me to, and that's the truth.)

As I wrote about the original Parfum d'Hermes, when I smell it I can tell it's made of quality ingredients. Even if you put it in a cheapjack bottle, I am pretty sure I would still love it: I might express surprise that something so cheap smells so good, but I wouldn't disdain it. But of course something so good couldn't be made so cheaply: quality ingredients cost more than mass-produced oils and low-end synthetics, and sometimes the difference is immediately apparent to the nose.

I don't think there's anything wrong with all this: it is normal to think of the packaging and even the advertising as being of a piece with the scent, and it's just as normal to treasure more highly something we've paid more money for. I think there are two lessons, though: we shouldn't be too willing to pay insane prices for scents just because they are expensive, and we shouldn't automatically disdain inexpensive scents just because they are inexpensive.

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My exceedingly long divagation on immortality last week brought a couple of comments in the form of questions, so we might as well have a look at those. They're two sides of the same coin, as far as I'm concerned.

First, maitreyi1978 wrote,

Seriously though, what makes you think there is time in heaven? Or that time is experienced the same way in heaven?

and then Marko wrote,

Does time only exist because of memories?

The answer to the first question is that most everyone else thinks there must be time in Heaven, and why should I be any different? The hymn that I quoted, after all, very specifically talks about durations of time, and this guy here seems pretty sure of it.

The second question is a bit thornier, but I am confident that the answer is that human beings do not exist without time: our personalities, in fact, are made almost entirely of it. There is a degree to which our personalities are shaped by our own bodies--the way in which we receive and process data--but beyond that, our personalities are formed by our memories, and these require time to give them structure and meaning. Time, said Woody Allen, is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once, and that's a joke but it's also completely serious; time is how we make sense of memories and therefore of our selves.

The answer to the third question, then, is the reverse: memories exist only because of time.

Marko also wrote,

Maybe God's "gift" to everyone who enters Heaven is a type of "lobotomy" that erases your ability to remember what you did the day before....it wouldn't matter what order you did things in (or if you did the exact same thing(s) every day) because everything would be experienced as if it were new and exciting.

That occurred to me, but I didn't get into this because I was writing a blog posting and not an entire book. If your personality is constructed out of your existence in time, then this sort of heavenly brain surgery will go a very long way towards obliterating that personality. Look at Oliver Sacks' stories of people who cannot lay down a short-term memory: some of the medical personnel and caregivers around them find themselves wondering if these poor victims of neurology even have personalities--if they are even really people.

Let's go right back to the start. Even if you don't have conscious memories of the things you did when you were young, these helped shape you. Maybe you burned your hand on a stove: you learned not to touch hot things. You learned how to read and tie your shoelaces and tell time. You learned the names of people and places and things. And all of these things are trapped in time like insects in amber: their sequence, their progression through time, is what makes subsequent experiences possible. You know who your Aunt Doris is because you've met her before. If you don't have a memory of having met her, then seeing her again is like meeting her for the first time. But if she remembers meeting you but you don't remember meeting her, then you have a disconnect, an embarrassing social situation, and if this happens repeatedly, then you have a scary neurological problem.

Everything in your life is built upon the previous experiences you have had, and this is what forms your personality. I saw a bunch of bad action movies: therefore, I don't like action movies. I had smoked eel once and it was pretty good, so I'll eat it again if it presents itself. These little things and thousands like them are what make you who you are.

You know perfectly well that your body is not who you are, not really: you can watch all those movies and science-fiction stories about personalities being uploaded into a computer or brains being transplanted into different bodies, and it makes perfect sense, because your body is sort of a machine for lugging around your personality. If someone could give you a perfect body (whatever that means) or if you lost a limb, you'd still be you. Your body changes over time, sometimes through your own machinations and sometimes simply through normal aging; you can gain or drop weight, get some wrinkles, lose the use of a digit through arthritis. But you're still yourself.

But if someone could magically alter your personality in some profound way, you know just as well that you wouldn't be yourself any longer. If someone could (surgically or supernaturally) make me, say, credulous and not cynical, or if they could make my every response to something be absolutely pleasant and even-tempered, never annoyed or angry or sarcastic or upset, then that might be nice for everyone around me, but I would no longer be me in any meaningful sense. We know this is true because brain injuries can change people's personalities in drastic ways: Phineas Gage had part of his brain ripped away in a railroad accident, and though he survived, he was a completely different person afterwards: his body and his name remained, but friends and family agreed that he was "no longer Gage".

And yet this is what brains and therefore personalities in Heaven must surely be like, with everything disagreeable ripped away. It is fair to say that if life in Heaven is perfect, then you either have no bad memories, or they don't matter to you. In the first case, an important part of your self has been erased, because you are the product of all your memories, good and bad alike: humiliation and pain have as much of effect on creating you as comfort and pleasure. In the second case, you've been lobotomized. In either case, you are only a facsimile of you, not yourself, not really who you are--certainly not the person who expects to enjoy eternal bliss in Heaven.

In Heaven itself, of course, if you can lay down memories, then we have all the problems I mentioned previously: storage space, tedium, and the sheer repetitive endlessness of eternity. Some will argue at this point that your new, heavenly brain won't have these problems, and I will again say that if that's the case, then you are not who you are now: your personality, your self, will have been transformed in such a way as to make you an entirely different person, in which case it's not meaningful to say that you're in Heaven: someone else is instead. If you have no bad memories, if you remember only every good thing that ever happened to you and will continue to do so, then in what sense are you yourself and not some mindlessly idealized Pollyanna version of you?

If you cannot lay down memories, then you have a new and much, much bigger problem, which is that like Sacks' patients you are stranded in a permanent now. Do you love to read books? Do you think of Heaven as a colossal library? Everything you read yesterday will be gone from your head today, so you can't follow plots or arguments, can't form conclusions, can't learn and grow and develop. Do you want to spend time with your loved ones? Everything you did, every perfect experience you had with them, will have vanished into the ether when you awaken. People you met yesterday, things you did, experiences you had: gone, all gone. It's worse than a lobotomy: it's Alzheimer's for all of eternity.

In fact, it's Hell.

It Got Me Thinking: Bond No. 9 Nouveau Bowery

2011-02-24T13:32:00.003-04:00

I was going to write about Bond No. 9's Nouveau Bowery weeks ago, but I wore it and wore it and got sidetracked into philosophical ruminations, and you know how these things go with me.

To get this out of the way, I don't like Nouveau Bowery very much. The very first breath of it is reminiscent of Eau Sauvage, with its citrus-herbal freshness, but alongside it is a strange and thoroughly synthetic accord, metallic and dairy and papery: it makes me think of a typewriter dipped mid-sentence in skimmed milk, which is not as interesting and CdG as that sounds. It is not especially pleasant. The rest of the scent is mostly a fougere with some flowers thrown in and then a nondescript woody base, not dramatically different from the sorts of things you would find on the men's side of the aisle in any department store for a whole lot less money (this stuff is $150 for a 50-mL bottle). I guess it's unisex, what with those muted, masked flowers, but it seems much more like a standard men's scent to my nose. (The company's own take: The sweet scent of skid row transitioning to ultra-modernity. For contrarians of all genders, an enticing anti-perfume, composed of near dissonant florals, citruses and herbs. Nope, not getting that, except for the literal "florals, citruses and herbs". But this would not be the first time that Bond's description of their scent doesn't seem to me to have any basis in reality.)

Here's the weird thing, though. I was wearing it for a few days to get a handle on it as ever and so I wore it to work, and a co-worker commented on how nice I smelled. That hardly ever happens. I usually wear scents that are very low-key, and in such small amounts that I figure nobody else can smell them, and unless I'm trying out something that I intend to write about, I only ever wear things I like. And people don't generally comment on them, so either they're polite or I'm accomplishing my aim of wearing fragrance for myself only.

So she liked it quite a lot. As an experiment, I wore Serge Lutens' Arabie the next day, and it is one of his usual oddball concoctions that I love so much, and either she didn't notice it or she didn't like it, because she didn't say a word.

What to make of this?

Perhaps you kind of like sushi and you eat it every now and then, and sometimes it's supermarket sushi and sometimes it's at a restaurant. You don't have much of a basis for comparison: you just kind of like sushi, and that's fine, of course. But if you like it quite a bit and eat it frequently in different places, and you've been to a number of different sushi restaurants in different cities, then you are inevitably going to develop a more refined taste. You will have more experience, more scope: you will have a much clearer idea of what's good, what's not so good, what's boring and what's innovative, what you've seen a hundred times before and what's new and interesting. It is not unreasonable to say that your opinion of a particular meal of sushi is more valid than that of someone who has less experience. Likewise, a movie critic who has seen and thought about hundreds, thousands, of movies, is going to have a better sense of cinema as an art form than someone like me, who may have seen nearly everything Hitchcock ever did but watches only a couple of dozen movies a year if that.

And this is true of every art form, of course, not least the art of perfumery. My co-worker who thought I smelled good didn't have the range of experiences with fragrance that I have: she's smelled some men wearing cologne, maybe bought some for some guy as a gift, and all of that certainly within the department-store and drugstore lines, because she doesn't have the inclination or the knowledge to seek out anything else. I, on the other hand, have smelled certainly over a thousand commercial scents over the last thirty years, and Nouveau Bowery is in some ways very much like other things I've smelled (not in a good way), but also rather oddball (also not in a good way). And as I get older and have smell more and more scents, and compare them to all the other scents I've ever smelled, which itself is a number always increasing, the likelihood of finding something good and interesting and valuable falls and falls and falls.

And this is what got me to thinking about immortality.

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Let's make a couple of assumptions. You're an average person, neither epically rich nor grindingly poor, living in a world just like ours except that for all of recorded human history, while many people live a normal lifespan, a fair number of people live a very long time, anywhere up to a thousand years and sometimes more, and at birth there's no telling how long. There's nothing magically special about you: you don't have a rare blood type that will cause you to be hunted down and your blood drained to be injected into some rich person's veins, and you don't have to hide your identity to keep people from discovering that you will live to be a thousand. You just happen to be one of those people, that's all. Lucky you!

The first problem with a hugely elongated lifespan, as the Greeks recognized, is that you're going to keep getting older and more decrepit. Look what happened to poor Tithonus, the mortal of whom Eos (the goddess of dawn) was so enamoured that she contrived to secure immortality for him while forgetting to also ask for eternal youth: he weakened and decayed and begged for death which would not come, until he was shut away forever. So if you are going to have immortality, you had better not senesce, either: some age between say twenty and thirty seems pretty good, although you may have other ideas about what constitutes the perfect age to remain at. It can't be the case that you simply age at one-tenth the usual rate, because then it would take almost two hundred years to grow to adulthood, and you would have a very, very long period of decrepitude at the end. Let's assume, then, that you grow to adulthood in twenty-odd years, age at the rate of one year to a hundred for the next nine hundred years or so, and then age more or less as normal people do.

You had better have some uncommonly awesome healing skills, because the idea of breaking your neck in a diving accident at fifteen and then living the next nine hundred-plus years as a C1 quadriplegic is not a pretty one: nor is even simply accumulating the normal wear-and-tear injuries that everyone is prone to. If you don't heal supernally well, then you are going to have to live your life oh so carefully, and where's the fun in that?

And then comes a huge problem, that of the proportions of time. When you're a child, a summer lasts ages and the time between the Thanksgiving and Christmas is nearly an infinity (not so bad for Americans, who celebrate Thanksgiving in November, as for Canadian children, who have Thanksgiving in October and no other real holidays until the end of December). When you're in your forties, as I can attest, time skitters by: Christmas was what seems like a few weeks ago, the end of February is already within view, and it will be spring and then summer before you know it. I can only imagine what it will be like at seventy or eighty.

The reason for this accelerated perception is that the moment of time in which you currently reside is always perceived as a ratio to the time you've been alive. (Smaller increments of time are not affected as much as larger ones: an hour generally seems like an hour to me no matter how old I am, though of course that might change when I hit fifty or sixty or seventy. But a year goes by more quickly as I age, and likewise a decade.) For an eight-year-old, a year is a twelfth of your entire life, and so it lasts a long, long time. At twenty, for some reason, time seems to run at the rate we'd expect it to: a year feels like a year. Once you're fifty, though, a year is a tiny two per cent of all the time you have ever known, and time simply seems to tick by much more quickly. When you're a thousand years old, a year rushes by at an unfathomable speed, and this is what it will look like: Say you're a twenty-year-old passenger in a motor home that's carefully observing the speed limit, riding along, watching the world go by outside the window, for one year. That year seems to go by, as we have established, in one year. If you are a thousand years old, that year-long trip whips past you, a huge smear of incomprehensible motion, in a perceived time of eight hours, forty-five minutes, and forty seconds. (If you could live to be ten thousand years old, a year rockets by in less than an hour--fifty-two minutes and thirty-four seconds, to be exact, assuming that there isn't something about a ten-thousand-year-old brain that makes time go by even more quickly: it almost certainly won't run by more slowly.)

So medical science will have to alter your brain, somehow, to manage this. Evolution certainly didn't equip people to be able to comprehend such spans of time, so some tinkering will be necessary. Quite a lot of tinkering, actually, because there's another problem, and that's storage. The human brain, majestic though it unquestionably is, did not evolve to hold everything we ever put into it: we forget things (a lot of things), and everything keeps changing, and changing faster and faster as time goes on. Language certainly changes: the English in which I'm writing didn't exist at all a thousand years ago, and chunks of it wouldn't be comprehensible to people living five hundred or even two hundred years ago. You will keep piling information into your brain, phone numbers and sports scores and actresses' jail sentences and recipes, more and more and more data, and you will hit a load limit at some point, and then you are in trouble, because you are going to have to start forgetting old things in order to remember new things, and if you don't get to decide what to forget, then your brain will.

There's also the problem of tedium. I don't mean boredom: a reasonably alert person can find enough things to do to make sure that isn't a problem, because there are millions of books to read, countless games to play and movies to watch and perfumes to smell, and while with every passing decade you may have to search longer and harder to find things that aren't rehashes of those you've already experienced, those things are out there. But tedium itself, the monotony of repetition, is going to accumulate as you get older, and nothing will mitigate that. You wake up and realize that you have to shave, again, for the thirty thousandth time, and will have to keep doing so for as long as you can imagine. And then there are those dishes to be done. And you have to go to work, and get the groceries, and clean the cat's litter box, and brush your teeth, as you've done countless times before and will have to keep doing countless times again. And it isn't just your own little life that's repetitious: culture, society, the entire world are going through the same things they've gone through since the beginning of civilization and will continue to go through: another disaster somewhere in the world, a new pop song that sounds like all the thousands of other songs you've already heard, yet another fruity-floral perfume like the hundreds of others you've already smelled in the last twenty years.

And another problem. In my experience, people's tastes tend to solidify in the first third or so of their lives. By the time you're in your early to mid-twenties, you know what you like, and you will probably discover new things as you get older, but your general taste is fairly secure, and everything that comes along after that is compared to the first third of your life's experiences and often found wanting: the music of your youth, as people have been saying for hundreds of years, was enjoyable, but what they listen to nowadays is just noise. People complain that music and food and popular culture aren't as good as they used to be, that human nature is baser than it used to be, and they've been saying these things for a couple of thousand years at least, and quite possibly since the invention of language. It isn't the case, of course, that the world is getting worse and worse: it's actually getting a lot better by many significant measures, at least in the Western world. But people's perceptions of their surroundings are ever compared to the way things were when they were young, and ever failing the test. So you live to be a thousand, but your tastes were more or less formed in the first twenty or thirty years of that, and the following centuries are an ever-increasing litany of how much worse everything's gotten.

And that's for a lifespan of a thousand years. What if you could never, ever die?

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I suspect that most Christians who believe in the idea of immortality in Heaven have never actually thought about it. In fact, I'm certain of it, because an eternity in Heaven is a horrifying prospect.

Hell is what's supposed to scare you into believing into Christianity: an eternity of torment, never-ending suffering. Here's a delectable paragraph from the classic 1741 sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God":

It is everlasting wrath. It would be dreadful to suffer this fierceness and wrath of Almighty God one moment; but you must suffer it to all eternity. There will be no end to this exquisite horrible misery. When you look forward, you shall see a long for ever, a boundless duration before you, which will swallow up your thoughts, and amaze your soul; and you will absolutely despair of ever having any deliverance, any end, any mitigation, any rest at all. You will know certainly that you must wear out long ages, millions of millions of ages, in wrestling and conflicting with this almighty merciless vengeance; and then when you have so done, when so many ages have actually been spent by you in this manner, you will know that all is but a point to what remains. So that your punishment will indeed be infinite.

And yet Heaven is no better in the long run (and that's what Heaven is, the long run). Some of the more rigorous strains of Christianity say that Heaven will consist of nothing but praising the name of God for all eternity, as testified to in the popular hymn "Amazing Grace":

When we've been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We've no less days to sing God's praise,
Than when we first begun.

It doesn't seem possible for people to actually believe that doing one single thing, lauding an egomaniacal deity, for all of eternity could be pleasurable, and most people seem to believe that there will be pleasures in heaven, not least among them reunion with departed loved ones. So let's assume that there are things to do in Heaven that are pleasurable, and that residents can partake of them while also praising the name of God, or that partaking in them is praising God, because he made all of it, and so we can be thankful in the same way that we're thankful to the cook at the same time as we're eating the meal they made. We still have a problem, and it is mathematical.

There is by definition a finite number of things to do in Heaven, but an infinite amount of time in which to do them. We know that there is a finite number of possible things because even if we assumed that human beings could theoretically do an infinite number of things, we can easily think of actions that will not be allowed: anything that could be defined as sin, for starters, such as promiscuous sex, or watching movies or reading books that depicted sinful acts. Since we're to be perfected in Heaven, of course, we won't want to do them, which raises the problem of free will, but there likely won't be much in the way of free will in heaven, so we might as well gloss over this. There won't be any pain of any sort in Heaven, no sickness, no misery, so that also eliminates a lot of possible activities: essentially, the entire creative process is impossible without failure and its attendant unhappiness. There will be no room for inventors, no new inventions, because the very idea of invention suggests that God didn't think of it first and supply it to the faithful in their eternal home: all the things that are ever going to be in Heaven are already waiting for you. Therefore, there is no progress, only the exploration of all there is and all there will ever be: consequently, there is a limit to the number of activities that are available to occupy our time. Time in the afterlife is infinite: actions are finite. And even if you consider all the possible orders in which you could perform these actions, or all the combinations in which you could do them--playing the violin while surfing just off the coast of a tropical island! while standing on your head!--there is still a finite number: you can't reach infinity by multiplying finite quantities.

Even if Heaven means (as the Jehovah's Witnesses images of Heaven always suggest) frolicking with lions and eating delicious food and enjoying time with resurrected loved ones and other such pleasurable pastimes, we are going to run through them eventually: we are going to do everything that can be done, and if we really plug away at them, we will have performed each of these activities a number of times approaching infinity, and time will still not have come to an end, because by definition it cannot. And what is worse, each of the activities is by definition as good as it can possibly be: there is not going to be any second-rate food in Heaven, no lacklustre lions that don't want to play with us, no arguments with our various uncles and siblings, so succeeding repetitions of each action will bring no more pleasure than the first.

Might this not get a little boring? If every single thing experience you have is as good as it can possibly be, will you not reach a saturation point sooner or later, and probably sooner? Move on to the next thing, you might say, but there are only so many things to do, and even if it takes you a million years to run through the entire list, time has only just begun, and you've done all the things on the list: so you do them again, maybe in a different order or a different combination--haven't bungee jumped in eight hundred thousand years, haven't had Thai food with Marie Curie on that particular cloud. But there is still an infinity of time ahead of you: once you've done all the things that can be done, each of them a perfect and perfectly enjoyable experience, in every possible order and every possible combination in which they can be done, time is still rolling on--in fact, it has only just begun--and it will not stop, ever. And then what?

If you have free will enough to wish for it, you'll wish you were dead, that's what. But death will not come for you.

Kiss of Death: Salvador Dali Rubylips and Eau de Rubylips

2011-02-02T15:39:00.005-04:00

I read a bunch of fragrance blogs--I suppose we all do--but there are three in particular that I go to every day, and it struck me just now that they're all very different, which is presumably why I read them all. Now Smell This is mostly all about the very newest releases, the place to go when you want to know what's next. Perfume Posse reads like a bunch of chatty friends: here's where we went, here's what we smelled, do you want some of it? And Perfume Shrine is marvellously deep, a place where you would not be surprised to find a ten-part dissertation on vetiver.

Me, I'll write about anything that happens to land on my skin: smell it, think about it, find a hook, get writing. If I have a fifty-year-old vintage scent, I'll write about that. If I've been obsessing about something I've had in my collection for ten years, I'll spend a few paragraphs on that. If some salesperson hands me a sample of a fragrance that was launched last week…okay, that never happens, but if I manage to wheedle or filch a sample of a fragrance that was launched last week, I'll do that.

I have a shoebox labelled NOT YET REVIEWED that is very full, mostly of samples: I have a lot of other things I haven't written about, too, in various other boxes scattered around the house, but then organization is not one of my strong points. Today on a whim I dug a tiny bottle of something called Rubylips out of that NOT YET REVIEWED box. It's by Salvador Dali, a line whose first scent was monumentally important to me and which has produced some other delights over the years, particularly Dalissime and Eau de Dali.

Rubylips, I figured, would be all about the colour red: since it was so modern, it would be a fruity floral, but a good one, with red fruit in the top (raspberry, maybe? currants, red plums?) and plenty of ripe red roses in the middle.

It's a fruity floral, all right, but it is disgracefully, staggeringly bad, a blot on the name of perfumery as an art. The top is a huge spindly mass of synthetic apple and citrus that jams its way into your head, ballooning into a cloud of unidentifiable, amorphous flowers of equal syntheticity, all of it bathed in a sickening sweetness. There's probably a base underneath all that, presumably the usual vague clod of ambery wood that underlies too many mainstream scents these days--it must all come out of the same vat--but I wouldn't know, because half an hour was all I could take before furiously scrubbing it off. Rubylips is nausea, bottled.

Ever a sucker for punishment, I tried Eau de Rubylips shortly afterwards. To my complete shock, it isn't terrible! It isn't good, either, god knows, but at least it's not a complete atrocity like its forebear. It's a rather unisex blend of grapefruity citrus and the ozonic notes that everything labelled "Eau" (or "Aqua") has to have these days, some sweet but unobjectionable and not especially feminine flowers in the middle (it really is very unisex), and a lightweight, pleasantly sweetish musky-woody base. There's nothing at all special about it, nothing you haven't smelled dozens of times before, but at least it doesn't make you want to cauterize your nasal cavities.

The Rubylips bottle is, as is usual with the Dali packaging, lovely: a tall, elegant rectangular prism of clear glass with a column of lips embossed into the back, which is lacquered in transparent red. Don't let it fool you into buying it! The Eau de Rubylips bottle is the same, but in frosted glass, and not quite as nice: they couldn't sneak some red in there somehow?

The name, by the way, comes from this piece of jewellery Dali designed

which is ghastly but undeniably Daliesque.

I Am Lost: Hermes Amazone (Vintage)

2011-01-31T19:41:00.006-04:00

Last year I was conversing online with a private seller of vintage scents: I had already bought a couple of bottles from her, and after going through her catalogue I was negotiating for a couple of other things. She didn't know much about scent--she was in it for the bottles, which I sort of get though not really*--but once she figured out my terms and my areas of interest (I'll pay a hundred and fifty bucks but not three hundred, I like seventies and eighties scents) she started making suggestions of things that she'd only just found in her apparently massive stash, discoveries that hadn't made it into her online catalogue yet. One of the things she proposed for me was a quarter-ounce of Amazone parfum*.

I didn't know the scent at all, except that it was an Hermes that was fairly old (1973, it turns out) and still in production, though surely reformulated. After doing a little research and learning that it had originally been a chypre, I figured a vintage bottle was worth risking the $50 she was asking. I wore it a few times, but I admit to not really getting it at first, wondering if I had wasted my money: it's got quite a lot of fruit in the top, it's more floral in the middle than I usually like, and the chypre base takes a long time coming. But it's been sitting on my desk for a couple of weeks now and I've been wearing it obsessively whenever I can; it's all I want to wear when I'm alone, and when I'm home but can't wear it, I open the box to take a sniff of the densely perfumed air inside. Amazone, as it was originally conceived, is an intoxicant.

In cinematic terms, "pulling focus" means shifting the focal point of a camera's lens to follow a moving subject or to shift emphasis from one element within the frame to another in a different plane. If you have three objects within your field of view, one five feet away, one twenty feet, and one fifty, you can focus on only one of them at a time: you can see the others, but they're fuzzy. Classically constructed fragrances--forgive me if you know this already, but maybe you just stumbled across this and don't really know anything about scent--have three acts: the top, which is the first impression composed of bright fresh elements that disappear quickly; the heart, which is what most people think of as the scent itself, lasting a few hours; and the base, which is long-lasting and deep. Amazone is a bit of a surprise: it has three acts, but you experience them all simultaneously, with only the proportion--the focus--changing. (You could argue that all scents are like this--that since all the parts of it are present from the beginning, you must be able to perceive them, can tell an oriental is an oriental right from the start, even if its characteristic base notes are muted. But that isn't necessarily true, not at all: clever perfumers know how to manipulate the elements of a scent so that parts of it are masked until later in the fragrance's development. I've been wearing Rocabar for years, but I still can't detect any vanilla in it until it's been on my skin for hours, even knowing it's there.)

To put it plainly: when you smell vintage Amazone at first, you smell the entire scent all at once, and throughout its life on your skin, but the focus gradually changes. The first act of Amazone is a dazzling fusion of bergamot and blackcurrant, a breakfast-jam note with sunshine pouring in through the window, bright and cheerful: who knew Amazons were so much fun? Just beyond it in softer focus is a floral heart dominated by rose and suffused with geraniums and green vetiver, and much farther in the distance is the oakmoss base that marks it as a chypre, with a certain chocolate darkness and that intimation of filth that makes true chypres so earthy and sexualized. You can smell all of these things, but only the top is sharply focused. Within a half hour or so the top has faded so the green roses can take centre stage, and here the magic of the scent begins to become evident: the top and the base are still well within view, the blackcurrant top hazy but still evident, the oakmoss looming blurrily in the background. As the clock ticks on, with the blackcurrant still present but only as a light, fizzy halo, the flowers and their attendant greens become dimmer and hazier, and the full majesty of the chypre base reveals itself to you.

Whoever you are, wherever you are reading this, I wish I could put a drop of Amazone on your skin and tell you that this is one of the things chypres used to be, what they still could be--that this is what has been lost due to changing tastes and short-sighted bureaucrats. Dinky little "modern chypres"*** with their wax fruit and their cleaned-up patchouli can't hold a candle to true chypres, great chypres.

One of the joys of a parfum as opposed to any other concentration is the charm of the miniature. The quarter-ounce of Amazone is a little thing, just two inches high by one inch wide: you could hide it in your fist with no problem. It is enchanting, a tiny little work of art. I couldn't find a properly clear online picture, but this one

and this one (with a nice shot of the parfum bottle's box)

will have to do. (The liquid inside my bottle is a much darker gold: it's certainly aged at least a little, with a hint of that acetone top that signals the start of its eventual demise. I hope to have used it up before that becomes an issue.) The bottle is an oval of clear glass, deeply carved with geometrically precise but rough-feeling frosted bands which segment it into panes: the top edge and the hemispherical stopper are also frosted. This banding gives it the arresting sensation of being simultaneously natural--it seems like bamboo or some other wood--and constructed, and from the front, back, or sides, the bands form the letter H, for Hermes. The print on the bottle, in a primitive script, is a dark red-ochre: so is the box, with accents of olive green, the whole having a sense of mystery (as all the best chypres do) and sensual abandon.

Nowadays the modern reconstruction of Amazone--likely having little if anything to do with the original, having been stripped of the oakmoss but dolled up with bucketloads of fruit and other synthetic fripperies, in the modern style--is in the house bottle which I guess some would call iconic but I think is boring. I have no idea what it smells like: I don't even remember having been in proximity to it in modern times, but at any rate I've never been moved to try it. I don't need to: whatever it is, it couldn't be as good as its magical forerunner.

*Because a lot of people use the word "perfume" indiscriminately to refer to a scent, whatever its concentration, I use "parfum" or "extrait" when referring to the actual perfume (as opposed to "eau de toilette" or "eau de parfum" or whatever) so that there will be no confusion. For no good reason, I hate the term "pure perfume".

**For me, obviously, the contents have always been paramount, though I admit to having bought some scents because I loved the packaging, and conversely to not having bought some--and on occasion to having declined to even smell them--because I hated the bottles.

*** I don't hate**** all of them! I am quite fond of some of the newer patchouli-heavy scents that people like to call chypres, such as Dior's Midnight Poison. I just don't pretend that they're anything like their ancestors.

**** I only just noticed, on re-reading before hitting the "Publish" button, that I used the word "hate" in all three of the preceding footnotes, and therefore in this one, too. It wasn't planned. Apparently I am just full of hatred.

Familiarity: Keiko Mecheri Cuir Cordoba

2011-01-24T20:03:00.003-04:00

When I wrote about Keiko Mecheri's Datura Blanche, launched in 2009, I also mentioned Serge Lutens' 2001 Datura Noir, and with good reason: they're exceedingly similar, except the Mecheri is far stronger and sweeter then the Lutens.

When I smelled Mecheri's Cuir Cordoba (also 2009), my immediate response to it was that it was a copy of Lutens' 2004 Daim Blond, except much louder, much leatherier, much irisier, and much sweeter--noxiously so in each respect.

I am not saying that Mecheri is deliberately aping Lutens' work but increasing the wattage for shock effect, for people--who are they?--who don't think Lutens' scents are potent enough. It could certainly be a coincidence. And that it all I have to say about that. If you like huge quantities of iris, then perhaps this is your cup of tea. On me it's horrifying.

Modern Times: Estee Lauder Private Collection

2011-01-20T12:27:00.004-04:00

Without having smelled the thing before last month, I'm going out on a limb here, but: there is no way Private Collection smelled like this when it was launched in 1973. It's practically a textbook case of reformulation to fit current tastes. It is thoroughly modern: the galbanum-y green but otherwise synthetic top notes testify to that.

In fact, I'll go further. My first impression of Private Collection--a little bottle of the EDP which is no more than two years old--is that it is, if not quite masculine, then mannish. It smells, in fact, as if someone had dumped the elements of a few women's scents and a few men's scents on a table and then challenged someone to build a scent from them blindfolded: there's a glug of Lauder's own White Linen in the brilliant top, a few pine needles from Rocabar or Pino Silvestre, a sheaf of not-excessively-pretty flowers, some of the dark woodiness of Ormonde Jayne Woman (or Man, because they're so similar), the standard warm amber-wood-balsam base that absolutely everything has these days. It's not a terrible thing, and I can see why some people would like it, but it has no idea what it is, and neither do I.

Staying Power: Alfred Sung Encore

2011-01-17T10:08:00.006-04:00

After two blockbusters, the Alfred Sung marketing people could probably have been forgiven for assuming that the next scent was a sure-fire hit, but Encore didn't stick around very long, and I don't know why.

Okay, I have a couple of theories. It's not immediately beautiful (although I have to say that the big white-floral original wasn't, either): the top is sharpish and a little violent. In fact, it's sort of odd: when I bought mine not long after its launch, it came with some bath products (probably shower gel and body lotion) in a little drawstring bag, and the bag smelled like Coca-Cola syrup. If you've ever worked with this stuff, you know just what it smells like, and the drydown of Encore does in fact have a distinctly cola-syrup smell to it. Cola smells mostly of sweetened cinnamon, vanilla, and citrus oils, with some other spices thrown in, and although there are many orientals out there with those elements, somehow in this scent they combined, or were combined, to give a definite soda-fountain effect.

After the big, brittle citrus-aldehyde top, Encore turns into an extravagant floral oriental with lots of tuberose allied to that cola accord. It is very large, very richh, and very imposing, and I think that might have been the second part of its problem: it was a throwback to the eighties in a time when lighter, less aggressive scents were starting to take over. You could never accuse Encore of being modest.

And it lasts pretty much forever, too. Here's how durable it is: last week around let's say 6:30 a.m. I put some on the back of my hand (as ever) so I could think about it. An hour later, I did the dishes, showered, put on some A*Men Pure Coffee, which is pretty potent stuff, and headed out the door to go to work. A few hours later, I was sure I could smell Encore, and I could. I arrive home from work at around 6:30, grabbed some supper, and sat down at the computer, and twelve hours after I had originally put on the Encore, I could still smell it. It survived not one but two complete washings, plus however many hand-washings I might have performed at work, and a twelve-hour day.

Now that's an oriental.

I always thought the Encore bottle was kind of genius. Here's the best picture I could find for the original perfume:

And here's the Encore perfume bottle*:

It's the same bottle, but warped, melted, reconfigured and reconsidered. Brilliant. It reminds me of one of those D'Arcy Thompson** transformations:

At any rate, Encore wasn't a big success, and so the next few Sung scents were not absolutely unlike the best-selling floral original: 1992's Sung Spa, 1995's Forever, and 1997's Pure were all white or white-ish florals, and Sung never did make another full-blown oriental. Still, they must have sold Encore for a few years, and they must have produced a hell of a lot of it, because you can still find it if you hunt for it. (I bought a bottle of Encore maybe five years ago, and I'm certain it hadn't been reformulated; it might be the case that it wasn't around long enough for that to be an issue.) PerfumeLA has it, and although it's rarely a good idea to buy something unsniffed, sometimes you get a pleasant surprise. If you want a proper old-style floral oriental that doesn't smell like anything you already own, this could be just such a surprise.

*Actually, I think that's the EDP pour bottle: the perfume bottle had a translucent frosted cap. I think.

**And the name D'Arcy Thompson makes me think of this genius Kate Beaton cartoon:

Seriously, you should read her all the time, because she's brilliant and hilarious.

Lumberjack 2: Space.NK.Man

2011-01-08T06:31:00.005-04:00

Space.NK is a British chain of cosmetic-and-fragrance shops, and despite having been to the UK three times in the last three years, I've never been into one. Not for lack of trying, I suppose, but imagine what a trial it must be to travel with me if (as Jim is) you're averse to pretty much everything scented: me trying to find a reason to duck into every perfumery and department-store fragrance section I happen to notice, he trying to do exactly the opposite. (He doesn't begrudge me the visits: it's just that he usually ends up killing time browsing for things he doesn't need, or worse, standing on the street outside the shop--there aren't a lot of malls in the UK, so it isn't as if he can just go to another nearby store in the same building.) If you asked him, he'd probably tell you that I didn't lack for scent shopping in the UK, but I could name dozens of places I didn't go to: we were on Carnaby Street and I could see Liberty but had to give it a pass, for god's sake!

Anyway, I've never been to a Space.NK store, but as it happens I do have a sample of their first men's scent, which is named, logically enough, Space.NK.Man. And the first time I put it on, I thought, "Oh, huh. Rocabar."

At first sniff, it does resemble Rocabar (which was launched in 1998, three years earlier): they are both woody, spicy outdoor scents with tons of conifer needles, both appealingly masculine. But the more you wear Space.NK.Man, the more you realize that the two scents are essentially the same idea treated in very, very different ways. Rocabar puts all its dry, coniferous notes up front, really wallops you with them, and only later treats you to an unexpected bath of vanilla, while Space.NK.Man starts off similarly dry and austere but then introduces its warm, creamy notes much earlier--they're not a surprise finish, but a part of the tapestry of the scent.

I already have a a bottle of Rocabar that will last me pretty much forever, but perhaps Jim is right to try to keep me out of a Space.NK, because if I found myself in one, I'm not entirely sure I could stop myself from buying Space.NK.Man. It's that gorgeous.

Showered With Happiness

2011-01-02T18:17:00.004-04:00

On December 31st or January 1st I was going to do a wrap-up of the year and write a little more about my neurological oddity, clear up a few things, add stuff I had forgotten, but it turns out that writing more about it is just as hard as writing about it was in the first place, so that's going to have to wait, although I did want to thank everyone who commented, because you were all really nice. And to think I was so worried about exposing myself so completely!

As I mentioned in late October, I got some Yves Rocher shower gel and hand soap in their limited-edition holiday Orange and Chocolate scent, and it is lovely stuff, which it would appear you can still buy, although I am going to warn you that the texture of these liquid soaps (which are identical in every way except the bottle) is not that great, being far too runny--more corn oil than corn syrup. But the smell is enchanting, and it's well worth the money.

But at least you can get that. Unless you live in the British Isles, you presumably can't get any of the next things I wanted to talk about, which in retrospect seems a bit mean, but at least if you're travelling there you can look for them.

When Jim and I were in the UK this past spring, I bought little bottles of shower gel from a company called Original Source; I got some Lemon and Tea Tree (smells like lemon meringue pie) and Mint (tingly, jazzy, and wide-awakey), and knew I had to get some more before I left. When I went to look for it in London before heading home, I couldn't find the Lemon, so I bought Lime instead. Some of Original Source's products are artificially scented, as we will see, but these three aren't, and so the Lime smells strikingly fresh and realistic. Jim tried some a couple of months after we got home and was instantly addicted: he doesn't like most artificial scents, but this smelled like the real thing. We tried to get some lime oil to put into an unscented shower gel, but there were two problems: 1) we couldn't find lime oil locally (though we could have ordered it for a fair bit of money), and 2) we couldn't find truly unscented shower gel (since even "unscented" or "fragrance-free" on a package doesn't generally mean that, and if it did, you probably wouldn't buy the product).

So we doled out tiny quantities of the shower gel to make it last--I still had the Mint and Lemon ones to fall back on, in addition to, as you can well imagine, others--and then in October when we decided to go back to London for a week, we knew that we would have to stock up. And did we ever. We ended up buying the equivalent of thirteen bottles of the Lime: five of the 250-mL bottle in ones and twos (so that we wouldn't look like complete freaks), and then four more of the

500-mL refill pouches when we discovered those at the local Sainsbury's. I wanted to get more, but Jim put his foot down, figuring our luggage was already heavy enough, and he was right. (We had left for the UK with our luggage half-empty, and when we got on the train to return home from Halifax, I discovered that my checked bag weighed 50.65 pounds. In addition to all that shower gel, we had bought a lot of books.)

On top of all that Lime shower gel, I bought a full-sized bottle of the Lemon

and also a pouch of Chocolate and Mint, which of course has some artificial scent in it but which is nevertheless charming, and also one last irresistible thing,

Winter, which supposedly consists of black pepper and cardamom but which also has other fragrance notes in it ("parfum" on the label), and I should say so, because it smells gorgeously like a very strong, spicy late-seventies or early-eighties men's cologne. (The word "WINTER" on the label appears to be set in lights like a marquee, but those are actually snowflakes, in case you were wondering.) I was going to use it on December 21st, but I kept forgetting until last night just before going to bed when I took it out of the storage closet so that I could shower with it this morning. The texture of all the Original Source gels is perfect--smooth and thick, just liquid enough so that it disperses instantly in water in your hand or on your skin.

As I seem to feel the need to state every now and then, the Original Source people--who as it turns out are not affiliated with Boots, as I mistakenly surmised back in May--are not paying me to say any of this, although frankly if they want to send me a bunch of product I'll happily receive it, because there are still a lot of their shower gels I haven't tried yet and won't be able to until I get back to the UK, which could take a couple of years, and while I'm at it I have to say that they really, really need to figure out a way to sell their stuff in North America, because it would go over gangbusters here. If you live in the UK, lucky you!

The End of an Era: 1989

2010-12-29T23:28:00.003-04:00

I'm not altogether sure if The New Yorker's online articles stay readable forever, or if they go off into some kind of gated enclosure to which you have to buy a key for the price of a subscription, but in the newest issue there is an article which you will want to read, about desserts in modern cooking. Specifically you will be interested in this paragraph on page 6:

After an apprenticeship at elBulli, he realized that his preoccupation was with scent. “That was something that hadn’t really been realized enough in desserts, I thought: the power of aromas. We had this new machine that could extract essential oils, and I began to play with it. I began making perfumed desserts.” He laughed. “I went to Sephora and found the most wonderful aromas in all the women’s perfumes. And I started making desserts built around their smells. Calvin Klein-like aromas. I wanted to make something as wonderful to taste as Chanel perfume was to smell. For me, that’s where all that new chemistry and equipment help. We have the machine to extract essential oils. Another just for smokes. Working with smokes and smells, this has a—fragile aspect? Sense memory extends to the heart of who we are. I think that there’s a freedom there, for a certain delicacy.” He shrugged. “You’ll see,” he said.

I am of two minds about the high-tech cooking exemplified by Heston Blumenthal and Ferran Adria. One part of me thinks that of course it is natural for artists to try new things, play with new technologies, experiment, give us new experiences: the other thinks that our palates, or at least the palates of people who can afford to pay for these meals, have become terribly jaded if we need (as described just after that quote above) something like a dessert that launches a tiny soccer ball into the air, a dessert that requires the use of a MP3 player.

Well, let the insanely rich have their toys. Perfumers have always used the latest technology, too, and there was no shortage of such technological abundance in the seventies and eighties, when fascinating new synthetics were cropping up on a regular basis. (Synthetic odorants were nothing new: Houbigant was apparently the first to use one, coumarin, in 1882, and Guerlain's Jicky used an overdose of them in 1889. But the 1970s saw the introduction of Headspace technology, which allowed perfume companies to gather and synthesize just about any aroma the world had to offer, which led to an explosion in the use of synthetics. The fragrant eighties wouldn't have been what they were without such aromachemicals.)

Red by Giorgio Beverly Hills seems to mark a sort of end point of eighties perfumery, an idea taken as far as it can go before snapping back or disintegrating. It had hundreds of ingredients, everything the perfumers could jam into it and still have it make some sort of aesthetic sense, with elements of essentially every branch of women's perfumery in one big cascading sequence: a fruity top (using all the newest synthetic fruit notes), a floral middle, a base that couldn't decide if it was an oriental or a chypre so it was both at once, the whole composition fresh but warm, bright but deep, light and dark in turns; too much, but gorgeously, radiantly too much.

I don't have any vintage Red, and although it's still in production, it's no longer what it used to be. And in fact looking through Basenotes' list of releases for 1989, I see that I don't own one single scent that I used to wear that year, not one. I usually avoid writing about things I don't have to hand: even though my scent memory is good, I want to make sure that I have all the details right, because memory has a way of tricking us. But I can't smell any of these things, so all I have is impressions. (I don't know if it has been clear up to this point, but with rare exceptions I only put pictures of bottles of things I'm smelling at the time of writing, and since I don't have any of these scents, there will be no pictures today.)

So here's what else I was wearing--in addition to all the other, older things I owned--in 1989:

Byblos, a weird, edgy floral with an acidic tinge, an irresistible raspberry note, and a thick musky base.

Claiborne for Men, which I remember not liking all that much, but I had samples, so I wore it from time to time: in the Salvador Dali Homme mode.

Montana Parfum d'Homme: too much patchouli, and ditto for the Dali mode and also the not-liking-it-much and the samples.

Eternity for Men: boring wet fougere that inspired a thousand imitators. Why did I wear it? Life is too short to wear boring things.

Tiffany for Men: very strong, very sweet floral chypre.

Joop! Homme: very strong, very sweet floral-wood scent.

Feeling Man by Jil Sander: very strong, very sweet fruity-tobacco scent.

Elizabeth Taylor Passion for Men: very strong, very sweet floral oriental. I think I see a pattern here.

Tsar by Van Cleef & Arpels: lightweight herbal-tarragon thing with a carnationy middle and a chypre-ish bottom.

After a decade of increasingly loud and voluminous scents, the nineties couldn't come fast enough. If you take a look at Basenotes' list of 1990 and 1991 releases, you will see a pretty definite trend towards quieter, more reserved fragrances: green-bamboo Kenzo Pour Homme, Dior's oddball beachy oriental Dune, Herrera for Men, Calvin Klein Escape (even gauzier than Eternity), Boucheron Pour Homme, Salvador Dali Laguna, the pale-green Gres Cabotine, the soft orientals Ralph Lauren Safari and Tresor by Lancome. There are still some powerhouses, of course, things that had been in the planning stages for a while, things that would appeal to people for whom "discreet" was a foreign word, and a few that split the difference: big floral-oriental Guess, E*N*C*O*R*E by Alfred Sung (sadly a failure, possibly because of the name), Givenchy's Amarige, Lauder's Spellbound, Chanel's Egoiste, Casmir by Chopard, Montana Parfum d'Elle. But the writing was on the wall: the nineties weren't going to be the eighties. And they weren't, either.

Changing Places: 1988

2010-12-26T21:52:00.006-04:00

I have been relying mostly on the Basenotes database to determine when scents were launched, and I've been trusting them more than my own memory, but I am not sure I believe the listings for 1988, because they have twenty-seven Maitre Parfumeur et Gantier scents, nearly the entire line, having been released in that year, and that hardly seems possible. The line was created in 1988, but did Jean Laporte really fling nearly thirty scents into the marketplace all at once?

Maybe he did. Nowadays multi-fragrance launches are commonplace, almost the rule rather than the exception. It would be hard enough to keep up with the deluge if all the big houses did two or three launches a year in addition to the usual barrage of celebrity scents and drugstore cheapies, but most everyone seems to be hewing to the throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks aesthetic these days. Just this past year: 5 Guerlains, 4 Ralph Laurens (as a set), 7 from Bond No. 9, 3 from Serge Lutens, at least 7 Givenchys that I know of, 6 from Donna Karan (three as a set)....

There were not quite so many releases each year in the 1980s; nothing I couldn't have kept up with if I'd put my mind to it. But I had something else to worry about, and that was another nose in the house. Jim and I moved in together within a month of meeting, which of course is a terrible idea, usually, but it made perfect sense for us; although I was, believe it or not, paying only $125 a month in rent, Jim considered it--and still calls it to this day--a rathole (a third-floor walkup with a makeshift shower, a barely functioning toilet, and no lock on the front door, which I shared with a couple who were on the verge of disintegrating), and he couldn't get me out quickly enough.

Jim, unfortunately, had then and has to this day a distaste for commercial scents. For anything scented. He'd gladly forfeit his sense of smell if it meant he wouldn't have to put up with another overperfumed co-worker in the elevator, another barrage of fragrance when walking into a department store. When I moved in with him, I brought with me not only my collection, but my desire to keep collecting. It took me a while to understand that scents were anathema to him, of course, because I am very slow on the uptake when it comes to other people's inner lives, but I soon figured out some workarounds: only go to the fragrance counter when I'm alone, don't wear things he hates (e.g. most of them) when he's around, carry sample vials so I can apply them before getting to work. We both make our compromises and we get along somehow, and that is how marriage works.

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At this point it's hard not to feel like I'm beating a dead horse, but here it comes again: mass-market scents in the eighties, or at least the ones that I wore, were better than anything you can find today: fuller, richer, more complex, more interesting, more challenging. Knowing is the perfect case in point.

We need to keep in mind that I am comparing two different types of the scent: the vintage that I have is the parfum, and the newer version, at most two years old though probably less, is the eau de parfum. Still, the differences are striking and unmistakeable, much more than could be accounted for by the difference in concentration. Because my bottle of Knowing parfum is probably fifteen years old, the top notes have started to go a little wayward, but the body of the scent is as it always was: a voluptuous chypre, gilded, lushly sybaritic. Nowadays a fruity-floral scent is something cheap and commonplace: there are literally hundreds of them on the market, and they're all pretty similar. But Knowing is a chypre with a fruity-floral heart, and it is mesmerizing: a golden cloud of rose and mimosa, a plummy richness tempered with the dried-fruit scent of davana, all piled atop a thick, warm base of patchouli and amber and an overdose of oakmoss. (With all those flowers, you'd think it would be a fairly girly affair, but in truth it isn't. Paulina Porizkova up there is in a tuxedo for a reason: the scent is called Knowing for a reason. It is all about sophistication and worldliness, and it smells darkly amazing on a man.)

Though I had discovered other chypres (Diva, Parfum Rare, even the Body Shop oil called Chypre), to the best of my recollection Knowing was the first scent that I put the name "chypre" to as a commercial scent, probably because it got a lot of ink; never let it be said that Estee Lauder slacks off when it comes to promoting their products. Because there was so much written about it at the time, and because it roped me in so handily, Knowing, to the best of my knowledge, was the first scent that got me really, seriously thinking about scent.

It's still in production, but of course it has been reformulated, and the re-do is very much a modern affair: brittle top notes, an immediate deluge of patchouli (the calling card of the "modern chypre"), an indifferent bouquet of flowers, no subtlety, no charm, no elegance. There is oakmoss, not remotely as much as there ought to be, but at least it's in there. If you smelled the two side by side (as I have), you would never think that they were versions of the same scent. If someone told you that they were, you would be shocked and disappointed that they had taken something so utterly redolent of genius and reconstructed it into that. It's as if they'd taken the Mona Lisa and run it through Photoshop software that reworked it in the style of Jeff Koons--and worse, destroyed the original and convinced everyone that that's what it had always been like (we have always been at war with Eastasia).

If you should ever chance upon some vintage Knowing, buy it. You must have it. (If you hate it, I'll buy it from you.) I've smelled a lot of chypres in my time--not enough vintage, for sure, but at least I was operating in a time when they were still being produced--and Knowing is one of the greats. If you have a negative opinion of Lauder scents, if you think they're too big, too bandwagony, too American, be prepared to reconsider. I don't think too much of Lauder's output in the recent years--the last really excellent thing they produced was Spellbound, back in 1991. though there have been some decent ones since then--but there were some classics through the years, as good as anything from France or Italy, and Knowing is one of them.

Now. What else came out in 1988 that enthralled me at the time? On the men's side of the aisle, not much. Of course, everyone was wearing Sung Homme, which was a guaranteed success after the sheer ubiquity of the first Alfred Sung scent a year earlier: I didn't pay much attention to it at the time, because women's scents were often much more interesting and because I was already developing a taste for the slightly out-of-mainstream scent: I didn't want to smell like everyone else. (I eventually did start wearing it, though, and still rather like it.) I also avoided the unavoidable Cool Water, Fendi Uomo and Jazz by Yves Saint Laurent; in fact, they made so little impression on me that I couldn't even tell you what they smelled like.

I did, however, wear the offbeat Fahrenheit, like most every other man at the time. The scent itself was not exactly me, although I owned it and wore it from time to time, but the shower gel--well, that was perfect, a cloud of that strange, angular floral-aromatic scent that dissipated to leave a trace of woody patchouli on the skin.

I also enjoyed Benetton Colors Uomo more than I probably should have, partly because I had been so fond of the women's version the year before and also because I liked the pentagonal-prism bottle. The scent itself wasn't really anything special, but its bright, masculine simplicity was an occasional pleasure.

I liked the odd, pepperminty New West Skinscent for Him, but something about it put me off, and I think that something might actually have been the name: they were so afraid of scaring off a customer by calling their product "cologne" or "eau de toilette" that they made up the name "skinscent", which is the same thing only pretentious.

I don't know what it smells like these days, but the very first Kenzo scent, in that bizarre flower-growing-from-a-stack-of-pebbles bottle, amazed and thrilled me in 1988. It was more or less a straight-up floral, but it was wildly complex, and what's more, it had a way of changing perpetually throughout its life: rather than having three acts as most classically constructed scents do, it was as amorphous and undulating as a Lava Lite. A flicker of coconut, a blaze of carnation, a fragment of wood; it seemed to contain everything possible, and it was ungodly beautiful.

Boucheron, the first scent from the jewellery house, was colossal. Huge. Almost unimaginably elephantine. Big fat orange-blossom top, big fat tuberose middle, big fat oriental base. There was so much of it. You'd think that the powerhouse eighties weren't almost over, that the era of huge perfumes wasn't about to come to an end.

Eternity put the first nail in that coffin, though. Fragrances didn't suddenly become quiet demure little things, of course: cultural shifts like that take a while to percolate through society (Obsession kept selling, and still sells), and scents that had been in the pipeline for a while were still going to be released. But after years of massive, sinus-clogging perfumes, there was a change in the air, and Eternity was at the vanguard: a gauzy, innocent white floral with a freesia core. It's hard to say whether Calvin Klein and his marketing people sensed a change coming, or bullied everyone into changing with their relentless onslaught of advertising: some of both, probably. But either way, things were not going to be the same.