Naturally, you are supposed to think of sex when you hear the name of Etat Libre d'Orange's 2011 launch "Archives 69". And then you are supposed to feel abashed when you learn that you, filthy beast, jumped to conclusions, because it's actually (supposedly) a reference to their address in Paris, 69 Rue des Archives. But in a classic case of having their cake and simultaneously eating it too, the logo for the scent is in fact three people engaged in mutual oral sex*.
Are people that easily shocked these days? Are we really meant to find any of this scandalous? Or am I just jaded?
Never mind. Archives 69 isn't about oral sex, or archives, or a building in Paris, or even the year 1969. What it's really all about, for some reason, is good clean fun.
The top is a bright, fizzy soda-pop burst of citrusy aldehyde with a leaf-green overtone that suggests candy spearmint leaves. (No aldehydes in the official list of notes, which run "Mandarin, pink pepper, pimiento leaf, orchid, prune, incense, camphor, benzoin, patchouli, musk": but since the intro feels like a softer version of Clinique Wrappings they're in there, all right.) The middle is a sweetened, slightly fruit-flavoured version of the relentlessly dry orchid from YSL Nu, but not enough to bring Archives 69 into the dreaded fruity-floral category; despite the candy-coated top, this has nothing of the teenaged girl about it. The base is pleasantly musky and close to the skin.
Archives 69 doesn't read as sexy: it's much too cheerful for that. It's all about having a good time, though, and I guess the kind of fun you're having (and how many people you're having it with) is up to you.
Bad Attitude: Afternoon of a Faun by Etat Libre d'Orange
I have an unfortunate suspicion that if Afternoon of a Faun been launched (under another name, with other packaging) by a department-store brand, although it isn't nearly mainstream enough for that, it would have been ignored, or written off as merely weird: but because it was launched by niche brand Etat Libre d'Orange, it is going to be given more consideration, and perhaps held in higher regard, than it ought to be. Because make no mistake: it is weird, and not in a good way. It's not even weird for the sake of weirdness. It's just bad.
Obviously nobody sets out to compose a bad scent. Sometimes they just turn out that way.
Badness is to an extent subjective, of course. Last night on Netflix I watched "The Emperor's New Groove", a movie I must have seen at least a dozen times by now and one which does not grow old, a dazzlingly funny animated Disney flick which broke out of the Disney mold by having only one song and by being gloriously anarchic and meta: it works at an adult level at least as well as it does on a slapsticky kids' level. If you don't like David Spade or animation or comedies, I can get that you wouldn't like this, but that isn't enough to make it bad — just not to your taste. But some of the Netflix reviews were extraordinarily negative: I can't understand how anyone can call it a bad movie, and yet some people do.
The perception of quality, the various rankings of good and bad, is affected by a host of intangibles and biases, and in the world of luxury goods, of which perfume is one, the most interesting is price. People, whether consciously or not (usually not), tend to think that, all other things being equal, the more something costs, the better it is, but for that to work you have to know that it's pricier, which is why even during the Depression, the tagline "The costliest perfume in the world" helped ensure the success of Patou's Joy.
You can't even help this: it's exceedingly hard to overcome this tendency to affix expectations to objects. You think that expensive wine tastes better than cheap wine, and if you unknowingly drink cheap wine which has been transferred to an expensive bottle, you are very likely to give it a higher rating than expensive wine poured from a cheap bottle.
And all of this is my roundabout way of saying that The Afternoon of a Faun ("Bergamot, pepper, cinnamon, incense, rose, immortal flower, orris, jasmine, myrrh of Namibia, moss, leather, benzoin") is, I am afraid, cheap wine in an expensive bottle: a spindly peppered floral, all angles and points, not in an interesting or appealing way but more like stepping on a jumble of Lego blocks (or, I guess, jamming them up your nose). Neither beautiful nor fascinating, the only two raisons d'etre for a perfume, it is instead meaningless and incomprehensible, which is to say that it is bad.
I cheerfully concede that I could be wrong about this, that it isn't actually bad but just not my cup of tea. Entirely possible. I am not the arbiter of greatness. But it smells like badness to me.
Last week I mentioned that I was putting a hold on ordering any new samples because I already have a bunch and because scents launched in big batches — which they all seem to be these days, on the theory that it's just as cheap to produce and launch four or thirteen as it is to launch one — tended not to be very good on the whole. A few days ago I discovered to my astonishment and borderline horror that I had not only done just that a while ago, I had completely forgotten about it, and so I have not only five more Etat Libre d'Orange samples I didn't even know about, I also have a round dozen samples by a company called L'Antichambre, which I must have ordered because many of them sound extremely delicious and you can never have enough gourmands. But I'm leaving the L'Antichambres in their little muslin bag and working through the Etats for the next few weeks, if you don't mind.
Etat scents tend to have perverse or misleading names, the better to shock and confuse you with. Nombril Immense smells mostly of patchouli: Like This smells like pumpkin soup. Even the apparently straight-ahead names don't necessarily take you where you think you're going to go. Divin'Enfant
does in fact smell like a rosewater candy and baby powder at first, but then it takes a sharp turn into adulthood by bringing in aromas of tobacco, leather, and coffee.
Long story short, Fils de Dieu du Riz et des Agrumes ("Son of the god of rice and citrus") smells just like what you think it ought to smell like: sharp, crystalline citrus on top of thick, creamy rice pudding, which you are eating a field of flowers on a sunny day while wearing a brown leather jacket. It is gorgeous, mesmerizing stuff, the perfect example of what Etat does best.
Gotcha: Bijou Romantique by Etat Libre d'Orange (eventually)
So I spent a bit of money getting, and a lot of time thinking and writing about, Luckyscent's Fueguia 1833 collection, and I decided that I was probably just going to stop ordering samples for a while, since most everything being made nowadays isn't (as arrogant as this sounds) up to my standards, when what appears in my inbox but an ad for another Luckyscent sample set, this time for Xerjoff's new Join the Club series?
I was very tempted, as you can imagine. The idea behind the series is a clever one: ten fragrances reminiscent of various clubs — jazz, yacht, book. After reading a few of the descriptions, I clicked on the link to put a sample set in the cart, but before I committed myself I read more of the descriptions, and eventually it dawned on me: I have been seduced and disappointed before by collections, and not even that long ago, because this is exactly what happened with the Fueguia collection*, and the "Best of 2012" sample set (I would beg to differ: en masse, they weren't the best of any year), and presumably others before it.
So Luckyscent, understandably wanting to sell what they have invested in, write a thrilled, glowing review of every single scent, carefully glossing over the fact that — as we all know by now, don't we? — every scent in a collection will not be, cannot possibly be, great. Or even good. So I thought, no, they're not getting my money this time around, alas. As George Dubya once memorably said, "Fool me once, shame on… shame on you. [Long, horribly awkward pause.] Fool me can't get fooled again."**
I love trying new things but even I have my limits. Fortunately, I still have lots of samples from various places, and so for the next little while, unless I weaken, I'll just be pawing through those.
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So reading the company's list of notes ("Bergamote & citron d'Italie, baie rose essence, ylang-ylang, sauge sclarée, iris de Toscane, vétiver de Haïti, benjoin, vanille..." — it always sounds so much better in French, doesn't it?) and Luckyscent's lip-smacking writeup ("another delicately hued composition that hovers just on the edge of being the most ethereal gourmand, with the subtle chocolate facets of iris, vetiver blending into the creaminess of vanilla and benzoin"), what would you expect: something thick and luscious, edibly tropical?
Not a chance. To my nose, anyway, Bijou Romantique smells like a whole lot of rather synthetic and slightly burnt spices. There's a bit of iris in there, but not enough to make me hate it, a smudge of benzoin to sweeten the deal, and a little clump of patchouli underneath it all, but otherwise it's nothing like advertised: it isn't a bijou, it isn't romantic, it certainly isn't feminine, and it's gourmand only if you like eating spices straight from the jar with a teaspoon. It took me a while to place it, but Bijou Romantique in fact smells like a reasonably precise copy of late-nineties Organza Indecence.
*I hasten to say that I didn't hate all the Fueguias, and in fact one of them had such an impact on me that this morning as I was heading to the gym I realized with a shock that I could smell the wonderful Pulperia in the air until I realized that, doing construction work, some workers were welding cast iron while others were laying down pitch, the smell of hot iron and tar and the flurry of sparks creating the smell of Pulperia, and what a thrill that was.
**If you watch that video of the speech, you almost feel sorry for him, because the second he starts in on the quote, he loses the thread of it — you can actually see it happen — and he realizes he's walked into a trap that there's no way out of, so he just blunders through to some kind of ending. But it's hard to feel really sorry for him: he doesn't appear to ever have had a coherent, independent thought in his entire life, and he was a stunningly bad public orator, a skill you'd think it would be impossible to get elected to office without. Every verbal trap he ever walked into he set for himself.
No No No Yes: Three More Fueguias (and a surprise)
Darwin's notes are listed as "cedar, grapefruit, vetiver", and in truth that just about sums it up. The grapefruit top is a bit toilety (in an interesting way, just a bare whiff of pee), the vetiver adds a bright-green sharpness, and the cedar dominates the whole composition. Simple and shallow, no depth at all, but very nice, though it's hard to see how it could be $150 worth of nice.
Ballena de la Pampa is said to be constructed around "musk, grass notes, ambergris": it starts off with a pleasant golden glow and then immediately turns into laundry musk, the exact smell of a big scoop of laundry detergent, sneezy and harsh. It is hard to conceive of this as anything but a huge waste of money, the manufacturer's for having created something so pared-down and wretched, yours if you should happen to buy it.*
Pampa Humeda supposedly smells of "leaf, eucalyptus and rosemary", but I can't tell because I didn't get a sample of it: to my considerable surprise I discovered that Luckyscent messed up my sample bag and accidentally sent me a vial of Etat Libre d'Orange's Jasmine et Cigarette instead. Let's pretend that Pampa Humeda is fantastic (it could happen) and move on to the ELdO, since I see I've mentioned it a few times but never actually written about it.
You wouldn't be out of line if you expected Jasmin et Cigarette to smell like a femme fatale: red lipstick, fur, whiskey-soaked voice, wreathed in dark jasmine perfume and cigarette smoke. But nothing of the sort! Instead, you get a big unfurling of bright jasmine coupled with the sunny peachfuzz smell of apricots, followed quickly by the sunwarmed-hay smell of tobacco. There is a faint trail of smoke underneath, but mostly it is cured but unburned tobacco, golden brown and glorious.
After the first bloom of the top notes, it sits reasonably close to the skin, the sort of scent that makes others lean in closer. It is heady, yes, but not femme fatale at all: the freshness of the fruity jasmine may skew it to the women's side of the aisle for some, but coupled with the outdoorsy, masculine tobacco, it's fascinatingly unisex. Despite the olfactory references to sunshine and peach orchards and tobacco fields, this is evening wear, I think: a bit too sultry for the office, a bit too mysterious for the daytime, it would sit well on someone with places to go after dark.
*I apologize, but just a little, for harping endlessly on the cost of these things: they seem so hideously overpriced for what they are, and I can't seem to get over it. The Etat scent is a third the price of the Fueguias, and yet it is so much better than either of them — and in fact with last week's exception, better than any Fueguia I've smelled yet — that the asking price for the latter seems almost criminal. You can get sixteen ten-mL bottles of Etat for the price of one small Fueguia. Manufacturers and vendors may of course charge what they like, but there is something very wrong with that equation.
Keep Going: Etat Libre d'Orange Like This (eventually)
I would like to tell you a meandering batch of stories about art and music and love which will eventually tie into the review at hand in a sidelong manner. If you want to skip all that and get right to my opinion of Etat Libre d'Orange's Tilda Swinton-themed fragrance Like This, just scroll way down until you see the bottle again: I certainly wouldn't blame you.
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Last spring I was visiting my mother in Ontario for a couple of weeks: she had been widowed the previous fall and wanted some company (and also someone to do chores: she's not getting any younger).
Reading the Toronto Star one morning, I discovered that an arts festival called Luminato in Toronto was opening with a revival of Philip Glass' pivotal, revolutionary opera Einstein on the Beach, which I had been listening to for at least a quarter of a century and of course desperately wanted to see, not least because I knew that I would never get another chance to see it: it's a huge, expensive production which has been revived only a few times since its first production in the mid-1970s. But a trip to see it was out of the question: we had already planned and paid for a trip to Tokyo that fall, and we couldn't possibly squeeze in another trip.
I knew my husband Jim would find out about the festival, because he reads just about as much as I do (which is to say "just about everything"), so I texted him to say, "Einstein on the Beach is being performed in Toronto this summer AND WE'RE NOT GOING." And Jim texted back, "We'll see," because if he thinks there's a thing that will make me happy, he wants to find a way to make that thing happen.
A couple of days later, he e-mailed me to say, in essence, "I had a really bad day at work and I have to get out of this awful city so I booked us flights and a hotel and got tickets to Einstein on June 8th so we're going."
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It's not the first time Jim has done such a thing. One day in the spring of 1999, I came home from work and he said, "Have you heard of a new Philip Glass chamber opera called 'Monsters of Grace'?" I had. "Well, we're going." He had arranged the whole thing, ordered the tickets and booked the flights and hotel, knowing that I would love the experience.
A lot of people hated "Monsters of Grace". I'm not one of them. At the end, I didn't even stop to think about it, but flung myself to my feet for a standing ovation. There weren't many others standing along with me (and in fact I believe some people were booing), but I didn't care: I loved it, and still listen to the music to this day.
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I met Jim in the fall of 1987, and the attraction was instantaneous and intense. He was 27 and magnetically appealing, catnip to women and men alike: the women were out of luck, but with men he'd had what turned out to be a tumultuous and eventful romantic life, something with which I could never compete. I was 24 and had had exactly one previous romantic relationship, so clearly I was an oasis of stability (or a fount of neurosis). I was I suppose decent-looking though not outstandingly attractive, but I can talk a fox out of a hen-house, and I have wide-ranging interests: "If you can't be rich or beautiful, be fascinating" is advice that has served a lot of men and women well over the centuries. (Cleopatra's legendary beauty might be just that: it's more than possible that she was rather plain, and it was her discourse and manner that seduced Marc Antony and Julius Caesar, among others.)
A few weeks after we got involved, Jim invited me out for dinner to meet two of his co-workers, Karin and Adele. I imagine we had been talking about art and politics, among other things, but the one thing I clearly recall discussing was "Einstein on the Beach", which I had been listening to pretty obsessively, as is my way. While I had absented myself from the table near the end of the meal, Karin pinched Jim's arm hard and said, "If you let this one get away, I will kill you," which is possibly the most flattering thing anyone has ever said about me.
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He didn't let me get away.
After twenty-six and a half years, Jim and I still find things to talk about. In fact, if you asked me the secret to a happy marriage, I'd say, "Be interesting to one another." We have drastically different tastes in most areas: while there's a bit of overlap, we hardly listen to the same music at all, we have different taste in TV shows and books, movies and theatre. Jim likes opera well enough, but mostly only comedies, whereas I like pretty much all of it. But that's all good! It gives you more things to talk about!
One area in which our tastes align almost completely is the world of art. We both prefer relatively modern art, mostly things from the last 150 years or so: the best exhibition we ever saw was the blissful Pop Art show at Montréal's Musée des Beaux Arts in the fall of 1992. And we both loved the movie Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present, which I beg you to watch, even if you think you don't like modern art or performance art: the film is profoundly moving. And if you don't like it, well, that gives you something to talk about, doesn't it? (As long as you have something intelligent to say and don't sneer at it like the half-witted Fox News reporter in the film, who clearly only likes art that's hanging on a wall, presumably something painted by Trisha Romance or Thomas Kinkade, something that matches the couch.)
Since we live in a small, rather provincial city, the only way we can experience everything we want to, all the operas and museums and movies and cultures, is by travelling, and luckily that's one more thing we have in common: we both love to travel. We're not rich, but we head out as often as we can afford to, and if we were independently wealthy, we would essentially just travel all the time.
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If my mother ever reads this she will be severely annoyed: even though I visited her in April of 2012 and am going up again this May, she will be peeved that I flew up to Ontario in June of 2012 and didn't even tell her, let alone visit. So: sorry, Mom, but we flew up on Thursday night last June and left on Monday morning and the long weekend was packed with events planned and unplanned, and there was just no time.
The tickets we had for "Einstein on the Beach" were for the first of three performances, the night of June 8th. "Einstein" is only nominally an opera: it's sui generis, hypnotically repetitive music and dancing, trancelike singing of nonsense lyrics and numbers and solfége syllables, no characters nor plot. Four and a half hours of music and dance and acting and visual stimulation with no intermission: you're encouraged to come and go as you see fit, and a fair number of people saw fit to leave and not come back.
And this may give you an idea as to why: the image on that album cover is a giant glowing slab representing the edge of a bed, but also appearing throughout the opera in various guises. Late in the opera, the object appears on the stage horizontal, and then over the next seventeen minutes or so, to pensive music, it gradually, gradually arises to a vertical position, at which point it (I think) represents a spaceship which slowly takes off and vanishes into the rafters. (When the glowing bar attained its vertical position on the first night, an audience member shouted, "Hurray!", to the laughter of the entire audience.) If you have an appreciation, or even a tolerance, for that sort of thing, then you might be the sort of person who would appreciate "Einstein on the Beach".
Here's another test: Knee Play 3 ("knee play" because it's a joint between longer sections), a piece which is simultaneously classical in structure — it's basically an A-B-A-B aria for a small chorus — and hyper-modern, a staggeringly rapid-fire, pulsating string of numbers alternating with a lullaby of solfège syllables.
Before I saw it performed, even having listened to it hundreds of times over the last quarter century, I didn't see how it was possible for anyone to sing such music, but by god, they do it. "Einstein" has many moments of virtuosic performance like that: cruelly difficult keyboard music, an octet of dancers who spend twenty minutes — twice! — whirling across the stage in mathematical permutations, the second time accompanied by a violinist who plays the most fiendish scales and arpeggios.
We sat through the whole production without budging: I had taken the precaution of drinking almost nothing the entire day, and Jim has a bladder of steel. You couldn't have gotten me out of my seat anyway: I was transfixed, agog. This music that I had been listening to for more than half my life, and which I had never expected to see staged, was suddenly complete — it suddenly made sense. Jim enjoyed "Einstein", but I more than loved it: I was transformed by it, and my very first thought, after "That is the greatest thing I have ever seen in my entire life," was, "And I have to see it again."
And I did. I cancelled the plans we had made for Saturday night and got another ticket — once was quite enough for Jim, but he can entertain himself in Toronto for an evening — and went the next night, and it was even better, because I could understand the visual symbols and the connections between the various elements of the staging. (I also knew where the slow bits were — every opera has them — and could slip out a couple of times without missing anything crucial.) An even larger proportion of the audience left on the second night: a woman behind me said, "This is torture!" to her companion, and they were gone by the end of the second hour.
For the next three months after returning home, I was obsessed. I listened to scarcely anything besides "Einstein on the Beach" on my iPod: I have three different recordings (from 1978, 1984, and 1993) and have cobbled together versions of the opera composed of my favourite elements from each one — the 1978 "Knee Play 3", the 1993 "Dance 2" — including a 70-minute version that I listened to almost every day for a month and a half. Gradually I let other music into my ears, but I still listen to "Einstein" often. If I could have, I'd have gone see it again in one of the other cities it played in (still two dates to go!): but I'm thrilled that I got to see it at all, not once but twice, and I will remember it until the day I die.
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My first exposure to the Persian poet Rumi was "Monsters of Grace" — his poems are the libretto for the arias and duets — and I guess my second was this Etat Libre d'Orange scent (you can listen to Tilda Swinton reading the poem that gives it its name, if you like).
Like This could also function as an imperative sentence: "Like this (or else)." And I wanted to, but I can't, because although it is tremendously interesting in the usual experimental, risk-taking Etat style, it's just not very attractive in the long run.
The basic structure of Like This is a gourmand, with a bright citrus flash at the top, an warmly edible, rose-accented heart, and a musky base. The trouble is that that edible middle consists mostly of spice-flecked pumpkin, an appealing fragrance in and of itself, but it goes on and on (it lasts a lot longer than four and a half hours) and never gets any lighter: after a short while it comes to seem thick and heavy and oppressive, to the point that you may feel as if you are drowning in an industrial vat of squash soup with rosewater in it.
As usual, lots of people seem to love this and maybe you will too. Maybe it's like "Einstein on the Beach", and you either get "Like This" or you don't. I don't: I wore it at least ten times trying to wrap my brain around it, and every single time I had to resist the urge to scrub it off. Enough.
Since most of the East Coast is getting slugged by winter, I figured it was appropriate to bring up this Christmas-themed fragrance, even if I am a couple of months late.
The name "Noël au Balcon" is the first of half of a French proverb meaning that if Christmas is warm enough to enjoy on the balcony, you'll be spending Easter in front of the fireplace. Consequently, you would expect it to smell Christmasy, and it does: it's reminiscent of Guerlain's Winter Delice in its unabashed use of spices, in this case red pepper and cumin, meant to suggest skin heated by a roaring fire in the hearth. It has a lot of projection: it's not shy about its hot-skin yumminess.
Here's the thing, though: it is extremely single-minded in its pursuit of this idea. Extremely. There are other facets to Noël au Balcon, but once the Christmas-fruit top has fled, all you're left with is an insistent spiciness, which begins to wear on you after a while. And it just keeps going: eight hours later, it's closer to the skin, but it's still just this endless barrage of hot spices. You can enjoy a square or two of gingerbread with candied orange peel on top, but if you have to eat the entire pan, and then another and another, sooner or later you're going to get sick of it.
Leather Man: Tom of Finland by Etat Libre d'Orange
Tom of Finland was an artist who liked to draw shall we say pictures of genetically exemplary gentlemen enjoying one another's company in various ways.
On the one hand, you would expect that a scent named after Tom of Finland would consist entirely of an excess of masculinity: tobacco and leather, say, maybe rum or bourbon and perhaps some sweaty cumin, a hint of black rubber or vinyl. On the other hand, this is Etat Libre d'Orange we're talking about, and they generally have no intention of doing anything anyone would expect of them. Consequently, their Tom of Finland starts out with fresh citrusy aldehydes which disperse to reveal a fresh, soft-green outdoorsy scent with a hint of warm sweetness underneath.
And then it turns into leather! It could have been the harsh tarry leather of Eau de Fier, but instead it has a creamy-smooth surface and an abundance of vanilla, even softer and sweeter than Jacomo Art Collection #2. It lasts forever, hours and hours and hours without flagging. Despite the hyper-masculine imagery, it's wearable by any woman who wants a supple-kidskin kind of leather scent without any fruit or flowers to get in the way.
I admit to not liking it at first, partly because I didn't get it (you'd think by now I'd be used to ELdO confounding all my expectations) and partly because ELdO is such a mixed bag that it never surprises me to discover that I really dislike something of theirs, so I wasn't prepared to either love it or hate it. (I've yet to come across one of theirs that I genuinely hated, though I suppose it's only a matter of time.) But I wore Tom of Finland for a few days and it's grown on me in the worst kind of way: I don't need a full bottle and I'm determined not to buy one, although it's awfully nice and you can never have enough leather scents, so I guess in a moment of weakness anything is possible.
Don't: Etat Libre d'Orange Don't Get Me Wrong Baby
I like to think that I am not unnaturally prudish, and the names and/or images of Etat Libre d'Orange's fragrances don't bother me, for the most part: pubic hair, breasts, whatever, it's part of their image. I don't mind the penis-gun graphic for Je Suis un Homme, because there's a point to it. But I just can't get behind a scent called Don't Get Me Wrong Baby I Don't Swallow, which is vulgarity for its own sake, a cheap shock tactic and nothing more. Maybe all their products are in the end: but that name just seems to be one step over the line. At least they showed a modicum of restraint in their Roy Lichtenstein-style graphic.
Think how much worse it could have been. If they could name a fragrance that, I wouldn't put anything past them.
As for the scent, it's a pleasant little floral in a candy store: bright aldehydes, orange-flower and lily-of-the-valley which eventually give way to marshmallow and cocoa powder, bolstered by sweet amber.
In fact, Don't Get Me Wrong Baby smells uncannily like your choice of chocolate-marshmallow biscuit (I'll take a Tunnock's Tea Cake, please and thank you)
Strumpet Voluntary: Etat Libre d'Orange Putain des Palaces
To get this out of the way first, I don't know why "Putain des Palaces" translates as "Hotel Slut", but it does, apparently. Was there a hotel named Les Palaces or something? Since we get both "palace" and "hotel" directly from French, you'd think that "hotel" would be "hotel" and "palace" would be "palace", but no, just proving what an unbridgeable gulf there is between English and French.
Anyway, you're not here to read about etymology, you're here to read about perfume.
Once upon a time, and not that long ago, not even a century, nice girls in North America didn't wear makeup and they didn't wear perfume. They might pinch their cheeks to bring up the colour, and they might wear a little eau de toilette in some innocuous lilac or apple-blossom scent, but to wear makeup or actual European perfume, the kind with a musky, animalic base that suggested sex, meant you were easy, and there was no middle ground. Virgin or slut: those were your choices. (Based on their perfumes alone, you could tell that the sluts were the ones having all the fun.)
A friend of mine had a delicious family saying that was dredged out whenever Mother or one of the girls was perfumed for a night out: "You smell like a whore's handbag." Etat Libre d'Orange's Putain des Palaces smells like a whore's handbag, in the best imaginable way.
After a bright, cheery mandarin-orange opening laced with aldehydes, PdP reveals itself to be a midcentury rose-and-violet perfume (it recalls vintage L'Interdit by Givenchy) with a heavy dusting of face powder. To some people, this will read as "old-fashioned" or even "old-lady", but they're not paying attention, they're not sticking around, because lurking just underneath is a slightly sweetened leather — could be the handbag, could be a well-used whip for all you know — and an ambery animal dirtiness with a decidedly sexual connotation: if this is old-fashioned, it's old-fashioned hussy. The only thing missing is a postcoital smoke (and Etat Libre d'Orange already has you covered there with Jasmin et Cigarette).
Putain des Palaces is so ineluctably feminine that there is something irresistible about the idea of a man unapologetically wearing it, someone stylish and masculine like English rugby player and all-around excellent human being Ben Cohen
or American actor Shemar Moore
because we expect men to smell like citrus and ozone (if they are under 35) or tobacco and barbershop (if over), and how terrific would it be to encounter a man confidently smelling like he'd teleported from the 1950s after having just spent some bedsheets time with a brazen lady?
Earlier this month I wrote about Serge Lutens' De Profundis, which is supposed to be about death in an abstract way, and Etat Libre d'Orange's Charogne is a play on the same theme, but the intention is more literal: "charogne" means "carrion", the body of a dead animal.
While Lutens scents are usually peculiar in the service of a bigger idea (Miel de Bois, say), Etat Libre d'Orange scents seem to be peculiar for the sake of their own peculiarity: sometimes I think they came up with a name or a concept and forced the scent to fit that, and other times it seems as if the perfumer had said, "Why don't we try this for the pure hell of it?", and then they just bottled the result. Sometimes it works, as when they grafted a candy-and-baby-powder accord onto a leather-coffee-tobacco base in Divin'Enfant: sometimes it doesn't, as it didn't in the baffling Encens et Bubblegum, to name just one. I can't tell if Charogne works or not: it's off-putting in a way that is hard to pin down in words. (It took me a whole week to get this far with it.) I like it and then I don't, I want to wear it again but then I want to scrub it off, or at least be wearing something else, but I keep coming back to it.
As for what Charogne actually smells like: not carrion! There's decomposition in it, but floral, not animal: a bowl of plastic-wrapped candy and a plastic-wrapped bouquet of flowers (mostly funeral lilies) a couple of days past their sell-by date sitting in a funeral home permeated with incense fumes. The synthetic plastickiness is not only obvious but clearly deliberate. It is sweet, in the way that overripe flowers and fruit are sweet, and the incense has a spiciness to it which doesn't cut through the sweetness but amplifies it, like eating a whole loaf of cinnamon-raisin bread. There is a suggestion of leather near the end, but it's more like Naugahyde seat covers than real leather: you wouldn't call this a leather scent, that's for sure — maybe a floral oriental, or a straight-up oriental. Or maybe it's just in a nameless category all its own.
It is just the damnedest thing: I wear it and wear it but can't tell if I like Charogne or not. It really is a puzzle. You should try it, though. I am pretty sure you've never smelled anything quite like it.
The Centre of Attention: Etat Libre d'Orange Nombril Immense
There is real, hard-core patchouli, the kind that smells a bit dirty, the kind that people associate with hippies and head shops. I can't wear that stuff at all. And there is the new, sanitized, molecularized synthetic patchouli, the kind that smells very fresh and clean, the kind that has been showing up in many fragrances for years now. I loved it for a while but now its ubiquity has begun to bore me.
And then there is Nombril Immense, which has somehow found the middle ground between these two. A mix of various patchoulis? A recent synthetic which combines the best of both worlds? No matter. It's completely dominated by the note, which is neither dirty nor hygienically steam-cleaned, a sort of lived-in smell, friendly and approachable.
There's a little bit of citrus and some black pepper in the top, and a bit of sexy balsamic warmth in the base, but otherwise Nombril Immense (the name means "Cosmic Belly-Button" and suggests countercultural navel-gazing and also the centre of the world) is all about the patchouli, so simple yet so colossally appealing. It does what fragrances are supposed to do: it makes you smell good. (I had two people tell me exactly that last week, despite the fact that I wasn't wearing very much of it: it has a presence.) The middle of the scent also has a chocolatey overtone: I can't wear Serge Lutens' Borneo 1834 despite its being a patchouli-and-chocolate confection, because it's that strong-and-dirty patchouli allied to a dusty-cocoa chocolate; Nombril Immense is the same idea but done, if not "right", then in a way which I can wear.
The website for Etat Libre d'Orange has this to say about their scent:
Exotique et précieux, ce bois indien subjugue ceux qui le respirent
which means "Exotic and precious, this Indian wood captivates all who inhale it," which is untrue at least where it claims that patchouli is a wood: the plant is an herb, not a tree, and even if it were a tree, its wood would be irrelevant since the oil is extracted from the plant's leaves. But the French have certainly never let the facts interfere in their perfume advertising.
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.
Scentroulette Day 1: Divin'Enfant by Etat Libre D'Orange
Every now and then you need something to jar you out of your routine. My routine is to pick a scent I'd like to write about, wear it, think about it, write down some thoughts, wear it some more, think about it some more, look up the official list of notes, think about it some more, and finally sit down to write about it. This gets me about one review a week, which is fine, I suppose, but I look enviously at other scent bloggers and ask myself, How do they do it? How do they write about something every day or two?
I have easily a hundred scents in my possession--mostly samples, fortunately--that I haven't written about yet. At that rate, and at the rate that I acquire new things, it's obvious that I'm going to keep falling further behind. Something must be done!
So for the next little while--let's say a month--I am going to try an experiment. Here are the rules:
1) Every morning, randomly (using a very loose definition of the word) grab a box, randomly select a zip-bag or other container from it, and randomly select a sample from that container.
2) If I've already written about it (which is possible, because my filing system is less than optimal, but at least I have a good memory), keep going until I find one I haven't. If it seems like something I can't wear (say I'm heading off to work or the gym soon and it's strong/girly/whatever), make a second random pick: then choose one of the two. No thirds!
3) Wear it. Make a few notes. Write about it, fast. That day.
Weekends are dicey, because Jim doesn't work them and doesn't like scents (to say the least). If he heads off to the gym before I do, I might be able to sneak one in. But five days a week for the next month or so? Doable. So let's do!
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"Enfant divin" is the usual French way to refer to the baby Jesus, so Etat Libre D'Orange is employing their usual shock tactics in calling their scent "Divin'Enfant".
It opens with a big wad of orange blossom, which, frankly, I am not a giant fan of. But immediately underneath is an equally outsized cloud of baby powder, with all its charming associations, and so it's obvious what ELO means to do: give us a standard recitation of the agreeable scents of babyhood, which turn out to be vanilla, orange-flower, a little peekaboo of rose, and the candy-powdery smell of marshmallow. It is charming.
But charming is not what ELO is about: perversity is. Creeping up from under the baby perfume is.... Coffee? Chocolate? Leather? Tobacco? This isn't a baby: it's a grownup, a leather-jacketed reporter on a caffeine-fueled, smoke-wreathed bender. The only thing missing is bourbon (which presumably you can supply yourself).
The disconnect between the two halves of the scent is mesmerizing. Equally so is the fact that you can't tell that any of the underlying scents are there at first; they're completely veiled by the top and middle notes. It hardly seems possible, but there it is: the magic of perfumery.
When I first put on Antihéros--the name means just what you think it does, only it's singular, French "héros" being identical to English "hero"--I thought, "Well, this can't be all there is to it, can there?"
It can.
There is a bare suggestion of something tarry at the very top, a breath of Eau de Fier, and then it's just soapy lavender. Very nice lavender, and very soapy, but that's all it is. It lasts much longer than you might think, and the bottom of it, though still lavender, is a little more expansive, with a hint of wood.
It is really very nice: I enjoyed using up my sample of it. It isn't fearsomely expensive: currently $69 for a 50-mL bottle. I only question why ELdO, and you, would even bother when there are lavenders that are far more interesting (though you may pay for the privilege), or just as good for much less money. There are certainly no less than a hundred scents currently on the market that contain a distinct lavender note: most fougere scents do, and there are plenty of fragrances that are hardly anything but. Demeter has a stripped-down lavender that's about a quarter the price, though it isn't as long-lasting; if you want a soapy barbershop lavender you can still find YSL Rive Gauche pour Homme; if you want a complex lavender you can buy Gaultier Le Male most anywhere; if you want something that you can't just get in the department store, you can buy Island Lavender by Caldey, hand-made by Cistercian monks.
I don't want to stop anyone from buying Antihéros, and I have nothing against ELdO; I like a lot of their scents. This one, though; this one I just don't get.
Art: Etat Libre d'Orange Rossy de Palma Eau de Protection
When Coco Chanel said, "a woman must smell like a woman and not like a rose," she was talking about her hyper-modern No. 5, a reaction to the simple one-note floral perfumes of the day. No. 5 smells of roses (among many other things), but in a veiled, abstracted way: it doesn't smell specifically like roses or jasmine or vetiver or, in fact, anything except itself.
But Chanel was wrong in hindsight. She couldn't have foreseen truly modern perfumery, in which people can smell like pretty much anything they want to, because there is a commercial fragrance for that: hot tar, plums, pine needles, clean dirt, whatever. If a woman (or a man, for all that) wants to smell like a rose, who is to say that she's wrong, or that that isn't what a woman smells like?
And what do you suppose this sublime creature below smells like?
She is Rossy de Palma, as seen above in the George Michael video for the song "Too Funky" (also worth watching for the spectacular Linda Evangelista) and below in Pedro Almodovar's "Law of Desire"
and one look at her tells you that she is Picasso's Dora Maar
arisen from the canvas like Venus from the waves.
Since her given name is Rosa--Rossy is a nickname, the equivalent of Rosie in English--then she ought to smell, contrary to Chanel's dictum, like a rose, wouldn't you think? Etat Libre d'Orange presumably did, because she was the namesake of their first celebrity scent (their second was for Tom of Finland). But not some prim, dainty English rose: it would have to be a force of nature.
Rossy de Palma Eau de Protection is a huge, gorgeous rose scent; clear and fresh, with nothing old-fashioned about it (unless you are determined to believe that some things like roses and lavender must by definition be old-fashioned). Whatever top notes there might be are immediately subsumed under the tidal wave of rosiness, with green leaves and long stems and a bit of thorn in evidence as well. It is breathtakingly bright and sharp, made sharper with a sprinkling of beguilingly harsh spice, mostly black pepper.
Underneath it all, though, is a gathering darkness: a deep, almost funereal gloom, a gothy drenching of ink-black patchouli mitigated, but just barely, with a dab of sweet benzoin and something that may or may not be chocolate. This is what L'Artisan's Voleur de Roses (another rose-patchouli composition) ought to have been.
Rossy de Palma Eau de Protection is pricier than the main Etat line: they run $69 at the moment, while the two name scents are $90. (Presumably the namesakes are getting a cut.) But this is one celebrity fragrance that's worth every penny.
What the?: Etat Libre d'Orange Encense et Bubblegum
“People have been cooking and eating for thousands of years, so if you are the very first to have thought of adding fresh lime juice to scalloped potatoes try to understand that there must be a reason for this.”
--Fran Lebowitz
The thing about Etat Libre D'Orange scents is not just that they're perverted--those épater-la-bourgeoisie labels and smutty names--but that they're perverse. Perfumery has been around for thousands of years, modern perfumery with its glorious synthetics for a little over a hundred, and nobody has previously thought of mixing the smells of bubble gum and incense. Nobody before Etat Libre D'Orange, anyway, with their Encens et Bubblegum.
It doesn't smell like bubble gum, though. They got that wrong. Bubble gum has a very specific, synthetic candy smell. It smells fluorescent pink. The first thing you smell in Encens et Bubblegum is a little closer to one of those scented Japanese erasers: sweet, fruity, a million miles from anything that nature has ever produced. If it smells like something you'd put in your mouth, it's a decent approximation of Adams Sour Gum, no particular flavour, just sour gum with a synthetic-fruit flavour. (Chewing gum and bubble gum don't smell the same, I hardly need point out.) This is soon joined by some sweetened flowers--mostly vague orange blossom--and some sweetish, smokeless incense.
After the top has faded a little, it's absolutely, single-mindedly linear. It's that sweet artificial-fruit scent and that subdued but sweet incense scent and that's it. For hours. Why is it so often the case that the things you love fade so quickly, and the ones you could live without (not to mention the ones you hate) just keep going and going and going?
It's not terrible. It isn't really much of anything, to be honest. It just is. The incense is very nice, but the whole composition is pointless: minor strangeness for its own sake. The ELdO scents aren't expensive, but I have a feeling that if you bought a half-ounce of Demeter Bubble Gum (which I haven't tried, but which almost certainly has to be closer to the mark than this) and one of Incense (which is pretty much identical to that in Encens et Bubblegum) and mixed them, you'd have something similar, probably better, for a lot less money.
Mister Right: Je Suis un Homme by Etat Libre D'Orange
Etat Libre D'Orange is a French niche perfume line which exists mostly for shock value, or would if its scents weren't any good, which in fact they (or at least some of them) are.
The shock value, though, is indisputably front and centre. Here's the illustration for their Vraie Blonde ("Real Blonde"):
And here's Sécretions Magnifiques (you can figure that one out for yourself):
And here's a bunch of other graphic design, including a woman's lips blowing a breast-shaped bubble (Encens et Bubblegum), an ambisexual mask (Delicious Closet Queen), and a phallic key penetrating a vulvar keyhole (Putain des Palaces, "Hotel Slut"):
Je Suis Un Homme means "I'm a Man", and the packaging shows a pistol morphing into a penis; all the subtlety you would expect from the company.
My first thought on my first wearing of Je Suis Un Homme was, "Leather!", and then immediately thereafter "Citrus!", and then a fusion of the two ideas: "Oh, my god, it's Christian Dior Eau Sauvage Fraîcheur Cuir!"
And I think it is, too, only Etat Libre D'Orange came up with it a year earlier.
The classic Eau Sauvage, a radiant citrus-floral chypre for men, spawned a flanker, Fraîcheur Cuir ("Leather Freshness"), which replaced the light chypre base with leather and wood: it was launched in 2007 and discontinued not too long afterwards. I smelled it in the Gatwick duty-free shop on my way out of London in September of 2007, and like an idiot didn't buy it: I thought I'd already spent enough on fragrances for one trip. And until the day I tried Je Suis un Homme I was pining after it, based on that one brief memory, because it was so obviously good. But we always want the things we can't have, don't we?
Since I can't compare the two directly, all I can go on is my memory of Fraîcheur Cuir and the reality of Je Suis un Homme, and the two are, if not the same, then twin brothers. Fraternal twins, maybe, but twins all the same. Je Suis Un Homme starts off with its two ideas immediately evident and equal in strength: radiant, dazzling citrus and a recently tanned cowhide. It's tempting to call it purely masculine, since it unites two of the staple ideas in men's perfumery, the citrus cologne and the leather chypre: but of course there have been leather chypres for women since the early days of the twentieth century, and women have been wearing citrus colognes for longer than that, so perhaps it's safer to say that despite its name, Je Suis un Homme is a unisex scent with a masculine edge.
As always, the citrus quickly burns up, though it's extraordinarily bright while it lasts. The leather that remains gradually gets deeper and richer, augmented by a spiciness and a slug of patchouli for good measure. (What would perfumery do without patchouli? It seems to be in everything I wear these days.) It is thoroughly animalic and almost indecently sensuous, as a good leather scent should be. The lasting power is not what you'd expect from an animalic fragrance, though: it starts to lose any carrying power after only a couple of hours, turning into a skin scent that can only be detected at close range--no bad thing for something this sexual, but this is a real deterrent to some people, who (understandably) want something that lasts a whole day. But the scent is so reasonably priced for a niche offering--50 mL for $69 at Luckyscent, no more than you'd pay for any department-store brand--that I think it's well worth it.
