Good God: Fils de Dieu by Etat Libre d'Orange

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.

Back in Black: Comme des Garçons Black

Well, I'm back.

I've been back for weeks, but it was hard to work up enough of a head of steam to write about scents. There have been entire days when I didn't even bother to wear one, which is a new and unwelcome development. Since I last posted, the lilacs bloomed and are gone, the earth has turned on its axis forty times, and manufacturers have launched another hundred and fifty or so fragrances: if that last fact isn't reason for true despair then I don't know what is.

For Mother's Day I took my mom out to lunch — not on Mother's Day, but the day before, because you know on the second Sunday of May every restaurant is packed from brunch 'til close — and bought her some things I knew she'd like: chocolates, a jar of pricey(ish) face cream, and a bottle of her favourite fragrance, Dior Addict. I knew she'd like those things because she picked them out: then I paid for them and had the cashier wrap the Dior so Mom would have the pleasure of opening it the next day.

I bet your moms do this: she slid a fingernail under a piece of tape on the wrapping so she could carefully open the package and then save the paper. I said, "Mom. You don't need to save the paper. Just rip it open. Rip it to shreds." She looked at me. "JUST DO IT!" I said, and she did. And after she had, I said, "You've never done that before in your life, have you?" And she hadn't. But she enjoyed it.

I naturally got the cashier to toss in a couple of samples: they turned out to be Something Sweet, the newest from Canadian cosmetics queen Lise Watier, and Adam Levine for Men, and you don't need me to tell you that they were both utterly dreadful, do you?

After visiting with Mom, I went to Toronto, where Jim flew up to meet me and we spent nearly a week doing most everything we could think of. We went to three operas, we saw a passel of movies, we spent time with our friends Ralph and Ansuya, and we did some shopping — but not for scents, which, in case it hasn't become clear, have started to lose their lustre. Of those hundred and fifty or so scents that have been launched in the last six weeks, there are surely at least a few that are worth sniffing: but most of those are not going to be anywhere that I can get my hands on them. The odds that I would stumble across something wonderful are not good, and they're getting worse all the time: more and more scents, from an ever more restricted palette of ingredients, marketed to an ever more undiscerning population. Hence my despair.

But I'll get over it. I have dozens of Luckyscent samples to try: maybe one or two of them will be up to scratch. It could happen!

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Comme des Garçons scents, as a pretty good rule, revel in modernity, flaunt it: they're more interested in being extreme than in being attractive. The original CdG scent, launched in 1994, was violently spicy and in no way beautiful, though of course it had its fans and is still in production. CdG has produced entire lines of scents that were meant to be off-puttingly modern: their Odeur 53 and Odeur 71 are deliberately synthetic (boasting wacky, improbable notes such as Dust on a Light Bulb and Photocopier Toner), and those were basically trial runs for the five-part Synthetic collection, now discontinued. Even their florals like Carnation and Rose have a certain attack-dog quality to them: they're poles apart from department-store florals.

The newest CdG scent is called Black, not to be confused with the Black entry in their Play series. I don't know if you're as tired of scents called Black or Noir that have no business using the name: it's ridiculous to call a sport scent Black and pretend that it's anything but another sport scent, as Kenneth Cole did with his Black. I think that just as scents calling themselves "Green" should be green, a "Black" should be black: dark, moody, sombre, witchy, or funereal. Givenchy can call a perfume Dahlia Noir, but that doesn't make it anything other than an uninteresting floral with nothing dark about it. (I'm sure the name is an offhanded reference to the Black Dahlia, although naming a scent after a failed actress and famed murder victim seems a trifle strange: but the packaging and the advertising made it clear that Noir was what they were going after, and they failed completely.)

On the other hand, sometimes you actually do get what it says on the package. Bulgari Black, Perry Ellis 360 Degrees Black, and Tom Ford Black Orchid hit the mark, smelling respectively of black rubber, licorice, and dark vanillic flowers.

CdG Black has earned its name, too. The top is aggressive, just a little too much too-much: with its pepper-and-petrochemical bite, it suggests tarry scents like Bulgari Black and Goutal's Eau de Fier. After fifteen minutes or so, it settles down into an unexpectedly comforting pairing of black licorice and smoky incense, where it stays for a few hours, gradually succumbing to a base of leathery cedar. It is dark without being oppressive, and the slow crepuscular transition from powerhouse spice to subtle woody leather is a marvellous thing.

Just Desserts: Cuir Velours by Naomi Goodsir

How about a couple of stories?

In 1980, when I was 17 and would see just about every movie that showed in the local two-screen cinema, I went to some cruddy horror movie so obscure and awful that I can't even remember what it was.* (It was the heyday of splatter movies and there were a lot of them out in the theatres.) The show I'd gone to see was a matinee: there weren't many people in the theatre, and so I noticed when an older woman, certainly in her late fifties and probably more than that, came in and sat down. I naturally assumed that she'd entered the wrong theatre and would leave as soon as she realized her mistake, but no: she stayed for the whole thing. And did I learn my lesson, that age is no indicator of a person's likes and dislikes? Oh, probably. Or possibly not.

Today at work, a young co-worker (Twenty? Maybe a bit younger?) asked me about my trip to Japan: since she is a fan of anime and manga and the like, she wanted to know if Harajuku was everything she'd read (it is). I mentioned Shibuya, and she said, "Oh! That's in a video game I play!"

"Yeah, The World Ends With You, right?'"

"You know about that?"

"Yeah, I used to have it for my Nintendo DS, and at Christmas I bought it for my iPad."

Boggled incomprehension.

"It's a great game!" I said. "Did you just think I was an old fogey or something?"

She didn't even pause. "Yeah, kinda."

So. Not even fifty, and I'm the old person that young people think is in the wrong cinema. I seem to give the impression of being stolid, conservative, set in my ways: it's not how I see myself, but it's how other people apparently see me. People are always shocked when they learn how many tattoos I have (four), because I evidently come across as the kind of person who could not possibly have even one.

Older people, it's fair to say, are often set in their ways. The young are willing to try anything because everything is still new to them, but older folks have already, if there's any adventure in their souls, tried countless things over the years: they've gradually discovered what they like, what works for them. When it comes to perfumery, I certainly know what I like, but I'm always willing to try something that seems like it might have a chance of being half decent, though one thing I do know: the fruity floral for women and the aquatic scent for men are done to death and nothing can ever make them new or fresh. Also oud.

Naomi Goodsir is an Australian milliner. No particular reason you should have heard of her if you're not Australian or a hat fan, I guess, but she launched two fragrances this past fall, so maybe you've heard of her if you're a perfume fan.

Cuir Velours, the name tells you, is a leather scent, and all I can say is, is it ever. I've worn a lot of leather scents over the years and if I've ever said that nothing new could be done with the genre, I take it back. Cuir Velours is marvellously new because it reads as two scents running in parallel: one is a soft suedey leather with suggestions of tobacco, incense, and rum — so masculine! — and the other is a dessert-sweet gourmand which starts out playfully fruity and gradually deepens through a creamy vanillic warmth and finally a chocolatey depth and richness. (There's immortelle in there, but it doesn't come across as floral, just edible.) It's a perfectly unisex leather, it lasts for twelve hours without hesitation, and it is a wonderful, wonderful thing.

Not in love with that bottle, though, I have to say. Even if it weren't utterly boring, the scale is off. If you didn't know that was a 50-mL bottle in the photo, you'd think it was a miniature, with that big galumphing bottle topped off by a teeny little cap. Ironically for a milliner's perfume, it looks like the bottle is wearing one of those wee top hats

which may be amusing on a person (or may once have been — it's kind of played out by now) but is just stupid on a perfume bottle. I can't get on board with that. Good thing Cuir Velours the fragrance is so attractive.

*What I do remember is that the trailer for "The Shining"



showed before the feature, and at 17 I was not prepared for it at all: a boring title crawl, a static shot of an elevator, and some disturbing music of a sort I had never heard before may not seem like much, but when the elevator door opened fifty-odd seconds in and that thing happened, I was utterly horrified. It slammed me to the back of my seat. It stuck with me for a long time. What mere movie could compare to that?

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.

Prize Fighter: Serge Lutens Boxeuses

A heads-up about the batch of Lutens samples I'm determined on reviewing. And with that out of the way…

My favourite reaction to a scent is an agog, drop-jawed "OH MY GOD!" It is rare: it happened with Ambre Précieux, my gateway into niche scent, and Parfum d'Hermes, I think the first extrait I ever bought, and with Lutens' Jeux de Peau and a very few other things besides. Something in my psyche or my olfactory setup steers me toward big lush heavy things, warm sexy orientals and chypres, leathers and woods and balsams: they are my drug of choice, and every few years I encounter one that has all the right elements in the right proportions and the right order, and then I am helpless within its steely velvet grip.

And that is precisely how I reacted to Boxeuses (this version of Boxeuses, I feel compelled to add, this slightly evaporated and possibly altered version that I find myself with). Everything about it is exactly right, every box checked. It is leather, and it is glorious.

I have always found Lutens' first attempt at leather, Cuir Mauresque, kind of boring — nice enough, but inoffensively, almost cringingly nice — and his second, Daim Blond, not much better, too restrained and also too irisy (irises and I do not get along so well). Boxeuses is the unexpected pairing of capital-L leather, warm and sultry, with piercing black licorice, garlanded with a little of that dried fruit we expect from Lutens (plums, I think, this time). True to its name ("boxeuses" are female boxers), the two main notes are big, and they duke it out for supremacy, neither getting the upper hand for hours: despite this struggle, they get along so well, leather and licorice, and who would have thought of that until Christopher Sheldrake and Serge Lutens put it in a bottle?

As you can tell from the bell-jar bottle above, Boxeuses is not an export but an exclusive, which means you can find it at the Lutens boutique in Paris and probably nowhere else: you can't get it in the tall, slender 50-mL spray bottle. Yet. (Lutens does release one or two exclusives a year to the export market and then withdraws them again, to give us commoners a chance to get our hands on them without diluting the brand too much.) If Boxeuses is one of the 2013 export releases, or if I should get to Paris next year (we're hopefully planning a trip in celebration of my birthday, the big 5-0), then I will try it again to see if it still affects me as my sample did, but I have complete faith that it will and then I am getting this, or rather it is getting me.

The Good Old Days: Hermes Bel Ami (vintage)

The original bottle for Hermes' Bel Ami, launched in 1986, looked like a tortoiseshell cocktail shaker, and how unbelievably cool is that? Even the box was tortoiseshell.

Now it's packaged in the house bottle, which is nice enough, I guess, but since they put just about everything in that same bottle, it's kind of boring. Even the box has been boringized (although I approve of the brown-with-blue-accents colour scheme). As for the reformulated scent, I have no idea what it smells like, because I haven't been able to bring myself to try it, but by all accounts it isn't what it used to be. Of course it isn't: reformulation never improves a scent, but either dumbs it down by removing elements deemed by European bureaucrats to be too dangerous for human consumption (oakmoss might give .016% of the population an allergic reaction!), changes it drastically to conform to modern tastes, or markets an entirely different, unrelated scent under the same name (an activity which should be illegal under bait-and-switch laws).

But the original? It's so excellent that I couldn't understand or appreciate it when I first encountered it (not the first time that ever happened to me). I got a typically big, generous sample (Hermes knows how to do them right) from the local perfumery, and I have a vivid memory of walking past the university library sniffing my wrist and trying to figure out if I liked or hated Bel Ami. And I couldn't decide. It was baffling, a complete mystery to me. I used up the entire sample and still didn't know. It was equal parts attractive and repellant, and in the end the essential strangeness of it kept pushing me away. I got another sample, emptied that, and still couldn't make up my mind. I didn't buy it. But it stuck in my head.

Finally, last year, a quarter of a century later (!), I ordered a big decant from The Perfumed Court, and at long last I was ready for it: I had smelled so many men's scents in the interim that not much could surprise me and nothing could scare me. It opens huge and mean, a gust of herbs and lemon, bitter pith and all, with a heavy-handed dash of Angostura bitters. And then, except for a long-lasting trail of bitterness, it's all replaced by an intensely complex leather: soft and cushiony, dirty-animalic, slightly floral with a hint of sweetness and (I think) the sharpness of vetiver, on a base of sandalwood and oakmoss. It is absolutely, uncompromisingly masculine and fantastically well done.

If you go out and buy the current Bel Ami, I don't know what you'll get. (It can't be as good the original.) But if you should stumble across that vintage bottle, or if you just trust me and order some from TPC before they run out, then you are in for a treat, because oh, they do not make them like this any more.

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

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.