CB Report, Part XIII

I had no idea when I started putting together these CB reports after Chandler Burr’s talk in December that they would drag on for four months, but there were so many perfumes that night and I’ve been working a lot and not updating very often. Unfortunately so much time has passed that I’ve forgotten a lot of the details and am going almost entirely by my notes, which, for the 13th scent he presented, L’Eau d’Hiver by Frédéric Malle (the perfumer is Jean-Claude Ellena) are sadly lacking. Here is what they say:

Sublime minimalism.
Maximum minimalism.

The way our bodies would smell in heaven.

That’s it! I remember he said that Ellena told him that the perfume is not meant to evoke cold winter air, but rather that it’s warm air for a winter day. This is a pretty perfume that I like to smell on others, but it’s not for me. By the end of the day I start to smell something a little waxy in its almond note that reminds me of artificial almond extract. But I’ve never met anyone else who doesn’t love it.

CB compared the feeling of L’Eau d’Hiver to these three paintings:

1. Robert Ryman’s Twin, 1966


2. This Edgar Martins photo, whose name I cannot seem to find anywhere


3. Ilya Repin’s Bargehaulers on the Volga

Shawarma Time

Sometimes I get tired of all the things I like. This happened a few weeks ago, when I went to Aedes with my friend K. I floated through the store slowly, as if in a dream, like I always do, because that store is totes my dream come true. I visited my usual list of stuff I want but don’t have (yet! mwahahaha): Début and Amoureuse by Parfums Delrae, Victorian Posy by Penhaligon’s, Anice by Etro, Ambre Extrême by L’Artisan Parfumeur, etc etc. These are total wonders, people, and I was like ho-hum, what’s next? I thought maybe I had become tired of perfume, which would mean I don’t know who I am anymore. I became slightly alarmed.

Then K. smelled something and went, “Oh my god! This smells like…Middle Eastern food! Like hummus! It’s like, oh my god, Shawarma Time!” I sped over and sniffed. This was exactly what I wanted, what I was looking for without even knowing it: a perfume that’s a gourmand, but in a savory instead of a sweet way. My alarm turned to excitement: Yes! I want to smell like food! Specifically, I would like to enter a room reeking like a whole meze platter. I DID NOT KNOW THIS ABOUT MYSELF.

The perfume was Heeley’s Cèdre Blanc, which is a reworking of their Eau de Cèdre, which I’ve never smelled. The foody smell comes from its top notes of cumin and cardamom. Wait a few minutes and you get soft Lebanese cedar and musk. The drydown is very light—lighter than I’d like, actually—and violetty. Reader, I bought it. It’s making me happy (and hungry) every single day.

(Photo from International Property Buyer.)

CB Report, Part XII

My notes for Chandler’s talk in December somehow don’t include anything about the 12th scent he discussed, which was Gucci Rush. Liz F., do you remember what he said about it? All I remember is something about Calpis, a gross-sounding Japanese carbonated yogurt soda. He compared Rush to Japanese carbonated yogurt soda, and he meant it as a COMPLIMENT.

So, here, read CB’s brief description of Rush (and other fragrances) in The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York:

Synthetics give you range, from the amazing milky lactones making Gucci’s Rush the ingenious piece of abstract art that it is (if Versace’s The Dreamer is the smell of silk, Rush is the smell of the most excellent rayon) to the gorgeous synthetic iris the perfumer Olivier Polge created when he made Dior Homme.

And, what the heck, why not read Luca Turin’s review of Rush while you’re at it?

Gucci hasn't put a foot wrong for some time. Both Envy perfumes were landmarks, and expectations were high for their latest. The first sniff gave me a shock of recognition, like a long-forgotten but familiar face, and I spent a few busy minutes dredging my memory for the original impression...Dioressence! Not all of it, mind you, just a bit I loved, which in the original happened two or three hours into the story and felt like a warm breath whispering crazy things in my ear. That breath is back, now strong, loud, irresistible, a sultry wind fit to keep everyone stark awake and plotting indiscretions.… The charm of this perfume is entirely man-made, no mention of Nature, e.g., flowers, etc. This thing smells like a person. To be exact, thanks to the milky lactone note, it smells like an infant’s breath mixed with his mother’s hairspray.... What Rush can do, as all great art does, is create a yearning, then fill it with false memories of an invented past.
*****

And, for good measure, Tania Sanchez’s review:

Has anyone ever made a more perfect fragrance for a night out? Tom Ford reportedly took about two seconds to say yes to the formula after smelling it, and if anyone seems to take longer, hand him a decongestant. When this milky, woody, peachy-jasmine in its opaque red plastic rectangle arrived in shops, it had a bit of the shock of Dylan going electric: though Rush had the bone structure of the kind, cuddly lactonic florals that had kept nice girls smelling good for decades, it came in a joyful fuzz of hairspray and noise, with a delicious, dissonant Habanita-like base of patchouli-vetiver-vanilla putting a growl in its voice. This is not a fragrance for office, theater, or fine dining; it announces its sloppy good mood for miles about, and woe to anyone in the vicinity who planned on using his sense of smell for anything else. This is large-scale outdoor art. And what’s more, though it smells so new, so confident, so reckless, so of-the-moment, Rush manages at every stage to feel cozy and alive, never a cold stranger—this creature may be from outer space, but its blood is warm.
*****

(Image: Neon Freaks by davan1328, a photograph that Burr said reminded him of Rush.)

The One That Got Away

About two years ago I recommended a perfume to my best friend, D. She likes sweet things, sugary girlie flowery things, so I urged her to try Acqua di Parma’s Iris Nobile, a light vanilla confection with tender, pretty threads of iris and orange blossom and star anise, and a whisper of something sweaty and human underneath. She made it her Signature Scent. I love this perfume, and I loved D. I haven’t spoken to her in a year.

I still don’t know why we fell apart. That’s probably because there’s no one reason—we came apart gradually over a couple of years. Something soured between us and decayed, and then nothing was the same anymore. We were once like sisters—people often asked us if we were literally sisters—and I still can’t believe I don’t even talk to her now.

Why has no one made a movie about the best-friend breakup? In a lot of ways it’s more profound than a romantic breakup, maybe because we assume that a best friend is for life. It’s more like a divorce than it is like breaking up with a boyfriend or girlfriend. I thought that D. and I would be together forever. Losing her was like losing a home; I lost the thing that grounded me, that made me feel most like myself. For a while after we stopped talking, I wasn’t sure who I was supposed to be. And ever since, I’ve been dying for someone to make a movie or write a book about what I went through, to explain to me what happened and why. I need someone to make sense of what happened with us, because it still makes no sense to me.

Of course there are some things I do understand: We lived in different cities for the majority of our friendship. When I moved to her city, the one she’d lived in all her life, the proximity put too much pressure on the relationship. It’s so much easier to lean on someone from afar, through phone calls and frequent visits; it’s harder to be there for someone when they can be at your front door within minutes. Living far away had allowed us both to ignore the changes that would eventually split us up: The death of her mother changed her profoundly, erasing much of the careless joy that made her a perfect foil for my dark moodiness; she remained in the safe cocoon of grad school while I worked job after job, making a career and the new kinds of friends that the working world brings; and of course, inevitably, there was the boyfriend that I didn’t get along with, the one who signaled just how different our lives and choices had become. I’m a little bit embarrassed to say that I became obsessed with the second season of The Hills when our friendship hit the skids; the Lauren and Heidi breakup, spurred as it was by Heidi’s relationship with the poisonous Spencer, was the closest thing I could find to what I was going through. After D. blew me off for the umpteenth time to hang out with her man, I imagined saying, as Lauren did to Heidi, “I have to REMIND YOU to be my best friend!” and “It’s not going to be fine until you and he are broken up!” Then I realized that I was relating with Lauren Conrad, who is a crazy and controlling friend, and I felt justly ashamed.

I know this is all kinda vague, but I don’t want to give out too many details because I don’t think it’s nice or fair to talk explicitly about your side of a breakup in public without the other person’s participation or permission. Here is what I feel comfortable saying: We met in college, where we shared the same mentor, who introduced us during our senior year. We got along so well, so fast, I lamented the three years we went to the same school without really knowing each other. When I had a crisis at the end of that school year, D. rescued me, took me in and put me back together. She was so sweet and so full of goodness that our mutual friend R. dubbed her the Milkmaid of Human Kindness. There was a time when our differences were complementary and sealed us together: her lightness vs. my darkness; the cool city kid vs. the one who grew up in the Midwestern suburbs; the skinny long-haired girl vs. me, tomboyish and neither fat nor thin; the serious student of classics vs. the girl who studied queer theory and Shakespeare and teen culture and film theory and the history of slavery and the history of clothes and still hasn’t made up her (my) mind what she wants to do for a living. When we both still smoked, we smoked cigarette after cigarette together in her apartment, talking about boys and families and our futures, which seemed, as brand-new college graduates, limitless and thrilling. When my parents came to visit, D. said all the butts in the ashtray were hers. I still remember my mom’s eyes widening in horror. I remember thinking, What a good friend.

Our 15-year friendship was the kind where nothing that happened to me felt real until I had discussed it with D. When I visited her, we’d watch terrible scary movies On Demand and stay up until 3 AM talking about every single thing in the world. When we were in our own cities this thing would happen all the time: One of us would tell the other, on the phone, about something she’d bought that day, and the other would say “Oh my god! I just bought the same exact thing yesterday!” We called this supernatural connection our DNA: as in D and A.

Our last date together was to see a movie that I didn’t want to see but she did. It was horrible; I wondered when I lost the ability to enjoy a bad scary movie with D. I knew at that moment that I’d never get it back.

This is a perfume blog, so I will talk about perfume. I have a bottle of Iris Nobile (an FB!) that I haven’t been able to use since the D. breakup. I put some on today, though, as an experiment. It is absolutely lovely, ethereal and earthy at once. It smells like innocence that’s just waking up and hitting puberty. It reminds me of stretching my arms on the first warm day of spring, and of spending a whole day outdoors and coming home smelling like grass, dirt, flowers and sweat, and of course it reminds me of D. It’s unfair that it reminds me so much of her; I wore this perfume before I ever recommended it to her. But she wore it better than I ever could. On me, its sweet and innocent qualities feel aspirational at best and at worst like a lie, whereas they’re exactly what you would expect the Milkmaid of Human Kindness to smell like. It reminds me of her so much that right after putting it on I wrote this post. It might be too depressing to ever wear this again; on the other hand, I miss our friendship, and I’m almost at the point where it’s nice to be reminded of when it was good.

(Image stolen from Living the Dream.)

CB Report, Part XI

As hot as Jenny Shimizu looked in those cK One ads, and as cool as the unisex idea was at the time, I never could abide the smell of that perfume. To me it’s cloying, like a Sweet Tart forgotten in a jean-jacket pocket and left there to molder.

Ch. Burr had some insightful things to say about it, though:

In 1992, perfumer Jacques Cavallier created one of the greatest examples of what is known as linear perfumery, L’Eau d’Issey. Japanese consumers tend to dislike perfumes that evolve on skin—fundamentally contrary to French perfumes, which are explicity built with openings, first acts and second acts—and L’Eau d’Issey was absolutely linear, singing the exact same unvarying tone from start to fadeout.

Two years later, Alberto Morillas and Harry Frémont, under the creative direction of Ann Gottlieb, produced an innovation at least as important. The innovations were two, actually. First, the juice continued the use of dihdromyrcenol that started with Tide detergent and continued with Drakkar Noir and Cool Water, and advanced the American hygienic school another significant step. Second was the marketing. When cK One came on the market, no successful unisex scent had ever been introduced. This one exploded. It was a revolution in its day and it remains an aesthetic benchmark. Try cK One again, and you’ll rediscover what another generation defined as clean and fresh. What I think is interesing about cK One is that is completely removed from the natural world. This is a Hollywood version of spring rain. It’s the freshness of laundry washed in the artificial gravity of a space colony, molecules whose scent we have been conditioned to associate with clean. There is nothing wrong with that per se. It simply means this scent mixes memory very powerfully with desire.

Jean-Claude Ellena once said to me: “There are two great poles of perfumery. Latin and Anglo-Saxon. Seduction and hygiene. The Latin wants to seduce; he says, ‘See how sexy I am. I’m coming to you.’ The American says, ‘See how clean I am. You can come to me.’” Ellena’s reaction also results from his impatience with anything too easy. “Today if I want to please Americans,” he told me, “I just put in 30 percent clean notes automatically. I know they’re going to say, ‘Oh, we love it!’” He rolled his eyes and pronounced, very dryly, “CK One,” and looked away into the middle distance.

CB Report, Part X

The 10th blotter that Chilly B passed out was a perverse choice. I’ll let him explain:

This scent was originally quite simple: It has a rose aspect (created with synthetic linalool, phenyl ethyl alcohol, geraniol) with a woody/mossy angle (probably inexpensive wood synthetics like Iso-E-Super), some linalyl acetate to give it a fresh/citrus angle, and some mid-century musks like Galaxolide for warmth. It was inexpensive. It is a fragrance that was never meant to be worn by anyone. It revolutionized the aesthetics and changed the history of perfumery.

In 1946, Procter & Gamble launched Tide laundry detergent. In 1947, they added fragrance. This is the latest iteration of that fragrance.

The fragrance made for scenting Tide has changed over time, but the concept has remained very much the same. Today there are new materials:

• hexyl cinnamic aldehyde
• the next generation of macrocyclic musks like ethylene bracylate and two Firmenich captives, Muscenone Delta and Habanolide

Tide uses these in huge amounts. In fact P&G trains and has more perfumers, and it buys more perfume raw materials, than any other company in the world. Functional perfumery is actually hugely important.

There are problems to be overcome with functional perfumery. In Tide, the detergent has surfactants and polymers that have a “chemical” odor, so masking that is the job of the scent. Enzymes like to chew on things, for example esters; the problem is that many fragrance materials are esters, so functional perfumers have to use fragrance raw materials that are not eaten by enzymes. Which means they have to be smarter and more inventive.

The synthetic musks used in Tide came to be associated with cleanliness and hygiene. But note: This “fresh” was not particularly “natural.” In fact I would argue that it was a very conscious stepping away from nature. This is not an actual mountain waterfall with slimy moss and giardia in the water. This is a waterfall on a gas plasma screen, sterilized and germ free.

You have a constantly reinforced memory of the scent. Every time you get dressed, you are being trained like one of Pavlov’s dogs that this scent means clean and fresh, that it is appealing and healthy. This is where we get the scents marketed under the name Kenneth Cole.

(Image: Shadows by Maluni.)

Call for Brainstorms

I just got this email from J.:

Can you guys, or will you, address the myth of, or successes in the "unisex" scent category on your blog? Is there anything that strikes a beguiling macho balance, or at least one that doesn't make a dude smell like whore lotion or a girl like cab air freshners? I AM PERPLEXED.

ALSO, is there anything that smells like a male sculptor that works in a basement with clay? Like earthy dryer sheets, but not too earthy-dirt. Like the desert on tumble dry.

For the first one I have a few thoughts of medium quality. They are:

Anvers I: The masculine parts are the spices and the wood and the femme balance is struck with flowers and amber. My husbot wears this sometimes, but so do I.

Tom Ford Extreme: It’s resiny like charred wood but soft like cedar and cinnamon. It’s strong enough for a woman but made for a man.

Diorella: Strong enough for a man but made for a woman. It’s Greta Garbo smoking a long cigarette in a garden of citrus and herbs and honeysuckle, while reading a sour-smelling musty musky old book.

There’s also, of course, the perennial unisex favorite Eau Sauvage, but that might be too extroverted for J.’s taste.

Oh! And how about Malle’s French Lover? Or something from the L’Artisan spice trio? Or, oh my god, how could I forget By Kilian’s Cruel Intentions? Try that one, J. I think that you will like it.

Commenters past have mentioned these women’s perfumes for men, too:

Cybil suggested Hermès’s Kelly Calèche. Liz F. likes Passage d’Enfer on a man. Gemma says that Guerlain’s Vol de Nuit would be great on a dude, too. “It smells like you could crawl inside it and cozy up,” she said. Liz recommends Stella Rose Absolute: “I remember smelling it on a man after a long flight and maybe my stale sleepiness slurred my judgement (I'm not so crazy about that perfume, actually) but it smelled magical.”

I don’t have any ideas for the tumble-dried desert. Anyone??? Or do you have more ideas for good unisex perfumes? Let’s get some heads together on this one.