This Week at the Perfume Counter: Omaha

This Christmas, I puchased Guerlain Homme as a present for my father, thinking it would be a good everyday scent for a guy who probably doesn't have many and tends to play it safe. I guess I have no memory, and simply put early indications of his apparently intrinsic sophistication out of my mind temporarily. Entering his bathroom, I saw a 4.2 ounce bottle of Guerlain Heritage on the counter. It was half empty. I smelled what seemed like natural musks in it, so I assume it dates back to the time of the fragrance's release.

Seeing it there brought back childhood memories of my father's previous colognes. He never seemed to have more than one at a time--my father is a deeply pragmatic person when it comes to finances and possessions--but he did have, at some point, Aramis and Aramis 900. I remember his long dressing room, with its full-length mirror and the double sinks, which always smelled of one or the other. My dad used splash bottles. My aunt tells me she remembers him wearing Old Spice as a very young man, so maybe he picked up the habit there. His Heritage is also a splash.

Aramis Devin: Another Country

I've always loved Devin, but it's so close to Aliage, and the lasting power is so inferior to its older sister, that I've opted out of buying it. Now that Aramis has re-released many of its forgotten classics, some of which were discontinued, I've revisited, and I see my error. If you told me one of my favorite movies was being remade, I imagine I wouldn't be that interested. If you told me the director was making a sequel on the same themes with some of the same actors, I'd pre-order my ticket.

I don't know that Bernard Chant, the nose behind Devin, had anything to do with Aliage. I assume he did, though I've seen Francis Camail listed as the Perfumer. I don't contest that, though the earliest credit I can find for Camail is Eau d'Hadrien (with Annick Goutal). That was in 1981. An Estee Lauder fragrance, Aliage came out in 1972. It certainly bears the woody-herbaceous imprint of Chant, but so does Aramis 900, and I don't know that he did that either.

Devin (1977) was the second fragrance release from Aramis, an Estee Lauder offshoot devoted to male grooming products. Chant inaugurated the Aramis line, in 1966, with Aramis Cologne. Aramis was Chant's Cabochard, her cheeks slapped with citrus aftershave. Aramis and Estee Lauder fragrances are curious in their approach to gender. Azuree, released about five years after Aramis, is its androgynous counterpart. It's as if the man who was Aramis, after dressing in female drag, then put a suit on top of his gown. Aramis 900 is strikingly similar to Aromatics Elixir, a fragrance Chant orchestrated for Clinique. JHL (1982) puts big boy pants on Youth Dew and Cinnabar, classic Lauder feminines, monogramming them with Mr. Lauder's initials.

Aliage was somewhat butch to begin with. It was promoted as a Sport Fragrance, though I'm hard-pressed to come up with a sport women were playing back in 72 which might have lent itself to such a powerful onslaught of resins, woods, camphor and jasmine, a combined effect nearly nuclear in strength. The chrome and glass bottle, with its seventies type, recalls the indoor tennis courts of my youth: curvy modular surfaces, corrugated metals and amber glass.

I picture women in short tennis skirts, hair fixed to their foreheads by sweat, but the ad for Aliage shows a fancy lady perched on the back of an open station wagon, holding what appears to be a polo stick. She's dressed in a herringbone pantsuit, a tweed overcoat slung over her shoulders. Her shirt looks like something a man would wear. I'm not sure a man would fancy her beret, but its jaunty angle doesn't exactly broadcast the girl next door, or anywhere nearby. The look is finished off with leather gloves and ankle boots. A flannel blanket hangs over the tailgate, on top of which: a picnic basket, phallic bread loaf and wine bottle poking out the top. Because ads of this sort are market tested to within an inch of their lives, I take it no room was left for accident here. The message seems to be very much about women's lib and a spirit of emancipation which begins with a mindset and extends into lifestyle.

Interesting that Devin should take such a different approach. While its advertising campaign mirrored that of Aliage in key ways (the outdoors, fresh air, green backdrop) it was practically unconscious by comparison. It was billed as a "country cologne: a rich, sophisticated fragrance that captures the relaxed, unhurried attitude of the country life." I'm not exactly sure what the country life looks like, but Devin seemed determined to articulate it. I've tracked down three adverts for Devin. All show a scruffy male in a decidedly contemplative mood. The setting might best be described as elbow-patch rural. Surrounded by trees, open country roads, and grassy fields, the model seems to be far away (mentally and physically) from the sporting life. Taken together, Devin and Aliage indicate a pretty blatant reversal of roles. While women navigate the playing field, men go out to pasture.

Aliage never loses its bluster. It's a wind that never stops blowing. In effect, it remains active, whereas Devin is passive. Aldehydes make the top notes (orange, artemisia, lavender, bergamot, galbanum, and lemon) shimmer like sunlight through overhanging tree branches. But Devin isn't bright like Aliage, which remains piquant. The middle notes are dense and moody: carnation, cinnamon, jasmine, caraway and pine tree needles. Compare this to the middle notes of Aliage: pine tree, jasmine, caraway, Brazilian rosewood. In Devin, the mixture feels velvety, the lambswool collar of a knit sweater rubbing against your face. The effect is partly cloudy, and none of the ads depicts a sunny setting. Carnation and cinnamon add a spicy, simmering quality. Someone's cooking in the kitchen, somewhere in the distance, but it isn't a woman.

The dry down of Devin is mellower still. The basenotes read like a litany of library aromas: labdanum, leather, amber, patchouli, musk, oakmoss, cedar. Aliage subtracts the leathers and languor, livening things up with vetiver and myrrh. Devin doesn't really remind me of the outdoors, whatever the intent. I see a domestic, if equally solitary, scene; a dark glass of tawny port, leather arm chairs, heavy drapes, vintage books, wood paneled walls, a burgundy Persian rug. It isn't entirely insular. The window provides a view, and is cracked, but only just so. Looks like it might rain. The woman of the house is out there with her polo stick, oblivious to the forecast.

Une Rose

Like most perfume aficionados, I have my favorite accords. I can spend hours, days, or months, tracking a good leather scent down, and toward that end have amassed: Knize Ten, Tabac Blond, Cuir de Russie, and any number of lesser known specimens. My nose is always alert for galbanum, and iris is a big draw as well, as are tobacco, oakmoss, and virtually all things green. There are a lot to choose from in each of these categories, and I'm kept pretty happy, but rose, another favorite, has eluded me.

It isn't that I haven't found rose fragrances I like, or even that I've been looking for something incredibly specific, which is to say something I know before I smell it, as opposed to the other way around. It's just that most rose fragrances I've smelled or purchased haven't seemed exactly right for me, however much I admire them. Rose is in so many perfumes and colognes to varying degrees, right up top or submerged down below. I've enjoyed some of the masculines, like Cerruti 1881 and Aramis 900, and many of what I call the cult roses, particularly Ungaro III and Alain Delon Iquitos. I've looked into all sorts of unisex roses, like L'Artisan's fleeting Voleur de Roses, for instance. I enjoy many of the alleged feminines too--maybe even most of all--like Cannabis Rose, Paris, and Mille et Une Roses. I'll take high end, like the Rosines, and low, like Coty Exclamation. I have no shame. Some of these I own and wear occasionally, but none come close to Frederic Malle's Une Rose, which struck me as the perfect rose, perfect for me, from the moment I first smelled it.

Une Rose was created in 2003 by Edouard Flechier, the man behind Poison, among others. Une Rose is to rose what Poison is to tuberose, and takes over the senses in similar ways. The profile for Flechier on the Malle website states that in 1967 he entered the perfumery school of Roure Bertrand Dupont and studied with the son of the school's founder, Jean Carles, he of such classics as Shocking de Schiaparelli, Miss Dior, and Ma Griffe.

Une Rose conforms in theory to the vogue for what Abigail recently called the "dirty rose." To me this phrase, aside from basically alerting the consumer she or he is not looking at a bottle of "old fashioned" rose perfume, is practically useless. It's true there's a grunge note to Une Rose, as with Voleur de Roses and any number of contemporary rose fragrances. Often, dirty is meant in a literal way, indicating that the fragrance smells of the soil it was theoretically yanked from. In the case of Une Rose it seems to mean animalic, too. But Une Rose is much more complicated than this kind of simplistic designation can account for. The notes are listed as wine dregs and truffles, and though these pyramids are usually more fanciful than factual, this one offers a useful imaginative keyhole into the perfume.

I sprayed Une Rose at Barney's on a drizzly day in Seattle and forgot about it--for a few minutes, anyway. When I stepped outside it came rushing back at me full force, and seemed a perfect sensory accompaniment to the weather, lushly colored the way things are on an overcast day, more deeply saturated than otherwise, with a density I would probably be apt to characterize as romantic in the rain. It seemed so full-bodied you could get drunk on it, so when I later saw "wine dregs" on the packaging it made sense to me. I couldn't stop sniffing my wrist. I couldn't stop thinking of a fall day back in high school when I'd worn a blood red flannel shirt I'd gotten at a thrift store, and somehow, because of that color, felt ten times moodier than I had any right to be, totally melodramatic, as if I were a perfect accompaniment to the golds and browns falling off the trees out the window. The word intoxicating gets thrown around a lot when discussing perfume, but Une Rose is one of the few scents I feel the word isn't compromised by, and when I open my cabinet it seems to stand out in a burnished glow, drawing my attention among the other boxes and bottles.

Cavemen in Pinafores: Perfume Does Drag

The other day, applying a perfume ostensibly intended for women, I thought, "I really better butch it up today if I expect to pull this one off."

Funny thing, though, how all that works: half way through the morning, I realized the perfume itself provided more than enough swagger. Maybe you know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the kind of fragrance which can come across like Corporal Klinger on M.A.S.H. All the markers are there: the satin, the tulle, the rouge, some lipstick. The hair is curled softly; it just so happens it's growing on the chest.

Like many male perfume bloggers I'm decidedly androgynous in my tastes, and feel strongly that a scent, though it tells a story in the bottle, only reaches conclusion on the wearer. Fragrance colludes with personality, and often works wonders when played against type. A guy in Lolita Lempicka, as Tania Sanchez suggests, can be a startling thing, akin to seeing the same tired movie with an entirely different cast. I'm not averse to wearing the allegedly chronic girly, such as Paris, Joy, or Herrera. What I'm getting at here is slightly different: the scent which mixes messages before one even applies it, and presents an even more complicated story on the skin.

The most obvious choice would be Black Orchid, a scent I, like many others, go back and forth on. Just when I decide it's silly and overrated, it changes my mind. Regardless, it bursts into the room, rattling the glassware. I think back to the first time I experienced it, at Sephora. I sprayed it on the back of my hand and instantly felt as though I'd opened a porn mag inside the Hallmark store. It felt shocking, like Angel once had, so wrong it was right. I admired it the way I admired a drag queen I walked the east village with one Saturday night in the nineties, before the area went antiseptic. You never knew what might happen to you out on the street, unless you were with someone so flagrantly confrontational, in which case you could expect to be egged. This particular drag queen gave it as much as she got it, and seemed fifty feet tall. This was a personality with the power to affect whatever environment it entered, not just interacting with it but altering it. Whatever you think of the dress and the make-up, you have to admire the balls.

Poison is so deeply associated with mile high bangs and Mildred Pierce shoulder pads, so tangled up in a cluster of mental recollections of the eighties (often heightened to the point of distortion) that one easily forgets or is prohibited from seeing at all how essentially masculine it is. Forget the tuberose; to smell Poison is to inhale a strange medley of spices most florals avoid at all costs. Coriander and carnation give Poison a peppery, woody aspect, embellishing the perfume's feminine properties with such a wallop of gusto that the category short circuits. I wear Poison occasionally. Everyone recognizes it, until they realize I'm the source. Then they're not so sure. How could it be Poison? What guy would have the guts to put it on? That slight element of surprise can allow a mental adjustment, enabling one to experience Poison outside its enforced context of era-specific excess and unfortunate-to-tragic fashion misfires.

Like many of the vintage orientals, Bal a Versailles is a bit of a winking Jesus, first uber-fem, then a resounding baritone. Some might say that winking is decidedly coquettish, settling the matter. But Bal a Versailles winks at such a rapid clip that the movement ceases to register. What's left is a kinetic, subterranean interplay between gendered codes and preconceptions. Some say the opening is inarguably feminine. I say nothing is inarguably feminine. Tie as many strings of pearls as you like around the neck of Barbara Bush. Dress her up in dowdy. Tell me she's simply a very straightforward, no nonsense woman, a la Barbara Stanwyck or, less generously, Janet Reno (which opens up another can of worms). I'm still not convinced George Sr. isn't in fact a tranny chaser. Which isn't to say Barbara isn't a woman. Just to say that a man attracted to her has wonky ideas about gender and tastes which, if dissected, might reveal unexpected, category-busting rather than -defining answers. It isn't that Bal a Versailles is beyond gender, but how many distortion filters can you put jasmine and rose through before they start going the other way? Bal a Versailles is the answer in action, working itself out right under your nose.

Spend some time with the oeuvre of Bernard Chant, and you'll start to notice certain similarities, not just between the feminines but between the feminines and their male counterparts. Many of Chant's male and female fragrances are so close in composition that it becomes increasingly difficult to regard the line supposedly separating them as anything but a mental construct. I sometimes wonder if Chant was a conceptual artist working in the field of perfume. It's as though he was engaged in a lifelong experiment. Create scents which resemble each other so closely that to discern gender differences between them would prove a bit like seeing the Emperor's new clothes. The only truly emphatic separation between the galbanum-driven Alliage and Devin are a few yards of marble flooring at Macy's and Saks. Likewise the woody-herbaceous rose of Aramis 900 and Aromatics Elixir, while Azuree and Cabochard lock eyes with Aramis. Was it Chant's project to demonstrate how little tweaking is required to edge a masculine into the feminine and vice versa? The distinctions between his masculines and feminines are so subtle as to imply mere formality. It's interesting to see the male consumer's largely negative reaction to Devin, such that it is (the fragrance remains, like Aramis 900, little known). Alliage, on the other hand, seems better understood. But it operates on a decibel one would consider more robust than a proper feminine. And if you're a guy who likes your fragrances to last, hop on over to the women's department. The only difference that counts between Alliage and Devin, it turns out, is a matter of hours.

Other fragrances which mix the gender codes: Cinnabar, Youth Dew, Gucci Envy, Habanitas, L'Heure Bleue, Chanel Cuir De Russie, Dune, La Nuit, Feminite Du Bois, Angel, Dioressence, Kingdom, Funny!, Caron Infini, Arpege.

Aramis 900

It’s difficult to imagine anyone but Bernard Chant behind Aramis 900. After all, he made everything else that smells like it, excepting Bandit.

Released in 1973, Araqmis 900 is a woody, herbal masculine with a bright cirtus opening and a dense, deep rose heart.

The fragrance has a slightly fecal, animalic character, most noticeably up top, and relates to the chypres Chant is famous for. It has the tang of Aramis, Azuree, and Cabochard, not just up top but at the base, likely from vetiver, and their floral embellishments too.

Luca Turin was surprised to learn that today's Aramis is nearly identical to the old Cabochard. It might surprise less seasoned connoisseurs just how similar Aramis 900 is to Aromatics Elixir. What surprises more than anything is how little difference there is between them. If they're brother/sister fragrances, then their relationship is decidedly incestuous.

It goes some way toward indicating how conditioned we are to segregate fragrances down a gender divide. Once the marketers have assured us enough that one can be safely worn by women and the other by men, we separate them in our minds, convincing ourselves the distinctions remain safely in place. A similar phenomenon tends to happen in general with fragrances, complicating things. Until someone points out the marked presence of violet in Halston, you might smell only “floral” and “woods.” Once you’re told, you can hardly smell anything else. That smell is deeply tapped in to memory is old news. Few explore how suggestible the sense is.

The truth is that if you’re inclined to wear 900 you might as well cross the aisle and pick up AE instead. While both are strong, AE is stronger, its rose less apologetic, its sillage more robust and therefore perhaps manlier than its male counterpart. Aramis 900 handles rose beautifully, despite or even due to that fecal note (those who go on about a dirty rose clearly haven’t yet smelled one rubbed in dog mess) but there’s no denying that 900 ultimately smells like the faint whiff left once AE leaves the room.

Aramis 900 runs about 45-50 dollars for 100 ml. You can find it sometimes in the department store with the Aramis fragrances for men.