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.

The Bright Side: Things I'm Looking Forward To

So there's bad news (no more quarterly installments from Perfumes: the Guide) but, hey, cheer up, there's plenty of good news, too. The fragrance industry is full of same old /same old (Another fruity floral--for moi? You...shouldn't have.) but every once in a while there are little glimmers of hope which manage to capture my attention. Here's where I'm finding the silver lining lately:

YSL Parisienne

I'm a big fan of Paris. Dirty secret: I layer the edp with patchouli (Patchouli Antique, Molinard, Comme des Garçons Luxe, Demeter). As anyone who even cursorily scans this blog knows, I'm an even bigger Sophia Grojsman fan. So the news that Paris is being updated or reinterpreted is music to my ears. There have been flankers (between 1999 and 2007: Paris Premieres Roses, Paris Roses de Bois, Paris Roses Enchantees, Paris Roses des Vergers Springtime, Paris Jardins Romantiques, and, more remotely affiliated, Baby Doll Paris) and others outside the corporate auspices of YSL have tried to approximate the original's greatness, but nothing comes close to that dew-drenched, violet colored rose marinated in wine.

I might be very much bored by yet another mainstream rose release, were it not for the participation of Grojsman. I'm not yet sure what kind of influence collaborator Sophie Labbe will have on the fragrance. I haven't been crazy about much if anything she's done up to now. But the description gets my mind racing. Damask rose, violet, peony, patchouli, and vetiver are nothing to shout about. But "a vinyl accord evoking metal gloss and varnish"? Someone's been paying attention to the more avant garde sectors of niche perfumery. While I doubt Parisienne will be anything close to Secretions Magnifiques, it is at least embracing an imaginative arena which moves beyond the tried and true, welcoming a broader range of fantasy projection from its consumer.

Halston

I have several bottles of Halston, and like them all, though I do notice differences. I have what appears to be parfum extrait from the early eighties, a cologne from a little later, and an edt I purchased last year at the mall for twenty bucks. Bernard Chant is credited with the original Halston, which I remember fondly from 1975. My sister and her friends wore it, and for a long time I couldn't smell it without conjuring a vision of her pink calico canopy bed. Regardless, it seemed very adult to me at the time--picture Carol King's Tapestry album playing in the background (everyone was listening to it; did any of us have a clue what she was really talking about?) --more so than Anais Anais, which came out three years later and seemed practically juvenile by comparison, custom made to match my sister's teenage bedroom decor.

The trend for reviving old fragrances with newer materials and a different, more ostensibly modern approach reminds me of the film industry's penchant for remaking classics. Sometimes the talent and the magic are there, and the results are a welcome surprise (see, say, Down and Out in Beverly Hills). Sometimes, you get a shrill, grasping approximation, an attempt to fix what wasn't broken (see Annette Benning and Meg Ryan in The Women, or Steve Carell in Get Smart). The Halston I know and love--all versions--is or was wonderfully woody, with weird herbal, mossy, and floral streaks zig-zagging through its structure and a bedrock warmth unique to Chant.

Elizabeth Arden now holds the license to market Halston fragrances, and has appointed perfumer Carlos Benaim to refashion the original Halston perfume--as a floriental. I don't remember anything like black currant in Bernard Chant's chypre, but this combination might just do the trick of approaching the original's strange contrasts at the very least.

Encre Noire Pour Elle

Basenotes reports that Christine Nagel, the nose behind one of my favorite fragrances, Encre Noire, has created a version for the ladies, Pour Elle. This will be news to many women I know, who claim Encre Noire as their own in a sublimely uncomplicated way. For me, there's such an exciting charge involved in crossing the aisle to grab a bottle of perfume in my fist. I use it not just to subvert or disregard boring gender codes and boundaries but to enter into an imaginative space few in the fragrance industry think to provide my sex entry into. I think many women must feel the same. For years they've been grabbing cologne off the bathroom shelf, walking around in someone else's pants. Hearing about Encre Noire Pour Elle, part of me inwardly sighs. Here's the line, it says. Let's not get out of control here. Let's all keep our seats.

Then again, it's Christine Nagel, she of the wondrous Fendi Theorema, Miss Dior Cherie, A*Men Pure Coffee, Armani Prive Ambre Soie, Yves Rocher Rose Absolue, and John Galliano (you might not like it so much. I happen to love it). "Why should rose be for females and vetiver for males?" She asked in a recent interview. "Who decides this?" The answer is in the question. There is a vetiver for females. It's called Encre Noire. And Rose Absolue smells great on me.

Fath de Fath

I have it on good authority that one of the biggest detriments to the success of Fath de Fath was its packaging. The bottle leaked. I'm inclined to believe this, as a bottle I bought my mother leaked in transit, one of only two perfumes I've known to do so. Ask me some time about my flight from Greece last year and the leaky bottle of Luxe Patchouli. I made many friends on that packed airplane, I can tell you.

Where did I read about a reorchestration of Fath de Fath? I'm guessing it was Nowsmellthis. Some faint ghost of the infamous Iris Gris is also rumored to be in the works. My hopes are set higher for Fath de Fath, as there's less room to screw it up. Fath de Fath was a lovely balance of fruit and woods, though the pyramid provided by osmoz lists nothing much which could be misconstrued as woodsy, per se. Pear and tuberose do odd things together in Fath de Fath. Were there musks and civet in this 1994 composition? If so, they won't be resurrected. Still, the Benzoin Fath de Fath contained had a lot to do with the fragrance's chemistry, and no one has banned benzoin yet--or have they?

Futur

Another re-release from Robert Piguet, Futur has been brought back from the past. I don't really care what they've done to it. Baghari and Visa were revisited with sensitivity and imagination. I own both and love them. If also by Aurelien Guichard, the Futur, I predict, will look just as good. From the Piguet website:

"She is witty, outspoken, and supremely confident. Her style is effortless. Her fragrance intensely feminine."

Here we go again. She, she, she. The company calls Futur a green woody floral fragrance, which just about covers the bases this side of oriental. I repeat: I do not care. I have Fracas, Bandit, and the afore-mentioned Visa and Baghari. I want a little army of those black block bottles, with their Bauhaus font and packaging.

Aramis Gentleman's Collection

What could be more exciting than the re-release of eight classic Aramis masculines? JHL alone is more than anyone can ask for. Add to this Devin, New West, Aramis 900, and Tuscany (the remaining two will not be sold in the U.S.). And fantastic pricing. 100 ml at 48 bucks seems downright old fashioned. There are fanatical attachments to Havana all over the blogs. I haven't smelled it and can't say why--though birch tar, coriander, and leather is all I need to hear. Get at me in September. 900 is a fantastic, feral rose, Chant's inversion of Aromatics Elixir. Devin is Aliage in a tux.

I owned a bottle of JHL back in the early eighties and was very pleased with myself, but until recently, when I came across a few fugitive bottles in a remote department store, I couldn't remember why. Smelling it again, I knew. In case you've never smelled JHL, imagine Youth Dew making love to after shave. I'm guessing I loved it so much because it was the best of both worlds, masculine and feminine, a fragrance through which I could bring the worlds of my divorced parents back together.

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.

Going Green, Part Two: Galbanum

With its penetrating, pine-like top note and slightly bitter, woody base, galbanum makes green pop, as if one of the green chypres had slapped you hard in the face with a chunk of bundled stems. Galbanum is a gum resin derived from certain Persian plant species grown abundantly in Iran. Its large flowering heads resemble those of fennel.

The essential oil has long been well-regarded by occultists. Alistair Crowley associated the aroma's properties with air, though it just as readily evokes earth. Depending on who you consult, galbanum is said to be a respiratory aide and an augment to psychic abilities. Pagan witchcraft regards it as a protectant. Perfumers, themselves alchemists of sorts, use it to add a certain kind of magic to their compositions. Part frankincense, part vetiver, its leafy terpenoid astringency ventilates the pastures of Carven’s Ma Griffe, Cellier’s Vent Vert, Ivoire de Balmain, Pheromone, Devin, Chanel No. 19 and, most spectacularly, Estee Lauder’s Aliage, which is more gale force than languid breeze.

Ivoire would fall on one end of the galbanum spectrum, Aliage on the other, with Pheromone following closely behind. Ivoire uses galbanum subtly, like its aldehydes, as a bolster to its floral accord. The effect is a rose bush surrounded by crisp, dry hay. Where Ivoire is ultimately arid, still, and slightly toasted, Vent Vert glistens, shimmering indefinitely with activity. Think of a lime rind rubbed into geranium leaves and you begin to apprehend Vent Vert’s effervescent character. Considered by some the first green fragrance, Vent Vert has a slightly raw dissonance, in large part due to galbanum. Chanel No. 19 is the adult counterpart to Vent Vert, smooth and transparent, a green floral quietly electrified by the glow of camphor.

Vent Vert and Ivoire arrange themselves parenthetically on either side of Gucci Envy for Women, which is something of a happy compromise between the two. All three share floral notes: hyacinth, rose, lily of the valley. Famously obsessed over by Tom Ford and Maurice Roucel, Envy's tall, slender bottle reflects the fragrance’s intrinsic angularity. Even the silver cap references something icily metallic within the construction. Envy is hard to articulate, and that metal sheen might strike you as a powdery hybrid of synthetic iris and musk, until you recognize the presence of galbanum, which like eucalyptus whiffs of menthol. Envy is a gorgeously understated use of the note, tart and dry simultaneously.

Don't be too quick to dismiss Pheromone. It's something of a galbanum retrospective, with florals and frankincense and pungent, sharp greens. This is chartreuse green, a bright landscape painted on black velvet in bold, broad strokes. The results are just this side of over the top - but hands down, the apogee of galbanum’s use in perfumery, still unmatched and, amazingly, still around, is Aliage. Like Envy its notes include peach, rose and jasmine, but Aliage bursts into coniferous territory Envy cautiously skirts, possessing a sucker punch of pine, thyme, vetiver, and oakmoss. Simulating a virtual reality of flowers shellacked in Vick’s Vapo-Rub, it’s like nothing you’ve ever smelled, and strangely familiar. Aliage is shockingly inexpensive.

Galbanum is mercurial, effecting compositions in subtly different ways. It smells modern, though, along with aldehydes, it was the previous generation’s equivalent to the fruity accords which buoy contemporary florals to varying degrees and towards often vastly different ends. The smell is intensely, viscerally green, smelling of grass and aromatic weeds and herbs. It penetrates your consciousness and roots there, a vivid inhalation of the great Out There.