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.

Thoughts on formulations and reformulations

The other day I was in a perfume shop and smelled Fahrenheit. I was shocked when I brought the card up to my nose because it smelled so different than the bottle I own. It was richer, for one, and I started to wonder if maybe the tester was an older version. I could smell leather, and I never get leather from my wimpy excuse for the fragrance, which practically dribbles out of the nozzle. What if I went into this store and bought a bottle and got it home and it smelled nothing like the tester did, because the two were different formulations? How can you be sure which version you have at any given point?

It made me wonder. I have three different versions of Arpege, and though you can see the bone structure in all of them, they get more interesting the older they are. The newer version is nice enough but has none of the floral complexity, none of the smooth diffusion I get from the others. It also has a strong whiff of what smells to me like synthetic vetiver, and I'm starting to wonder about that, too, because I smell the same note presiding over the latest reformulations of Mitsouko, Je Reviens, Chanel No. 5 and White Linen. What is this note, exactly, and what's it doing in so many contemporary reinterpretations?

The Fahrenheit I own smells good enough, if just--and you can sense that original silhouette in it, if watered down to transparency--whereas the one I smelled in Sephora last week is atrociously far removed. I can barely see the relation. They seem to have simply gutted it. White Linen, Worth, and the others have fared better in the face of restrictions and penny pinchers; then again, I don't have the originals at hand to run comparisons. The old Arpege is preferable enough that I worry my 3.4 ounce bottle will run out sometime in my lifetime.

Today I read the Chandler Burr review of Britney Spears Midnight Curious. I was curious myself, and drove over to the store to smell it. Had I missed something good all this time? Not really. The discrepancy between what I smelled and how he talked about it left me confused. It smelled fairly generic to me for what it was: an intensely sweet bluebbery accord, part rubber Barbie skin, part scratch and sniff pie. I thought, well if he's going to champion this dreck I'm going to stop telling myself not to buy that bottle of Giorgio Red simply because it's gauche.

For twenty dollars I got an ounce and a half. I sprayed some on my arm once I was in the car and instantly started wondering what it used to smell like. I appreciate it now, but I suspect natural musks made it much different, like the old Arpege and Fahrenheit. Something about the current Red has always smelled slightly askew to me. I feel that way about Bal a Versailles, too.

Peach, black currant, hyacinth, and cardamom supposedly compose the nigh notes. Red reminds me of a drugstore perfume dressing up as Opium for Halloween with articles found in its mother's closet. I don't know who the mother is. Remember Bugsy Malone, the gangster movie where all the characters were played by child actors? It's like that. Instead of gunfire, pies in the face. Things are tangier than they should be in Red, exaggerated, a little cruder, but I can't help it. I love the stuff. It feels sort of schizophrenic in an entertaining way.

After some talk on this blog about Karl Lagerfeld's old KL perfume, I found some at the mall. It drove me crazy for a few days, as I knew I'd seen the bottle somewhere in town but couldn't remember where. The store had only a half ounce splash bottle left. It was nice, but too similar to other orientals I own to spend what they were charging. I'm not much of a dabber, either. KL smelled deep, but not as deep as Opium and Cinnabar, which still get my vote for the hardest of the hard core. And I'm more partial to Obsession than it seems legal to be on the blogs. How could such a great perfume have been, as some critics allege, a mass delusion?

Rather than buy the KL, I picked up two older Nina Ricci fragrances, Deci Della and Les Belles de Ricci Delice d'Epices. Deci Della was created by Jean Guichard in 1994. Some say fruity floral; again, I don't get that so much. The oak moss, cypress and myrrh force the raspberry, peach and apricot down roads they're not accustomed to traveling, if perhaps at gunpoint. There's that strange tension there between opposites. The oakmoss gives the fragrance an aroma very few contemporaries have, obviously.

Delice might also have been created by Guichard. I know he created one of the Belles at least. I'm not sure which. When I first smelled it I thought it had to be Annick Menardo or Sophia Grojsman. It has the edible qualities of the former and the sensual overload of the latter. I thought for sure, until I got it home, that Delice smelled identical to Tentations, another Grojsman creation. It has a caramellic undertone, for sure, but isn't entirely foody to me. It isn't exactly spicy, either.

Comparing Deci and Delice to Midnight Fantasy might seem unfair, but I do think it points up what perfume has lost since all the restrictions on, among other things, musks, oakmoss, and civet. And I don't think a fragrance like Midnight Fantasy is any kind of answer, as pleasantly banal and insidiously catchy as it might be. Aurelien Guichard is probably one of the best barometers right now for how these older visions can be recreated in the present without entirely losing their original spirits. His Visa and Baghari for Piguet find ways around the black hole left where oakmoss and natural musks once were, and I can't wait to see what he's done with Futur. As for Midnight Fantasy, I'll pass.

L'Interdit (R.I.P. Audrey Hepburn)

Can someone please tell me what the 2002 reformulation of L'Interdit ever did to anyone?

I know, I know, the first one was Audrey Hepburn, all powdery florals and white gloves with a touch of wispy, ephemeral whatnot. I'm sure it was lovely, and in comparison, here comes Raquel Welch, top heavy, shaking it, showing it, lips like a come on, hips like a been there, done that. It's like replacing a Rolls with a Ferarri, I know, but a Ferarri is quite something too, so can we all stop acting as if it's chopped liver and onions?

I'd read so much about the reformulation (and we're not talking about the more recent reformulation, which seeks to restore, some say successfully, the original Hepburn effect) that when I tried it, I was a little shocked how much I liked it. I don't know why these things keep shocking me. When I smelled Parfum d'Habit, more recently, I was surprised too. I'd read customer reviews on basenotes and makeupalley describing it as the most animalic thing this side of a rat's ass; foul, leathery, urinous, and just generally, unforgivably offensive. I couldn't figure out what people were talking about. Medicinal, yes; urinous, no. I smelled no leather, no animal, no wet dog, and really, truth to tell, not a whole lot of anything I'd heard described. Parfum d'Habit is pretty, to be sure, and even somewhat jarring at certain points, particularly the opening, which has the medicinal astringency of witch hazel, but it's hardly the caveman I expected, and the 2002 L'Interdit is certainly no run of the mill fruity floral.

I should have known, with Jean Guichard at the wheel. Everytime I smell a Guichard fragrance I'm again reminded how much his son Aurelien has inherited from him, and you can see links between L'Interdit and the light/dark achievements of Visa and Azzaro Couture. Like father, like son. Papa Guichard's genius, to me, is persistent radiance with an inner edge which somehow turns things inside out or upside down. Rather than getting brighter, and lighter, Guichard Sr.'s best work dries down to a burnished, heat seaking core, revealing unexpected, unsettling dissonance. So Pretty by Cartier has a straightfirward succulent fruit note up top and a darker, contrasting pit of angst deeper down. Eden seems so bright, so cheery and floral at first, and yet the picture Cacharel uses to package this fragrance gets right to the bottom of its attraction, showing a tangled jungle of competing white flowers and the somewhat unsettling suggestion of something like a poisoned apple beyond all the distracting foliage. Fendi Asja achieves this contrapuntal effect by turning berry into heady red wine. Go down the list, and you'll find these magic tricks throughout Guichard's oeuvre, right down to the weird, doughy jasmine of LouLou.

Guichard's L'Interdit sprays on like an easy going if steeply pitched fruity floral, but there's something in there which doesn't quite fit the image, and you start to see it very soon after the initial notes start wearing down. I'm no chemist, but judging by the pyramid provided by Osmoz, I would guess this has something to do with the combined effect of iris, frankincense, and tonka bean in the dry down. What I kept thinking, before I'd seen the notes, was that someone had mixed some incense into my bottle. How could a stereotypical fruity floral dry down into something so resinous and compelling? The answer: this is no stereotypical fruity floral. Givenchy seems to have known this, and after you discover the fragrance's weird complexity, the red label and box make perfect sense. Yes, red for rose--and passion.

That iris and frankincense combination gives L'Interdit a rooty incense accord I find pretty intriguing, making L'Interdit anything but a 1950's nice girl perfume. That isn't to say you would notice iris in the mix, before or after you know it's there. The tonka bean gives it a sturdier platform to stand on, suggesting cinammon, hay, clove, caramel and, especially, almond. This trifecta of contrasting basenotes gives L'Interdit a curious quality, making you wonder what it might do next. The Audrey Hepburn prototype died with its source, and what Guichard seems to have been saying or suggesting with his reformulation is that it might be high time we redefine what we mean by "nice girl" in the first place. In the fifties, being a nice girl meant that you knew your place and didn't rock the boat. You were to look pretty and to defer, always demurely. You refrained from showing more skin than absolutely necessary. Guichard's L'Interdit is a celebration of the nice girl's emancipation into sensual and emotional complexity, allowing her the freedom to be outspoken and even contradictory without reducing her to total transparency. Whereas the original evoked soft, powdered skin, Guichard's version celebrates the dewy prespiration of a woman too busy experiencing life to let the tought of a little sweat trouble her.

The accomplishment of this 2002 remake is its ability to balance light and dark, sweet and salty, hot and cold, and a world in between.