This Week At The Perfume Counter: random notes

The Korean perfume store closed its newest location, and the older location does not have Rochas Femme. I purchased it online for next to nothing instead. Roudnitska did the original. The reformulation was done by Olivier Cresp and substitutes cumin for the shock value once provided by now-outlawed animal no-no's. I haven't received the bottle yet but know when I do I'll smell the fragrance wondering what the first Rochas Femme must have smelled like.

I ordered Jacomo Silences. I believe this is the one Luca Turin was crazed over at some point, but I've looked through everything I have on him and can't find a mention of it. Supposedly, green florals with galbanum, so one would think it's a no brainer for me.

The friendly young woman at the Chanel counter in the local department store let me smell the new Chanel No. 5 flanker. It smelled fine. Chanel No. 5 EDP did not, to my nose. Something foul and one dimensional in the heart, after a rich opening full of busy distractions.

One thing I'm fascinated by is the relative ignorance at the perfume retailers regarding concentration. Most of the people I've talked to seem to think the EDP and EDT versions of any given perfume are interchangeable, considerations of strength aside. Both Sephoras here, for instance, place tester bottles on their extravagantly pristine shelves for only one of Chanel No. 5's iterations. This means that someone buying the EDT has no real idea what it smells like until she or he gets it home. Tom Ford's iterations are even more markedly different than Chanel No. 5's, and yet a tester bottle for Voile de Fleur stands in for the Black Orchid EDP, and the two smell nothing alike, not even remotely, but don't try to point this out, because it's futile. When I shop at Perfumania (sigh) I often have to pointedly ask whether the bottle they're spraying on the test strip is EDP or EDT. It never occurs to them to tell me, otherwise.

I smelled the new Lancome. A lot of people must be smelling it, because the testers I've seen are all half empty. Perhaps this is something the perfume companies do? They send the department stores half-empty bottles so that customers will believe something like, say, Magnifique to be a hot commodity. To me the perfume smelled like some sickly sweet something or other I couldn't put my finger on. I liked it--the way a child likes his favorite page in a scratch and sniff book. I'm not sure that's wearable. People like to put cocaine up their noses, too, but they don't want to cover themselves in it. Al Pacino's white-powdered mug in Scarface just popped into my head, so perhaps I'm wrong and haven't spent enough time amongst coke fiends.

I returned Guerlain Heritage because I can always buy it for my friend once Christmas is closer, whereas I'm short on funds now and need money to buy more perfume for myself. The woman who'd sold Heritage to me didn't understand why I was buying it. Strangely, she didn't seem to understand why I was returning it either. I returned Chanel No. 5 too, explaining that I'd purchased these two as bride and groom gifts, and--wonder of all wonders--she already wears Heritage and he already wears Chanel No. 5. I know these salespeople recognize my sickness but I'm helpless to stop myself. It's some reassurance that they must pretend as if they don't recognize my obsessive, unreasonable behavior.

I bought a cheap bottle of Gres Cabaret online because I haven't yet exhausted my need for the perfect dark rose. I smelled many in LA but none knocked me to the floor. Intending to buy Eau d'Italie's Paestum Rose, I got Sienne L'Hiver instead.

I bought Miracle Forever at Perfumania because I needed something right that minute. I was interested in Calvin Klein Euphoria for some reason I don't fully comprehend. Weeks before I'd been interested in Miss Dior Cherie. People online slam such fruity patchouli's viciously, with an open hostility which only piques my interest two-fold. I forgot my wallet so at Perfumania I only had enough cash for the slightly cheaper Miracle Forever. "This smells like Euphoria," the saleswoman exclaimed to her co-worker, amazed. "Can you tell me if that's EDT or EDP?" I asked.

I'm going to venture that people now denigrate these fruity numbers the way others once put down the civet-driven, musked out chypres of yesteryear when maybe refreshing colognes were more sensible or considered more "mature". I'm not yet sure what's so bad about fruity, other than the fact that it's everywhere. Pants are everywhere too. I don't understand the whole mature and immature thing when it comes to fragrances. I don't always understand pants, either.

Getting Miracle Forever home, I realized with a twinge of disappointment that it's very similar to Chanel Allure Sensuelle. I also realized that Beyond Paradise is very close to Gucci Envy, which leads me to suspect that BP has galbanum in it, which no one talks about. Instead they talk about banana and melon, which I don't get in the least.

At TJ Maxx I was obsessed with Anais Anais, Diamonds and Emeralds (recognizably Sophia Grojsman), and Fendi for Men. I managed to get out without purchasing everything I put my nose to, though not empty-handed, mind you. Never empty-handed.

I did not bother smelling Kate Moss, as I'm saving that for a more desperate day.

Overrated, Underrated

More than a few people have noted a passing resemblance between Chanel Allure Sensuelle and Tom Ford Black Orchid. Both follow a recent trend in feminine perfumery, mixing a floral up top with a grunge accord at the bottom, albeit to varying degrees of success. Both have a candied decadence to them. Both dropped the same year. However, Black Orchid gets all the love, while Sensuelle, which must carry the weight of Coco Chanel on its shoulders, is treated as the ugly step-child.

Let’s be clear: Allure Sensuelle is no Chanel No. 5—but neither is Black Orchid. And while Allure Sensuelle has mastermind Jacques Polge behind it, Black Orchid…doesn’t. Like the new and old versions of Rive Gauche, the two intersect, smelling more like each other at certain points during their respective developments, then less. Both arguably unisex, Black Orchid has the advantage of Tom Ford’s blurred lines behind it, whereas Chanel sells to the gender segregationist set, and therefore plays to half its potential audience.

Despite the bluster of its campaign, signaled by the phallic, rectangular bottle (a bit like Mildred Pierce in her square-shouldered furs) Black Orchid never quite pulls it off. From the moment you spray it on, you can see it has big plans. It screams get out of the way in a coarse baritone vibrato. For the first five or ten minutes it's running off at the mouth, boasting so assertively that you trust it has something to say. It does and it doesn’t. The construction of Black Orchid is comparable to one of those old Rube Goldberg contraptions. In order for the little silver ball to end up in the bucket, everything must be perfectly conceived and constructed. The metal rails must be pitched the right way, lest the ball lose momentum before it hits its mark. The wooden lever that ball is meant to drop on, which will then hit the stick which holds the rubber fist, which will then slam against the button which releases the trap door, and the ball, so it can roll along its merry way, must be flexible enough. You look at a Rube Goldberg construction and it seems fine, everything looks great, until you try it out, at which point it either operates beautifully or things fall apart. Black Orchid is pitched a little too sharply. Certain chutes and ladders have been angled ever so slightly the wrong way, but you don’t know it until you’re rolling along all those rails. The proportions are wrong. You can see the image you’re meant to watch, under sheets of zigzagging static, or you think you can—but whoever tried to fix the picture slammed the side of the TV, rather than taking the time to adjust the knobs.

The heart of the fragrance lingers in gorgeous, twilit territory, where the flowers are nicely complicated, as if turning the lights down low made it as hard to smell as see, and a vivid, earthen woodiness reminds you the ground is underfoot. There’s even a tangy zest somewhere in there—turning the aromatic pungency of a fougere on its head. Wild Orchid lingers, pretending to relax, but only briefly, and the bluster of the opening notes resumes. This is a busy fragrance—places to go, people to see—off it rushes again. That would be fine, were it rushing somewhere half as interesting as the place it’s evacuating. The next thing you know, it’s stuffing its face with food, so furiously that you’d be hard pressed to say what’s on the menu.

Black Orchid’s intentions are fairly clear, and that’s probably a large part of its problem. From the ads and the hype you know what it’s meant to be: a bold, starkly etched fragrance reminiscent of those the great houses once released with the fanfare of the first walk on the moon. And it is reminiscent—like Jessica Rabbit is reminiscent of Rita Hayworth. In order to understand Black Orchid you must hold it up to the classics, and of course it comes off like a caricature. A shame, really, as it isn’t bad—or even mediocre.

The heart of Allure Sensuelle never quite achieves the magic of Black Orchid’s brief, hallucinatory moment of beauty. Arguably more linear, it is a consistent performer. It has some of Black Orchid’s tang but holds on to it until it figures out how to use it. It has the incense on bottom, along with patchouli and vanilla in place of truffle. It’s remarkably similar, but feels confident it has nothing to prove. Someone please tell this fragrance it’s a Chanel. Clearly it didn’t get that memo, which is where its own troubles began. Like Guerlain, the house of Chanel is on thin ice: will it mess with the perfection of its old reliables? Will it continue to produce the kind of quality women the world over have come to expect? Well, yes and no, in no certain order.
Had Allure Sensuelle been release by one of the niche lines this would be a moot issue. It’s a perfectly respectable, even lovely perfume. It draws from various currents of modern perfumery to show the others how it’s done. People expect innovation from Chanel—perhaps unfairly. So a mother lode of aldehydes were dumped into No. 5. So Cuir de Russie is the most exquisite embodiment of luxury between Planet Earth and Pluto. Why must every Chanel fragrance which doesn’t have the good fortune to be a miracle have to be considered a miserable step in the wrong direction?
Allure Sensuelle has its strengths. Its use of vetiver is accomplished and unusual for a feminine perfume, handled with considerable sensitivity to overall development. It has just the right amount of peppery dissonance, is burnished just so with the solar heat of frankincense. It lasts. It is aptly named, managing to achieve an interesting balance between salty and sweet, floral and oriental. It is arguably more androgynous than Black Orchid, and when a man smells it on a woman, he might just be taken aback by unexpected, unfamiliar urges and impulses.
If anything, Chanel must be faulted for its laziness in building a palpable sense of identity around Allure Sensuelle. A simple comparison between the genius of Ford’s creative direction (Black Orchid: vintage glamor, decadent impulses) and Chanel’s proposed fantasy (Allure Sensuelle: exactly…what…exactly when…exactly where and how?) makes clear Allure Sensuelle's true failure.
All the same, you could do much, much worse—in or outside of Chanel.