I Wore This: Chanel Egoiste

You can tell a lot about a gay guy's ex boyfriends by the colognes he wears. They get passed along, or stolen. A guy smells something on his boyfriend, is reminded of him, wants to be like him, lifts the scent as a way to project the same ineffable qualities. To get closer or to swallow the object of affection whole. Isn't that what we essentially seek to do with those whose appeal we want to absorb?

I guess there was a time when everyone was wearing Egoiste. Women, too, as it has that kind of no brainer crossover appeal. There was a time but I don't remember it much. I was a little all over the place in 1990, when the fragrance came out. Even so; somehow, it brings back memories. It's instantly recognizable but I don't remember where the memories come from.

A few years ago I met a guy who'd stolen it from his ex. He wore it as I think fragrances should be worn - in abundance. It smelled amazing, and looked great too, if that's possible. Some fragrances are so distinct and such a part of the culture that they conjure some kind of hazy but emphatic image in your mind.

The first time I remember smelling it on him he was wearing a navy and white striped boat neck T-shirt, long sleeved. It seemed the perfect compliment to the scent. A navy and white striped shirt seems very femme and Parisian to me - "I know this is how sailors dressed but I'm not a sailor; I'm just attracted to them." The blue and white striped shirt is acquired as a style the same way your ex's fragrance was, as a way of assuming or inching toward a persona you wish to assert your right to.

Egoiste is for me a cousin to Caron's Third Man. It's a pretty boy scent. The guy who wears this theoretically and theatrically crosses his legs ("like they do in Europe," as I've heard southerners say, as if they wish to believe this femme-identifying posture was imported from other ostensibly less masculine lands). Both remind me of long-locked Tadzio in the film adaptation of Death in Venice. He wears a striped blue and white shirt so maybe that's where I'm getting all this from. Also because of him, possibly, I see this as a blonde haired scent, which might be saying Aryan? Dunno. In any case, if I'm being honest, I wear this and feel fair skinned and blonde and the center of some distant admirer's gaze. Because Tadzio's allure is, however unwittingly, remorseless, even cruel, I see Egoiste as having a practically brutal elegance. It's the scent of not having to worry as much about things as the people who wish they were you.

Egoiste is a blonde wood scent - so there's that, too. This really buttery sandalwood and tobacco with rose. And it's best worn by people who aren't blonde at all, as a way of screwing with your head and flipping the finger to traditional concepts of beauty. Says me. It's scent in the best possible way - fantasy enacted through drag and/or impersonation.

Shifting Clouds: Organza

I keep thinking I must have written about Givenchy's Organza.  It's one of my favorites - even though, until recently, I didn't wear it all that much.  Weeks ago, a friend discovered a tiny bottle, probably 5 ml at most, in a flea market, and he wore it so much I was compelled to bring my bottle out of effective retirement.  Suddenly, I saw Organza in a different light, the way you do when you watch a favorite movie with someone who's never seen it before.  I appreciated it more, and saw some of its qualities more clearly.

I always liked Organza - creamy, rich, and long lasting, it's pretty hard not to like.  But when I bought a bottle a few years ago, it was only an ounce or so.  My friend loves Organza, along with Poison and Moschino de Moschino - and his signature, Chanel Egoiste - and it smells so fantastic on him (everything seems to) that I hated to see him dabbing rather than spraying, so I gave him my bottle, and I went looking for another one.

The bottle I gave him is older, and my bias against reformulations led me to assume it must be better than the current version.  I was surprised to learn that whatever they're currently stocking is just as good, if not a little better, than the original.  That's not the case with the fragrance's flanker, Organza Indecence, which is still nice these days but less in some indefinable way than it was.  Weirdly, Organza doesn't seem as robust now but projects with more presence and seems to last even longer than the old stuff, which is muskier but moves more quickly through its development, if something as linear as Organza can be said to develop.  The latest Organza envelops you in a mood, permeating your outlook all day.

Organza was created in 1996 by Sophie Labbe.  That surprised me too.  Labbe isn't one of my favorites. In fact, there isn't much of anything she's done that I would recommend.  The last thing she did that I smelled, Calvin Klein Beauty, was..what it was:  a clean, musky floral with all the presence of a raw peanut.  Nice enough for a Christmas gift - unlikely to offend anyone; it was a bit like giving your father a striped tie or a winter scarf (guilty, by the way), beige or camel colored, the kind of thing he wouldn't cry too much over if he left it behind after dinner at the restaurant.  He might not even run back for it.  Labbe's Parisienne, for YSL, left me kind of cranky.  Why mess with perfection?  Like Belle d'Opium, Parisienne seemed like some kind of vandalism: like Jean Luc Godard remaking Breathless as Porky's, although I suspect someone like Godard would have made the material a little more interesting, if not exactly re-inventing the wheel in the process.

The thing you notice most about Organza - which might just be a lie of the mind, an illusion created by the color of the "juice" and the name itself - is an odd impression of oranges, odd because there's nothing the least bit citrus about the fragrance.  The notes list orange blossom, but orange blossom doesn't smell like oranges, nor does Bergamot really, which is also listed.  The effect resembles Anne Pliska, another deceptive use of orange - though the two fragrances are otherwise pretty dissimilar.

That orangey impression never really wanes for me, though the floral heart makes itself known from the beginning and only deepens as the top notes recede.  Nothing really recedes, I guess, in Organza.  You just become aware of different things the longer you spend time in it.  The orange is abundantly creamy.  The florals - gardenia, honeysuckle, tuberose, ylang ylang, jasmine - are even creamier.  Organza is sweet - and gourmand - but doesn't feel sugared or foody.  It feels slightly old fashioned - perhaps because it's so rich and expansive - and big boned, like another creamy floral, 24 Faubourg (by Hermes), but the sweetened aspects make it feel distinctly contemporary at the same time.

Some of the sweetness - maybe a lot of it - can probably be pinned on the vanilla.  There's quite a lot of it in Organza, but, again, it's so perfectly balanced with the florals and a dash of nutmeg that it feels inseparable from them.  Smelling Organza, I would never think "floral", either, whereas with Faubourg you can't think anything else.  The base isn't really much of a base, as when Organza "dries down" it remains consistent with its initial impression.  The base is more like a coat the fragrance is wearing.  In addition to the vanilla, it includes amber, cedar, and sandalwood.  There's the faintest woodiness to Organza.  It's an amazing construction, this thing.  You regard it the way you do the sky, amazed at something so huge and wondrously constellated, its slow-moving clouds constantly shifting into the subtle shapes of only vaguely recognizable things.

I have way too many perfumes.  I make it a policy not to say just how many.  The point is I have no business getting anything larger than 50 ml.  Eventually, it will run me out of house and home.  Were I a more practical, sensible person, I would buy decants, or travel sprays.  Lately, though, I've been drunk on the way a big brick of a fragrance feels in the hand.  Case in point: those older, slender Chanel chunk bottles (what's dreamier than something called Cristalle in a container which strikes you as a fortress?)  I bought a bottle of Organza that is so enormous and formidable it feels like a staggeringly tall building on a busy street corner.  I can't help myself.  Nothing equals the feeling of a bottle like that, or matches so perfectly the scale a fantastic fragrance like Organza dictates on your fantasies.

My Last 5 In-Person, Real Time Perfume Interactions

You might think that people comment on my perfume all the time.  Alas, they don't.  It's exceedingly rare that anyone says anything about it, and I wear, I imagine, quite a lot.  The last week or so has been a bonanza of interaction.  People at the store.  People at the dinner table.  On a park bench.  Passing on the street.

Here's something else:  I rarely smell perfume on other people.  It's a sad fact of life I try hard to accept.  My friend Jack and I talked recently about how much perfume we give away and how infrequently we smell any of it on its recipients.  I don't know why but lately that changed, too--if only just a little.  Here are the top 5 most recent encounters.

1. Standing in the perfume section of TJ Maxx.

Which is a pretty desperate state of affairs lately, by the way, unless you are so in love with Hugo Boss that you can never have enough of it.  I'm standing there, trying to be excited about the one vaguely interesting thing I managed to find, Si Lolita (I did not end up buying it but holding onto it for a time made me feel a little less despondent), and a woman asks me about it, wondering if I've smelled it and if it's any good (I have and it's okay, if your only other option is Hugo Boss), and I pretended to be buying it for a "girlfriend" because this always makes things easier, and suddenly the woman says, "What's that YOU'RE wearing?  That smells GOOOOOD."  I was wearing an oil I'd made.

2. Sitting down to Easter dinner in a double wide.

My friend's family invited me over to celebrate the holiday.  There were two rather large holes punched in the wall and I tried not to focus on how they might have gotten there, and so close together, as if someone lost his temper a lot but was able to really focus it in one little area quite adeptly.  The guy at the end of the table had a mullet.  The oldest son wants to be a cheerleader, and I think not the male kind.  The younger twins seem embarrassed by this.  The guy with the mullet was probably in his seventies and belched loudly and prodigiously.  There was something mocking about his mullet.  It dared you not to be offended in some way by it.  We were in a military town, and before the meal we'd been to the commissary, where I'd put on a little Youth Dew bath oil.  A little spot of relief on my wrist.  The woman across from me at the table--married, better or worse, to mullet-- suddenly perked up and said, "who smells so good?"

I felt my face turning red but figured oh to hell with it.  Me, I said.

That must be Obsession, she said.  I really like Obsession.

3. Sitting on a park bench next to an Indian burial mound.

I was talking to a friend.  A very attractive, newly acquired friend.  Very stylish.  Very well put together.  One of those guys who seems to have stepped out of another time--slightly vintage looking.  They don't make faces like his much.  You see them in old tintypes. He had on a boat neck striped shirt.  Thick blonde-ish brown hair.  There was a little breeze in the air, and I could smell his day on him, and underneath that, just faintly, the gorgeous, silky smell of Chanel Egoiste, totally personalized by a full 24 hours of wear.  He'd put it on that morning, he said.  It mingled with his cigarette smoke.  I had a little trouble focusing on what he was saying.  This is what perfume ads try to capture, I thought.

4. Warehouse office downtown.

A girl I know who has received much perfume from me, and never seems to be wearing it, smelled wonderful one day.  As we talked the smell came in and out, yanking me into different moods and thought patterns.  She told me she'd layered Jo Malone Grapefruit Cologne with Bond No.9's Scent of Peace.  The Malone she doesn't tend to think much of by itself, and frankly Scent of Peace is war on my nerves on its own, but the combination was just enough of a curve ball to call a truce, and super lovely.

5. Standing at the oil counter mixing something.

A guy came in looking for something for erectile issues.  I didn't know the store carried such a thing.  They went right to it.  He was looking at jewelry, too.  I thought, oh, some lady is really in for no end of trouble, and all she gets for the incessant "attentions" will be a little pair of silver earrings she's probably instantly plotting to return.

Another guy came in.  Some kind of itching disorder.  His wife believes things are coming out of her pores.  The ladies at the counter went right to the herbs again.  If you think the fragrance counter is full of intrigue you should step up to the oil section of your local hippie apothecary.

I was very fascinated by all this but kept focused on my oils, until some other guy came in looking for who knows what, and started sniffing the air.  What's that smell? he asked, obsessed.  It made me so happy.  I had all my little bottles open on the counter next to him: rose, patchouli, clove, cinnamon, ylang, Nag Champa, Jasmine, sandalwood.  Turns out he was smelling the rose geranium, which I'm pretty fond of, too.