Niki de Saint Phalle: Review and Bottle Giveaway

It's easy enough to smell Niki de Saint Phalle's perfume without thinking of the woman behind it; easier, no doubt, than trying to wear No.5 without thinking of Coco Chanel. Taken at face value, de Saint Phalle is a grassy green chypre, falling somewhere between Givenchy III, YSL Y, and Jean-Louis Scherrer. It lands on the dry side, and feels far more herbal than its peers. It's the youngest of that group as well. You can talk about the fragrance, even about how challenging it can be, without knowing anything about its namesake. But there's a reason it's been a cult favorite since its release in 1982, and much of that has to do with the way it successfully embodies the contradictions, conflicts and quirkiness of the woman behind it, an individual just as fascinating as Coco Chanel.

Her father was French; her mother American. She was born in France but raised primarily in the United States. Until the stock market crash, the family had been wealthy. She began her career as a fashion model, but had been painting as early as her teens, when she was kicked out of school for painting the building's trademark iron fig leaves bright red. She married her childhood friend, composer-then-writer Harry Mathews. They'd met when she was thirteen. He was fourteen. Along with poets James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashberry, Mathews founded the literary journal Locus Solus. It didn't last long, but was to many writers, apparently, what the Velvet Underground has been to musicians. It certainly brought a steady stream of literary and artistic figures, many of them pop, experimental, and/or Avant-garde, into the young couple's life.

In a 2008 interview about the ten years he spent living with Niki, Mathews said that their attraction to each other had a lot to do with similar backgrounds. Both came from "genteel, moderately well-to-do families who subscribed...to the tenets of upper-class New York WASP society." Both were "artistically inclined, oversensitive, overtly rebellious romantics." Niki was modeling for Vogue and Elle magazines, but was troubled mentally, "devising one ingenious method of suicide after another." Ultimately, she suffered a nervous breakdown. She was institutionalized and underwent shock treatment. It was barbarous, according to Mathews, but it helped her. She started making collages around that time out of stones, twigs and other items she found on the grounds around the clinic. She also resumed painting. As she gave up modeling and her acting studies to become an artist, Mathews abandoned music for writing. There were rumors about Mathews, allegations he was involved with the CIA. Later, he wrote a book which simultaneously denied and confirmed the idea.

I remember seeing a lot of Niki's work as a child, but I can't think where I might have run into it. The point is, her painting and sculptures have a distinctive look, instantly recognizable, a look she would later incorporate into the fragrance's packaging and sensibility. Her exposure to the work of Antoni Gaudi, specifically his broken tile mosaic park benches and sculptures in Barcelona's Parque Guell, was crucial to her artistic development. Unlike Gaudi's sculptures, her work tended to make more use of found objects, and she didn't often fit them together following the symmetrical logic he did (He didn't always follow symmetrical logic either, judging by the dripping, trippy facades of La Sagrada Familia Cathedral, also in Barcelona). Later, she would admire the work of artists such as Paul Klee, Matisse, Picasso, Jasper Johns, de Kooning, and Rauschenberg, all of whose influence could be felt in some way or another in her own evolving sensibility. At the same time, her work is completely individual in its overall effect.

She eventually moved on to large scale sculptures of women, part Botero, part Sunday comic strip; these were massive, doughy iron figures painted in bright, bold colors and geometrically patterned shapes. In 1978, after another serious illness, she laid the foundation for The Tarot Garden, a sculptural installation celebrating female creativity and strength, peopled by her figures. The installation became the focus of her life, and she spent the next ten years creating this garden. Her long term dedication to the project made it clear that Gaudi had been not just an artistic influence but a kindred soul as well; like her, Gaudi spent years constructing Parque Guell and the Sagrada Familia cathedral. As with de Saint Phalle, his sanity and health were sometimes compromised, if not always dictated, by the efforts these passionate commitments required.

It was to help fund the Garden that de Saint Phalle created her fragrance several years later. The notes are listed as follows: artemisia, mint, peach, bergamot, carnation, patchouli, orris, jasmine, ylang-ylang, cedar, rose, leather, sandalwood, amber, musk, and oakmoss. People have discussed Niki de Saint Phalle as an early example of the celebrity (in this case a well-known artist) fragrance. I think of this particular perfume more as performance art, a way of taking an artistic sensibility into the headspace of others; another sort of art installation. Many people talk about the patchouli, too, though I've never been particularly conscious of it. More than anything, I smell soft peach, artemisia, oakmoss, and an usually employed ylang ylang. Niki de Saint Phalle smells more old fashioned to me than other green chypres I love. There's a melancholy to it that I've never smelled in those, as well. I'm sure many regard this more simply as a floral chypre, but it's always struck me as a quintessential grassy green chypre, though, again, there's nothing exactly like it.

It's closest to Bandit, I think, in many ways. It has that ashen smokiness to it. Unlike Bandit, where the presiding feeling is more mercenary, Niki de Saint Phalle is smoky in a far more subdued way, like the memory of smoke lingering on someone's clothes, or the aroma left on furniture once the smoker has left the room. That probably contributes to the forlorn quality for me. Though strong, de Saint Phalle feels soft and muted. Smelling Bandit, I sense perfumer Germaine Cellier's daring audacity, as if the perfume were an assault on the silliness of polite society; unexpected, strange, and remorseless. Saint Phalle is filled with a sense of regret--of people gone and things you can't change or get back. It reflects a mind which views things uniquely but at a price. It's a lot subtler.

Knowing more about Niki's past, I see the bottle's design in a new way. How interesting that it features a painted snake intertwined with its unpainted metallic twin. That iconic sculptural detail now reminds me of her attempts to integrate color and art into her life and the lives of others, and the challenges involved, mainly in the form of institutionalized resistance and mental duress. I love the story of Niki painting the uncolored iron fig leaves of her school, an artistic vandalism which strikes me as a more playful version of Cellier's bolder anarchic streak. The fig leaves, painted and unpainted, grew together and became snakes for the bottle's cap, a symbol of tenuous unity, precariously balanced tensions.

I have two bottles of Niki de Saint Phalle. I'm giving one away. This one ounce bottle of edt concentration is from the eighties. It is boxed but unwrapped. The bottle is full and has only been sprayed three times; once for this review. I'll draw a name from the comments on Monday. To be eligible, you must have commented on our blog before. Please leave your comment here to be considered.

Monstre: Chanel No.5 as Celebrity Bio

There are many things to like in The Secret of Chanel No.5: The Intimate History of the World's Most Famous Perfume. Biographer Tilar J. Mazzeo treats the perfume as a significant piece of cultural history, focusing not just on the iconic design of its bottle and packaging or the astonishing longevity of its status as a bestselling fragrance but on some of its more ephemeral attributes and properties, many of which are more difficult to articulate, let alone determine. It's the first book of its kind, illustrating the power a fragrance has to contextualize its moment in time. Imagine the possibilities: perfume as social history, as personal memoir, as political thriller. An entire bookcase of such books, transforming the library into a perfume cabinet. No.5 is a good place to start, as its moment in time seems to be occurring in stop motion.

The book begins with a brief sketch of Chanel's childhood as an orphan. It moves from there to her involvement in the demimonde, experiences which mirrored the showgirl background of another, ultimately less fortunate turn of the century figure I admire, equally difficult but brilliant Jean Rhys. Like Rhys, whose most recent biography was named after her favorite perfume, Guerlain's L'Heure Bleue, Coco Chanel became a kept woman. She understood the rub--the ways in which affairs with married men were meant to work--but she was, again, like Rhys, as stubborn as she was passionate. She broke the rules by falling in love, causing heartbreak, loss, humiliation, and in some ways, self-sabotage. As with Rhys, the pattern of dependency and defiance repeated throughout her life, with less than glamorous results, whatever the fashions dressing it all up.

I found Mazzeo's account to be more engrossing once it moved onto Coco Chanel's development as a businesswoman. She was a far shrewder figure than Rhys, but in several ways equally foolish, signing away the majority of No.5's profits to business partners whose reach extended her own. The agreement assured the widespread success of her flagship fragrance but it was a decision she came to regret, and in fighting it, she betrayed her own best interests. This too reminded me of Rhys, whose lover, writer Ford Maddox Ford, helped get her published. Rhys came to resent his hold over her, though she depended on his largesse and influence--as did his wife. Coco's reputation and initial success seem to have been built through the same kind of extra-marital support Rhys alternately enjoyed and alienated. Chanel built herself from the ground up, judging by these accounts, a transformation as radical in opposites and contradictory impulses as the perfume she created in her image.

During the second world war, Chanel fought bitterly against the contract with her partners. The story of her anti-semitic behavior toward them is unflattering and fascinating. She was devious and hypocritical and seems to have refused any attempt at diplomacy. There was a childishness to much of Chanel's conduct during this time, an escalating desperation to maintain control of her image amid the extenuating circumstances of middle age and war. The inflexibility of her position was perfectly in keeping with the extremism of dictatorial Germany. Her own possible, if not probable, collaboration as what some characterize as a war criminal during this time, her affair with a Nazi, is detailed in the biography as well.

After the war, the No.5 contract was renegotiated. Coco willed it to be, by creating her own competing line of perfumes. She badmouthed the name and reputation of No.5, accusing it of inferior quality. Though manufacturing and distributing these newer, unaffiliated perfumes put her in breach of the original contract, her partners were left with no other choice but to meet her terms, much the way a married man must ultimately bend to the will of his mistress, lest he unleash the powers of anarchy she could exercise over his ordered little existence. In this way, the story of No.5 can be seen as an illustration of the collusion and conflicts between ego and id, creator and creation overlapping and co-existing with separate lives of their own, the one influencing the other, rearing its head to expose the mask of public respectability worn by its double. Coco's creation took on a life of its own, and she couldn't always, couldn't often, exert control over it with her own will. Throughout Mazzeo's book it's tempting to imagine Coco's figure dancing beyond the distorted glass of No.5's bottle, by turns trapped in and locked out of or behind her own creation and trying to get back in.

The book details the possible precursors to the fragrance within the industry. It discusses the career of Ernest Beaux, No.5's perfumer. These are fascinating details as well. The more technical story of the fragrance, dealing with its ingredients, its formulation, the influence of aldehydes, the cultivation of jasmine crops, particularly the espionage of smuggling jasmine absolute abroad during Nazi occupation: all are lucid and informative, and clearly related to the larger context of Coco's personality and life. The story is at its best when it has room to breathe. It feels a lot shorter than it wants to be, and in some respects resembles the respectful reformulation of a classic perfume: all the right things are there, in the right combination, but there's a certain lack of oomph in some way, a problem of proportion. At times, a feeling of depth is missing. That might be inevitable in such a short format. This history is a scant 200 pages--which isn't much space for the longest bestselling fragrance ever, let alone the woman who created it, living a number of lives herself in the process. It feels most rushed in the beginning, which is to say: this book-as-perfume's top notes seem a little thin. The middle sections, during the war and after, are more expansive, more substantive. You feel the pulse of various dynamic tensions, the Dickensian interplay of competing narratives which makes a story feel convincingly three dimensional.

It's difficult to determine what inspires the creative impulse. I don't know that Mazzeo's assertions are inaccurate. They're vividly imagined but lack the kind of detail needed for connective tissue. She makes an attempt to link No.5 in some mystical or Jungian way with Coco's orphanhood and formative affairs, to endow motifs of her childhood with talismanic properties. Without sufficient detail, these things seem like something viewed form a speeding car window. They don't resonate as they probably should or leave a proper impression. It's hard to conceive of them sticking with Coco, when they barely stick with you. I understand the urge to define what makes No.5 what it is. But I think that story is best left to the mind of the wearer and the reader. In long stretches of Mazzeo's book, one feels the panoply of weird, dissonant energies coursing through the perfume--that inexplicable alchemy. That's a remarkable achievement, operating as smell does in some strange way. It' an exciting read.

The Smell of Claude: Parfum de Peau, Parfum d'Homme, Parfum d'Elle, Just Me

A few months ago, I found a bottle of Montana perfume at the local discount drugstore. Half off the original price ($44), it seemed like a steal to me. Never mind the beat up blue box, the lid of which was barely hanging in there. Never mind the fact that the bottle was a dreaded splash. I wasn't that impressed with the scent when I smelled it, but at twenty two dollars it seemed like something I should have, and I bought it.

The box said, simply, Montana, in a script anyone who went to high school in the eighties would instantly recognize. I couldn't find anything about it online--on basenotes, on makeupalley, on the blogs in general. The consensus seemed to be that Parfum de Peau was the best of the designer's fragrances, but I'd never seen it. I had seen Parfum d'Elle, smelled it, and been turned off by it; specifically, a strange, off-note of piss-honey which reminded me of a syrup-drizzled variation of Miel de Bois. I'd also smelled Montana Blu, a later fragrance created by Annick Menardo (Bulgari Black, Lolita Lempicka, Le Labo Patchouli 24), a floral aquatic which bored me before I even brought the bottle up to my nose. I found nothing on plain old, blue box Montana, so I set it aside and forget about it for a while.
Imagine my surprise when, weeks later, I discovered that Parfum de Peau has also gone by the name Montana, and that the nose behind it was none other than Jean Guichard (Eden, Lou Lou, Obsession, Asja), whose work I've been appreciating more and more lately. It was later reformulated by another great, Eduoard Flechier (Poison, Une Rose, Vendetta Uomo) with synthetic castoreum. It blew my mind to think that this wonderful thing was sitting right on my own cluttered table, that I'd had it all along, that I'd been so disinterested when I first gave it a go. I smelled it again and wondered where my head had been the first time. Montana de Montana/Parfum de Peau is wonderfully bizarre in its way.

Michael Edwards classifies it as "chypre - floral", but initially it smells like your average eighties fruity floral, some of which might be due to its having inspired so many fragrances since its introduction in '86, however tamed its imitators. Deeper in, the scent is a revelation of finely calibrated opposites; peach and blackcurrant against pepper and cardamom, powerhouse tuberose against equally pungent ginger and carnation, with animalic leather tones lurking underneath it all. Even when compared to the fragrances of its day (between 1980 and 1985: Fendi, Jardins de Bagatelle, Jean-Marc Sinan, Obsession, Paloma Picasso, Vanderbilt, Giorgio, Paris, Poison, Calyx, Beautiful, Coco, Ysatis) Parfum de Peau comes out looking like a powerhouse. It has more in common with masculines of the time, sharing the off-kilter, urinous bombast of Kouros, and the animal growl of Lauder for Men, Dior Jules, and Givenchy Xeryus. Among its female counterparts, Paco Rabanne La Nuit comes closest in terms of the sheer, beastly nerve of Peau's base notes (castoreum, patchouli, civet), but even La Nuit, which will win you no favor amongst canine population, pales in terms of audacity. La Nuit was also created by Jean Guichard. Peau was a tribute to Montana's muse and future wife, Wallis Franken, whose style was decisively androgynous, her hair bluntly cut to match the right angles of Montana's geometrical garments.In retrospect, it's easy to dismiss Montana as a joke. The exaggerated curves and angles, pinched waists and power shoulders, primary colored, head to toe leather and wool ensembles seem cartoonish now, something Cruella Deville might design for Olive Oyl. It hasn't helped that Montana himself, like Karl Lagerfeld, seems intent on freezing his own 1980's look in time, gravity and decay be damned. In contemporary photos, Montana comes off looking like a caricature, more mustached Barbara Cartland than master tailor. And while many of his peers have aged no more gracefully, their clothes withstand the test of time looking a little more dignified. Thierry Mugler might have turned himself into a stuffed, pinched sausage of a fantasy action hero, but his fashions look as forward thinking now as they did back on the runway.

At the time, Montana was as radical as Parfum de Peau, and his overall sensibility was well suited to the fragrances he released. Montana's formative years were full of unlikely contrasts and emphatic, satirical overstatement. Born in Paris to a German mother and a Catalan father, he began his fashion career in 1971 making jewelry out of papier mache and rhinestones. In 1972, he designed biker outfits for the MacDouglas Leather company; in 1973, a ready to wear leather collection. He formed his own company in 1979, presenting his first collection, Hommes Montana, two years later. He opened his first boutique in 1983, following this, in 1986, with a second. Between 1990 and 1992, he designed haute couture for the House of Lanvin, work for which he was received two consecutive Golden Thimble awards. Despite the acclaim, he was replaced, his approach having been deemed by the money men at Lanvin as a bit too extreme for the consumer's taste. The Montana Fragrances Company launched in 1984.The fragrances were as consistent with the designer's vision as Armani's sleek, shades-of-grey fashion banalities have been with Armani Code, Armani Diamonds, Armani Sensi, and Attitude. Montana was one of the chief emissaries of the big shouldered, the oversized, and the asymmetrical, and his work, a confluence of the feminine with the masculine, was in keeping with cultural signposts of the time, like the razor angled exaggerations of Patrick Nagel's artwork and the outwardly artless slouch and flop of New Wave music and its stars, whose MTV videos served as a runway into the mainstream. Though Montana was said to have been inspired by the carefully pleated drapery of Mme. Gres, his own work, aside from a few obvious tributes to that style (see the above photo), was more aggressively basic, deceptively simple. Montana's achievement has primarily been in silhouette, whereas Gres' had to do with the detail within the form. What Montana took from her was a studied sense of effortlessness. Like Montana's clothing, the Gres gown seems to have simply fallen that way on the body. Both were precision tailors dealing in concentrically arranged swirling lines.

Like Parfum de Peau, Montana Parfum d'Homme (the original, also by Flechier) was a bold olfactory proposition, equally complex. The first impression is a citrus and aldehyde counterpoint off-set by the herbal influence of lavender, pepper, and tarragon and the spicy-sweet addition of cinnamon. The herbs persist into the heart, transitioning smoothly into more aromatic accords. Flechier contrasts these to notes of rose, jasmine and carnation, and the mixture of pine, sage, geranium, and florals is a unique one. The base is a more traditional masculine infrastructure of sandalwood, patchouli, leather, amber, cedar, oakmoss, and labdanum. The fragrance was reformulated in 2001 and rechristened Montana Pour Homme, a name which, removing the word parfum, perhaps sought to give the Montana man his balls back. Even balls couldn't help the scent itself, which became a watery nonentity of citrus and indeterminate accords.

After coming around to Parfum de Peau, I revisted Parfum d'Elle and found that it, too, deserved more than a cursory dismissal. Released in 1990, d'Elle is a toned down study in opposites, as intriguing as de Peau in theory, but more languid, more mellow in practice. Fragrantica classifies it as a fruity chypre, listing its top notes as lime, ginger, melon, mandarin orange, bergamot and lemon; its middle notes as tuberose, hyacinth, ylang-ylang, lily-of-the-valley and Brazilian rosewood; and its base notes as tonka bean, amber, vanilla, oakmoss, cedar and tobacco. It must be the collision of tuberose, tonka bean, and tobacco which gives the original parfum d'Elle its almost freakish beauty. It comes off like Ziggy Stardust, scary and pretty, turning the recognizable signposts of feminine beauty and glamor in on themselves in a way which forces you to re-evaluate your relationship to them. Parfum d'Elle, too, was reformulated. In 2002 it became an entirely different proposition, milder still, more listless for it.

My other Montana favorite is the late 199os release, Just Me (predating Paris Hilton's theme-park fragrance by nearly twenty years). Just Me was marketed by Vera Strubi, who, as president of Thierry Mugler Parfums Worldwide, had helped ensure Angel's success in the suburban mall, circa 1992. In 1995, Clarins had acquired, along with Azzaro fragrances, Montana's line. Parfum de Peau and Parfum d'Homme had been successful, and Montana was still a going concern in the worldwide market. But if Angel could make it, the possibilities seemed endless. Not so much when it came to Just Me, however strange a brew. Just Me's perfumer, Francoise Caron, had created Ca Sent Beau, for Kenzo, a decade earlier. With its part woody, part fruity florals, Ca Sent Beau was a clear precursor. Just Me is just unusual enough, on the surface of things, more careful in its contrasts than Angel. Compared to Angel, it's a dainty everyday scent. On its own, it's an odd thing, fruity in an almost antiseptic way up top, with spectrally weird polar points of acidic pineapple, sickly sweet melon (a la Parfum deTherese), indolic jasmine, and chocolate.

Just Me was a failure in a big way, if only because Angel put the stakes so high. Montana's subsequent releases paled by comparison, lacking the nerve, the playful disregard for clear boundaries and common sense. Even the bottles became boring, flattening out into distinction-less excuses for elegance. Gone were the falling leave kinetics of those older, Noguchi on acid containers, which echoed the drape and falling motion fold of the clothes. Though he lost the rights to licensing his name and ultimately sold the line, Montana himself continued to design, but as a public figure, let alone a force in fashion, he produced nothing remotely close to the the angular affronts of his eighties work. Luckily, most of his best fragrances can be still be found online. The House of Montana went bankrupt in 1997. When Wallis Franken fell from the couple's third floor Paris apartment, her mysterious death was ruled a suicide, and Montana lost his muse in the worst possible way. The Montana BLU line, a failed attempt to translate the Montana asthetic to more afforable casual wear, was launched in 1999. A younger generation of designers have expressed their debt to Montana's eighties and nineties ouevre, notably Alexander McQueen, whose stratifying Kingdom could also be seen as an homage to Parfum de Peau.

Random Thoughts on Shocking de Schiaparelli

Recently, over at nowsmellthis.blogharbor.com, Angela posted a piece on Shocking de Schiaparelli, comparing old version to new. The lucky woman found a bottle of one or the other at the thrift store, along with a quilted robe and a shell-ornamented soap dish, and reports that the versions are only marginally related.

I've never smelled the orginal, though I was told by Christopher Brosius of CB I Hate Perfume that it surprised him: "Not at all what I expected--but then, that was Elsa's genius... I can say that I was expecting something rather deep and exotic from 'Shocking' but found it to be quite light, fresh and brisk - essentially the exact opposite of Chanel no. 5 (which present incarnation I must say I LOATHE, although I do get the point of the original)." Sometime last year, I found a bottle of Shocking (the 1990s reformulation, I'm guessing) and have thoroughly enjoyed the fragrance, however big a bastardization of the Jean Carles original it might be. For me, the newer Shocking has few peers in the category of spice rose, with an excellent ratio of longevity to projection. I'm going to put myself out on a limb and say that I suspect Brosius would dislike it, as in interviews he's made it very clear what he thinks of the volume at which contemporary perfume speaks as a whole. It's true, new Shocking speaks loudly at first, but it settles down into something I'm willing to wait out. Angela isn't exaggerating when she says a spritz of Shocking lasts all day. It does, and then some, in my experience. Honeyed and balsamic, with a prominent clove note, it grows richer and more interesting as time goes on.

Schiaparelli herself interests me more and more, too, especially after reading Canadian writer Derek McCormack's latest book, The Show That Smells. Over the top and tightly written, the novel recounts the story of a non-existant "movie" made by Todd Downing, director of the cult classic Freaks, which stars Elsa Lancaster in the role of Elsa Schiaparelli, a vampire. Her arch-nemesis: Coco Chanel. The whole thing takes place in a hall of mirrors, where Schiaparelli and Chanel fight for the soul of poor, hapless Carrie, whose husband, country singer Jimmy, is dying of Tuberculosis. Schiaparelli agrees to save Jimmy if Carrie will relinquish her soul. I think she wants to eat her, too. Schiaparelli's restorative magic elixir? Why, Shocking, of course. Chanel plays good, Schiaparelli bad, and it's abundantly clear, from the first sentence, that McCormack clearly favors the latter. The Carter Family make appearances as well in this "thrilling tale of HILLBILLIES, HIGH FASHION, AND HORROR! Literate perfume aficionados would definitely find the book thrilling--trading as it does in fashion and fragrance lore, including a longstanding , extravagantly vicious enmity between Chanel and Schiaparelli.

I'd never read much about Schiaparelli before. I assumed she was sort of a novelty act. Reading up on her after McCormack's book, I learned that a lot of this has to do with how her legacy was managed, or mismanaged. Chanel is assumed to be the more relevant, more important (i.e. better) designer. And yet to google Schiaparelli's work is to witness the intersection between surrealism and fashion in the thirties and forties: a skeleton dress, the bones quilted into the fabric; a hat shaped like an upturned shoe; a gown with simulated rips, called the Tear Dress. Schiaparelli, much more so than Chanel, had a sense of humor about what she was doing, and her direct descendants would be Comme des Garçons, Martin Margiela, John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Moschino, and Etat Libre D'Orange, all of whom share her interest in playing around with the line drawn between good taste and bad, low brow and high. To assume that Schiaparelli is no longer the household word that Chanel is would be tantamount to saying that Van Gogh never sold any paintings during his lifetime because he was a dreadfully untalented painter.

Tomato, Tomawto: The Many Faces of a Perfume (or, Just Who Do You Think You're Talking To?)

You never know what you're going to get when you order perfume off the internet these days.  Everyone knows you take your chances with Ebay (will it be the right formulation, or even the real thing?) but many of the other fragrance vendors can be just as inconsistent.  Back when I ordered Bandit, for instance (from I don't remember where), I received what I imagined must be the latest iteration.  In Seattle, months later, I smelled from a bottle in an off-the-path perfume store and it seemed to be the same.  I'd never smelled Bandit before purchasing it so had nothing to go by, but I'd read Lucca Turin's review of the fragrance in Perfume: The Guide, which reports that the modern reformulation is pretty faithful to the original(s).  The bottle at the perfume shop in Seattle looked like it had been on the shelf for a good many years.  The box had that beat up quality.  The one I'd purchased online seemed a little newer.  After all this, I found two quarter ounce bottles of Bandit pure parfum.  They smelled heavenly, much better than the others I'd come across, but the bone structure was there, and the difference was no more than the one between most EDP and parfum extrait concentrations.

I was excited to get back to Perfume House this year because they carry the Robert Piguet line.  Looking back, I couldn't understand why I would have ignored Bandit my first time there.  Wouldn't I have snatched it up immediately, such an arresting perfume?  I can't even remember smelling it.  Maybe, I thought, I just wasn't yet evolved enough and didn't recognize its greatness.  Maybe my tastes needed to mature a little.  I'd been much more attracted to Visa during that first visit to Perfume House.  Because I have Bandit now, I wasn't interested in getting any more this time.  But I was very interested in picking up a bottle of Baghari, which I'd seen at the Los Angeles Barney's months ago and liked.  I'd been given a sample of it during my visit and ultimately decided against buying any; since then, having spent more time with the Baghari, I realized I wanted some, and planned on buying it at the Perfume House.

This is where it gets confusing.  In December, a friend from Portland visited.  She agreed to pick up a bottle of Visa for me at the Perfume House.  I figured I should resume my exploration of Piguet there, since Visa was the one I'd initially found most compelling, but when my friend/courier arrived with said merchandise, I didn't really recognize the smell.  I did and I didn't.  It seemed less interesting at first and I had to adjust my expectations.  In my head, "Visa" had become something else, richer, more visceral.  By comparison, this here was plain old fruity gourmand.  Fast foward to my recent return to the Perfume House.  Another customer came in, looking for something special.  She'd just been initiated into niche perfumery and the world of fragrance teeming just under the surface of the face mainstream  fragrance shows to the world.  I couldn't resist making suggestions, and went directly to Bandit, excited by the prospect of blowing someone's mind--but when we sprayed it on a cotton ball, it smelled nothing like the Bandit I know.  It bore no similarity, even, that I could tell.  Gone was the grassy splendor; gone the strange, perversely au contraire base.  This was powdery and prissy, a stuffy society lady to old Bandit's Sartre-reading, gender-bending, chiffon and leather streetwalker.  Perfume House is reliable and I trust these are the latest versions of Piguet, as they say, so what's up?  Are THEY being lied to?

Complicating things, Baghari smelled nothing like the tester I'd been given at Barney's.  I could see about as much relation between the one and the other as I could between Bandits Now and Then.  Did I mix u all my testers?  Did Barney's have a different version of Baghari?  The tester was a wonder of jasmine and rose under a fizzy layer of citrus aldehyde.  I could see, smelling it, the perfume Turin seemed to be talking about in The Guide.  The one at Perfume House was equally lovely but in an entirely different direction, distorting my ability to immediately appreciate it on its own merits.  And while I'm thinking about it, why did Barney's even have Baghari?  Why Baghari but not Bandit, when both are about as obscure to the average consumer?  Why Baghari but not Fracas, for that matter, which is recognizable enough to have put Baghari in some kind of useful context for the uninitiated?  Was the tester I was given at Barney's LA even Baghari in the first place, or did I simply remember it that way?

The virgin buyer of Bandit might be getting any one of several versions, whether he walks into a store or shops online.  Add to this the fact that some retailers are no better than the sales force at Sephora when it comes to knowing what they have in stock and what it should smell like.  My first bottle of Bandit was opened and partially used.  I sent it back and got another, equally beaten but at least unopened.  I was lucky and got an older version.  How many others aren't so lucky, and think we're smelling the same thing when they sound in on makeupalley.com?  It isn't just Piguet and a classic like Bandit, known by many without, more often than not, actually having been smelled (after all, I heard about Bandit and many other perfumes long before I actually got my hands on them).  It's any old perfume, no pun intended.

It's Magie Noire, for instance.  The first time I smelled it was in a discount shop.  Do I need to tell you that the second time I smelled it I barely recognized the thing?  It's Anais Anais, which is said to be very much the same as always and I believed this, until I smelled a bottle from the eighties and had a very different impression.  Is Lou Lou the same old Lou Lou?  Is Coco the same old Coco my sister wore in high school?  How much of the perceived changes between one and the other has to do with the passage of time and the distortions of memory?  How much is someone else's tinkering around?  We all know that natural musks have gone the way of the Studebaker, changing the face of nearly every perfume in some minimal to profound way, and that various other ingredients have been outlawed as if they were crack cocaine or hashish and the public must be protected from them lest they serve as gateways to more insidious contraband.  Everybody knows that one perfume is repackaged as an entirely new thing using the same name, while another is presented as if an entirely new entity under a totally different name, and some of us catch these things, but how do you discuss perfume when you never know what you're dealing with from one to the next, or whether you're even talking about the same thing?  It's like discussing the color red with someone viewing things through rose-tinted glasses nobody told you or him he was wearing.  You both might as well be color blind.

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.