A Dozen Roses: 12 More to File Under Rose

An entry on roses is some kind of folly, given that so many fragrances contain rose, even when not presided over by it. Where to begin? Where would it end? I would never propose an exhaustive list--at least at no time in the near future--but I do have personal favorites. Some of these I've already reviewed or mentioned (see the list at bottom). Others I've only recently discovered. Here, off the top off my head: a dozen roses...


Tocade (Rochas)/West Side (Bond No. 9)

These seem like companion pieces to me. Tocade is by Maurice Roucel. West Side is by Michel Almairac. Tocade is textbook Roucel, with a weird, trademark doughy quality which finds its way into a lot of what the perfumer does. West Side is boozier, deeper and darker. Tocade projects. West Side spreads out on the skin, lurking. It sometimes sneaks up on you when you least expect it. West Side seems like it will be outlasted by Tocade but ends up outrunning it. Both have a pronounced vanillic backbone, but West Side takes a little longer to bring itself out of the closet. When it does, West Side starts to resemble Tocade more clearly. Note: the booziness of West Side isn't the wine-drenched rococo of YSL Paris. Fans and detractors of West Side talk about cigarette ash and smoke, and I can understand why. West Side has that quality you get from a glass of port wine--the day after, when it smells like you feel. There's something slightly hungover about it. But Tocade can also be a tad too sugared, too tight lipped somehow. It needs to let its hair down. I like both at different times.

Noir Patchouli (Histoire de Parfums)

If ever there was a misnomer, this is it. Still, don't think you won't find patchouli here. You will. But more than anything, Noir is a study in rose and what it does with a strong dance partner. This is a beautiful rose: smooth, rich, intense. Noir? Not so much, though it isn't exactly light, either. What can a word like noir mean in perfumery at this point? It's like saying fine when someone asks you how you are. Fine can mean anything from okay to destitute. Fine means nothing and everything, as does noir. Like Blanc Violette, also by Histoire de Parfums, Noir has a woody come nutty underbelly I find pretty addictive. The longevity is great, the projection decent. This is beautiful stuff, a modern interpretation of classic rose chypres like Aromatics Elixir. It's worth the hefty price tag.

Beautiful (Estee Lauder)

I can never really determine the nose responsible for Beautiful. Some say Bernard Chant had a hand in it. I've heard other names as well. Beautiful gets slammed for its potency. To many it smells of dryer sheets. I smell tobacco and an impossibly honeyed, saturated rose. Yes, Beautiful is part of that eighties trend in forced perspective perfumery. Everything is huge, resulting in a big block of Godzilla rose, which hits you over the head with the force of a semi. I don't mind the blow, personally, as it puts my head in a pretty nice place. What's in this thing? Disregard the pyramid you find on osmoz.com. Beautiful smells nothing like the sum of its parts. When people complain of Estee Lauder fragrances, Beautiful seems to be the most oft-cited case in point. It makes statements (i.e. takes no prisoners). It commands attention and I suspect passes migraine through a room with the remorseless efficiency reserved for clouds of nerve gas. Here's the thing. I love these fragrances. There's something so powerful about them--not only literally but theoretically. Here's a perfume that can alter the emotional climate of a room.

Shocking (Schiaparelli)

I've only ever smelled the reformulation of Elsa Schiaparelli's famous fragrance. I'm told it pales in comparison to the original, though pale is probably an inept choice of word for something as bold as Shocking. As a matter of fact, Shocking relates very clearly to Beautiful, speaking in the same honeyed voice, albeit knocked down a few octaves. Shocking is the quintessential clove rose for me. I've yet to smell one I like better. What makes it for me is the tarragon, which gives an odd little herbal kick to the fragrance. The narcissus adds a camphoraceous edge, contrasting against the rose while complimenting the tarragon, which otherwise might have seemed more accidental than intentional. Again, some find this a bit strong. More for me, I guess. The original was composed by the legendary Jean Carles.

Incense Rose (Andy Tauer)

My favorite Andy Tauer fragrance, Incense Rose is a perfectly lovely mixture of frankincense and floral. It wears a lot more complicated than it sounds, and gives you a lot of time to count the ways.

Lipstick Rose (Editions de Parfums Frederic Malle)

My reaction to this stuff is purely irrational, because it has no desire to be anything like the best perfume in the world, and yet when I smell it I can't remember liking anything better. Every time I spray Lipstick Rose on I can't imagine wearing anything else ever again. It smells of waxy lipstick, true to its name, and a purely artifical rose, the kind of scent you find in cosmetics more than commercial fragrance. Lipstick Rose is about the only perfume in the Malle line which has a sense of humor about itself. That isn't to say any of them need a sense of humor, but the presence of Lipstick Rose in this line makes me think of Malle in much more generous terms. That a line with such high quality output has the confidence to put out something so richly cheap and cheerful says something about the wonderful breadth of its curatorial vision. Lipstick Rose makes the line seem less prissy, a little more uninhibited, like a private school girl who gets into Nina Simone and Britney Spears with equal fervor.

Nahema (Guerlain)

Guerlain's signature rose, Nahema is hard to find in the states. I found some at a discount store, amazingly enough. Nahema was inspired by a character Catherine Deneuve played on screen--or am I imagining this? After a while, it's hard to parse through the fact and fiction of an industry which cultivates as much secrecy and perpetuates as much outright bullshit as humanly possible in the selling and manufacturing of its product. Theoretically, I find very little relation between Deneuve--and any character she's played--and Nahema. The perfume is an odd bird for me in many ways. I shouldn't like it. There's something slightly artificial about it, I always think. A heightened fantasy of rose which is sweeter and fruitier than I might ordinarily like. There's a strangled, almost shrill peach nectar in there, brightening the rose in a way which seems half moonlight, half neon. But Nahema is extraordinary, so there's no use measuring it against typical expectations. I think what unsettles me about Nahema, and granted, it isn't easy to explain, is the sense that it never really merges with its wearer. It's a little more cat than dog that way. It remains a little aloof on the skin, as opposed to something like Beautiful, which creates a sense of depth and detail. Maybe Nahema resembles Deneuve more than I at first like to think.

Elixir (Penhaligons)

Why do people slam this so? I smelled this in a tiny Milano shop through a paper cone and wanted to have sex with the nearest inanimate object. I considered the cone, however briefly. I had trouble focusing on the SA, who was having trouble speaking my language. No matter. I hardly knew my language either anymore. Like a lot of Olivia Giacobetti's work, this fades quickly. It goes sheer, to put it charitably. But with the best of her stuff, you don't care, and I find myself not giving such a sh*t with Elixir. Cinammon red hots? Come on. Not to me. I smell a nuclear rose, molten hot, radiating off the skin in circular waves. I'm told it's an update of Blenheim Bouquet, though to me it's more like Blenheim Bouquet on acid. Didn't Turin give this something like one or two stars? Yes? Well, he doesn't like pear so much either.

Boudoir (Vivienne Westwood)

Another in a long line of much maligned. Abigail didn't like this one so much herself. I can't help it, I think it's swell. Supposedly it smells like a woman's bed after an evening of sweaty sex. Having no frame of reference, the connection fails me. I smell something vaguely related to Shocking, less the clove, nine times the honey. Picture Beautiful mixed with Miel De Bois. I smell sweet. You smell litter box. What's to be done? I'm no fan of the Westwood line of fragrances. Let it Rock is perfectly nice, but nothing I would spend my hard-earned money on. The others I've barely bothered with. Buodoir is an exception. Its absolutely an intense smell, and retro, but it really goes back no further than the eighties, which again is a problem for some but a solution for me. I wasn't forced to tease my bangs within an inch of their lives in high school, so a big-shouldered fragrance like this seems downright novel to me.

Boss No. 1 (Hugo Boss)

This is essenitally Shocking for men. Women should wear it too, naturally. It seems inconceivable that something like this would be considered masculine in 1985, the same year Beautiful came out. Then again, I'm always surprised when I look back to the masculines of the seventies and eighties and see how decidedly asexual they were/are. The man responsible is Pierre Wargnye, he behind Drakkar Noir and, more recently, Antidote. I like Antidote very much. I like it much better than a lot of other people seem to, and I see connections between the spices employed there and in Boss No. 1. Wargnye also did La Perla, which makes a lot of sense when you stand it beside No. 1. Osmoz lists this as an aromatic fougere. Well, okay. This is one case at least where the pyramid gives you a good idea what you're getting yourself into, so I'll leave it at that: jamsine, rose, honey, juniper, basil, artemisia, tobacco, cinammon, cedar, patchouli. Be forewarned. You better like patchouli.

Essence (Narciso Rodriguez)

Buy it for the bottle if you have trouble justifying the purchase for any other reason. I happen to like the book as much as its cover. Not everyone reads. Rose, violet, aldehyde. They call the violet iris; I suppose because it's more fashionable these days. I don't really care what they call it. I think this stuff smells great. If you're a guy looking for a dandy rose, this is a good place to go. The bottle will distort your face into the portrait of Dorian Grey.

Jil Sander Women III (Jil Sander)

This is very directly related to rose chypres like Aromatics Elixir and La Perla, but oh what a difference the addition of bay makes. Good luck finding it in the U.S.

Others filed under Like: Mille et Une Roses, Aramis 900, Alain Delon Iquitos, Paris, L'Artisan Voleur de Roses, Fresh Cannabis Rose, Knowing, Clinique Aromatics Elixir, Lancome Tresor

Hot and Cold with Grey Flannel, Beautiful

This weekend, I've been watching my friend's dogs downtown.  This is only about a ten minute drive from where I live, and I'm here all the time anyway, but being in someone else's space can feel like a vacation, if only from the static landscape of your everyday routine.  A different space offers new perspectives, making almost everything seem entirely new.  It's as if you stand back from your life and view it from a small distance a little more objectively.

I thought about this weird shift of perspective and how profoundly a subtle change can influence the mind because almost every perfume I own has smelled different to me over the last several weeks.  The air went decisively cold here, and they all seem to behave differently, like creatures shedding their fur or skin, entering into some transitional appearance or behavior for the time being which renders them practically unrecognizable from their former selves.

The biggest difference is longevity.  I used to think the difference between a short- and long-lived perfume was simply a matter of time.  You enjoyed the latter at length.  The former you kept spraying or accepted defeat.  Now I realize that the longer perfume stays on the skin, the more deeply your mind engages with it.  Even the most linear perfume, over an extended period of time, is given depth and shading by one's perceptions: the mental and emotional associations you make with it, the ability to juxtapose one environment with another as you carry it through the scene changes of your day.  Even things as apparently minute as other people's largely imperceptible reactions and adjustments to a fragrance create an ever evolving context.  Increased longevity extends the drama of a fragrance in any number of ways, in any number of directions.

You do notice the stages more lucidly, where they exist.  Some scents, like the Fresh line or Jo Malone, have none to speak of.  Others tumble down into their base notes like leaves falling from the trees, creating a series of changing shapes on the way.  I was shocked by Grey Flannel this morning.  I sprayed it on the back of my hand and wondered where I'd been all this time.  I've always smelled the violet, but suddenly everything around it had shifted, and seemed heightened.  I smelled galbanum as if it had elbowed its way in out of nowhere.  And rose: how to explain having missed the obvious for so long?  The rose in Grey Flannel presides over the entire affair in a steady, calming tone of voice.  As the scent progresses and my senses adjust to the shock of the new where I least expected it, I notice the citrus accords.  The geranium!  Grey Flannel isn't just severe, as many who've grown up with it assert, but tangy and textured, qualities for which it rarely gets credit.  The most surprising discovery for me is the presence of iris, situating Grey Flannel closer to Dior Homme than I would ever have thought to put it.  I see now that in many ways these two masculines are different generations of a similar philosophy.

This curious ratio between alleged stridency and an underbelly of subtle permutation is something Grey Flannel shares with Beautiful, by Estee Lauder.  True, Beautiful is a big boned eighties floral.  But it has more complexity than well over half the mass market fragrances presently sold at the mall, and the stridency smuggles in softer, more nuanced shapes the way shoulder pads concealed femininity behind a parody of the masculine silhouette.  What produces that tobacco accord Tania Sanchez talks about in Perfume: The Guide?  Is it a combination of cedar and vanilla?  Why is it that a scent which is famous for being overly feminine leans increasingly toward the conventionally masculine as it plays out on the skin?  In the warmer months, this drama zips along with the economy of a sitcom.  Laugh tracks and audience applause lead you in pre-orchestrated directions without giving you the time to make sense of the leaps.  In the winter, Beautiful slows down, giving you the room to wander around in it.

These are just two of the scents I'm getting re-acquainted with.  Even the ones I thought I knew seem foreign, like 1000, which seems less floral to me, more chypre, dark and moody where before it seemed bright and slightly empty-headed, too pretty for its own good, or yours.  How is it that a scent which seemed so cool in the summer now feels so warm in the winter?  Are fragrances mood rings, driven by body temperature?  The season makes velvet of fragrances, it seems to me, and I'm so busy reconsidering everything it's as if I bought an entirely new collection.

This Week at the Perfume Counter: In which your roving I Smell Therefore I Am reporter makes the marketplace rounds, nostrils flared

I keep going back to the Estee Lauder counter. Do I want Sensuous? I can't decide. I do and I don't and I might and maybe, don't pressure me. Everyone says it smells great for an Estee Lauder fragrance, but I tend to scratch my head at that, and not because it itches. I continue to be surprised at the House of Lauder: this week, by Beautiful. What an incredible, gooey, tobacco rose. Try to convince me otherwise. The more I smell Bernard Chant's work, the more astonished I am. Azuree, Aliage--even Estee, which many consider some kind of mistake. Is it because I grew up smelling the Lauder line that I love the fragrances so much? My mother had a half-empty/half-full bottle of Youth Dew on her dresser. It still might be there. I loved the gold bow affixed to the elastic band. I loved the smell, which seemed so dated it had pushed back into the future going in the opposite direction. I can't remember who had Estee on her dresser; possibly my paternal grandmother. I stood before her bureau smelling from the open bottle, which she displayed on a gilt, mirrored tray. It smelled fantastic then and smells even better now, with an emotional pull to it from accumulated memories. A brighter, more startling cousin to Chanel 5 and Arpege. Its silver cap seemed perfectly apt to me at the time. There was something chilly about it, like iced flowers.

Friday at the mall, the Lauder counter was unattended. A pretty blond came over to help but didn't know whether they stocked Tuberose Gardenia. She did price Sensuous for me, and told me, as they all do, how fantastic it smells, as if, being a guy, I can't smell a difference between, say, Joy and Ajax. Yes, yes, I said, fantastic, fantastic. After pricing Sensuous for me, she left, explaining that whoever usually worked Lauder was, like, in the bathroom maybe and would be back later, presumably in case I needed someone to tell me how good something else smelled. I left and went across the hall to Perfumania, which sometimes requires a great deal of patience. The staff there works on commission and, I'm told by someone who migrated to Macy's, are encouraged to sell, sell, sell. It isn't enough that you buy a bottle of Posion. You must also buy Ralph Lauren Pure Turquoise, and lotion, and here, what about this, and this other thing, and--hello, where'd you go? Someone at corporate believes there's no hope of a return customer at Perfumania--the client walks in, crazed, buys on impulse, then leaves, forever--so why bother with subtlety?

I'd just smelled Cinnabar and wanted to compare it to Opium. I also wanted to know the difference between the three Opium flankers Perfumania stocks, but I've been down that dead end road before. They have no idea. Better luck on the website, which has no pictures for these and offers no clearer an idea. My favorite saleswoman was there (I call her Gladys). She knows I have a problem and need zero encouragement. I'll be back no matter what happens, again and again and again, often several days in a row. If the whole city evaporated in a strange toxic cloud overnight I would still drive over, out of habit, exiting my car, walking directly to the location of Perfumania, without noticing its conspicuous absence, until I stood on its once-hallowed ground or whatever and looked up and was like, oops, oh yeah, that apocalypse thing. Gladys has her tester strips ready in one hand as I approach, a pen in the other. Hello, Brian, she says. What are you buying today? When I leave, Gladys doesn't say good-bye or come see us again. She says, see you tomorrow.

I couldn't tell the difference between Opium and Cinnabar and figured I'd allowed sufficient time for a bathroom break, so I returned to the Lauder counter. It was still unattended, and the blond was gone now, too, but a rather dour young lady approached me, or rather, waited for me to approach her. Did I imagine a tone of impatience in her voice? I wanted to price Private Collection. My sister used to wear it and it smells so-

Yeah yeah, hold on a second, her demeanor said. She was back there reaching around in the display case like a blind woman, and I thought, dare I guide her? She didn't seem like the type who wanted the raft at her drowning moment, unless she could be made to feel she'd found it and inflated it herself. It's right there, I started to say. Yeah, I know, she snapped. I'm just trying to blah blah blah, as if I'd interrupted a delicate procedure and now she'd have to start all over. Hmm, she practically yawned, once she'd extracted the Private Collection. "We have one pocket size and one larger but the larger is a spray and the pocket is a roll-on so your best bet is to go with the larger." I could plainly see, reading the boxes, that both were spray bottles, but didn't point this out. And how much is the Estee, I asked, once she'd priced the PC. Very cheap, it turned out, as the Lauders usually are. I took one of each. Ringing me up, she entered 3333 instead of 33, and was suddenly humble, as if I might run to the bathroom and report her mistake to the Lauder rep.

Other purchases this week included: Michael for men, Romeo Gigli Sud Est, Magie Noire (the old one), and ENjoy. I should point out that of all the perfume counters I've been to in the last few weeks, with the exception of Memphis Fragrance (which is always friendly), Walgreens was the most helpful. Imagine that.