Le Labo Aldehyde 44

Sometime last year, Abigail started raving about Aldehyde 44.  At the time, I was just dipping into Oud 27and Rose 31, a few other Le Labo fragrances I'd been curious about.  I was pretty thrilled with both of those, and I'm sure I'll review them at some point.  I think I'll also revisit Patchouli 24, as I've realized, spending a few years with it now, how truly fantastic it is, and how little there is like it.  Despite all this--and the fact that Iris 39 is truly the holy grail of iris fragrances for me--Le Labo doesn't always thrill me, and comparisons with Muriella Burani didn't do Aldehyde 44 any favors, as I'd tried Burani, on Abigail's recommendation, and found it disappointing, so I didn't feel an urgency to trot on over to Dallas and look into Aldehyde 44, which is a city-exclusive at Barney's there.  It's not the first time I've been wrong.

White Linen & The Summer of '86

My parents divorced when I was 14. I have a very kind and wealthy aunt who decided to give my mother and me a fantastic gift. My aunt gifted us a 3 month trip to Europe during the summer of ’86. My mom took a leave of absence from work and we were able to take off on an unforgettable adventure, forgetting the divorce, and all the typical issues of day-to-day life.

My aunt also gave me a perfumed gift set as a going away present. She chose Estee Lauder White Linen, which was extremely popular in 1986, so I left for Europe with the body lotion, shower gel and perfume. For the rest of my life, the scent of White Linen will remind me of that fabulous trip. I’m not sure if this is still the case, because I haven’t sniffed White Linen in years, but when I imagine White Linen I can feel the heft of that frosted glass container the body lotion was housed in.

Being 15 years old and traveling for 3 months with one’s mother can be a little tricky. I was the poster child of a rebellious teenager and my mom and I were already having lots of trouble getting along, and, of course, 95% of the time it was my own fault. But when we got to Germany, the first country on our trip, we were so happy and interested in everything that it was fairly easy to let everything fall into place and treat each other nicely. Our first stop was to visit my uncle and his wife in Munich. My uncle’s wife is a gorgeous Korean woman, who turns out to be one of the few people in my family who wear fragrance. She always had a bottle of Shalimar, and I think it was the pure parfum, on her dresser. Her name is Chong Suk and she was/is gorgeous, with long flowing blackish-blue hair, perfect skin and fashionably dressed (heels at all times). Chong Suk and I did some damage shopping in Munich. She also bought me a bottle of Shalimar for myself. But I didn’t open Shalimar, I was using White Linen on this trip, until it was empty.

We stayed in Germany for almost two months, using my uncle's home as our launch pad and taking several long weekends and extended trips to Belgium, France, Spain and Switzerland. Everywhere I went White Linen came with me. I always used the body lotion after shaving my legs and I would cup my hands over my nose giving it one last big huff when I was done. White Linen seemed so clean, effortless and sophisticated at this juncture in my life. We spent a week in Paris, which oddly, wasn’t the highlight of my trip. We did all the museums and all the sights that tourists must do. I ate escargot and macarons. We pretty much didn’t leave a stone unturned. My mom had a friend, a distant cousin, whose apartment we stayed at in Paris, so the experience seemed as authentic as can be.
In Paris I bought a few gifts for friends back home. I chose Rochas Lumiere because I loved the bottle. I haven’t a clue what Lumiere smells like, but the bottle was purplish, romantic and feminine. I ended up keeping a bottle for myself. No surprise there.

Our last month was spent in the United Kingdom. My mom had a friend whose flat we stayed at in London for a week. Then we spent 9 perfect days staying at the Savoy in London where we had afternoon tea every day and at night attended the theater. I visited my pen pal who I’d been writing to since the 5th grade just outside Bath, England. Anne, my pen pal, turned out to be aloof and not what I expected, but it was still an experience hanging out with her for a few days.

My best friend Megan gave me a few mix tapes before we left. I listened to these mix tapes constantly while we were in the car, train or subway. I had a boy crush back home. Tim and I weren’t technically dating, we had only kissed once at the movie theater, during a showing of Nightmare on Elm Street, but I thought about him nonstop while listening to Madonna’s True Blue. Even though I was having the time of my life, it did feel a little scary missing out on a whole summer of friendship, gossip and goings-on back home. I wasn’t listening to Tears for Fear Everybody Wants to Rule the World over and over again like everyone in America; this wasn’t playing on the radio in Europe. I caught up with MTV, the gossip and the music scene once I returned, a slightly different person.

Mom and I then took an ultra touristy bus tour across England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It lasted 3 weeks and lucky for me there was a whole contingent of teenagers traveling with their parents on this trip. Now this was fun because I could sneak off with the teenagers and get into little bits of trouble here and there. Don’t forget, back in ’86, it seemed the UK had a relaxed attitude towards the drinking age, so there was lots of fun to be had. I met a boy on this tour, his name was Adam, and we had a 3 week teen-aged love affair. I remember one night after sneaking out of his room (no, THAT didn’t happen in case you’re thinking I was THAT rebellious), he said “you always leave such a pretty trail of fragrance after you leave me,” and here I am thinking all these years later that this was the very definition of sillage, I was leaving Adam a little White Linen scent trail.

This 3 month trip didn’t heal all our wounds but it allowed us to forget about many of our familial problems and gave both my mom and I a lifetime’s worth of memories. The sensation of those White Linen bottles in my hands and the scent of its perfume, both on my person and emanating from inside my suitcase is an embedded scent memory and so much a part of my European adventure of ‘86. I finished off all the White Linen that my aunt gave me by the end of the trip. As much as I loved White Linen that summer, I never bought it or wore it again. White Linen remains the summer of '86 for me.

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.