Youth Dew Gets A(nother) Face Lift

Recently, I've been exchanging emails with Elena over at Perfume Shrine about a series of mysteries revolving around Youth Dew and its somewhat unknown related iterations, all of which were released during a little blip on the Lauder screen in the mid seventies. It's been fun playing detectives - the fragrances have come and gone, so it's all harmless mystery. Things get a little more serious, I learned, when a more established fragrance is forced into what is considered by its die hard fans a weird sort of early retirement. I'm speaking of the latest Youth Dew reformulation, but I'll get to that.

In 1977, Estee Lauder released Soft Youth Dew, a flanker to her flagship fragrance. At least, I think she did. Pick a day, any day, and run a search on Ebay for Soft Youth Dew. All you're ever likely to find are half ounce gift with purchase bottles. It's almost as if the fragrance was put on a giveaway trial run and quickly considered ill-advised, without ever actually being put on sale. Stranger still, when I did find something other than a half ounce bottle of Soft Youth Dew, it was a vintage tester bottle. The juice in that tester bottle smells very little like the Soft Youth Dew contained in the half ounce bottles, several of which I've smelled. It's much closer to Youth Dew proper, with a hand extending firmly toward Cinnabar.

Cinnabar was released a year after Soft Youth Dew, and the bottle it comes in hasn't changed much over the years. What has changed is the cap, and the name. Soon after the appearance of Soft Youth Dew, Cinnabar was introduced under the title "Cinnabar, Soft Youth Dew Fragrance". The cap for the earliest spray bottles of Cinnabar is identical, except in color, to the cap on my Soft Youth Dew tester bottle. Viewing these together was the first time I'd thought about a direct, explicit connection between Youth Dew and Cinnabar. When you remove Cinnabar's cap, you see that the bottle looks very much like the original bath oil and cologne flacons for Youth Dew. Many people have commented on a connection between the fragrances, but that has always been a perceived connection, based on ingredients and standards of classification. Those earliest bottles for Soft Youth Dew and Cinnabar, as well as the commingling of their names, makes their intrinsic connection crystal clear.

Also clear: Lauder had no apparent problem with a connection being made. Either way, she would succeed: Cinnabar might, on the one hand, trade on the success and lineage of Youth Dew; on the other, it might break new ground as something quite different, for those who didn't really fancy Youth Dew much. Soft Youth Dew disappeared. Youth Dew and Cinnabar prevailed, the latter presenting some formidable competition for Opium, a similar oriental released the year before.

Elena pointed out to me the possibility or probability that Lauder and Yves Saint Laurent might have been in competition over the choice of Opium's inro style tasseled bottle. Had Lauder won, the strategy for Cinnabar's marketing might have been different. Opium, of course, won, but Lauder clearly next bested Yves, choosing a name for her oriental which embodied inro without having to shape itself as one. There was a bit of been there done that to Lauder's decision in packaging Cinnabar anyway. For years she'd been presenting solids of her fragrances in decorative compartments one could attach to a dangling chain. Essentially, as Elena pointed out, the inro-themed idea was first hers. Besides which: While Opium was a provocative name, Cinnabar was a richly evocative one, whose associations reverberated in the consumer's imagination, as opposed perhaps to simply scandalizing or titillating it.

Soft Youth Dew and Cinnabar/Soft Youth Dew Fragrance weren't the first times an Estee Lauder fragrance appeared and disappeared in short order. Soft Youth Dew competed with Lauder's own trio of fragrances: Pavilion, Celadon, and White Linen, one of which will sound very familiar to you, two of which you've possibly never heard. It wasn't the last time the Youth Dew franchise was openly toyed around with, either: years later, Youth Dew Amber Nude was there, then not.

In between all these up front conceptual tinkerings have been behind closed doors tweaks and adjustments - and not just of Youth Dew but of all the Lauder scents. Almost everyone realizes that Youth Dew has changed at least a little over the years. The animalics it originally contained had long since been removed a year ago or less (or more), when the fragrance changed more than ever before. Until this latest change, Youth Dew die hards remained content(-ish). The juice remained that nice dark balsamic brown. Its oils pooled luxuriantly on the skin. Its smell contained a thousand childhoods, and motherhoods, a menagerie of memories and remembered moods.

Want to see a shit-storm? Visit the Lauder page and peruse the customer reviews for Youth Dew. Notice that around this time last year, the objections began. They haven't stopped since. "This is not my Youth Dew," wrote YouthDewGirl, age 55-64, El Cajon, California. "I do not know what Estee Lauder has done to this fragrance but it is terrible now... Bring the old Youth Dew back again!"

"The new generation will never know what they have missed," according to Mother01, age 55-64, Elkton. "They will try the new version and move on, because it is nothing special now. The original scent was used by four generations of women in my family."

You get the picture. So do they. This litany of objections, as several note in the "reviews", demonstrates how savvy the loyal consumer is. The Lauder lady at the counter will tell them nothing has changed, just as I was told yesterday at the mall, but the longtime Lauder buyer smells rat. In a sense, Elena and I have been, in the last few weeks, enacting our own version of this online commiseration, comparing our impressions and theories about Soft Youth Dew and Cinnabar and their relationship to Youth Dew original, testing personal perceptions against those of a peer.

For us, it's innocent sleuthing. To the Youth Dew Loyalist, changes to the formula are a far less entertaining affair. For the Lauder brand, this breach of contract with the consumer is serious business indeed, and if the reviewers honor their word, the company will realize they only thought they knew what a slump in sales truly meant. Reading these reviews I thought, don't mess with loyalty. Then too, I thought that anyone who's ever gotten into an argument with a woman of a certain age should know better than to try to pull the rug out from under one. Tell her you're selling insurance out of Cambodia and need to dip into her pension, maybe, but messing with her fragrance is folly.

Still, I thought, how bad could it be? So I went and smelled it.

I don't think it is bad. In fact, I like it. It's a fine fragrance, better than most, on its own terms. The problem is that Youth Dew can't be separated from its own terms: that's a lesson Lauder might have learned herself with early Cinnabar and Soft Youth Dew, and it's a lesson Tom Ford must have surely learned the hard way with Amber Nude. As the Lauder sales associate told me yesterday, the biggest obstacle for Amber Nude was the fact that no one seemed to be able to figure out it wasn't meant to REPLACE Youth Dew. Thus the constant refrain: What happened to my Youth Dew? Hard to sell a flanker when it sits between the original and its loyalist.

The feelings for and against Youth Dew are strong enough that no side really wants to see something slightly different. Take it or leave it, yes. Six or half a dozen, not so much. "Everything that made Estee Lauder's original fragrance so unforgettable is still here," read the ads for Soft Youth Dew. "It's all just a little s-o-f-t-e-r." Apparently, not soft enough, or too soft altogether when it comes to lovers and haters of the original.

The newest Youth Dew is more leathery to me. It still comes in the Body Satinee, the cream, the dusting powder, the bath oil, the deodorant (head scratcher, that one). All are arguably just as penetrating as Youth Dew's ever been, in any concentration. The oil won't be pooling, but the fragrance sticks around. No more cola colored contents. No more deep, dark, recesses of the earth balsamic structure. It can hardly be said that this Youth Dew is younger, or hipper, less stately than Youth Dews past, so it's hard to believe the changes have been an effort to win new consumers. It's a woody oriental, with less floral decadence than it once, even recently, had. Stealth woody orientals aren't selling like hotcakes, last time I checked.

This version, in fact, reminds me more of an exercise like Amber Nude and Soft Youth Dew than it does a reformulation. In effect, in all but name, a flanker. In some ways it reminds me of the reformulated Magie Noire's relationship to its original. It remains, however dark and oriental, surface bound somehow, lacking that weird vintage resonance. Still, for me, if not for the Lauder website reviewer, it's unmistakably Youth Dew - and latest Youth Dew's version of surface is still far deeper than the majority of contemporary fragrances.

It's interesting to consider what Lauder, still living, might have made of all this - let alone to ponder whether she would have allowed it in the first place. I like to think she learned some kind of lesson with Soft Youth Dew and Cinnabar, though I don't know just what that would be. In truth, her handling of those two related fragrances, however superficially confusing, was done intelligently enough that no existing fragrance was compromised, no established name muddled. It's hard to imagine Estee, who spent so many years building her empire, woman by woman, relationship by relationship, countenancing this kind of maneuver, which amounts to betrayal in the eyes of many of those women. Better to have let Youth Dew die, she might have thought.

Which is exactly what the ladies on Lauder's website are saying.

(Pictured: the changing face of Youth Dew - from Youth Dew to Cinnabar and everywhere in between. Top photo: Cinnabar, Soft Youth Dew Fragrance. Second down: Tester bottle for Soft Youth Dew. Third down: Early bottle for Cinnabar. Fourth down: Early Youth Dew cologne bottle. Fifth down: Magazine ad for Soft Youth Dew. Sixth down: A hybrid Cinnabar/Youth Dew/Soft Youth Dew bottle, with Youth Dew's silhouette, Soft Youth Dew's name, and Cinnabar's branding.)

Belle of the Barnyard: Max Factor Epris

If I'd been looking for a spokeswoman in the eighties, and had a sultry perfume to sell, Jaclyn Smith wouldn't have been my first (or second) choice. While not exactly strawberry shortcake, she was never really the let's get right into bed type. Had I seen the Jaclyn-centric ad for Epris before smelling this 1981 Max Factor fragrance, I doubt my curiosity would have been triggered. Fortunately, I found a mini at some antique store last summer, traveling cross country with my mom (I don't advise this, by the way, unless you can keep your travel time down to under five hours or you're going convoy style in separate cars).

Until a week ago, I enjoyed this mini periodically but had no idea what it was, and much as I liked it, I didn't really investigate. I don't think I even checked the bottom of the bottle, where the label indicates the name. I assumed it was some Youth Dew era oriental, a one off that didn't make a wave (though it clearly should have) and barely made a dent in the mass market culture of suburban perfume lovers. At some point I even thought it might actually have been decanted from a larger, more recognizable fragrance by another traveller who, like me, needed some back up on the road. Who knew Epris was listed on Fragrantica all this time, or that I could have very easily looked into it before now?

Fragrantica lists Epris as a chypre floral. My immediate thought, reading this, was that if Epris is a chypre floral, Bandit is a fruitchouli in a faceted pink bottle. Epris doesn't even smell like a floriental to me. It's straight up balsamic oriental, with the usual suspects hiking up their skirts: patchouli, spices (clove, clove, and clove) and a generous scraping of civet and castoreum. It has a leathery feel instantly, rather than drying down to one, and while there are florals in the mix, as in Youth Dew, they've obviously been told to sit down and shut up. This fragrance wants to get horizontal, and it wants to get horizontal now. After gymnastic somersaults through spiced amber and barnyard, it gets a little powdery in the late dry down, as if to say, "Yes, that's my bosom you're smelling."

"Maybe your mother never told you," begins the television ad, "there's more to being a woman than minding your manners." You might easily assume, hearing Jaclyn Smith say this, that she's just sucked on helium. Maybe it's the quality of the recording in the version I watched. Either way, as with the designation "chypre floral", there's a real disconnect between the way the fragrance is made to sound (girly) and the way it actually smells (far end of post pubescent: pun intended). "Being a woman means sometimes taking the first step first," Jaclyn continues, after introducing herself in a sequined, mostly sheer black dress reclining on a plump leather sofa. Again, I would say leap, not step, because Epris is clearly an attack mode type fragrance, with a physical vocabulary ranging from pounce to pulverize.

Epris, says Jaclyn, is a fragrance that understands this "first step first" thing. "Epris is a little unsettling; a little disturbing. Epris is a most provocative fragrance. If mama never told you, I'll tell you: Part of the art of being a woman is knowing when not to be too much of a lady."

Whatever the tone of her voice, at least the dialogue speaks truthfully about the perfume. While the initial impression of Epris is along the lines of Youth Dew, it soon takes a slight but hard left turn toward Tabu, putting itself in park somewhere in between. Even in an era characterized by bold, forceful constructions, Epris was something of an oddball, looking back lustfully not just to Youth Dew (1953) and Tabu (1932) but to one of my all time favorites, Bal a Versailles (1962). It dives straight down to patchouli and animalics without bothering to ask you if you mind. There's that kind of confidence in it. It's on the prowl and thanks you very much for letting it out of the bottle to get the ball rolling, but no time for niceties. It don't mind if it do.

There's a taste for this kind of thing, and not everyone's salivating over it. I'm grateful, because it's scarce online, unless you want to stock up on minis until you have something approximating full bottle. I'm impressed with everything about Epris - the fact that Max Factor produced it, its tenacity, its husky attitude, its uniqueness among its eighties peers as an old school, unapologetic oriental. It's been a long time since I smelled something this good, and I was happy to find a seller online who was offering two one ounce bottles. How much do I like Epris? Better than my favorite Serge Lutens fragrance (a tie between Cedre and Arabie, in case you're wondering). Once again, I'm reminded that some of the most satisfying fragrances have been sold at the drugstore, for a steal, and they didn't even have oud in them.

Scent Memories: Three Women in Hickman, Kentucky

Around this time last year, I interviewed a woman about the scents the women in her family used to wear. Each of her aunts had her own signature scent. There was Dot, Baby Doll, Judy, Juanita, and Linda, the youngest. She said her aunts wore White Shoulders and Youth Dew, among other things, and together they represented what she called a "menagerie of scent." Until 2011, all of the five women were still living. Last summer, Linda was having trouble hearing and went to the doctor. Her body was riddled with cancer and she died about a month later. This summer, Dot died, leaving three.

Dot had kept up the family home in Hickman, Kentucky since their mother's death in '95. My friend, who is the daughter of the woman I interviewed, had been to the funeral and came back telling me about the place. She texted me pictures to illustrate. In the attic, there was an old Guerlain dusting powder box: L'Heure Bleue.

I've been wanting to make a western movie of some kind, ever since Abigail recommended the book The Sisters Brothers to me. The book was as fantastic as she'd said it would be, and instantly made me want to do something with some of that frontier mood. I told my friend I was writing a story but didn't have a house to film it in, and she mentioned this place in Hickman, and off we went with cameras and microphones to check it out.

Since Dot died, the house is just sitting there, used mainly for rare family get togethers. There are family photos all over the mantel and propped along the transoms. A sign between the dining room and the kitchen reads: "God help me to know when to keep my big mouth shut." In the small bathroom, there's a single bottle of perfume, an older version of Cachet.

The three surviving sisters knew we were coming and were at the house when we got there. They'd brought fried chicken, okra, and biscuits. There was Diet Coke in the fridge. They all sat in the living room while we took test shots of the place but it soon became pretty obvious that they were the most interesting things in the house. They talked about their memories of boys and each other and the people in Hickman. And I asked them about perfume.

Judy told me about the time she'd saved her allowance and the money she got for Christmas, which added up to 29 cents, to buy a perfume set which included powder. I can't remember what scent it was. Like her daughter, who I'd interviewed, she recounted what all the women had worn, but their stories differed slightly. They seemed to remember every perfume they'd ever worn.

There was a Hammond organ in the room and at one point Juanita played it while the rest sang hymns. Baby Doll was eating pie out of a tin dish and started to cry, maybe because all the talk about perfume brought back memories, and she felt the absence of Dot and Linda. When we left Judy told us she didn't know why they all got so mean but she thought it was probably because there were three men present, counting me, and men seemed to do that. I didn't think they were mean and I think maybe what she meant was that they got candid in a way they worried might be unladylike. I loved that they talked freely, the way I imagine they do when they're alone with each other.

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.

An Interview with Jack

You probably don't need us to tell you we have sort of interesting readers. I met Jack on Facebook, after doing a search on Paco Rabanne's La Nuit there, and we hit it off instantly. Jack treats his facebook profile like a perfume blog for the most part, posting vintage ads, his scent of the day, and observations about everything from why the kid in an old Arpege image is creepy to the fact that he just found Florida Water at Wal-Mart. He does a recurring thing called Edith's Shopping Bag which keeps track of his perfume purchases, with pictures for the short of attention span. It made sense that he'd been reading the blog for a while--even though it took us a little longer than your average person to figure that out. Hey, you're the guy from that blog, he said one day. Um, yeah, I answered. You know it? Duh! Jack's a really smart guy and, like Abigail, and a lot of you, a lot of fun to talk to. We met on Facebook to chat tonight, in the first of a continuing series:

The Family That Sprays Together: Some Hypotheticals Involving You, Your Loved Ones, and Smelly Stuff

Commingling with family around the holidays can be treacherous. Most of our families love us. Okay, so yours loves you. But even when there's no surplus of love, it can sometimes feel as though two entirely different species are coming into contact. By that I mean people who love perfume--a lot--and people who think it smells kind of good but only on someone in another building than the one they happen to be inhabiting.

The following are two hypothetical scenarios which might help you navigate this potentially explosive( i.e. diffusive) territory. I pulled them out of my imagination and can assure you with confidence they involve no persons living or dead.

Okay. They happened to me.

This Week at the Perfume Counter: Omaha

This Christmas, I puchased Guerlain Homme as a present for my father, thinking it would be a good everyday scent for a guy who probably doesn't have many and tends to play it safe. I guess I have no memory, and simply put early indications of his apparently intrinsic sophistication out of my mind temporarily. Entering his bathroom, I saw a 4.2 ounce bottle of Guerlain Heritage on the counter. It was half empty. I smelled what seemed like natural musks in it, so I assume it dates back to the time of the fragrance's release.

Seeing it there brought back childhood memories of my father's previous colognes. He never seemed to have more than one at a time--my father is a deeply pragmatic person when it comes to finances and possessions--but he did have, at some point, Aramis and Aramis 900. I remember his long dressing room, with its full-length mirror and the double sinks, which always smelled of one or the other. My dad used splash bottles. My aunt tells me she remembers him wearing Old Spice as a very young man, so maybe he picked up the habit there. His Heritage is also a splash.

Aramis Devin: Another Country

I've always loved Devin, but it's so close to Aliage, and the lasting power is so inferior to its older sister, that I've opted out of buying it. Now that Aramis has re-released many of its forgotten classics, some of which were discontinued, I've revisited, and I see my error. If you told me one of my favorite movies was being remade, I imagine I wouldn't be that interested. If you told me the director was making a sequel on the same themes with some of the same actors, I'd pre-order my ticket.

I don't know that Bernard Chant, the nose behind Devin, had anything to do with Aliage. I assume he did, though I've seen Francis Camail listed as the Perfumer. I don't contest that, though the earliest credit I can find for Camail is Eau d'Hadrien (with Annick Goutal). That was in 1981. An Estee Lauder fragrance, Aliage came out in 1972. It certainly bears the woody-herbaceous imprint of Chant, but so does Aramis 900, and I don't know that he did that either.

Devin (1977) was the second fragrance release from Aramis, an Estee Lauder offshoot devoted to male grooming products. Chant inaugurated the Aramis line, in 1966, with Aramis Cologne. Aramis was Chant's Cabochard, her cheeks slapped with citrus aftershave. Aramis and Estee Lauder fragrances are curious in their approach to gender. Azuree, released about five years after Aramis, is its androgynous counterpart. It's as if the man who was Aramis, after dressing in female drag, then put a suit on top of his gown. Aramis 900 is strikingly similar to Aromatics Elixir, a fragrance Chant orchestrated for Clinique. JHL (1982) puts big boy pants on Youth Dew and Cinnabar, classic Lauder feminines, monogramming them with Mr. Lauder's initials.

Aliage was somewhat butch to begin with. It was promoted as a Sport Fragrance, though I'm hard-pressed to come up with a sport women were playing back in 72 which might have lent itself to such a powerful onslaught of resins, woods, camphor and jasmine, a combined effect nearly nuclear in strength. The chrome and glass bottle, with its seventies type, recalls the indoor tennis courts of my youth: curvy modular surfaces, corrugated metals and amber glass.

I picture women in short tennis skirts, hair fixed to their foreheads by sweat, but the ad for Aliage shows a fancy lady perched on the back of an open station wagon, holding what appears to be a polo stick. She's dressed in a herringbone pantsuit, a tweed overcoat slung over her shoulders. Her shirt looks like something a man would wear. I'm not sure a man would fancy her beret, but its jaunty angle doesn't exactly broadcast the girl next door, or anywhere nearby. The look is finished off with leather gloves and ankle boots. A flannel blanket hangs over the tailgate, on top of which: a picnic basket, phallic bread loaf and wine bottle poking out the top. Because ads of this sort are market tested to within an inch of their lives, I take it no room was left for accident here. The message seems to be very much about women's lib and a spirit of emancipation which begins with a mindset and extends into lifestyle.

Interesting that Devin should take such a different approach. While its advertising campaign mirrored that of Aliage in key ways (the outdoors, fresh air, green backdrop) it was practically unconscious by comparison. It was billed as a "country cologne: a rich, sophisticated fragrance that captures the relaxed, unhurried attitude of the country life." I'm not exactly sure what the country life looks like, but Devin seemed determined to articulate it. I've tracked down three adverts for Devin. All show a scruffy male in a decidedly contemplative mood. The setting might best be described as elbow-patch rural. Surrounded by trees, open country roads, and grassy fields, the model seems to be far away (mentally and physically) from the sporting life. Taken together, Devin and Aliage indicate a pretty blatant reversal of roles. While women navigate the playing field, men go out to pasture.

Aliage never loses its bluster. It's a wind that never stops blowing. In effect, it remains active, whereas Devin is passive. Aldehydes make the top notes (orange, artemisia, lavender, bergamot, galbanum, and lemon) shimmer like sunlight through overhanging tree branches. But Devin isn't bright like Aliage, which remains piquant. The middle notes are dense and moody: carnation, cinnamon, jasmine, caraway and pine tree needles. Compare this to the middle notes of Aliage: pine tree, jasmine, caraway, Brazilian rosewood. In Devin, the mixture feels velvety, the lambswool collar of a knit sweater rubbing against your face. The effect is partly cloudy, and none of the ads depicts a sunny setting. Carnation and cinnamon add a spicy, simmering quality. Someone's cooking in the kitchen, somewhere in the distance, but it isn't a woman.

The dry down of Devin is mellower still. The basenotes read like a litany of library aromas: labdanum, leather, amber, patchouli, musk, oakmoss, cedar. Aliage subtracts the leathers and languor, livening things up with vetiver and myrrh. Devin doesn't really remind me of the outdoors, whatever the intent. I see a domestic, if equally solitary, scene; a dark glass of tawny port, leather arm chairs, heavy drapes, vintage books, wood paneled walls, a burgundy Persian rug. It isn't entirely insular. The window provides a view, and is cracked, but only just so. Looks like it might rain. The woman of the house is out there with her polo stick, oblivious to the forecast.

JHL: The Secret's Not So Secret Anymore

It never occurred to me back when it first came out, but JHL is, as many online have commented, so similar to Youth Dew, Cinnabar, and Opium that it could easily replace any one of them on the shelves and no one would be the wiser. Aramis has just relaunched JHL as part of its Gentleman Collection, along with Havana, Devin, and Aramis 900. I've yet too smell Havana but hear it's somewhere out of this world, too, which is saying I like JHL very much. Then again, I like Youth Dew and Cinnabar. I bought both of them sometime last year and wear them regularly. At first they seemed spectacularly feminine. Then they just seemed like something I would wear. You can find infinite scrolls of copy on those legendary perfumes, so I won't dwell on them. What I'm more interested in, really, is how somebody got away with releasing JHL as a masculine at a time when Kouros and other hairy-chested behemoths ruled the roost.

I'm also fascinated by the fact that I never saw any connection at the time. Did anyone else, or was it just me? How was it possible that Estee Lauder would even venture such a stealth move on the buying public, conflating masculine and feminine right under the consumer's nose, without concern that such a sales strategy would backfire? For as long as I can remember now (okay, a little over a year) I've been championing the erosion of gender categories in fragrance. They seem so arbitrary and bogus, mere marketing tools. Smell is democratic. A man washes his hands in flowery soap and thinks nothing of it, yet, somehow, Aromatics Elixir is beyond the limits of masculinity, no matter that it smells very similar to Aramis for men. We seem to ignore the blurred boundaries between these fragrances across the so-called gender divide as though we've internalized the segregation of scents which technically smell virtually the same.

How many men smelled Youth Dew or Cinnabar on their lady friends (mothers, wives, grandmothers, steadies, strangers) and liked it? Lauder must have done the math. By pouring Youth Dew into a butch bottle with a masculine monogrammed label (ostensibly for her own husband) she allowed men to wear what they'd already been enjoying for years. I imagine Mr. Lauder smelling Estee's neck for the umpteenth time. Oh that smells wonderful, he says. You should try some, says she. Oh no, I couldn't possibly, he guffaws. It's so feminine. I like it on you, dear. What if Estee simply poured Youth Dew or Cinnabar into a new bottle, as a little experiment. Here's a businesswoman who sold more units than the average highest-selling male. I wonder how many times she felt condescended to, as though her province were simply the house-bound lady folk. How many times was she made to feel that in a world of men she wouldn't sell those numbers? How must she have felt, being treated as if her proper place were in the home? It would certainly bolster my desire to make a point--if only for my own personal satisfaction--and I have only a fraction of her ambition and drive.

Which isn't to say adjustments weren't made to the formula. The truth is, there isn't much difference between JHL, Youth Dew, Cinnabar, and Opium--how else would the experiment work, otherwise? But there are subtle adjustments. JHL has the faintest whiff of fir, a certain strain of alpine airiness moving through its structure. Michael Edwards classifies it as "aromatic--rustic", whereas Cinnabar, for instance, is listed as "oriental--spicy". Both have rose, cinnamon, and carnation in their hearts. Both open piquantly with a zesty spritz of orange. JHL replaces Cinnabar's incense with labdanum, adds pimento up top and the fir note instead of jasmine, which makes a far subtler adjustment than you might expect. It might also be that Lauder wanted to show in some way how little distance there is between making a so-called feminine into a so-called masculine. Baby steps, really. It certainly would have shown that knowing a thing or two about women was in some ways knowing as much about men. Was Estee Lauder this avant-garde--the Marcel Duchamp of perfumery and cosmetics? If so, don't count on anyone giving her credit for it, despite the fact that Devin is a dead ringer for Aliage, and Aramis 900 just a hop skip and a jump removed from Tuscany per Donna.

I received a bottle of JHL in grade school, and couldn't have been happier. I liked it better than any cologne I'd ever smelled, and wearing it was vaguely confusing, because I generally had no taste for male fragrances, certainly far less than I do now. For years I'd hung out at my mother's bureau, enjoying her aged bottle of Youth Dew in secret. I could never put it on. I couldn't risk letting anyone smell it on me. I had to absorb the smell mentally and store it in my head. I was so conditioned, so programmed by social codes and mores, that when JHL came along, I had no idea I was finally able to bring my love of Youth Dew out into the open. It was still a secret, even from me.

Will the Real NORELL Please Stand Up?

When I was a kid, Norell was the kind of perfume I expected to see out on my grandmother's dresser, displayed on a gold and glass tray. I wonder what it was about the bottle, or the perfume, that made it seem so formal, made it such an exhibition piece. I remember it being incredibly rich, with smoky galbanum notes and a luxuriant complex of spiced musks, placing it alongside other old time heavies like Dioressence, Miss Dior, Youth Dew, Aliage, and Arpege. I couldn't imagine anyone wearing it without a dinner date or a gala to attend.

Now that I know what was in Norell--in it back then, at least--that doesn't seem like such odd company to have kept. At the time, I knew nothing about galbanum, and really didn't identify it as a green, coniferous note with mentholated overtones. Instead it made perfumes like Miss Dior and Aliage seem impossibly heady to me. Youth Dew was heady too (and made, or so some say, by Josephine Catapano, the same nose who created Norell and Laroche's Fidji). Youth Dew and Norell share a balsamic density which made them seem interchangeable in some way, a dignified secret passed from one bottle to the next. They were the kind of perfumes old women wore to create a line of defense against a younger generation's lack of manners, good breeding, and class distinctions.

Over the past several weeks I've tried various reformulations and concentrations of Norell, all of which, though fairly different in many respects, open on a strong gust of galbanum. Where they differ most is in the dry down. The latest reformulation ($5.99 an ounce at Perfumania) opens with sharp galbanum, radiates quite nicely, then promptly collapses into a muddled, if persistent, amber. Given how low much higher and mightier ilk have stooped during the past decade, fudging around with their formulas and their ingredients, it's a wonder a drugstore standby like Norell hasn't descended altogether into hopeless mediocrity. Just don't go comparing it to the original. Lucky for you, that would be hard to do, as the original is hard to come by, and after so many versions, who would recognize it?

The fragrance was released in 1968 by Norman Norell (he dressed Lady Bird Johnson, Babe Paley, Lauren Bacall, the socialite Hope Hampton and Dinah Shore, among others) and was sold to Revlon in 1971 for 1.25 million. The Revlon formulation would have been what I snuck out of my stepmother's medicine cabinet in high school: still rich, still smoky, opaque and full of stark contrasts, like a strand of pearls against a black wool evening dress. It still had something of a reputation to uphold. In the late nineties, the fragrance was sold to Five Star Fragrances, which also owns the rights to Royal Secret, another perennial el cheapo balsamic bomb (not necessarily a bad thing: see Youth Dew). An attempt was made to market the fragrance back to the young women who must have smelled it on their own mothers and associated it with class, luxury, and a certain overall way of life, a fantasy of affluence. Faye Dunaway, a woman their generation watched mature on movie screens, was made the face of this new good old Norell. The Dunaway formulation smells, like the others, of galbanum up top, pungently green, but this is something of a come on, as the underlying content is lacking in substance and devolves into a hollow, tangy mess; not quite green, not remotely smoky, and nowhere near rich.

It seems to me the closest I'll get to the old Norell is the bath oil, judging by recent revisitations. At about 10-20 dollars an ounce online, the oil is a real bargain, if not an outright steal. For this you get the smokiest, greenest, most balsamic iteration of the lot. It goes on rich and it dries down that way, remaining complex, retaining its density. It smells wonderful, and relates clearly to Youth Dew, which is also available, also smoky and warm, as a bath oil. I imagine the bath oil is close to the pure parfum, though I haven't tried the latter. Norell also comes in a colonge spray. I haven't tried that either. The pure parfum is also dirt cheap, all things considered, and might be worth a shot.

The Scented Salamander lists Norell's notes as: galbanum, ylang ylang, carnation, clove, cinnamon, coriander, vanillic cardamom, musky vetiver, oakmoss, and myrrh. I can't dispute any of these, nor can I smell them individually. Norell is a concerted effect and feels, like Youth Dew, highly concentrated. Myrrh makes rational sense, as does clove and carnation. There's a spicy radiance to Norell. A New York Times Magazine article from 2001 discusses how complex those old perfumes were. Catapano characterized them as "long, like a treaty." She never understood why Norell didn't remain more popular than it was. Maybe she did understand and simply refused to accept the obvious. Comparing Ellena to Norell, for this generation, at least, is like trying to convince someone to wear a heavy boucle coat instead of a gauzy linen wrap on a Spring afternoon.

From the Times article: "Paul Austin, Quest's vice president of marketing and new business development, says that when Norell appeared, it had a lot of presence and character, unlike the lighter florals in America. Perfumers today could never get Norell past the focus groups. 'The green top note is a tough sell,' admits [perfumer Rodrigo] Flores-Roux, referring to the pow of galbanum, the resinous grassy odor that first hits the nose. Austin adds that American women have an aversion to the clove and spicy floral notes at its heart. The aldehydes supported by ylang-ylang dates the fragrance, putting it in a class with Chanel No. 5..."

"It's a silly world," Catapano said, considering what had become of her favorite creation. "It's the best fragrance. And nobody buys it anymore." Chanel has had reason and the wherewithal to reformulate Chanel No. 5 for future generations, translating the fragrance according to changing times. Norell has had no such good fortune.

From the back of the closet: Youth Dew, Eau des Merveilles and Anne Pliska

The quest continues, maybe I should label this as a series. Today I decided to wear some more forgotten gems, oldies but goodies, which are in the back of my closet. During the day I wore Estee Lauder’s Youth Dew (!) and this evening I changed into Hermes Eau des Merveilles on one arm and Anne Pliska on the other.

First, I love Youth Dew (there I said it!). The first 15 minutes are “old classic aka little old lady” but once the fragrance settles and blends into my skin I love it. Youth Dew isn’t a sweet little old lady but one with a Harley in her garage. While Youth Dew has a sort of “dated” aroma it’s also aggressive and edgy. I’m a firm believer that anyone can wear any fragrance especially if they toss aside preconceived notions and simply allow the scent to meld with their own essence. On me, Youth Dew is so spicy it growls.

Youth Dew notes: spicy notes, orange, bergamot, peach, aldehydes, clove, rose, ylang-ylang, cinnamon, orchid, amber, tolu, patchouli, benzoin, and vanilla.

In the evening I wore Hermes Eau des Merveilles and Anné Pliska edp. I’ll start with Hermes. I chose Hermes EdM because a commenter mentioned it the other day after I reviewed Bvlgari Black. Hermes EdM is a gorgeous fragrance and while I would always include it on my “top perfumes” list I just never wear it. It seems to be a novelty for me, something I love in theory but never get around to wearing. Well, tonight I wore it. I really do love this salty, woody, ambergris aroma. EdM takes me away (I think of the commercial “Calgon…take me away”) to a beach on a cool breezy day. As a rule I love salty scents and the combination of salt with woods, amber and pepper are simply dreamy. Note to self: Wear Hermes Eau des Merveilles more often!

Hermes Eau des Merveilles notes: elemi, bitter orange, Italian lemon, Indonesian pepper, pink pepper, ambergris accord, oak, cedar, vetiver, balsam of Peru and tears of Siam

The last fragrance of the day is Anné Pliska edp. I used to like this but things have definitely changed. I’m not enjoying Anné Pliska at all. I love amber but tonight Anné Pliska is smelling like an orange creamsicle – yuck. There was a time when I thought
Anné Pliska was the superior ambery oriental to CK Obsession and a nice modern interpretation of Shalimar. Now I think Obsession is easily better than Anné Pliska and Shalimar will always be the gold standard in the amber/citrus arena. Bleck – it really does smell like an exact fragrant replica of an orange creamsicle…. I need to scrub my arm and apply Hermes EdM to both.

Anné Pliska notes: Bergamot, amber, patchouli, geranium, musk, vanilla