More Tassels, Please: Things I'm Liking Lately

1. Please, please, please, put more tassels on perfume.  Put all kinds of dangly things - but tassels, if you can swing it.  Nothing feels better on a perfume bottle.  Nothing makes a perfume feel more like a perfume to me.  And don't skimp.  I like a nice, fat tassel.  Something you can really run your grubby little fingers through.  I have dozens of hundreds of fragrances.  Less than one percent have tassels, which really saddens me.  I realized this yesterday, when I saw the new Shalimar flanker, Parfum Initial.  I'm so tassel-deprived, it turns out, that it didn't matter what Parfum Initial smelled like (the verdict is still out on that).  I had to have it.  The Parfum Initial tassel is a little short for my taste but it has just the right heft.  It completes the bottle, and the fantasy, whatever that fantasy is (verdict still out on this too).  I look at almost every other bottle I have, however much I love the fragrance, and wish it had a tassel now.  They all seem slightly incomplete to me.  I get a little sad about it.  Another great tassel - the perfect tassel in every way - is the one on my bottle of Armani Onde Vertige.  Burnt cinnamon in color, attached to a longer cord with a pretty bead, it's just the right length, extending to the bottom of the bottle.  It's just the right thickness.  The bead makes a nice, delicate sound when it strikes the glass.  You want everything to go quiet so you can hear it better.  I suspect, seeing a well tasseled fragrance, that I would pay as much as thirty dollars more than I might normally.  Something comes over me.  I go into a fugue.

2. Chunky bottles get me every time, too.  The right kind of chunk, I guess.  Mona di Orio got chunk down better than possibly anyone has.  That big block of a bottle speaks my language.  I feel like I'm having a conversation with it.  Delicate things, those fragile, perilous case studies a la Lutens, get on my nerves.  I feel like I'm babysitting them.  I feel responsible for them in a way I resent.  What if they topple?  They're so anorexic, so kind of coy and anemic.  Oh aren't you pretty, you feel you're supposed to say.  Oh aren't you precious.  I want to slap these bottles.  I want to snap them out of their narcissism.  A blocky bottle holds its own and needs no such assistance.  It says, I deserve to be here and I'm sitting myself right down.  I like the Chanel bottles, for the most part, which are temperamental in transit but once arrived cannot be fazed.  Those taller Chanel bottles, the older things with the sturdy black caps, are even better.  Noting like Coco standing tall on your dresser, a miniature wall of scent.  The Mona di Orio bottles sit well anywhere, including your hand.  They could be used as a weapon.  While I can't imagine a scenario in which I'd need to wield a fragrance like a weapon, I enjoy knowing I could.

3. A blocky bottle needs the right cap, and again, Mona di Orio is doing this best.  Please try to tell me there is a better cap than this on the market.  I'd like to see you try.  Save yourself the trouble and admit defeat.  Worst are the gimmick caps.  Oh, I'm a butterfly.  Hey, I'm a bouquet of big vinyl flowers.  Who in Justin Bieber's camp thought this was a good idea, and how did they miss Marc Jacob's Lola, which would have deftly proven them wrong?  Many caps don't sit well on their bottles.  As much as I adore Parfumerie Generale, those black caps are a real issue.  They slide right off.  Often, the plastic ring meant to secure a cap to the neck doesn't secure a thing.  Histoires de Parfums realized the oversight of their earlier bottles, with those bizarrely ill-fitting gold plated caps, and redesigned a lot more intelligently.  Thank you.  A trendy little capricious cap mans nothing if it constantly falls off, as Tocade does for me.  Because of all these accident prone caps, maybe, I've really come to appreciate a good snap or click.  The Mona caps are solid, which is great, and unique, and there's a sound of finality to them.  Don't worry, they say, we've got this.  Go about your business.  A cap like the one on Natori constantly needs your help.  Beautiful stone cap, nice bottle, but a disastrous match.  The cap is too heavy.  It needs some kind of neck brace.  Other bad caps: Parfums Delrae, Keiko Mecheri, Cartier.  Other good caps: Byredo, Chanel, Etat Libre d'Orange, L'Artisan, Heeley, Malle, Diptyque, Cartier.

4. Guys who know a lot about perfume are my preferred sales associate.  It's just something I like.  The guys at Barneys have a little too much attitude for me, and seem rather bitter.  Recently, the one I dealt with actually rolled his eyes.  He couldn't be bothered with my questions.  He couldn't be bothered with the prospect of me.  Maybe I'm just that annoying.  The guys at Luckyscent Scent Bar are pretty dreamy and I'm glad I don't live in LA, because I think I'd probably stalk them.  I won't name them, in case some of you know them.  I don't want to embarrass them.  They're knowledgable, which is always a plus.  Okay, it's always freaky. You can't believe a sales associate actually knows what he's talking about.  For the most part, they're patient, but I don't really care much about patience.  It's their obvious love of perfume that slays me.  I'm like a puppy.  They're not just trying to sell you.  They have opinions, and favorites, and once you get them going it's like you're shopping with them.  I've found a few really good female sales associates - the local Estee Lauder SA is fantastic - but for me, finding a good guy sales associate is kind of special.  As a guy, I feel a little more understood dealing with them.  It's like being a Star Trek geek and finding a fellow Trekkie.  And if they bring out a tuberose fragrance they really love I just about go into a pleasure coma.

5. Perfumes that people hate or think are just a bit much always, when I finally smell them, seem like a dream come true.  I'd heard about Byredo M/Mink for months.  I'd read that it was stinky, strange, or conversely brilliant.  I was shocked when I got my hands on some.  Really?  All that fuss over honey and aquatics?  Somehow, rather than disappointment, I feel relief.  I feel, mind you, no less estranged from the currents of popular opinion than normally, but I'm glad to find something unusual and wearable and relieved that the hype is once again really just that, without the fragrance being a total letdown.  Absolue Pour Le Soir was another one.  Oh the cumin, people said.  Oh the horror, the stealth, the unbearable tenacity.  Whatevs.  Pour Le Soir is gorgeous.  Yes, plenty of cumin, but magnificently blended, and curiously strong without being overpowering.  The only fragrance I can think of which really does live up to its reputation is Etat's Secretions Magnifiques.  I won't wear it, though I appreciate it.  In fact, what I appreciate most is its hostility.  SM is unique among fragrances in its insistence on being difficult.  I know, I've heard many people say it smells just delightful on them, that they don't get anything foul, or challenging out of it.  And I think they're lying.  It's meant to be challenging and it is a challenge and whether or not you can withstand the challenge is an entirely different issue.  I'm liking M/Mink so much that it hurts.  Of course, everyone who hates Byredo said that they'd finally gotten it right.  Often I wish those people would shut it.  Everyone, even Guerlain, gets it wrong, all the time if not frequently.  I truly gorgeous fragrance is a freakish exception.

What's in a Name: More on Etat Libre D'Orange

Whenever my good friend Bard is over, I present him with a selection of fragrances to smell, hoping to hear wildly detailed descriptions. Bard is a writer and always has something interesting to say about even the most ostensibly thoroughly uninteresting subjects, so my hope each time is that he'll describe what I'm smelling in some way which will support my conjured vision of it.

He always disappoints me. Actually, I'm often frustrated, if not inwardly furious. Rather than give me elaborate narratives he offers cryptic, inert, one word summaries. "Play-doh," he says, handing the bottle back to me, or "Astro-turf." Sometimes he gets a little wordier. "I'm reminded of a cat doing a dance on an umbrella," perhaps, or: "This one is hamster cage--with a trace of hamster pee." I'm convinced he does this to annoy me, to short circuit the carefully wrought fantasy life I've built around the perfumes I like and perfume in general, but I'm also willing to concede that he might just see fragrance differently than I do; not as a procession of florals and leathers and orientals and gourmands but as an amorphous stream of wildly diverse associations and abstractions.

I thought of this today because a few more Etat Libre D'Orange perfumes arrived in the mail. In the past, I enjoyed Jasmine et Cigarette and Rien, but I've resisted buying any more of the line's creations until now, and I'm not sure why. I suspect it might be all the bad feeling around them, which influences me more than I realize--though now that I'm aware of this I want to look at them even more intently.

I find the discussion revolving around this line and its aesthetic more than a little perplexing. While enough people appreciate the perfumes, many more don't, or do only grudgingly, scoffing at the advertising schema or the florid copy, closer to old purple prose porn like Lady Chatterly than something describing the pyramid of your average fruity floral. We perfumistas say we're wise to the way fragrance companies talk about their product, able to discern between reality (what it smells like to us) and fantasy (what they say it conjures), and yet Etat Libre D'Orange, which gently mocks this way of selling and looking at perfume, is taken so seriously by some of the most ardent among us that you often wonder what exactly they want: the truth, or a more skillfully worded lie.

I would wager that Etat, like Bard, knows that you can describe fragrance in any number of ways, if you liberate yourself from the comforting straitjacket of perfume convention, and that in doing so you can expand your fantasy life exponentially, liberating it from the ad copy to which it adheres so closely into some terra incognito of pleasure and impulse. Many people take umbrage with the company's bold pronouncements, the whole "revolutionizing perfume" posture assumed by the ad copy, and, holding that up to the silly pop art erotic playfulness of the ad imagery, they (I think) mistakenly assume that Etat must be full of it, a clueless company unwittingly contradicting itself. How can you assert that you're the most radical thing to come along in modern perfumery and expect to be taken seriously when you package your product in ridiculously infantile parodies of sex and gender? Well, exactly. Almost every perfume house known to perfume lovers does exactly that, in a more meticulously evolved way.

People act as though Etat is celebrating the iconography of porn, and to an extent they are, but they're also poking fun at the way perfume is sold to us, showing us, in the process, how even the most jaded among us demand this approach. We demand to be sold sex like we're impressionable children--and so what, anyway. We want our fantasy world supported and indulged, however childish, and perhaps it should be. Perhaps we should embrace that rather than pretend it doesn't exist in the more evolved. What if Etat weren't trying at all to take perfume advertising all the way but to show us that it's already there and we just don't see it, if only because, for the most part, we choose not to? Could we then look at the perfumes for what they are, and maybe acknowledge that when Etat says they want to revolutionize the world of perfume, they mean the way it's perceived more than the way it's sold or composed?

People complain. The perfumes aren't all THAT. Snap. They aren't so very groundbreaking or unusual. Snap snap (Oh no I didn't!) But of course they are. Compare them to anything at the mall and you see that it's true, that even when they tweak pop formulas just the tiniest bit, they're showing how rigid mainstream and even niche perfumery typically is. That isn't to say that some of these perfumes aren't thrillingly strange. Secretions Magnifiques certainly is. It's mostly to say they needn't go very far to show up contemporary perfumery for what it is: afraid of its own shadow, chicken when it comes to taking even the smallest, subtlest risks. "Subversive"? "Disturbing"? Oh come on, now. Have a sense of humor. What's the difference between Etat using these words to describe Secretions and venerable Guerlain saying, of Insolence, "The irreverent scent of youth, daring, and freedom"? Oh REALLY. Freedom from what, exactly? The difference, perhaps, is one between tongue in cheek and head so far up own ass. I'm pretty sure the one, openly cartoonish, is having a laugh at the other.

Vraie Blonde is a comic vision of succulence and fizz, and at the same time a refined construction which sits interestingly beside fragrances like Mitsouko and Yvresse, chatting up a storm with them. Encens et Bubblegum is what the name says and more, and the unusual combination of words, rather than restricting you to reductive associations, encourages you to make new ones. These are playful, skillfully done, often gorgeous juices--and remarkably consistent in vision. They participate in the history of fragrance even as they assist in ushering us into its future. It's clear to me that nothing whatsoever about Etat Libre D'Orange is crass or obsessed with the bottom line. The pictures of spurting penises and Dali lips blowing nippled bubbles might strike you as obscene. They might strike you as shameless attempts to get your attention or your money. But what Etat is doing has nothing to do with cutting corners or selling short.

It's hard to imagine any other company, even Comme des Garçons, releasing Secretions Magnifiques, though it makes sense that the perfumers behind Etat do so much work for that company. Comme des Garçons, like Etat, is interested in expanding and exploring what it means to enjoy or appreciate perfume. What should--what can--perfume be? How should we talk about it? Does it HAVE to smell like this or that? If so, who says? What's the lingua franca, or can there be one? Maybe it's too personal. Maybe we call it flowers and fruity gourmands because this shorthand, however shy of the truth, is the readiest common barometer. If that's the case, who's pandering to the bottom line? The angrier or more indignant people get about Etat's methodology, the more interested I become in their project and perfumes. It's clear they're touching nerves--and with such wonderful prods.

To me, Secretions Magnifique is conceptual art applied to perfume, and to smell it is to engage with the phenomenon of fragrance in unusual, even exceptional, ways. If Secretions Magnifique falls, to some, or even all, just this side of unwearable, so what? I get tickled and fascinated when people start talking about wearability. Bandit, even now, is considered not so very wearable by some, and it troubles me not the least. Perfume doesn't necessarily have to be about wearability, and in fact, when I smell Mitsouko and my mind starts racing and the synapses start firing, I'm not thinking about how good it will go with my shirt or my suit. Hopefully, I'm beyond the restrictions of such thinking. I'm simply fantasizing, in some dreamy netherworld of mood and sensation. To me, Etat Libre D'Orange speaks to THAT kind of liberation: the enjoyment of perfume for enjoyment's sake.

Put another way, why should Bard change his vocabulary to fit my limited imagination?