Roja Dove Scandal: Enters my top 10

Anything described by Luca Turin as “preposterously intense” and “enormously rude” is going straight to the top of my must-try list. If that weren’t enough, anything considered heavily tuberose, indolic and slightly animalic is a siren call loud enough to keep me awake at night.

I started with a good sized decant of Scandal. I’m nearing the end of my decant and now a full bottle is on the way.

Here’s the thing, Scandal isn’t particularly intense nor is she rude. To me, Scandal is sublime with a capital S. Scandal is intoxicating, warm, and engaging, but she does have an attitude. Get this: Scandal is now firmly on my top 10 list of all time. Don’t ask me to list my top 10 – those that are *always* on this list (at least lately) are: Teo Cabanel Alahine, Annick Goutal Ambre Fetiche, Amarige Harvest Edition 2006, No. 22 and now Scandal. Naming the remaining 5 will give me fits. Oh, heck, listing this much has given me a panicky sensation.

The fragrance which reminds me the most of Scandal is Fracas. Do Fracas and Scandal actually smell alike? Not really. But they are second cousins. I find Fracas more in your face than Scandal. Fracas is a straight up Diva while Scandal basks in the shadows with inky, smoky eyes. Fracas is platinum blond, Scandal is brunette. I sort of hate these appearance and personality comparisons but sometimes they just make sense. I wore Fracas a great deal back in the 90’s. I also wore Fleurissimo which is another big white floral. As much as I love the idea of both of these perfumes, they wore me out. I need to admit: I can’t wear Fracas, it’s too much and makes me a bit headache-y. I also feel like an imposter wearing Fracas and Fleurissimo, like I have a sign over my head which reads: “Alert! Alert! This woman is trying to enter our club but she is NOT one of us.”

Are Fracas and Fleurissimo cold white florals? Is that it? Scandal feels warm and easy. Scandal melts into my skin and I feel completely comfortable wearing it. Scandal has been described as a classic 1950’s type of big white floral; it most definitely reads classic to me but not particularly retro. Scandal smells like equal parts tuberose, jasmine and freesia with touches of lily of the valley to make it gentle. The start is strongly orange blossom and this is where Scandal reminds me of Fracas, the opening is a big tilt-o-the-hat to cousin Fracas. The jasmine adds a green touch and the tuberose is very warm and animalic. The whole composition is loud yet cozy warm and the softly woody spices and musk in the base are nothing short of perfection.

Most of the time, my very favorite fragrances are one’s which are a scent of their own, not an accumulation of notes. Take Alahine for instance; maybe you could pick out the notes if you tried, but overall, Alahine is Alahine, it’s own scent entity, it exists as a whole, not a group of notes sticking together in the same vicinity. Same for No. 22, No. 5 and many others. Scandal, while a beautiful rendering of the sum of it’s notes, is also one of these scents; it is simply the smell of Scandal. The notes are dense are difficult to smell apart whereas some fragrances leave space between the notes, like Hermes Vanille Galante, were I can smell the spaces in between the notes. Scandal, like Fracas, Divine and Songes is a big white floral with an existence and attitude all it’s own.

According to basenotes:
Top: bergamot, muguet, orange blossom
Middle: freesia, rose, jasmine from Grasse, tuberose
Base: sandalwood, orris, balsams, musk

Bond No.9 Saks Fifth Avenue for Her

Michel Almairac has done some pretty high profile fragrances, some of which even the newest or most casual admirer of perfume will find familiar; Gucci Rush, Gucci Pour Homme, Chopard Casmir, and Dunhill Men among them. He's also done a lot of niche work, like Voleur de Roses for L'Artisan and Le Labo Ambrette 9, and lower profile mainstream compositions like Gres Cabaret, Joop Homme, and Paloma Picasso Minotaure for men. Though he has been productive since at least 1982, his name is hardly as well known as contemporary peers Sophia Grojsman (Poison, Yvresse, White Linen), Jean Claude Ellena (Hermes) and Maurice Roucel (Missoni, Be Delicious, Tocade). Even among perfumistas, he's hardly a household name.

Almairac has done five fragrances for Bond No. 9, several of which I like very much. Fire Island has its detractors, but I'm a fan. It smells like suntan lotion, but it's a fantasy version, conjuring the beach and summer memories and a laid back state of mind. It starts out strong with gardenia and seques eventually into white musk and soft patchouli, a progession which mimics the real sense of a day in the sand, where you start out fresh and clean and end up salty, slightly grungy, and warm. Bryant Park is pleasant enough. West Side, too. Recently, I smelled Saks Fifth Avenue for Her, a fairly straightforward tuberose, and I think I like it most of all.

Sold exclusively at Saks, it has an unusual quality for a tuberose. It has that buttery, rubbery quality many of them do, but something else too. This might be the vetiver at its base. It might be all kinds of things. What it smells like is somewhat smoky. Almairac delivers this unexpected trick in a few other places. The incense singe of Gucci Pour Homme comes most readily to mind. Along with vetiver and tuberose, the notes include vanilla, jasmine and gardenia. Pretty simple. The effect is deceptively simple, too. What I like about Saks is how quietly strange it is. It reminds me of Fracas with an ever so slight gourmand edge to it. I think that's what makes it for me. It's as if someone figured out a way to grill Tuberose and serve it up as an appetizing dish, making tuberose seem as edible as artichoke or coconut. Coconut is a good analogy, as many people swear there's some in Saks. They find Saks somewhat tropical. I guess I really don't. Then again, it makes perfect sense to me that the man behind Saks and Rush is the man behind Fire Island, because all do interesting things with tuberose and/or gardenia. Like many tuberose fragrances, Saks last well, but it doesn't seem as "take no prisoners" as some can, and I'm someone who likes the assaultive quality of Michael by Michael Kors. Whether or not you find its qualities worth the price tag is another question, and always or often an issue with the Bond line.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dandy of the Day: Isabella Blow (1958-2007)

Isabella Blow was an English magazine editor and international style icon. The muse of hat designer Phillip Treacy, she is credited with discovering the models Stella Tennant and Sophie Dahl as well as the fashion designer Alexander McQueen (she bought his entire graduate thesis collection). Blow often said her fondest memory was trying on her mother's pink hat, a recollection that she explained led to her career in fashion. She worked with Anna Wintour and Andre Leon Talley at various points. As with Talley, half her work seemed to be expressing and asserting her personal aesthetic. In a 2002 interview with Tamsin Blanchard, Blow declared that she wore extravagant hats for a practical reason:

"...to keep everyone away from me. They say, Oh, can I kiss you? I say, No, thank you very much. That's why I've worn the hat. Goodbye. I don't want to be kissed by all and sundry. I want to be kissed by the people I love."

Toward the end of her life, Blow had become seriously depressed and was reportedly anguished over her inability to "find a home in a world she influenced". Other pressures included money problems (Blow was disinherited by her father in 1994). On May 6, 2007, during a weekend house party at Hilles, where the guests included Treacy and his life partner, Stefan Bartlett, Blow announced that she was going shopping. Instead, she was later discovered collapsed on a bathroom floor by her sister Lavinia and was taken to the hopsital, where Blow told the doctor she had drunk the weedkiller Paraquat. She died at the hospital the following day.

Images of Blow, in which her inimitable spirit is abundantly apparent, remain iconic illustrations of committed individualism. We at I Smell Therefore I Am believe that Blow might have worn any of the following:

Robert Piguet's Fracas - tuberose softened in butter.

Frederic Malle's Carnal Flower - the exact moment of
orgasm, bottled.

Ava Luxe Midnight Violet - a bed of violet glowing under the moon, the smell wafting upwards with each step taken through the woods.

Annick Goutal's Sables - a bonfire in the field, its smoke surrounding you, leaving with you on your clothes.

Thoughts?