The Synaesthesia of Scent

In The Diary of a Nose, perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena writes, "Green is the only color that makes sense as a smell," adding that, in his collection of raw materials, he has different kinds of green including gentle, harsh, smooth, sharp, dense, etc. Among these he has greens "that smell of beans, fig leaves, syringa, ivy, seaweed, elder, boxwood, hyacinth, lawns, and peas."

He might be right, in one sense, given that of all the colors green is used maybe most frequently as a descriptive. Green chypre, for instance - or green floral. When I think of any number of fragrances I picture the color green. I can't talk about, or wear, Jean-Louis Scherrer or Givenchy III without seeing the fields of parched summer grass I remember from my childhood vacations in rural Arkansas. Alliage brings to mind bitter snapped stems. Clinique Wrappings is a shock of fir peeking out from under banks of aldehyde snow; Tauer's Cologne du Maghreb, a dish of fresh herbs. Ellena says every perfumer runs the hazard of conjuring mental images of toothpaste when using mint in a composition, but I smell it in many fragrances and think of herb gardens.

It might be more accurate to say that green is the color that gets the most mileage in the scent vocabulary. Red, for instance, is a little trickier, but some rose-centered fragrances do read to me as red. Une Rose has always brought to mind a deep red velvet when I smell it; Agent Provocateur, a drier shade on the spectrum, like something long sitting out in a potpourri dish. Miss Dior Cherie - don't let's get started on exactly which version - reminds me of fresh strawberries; not just their smell but their damp, staining skins. Lipstick Rose evokes the obvious - but even Arden's Red Door recalls the crimson lipstick my grandmother applied with a brush from its tube.

I often think pink, especially with the contemporary spate of fruity florals. Baby Doll is strictly bright fuchsia tutus and tart berry innards. Yellow crops up every so often too - buttery yellow for certain floral compositions, palest yellow for scents whose vibe feels incredibly buttery to me, whether from orris root or otherwise. Daffodils pop up in my head. More often than anything I imagine golden yellow to orange hues, probably because orientals are one of my favorite types of fragrance. Alahine is golden light at dusk, casting everything in a late afternoon glow. Mitsouko is a brassier shade, something like peaches steeped in liquid sun. I even think of white, when I smell White Linen - something scorched of all color, singeing the senses.

Sometimes I wonder if some of us have a rare offshoot of synaesthesia when it comes to scent. The synaesthete cross-pollinates the senses in ways most people don't. She might see a number and hear it as a sound, for instance. She might see a color and experience it as a smell. What about the other way round, I wonder. What about seeing a scent as a color, as a sort of tinted wash that spreads over our senses? Has anyone seen MARNIE, the Hitchcock film, where Tippie Hedren's kleptomaniac goes into fugues, seeing red when an object or a situation triggers certain emotions? During these episodes the whole screen goes blood red. I wonder if scent is like that for some of us.

It's not quite as cinematic with me, but most of the smells I love do filter the images they conjure through some emotionally corresponding colored lens. When I smell Vent Vert, I do see green - my mind goes right to an analogous image - a field, a spring lawn, fresh shoots proliferating on deciduous branches. It's like that in some way with every scent I smell. So I'm not sure I agree with Ellena, whose own Kelly Caleche tints my imagination a specific sort of pale but vibrant metallic pastel.

More on Histoires de Parfums: Tubereuse L'Animale

Abigail and I often think along the same lines. We split L'Animale over a month ago, and though I loved it instantly, and we've talked about it some since, I kept forgetting to write about it. This week I started thinking about it again. I wore it two days ago. All morning, I reminded myself to sign on so that I might put it into words. It's hard to put into words, as Abigail (aka Birthday Girl today) said. It's beyond words in certain ways for me. I read a review of L'Animale and the other two in the trio of HDP's tuberose-themed fragrances on Grain de Musc where Denyse seemed able to put all three into words (is there anything this fantastic writer can't put into words), and Abigail's done a decent job too, so what's my problem?

I think part of what stymies me lately when it comes to writing about perfume is that in a lot of ways I don't always feel so wordy about fragrance. It's not something which prompts me to immediately start looking for a vocabulary in my head. I value that part of smell which falls beyond words and the intellect, and I like to spend some time gestating with the fragrance. More often than not, after this gestation period I'm further beyond words, and the scent has entered some psychic space of mood and memory. What leads me to blog is wanting to communicate about fragrance in general. I like talking about it. I like hearing what other people have to say. I like our giveaways because people come out of the woodwork and this can feel like something close to a conversation. But I don't often like narrowing any fragrance down. And the posts I do best are free-associational.

Along those lines, I considered discussing some of my favorite green scents. By green I mean the color of the juice, not the category. Some fragrances make perfect sense in green: like Yendi, which is a cut grass aldehyde. Others should be green and aren't, like Givenchy III or Jean-Louis Scherrer. Stick with me here. Others make sense in an unusual way. Think of Eau Noire by Dior, which isn't "green" in theory but feels so right, so apt, when you smell it and look at it simultaneously. The color registers emotionally. Are so many scents amber and clear because we expect them to be, and imagine something must have gone wrong if they aren't? I suspect green feels so right to me in the context of Eau Noire partly because a green fragrance is unusual to a point approaching decadent--and Eau Noire has some pretty decadent pleasures: rich, almost savory but sweet too, like sex on skin.

L'Animale has immortelle in it, as does Eau Noire. The color of the fragrance is greener still. It seems even weirder in the case of L'Animale because the Histoires perfumes, though there aren't a ton of them, are all pretty predictably hued. When my bottle of L'Animale arrived it was thrilling to see that shade of emerald, not brilliant but swampy green, through the bottle. It was almost like a warning. The most shocking thing was how little like tuberose the thing smells. Tuberose you say? Oh really? It totally caught me off guard, which is a fantastic way to experience a perfume.

Unlike Abigail (and a lot of other bloggers, judging by the sometime hostility toward the line), I've been very impressed and smitten with Histoires de Parfums overall. Some could have better longevity, but this is a constant issue for me. My favorites are Noir Patchouli (hold up, also green!) and 1740 de Sade. De Sade is a good comparison, one I made the moment I smelled L'Animale. In fact, L'Animale seems like a more androgynous version of 1740. Both focus on immortelle. 1740 is intense, the same way Angel Liqueur and Malle's Une Rose are, with the near-syrupy density of a tawny port someone's been storing in a dark cask for decades.

Denyse from Grainde Musc smells the tuberose eventually. I never do. I might not be looking too hard. I don't ever smell the tuberose in Vierges et Toreros by Etat Libre D'Orange, either. I smell wet dog and rubber (don't assume I don't love this smell). L'Animale feels like a sweaty scent. Something your body would make of a more delicate perfume after a night out dancing in a tropical climate. It seems old--not vintage necessarily, not the way people mean "vintage fragrance". More like something stored in a crypt, some special elixir with dangerous properties meant for the right hands.

Another thing I thought of when I saw and smelled L'Animale was a trip I took to Barcelona once. You couldn't get Absinthe anywhere else but, I think, I don't know, like, Prague or something? Someone will correct me if I'm wrong. You can get Absinthe all over now, but it doesn't have wormwood, which is what I was told made it outlawed. Only a few places in the maze of old town Barcelona served Absinthe at the time. We spent an entire evening looking for it, searching with the kind of manic zeal I usually reserve for the perfume counter. When we found it, and drank it, and were in some head space I hadn't entered before and haven't since, and couldn't really put into words (here we go again), I looked at the green residue in my glass and thought how perfect the color was for the sensation of the liquor. L'Animale has the same kind of vaguely clandestine mystery about it, and I can picture someone pouring it into the bottle over a cube of sugared immortelle laced with who knows what.

Christmas Smells: A Purely Biased List of Favorites, PART ONE

I'm not one for seasonal strictures--I'm dressed in white as I type this--and when it comes to fragrances, I find that I wear the ones I love all across the calendar. Still, scent is associative, and no time evokes specific memories around smell more than Christmas.

The fragrances I love to rediscover during this holiday aren't always the usual suspects; certainly not often the flankers intended to conjure a fantasy feast of gingerbread and fruitcake. My favorites scatter the elements of Christmas like a cubist painting, approaching the subject from a variety of angles simultaneously. They parcel Christmas out into bits and pieces of sensory memory, rendering them with photographic detail. Theoretically, I'd have to wear these fragrances all at once to get the bigger picture. In reality, they only work separately, one at a time, demonstrating how complex and textured the memories surrounding holidays are. Forty Christmas seasons have accrued a dense system of overlapping triggers. The following are the tip of the icicle.

New Haarlem (Bond No. 9)

There are several good coffee-centered scents in my cabinet (Ava Luxe Cafe Noir and A*Men Pure Coffee, to name a few). New Haarlem is something of a curiosity among them. While the coffee note is unmistakable, it tends to be much more impressionistic, depicting not just the steaming cup but the mood of the breakfast table conversation. As it wears, New Haarlem becomes slightly spicy, with interesting undertones of amber.

Ambre Fetiche (Annick Goutal)

Ambre Fetiche is a deeply resonant mixture of resins and leather (birch tar, maybe?). It lasts and lasts, and lasts some more. This is a slowly collapsing, intermittently crackling pile of resinous logs left burning in the fireplace, viewed through the frosted glow of nighttime windowpanes.

Nuit de Noel (Caron)

Christmas is the smell of things stewing, simmering, and roasting. So what's with all the marzipan? Nuit de Noel is that rare seasonal fragrance, which bypasses sweet tooth for smoked savory and mixed nuts. That would be wood smoke and hazelnuts, and mingling somewhere within is the combined effect of all the settled-in perfumes worn by the women of the house.

L'eau (Diptyque)

The pomander hanging over the dinner table, distributing the aroma of clove, fir branch, orange oil, cinnamon, and dried rose in all directions. Approaching religious experience, it manages to insert the mood of Christmas Eve cathedral (those vast, vaulted ceilings and a Christmas tree the size of Rockefeller Center) into the dining room.

Wrappings (Clinique)

While not technically a seasonal release, Wrappings is sold only at Christmas. You get a 30 ml bottle with perhaps an equally modest tube of lotion. Forget the lotion, and buy the gift for yourself. This stuff is Ormonde Jayne Woman writ in neon the colors of pine tree and holly berry. Where Woman is warm, sleepy-eyed, and twilit, Wrappings is blinding bright and bracing cold. Woman is a solitary walk along a forest trail. Wrappings is a party in the snow. Mace, artemisia, cedar, and moss go the expected places. What veers Wrappings down an unknown path is the steep cocktail of cyclamen, jasmine, rose, carnation, and orris, electrified by aldehydes. The overall effect is as exhilarating as a snowball fight deep in the woods.

Minuit de Messe (Etro)

I get confused when people go on about this one's gothic prowess, as if it were all dungeon stone and incense smoke. It must be my chemistry, or my nose. Messe has always been user-friendly for me, a mellow, resinous incense. There's a wonderful zest of citrus up top, which takes its time leaving. Upon its departure, frankincense and amber move to the center of the picture. Truly a midnight mass, materializing a dim cathedral full of well-dressed men, women and children, all buzzing with barely contained, drowsy excitement under a veneer of respectably somber supplication.

Gaultier2

There's too much dissonance in there to dismiss this as a sweet-shop essay on all things cake and cookie. "Woodsy notes" are listed in the pyramid, along with amber, musk, and an admittedly ubiquitous vanilla. This doesn't begin to get at the weird play of contrasts in Gaultier2. It's a dividing fragrance. Some find it saccharine. I find it has just the right touch of Barbasol. There's enough five o'clock shadow and tobacco in there to complicate the picture. One of the few fragrances to remind me of the men hanging out on the periphery of the Christmas festivities. Simultaneously robust and laid-back.

Anne Pliska (Anne Pliska)

Somewhere between Shalimar's citrus petrol and Obsession's electric spice, Anne Pliska's signature scent strikes the perfect balance between edible and inedible on the oriental continuum. Abundantly tranquil, like a half-recalled moment of a forgotten Christmas day, where the chatter of family and the steady rustle of gift wrap evolved into a quiet, subtle hum, clearing your mind to unnoticed pleasures, scents from the kitchen you hadn't been able to smell through all the noise.

Agent Provocateur (Agent Provocateur)

Roses are really the last thing the holidays bring to mind, yet despite all its comparisons to rose chypres past, Agent Provocateur manages to evoke the season in a way none of its predecessors did. It's probably the saffron up top, the cedar down below, and the vetiver somewhere in between, which situate the florals in the sweet but boozy territory of spiced rum cake, an aroma ascertained through elaborate plumes of cigarette smoke.

Cinnabar (Estee Lauder)

Truly a classic. Woozier then upright Opium, this oriental has dipped into the punch bowl with a little more abandon. You can smell the fermented fruit on its breath, and its fuzzy state of mind is palpable from the other side of the room.

Noel au Balcon

I get pretty weary of the slams directed at Etat Libre D'Orange. The more time I spend with this line, the more I appreciate its artistry and quality. Even it's most ostensibly mainstream (i.e. throwaway) fragrances, like Don't Get Me Wrong, Baby (I Don't Swallow), offer riches worth revisiting. The sense of humor is refreshing and conversational. Why is it that we can laugh at the unintentionally silly and overblown ad copy of estimable houses like Guerlain, while faulting Etat for its open sense of the ridiculous? Why is it we don't bat an eye at horsey Hilary Swank writhing in the cosmos for Insolence, but decry the squirting penis of Secretions Magnifiques, as though the latter weren't the subliminal thrust of the former laid bare? In an industry which serves no higher goal than the bottom line, releasing only what has been test-marketed to death, what exactly is the beef with a house whose nerve is prodigious enough to push boundaries in the form of a fragrance like Secretions Magnifiques? I find it hard to take Etat's detractors seriously.

Noel au Balcon is a subtle inversion in some ways of the seasonal release. Key word release here, as indicated by the stuffed corset of the perfume's accompanying illustration. Noel au Balcon takes the dense cakey comfort food of Five O'Clock au Gingembre and turns it on its nose with perfectly judged touches of cistus and red pepper. It truly evolves on the skin, from sweet to salty, maintaining an interesting floral backbone throughout. Apply it before you meet the family. It will linger until you leave with mandatory leftovers. It has far more gravity than its brethren.

Une Rose

The only other Christmas rose for me. This one is straightforwardly rose, but its wine dregs hint at that half dark, half jolly place the right kind of holiday party can take you. This is rose as high drama--moody, like the emotional baggage you bring to the Christmas table, a state of mind where a butter knife can look like more of a weapon than you ever had cause to notice before. A scent like Une Rose makes all the trivial resentments and longings teased out by the holidays seem as majestic and impertinent as classic opera performed in combat boots.

L'Artisan La Chasse Aux Papillon Extreme & Frederic Malle Une Rose

Two quick things ~

First, I should have included L’Artisan La Chasse Aux Papillon Extreme in my post from a few days ago called Pick a Pepper. La Chasse is a gorgeous peppery linden-floral fragrance. If I wasn’t so annoyed with L’Artisan for their utter lack of tenacity surely I would have thought of this one. La Chasse is a beautiful delicate floral with a heavy dose of linden and a solid dash of pepper. Overall it’s a light and ethereal fragrance, I notice I used the word ‘heavy’ in the prior sentence and there’s nothing heavy about La Chasse – just that the most noticeable floral note is linden for me. I love La Chasse, and I just deal with the lack of staying power by spritzing myself about 12-15 times in the morning.

Longevity: reasonable if you apply 1/4 of the bottle
Sillage: light
Rating: the scent is just so lovely I give it 4 stars even while grumbling about it's tenacity

PS: I should note that the original La Chasse Aux Papillon and the Extreme versions are quite different. The original does not contain pink pepper and therefore is much more delicate, girlish and simply pretty in a generic sense. The Extreme concentration is, once dried down, perhaps a bit more spicy/peppery than it is floral.

Second, whoooooaaaa, Brian sure was right when he wrote about Frederic Malle Une Rose being a stunning rose fragrance. I finally purchased myself a bottle and have been in a virtual fragrance-induced-coma all day. Une Rose is unlike any other rose scent I’ve smelled. It starts off like a bunch of lush, velvety crimson red roses ~ a perfect bouquet of David Austen roses that I just want to shove my face into. Then Une Rose does a lot of morphing around. The middle phase is a fresh earthy, mossy, herbal, garden bed with bushes of roses growing from it. The last phase, the dry down, is an unusual loamy-vetiver-earthy rose scent that strikes me as the aroma of an afternoon in the garden, down on my knees, hands in the soil, weeding, clipping the rose bushes and very much involved with nature and vegetation. Even though it smells earthy and loamy I wouldn’t call this a ‘dirty rose.’ Une Rose seems more like the true to nature smell of a bed of roses in a damp, earthy spring garden. And, if you haven’t smelled it yet, be prepared for a great deal of changing. Une Rose takes several hours to go through all these interesting stages on your skin. Each stage is so different, beautiful and unusual. I’ve read that wine dregs are among the notes in Une Rose. If I focus I can smell what seems like wine dregs, although had I not known this I don’t think I would have identified this note as wine. I think the wine-like note serves to keep the rose essence extremely lush and sweet all the while there’s so much damp and earthiness happening. If this sort of rose appeals to you ~ Une Rose is Hypnotic.

Longevity: Excellent, easily 5+ hours
Sillage: depends on application, it will project if you want it to.
Rating: 5 Stars, a stunner

Une Rose

Like most perfume aficionados, I have my favorite accords. I can spend hours, days, or months, tracking a good leather scent down, and toward that end have amassed: Knize Ten, Tabac Blond, Cuir de Russie, and any number of lesser known specimens. My nose is always alert for galbanum, and iris is a big draw as well, as are tobacco, oakmoss, and virtually all things green. There are a lot to choose from in each of these categories, and I'm kept pretty happy, but rose, another favorite, has eluded me.

It isn't that I haven't found rose fragrances I like, or even that I've been looking for something incredibly specific, which is to say something I know before I smell it, as opposed to the other way around. It's just that most rose fragrances I've smelled or purchased haven't seemed exactly right for me, however much I admire them. Rose is in so many perfumes and colognes to varying degrees, right up top or submerged down below. I've enjoyed some of the masculines, like Cerruti 1881 and Aramis 900, and many of what I call the cult roses, particularly Ungaro III and Alain Delon Iquitos. I've looked into all sorts of unisex roses, like L'Artisan's fleeting Voleur de Roses, for instance. I enjoy many of the alleged feminines too--maybe even most of all--like Cannabis Rose, Paris, and Mille et Une Roses. I'll take high end, like the Rosines, and low, like Coty Exclamation. I have no shame. Some of these I own and wear occasionally, but none come close to Frederic Malle's Une Rose, which struck me as the perfect rose, perfect for me, from the moment I first smelled it.

Une Rose was created in 2003 by Edouard Flechier, the man behind Poison, among others. Une Rose is to rose what Poison is to tuberose, and takes over the senses in similar ways. The profile for Flechier on the Malle website states that in 1967 he entered the perfumery school of Roure Bertrand Dupont and studied with the son of the school's founder, Jean Carles, he of such classics as Shocking de Schiaparelli, Miss Dior, and Ma Griffe.

Une Rose conforms in theory to the vogue for what Abigail recently called the "dirty rose." To me this phrase, aside from basically alerting the consumer she or he is not looking at a bottle of "old fashioned" rose perfume, is practically useless. It's true there's a grunge note to Une Rose, as with Voleur de Roses and any number of contemporary rose fragrances. Often, dirty is meant in a literal way, indicating that the fragrance smells of the soil it was theoretically yanked from. In the case of Une Rose it seems to mean animalic, too. But Une Rose is much more complicated than this kind of simplistic designation can account for. The notes are listed as wine dregs and truffles, and though these pyramids are usually more fanciful than factual, this one offers a useful imaginative keyhole into the perfume.

I sprayed Une Rose at Barney's on a drizzly day in Seattle and forgot about it--for a few minutes, anyway. When I stepped outside it came rushing back at me full force, and seemed a perfect sensory accompaniment to the weather, lushly colored the way things are on an overcast day, more deeply saturated than otherwise, with a density I would probably be apt to characterize as romantic in the rain. It seemed so full-bodied you could get drunk on it, so when I later saw "wine dregs" on the packaging it made sense to me. I couldn't stop sniffing my wrist. I couldn't stop thinking of a fall day back in high school when I'd worn a blood red flannel shirt I'd gotten at a thrift store, and somehow, because of that color, felt ten times moodier than I had any right to be, totally melodramatic, as if I were a perfect accompaniment to the golds and browns falling off the trees out the window. The word intoxicating gets thrown around a lot when discussing perfume, but Une Rose is one of the few scents I feel the word isn't compromised by, and when I open my cabinet it seems to stand out in a burnished glow, drawing my attention among the other boxes and bottles.