Balmain Vent Vert: Thoughts and Older Version Bottle Giveaway

Niki de Saint Phalle: Review and Bottle Giveaway

It's easy enough to smell Niki de Saint Phalle's perfume without thinking of the woman behind it; easier, no doubt, than trying to wear No.5 without thinking of Coco Chanel. Taken at face value, de Saint Phalle is a grassy green chypre, falling somewhere between Givenchy III, YSL Y, and Jean-Louis Scherrer. It lands on the dry side, and feels far more herbal than its peers. It's the youngest of that group as well. You can talk about the fragrance, even about how challenging it can be, without knowing anything about its namesake. But there's a reason it's been a cult favorite since its release in 1982, and much of that has to do with the way it successfully embodies the contradictions, conflicts and quirkiness of the woman behind it, an individual just as fascinating as Coco Chanel.

Her father was French; her mother American. She was born in France but raised primarily in the United States. Until the stock market crash, the family had been wealthy. She began her career as a fashion model, but had been painting as early as her teens, when she was kicked out of school for painting the building's trademark iron fig leaves bright red. She married her childhood friend, composer-then-writer Harry Mathews. They'd met when she was thirteen. He was fourteen. Along with poets James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashberry, Mathews founded the literary journal Locus Solus. It didn't last long, but was to many writers, apparently, what the Velvet Underground has been to musicians. It certainly brought a steady stream of literary and artistic figures, many of them pop, experimental, and/or Avant-garde, into the young couple's life.

In a 2008 interview about the ten years he spent living with Niki, Mathews said that their attraction to each other had a lot to do with similar backgrounds. Both came from "genteel, moderately well-to-do families who subscribed...to the tenets of upper-class New York WASP society." Both were "artistically inclined, oversensitive, overtly rebellious romantics." Niki was modeling for Vogue and Elle magazines, but was troubled mentally, "devising one ingenious method of suicide after another." Ultimately, she suffered a nervous breakdown. She was institutionalized and underwent shock treatment. It was barbarous, according to Mathews, but it helped her. She started making collages around that time out of stones, twigs and other items she found on the grounds around the clinic. She also resumed painting. As she gave up modeling and her acting studies to become an artist, Mathews abandoned music for writing. There were rumors about Mathews, allegations he was involved with the CIA. Later, he wrote a book which simultaneously denied and confirmed the idea.

I remember seeing a lot of Niki's work as a child, but I can't think where I might have run into it. The point is, her painting and sculptures have a distinctive look, instantly recognizable, a look she would later incorporate into the fragrance's packaging and sensibility. Her exposure to the work of Antoni Gaudi, specifically his broken tile mosaic park benches and sculptures in Barcelona's Parque Guell, was crucial to her artistic development. Unlike Gaudi's sculptures, her work tended to make more use of found objects, and she didn't often fit them together following the symmetrical logic he did (He didn't always follow symmetrical logic either, judging by the dripping, trippy facades of La Sagrada Familia Cathedral, also in Barcelona). Later, she would admire the work of artists such as Paul Klee, Matisse, Picasso, Jasper Johns, de Kooning, and Rauschenberg, all of whose influence could be felt in some way or another in her own evolving sensibility. At the same time, her work is completely individual in its overall effect.

She eventually moved on to large scale sculptures of women, part Botero, part Sunday comic strip; these were massive, doughy iron figures painted in bright, bold colors and geometrically patterned shapes. In 1978, after another serious illness, she laid the foundation for The Tarot Garden, a sculptural installation celebrating female creativity and strength, peopled by her figures. The installation became the focus of her life, and she spent the next ten years creating this garden. Her long term dedication to the project made it clear that Gaudi had been not just an artistic influence but a kindred soul as well; like her, Gaudi spent years constructing Parque Guell and the Sagrada Familia cathedral. As with de Saint Phalle, his sanity and health were sometimes compromised, if not always dictated, by the efforts these passionate commitments required.

It was to help fund the Garden that de Saint Phalle created her fragrance several years later. The notes are listed as follows: artemisia, mint, peach, bergamot, carnation, patchouli, orris, jasmine, ylang-ylang, cedar, rose, leather, sandalwood, amber, musk, and oakmoss. People have discussed Niki de Saint Phalle as an early example of the celebrity (in this case a well-known artist) fragrance. I think of this particular perfume more as performance art, a way of taking an artistic sensibility into the headspace of others; another sort of art installation. Many people talk about the patchouli, too, though I've never been particularly conscious of it. More than anything, I smell soft peach, artemisia, oakmoss, and an usually employed ylang ylang. Niki de Saint Phalle smells more old fashioned to me than other green chypres I love. There's a melancholy to it that I've never smelled in those, as well. I'm sure many regard this more simply as a floral chypre, but it's always struck me as a quintessential grassy green chypre, though, again, there's nothing exactly like it.

It's closest to Bandit, I think, in many ways. It has that ashen smokiness to it. Unlike Bandit, where the presiding feeling is more mercenary, Niki de Saint Phalle is smoky in a far more subdued way, like the memory of smoke lingering on someone's clothes, or the aroma left on furniture once the smoker has left the room. That probably contributes to the forlorn quality for me. Though strong, de Saint Phalle feels soft and muted. Smelling Bandit, I sense perfumer Germaine Cellier's daring audacity, as if the perfume were an assault on the silliness of polite society; unexpected, strange, and remorseless. Saint Phalle is filled with a sense of regret--of people gone and things you can't change or get back. It reflects a mind which views things uniquely but at a price. It's a lot subtler.

Knowing more about Niki's past, I see the bottle's design in a new way. How interesting that it features a painted snake intertwined with its unpainted metallic twin. That iconic sculptural detail now reminds me of her attempts to integrate color and art into her life and the lives of others, and the challenges involved, mainly in the form of institutionalized resistance and mental duress. I love the story of Niki painting the uncolored iron fig leaves of her school, an artistic vandalism which strikes me as a more playful version of Cellier's bolder anarchic streak. The fig leaves, painted and unpainted, grew together and became snakes for the bottle's cap, a symbol of tenuous unity, precariously balanced tensions.

I have two bottles of Niki de Saint Phalle. I'm giving one away. This one ounce bottle of edt concentration is from the eighties. It is boxed but unwrapped. The bottle is full and has only been sprayed three times; once for this review. I'll draw a name from the comments on Monday. To be eligible, you must have commented on our blog before. Please leave your comment here to be considered.

Going Green, Part Two: Galbanum

With its penetrating, pine-like top note and slightly bitter, woody base, galbanum makes green pop, as if one of the green chypres had slapped you hard in the face with a chunk of bundled stems. Galbanum is a gum resin derived from certain Persian plant species grown abundantly in Iran. Its large flowering heads resemble those of fennel.

The essential oil has long been well-regarded by occultists. Alistair Crowley associated the aroma's properties with air, though it just as readily evokes earth. Depending on who you consult, galbanum is said to be a respiratory aide and an augment to psychic abilities. Pagan witchcraft regards it as a protectant. Perfumers, themselves alchemists of sorts, use it to add a certain kind of magic to their compositions. Part frankincense, part vetiver, its leafy terpenoid astringency ventilates the pastures of Carven’s Ma Griffe, Cellier’s Vent Vert, Ivoire de Balmain, Pheromone, Devin, Chanel No. 19 and, most spectacularly, Estee Lauder’s Aliage, which is more gale force than languid breeze.

Ivoire would fall on one end of the galbanum spectrum, Aliage on the other, with Pheromone following closely behind. Ivoire uses galbanum subtly, like its aldehydes, as a bolster to its floral accord. The effect is a rose bush surrounded by crisp, dry hay. Where Ivoire is ultimately arid, still, and slightly toasted, Vent Vert glistens, shimmering indefinitely with activity. Think of a lime rind rubbed into geranium leaves and you begin to apprehend Vent Vert’s effervescent character. Considered by some the first green fragrance, Vent Vert has a slightly raw dissonance, in large part due to galbanum. Chanel No. 19 is the adult counterpart to Vent Vert, smooth and transparent, a green floral quietly electrified by the glow of camphor.

Vent Vert and Ivoire arrange themselves parenthetically on either side of Gucci Envy for Women, which is something of a happy compromise between the two. All three share floral notes: hyacinth, rose, lily of the valley. Famously obsessed over by Tom Ford and Maurice Roucel, Envy's tall, slender bottle reflects the fragrance’s intrinsic angularity. Even the silver cap references something icily metallic within the construction. Envy is hard to articulate, and that metal sheen might strike you as a powdery hybrid of synthetic iris and musk, until you recognize the presence of galbanum, which like eucalyptus whiffs of menthol. Envy is a gorgeously understated use of the note, tart and dry simultaneously.

Don't be too quick to dismiss Pheromone. It's something of a galbanum retrospective, with florals and frankincense and pungent, sharp greens. This is chartreuse green, a bright landscape painted on black velvet in bold, broad strokes. The results are just this side of over the top - but hands down, the apogee of galbanum’s use in perfumery, still unmatched and, amazingly, still around, is Aliage. Like Envy its notes include peach, rose and jasmine, but Aliage bursts into coniferous territory Envy cautiously skirts, possessing a sucker punch of pine, thyme, vetiver, and oakmoss. Simulating a virtual reality of flowers shellacked in Vick’s Vapo-Rub, it’s like nothing you’ve ever smelled, and strangely familiar. Aliage is shockingly inexpensive.

Galbanum is mercurial, effecting compositions in subtly different ways. It smells modern, though, along with aldehydes, it was the previous generation’s equivalent to the fruity accords which buoy contemporary florals to varying degrees and towards often vastly different ends. The smell is intensely, viscerally green, smelling of grass and aromatic weeds and herbs. It penetrates your consciousness and roots there, a vivid inhalation of the great Out There.

violets are blue...by Brian

Last night, I started thinking about the mini bottle of perfume my grandmother once kept in her medicine cabinet, squirreled away between expired aspirin and a dented tube of Neosporin ointment. A slightly resinous, dewy violet soliflor, it projected much farther than the size of its container would lead you to expect. I have no idea what it was called. It wasn’t labeled. Something very cheap, probably.

Who knows why my grandmother hung onto it all those years. She certainly didn’t wear it—in public. Summers and winters I visited, and each trip I snuck repeatedly into her bathroom, and each year I could recall the scent more specifically in my mind, and I anticipated meeting it again and that shock of recognition and the sense it gave me that all was well.

 I probably don’t need to tell you that I could have spent all day in there with the door locked, that I got lost, sitting on my grandmother’s antique, velvet covered parlor chair, my elbows anchored onto her marble counter top, my mind elsewhere. I doubt I need to explain the intoxicant that perfume was for me. I’m guessing that if you’ve bothered to read this far you’re on the same kind of inexplicably obsessive quest and, like me, can beam to another dimension of pleasure and bittersweet emotional territory simply by placing a bottle of perfume under your nose.

When my grandmother was sick and it was clear she wouldn’t be around much longer I stole the bottle and brought it home with me. I was too ashamed to ask for it, and knew it would be lost forever once she died. I never regretted this filial larceny, as it seemed more like a rescue mission to me. Who else could be counted on to preserve and understand its peculiar mystery? Deceptively banal, it looked like something you would toss out with the rest of someone’s belongings, meaningless detritus from the past.

I placed the bottle in my own medicine cabinet, which seemed to me its natural environment, and the curious thing I noticed from the moment it became mine was that I hadn’t actually been smelling violet all along. It isn’t until someone points it out to you that you detect, say, the leather in Piguet’s Bandit. Before that, it hasn’t existed. Afterwards, you smell Cellier’s masterpiece again and miraculously, to your astonishment, it appears, and stays there—prominently, even—forever after, like the exhaust from a sofa stuffed with cut grass. What I’d been smelling in my grandmother’s mini bottle was my childhood, memories of her and summers there and freedom from worrying intensely about things the way adults do. An incredible sense of love and well-being permeated my consciousness when I inhaled it.

A complex, emotional mother lode of associations had accumulated within the scent over time, for which violet was simply the carrier, a double agent harboring top secret, volatile information. I only recently became aware of top notes and base notes, of linear as opposed to complex compositions. There weren’t perfumers behind Joy and Chanel. They simply existed, like the sky and the sunset, oxygen and birds, situational magic from the universe. I wasn’t a collector or a connoisseur. Perfume wasn’t science.

I didn’t pick scents apart, way back when, or even known it was possible. I didn’t know there were sites to break things down for you. Rose, iris, sandalwood, patchouli, aromachemicals, soliflors and abstracts. Smells were no less mercurial before these terms entered my frame of reference, but they operated in a much more emotional, less strictly analytical way. My experience of fragrance had previously been more primal, and though various perfumes still have the capacity to hijack my consciousness, expanding viscerally in my mind, the intensity doesn’t last as long as it once did, and I suspect that’s because of my arguably psychotic efforts to figure out the name or manufacturer of the juice in my grandmother’s mini bottle.

At one point, several years ago, when my partner was cleaning the bathroom, I heard something shatter, and rushed in to see what was going on. I saw the bottle in shards scattered about the sink, and my response was so violent, so impulsive, so irrational and beyond my control that it sort of terrified me. It meant that my grandmother was now truly gone, and someone close to me had been responsible for her death—or I was. Inconsolable then, I still feel sick when I think about it now. My grandmother kept that scent alive until she couldn’t anymore. I’d taken responsibility for that delicate network of memories and through unconscionable carelessness failed her miserably. My partner collected the larger remains of the bottle, wrapping them in plastic. Some of the liquid remained but has since vanished. I can’t look at it. I get too upset.

Since then, I’ve become like Poe’s unnamed narrator, searching for his beloved Ligeia in other people’s faces. When I approach a perfume counter, I want nothing more than to find my grandmother’s memory. I want that scent back. It’s a time machine. I search for it in all things remotely similar. Trumper’s Ajaccio Violet comes close, foregoing the syrup sweetness which distinguishes most of these soliflors from the vibratory warmth I remember. Close but not quite. It’s impossible for me to think of perfume now without feeling it has nearly religious, sacred properties, and violet has been the holy grail.

Last week, I made an important discovery online. A fragrance I’ve seen at least thirty times in a local discount perfume shop and overlooked as irrelevant smells distinctively, even exclusively, of violet. It was released in 1947, right before my grandmother's home was built, at a time when my grandfather was still trying to make up for his philandering with gifts. The first perfume from the house of Balenciaga, Le Dix is officially described as a floral chypre. Its bottle is a solid , faceted affair, its liquid the color of champagne. It was created by Francis Fabron, the nose behind the original L'Interdit and l'Air du Temps. The pyramid lists neither violet nor aldehydes, and yet these are the perfume's combined impression.

Like other aldehyde constructions, the sum total makes the florals pop, simmering against a cool background of white. In this case, a hot and cold accord materializes, unmistakably violet. Learning this, I rushed over to the store in question, pointing impatiently at the box on the shelf so the Chinese owner, who barely speaks English, would understand. Is old, she said, smiling. You like the old perfume.

I ripped off the cellophane and opened the corrugated glass bottle out in the car, spraying my arm. The air vent carried the fumes up my nostrils, and I jettisoned away, soaring back through time to the high grass outside my grandmother’s window, the feel of her chair’s velvet on my bare thighs and the fabric’s vibrant green hue, the melancholy effect of the striped yellow wallpaper in there and her luxurious gold tub. I heard adult voices outside the door, and saw my little kid face in the mirror, suntanned and frightened, staring back at me.

Then I was in the field by my grandmother’s house riding the lawnmower for the first time, and there they all were in the distance, waving me back, I’d gone too far, but I wanted to show off, so I made another turn, too widely, and before I could stop the thing I’d grazed the enormous vacation trailer my grandmother had taken to Arizona and Florida and Nevada, and I was so ashamed by my bravado, so humiliated that I slammed into park and bolted off into the weeds, and kept running and running, crying so violently I couldn’t see where I was going, until for whatever reason I stopped, panting, just in time to hear my grandmother’s voice calling out to me with the sound of total forgiveness.