Shifting Clouds: Organza

I keep thinking I must have written about Givenchy's Organza.  It's one of my favorites - even though, until recently, I didn't wear it all that much.  Weeks ago, a friend discovered a tiny bottle, probably 5 ml at most, in a flea market, and he wore it so much I was compelled to bring my bottle out of effective retirement.  Suddenly, I saw Organza in a different light, the way you do when you watch a favorite movie with someone who's never seen it before.  I appreciated it more, and saw some of its qualities more clearly.

I always liked Organza - creamy, rich, and long lasting, it's pretty hard not to like.  But when I bought a bottle a few years ago, it was only an ounce or so.  My friend loves Organza, along with Poison and Moschino de Moschino - and his signature, Chanel Egoiste - and it smells so fantastic on him (everything seems to) that I hated to see him dabbing rather than spraying, so I gave him my bottle, and I went looking for another one.

The bottle I gave him is older, and my bias against reformulations led me to assume it must be better than the current version.  I was surprised to learn that whatever they're currently stocking is just as good, if not a little better, than the original.  That's not the case with the fragrance's flanker, Organza Indecence, which is still nice these days but less in some indefinable way than it was.  Weirdly, Organza doesn't seem as robust now but projects with more presence and seems to last even longer than the old stuff, which is muskier but moves more quickly through its development, if something as linear as Organza can be said to develop.  The latest Organza envelops you in a mood, permeating your outlook all day.

Organza was created in 1996 by Sophie Labbe.  That surprised me too.  Labbe isn't one of my favorites. In fact, there isn't much of anything she's done that I would recommend.  The last thing she did that I smelled, Calvin Klein Beauty, was..what it was:  a clean, musky floral with all the presence of a raw peanut.  Nice enough for a Christmas gift - unlikely to offend anyone; it was a bit like giving your father a striped tie or a winter scarf (guilty, by the way), beige or camel colored, the kind of thing he wouldn't cry too much over if he left it behind after dinner at the restaurant.  He might not even run back for it.  Labbe's Parisienne, for YSL, left me kind of cranky.  Why mess with perfection?  Like Belle d'Opium, Parisienne seemed like some kind of vandalism: like Jean Luc Godard remaking Breathless as Porky's, although I suspect someone like Godard would have made the material a little more interesting, if not exactly re-inventing the wheel in the process.

The thing you notice most about Organza - which might just be a lie of the mind, an illusion created by the color of the "juice" and the name itself - is an odd impression of oranges, odd because there's nothing the least bit citrus about the fragrance.  The notes list orange blossom, but orange blossom doesn't smell like oranges, nor does Bergamot really, which is also listed.  The effect resembles Anne Pliska, another deceptive use of orange - though the two fragrances are otherwise pretty dissimilar.

That orangey impression never really wanes for me, though the floral heart makes itself known from the beginning and only deepens as the top notes recede.  Nothing really recedes, I guess, in Organza.  You just become aware of different things the longer you spend time in it.  The orange is abundantly creamy.  The florals - gardenia, honeysuckle, tuberose, ylang ylang, jasmine - are even creamier.  Organza is sweet - and gourmand - but doesn't feel sugared or foody.  It feels slightly old fashioned - perhaps because it's so rich and expansive - and big boned, like another creamy floral, 24 Faubourg (by Hermes), but the sweetened aspects make it feel distinctly contemporary at the same time.

Some of the sweetness - maybe a lot of it - can probably be pinned on the vanilla.  There's quite a lot of it in Organza, but, again, it's so perfectly balanced with the florals and a dash of nutmeg that it feels inseparable from them.  Smelling Organza, I would never think "floral", either, whereas with Faubourg you can't think anything else.  The base isn't really much of a base, as when Organza "dries down" it remains consistent with its initial impression.  The base is more like a coat the fragrance is wearing.  In addition to the vanilla, it includes amber, cedar, and sandalwood.  There's the faintest woodiness to Organza.  It's an amazing construction, this thing.  You regard it the way you do the sky, amazed at something so huge and wondrously constellated, its slow-moving clouds constantly shifting into the subtle shapes of only vaguely recognizable things.

I have way too many perfumes.  I make it a policy not to say just how many.  The point is I have no business getting anything larger than 50 ml.  Eventually, it will run me out of house and home.  Were I a more practical, sensible person, I would buy decants, or travel sprays.  Lately, though, I've been drunk on the way a big brick of a fragrance feels in the hand.  Case in point: those older, slender Chanel chunk bottles (what's dreamier than something called Cristalle in a container which strikes you as a fortress?)  I bought a bottle of Organza that is so enormous and formidable it feels like a staggeringly tall building on a busy street corner.  I can't help myself.  Nothing equals the feeling of a bottle like that, or matches so perfectly the scale a fantastic fragrance like Organza dictates on your fantasies.

This Week at the Perfume Counter: Vending Machine

By now, the Russians at the fragrance kiosk are used to me. We know each other the way maybe a grocer used to know the guy down the street; not as best friends or even intimate acquaintances, but with a regularity that involves a lot of shorthand and a respite from yet another stranger in a long line of customers looking for the latest celebrity scent.

They know I want to see whatever just came in. I have no idea who their sources are, but they're always getting something I might have trouble tracking down on my own. I like the blonde woman the best. The place is cramped--they keep over half of their inventory in a storage unit they rent from the mall--but she'll dig through it without complaining. She'll open however many perfumes I want to smell. She'll even let me repackage them when she's particularly slammed.

Lately, the celebrity scent du jour has been Beyonce Heat. The kiosk generally stocks no more tan two or three bottles of the most popular sellers. They have ten bottles of Heat on hand at any one time, and they move quickly. Latifah didn't move anything near that. The most popular scent overall seems to be Light Blue. They don't move much Chanel. But Heat has spiked the chart in a way no other fragrance has. This seems to surprise no one but Beyonce, who, based on a recent quote, wasn't apparently paying attention.

I haven't found too terribly much at the kiosk these last several months. They do have a big bottle of Armani Onde Mystere, and having revisited it a couple of times I see it's a little more interesting than I originally thought, but I haven't seized it. I can get it fairly easily online. They got a bottle of Armani Gio in several months ago. I ignored it at first--it seemed like a pretty standard spiced tuberose to me--but after spraying it on a card and carrying that around for a while I realized how unusual it is. The real bonus with Gio arrives about an hour into wearing it, when the fruity green components bridge more fluidly into the tuberose and orange blossom. I'm guessing they still make this and sell it in Europe, because the box is not old and the list of ingredients is distractingly extensive. I imagine it smelled even better back in its day.

Yesterday, I had a curious conversation with a vendor at Macy's. I asked to smell Organza Indecence--not the tester, which was a much older bottle, but the Parfums Mythiques version, which is what they were selling. The vendor looked at me as if I were some kind of eccentric. Mention of the other Mythiques, none of which are available at the mall, opened up a parallel dimension for her. It was as though I were talking about alien sightings at Roswell. She might have told me what sales associates usually do, that there wasn't a tester for that and anyway they're the same, if not for the sales associate standing with us, a woman who told her, "He's a perfume connoisseur." I don't think she thought much of that--why should she? It still translates as "eccentric"--but she seemed curious where this was going, so she opened a bottle of the Mythiques version and sprayed it on a card for me.

They tell us there isn't a difference, she said. I'd just been through this with the SA at Dillards, where I returned a bottle of the new, allegedly unimproved, Opium. I'd bought it to spend a day with it. It was a boring day, like a date who keeps ordering salad. The SA asked me what the problem had been. Normally, I would say, "She already had it," as if I'd purchased it as a gift. But having just written a review of the changes to Opium's formula, I was interested in seeing what her reaction would be to an assertion something had been altered or tweaked. Oh no, she said. You should tell her it's exactly the same. They just changed the bottle. It has changed, I said. It's been reformulated. She looked at me like I was crazy for a millisecond, then her face relaxed into Stepford SA mode, if you can call that relaxed, and she chirped how pleased she would be to reimburse me.

It's fascinating to me that a vendor, as opposed to a sales associate, wouldn't truly know about or at least sense these reformulations. The idea that anyone could mechanically move through the tasks of a job having to do with fragrance is like the idea of a unicorn. Surely such a thing can't exist. Even so, it seems to me that customers would have to be making the changes known to her, if she can't tell or isn't bothering to pay attention herself. I'd just smelled Hypnotic Poison, and, sure enough, as the blogger Ambre Gris pointed out, it's no longer the same--maybe even eviscerated, to use Grain de Musc's term. Indecence too smelled altered.

The vendor assured me she wouldn't be able to tell the difference. I asked her to spray the old version on a card. Like the older Opium, older Indecence smelled deeper and richer, with a boozy bottom line to it. It was as if I were detailing the intrigue of some other industry when I told the vendor about the regulations and restrictions, the changes, the eviscerations. Isn't that something, her expression said. I think it's just difficult for me to imagine having a job in fragrance and not wanting to know all about it: good, bad, ugly, and otherwise.

These newer formulations seem much shriller to me. They're louder. And for all that shouting, they peter out more quickly, as if they've exhausted what they have to say before they even get going. They lack subtlety. Hypnotic Poison has none of the nuanced softness it did. Pure Poison has changed a lot too, but in a different direction. Gone are those wonderfully pungent, over the top contours. I found an older bottle at a discount store here in town, and compared it to a newer bottle. The newer version comes out with a whimper and stays there. The older Pure Poison is like a speed freak chatterbox on the skin. I happen to like a chatterbox with something to say, especially when, as with Pure Poison, orange blossom is a big part of the one sided conversation. I'll give orange blossom the floor any time it has something to say. This is what it really comes down to for me: even at their best and most sensitively done, the reformulations are one dimensional.

All of this makes me appreciate one of my favorite SA's, the woman just a few yards away from the Givenchy vendor, at the Estee Lauder counter, who very openly told me that Beautiful has been so drastically reformulated she can't stand to smell it anymore. She and her co-workers have been instructed to accept exchanges from disgruntled customers without acknowledging that anything has changed, presumably from women who have been wearing the stuff for decades now. The idea that the early onset of dementia in their elderly clientele is being hastened by the cosmetics counter is really disturbing to me.

Speaking of Lauder, I found box sets of Private Collection Tuberose Gardenia at the discount outlets for about a third of their retail price. The underbelly of this is the implication that the fragrance, like Opium and the Poisons, has been or is being reformulated. This fragrance was released in 2007. I put a positive spin on this by considering myself lucky to have found a bottle I can afford before they "change the packaging".

And the wait is over: L'Artisan Havana Vanille

Man, it took long enough for this stuff to show up! I pre-ordered Havana Vanille in August and just received it Monday (12/21). I admit that during this long wait I became thoroughly disenchanted. I’ve been reading very negative posts on MUA & POL and I became less and less interested in it ever gracing me with it’s presence. Many noted it’s lightness, suggested it was fleeting, thought it smelled like something wet and moldy. Now that I have my bottle I gotta ask: what on earth are you smelling out there? Havane Vanille is simply gorgeous.

I’ve been wearing Havane Vanille for two days. One thing is for sure; this is not a fragrance you can judge based on a dab from a 1 ml vial. You need to spray HV – and I mean several big, bold sprays of it. Today I scanned MUA and read a post by DorothyEm where she wrote this in response to someone asking how to make L’Artisan scents last longer:

DorothyEm: “I read a post on another board from a L’Artisan representative and he suggested that you spray enough so it "pools" on the skin. In other words, spray liberally and enough to make your skin WET.”

It now occurs to me that I should do this will all L’Artisan fragrances, not just Havana Vanille. Maybe I should be ‘spraying myself wet’ with Annick Goutal, Chanel and Jo Malone, too. Just a thought. Anyway, back to HV. The fact that I wasn’t particularly interested in Havana Vanille ever showing up combined with the second fact that I don’t get excited by vanilla fragrances in general makes me recommend HV highly. Or perhaps this means HV is a vanilla fragrance for those who don’t care for vanilla scents. Case in point: I love Guerlain Spirituese Double Vanillle but this is perhaps the only vanilla I go crazy for and I wear it about 3-4 times per year, usually when I’m on a diet or when the weather is frigid and I need to olfactory equivalent of a big down comforter. My taste in vanilla scents pretty much runs toward ambery woods and not straight vanillas at all. My favorite ambery woods are Givenchy Organza Indecence (amber, cinnamon, and woods, woods, woods), Theorema (clove, orange, spices, and woods, woods, woods), Annick Goutal Ambre Fetiche (gorgeous ambery woods), Serge Lutens Rousse (cinnamon & woods) and Parfum d’Empire Ambre Russe (decadence bar none). So, as you can see, vanilla fragrances are pretty much not in my collection (well...I really dig Cristobal by Balenciaga and I think of it as a highly vanillic oriental). But, in general, I prefer ambery woods. So, if you are like me, you might also love Havana Vanille.

Havana Vanille begins like an after dinner drink heavy on the booze, specifically rum, and it's a very dark rum. Think of something along the lines of a Black Russian or Baileys Irish Crème. Something thick, boozy and spiked with milk. I might be hallucinating but I also smell something like almond liqueur – along the lines of Frangelico. Havana Vanille transports me to a dark retro lounge with me draped in the corner leather booth and, yes, on this occasion, I'm smoking a cigarette (maybe even a clove cigarette, it’s been years, give a girl a fantasy indulgence). Havana Vanille simmers down and loses it’s gourmand quality once the rum note dissipates but it never leaves entirely. Once the rum simmers it becomes a veritable spice fest; clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, dry smoky woods and burnt sugar. I know there is tobacco here but it’s so mild mannered I can’t pick it out. I can’t say I smell anything that resembles straight up vanilla, or vanilla as I know it in perfumery, and this is likely why I enjoy HV so much. To me, it smells like the idea of vanilla, and those I asked to smell me the past two days did not say I smelled like vanilla (fyi: they said I smelled really good, but didn’t know what it was). I don’t find much resemblance at all to Tom Ford’s Tobacco Vanille, which is good, because I’m not a fan. I think of Havana Vanille as a love child, a result of the coupling between Guerlain Spirituese Double Vanille and Givenchy Organza Indecence. It’s a blessed child – born from good parents. If you like ambery, spicy woods as I do, you ought to check out HV.

Notes include rum, clove, dried fruits, narcissus, tonka bean, helichrysum, vanilla, smoked woods, moss and balsamic notes