Perfumes I ought to like... but don't

 Earlier today I tried wearing Jean Patou Sublime for about the fifth time. There are so many fantastic fragrances from Patou that I find it curious I don’t enjoy Sublime.  From Sublime’s list of notes it seems like a perfume I would cherish (listed notes are orange, Mandarin from Sicily, ylang-ylang, lily of the valley, rose, jasmine, orange blossom, vetiver, sandalwood, oak moss and vanilla). Plus, Sublime is a floral oriental which is my favorite fragrance category.  But today, I tried Sublime for the final time, and I just don’t like it.   

This got me thinking about other fragrances it seems I should love, but don’t.  Take for instance the entire Ormonde Jayne line.  I completely understand why many of you hold up the Ormonde Jayne line as being one of the best.  Most of the Ormonde Jayne fragrances pair interesting and unusual combinations.  They seem unique, special and well-crafted.  The ingredients seem high quality and the bottles are lovely.  But, every single OJ fragrance ends up smelling virtually the same to me once dried down.  I’ve read that this might mean I’m hyper sensitive to Iso E Super, which is an aroma chemical, said to be used freely by Ormonde Jayne (and virtually all perfume houses, not just the OJ brand).  Iso E Super is supposed to be a wonderful “connector,” adding a smooth, robust quality to fragrances and smelling like velvety woods and/or amber [You can find a helpful article about Iso E Super over at PerfumeShrine].  For me, almost every fragrance (except Tiare and Frangipani) ends up smelling like murky synthetic, artificial woods.   I want to enjoy some of the fragrances from Ormonde Jayne, but sadly, I can’t.

Aside from some trepidation about wearing patchouli in public, I do love the smell of patchouli.  I enjoy many fragrances with a hefty patchouli base, some of which are the original Prada and Angel.  I also value and appreciate potent fragrances with excellent longevity.  Chanel Coco Mademoiselle can be described as a sweet patchouli number that’s both potent and lasts forever.  But the sum of its parts just doesn’t add up to something I can wear.  It seems like I ought to like Coco Mademoiselle but it makes me run, not walk, in the other direction.

 

I also love ambery orientals.  Teo Cabanel Alahine is my #1 BFF and I’d classify it as an ambery oriental or perhaps as a floral oriental.   I hold perfumer Maurice Roucel high regard as he’s created a whole list of wonderful perfumes I appreciate and wear.  But somehow, even though Guerlain L’Instant was created by Roucel and its an ambery oriental it is perhaps my most dreaded fragrance of all time.  Guerlain’s L’Instant is the olfactory equivalent of ‘nails down a chalkboard’ for me.  It’s been a very long time since I even tried to wear it and I don’t think I attempted wearing it more than twice.  When people say Thierry Mugler Angel is tooth-achingly sweet I often think they should be describing L’Instant not Angel.  L’Instant is a sharp juxtaposition of citrus and sweeeet that makes my skin crawl.  When I read the list of notes it seems like L’Instant should be beautiful, but the reality for me, is that it’s a fearsome monster.  I enjoy plenty of sweet fragrances (Keiko Mecheri Loukhoum eau Poudree is one) but for the most part I’m finding I like orientals to be dry (such as Alahine and Canturi) instead of sweet.  Or perhaps it’s simply that Guerlain L’Instant is my nemesis. 

A few other notes I typically enjoy are mimosa and almond.  And as I’ve outlined above I always appreciate long wear and potency.  Yves Saint Laurent Cinema is a potent, long wearing fragrance with prominent almond and mimosa notes.  In theory, I should like Cinema, but in practice, I don’t.  Now, don’t get me wrong, YSL Cinema is not my nemesis and it doesn’t make me run away.  In fact, I’ve smelled Cinema on others and find it pleasant.  But on me it’s a boredom issue, it just doesn’t do anything, anything at all, for me.  I’ve tried wearing it a couple times and within an hour always have the strong urge to remove it and apply something I really enjoy.

Last but not least is a cheery little number which features a pretty spring bouquet and most notably a strong linden note.  I love fresh, innocent, natural smelling florals, which is why I adore just about the entire Annick Gotual line and I especially enjoy the scent of linden.  La Chasse aux Papillons is one of L’Artisan’s  bestsellers, and it even has reasonable longevity AND has just about the prettiest fragrance name ever (La Chasse aux Papillons roughly translates to Chasing Butterflies in English). Nevertheless, I still can’t find anything to like about this fragrance.  I blame the pink pepper note which is quite strong in the Extreme version, but it’s also noticeable in the regular edt.  This pink pepper note seems jarring and throws off the easy-going florals for me.  Aside from this peppery quality, I just can’t get excited about La Chasse.  Sure, I could wear it without hating it, but it doesn’t make my heart sing; it’s as if I was wearing SJP Lovely or D&G Light Blue.

Do you have fragrances which seem tailor made for you, but somehow, they fall disappointingly short and you don’t like them? 

Cheap Thrills: Dunhill Desire for a Woman

It's a testament to Maurice Roucel's talent that his cheapest fragrances often smell as good as his high end niche reputation makers. K de Krizia is an amazing aldehyde floral, dirt cheap online. Nautica Voyage, a miraculous little sleeper of a scent, retails for as low as thirty-five dollars. Rochas Tocade (25 bucks) smells as fantastic, if not more so, than Guerlain L'Instant (60-70). Lalique Pour Homme (roughly $35) might just smell better than Bond No. 9 Riverside Drive (three times the price). Nothing compares to Iris Silver Mist, of course; then again, it's more an out-of-body experience than a perfume, and holding it up to mere mortals for comparison is like looking for a Paul Lynde "type" to play David Bowie in a high school musical. Wondrous oddities aside, Roucel's work remains remarkably consistent.

One key to that consistency is his trademark magnolia accord, which relates many of his scents to each other and smells so rich, creamy, and tangible you swear you could eat it or touch it or slather it all over yourself. Tocade is vanillic rose laid out on this signature base. L'Instant uses it not just as a foundation but as reason for being. You smell it everywhere in Roucel's ouevre, from Broadway Nite to 24, Faubourg. Tenacious sans bombast, it transitions from high to low, adapting itself to everything in between. What could be cheesier than something named Dunhill: Desire for a Woman? And yet, like almost everything else he's done, missteps and heavy hitters alike, Dunhill Desire too arranges itself around that familiar rubbery magnolia accord.

Lush, long lasting, and impressive, Desire has more going on in its top notes than the entire formulas of many a mainstream fragrance. I bought my 2.2 ounce bottle for 30 dollars--so it has more going on for less money, too. I'm not going to pretend I've wasted much time on Dunhill fragrances as a whole. There seem to be so many--for men, at least--the majority of which strike me as something my straight male friends would wear, lured by some aspirational fantasy associated with the name.

"Dunhill caters to the needs of the discerning man," says the company's ad copy, "from formal and casual menswear, to handcrafted leather goods through to fine men's jewelry" and so on, ad nauseum. Not pens and pencils but "writing instruments"; not watches but "timepieces". Jude Law is the spokesmodel and litters the website looking studiously urbane; suave, styled within an inch of his life, and bored out of his mind. "I'm sensitive, well dressed, and sometimes known to lean against the shelves in my library reading from a randomly selected, leather bound book," his sensitive expression says. Greys, tans, black, white. The menswear line is designed for "the modern gentleman and the maverick traveler."

I suppose a maverick travels in his own private plane, as opposed to lowly first class, and lives in a world drained of color. With their facile attempts at signaling a certain kind of cut-rate Ralph Lauren affluence, the few Dunhill masculines I've smelled depressed the hell out of me--as if to be a man means ipso facto to be magnificently tedious--and why be depressed, with so many wonderful things to smell out there? I've ignored Dunhill, and will probably continue to do so. Desire for a Woman seems to be an anomaly for the line: it smells like nothing else on the shelf, performs impressively, and like my favorite Roucels, manages somehow to suggest both impeccable taste and fun-loving, imperturbable trash.

I don't know exactly what's in it. I only know that I like it. It starts out intensely floral but very subtly evolves on the skin, arriving at a perfectly calibrated olfactory architecture of spiced amber, buttery warmth, and woods. From various sources online I've heard rose, freesia, caramel, sandalwood, and vanilla. There could be watermelon in it, for all I really know. Like everything else Roucel does, Desire smells edible without feeling particularly gourmand or foody. His fragrances share this precarious quality with the work of Sophia Grojsman.

Think of Desire as L'Instant Intense. I was always disappointed by L'Instant, and smelling Desire I now know why. L'Instant was far too timid; a miscalculation for which Roucel overcompensated, three years later, with Insolence, Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill to L'Instant's Masterpiece Theater. Desire situates itself somewhere in the middle of these extremes, a luxury it earned, most likely, by virtue of its market. Imagine the pressure applied at Guerlain, which has a real heritage to uphold, compared to the fairly straightforward, faux historical mass market imperatives of an outfit like Dunhill, whose incessant releases survive or perish according to a sink or swim mentality. Desire seems like Roucel having some fun, with a more relaxed attitude and a healthier sense of humor. The bottle is shimmery fuschia, just so you don't miss it, a delicious squeal of laughter compared to L'instant's pale whispery, watered down purplish pink.

Dunhill marketed Desire as the fragrance equivalent of the young woman in a pajama top designed to look like her boyfriend's, only in bright girly colors. Smells a little like his cologne, they said, but not to worry: strong enough for a man, but made for a woman, etc. Lo and behold, the reverse holds true. The perhaps unintentional effect of Desire's conglomerate of notes is a dreamy-sweet, curried pipe tobacco aroma, a mixture of powdered bubblegum and smoking room which makes the fragrance, in fact, a far superior masculine than any of the Dunhill males I've had the misfortune of smelling.

L'Interdit (R.I.P. Audrey Hepburn)

Can someone please tell me what the 2002 reformulation of L'Interdit ever did to anyone?

I know, I know, the first one was Audrey Hepburn, all powdery florals and white gloves with a touch of wispy, ephemeral whatnot. I'm sure it was lovely, and in comparison, here comes Raquel Welch, top heavy, shaking it, showing it, lips like a come on, hips like a been there, done that. It's like replacing a Rolls with a Ferarri, I know, but a Ferarri is quite something too, so can we all stop acting as if it's chopped liver and onions?

I'd read so much about the reformulation (and we're not talking about the more recent reformulation, which seeks to restore, some say successfully, the original Hepburn effect) that when I tried it, I was a little shocked how much I liked it. I don't know why these things keep shocking me. When I smelled Parfum d'Habit, more recently, I was surprised too. I'd read customer reviews on basenotes and makeupalley describing it as the most animalic thing this side of a rat's ass; foul, leathery, urinous, and just generally, unforgivably offensive. I couldn't figure out what people were talking about. Medicinal, yes; urinous, no. I smelled no leather, no animal, no wet dog, and really, truth to tell, not a whole lot of anything I'd heard described. Parfum d'Habit is pretty, to be sure, and even somewhat jarring at certain points, particularly the opening, which has the medicinal astringency of witch hazel, but it's hardly the caveman I expected, and the 2002 L'Interdit is certainly no run of the mill fruity floral.

I should have known, with Jean Guichard at the wheel. Everytime I smell a Guichard fragrance I'm again reminded how much his son Aurelien has inherited from him, and you can see links between L'Interdit and the light/dark achievements of Visa and Azzaro Couture. Like father, like son. Papa Guichard's genius, to me, is persistent radiance with an inner edge which somehow turns things inside out or upside down. Rather than getting brighter, and lighter, Guichard Sr.'s best work dries down to a burnished, heat seaking core, revealing unexpected, unsettling dissonance. So Pretty by Cartier has a straightfirward succulent fruit note up top and a darker, contrasting pit of angst deeper down. Eden seems so bright, so cheery and floral at first, and yet the picture Cacharel uses to package this fragrance gets right to the bottom of its attraction, showing a tangled jungle of competing white flowers and the somewhat unsettling suggestion of something like a poisoned apple beyond all the distracting foliage. Fendi Asja achieves this contrapuntal effect by turning berry into heady red wine. Go down the list, and you'll find these magic tricks throughout Guichard's oeuvre, right down to the weird, doughy jasmine of LouLou.

Guichard's L'Interdit sprays on like an easy going if steeply pitched fruity floral, but there's something in there which doesn't quite fit the image, and you start to see it very soon after the initial notes start wearing down. I'm no chemist, but judging by the pyramid provided by Osmoz, I would guess this has something to do with the combined effect of iris, frankincense, and tonka bean in the dry down. What I kept thinking, before I'd seen the notes, was that someone had mixed some incense into my bottle. How could a stereotypical fruity floral dry down into something so resinous and compelling? The answer: this is no stereotypical fruity floral. Givenchy seems to have known this, and after you discover the fragrance's weird complexity, the red label and box make perfect sense. Yes, red for rose--and passion.

That iris and frankincense combination gives L'Interdit a rooty incense accord I find pretty intriguing, making L'Interdit anything but a 1950's nice girl perfume. That isn't to say you would notice iris in the mix, before or after you know it's there. The tonka bean gives it a sturdier platform to stand on, suggesting cinammon, hay, clove, caramel and, especially, almond. This trifecta of contrasting basenotes gives L'Interdit a curious quality, making you wonder what it might do next. The Audrey Hepburn prototype died with its source, and what Guichard seems to have been saying or suggesting with his reformulation is that it might be high time we redefine what we mean by "nice girl" in the first place. In the fifties, being a nice girl meant that you knew your place and didn't rock the boat. You were to look pretty and to defer, always demurely. You refrained from showing more skin than absolutely necessary. Guichard's L'Interdit is a celebration of the nice girl's emancipation into sensual and emotional complexity, allowing her the freedom to be outspoken and even contradictory without reducing her to total transparency. Whereas the original evoked soft, powdered skin, Guichard's version celebrates the dewy prespiration of a woman too busy experiencing life to let the tought of a little sweat trouble her.

The accomplishment of this 2002 remake is its ability to balance light and dark, sweet and salty, hot and cold, and a world in between.

The Caretakers

Back in December we were holding a big 20% off sale at The Posh Peasant and one of our customers ordered Keiko Mecheri Hanae, which just ran out of stock that day. We contacted her (let’s call her Anne) asking if she wanted to wait for it while a new supply came from the manufacturer or whether she’d like something right away and wanted a different perfume. Anne replied that she had no problem waiting for KM Hanae, because this was the perfect fragrance for her. She told me she’s a pediatric nurse, and she wears Hanae because it’s beautifully soft and comforting and hands-down the most unobtrusive and lovely floral scent she’s ever found to wear at a hospital around infants and children.

This struck me as such a wonderful notion. So many of us talk about wearing perfume solely for “ourselves,” which usually means we still adore something like Serge Lutens Tubereuse Criminelle even though during the first hour anyone around us might get little whiffs of menthol and gasoline! But all of us in an office environment or any sort of work environment where we’re in contact with others need to be mindful of the impact our scent has on others. Now, I’m not interested in getting into the whole debate about banning fragrance in the office (which I think is terrible) but instead looking at the way we smell and how this influences others in our day-to-day lives.

What Anne brought to my attention is that there are professions where one wants to smell nice, but nice in a way that takes those around you into consideration, just as much as your own preference. Anne had found the perfect scent with Keiko Mecheri Hanae. Since this communication with Anne, I think of Hanae as a softly soothing and “caring” smell.

Other fragrances that I’ve come to group into this caretaker category are: Lalique Le Parfum, Miller Harris Couer d’ete and Guerlain L’Instant.

Lalique Le Parfum is the only oriental fragrance from Lalique but it’s a very soft and non-challenging oriental. LLP is mostly a vanillic floral scent with gentle dashes of spices. The list of notes may make you think it’s a big powerful fragrance but it’s not, it’s so comforting and pretty. Sometimes finding a perfume that is just perfectly pretty is a real challenge. Lalique did it with Le Parfum – it’s luminous and I love it.

Miller Harris Coeur d’Ete is another lovely caretaker fragrance. The story goes that Lyn Harris created Coeur d’Ete while she was pregnant; she wanted something that would nurture her senses. Lyn Harris created Coeur d’Ete with some unusual notes, it includes white lilac, cassie & heliotrope, blended with things like chocolate bean, banana and liquorice. Coeur d’Ete is an especially soft and gentle floral and even though it contains chocolate, banana and liquore, the gourmand notes do not overtake the florals.

Guerlain’s L’Instant, perhaps the least loved by true Guerlain fanatics (Guerlainiacs?!), is another caretaker contender. The notes read as seemingly similar to Shalimar but it’s nowhere near as aggressive as Shalimar. L’Instant starts with a citrusy burst but mellows down to a soft honey-vanilla-amber floral, with the floral note bearing the most resemblance to magnolia flowers. L’Instant strikes me as creamy and most notably it’s a gentle, modest scent that I imagine anyone smelling on you would find lovely.

This is just a handful of fragrances that strike me as being soft, gentle and agreeable to the wearer as well as to those around you. Surely there are many others.