An Interview with Jack

You probably don't need us to tell you we have sort of interesting readers. I met Jack on Facebook, after doing a search on Paco Rabanne's La Nuit there, and we hit it off instantly. Jack treats his facebook profile like a perfume blog for the most part, posting vintage ads, his scent of the day, and observations about everything from why the kid in an old Arpege image is creepy to the fact that he just found Florida Water at Wal-Mart. He does a recurring thing called Edith's Shopping Bag which keeps track of his perfume purchases, with pictures for the short of attention span. It made sense that he'd been reading the blog for a while--even though it took us a little longer than your average person to figure that out. Hey, you're the guy from that blog, he said one day. Um, yeah, I answered. You know it? Duh! Jack's a really smart guy and, like Abigail, and a lot of you, a lot of fun to talk to. We met on Facebook to chat tonight, in the first of a continuing series:

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.

6 First Impressions

"The first time I passed through Switzerland," wrote journalist Ernesto Sabato, "I had the impression it was swept down with a broom from one end to the other every morning by housewives who dumped all the dirt in Italy."

Psychologists say we have three seconds to make a first impression. Even when we've only just met someone, and spend maybe all of several minutes with them, we leave with an indelible sense about their personality and character, an overall assessment which elides substance in favor of tone. We carry that away with us for better or worse, and we return with it, making subsequent decisions based on those early conclusions. Often the first decision we make is whether or not to have anything to do with someone again.

Is it fair to rush to judgment, or should we worry about it? First impressions can be misleading. Take the gruff woman you meet through a friend. You assume she's closed off, a snob, tight lipped because she has nothing to say. What's her problem, anyway? Turns out, you later discover, she might not say much but she doesn't mince words, either, and her silence usually means she values privacy. When you need her to keep a secret, she does.

And what about perfume? So much of my education has involved adjustment to and reassessment of things I at first either felt ambivalent about or reacted with extreme distaste toward. I loved Chanel Cuir de Russie instantly. I knew I'd just inhaled something truly great, a work of art; a masterpiece, even. Ditto Dzing! And Lancome Cuir. I smelled Une Rose and felt I'd finally found the perfect rose. On the other hand, there's Donna Karan Signature. I liked it from the start, but my feelings have changed, deepening over time, and what I first smelled is a much simpler picture than what I see now. Ivoire seemed only minimally interesting to me when I first found it. Now I find it something of a changeling, more complicated than I gave it credit for. Others, like Patou 1000 and Pure Poison, seemed inifinitely feminine to me at one point, a line drawn in the sand along the gender divide. Now I wear them very comfortably, and that line, washed away, keeps shifting, appearing somewhere else.

Maybe truth and fiction co-exist in first impressions, representing a code you crack over time. I expect my feelings about the following fragrances to evolve, and I'm fully aware that some of these gut reactions say more about me than the perfumes themselves, but I thought it might be interesting to explore my first impressions, looking for some kind of truth in them, as so much of what I write about perfume is carefully thought out, evaluated and re-evaluated.

1. Cuir de Lancome

Turpentine and violets are having a conversation, and birch tar keeps butting its head in. The violet is soft and a little moody. It can't quite say what's on its mind. This is the very best of the Lancome reissues, given a run for its money only by Sikkim. It smells of the leather handbag your mother was given at Christmas when you were a kid, off-putting and hypnotic at the same time. You want it to stay like that forever, with that fresh off the shelves clarity. It smells of Cuir de Russie and Heeley's Cuir Pleine Fleur, without the barnyard, like Caron Tabac Blond and Knize Ten without all the fuzzy distortion. This is fine store bought leather, lightly stained, with an oily finish on it that your fingers slide right along. It stays clear and bright on the skin without the sense that anything darker lurks in the wings. I used to hide in my grandmother's closet trying to get to the bottom of all the things that made her who she seemed to be. All her accessories and clothing. Why did she keep some things and discard others? Why did she favor one denim skirt over a pair of burgundy kulots? How did she wish to see herself, and how did that match up to how she felt? Did everyone else see the same person I did? Adults were endless mysteries to me; none more so than her. The thing I remember most about her closet was all the leather: belts and handbags and shoes. Even her Polaroid camera had leather detailing. I used to wonder how much of her would be left if you took all that away. The smell of the leather was tough and sweet, noxious but comforting. Like her skin, which was lined with age and tanned, it seemed like some kind of armor against something.

2. Guerlain Vol de Nuit

A big blast of galbanum right up top, along with the signature Guerlain depth of focus. It smells very much like a high end masculine. You can see a line straight from this to Guerlain Homme, and it has, thanks to the galbanum and what comes off like pungent narcissus, a camphoraceous intensity about it, rather than the mojito glued to Guerlain Homme's fist. Just a faint whiff of booze on its breath. No girly drinks for this one, though someone did put vanilla bean in the whiskey glass.

3. Lancome Magie Noire (pre-reformulation)

How can this feel so wrong--but wear so right? It's nothing like the reformulation, which is straight up powdery woods. This has a strange, nearly off floral formality missing from the update. That influence doesn't make it old lady as much as off its rocker. If this is old lady, she has a towel over her head like a turban, fastened with a brooch you mistake for costume jewelry at your own risk. Befriend her and you might have inherited it. She's hard of hearing and listens creatively, so she might take your condescension for friendship either way. Magie Noire has a weird, fruity influence which mingles not altogether comfortably with what appears to be narcissus, like the honey people sometimes infuse with chamomile. Strangely, it smells more modern than its latest iteration, putting it closer in mood to the latest Visa than the late great gone forevers.

4. Parfumerie Generale Un Crime Exotique

This is almost photorealism gourmand, smelling of tea steam and gingerbread. But there's something there you instinctively know not to swallow. It isn't just foody, but the room and the mood of afternoon tea time. Intoxicating, evocative stuff, endowed with an emotional undertow devoid of any apparent rational sense. I don't know the Cotswold cottage it conjures. But I can see it like a memory of sitting there. The walls are yellow from the morning sun. Someone is at the sink with his back to me, getting the tray ready. I'm hoping for biscuits. There are mismatched ladder-back chairs and woven place mats on the table. The shadows are gentle. Outside the yard seems respectful of the house's scale, with a modest garden and well manicured patches of cascading shrubs. It seems picture perfect and just as I start to wonder where I put my digital camera, the neighbor passes the open window in his overalls, waving jovially, and the stranger in the kitchen, bringing the tea over, sees the neighbor just in time to tell me all about his predilection for local underage boys and dress-up in his wife's clothes. In some ways, this is a throwback to Magie Noire, a comparison I might not have made without spraying them on two sides of the same arm.

5. Etro Palais Jamais

It's as though someone put a scrap of paper in an ashtray alongside a not-entirely snuffed out cigarette, and the only thing on hand to douse the fire before it got out of hand was a bottle of Guerlain Vetiver. The juice turned grey green in the glass, smelling and looking like fragrant, dissolving coal. This smells fantastic but I'm already preparing myself to defend it by anticipating exactly how its detractors will dismiss it. So many people are so anti-smoke. Back in high school, we lived across from a city park. It was close enough to sneak over for cigarettes. Something about the smoke mixing into the evergreen and concrete of that environment calmed me down, putting my angst into perspective. It made cigarettes seem perfectly natural too, practically harmless. Surely those big tree could take it. On Fall days you could smell the dirt and the grass and car exhaust from the kids driving their parents' cars around the relatively safe back roads of the park. It wasn't unusual for someone in one of the adjoining neighborhoods to be burning leaves. Even when they weren't, the memory of bonfire from Homecoming past or approaching played heavily on the mind.

6. Jean Patou Sira des Indies

I've heard bananas foster but to my nose it's pear. After which: some very expensive apertif, some sweet but bitter cordial served in a squat but fluted glass you might snap in two if you grabbed with more than your thumb and forefinger. If this is in fact bananas foster, someone soaked it in Joy, rendering it heady but inedible (and indelible). With Patou you get a curious transparency, similar to Chanel, but in place of Chanel's chilled glass lucidity, Patou provides warmth, a clearheaded sense of burnished texture. Picture a woman with natural blond hair. She's sitting under indirect sunlight, and you see every facet of the color. It isn't "just" blond, like a cheap at-home kit, all uniformly hued, but infinitely varied, with depth and volume you can't imitate without accomplished artistry. Blond turns out to be an amalgam of things, some darker, some lighter, yet the end effect is the sense you could look straight through the back of the head to the freckles on the front of her face.

Looky-loos

I can spend hours in the Korean-owned fragrance store here in town, going without food, water, sleep, or even contact with the outside world. The place has been a total education for me. Within a short three months I've been able to smell dozens of perfumes I might otherwise only have read about. The owner took over the store from his relatives, who operated the place for years, so a healthy percentage of the inventory dates back to pre-reformulation, meaning that even those I think I'm familiar with have the capacity to surprise me.

The first time I walked in, I spotted the old Montana for men. It has a great, bracing smell, cedar astringency, very nice. Adjacent to it was the newer formulation. The old is boxed in red, the new in blue. There's really no comparison. As often happens with old and new formulations, the two are completely different fragrances. The recently re-released Magie Noire, on sale at Perfumania, is a pale iteration of the original, which the Korean shop has. The original is strange and indolent--barely this side of foul, and wonderful for it. The re-release smells good, but really only indirectly references the original, the way a matchbox car does its source. Imitation of this kind requires crude generalization. Corners get rounded off. Suggestion substitutes for detail. Several of the perfumes the owner has carried haven't been reformulated, they're just hard to find: Issey Miyake's Le Feu D'Issey, Etienne Aigner No. 1, Yohji, K de Krizia. Every time I go in I see something new. One day I looked up and saw two quarter ounce bottles of Bandit pure parfum. The place is a museum, a history lesson, and a candy shop.

I ask a lot of questions. Who buys what, or does it actually sell at all? I won't bore you with how popular Paris Hilton's perfumes are. Because I'm there often and for significant blocks of time, I witness various shoppers come and go, and what they ask for fascinates me. I've yet to see anyone play. They come in looking for Mariah and that's what they want to see: not something different or even something like it. Recently a girl came in shopping for her boyfriend. He wears that, she said, pointing to Jean Paul Gaultier. This looked promising, until she said he has about ten bottles, all lined up in a row. She wanted to buy him something, but she wasn't sure what. He drives a nice car and he runs three businesses, she said. He dresses nice. I suggested Body Kouros, because no one else would be wearing it and it smells phenomenal. She liked it but she didn't know if he would.

"Now, is that in the same...what am I trying to say?" she said. "Are they in the same..."

Do you mean class? I asked. Do you mean Is Body Kouros in the same class as Gaultier?
"Yeah," she said. "The same, like, level."

So I told her that YSL, who'd just died, is to Jean Paul Gaultier as Leadbelly is to Rap. She'd never heard of Yves Saint Laurent and she didn't really care. She didn't want something nobody else was wearing. For her and her boyfriend, and for a lot of people, cologne is a label, to be recognized and to impress. She didn't end up buying anything.

Leaving a perfume shop without making a purchase is so unthinkable to me that I literally can't imagine it. So you're low on funds. Don't you want a sample? Aren't you curious about wild cards? What if the best perfume you've never smelled is sitting on one of those shelves somewhere? What if something up there smells a lot like the stuff you wear now, only better? Every time I'm standing there and someone walks in smelling of nothing, it hits me again, how few people actually wear cologne, and how few of those wear anything any good or which at least expresses something unique about them. When my co-worker started wearing CK1 I was so enthusiastic. It was so nice to have someone else's cologne to play off of. When I got Lolita Lempicka au Masculin I gave it to her. It reminded me of Lempicka for women, which I already had. By giving it to her, I could still smell it. She's the kind who goes through one bottle at a time--and only applies once a day, so it wouldn't be going anywhere soon.

I have a fantasy, and it goes like this: I walk into a perfume shop, and all the usual suspects are there, sniffing all the same old same olds. Then somebody off in the corner (I like to think a guy) lights up like someone stuck his finger in a socket. His eyes are huge. He has a bottle in his hand. I gather he's just smelled it. He speaks directly to me because I'm the only one paying attention. If I wasn't paying attention, he'd be talking to the shelf.

"This stuff is amazing. Oh my God Oh my God oh my God. How have I never smelled this? Did this just come out? And in Eau de Parfum. And by Maurice Roucel. It's practically edible. There's only one bottle left. There's only this tester. Do you think they'll sell it to me? Do you think I can talk them into it? I'm prepared to sell my body. I'd wash dishes if they had any. I can't leave without this. I have to have it. I have to have it right now."