Hedonist by Viktoria Minya: What's in a Word

It's been interesting, as early reviews of Hedonist have come in, to see what people make of the word. I had no idea it had quite the reputation it does - you'd think, from some of these reactions, it were a synonym for harlot, trollop, or worse - and I wonder what Viktoria Minya, the perfumer behind the scent, thinks about all this, because to my nose the fragrance is more in keeping with the actual definition of hedonist than with these apparently somewhat popular connotations, and I imagine she must have been thinking of the bigger picture too.

Strictly speaking, hedonism has to do with the pursuit of pleasure - as in, first and foremost - which would make a hedonist, I guess, on the one hand a pleasure seeker and on the other averse to anything which veers in the opposite direction. Nothing in that definition privileges carnal pleasure, though the physical would obviously be included in any bullet list of what floats the boat. That bullet list might also include fine cuisine, silk clothing, spring days, comfortable furniture, and feathers, depending on your taste. It probably wouldn't include okra. Regardless, Hedonist doesn't make any effort to claim one pleasure at the expense of others - and when I smell the perfume it's far more expansive in tone than the "merely" sexual, if those two words can be used together.

Minya, who is based in Paris, has mentioned in the literature for Hedonist that it harkens back to classic perfumery, and it does feel classical, even grand. There's a retrospective quality to the fragrance that nods back to early twentieth century perfumery, certainly - but again, I think the scent sees a bigger picture in its references as well. Some reviewers have compared its wonderful peachy facets to Mitsouko (a reference point I can get behind, as long as I'm not stuck there). For me, one of the fragrance's biggest bonuses, not to mention pleasant surprises - and there are many - is how strongly it relates to some of my favorite eighties fragrances.

That's where some of you will stop reading, I suspect, whereas some will now have perked right up. Hedonist certainly has the iconic sensual boldness that characterizes some of my favorites from that era - Poison, say, or Diva - but without their take no prisoners bombast. I see an 80's connection, I guess, mainly because that decade was the last great period for this kind of sumptuousness, a time when a fragrance was meant to be smelled rather than merely perceived, to register not as a whisper but as a declaration - of elegance, of personality, of intent. Poison, Diva, Paris, and, say, Giorgio, are the no-brainer 80's benchmarks, but Hedonist reminds me more of lesser known favorites from that era; particularly, a fantastic earlier Krizia fragrance, Moods.

Like Moods, and some of the other 80's fragrances I'm thinking of - the once wonderful Creations by Ted Lapidus, for instance, Houbigant's Demi-Jour, or the reformulated Shocking de Schiaparelli - Hedonist is maximally honeyed. It has a green-tinged vanillic sweetness to it I remember from Moods as well. It's a fully saturated fragrance but plays off the skin in a very contemporary, radiantly diffusive way. I imagine people will notice its sillage, without feeling victim to it, and in that way, among others, it updates some of its influences.

Honey-faceted fragrances often have a slightly animalic quality to them, to put it diplomatically. While its aura is lush and dramatic, Hedonist has a sweeter, cleaner disposition. I get a tea note, a very nice tobacco storyline going on, orange blossom, and that honey, primarily. It's a fascinating combination, which lasts well and conjures any number of nostalgically pleasurable mental and emotional sensations. One Fragrantica reviewer characterized the overall effect as "really golden...[reminding her of] honey and ambrosia with a glass of Alsatian Gewurztraminer." I've never had gewurztraminer, but I like the sound of all that. Hedonist feels strangely familiar at various points during its lifespan, maybe because in some way it catalyzes little memories of comfort like this. It's familiar the way remembered pleasures can be. The dry down does interesting, even subtly unusual, things with its osmanthus/peach/tobacco combo, opening it up rather than narrowing it down. The fragrance is heady but bright, surrounding rather than suffocating the way fragrances this opulent can tend to do.

I miss some of those eighties honeyed fragrances, so Hedonist has been a welcome surprise. They don't make them much like this anymore. In most ways the perfume landscape, commercially and otherwise, is starting to seem pretty spare and minimalistic, kind of anemic in the pleasures it affords. Hedonist would be a welcome change at half the fragrance it is. Fortunately, its pleasures pay off in dividends. In the few weeks I've been wearing it I've grown to like it more and more, and I keep noticing different things - like, I think, some cedar in the mix, and a presiding creamy warmth I hadn't singled out for a while because I kept focusing on the peach and the tobacco specifically.

Fragrantica calls it a woody chypre. For me, it has more affinities with the floriental. I hope Minya does more but Hedonist already feels like an old favorite, and I'll take a new line with a single fantastic scent over one with ten mediocre fragrances any day. Luckyscent sells the fragrance, which comes in an appropriately luxurious bottle (pictured above) and box. Already, with this perfume, Hedonist has a new connotation for me.

Miss Habanita: Dark in Broad Daylight

If you've only smelled the reformulation of Molinard's Miss Habanita and been led to believe it has little or no connection to its reason for being, good old smoky Habanita, it's perfectly understandable - and I feel sorry for you. Here's a good, if kind of tragic, example of a careless reformulation, where everything interesting and even remotely complicated has been altogether removed from the fragrance as initially conceived. And for what? It's hard to imagine the current version of Miss Habanita selling any better in the present marketplace than what it replaced might have.

Released in 1994, over 70 years after the release of Habanita, original Miss Habanita is one of my favorites, and the two relate to each other in fascinating ways. Miss Habanita, these days, is a densely sugared white musk affair, chokingly sweet, depressingly banal for something so relentlessly perky. Its fruits are neon jammy, and the neon is right up in your grille. Fruits have been done better, frankly, and original Miss Habanita is still around here and there on Ebay to prove it.

Classified as a fruity chypre, its take on fruit recalls Nina Ricci's Deci Dela, by Jean Guichard, which was released the same year. Deci Dela and Miss Habanita are very similar in their use of steeped fruits over a drier than dry base of oakmoss. This isn't cheery, life affirming succulence. It's darker than that; more earthy. While we're all waxing poetic over our romantic ideas about oakmoss, let's remind ourselves how the Egyptians viewed it. As Edwin T. Morris mentions in Fragrance: The Story of Perfume from Cleopatra to Chanel, it was once an essential part of the embalming process. Egyptians stuffed the cavities of eviscerated corpses with it, preparing for burial and the afterlife. Then as now, it was a good fixative; its antimicrobial properties "serving admirably in the mummifying process". When some people smell oakmoss and say it reminds them of something damp and musty, they're not too far off the mark.

Pretty elemental stuff - as opposed to, say, something slightly smooth and sweet which used to be in a lot of fragrances in much larger quantities. Vis a vis Miss Habanita, let's put it another way: someone took the peach off Mattisse's table, where it fit in with the contrived color scheme, and threw it out in the yard, where time's gotten to it and reminded you that a painting, like mummification, freezes things into a lie. The fragrance sits comfortably somewhere between compote and compost. Original Miss Habanita was a late stage reminder that at one point perfumery had as much to do with the unknown and the unsettling as smelling fancy or clean. Miss Habanita has a little weirdness and mystique in it, mixing the beautiful with the ever so slightly macabre. Listen, don't get me wrong. Miss Habanita isn't that dark. But we've gotten so used to FRUITY FLORAL meaning something much brighter and perkier and airheaded that a recalibration might be necessary before approaching what that used to mean.

Miss Habanita distinguishes itself from Deci Dela further by faithfulness to its source, a composition which itself plumbed the depths of the darker side. I wouldn't say that Miss Habanita is perfect for those who find Habanita a little much, obviously. For one thing, a Miss can get in just as much trouble as a Mrs., if not more. Ideally, appreciating one means appreciating the other. Miss Habanita isn't a refinement or a series of improvements but a way of contrasting certain aspects of the original in refreshing ways.

The moss - and some vanilla - speak to the creamy tobacco of vintage Habanita. Everything anyone might find questionable, if not entirely objectionable, is still there - the leather, the tobacco, the dirtied amber, the palest hint of decayed floralcy - and maybe even amplified in some way by bringing a certain amount of translucence into the equation. I can just as easily imagine Miss Habanita being used to scent cigarettes, as Habanita once was, and Habanita is such a dense proposition that it's easy to forget it also contained peach and orange blossom and plenty else besides, much of which reappears in its progeny to more emphatic effect.

Miss Habanita reminds me of Habanita with the lights suddenly turned up. Everybody's still doing what they were doing in the dark. They haven't had a chance to pretend otherwise yet. It lasts amazingly well, always surprising me by its persistence. It's a wonderful fragrance, full of quiet melancholy. Other than Habanita, there's really nothing quite like it.

I suggest looking for it on Ebay. I've seen it through e-tailers but the bottle you receive is not always the bottle pictured, and a simple exchange of emails with an Ebay seller will reassure you of getting what you pay for. The original formula came in two bottles, one frosted mustard, the other translucent amber. One of these is simpler in design; my favorite of the two, the amber glass, looks exactly like the famous Lalique Habanita bottle graced with water nymphs and has a glittery metallic bronze cap.

Multiple Rouge by Humiecki and Graef

There's really nothing else like Multiple Rouge, which has made it difficult to write about. My favorite of the offbeat Humiecki and Graef line, it's somehow simultaneously weirder than it sounds, and tamer. There's no denying it's a big bowl of fruity berries, a sort of study in various succulent hues of red. There's no getting around the immortelle, which, like patchouli, is going to be a deal breaker for some. But somehow, these two, encouraged by a dash of coriander, play nice. Multiple Rouge is similar to the fruitchouli, but something else altogether, thanks to the immortelle and a salted caramel effect.

The berries have a darker quality than, say, the explosive brightness of a fragrance like Byredo Pulp, but Pulp is a useful comparison. Like Multiple Rouge, Pulp is an oversized fantasy take on fruit. Still, for all its outlandish strangeness, Multiple Rouge is a far mellower wear. Moodier, too. Pineapple and peach complicate things, arranging the scent into interesting tensions. This is tart but seasoned pineapple, and a stewed peach. Together they seem to conjure something like apple, if not in the shape of anything you'd want to eat.

There's a savory feel to Multiple Rouge unlike anything I've smelled in a berried fragrance. While it isn't gourmand in any conventional way, it nevertheless feels foody. There's something aquatic going on as well. So: berry, salt, apple, peach, pineapple, ozonic, immortelle. See what I mean?

People talk about Multiple Rouge's sense of playfulness. Beyond words, it's a study in absurdity, fragrance as delighted squeal. Just as many seem to feel the joke's on them, and fail to see the humor. Did I mention the booziness? Those apples and berries are on their way to some kind of special, simmering brew, the kind you find in a Crock-pot around the holidays, spiked to get you through Uncle Ed's second wind; dash of grenadine, dash of cognac.

I appreciate Multiple Rouge's unusualness, but wear it seriously. It's one of my favorite immortelle scents, along with Fougere Bengale, Sables, Eau Noire, and 1740.

Top photo: Bert Stern
Middle: Norman Parkinson
Bottom: Irving Penn

Colors de Benetton 1987

It's probably unfair to review this one, as the liquid currently sold under the name doesn't much remind me of the original version, a bottle of which I was lucky enough to find at a discount store.  But the old Colors is such a great fragrance, especially for autumn, and so curiously forgotten, that I can't resist.

At one point, Benetton was, along with Esprit, an interesting anomaly at the mall.  The windows of the store popped with primary color in an otherwise boring beige granite landscape, and the ads, early on, were an energetic antidote to the unconscious xenophobia of my midwestern upbringing.  Say what you will about those ads - eventually, they were a logical point of contention for many: they were virtually the only thing in Vogue, short of Naomi Campbell, pointing toward a more diverse cultural color palette.

The clothes never thrilled me much.  I was shopping at thrift stores - looking for that perfect hue of sixties ochre or pea green - diametrical opposites of the bright greens and yellows at Benetton.  And until I found this bottle of Colors recently, I'd forgotten the fragrance myself.  Yet, smelling it now, all kinds of memories come back.  I was surprised it was so familiar, and it occurred to me that many girls I knew back in high school must have worn it, though it had a lot of competition.

That competition, in my neck of the woods, was roughly as follows:  Loulou, Anne Klein, Bijan, Calyx, Camp Beverly Hills, Coco, Beautiful, Creation, Joop, Obsession, Poison, Sung, and Ysatis.

Many of these are still in production, and continue to move the units at breakneck speed, and it could be argued that they've survived so centrally in the marketplace because they were more memorable to begin with.  I don't have the data to support or dispute that, aside from pointing out that Calvin Klein and Givenchy have a bit more corporate muscle than a pint-sized Italian upstart, however daring its approach.  I could also argue that few fragrances could have survived the onslaught, the following year, of the cultural behemoth known as Eternity, which seemed to shift everything - the way women wanted to smell, the way they wanted to come across, the way they wanted to live, etc.   In short, they wanted to live in a fantasy world that looked like the Eternity ad campaign.

But for me Colors has something none of its competition did.  One of the earlier forays into fruity floral, it was piquant in a way you didn't typically find at the fragrance counter.  Those early fruity floral touches were nothing like their modern spawn.  They didn't feel like bubblegum disguised as a fragrance, and they integrated their fruity elements more judiciously - in a way which felt more in keeping with the classical fragrances you were used to.

Colors is a curious medley of these fruitier notes (pineapple, peach), herbal touches, well blended florals (the notes list tuberose and jasmine but I wouldn't have been able to name them without looking), and oriental mainstays (patchouli, civet, oakmoss, opoponax).  You notice the peach and pineapple first, but rather than the syrupy compote you get in the modern fruity floral, Colors presents them more delicately, augmented with sage, vanilla, and the slightest hint of civet.  It's hard to imagine a fruity floral of today with civet, or patchouli which isn't scrubbed clean of anything making it recognizable as such.  A tricky combination, but Colors shows how well it used to be pulled off.  That peachy softness lasts for quite a while before the fragrance descends into its heart of muted vanilla and orange blossom.

Colors is a strong, long lasting fragrance, but a mellow wear.  It's classified as an oriental, not a fruity floral, in fact, and the use of vanilla and orange blossom (both of which I smell right down to the bottom) give it an overall creaminess which comes closer to LouLou and Ysatis than any of its other competitors.  It feels younger than the latter; a little older maybe than the former.  It's miles away from the powerhouses of its time - Poison being a good example - and I wouldn't say it's as strong as many of the louder fragrances currently front and center at the mall.

It was created by Bernard Ellena, who did another little one-time sleeper for Benetton called Tribu.

Really love your peaches want to shake your tree

As much as I hold the house of Parfums MDCI in high esteem, their peach fragrance, Peche Cardinal, was not right for me. Peche Cardinal is far too sticky, drippy, juicy sweet and didn’t seem like a sophisticated perfume. I was disappointed, because I’m smitten with several others from MDCI.

For me, the ultimate peach fragrance is Keiko Mecheri Peau de Peche. If you desire a peach scent that doesn’t evoke Jolly Rancher candies or syrup, but instead the soft fuzzy skin of a perfectly ripe peach, then this is the one for you.

KM Peau de Peche makes me want to smell like a peach. Even though it isn’t citrusy it still has that “happy” effect on me that’s usually reserved for scents with orange, lemon and grapefruit. And, most amazing of all, KM Peau de Peche smells like real perfume, like something an adult can wear with panache. Peau de Peche starts of like you just sliced open a peach; it’s juicy, delectable and full of nectar. I always want to drink it. Once it dries down, however, the juicy quality reduces and it becomes slightly woody and powdery. KM Peau de Peche stays relatively dry and not overly sweet especially for a fruity scent. The dry down is sublime; it becomes all sandalwood with a hint of peach.

Peau de Peche, like every Keiko Mecheri perfume I’ve tried, is minimalist, simple and well done. I know it’s because Keiko Mecher is Japanese but I get an Asian vibe from her fragrances. Peau de Peche makes me want to don a silk kimono, walk into a room through sliding rice paper doors and pour myself a spot of jasmine tea. I feel elegant, uncluttered, peaceful and happy when I wear Peau de Peache.

There seem to be a good amount of aldehydes in Peau de Peche because the sillage is decent and it pops off the skin a bit. The longevity is good, especially if you apply liberally.

Notes: white peach, orris powder, sandalwood, amber wood

Available at The Posh Peasant