Miss Dior le Parfum: One of Those Things That's Not Like the Other

Dior has never been one for leaving a good thing unbroken. Fahrenheit, while nowhere near what it used to be, remains within the company's inventory, but has spawned something like seven flankers - and counting. J'Adore, a bit of a ghost of its former self as well, has been parlayed into its own cottage industry, with about fourteen related "versions", including limited editions, seasonal variations, anniversary distillations, and one extrait and absolute after another. Since launching in 1999, J'Adore has been subjected to these updates or additions annually.  Addict and Dior Homme have been handled similarly.

At the same time, Dior has shown some superficial sensitivity to the preservation of its antiques, housing them, however renovated, within the collection called "Les Creations de Monsieur Dior", a funny name maybe, considering the monsieur in question would presumably be Christian himself, whose name has been removed from the brand for some years, which is simply now referred to as "Dior." It's questionable at this point just who Monsieur is meant to mean: Christian, or François Demachy, the man responsible for overseeing these various "collections" and for re-orchestrating (i.e. reformulating) their constituent fragrances.

Diorling, Diorella, Diorama, and Dioressence bear little resemblance to the scents they once were. Demachy has argued that the auteur theories about perfumers are overstatements, if not misleading simplifications. A fragrance like Ungaro Diva, commonly regarded as an early composition by Jacques Polge, was in fact, Demachy has asserted, more collaborative, representing the work of several well known perfumers, among them Demachy himself. I don't doubt it; nor do I believe that our romance about perfumers and the sanctity of their work properly accounts for the bigger picture reality of business as usual at a large aroma-chemical corporate entity like Givaudin or Symrise.

Demachy has something more at stake in this line of argument promoting the devaluation of single authorship in mass market perfumery.  Dior's parent company, LVMH (of which Demachy is "super creative director"), has moved to take over Dior's fragrances, previously owned as we knew them by chemical corporations (such as Givaudin and Symrise, et al) which copyrighted the original in-house formulas. By creating these variations, Dior and LVMH seek to restore their ownership and control; slightly different names, slightly different formulas, made with materials other than those owned by the companies who patented them. The fact the resulting fragrances bear little resemblance to their namesakes is I guess apparently neither here nor there, unless you are a consumer who fell in love with the originals. Still, you have to ask yourself what Dior doesn't seem to be asking itself - is it worth holding onto these names if they gradually move so far astray of recognizability that what's in a name means next to nothing? Demachy says yes indeedy, by contesting, however justifiably, issues of authorship.

Miss Dior Cherie and Miss Dior are the first real indication of what all this means for those of us with our fingers on the atomizer. Created by perfumer Christine Nagel for Givaudin, the original Miss Dior Cherie was maybe one of the best iterations of what we now know as the category fruity patchouli. It had an interesting tension to it, part strawberry, part caramel, part buttered popcorn. It bore some relation to Angel, but was brighter somehow, its contrasts, though bold, not quite as confrontational. Some loved it, some hated it. In the last several years, Dior and LVMH seem to have used Miss Dior Cherie as a litmus for how far they can take Dior's fragrances away from their vocabulary, and as a barometer for the usefulness of that vocabulary in the first place.

Miss Dior Cherie is now, for all intents and purposes, Miss Dior, and Miss Dior is something no one talks about. We all know it existed. We all know this Miss Dior is not that one. That Miss Dior, I imagine Demachy would be the first to point out, was already very little who she'd once been. She'd been, as we say, gutted. Though still recognizable, facelifts had rendered her indefinably altered. We lamented the changes, however hard they were to pinpoint. Demachy seems to be saying that nothing remains the same, so laboring over a name is a pointless endeavor. But trying to pinpoint the changes, I'd argue, with an existing reference point - i.e a name - was useful in some way. What happens when the reference point is evacuated entirely? The reference points are arguably essential, if only to attempt to qualify how over time things inevitably change, and what change means as an ongoing reality.

The conversation generated by those kinds of ongoing comparisons (between original and reformulation, for instance) is killed as far as Miss Dior is concerned. Before long, it will be as if the conversation never happened. The conversation will live on in our minds, vague over time, the way the original Miss Dior, or its facsimiles, will. Imagine the dialogue at your local department store now, where the Dior sales associate will look at you foggy eyed when you assert that there was once a Miss Dior of a different stripe, that Miss Dior is not in fact simply Miss Dior Cherie renamed and rebottled. Try to imagine a conversation of this kind, dealing in nuance and subtle distinction, with associates who still actively contend there is no difference between an eau de parfum and an eau de toilette. These are, typically, people who, as it stands, treat anything they don't stock as fictitious. I have to question Dior's game plan, after my experience buying Miss Dior le Parfum. The Dior associate who helped me spent twenty minutes trying to track down just what I was looking for, with all the boxes (Miss Dior eau de Parfum, Miss Dior Cherie EDT, Miss Dior Cherie EDP, Miss Dior Eau Fraiche, etc.) lined up right under her nose. Try cultivating brand loyalty when determining what exactly the brand is involves an afternoon-long excavation.

Miss Dior le Parfum smells lovely. There are remnants or echoes of original Miss Dior Cherie in it, though nothing I can discern remotely connected to the original Miss Dior. Like much of what Demachy has done, there is an abiding amber creaminess to Miss Dior le Parfum. It's rich, if not particularly expansive. There's something like strawberry in it, marinated in an abundance of vanilla, amber, and refined patchouli. One wonders, smelling it on cloth or paper, whether anyone involved in its creation ever actually smelled it on skin, because on skin that richness becomes a bit self-absorbed - rarefied and stingy like the girl at the party who knows everyone will eventually come to her. Like J'Adore L'Or and Hypnotic Poison Eau Sensuelle, both also by Demachy, Miss Dior le Parfum approaches embarrassment of riches, in the sense that it is almost too refined to bother with pleasing anyone but itself, let alone you. It makes the most sense on a paper strip, where it plays out slowly.

It's one of the more exciting things at the department store counter right now, and that makes it seem very exciting indeed. How exciting is that, when the barometer is lower than the final stages of a drunken game of limbo, where the bar is down where only the truly inebriated would dare to crouch? I love it, with some kind of qualification I can't put my finger on, but who can spot much with a moving target? What exactly am I comparing it to, and why bother? It's a great fragrance: something old, something new, a department store fragrance done well. It invites a series of fantasies. It lasts reasonably well. And it has no relationship to anything I can attach emotional significance to.

It has nothing at all to do with its namesake, and hardly needs to, so I suppose the problem for me lies with Demachy, Dior, and LMVH. While I sympathize with their position, I find their tactics dishonest and offensive. It's a small thing, ultimately. They're telling me that the name means nothing. And yet they're fighting hard to keep it, which indicates otherwise. We all know, as consumers, that these names do in fact mean many things, many infinitely personal things. These creations live with us and become parts of our narratives. I trust Demachy, at least, knows this. It's one thing to be told that things change and that, for instance, the fragrance your mother or your grandmother wore as an integral part of her identity and your understanding of her will go the way of all relics. It's quite another to assert that you might as well play fast and loose with these cultural signifiers, insisting on the one hand that they mean very little, even as you work hard to capitalize on their mystique.

Histoires de Parfums' 1740 Marquis de Sade: Dulling the Whip

As excited as I was to smell one of the latest Histoires fragrances, Editions Rare Petroleum, recent sniffs from the rest of the line's testers were a serious disappointment. I like most of the fragrances, but I liked none more than 1740. Discovering that many of them seemed to have been ever so slightly tweaked was shock enough, given such a relatively young brand. Changes in 1740 have left it, for me, a ghost of its former self, and I feel that absence the most acutely and personally.

As with most subtle tweaking, the smallest alteration can wrought a most profound transformation, and while 1740 is there in basic structure it feels gutted somehow. I doubt anyone associated with the line will confirm this, no more than anyone at Lauder would fess up to the renovation of Private Collection, but I detected the difference instantly and was heartsick about it.

I have an older bottle, and sprayed some on this morning. I went out for a walk through the state forest, up hills, down around creeks, past a massive hornet's nest dangling by a thin vine from a tree branch. I perspired from the heat and exertion but the scent stayed with me, and even now I can smell it wafting up from my skin, creating some future narrative of memory around the experience of the woods. I don't know of any other scent that endures with the potency of 1740.

For me, aside from Tauer's Lonestar Memories and Vero Kern's Onda, no other fragrance I own has built up a wider series of stories over time, intertwining with my own day to day life. As with Lonestar Memories, which conjures back trips to LA and Massachusetts and the momentous things I went through while at those places, 1740 reads like a roadmap of my recent past, detailing all the emotional peaks and valleys. The latest version of the fragrance barely made it out of the store and down the street on my skin with anything resembling its previous tenacity. It's hard to imagine it surviving past the first serious incline in the forest.

The notes list davana sensualis, patchouli, coriander, cardamom, cedar, elemi, labdanum, and leather. What I've always smelled is something sitting between the honeyed savory of immortelle, tobacco, and tawny port, a fantastically sensual arrangement of notes which on their own would be too much to stomach but in this particular combination take me right to the point of excess and hover there. This latest version airs everything out to something approaching sheer. The basic qualities are still present but they feel shrill and excessive without the heart of the fragrance there to cohere them. Once rather rich, the perfume now feels merely loud, and only for a short time.

1740 is - was - one of my favorite fragrances. It's a day long event and I've reserved it for times I know I'll be able to stick with it and remain in a reflective frame of mind. I'll be hoarding it even more selectively now, and it frustrates me that I'll never be sure which version people are talking about.

2012: Ringing It In

It's been a strange, eventful year.  I haven't always had time to write.  I haven't usually, I should say.  And in many ways my feelings about blogging have shifted; whether or not permanently, I don't know.  I started out with a real joy for blogging here, and a genuine enthusiasm for the things I was learning, not just on the shelf but from other bloggers.  The last two years, especially, brought quite a shift.  What seemed like a big happy family showed signs of strain and competitiveness I'd never noticed before, and after ranting about it for a while (some called it ranting, I called it satire, meaning I felt it was worth writing about, and poking fun seemed hopeful, indicating things could change) I went quiet.

I also got very busy.  Andy Tauer and I started working on the Tableau de Parfums line more than a year ago, but all of our behind the scenes efforts were made public in 2011, and that involved more work.  I enjoyed that work, and continue to, but it's given me less time to write and a very different perspective.  I was less interested in what was going on outside my workspace, because my desk was so full, and felt too that I Smell shouldn't simply be used as a broken record voice box for my pursuits and adventures or even setbacks with Tableau.

At the same time, several months ago, I started to worry that my enthusiasm for perfume in general was gone for good.  I'm happy to say that it's not.  At least I think not.  Yesterday, driving back from rural Mississippi, I spotted an independent, mom/pop drugstore I'd never seen before.  I got excited, knowing they'd probably have perfume, and that among their inventory might possibly be older bottles.  You won't necessarily be thrilled by what I walked out with - old version Cinnabar and Anais Anais, and a bottle of Bill Blass Hot - but here's the thing: I realized that we don't need to be excited by the same things.  Being excited at all, still having that capacity, is good enough for me.

It's an important distinction for me, because as I say, for whatever reason, I haven't been excited about mainstream or even niche perfumery in quite a while.  And I've been bummed out about that.  Walking into that drugstore and discovering those surprises reminds me that the fragrance industry, and even the fragrance community, however that's defined, aren't the reasons I'm into perfume, nor are they my sole outlets in pursuing this interest.

Most of my year was spent with my old favorites.  I found myself seeing them in new ways, enjoying them into different seasons, noticing how they changed in different climates or with a shift of personal perspective.  It's nothing thrilling, probably, to write yet again about Chanel Coco, when I've written about it before, particularly when the Chanel talking points are Beige and Jersey (if ever two words summed up the state of the industry...).  Yet I kept seeing Coco and so many other old favorites in new light.  They kept feeling new to me.

This year more than any other so far made me feel it was pointless to talk about even these old favorites, even were I to find something new about them, because reformulations are so frequently conducted at this point that to talk about one version only is some sort of mistruth.

The barometer is gone, or at least I have trouble figuring out how to find one in my conversation.  This was illuminated pretty baldly for me during a trip to Chicago several months ago.  Oh how they were stirring and shaking and spinning in the Lush department at Macy's.  Such a commotion.  You'd think perfume had been created a year ago.  It was scary but touching, somehow.  Yet beyond Lush, a ghost town.  I wandered the counters of Macy's without ever seeing a sales associate.  And why should they be there?  Smelling the perfumes only confirmed for me that there was nothing really to talk about anyway; certainly nothing to explain.

The Estee Lauder counter was represented, but all the juices in the tester bottles looked different.  Even Private Collection, usually rich gold in color, was pale, like somebody had refilled it with water.  The perfumes I love and recognize instantly smelled only generally like themselves.  Though I knew that Estee Lauder, like everyone else, practices reformulation as a matter of routine, I'd foolishly held them up as some basically unchanging entity in a sea of otherwise constantly shifting marketplace priorities.  The versions I smelled of Cinnabar, Beautiful, Azuree, and Youth Dew there at Macy's made it clear that Lauder has as much contempt for me as any other manufacturer.  Which is why this old bottle of Cinnabar in a forgotten drugstore was such a visceral thrill.

Another key factor in my relationship to perfume in 2011 had to do with watching perfumers work.  seeing Andy Tauer in action, how much care and concern and imagination he puts into what he does, set a high bar for me.  I felt the same about Olfacta, who sent me a wonderful fougere she'd been working on for a while.  These insights and experiences were so personal and meaningful that they inevitably spoiled me when it came to perfume packaged impersonally and without much imagination beyond their heartfelt labs.

What I wish for everyone in 2012 is probably perspective.  My trip yesterday to the drugstore reminded me how important it is, and how hard to come by.  People are still out there doing wonderful things, truly unique, meaningful things.  The ubiquitous reach of mass media and online outlets lead us to believe that we know every corner, deadening our perspectives.  I'm telling you: I believe these little proverbial drugstores of surprise are out there in the world, waiting for us to discover them when we least expect it.

Three Faces of Habanita

On Valentine's, Josephine over at Notes from Josephine posted an ode to Habanita.  It went:

Wood Stain

Just Lit Cigarette

ATV Exhaust

Root Beer with Dry Ice

Board Meeting

Fresh Laundry

Divinity

It's getting complicated with these older perfumes.  There are now several versions out there.  Sometimes several means many.  I own three versions of Habanita--and each smells quite different.  They're clearly the same fragrance.  I wouldn't say by any stretch that Habanita has been vandalized beyond recognition.  But the earliest version I own is a slightly different conversation than the latest.  So when I read Josephine's ode, I wondered which she was talking about.

One of the easiest ways to make distinctions between versions is to describe the packaging.  In the event the packaging hasn't changed (I don't believe Habanita's has--much, if at all), the list of ingredients is instructive.  My earliest bottle of Habanita lists only aqua, parfum, and alcohol.  Let's call that Version 1.  Version 2 has a longer list, and that list includes oakmoss.  I take this to be a more recent version, but not maybe as recent as the parfum formulation Molinard released a few years ago.  That's Version 3.

This Week at the Perfume Counter

Here's a tip. While I totally understand wanting to avoid the mall altogether, I encourage you to check out the free floating kiosks some of them host. In the past, I've found very good things at a number of these places. They don't have Lutens, L'Artisan or anything remotely niche, let alone indie. But they often have things you can only get online otherwise, and frequently they have the older formulas in stock. It's true, you can get Tresor at the Lancome counter. And the sales associate there will tell you the formula hasn't been changed. You might even like the newer formula; sometimes, I prefer them. Regardless, the kiosks can increase your options.

Here in town, there are two, at two separate malls. I haven't been so lucky at the one. I did find Lalique eau de parfum and Lalique Encre Noire, which are otherwise hard to come by in these parts. I've come across a few other things, as well. The other kiosk has been a lot more fruitful. There I've seen everything from Paloma Picasso Tentations to the original Lagerfeld, and many things in between. Fendi, Tocade, Givenchy III, Creed Bois du Portugal, and many new releases which don't make it to the local department store shelf.

This week I took a trip for Thanksgiving, two hours outside of town. Another kiosk. Pre-reformulation Organza Indecence, the original Perry Ellis for women, Tendre Poison, Tiffany for Men, and more. The problem I ran into with the proprietor there is one I've experienced with all of them. A few problems, actually. I'll call them challenges.

Typically, the owner only puts out front what most people will recognize, and he or she tends to be very aggressive. One has to be, with the kind of thru-traffic they get. If you don't grab them quick and forcibly, you've lost the sale, maybe. These kiosks are small, with limited shelf space, so everything is stacked precariously. The owner knows what he or she has but not necessarily much about perfume, nor does he or she want to do a lot of digging around for nothing. That would mean a lot of rearranging. And for what?

Their attitude--rushing you, bombarding you with questions (what are you looking for, what do you like, who is this for)--can make browsing a challenge, especially if you're trying to get close enough to view through the glass to see the stacks beyond their featured items. I've learned to make my questions as specific as possible. I ask for specific perfumes, though this is kind of a catch 22. Most of the goodies will come as surprises. What they have isn't necessarily anything you can think off the top of your head to look for. They've stocked it because they know sooner or later an elderly lady will wander by asking for it. It isn't something which will fly off the shelves, so they don't display it. The rarer it is, the more deeply buried in their inventory. How are they to know you're the elderly lady in question?

Communicating with the kiosk owner can be a pain, too, because they're in the business of hard sell. They could easily walk down to the department store, mere yards away, to see that it still stocks Organza Indecence, albeit a new formula, but they don't really need to be informed. They'll simply tell you it's very rare. Likewise, when you make the general comment that you like older, discontinued fragrances, they will start presenting you with items you can find upstairs at Perfumania, or things you know very well can be had from an e-tailer at a fraction of the price they're charging. All of this aside, once you get to know them, if you have that kind of time to invest, they start to understand what you're looking for, and even loo out for it themselves.

Another tip. Look at the local drugstore. I've found the following on these shelves: Fendi EDP and EDT, Samsara EDP, Poison, Fahrenheit. All pre-reformulation. The other day, I found an older bottle of Amarige and a one ounce bottle of Poison Eau de Cologne, at drugstore prices. I've also seen early Oscar bottles, Dune, Poeme, and many others. Don't assume that a newer drugstore won't have older bottles. I suspect that the newer stores are stocked with some other closing location's inventory at times. Additionally, that new Rite Aid you pass might be a renovated local pharmacy. You never know.

This Week at the Perfume Counter: Boston

I should say Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which is where I spent most of my time on this trip; but Portsmouth had no perfume to speak of, and though I only made it into Boston for a two hour perusal, most of what I saw during my stay was there. Neither my host nor her boyfriend are very much into perfume, so that limited my time considerably. She likes it but would rather have something picked out for her; he can't imagine anyone needing more than half an hour to shop for something so...hygienic. I knew I wasn't going to have long.

I'd intended to head over to Neil Morris, and I'm sad I didn't get to, but Barney's and Saks were close together and covered more ground in a shorter window of time. The selection at Saks was unexpectedly extensive. They had all the Guerlains, it seemed--every last one of them. The bee bottles, the elixirs; Vega and Derby and Liu, even. I'd smelled Vega before, from a decant, and liked it, but smelling it there, in the presence of its fantastic bottle, I appreciated it more. I wasn't crazy, still, about the elixirs. Again, I'd smelled them by decant, but even their bottles failed to sway me. All the sales assistant wanted to talk about was Idylle--and yet she had no idea, when pressed, what the prices, or even the available sizes and concentrations were. I feel almost certain that, had I asked the difference between the EDP and the EDT, I would have been told something along the lines of "none whatsoever", never mind the fact they're marketed as entirely different interpretations. One SA went off to find me a bottle of Vega, after forcing me to repeat the name several times. She'd never heard of it and seemed to believe I was making it up.

I don't know why I didn't grab a bottle of Acqua di Parma's Colonia Intensa. I've been enjoying a tiny decant for months now, and keep telling myself I'll purchase a full bottle the next time I see one, but I'm always looking for things I haven't already seen or been given the chance to smell, and when I arrive at a place like Saks there's a lot of competition for my attention. Or so it seems. It's only later, returning to the relative quiet of my decant, that I realize I like the reliable pleasures of Colonia Intensa more than any of the shiny new bells and whistles the department store has to offer. Colonia Intensa has good sillage and longevity. It smells richer and warmer than anything I ran into at Saks. Note to self: when you see it again, focus.

The new Halston Woman, also at Saks, is a strange thing. I'll give it another chance at some point, but I'm in no hurry. It's a bit of a hot mess, really. I don't know where to start. It rubs me the wrong way and keeps rubbing. I felt downright chafed as the day went on. Musky? Rubbery? Floral, fruity, woody? Halston Man is much better, but it smells so much like z-14 that I see no real reason to bother. Z-14 is as good as it ever was and ubiquitous at the discount outlets. Ten bucks, last time I checked.

I'm thoroughly confused by these releases. Assuming the audience for anything Halston is anything beyond select at this point, why not restore the original fragrance to the shelves? No fancy silver bottle is going to give Halston This or That the kind of boost it would need to waste the time and money coming up with something supposedly new. The original Halston remains one of my favorite Bernard Chant creations. It remains one of my favorite perfumes, period. It's so fantastic that on four separate trips over the course of the last two or three years I've purchased a bottle on vacation, even though I know reformulations have made trying to find a good one something of a grab bag. I bought a half ounce at a CVS pharmacy in Portsmouth and was shocked at how bad it's gotten. Luckily, you can still find older bottles here and there (try older Walgreen's and Rite-Aids) and the manufacturer has made it very easy to tell the difference between newer and newest; the latest, most wretched version of Halston has decided to go against the designer's wishes, printing his name across the bottom of the bottle. Older bottles are without this "signature".

One trend I noticed at Saks, seeing everything laid out for the first time in ages, all the new releases in pretty little rows, is the rage for trios and "exclusive" lines. I wasn't totally unaware of these developments and have even partaken of some, but being faced with them in person was a little depressing, mostly because so many of them suck. The Eau de Fleurs series from Chloe is so half-assed I'm not bothering to report on it.

Everywhere you looked, there was something pretty unremarkable being touted as the best thing since a bottomless cup of coffee. In case you doubted the wondrousness, two more were thrown in--or the price was jacked up so high that you couldn't possibly perceive it as anything short of luxurious. I suppose I felt this way about the Elixirs at Guerlain, though some were nice, and some even great. Part of what gets lost in this strategy, for me, is the charm of something like Vega, a re-release which feels special and unique, clad in its own distinctive fashion, rather than some sleek, almost militaristic line-up like Elixirs, which inadvertently (again, for me) makes fragrance feel like yet another part of a regular drill, something to dab on after making one's bed so fastidiously that a quarter could be bounced on it.

I suspect this is Guerlain's and Chloe's way of absorbing the lessons of niche lines like Lutens, whose uniform bottles and overall corporate sensibility have made a dent in the way fragrance companies approach marketing and manufacturing the fantasy of desire and luxury. I don't love the Lutens silhouette but I do think they got it right. The delicacy of the bottles, the precarious way they sit, like fragile dominoes, the care you must take with them, knowing they might fall over and shatter: all of these things create an interesting contrast to the utilitarian aspects of the packaging, giving those sharp corners and flat lines conceptual curves. I see none of that intelligence at play in the trickle down product at Saks.

Not that Lutens is getting everything right. Smelling the line at Barney's, I noticed nothing different. It was only later, when I took a generous selection of samples home, that I smelled a rat. Many people have commented in the recent past on Fleurs d'Oranger: something's different, not quite the same, not as good, abysmal by comparison. I only smelled it within the last year, so I have no idea what it once was, or whether it has in fact been altered, but I do know what Arabie used to smell like, and the sample I was given is, frankly, what new dimestore Halston is to old designer label Halston. It feels hollowed out. That's about the best way I can describe it. The Arabie I knew was rich, deep, and emanated from the skin in waves of spicy warmth. That warmth is altogether gone. I can still smell the basic outline of Arabie, and what's left is a very attractive fragrance, but it would be generous to call it a ghost of its former self. Ghosts have more presence.

I couldn't help thinking back to a recent feature on Lutens' Moroccan home in W magazine, photos of which give new meaning to the words opulence, embellishment, lavish, and affectation. The home is lovely, if you can call something which seems to span five city blocks a home. The article revealed that, aside from chief houseman Rachid, Casa de Lutens once employed 500 people (I'm guessing most were male). The place is a cornucopia of detail and filagree. Plush textiles, textures, and tapestries seem to adorn every available surface which can't be determined to have a pulse.

The decoration, like the creation of a perfume, took years. The density on display is something I inevitably contrasted to the practically anorexic specter of Arabie 2010, begging some interesting questions. The article would like me to believe that, at heart, Lutens is a simple man. Now that the renovations on Casa Lutens are reaching their conclusion (in an age of ever present coverage, what better end point than a definitive photo spread?) Lutens might just abandon it altogether, opting instead for a "small, spartan maid's room somewhere."

One has to wonder where the maid will be shipped off to, or what makes Lutens so sure that a maid's room can generally be classified, outside of those in his own home, as spartan, as if poor people have fewer belongings because they've reached some purer state of being where, even could they afford them, belongings would feel like a spiritual nuisance. Friend Anjelica Huston says she wouldn't be surprised to see Lutens move into a yurt. Judging by these photos, I wouldn't be surprised, either, as long as we're talking about one of those yurts with air conditioning and an indoor pool. You know the kind. I hope you'll oblige me a sense of humor about Lutens' meticulous extravagance. One would hope to find as eccentric a figure as Serge behind such a visionary line of fragrances. I only wish he hadn't moved Arabie into the spartan maid's room, and I wonder what else he's going to cram in there before he's done rearranging. Not all of his customers look to perfume as an expression of asceticism.

What distresses me most about the Arabie discovery is the seed of doubt it places in my mind about consistency in Lutens fragrances. How do I know that the bottle of Cedre or Rousse I buy will be the one I smelled a the counter? Testers are invariably older. At least the newer species, like the fantastic Fille en Aiguilles, can be counted on to smell the same, if only because no one's had time to tinker with them yet. I find this same frustration store-wide when I shop for perfume these days. The bottle for Shalimar has been redesigned by Jade Jagger, as has the perfume itself, though no SA that I've come across will admit to this. Because they see no difference, and the older bottles are still in stock, who knows what I might be handed, or how surprised I might be upon smelling it at home.

My host was rushing me, which made it very difficult to reach a conclusion about what I wanted to purchase, if anything. Too late to go back to Saks for a bottle of Colonia Intensa. I decided to play it safe. I picked up a small bottle of another Bernard Chant fragrance, Antonia's Flowers. I think it must be pretty old, as the ingredients list only aqua, parfum, and alcohol. I also got Malle's Lys Mediterranee. When I do get anything Malle, I tend to go for the travel size. Three little 10 ml atomizers are more than enough for me, and make Malle a much more affordable purchase. I've had my eye on Lys for over a year but always talk myself out of it at the counter. Too much like Donna Karan Gold, I tell myself. Getting Lys home, I realized there are more differences between the two than I'd realized. Of course, what do I know? When I first bought Gold I swore it was a dead ringer for Black Orchid. Have no doubt, though: Arabie is not itself lately.

Paco Rabanne Metal

I happened upon Paco Rabanne Metal about 7-8 years ago in a discount bin at either Marshalls or TJ Maxx for around $25 bucks. I was clueless to what it smelled like. I think, at the time, I was confusing it with its far more well-known friend, Paco Rabanne Calandre. In my mind Calandre was something to have, and finding it for cheap was a completely sane, justified, unsniffed purchase.

I brought my bottle of Metal home to open, sniff and to eventually cherish. For at least a year I still thought I was wearing the more famous Calandre (I had the names confused) and at this time we didn’t have all the online resources for looking up fragrance names and notes like we did post-2005). I was wearing and loving Metal back in the dark ages, before I even knew who created it or could have read reviews written about it (though there are hardly any at all to this day). Eventually, after finishing one bottle of Metal and then purchasing a second, I was able to look it up online to discover I was in love with a nice Paco Rabanne fragrance, for sure, but it was not the more famous one called Calandre. Of course I then did a whole exercise in discovering all the Paco Rabanne fragrances, several of which are phenomenally good for such unknown fragrances. And, I’m pretty sure I read that Calandre was discontinued last year, much to the sadness of many who love that fragrance. Nevertheless, as good as Calandre is/was, my heart will always belong to Metal.

Metal was created in 1979 by Robert Gannon. I was 8 years old in ’79 so have no memories of it back then nor do I recall ever smelling it on anyone else in the 80’s. I was raised in a non-perfume-wearing family so it wasn’t until high school when all my girlfriends were wearing Poison, Loulou, Beautiful and White Linen that I started sniffing fragrance on others (oh, and the boys were wearing Polo and only Polo). I don’t recall smelling anyone wearing Metal in my life until that day in the early 2000’s when I picked up a bottle unsniffed. Smelling it now I’m astonished that it was created in ’79 because it seems so modern. Maybe the Metal I’ve come to know is a reformulation and this isn’t how it originally smelled, back in the disco and punk era when it launched. Even so, even if I am smelling a complete reformulation, I love it just the way it is.

For comparison’s sake, the most obviously similar fragrance, which almost everyone has sniffed is Chanel No. 19. Metal pays some tribute to Chanel No. 19, however, I don’t find it to be a derivative copycat at all. While Metal & No. 19 are both green chypres, Metal is brighter, more cheerful and effervescent, while No. 19 is a more subtle, serious, and steely confident iris.

The nose behind Metal, Robert Gonnon, also created Cacharel Anais Anais, O de Lancome and Sikkiim for Lancome. I can smell some similarity between Metal and O de Lancome with Gannon’s fresh and liberal use of galbanum in both fragrances. And both O de Lancome and Metal have a similar woody, green, unmistakably chypre feeling dry down. Metal starts off so bright it’s almost as if I’m spraying myself with a grin. It begins with bergamot and galbanum in spades and this is the really green almost bitter sort of galbanum that I love. I found a list of notes at Fragrantica, and these somewhat give you an idea of the scent (though I admit to smelling nothing along the lines of peach, maybe a dash of lily of the valley instead):

Top: galbanum, bergamot
Heart: ylang-ylang, peach
Base: white iris and rosewood

It's namesake may be Metal but there is nothing metallic about this fragrance. It’s a dry, green, woody chypre. In fact, I find Calandre to smell more metallic than Metal. The bottle is very near identical (if not actually identical) to the Calandre bottle. I love these simple, streamlined, modern architectural type bottles. They seem beautiful and masculine to me.

When everyone else is hopping up and down about the latest Lutens, L’Artisan or Duchaufour, I have more fun and find more enjoyment when writing about scents that are unequivocally great, but never mentioned, and also inexpensive. Just like films and restaurants and many other facets of my life, I tend to love the sleeper gems the most, I’d say.

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".

Sleight of Hand: Opium, Version Now

Whenever an actress of a certain age who has disappeared for a few months returns on the scene with a perky new set of bangs, I always start looking for the tell tale signs of a nip and tuck. When something seems different, it typically is. This happens to me on the rare occasion I shave. Did I do something different to my hair? New glasses? New diet, maybe? I get this kind of reaction so reliably that it occurred to me, the last time I shaved, that such an occasion would be a very good time to plan some small subterfuge. That's taking it for granted I could afford plastic surgery.

News of the newly designed Opium bottle filled me with a sinking feeling. What could YSL be trying to hide? Surely this wouldn't be the first time someone has tinkered around with the formula. Whether or not I like the new bottle (I do, on it's own terms, and I don't, compared to the iconic look of the original) is beside the point. The perfume itself is far more important to me. I've been suffering from a feeling of helplessness lately. It would be one thing if I adored a lot of the newer fragrances I smell. I don't; or not so much. So there's that: I'm not a fan of the direction fragrance is taking. I'm not a die hard for vintage either, especially. I'm happy with the way fragrances smelled in the eighties and early to mid nineties. But everything is starting to smell very similar to me in a certain sense, and not in a way which feels motivated by passing fashion, like the big boned stuff of the eighties, say, or the Angel clone mine field of the nineties.

I can't describe this sameness, exactly. It's something I sense the moment I smell something which has just been released or reformulated. The new Rochas has this quality of deja vu. The new Mitsouko. I mention these because I feel they've been reformulated with care and consideration for the most part, as has Opium. The point is, even reformulations I like and recognize as having a clear relationship to their prior incarnations are starting to bum me out, because they smell like somebody's desperate vision of Now.

Opium smells great, as it turns out. But along with the hard orange plastic which used to encase it, something more substantial has been removed. YSL will tell you it's the same fragrance, of course, and most people who love Opium will not feel it has changed, the way, say, longtime lovers of Estee Lauder's Beautiful sense a change in their beloved fragrance of choice. Beautiful smells like Beautiful, but not like it always did. Opium still has the carnation, which is reason enough for relief. I imagined that would have to be the first to go in a bid for "modernization." It still has that wonderful woody rasp to it. The difference is subtle but, for me, constitutes a significant loss. It's the difference between ringing a glass bell with a silver fork and a piece of balsa wood.

That isn't to say the new Opium is hollow. It isn't. It has good persistence, and some amount of presence. It is still an oriental--and probably heavier than anything near it on the shelf. But some of the drama is gone. It has less resonance. The department store had a bottle of the old version sitting out and I compared before and after. More than anything I notice a boozy ambiance is missing. A real sense of depth, like the vapors that rise off a glass of brandy when it stirs. I think what depresses me most is knowing that Opium is one of those fragrances many people feel was "too much" to begin with, leaving it vulnerable to this kind of update.

Given that, it could have been worse. I fully acknowledge that. But I believed there was a place for "too much" in a marketplace which offers so little. I never look at an actress or actor for that matter who is aging naturally and gracefully and think, Why am I forced to look at that dinosaur? Frankly, if I want to watch a movie full of twenty year olds there are plenty of them. Opium was like Charlotte Rampling, to me--one of those women fearless enough to aim for timelessness rather than ceaseless modernization. It makes me happy to see Rampling's face here and there. It gives a sense of context to things. It's a counterpoint. Smelling the new Opium, I feel as though her agent finally convinced her to have a little work done.

Thoughts on formulations and reformulations

The other day I was in a perfume shop and smelled Fahrenheit. I was shocked when I brought the card up to my nose because it smelled so different than the bottle I own. It was richer, for one, and I started to wonder if maybe the tester was an older version. I could smell leather, and I never get leather from my wimpy excuse for the fragrance, which practically dribbles out of the nozzle. What if I went into this store and bought a bottle and got it home and it smelled nothing like the tester did, because the two were different formulations? How can you be sure which version you have at any given point?

It made me wonder. I have three different versions of Arpege, and though you can see the bone structure in all of them, they get more interesting the older they are. The newer version is nice enough but has none of the floral complexity, none of the smooth diffusion I get from the others. It also has a strong whiff of what smells to me like synthetic vetiver, and I'm starting to wonder about that, too, because I smell the same note presiding over the latest reformulations of Mitsouko, Je Reviens, Chanel No. 5 and White Linen. What is this note, exactly, and what's it doing in so many contemporary reinterpretations?

The Fahrenheit I own smells good enough, if just--and you can sense that original silhouette in it, if watered down to transparency--whereas the one I smelled in Sephora last week is atrociously far removed. I can barely see the relation. They seem to have simply gutted it. White Linen, Worth, and the others have fared better in the face of restrictions and penny pinchers; then again, I don't have the originals at hand to run comparisons. The old Arpege is preferable enough that I worry my 3.4 ounce bottle will run out sometime in my lifetime.

Today I read the Chandler Burr review of Britney Spears Midnight Curious. I was curious myself, and drove over to the store to smell it. Had I missed something good all this time? Not really. The discrepancy between what I smelled and how he talked about it left me confused. It smelled fairly generic to me for what it was: an intensely sweet bluebbery accord, part rubber Barbie skin, part scratch and sniff pie. I thought, well if he's going to champion this dreck I'm going to stop telling myself not to buy that bottle of Giorgio Red simply because it's gauche.

For twenty dollars I got an ounce and a half. I sprayed some on my arm once I was in the car and instantly started wondering what it used to smell like. I appreciate it now, but I suspect natural musks made it much different, like the old Arpege and Fahrenheit. Something about the current Red has always smelled slightly askew to me. I feel that way about Bal a Versailles, too.

Peach, black currant, hyacinth, and cardamom supposedly compose the nigh notes. Red reminds me of a drugstore perfume dressing up as Opium for Halloween with articles found in its mother's closet. I don't know who the mother is. Remember Bugsy Malone, the gangster movie where all the characters were played by child actors? It's like that. Instead of gunfire, pies in the face. Things are tangier than they should be in Red, exaggerated, a little cruder, but I can't help it. I love the stuff. It feels sort of schizophrenic in an entertaining way.

After some talk on this blog about Karl Lagerfeld's old KL perfume, I found some at the mall. It drove me crazy for a few days, as I knew I'd seen the bottle somewhere in town but couldn't remember where. The store had only a half ounce splash bottle left. It was nice, but too similar to other orientals I own to spend what they were charging. I'm not much of a dabber, either. KL smelled deep, but not as deep as Opium and Cinnabar, which still get my vote for the hardest of the hard core. And I'm more partial to Obsession than it seems legal to be on the blogs. How could such a great perfume have been, as some critics allege, a mass delusion?

Rather than buy the KL, I picked up two older Nina Ricci fragrances, Deci Della and Les Belles de Ricci Delice d'Epices. Deci Della was created by Jean Guichard in 1994. Some say fruity floral; again, I don't get that so much. The oak moss, cypress and myrrh force the raspberry, peach and apricot down roads they're not accustomed to traveling, if perhaps at gunpoint. There's that strange tension there between opposites. The oakmoss gives the fragrance an aroma very few contemporaries have, obviously.

Delice might also have been created by Guichard. I know he created one of the Belles at least. I'm not sure which. When I first smelled it I thought it had to be Annick Menardo or Sophia Grojsman. It has the edible qualities of the former and the sensual overload of the latter. I thought for sure, until I got it home, that Delice smelled identical to Tentations, another Grojsman creation. It has a caramellic undertone, for sure, but isn't entirely foody to me. It isn't exactly spicy, either.

Comparing Deci and Delice to Midnight Fantasy might seem unfair, but I do think it points up what perfume has lost since all the restrictions on, among other things, musks, oakmoss, and civet. And I don't think a fragrance like Midnight Fantasy is any kind of answer, as pleasantly banal and insidiously catchy as it might be. Aurelien Guichard is probably one of the best barometers right now for how these older visions can be recreated in the present without entirely losing their original spirits. His Visa and Baghari for Piguet find ways around the black hole left where oakmoss and natural musks once were, and I can't wait to see what he's done with Futur. As for Midnight Fantasy, I'll pass.

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.

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.

Mitsouko

Saying you love Mitsouko is like saying you shop for groceries, the kind of statement unlikely to come as a newsflash to anyone--yet the fragrance does have its detractors. I don't know these people, naturally. I make a conscious effort not to know them. I very nearly developed amnesia about my relationship with one friend when recently she said Mitsouko smelled like that stuff that repels mosquitoes. Surely you don't mean citronella, I warned. After carefully judging my facial expression, she answered, certainly not.

Until I smelled the pure parfum at Nordstrom this month, I was fairly ambivalent about Mitsouko myself. I'd owned the EDT for a while, and pushed it to the "for special occasions" section of my collection, otherwise known as scents I dislike, am disappointed with, or don't understand. A spritz on the wrist lasted all of five minutes, it seemed to me, which was reason enough to move on.

I have no idea where this EDT falls on the reformulation continuum. It smells different enough from the EDP I purchased at Nordstrom that I wonder. The EDP has different packaging. The EDT has the geometrically striped, foil-bright gold box most of my Guerlain purchases from the local department store bear. The EDP box is more discreet, matte gold with a simple logo. Who knows what any of this means or where lines can be drawn or comparisons made. As I've mentioned before, don't expect clarification from the department store, or, God forbid, the Sephora counter, whose employees seem equally confused by the words Guerlain and Homme, the latter being a word they seem to take as some sort of environmental product for spraying on sheets or carefully abstracting unwelcome water closet aromas.

The Mitsouko EDP starts out bright and a little warm. It seems to give off heat, like simmering peaches. There are many other things in there, some of which you'll find listed on basenotes, though that listing is pretty sparse, as if this were a construction of admirable restraint. Perhaps that's true, and there's barely anything in Mitsouko. Maybe it's one of those experiments in minimalism so fashionable with people who like to believe things should be kept simple. I find that hard to believe, given how complex some of the Guerlain oldies are said to be. Their base materials alone would make quite complex perfumes. Whatever the listed pyramid of Mitsouko is, wherever you happen to be looking, I smell a strong gust of vetiver similar to that present in many contemporary perfumes. It presides over the entire composition, as far as I can tell, bolstering it from top to bottom with a fairly masculine character.

Though the EDT smells very similar to the EDP and is recognizably the same perfume, it lacks that quality. I smell the oakmoss prominently in the EDT, getting that muted, slightly fussy ambience associated now with elderly women and, increasingly, daring young men. This puts it closer to old school chypres, the closest of which, in my cabinet, would be Trussardi Femme and Rochas Mystere. Both possess a dry, almost smoky aspect absent in the Mitsouko EDP. The EDP is closer to the new chypres in many respects, not least because of their sunny disposition. Clearly, new means were applied toward a familiar end, but the result is arrestingly bright.

Which isn't to say the Mitousko EDP is insipidly cheery. It isn't. It's a complicated smell pretending to be more straightforward than all that. It has stealth and wears powerfully. It's remarkably androgynous, part sultry, part swagger. The brilliance of the reformulation is its ability to look forward and backward simultaneously, to modernize Mitousko without reducing it to a museum piece, admirable but unwearable. It smells richer than most of what perfumers are producing today, and more accessible than much of what came before it. The 2 ounce bottle seems a steal to me, given the endurance the fragrance has.