Eternity: Cleaning Up The Eighties with Calvin

Christy Turlington, saddled with motherhood, daydreams of a night out at Studio 54

For a long time, I regarded Calvin Klein's Eternity as its own sort of stand alone monolithic entity.  In my mind, it sat on its own somewhere, out of context.  It was so all over the place during the time of its release and for several years afterward and was such a brilliantly art-directed phenomenon that it seemed more like a cultural attitude than a scent.  You smelled it everywhere, on everyone.  It seemed so definitively of its time, yet it wasn't anything particularly new (Tania Sanchez has remarked how closely it resembled an earlier Caron, which itself was pretty traditionally floral; a little stuffy, even) and in fact it essentially took an older form, the dowdy floral bouquet, and shoved it into the big shouldered stance so popular in the eighties.

Sophia Grojsman, the perfumer behind Eternity, was of course the go-to woman for this kind of treatment.  She'd done Paris, the quintessential neon floral, several years earlier, and excelled at pumping up the volume without sacrificing density.  Her fragrances of that time were loud without being shrill.  No one has really matched Grojsman in terms of radiance.  Her fragrances, especially the scents she created between the mid eighties and the mid nineties, were radiant to the point of radio-activity, translating the baroque intensity of classical perfumery represented by a fragrance like Bal a Versailles in a uniquely contemporary way.  A Grojsman fragrance took over the senses in a way very few eighties scents, as loud and bombastic as they were, managed to do.  They were powerful but because of their radiance felt buoyant rather than heavy.

Obsession, which came out in 1985, was really Calvin Klein's first massive success in fragrance.  Obsession was one of the heaviest of the heavies, as dark, deep and mysterious as Eternity was bright, buoyant and straightforward.  Even the ads for Obsession were dark: dimly lit scenes viewed through screens and colored filters.  Josie Borain was the perfect model for the Obsession campaign, and really the first sign of Klein's still unparalleled brilliance at creating powerful associative images and personas which brought his fragrances vividly to life in the imagination.  Borain was the athletic-to-the-point-of-boyish Calvin Klein consumer wandering into the exotic oriental territory of Obsession.  The ads depicted her sensual saturation in a nocturnal  world of hedonistic abandon, emphasis on random couplings and sweat.  Obsession was Klein's mass-market version of the often anonymous nightlife excesses popular among the early eighties Studio 54 celebrity demimonde.

Playing the Peach Card: Boucheron Jaipur

Boucheron Jaipur seems, to me, a perfect choice for the Holiday season, setting aside impressions inspired by the original ad for the fragrance, which is festive in an entirely different way. According to press materials, Jaipur "revives the mythical story of the Naurantan, a bracelet traditionally offered to young brides in Rajasthan for good fortune." I suppose one is luckiest, in some cultures, with one's hands tied behind one's back. And naked, of course. It often helps to be naked. The luck can adhere to you more easily that way. In some cultures, people get married naked. They live out their lives naked, in fact, because nothing is worse than to be fully clothed when luck comes calling. Many have been shit out of luck who were overdressed at inopportune times.

The notes for this lucky elixir are listed as follows: plum, apricot, peach, violet, rose, acacia, heliotrope, peony, iris, musk, amber, sandalwood.

Jaipur was created by Sophia Grojsman, way back in the dark ages (1994), and as Dane over at Peredepierre says, it "plays the peach card." Fragrantica classifies it as "Floral Fruity". I wouldn't disagree, but would include a caveat. Since the mid-nineties, Floral Fruity has evolved (or devolved) into a pretty different beast than it once was. See any number of celebrity fragrances, starting with something, anything, by Britney Spears. These days, Floral Fruity is synonymous with sugary sweet, but it wasn't always that way, and Grojsman's instantly identifiable "milky peachy accord" (again, Dane) exemplifies the category's roots.

Many of Grojsman's perfumes feel lit from within. They hit the skin and it seems someone has switched a light on. There's a bright, happy glow to much of the work she did in the eighties and nineties, a quality which is simultaneously exuberant and adult. The closest I've seen a mass-market contemporary fragrance come to those special effects has been Gucci Flora, which didn't impress many people--and was, admittedly, a bit been there, done that--but was, for me, a welcome revisiting of a style Grojsman made famous. For me, in a way, Flora wasn't as much redundant as a tribute. The ad for Flora captured the euphoric feeling produced by smelling something as baroquely rich as Jaipur and seemed, with its sun-dappled field-of-flowers imagery, like some forgotten broadcast from the eighties. Do stick around for the jaded valley girl voice over at the close of the commercial; that's quite an evocative throwback, too.

Grojsman is one of my favorites, the nose behind an influential arsenal of iconic fragrances including Paris, Yvresse, Vanderbilt, Eternity, Spellbound, White Linen, Tresor, Bvlgari Pour Femme, and Calyx. Many of her lesser known fragrances are fantastic: Tentations, Celine Magic, Bill Blass Nude, Kashaya. Her body of work bottlenecks around the ten year period from the mid eighties to the mid nineties. Since then, she's done only several that I know of: S-Perfume's 100% Love and Outrageous!, for Frederic Malle.

I've smelled both, and like them--a lot--but, for me, Grojsman excels at making all-American department store fare. I say that with respect, because I think more than most perfumers Grojsman helped elevate the fragrance counter at the mall, bringing a uniquely heightened level of fantasy to the middle American consumer. Think how many of her fragrances can still be found in that competitive marketplace. You can still easily find Paris, Tresor, Eternity, Spellbound, White Linen, Calyx, Bvlgari. That's quite a streak.

Her forays into niche territory have felt a bit constricted to me, which is odd, given the budgets I imagine she was provided. They don't engage with the technicolor saturation of the mainstream fragrances on which she built her reputation, and I suspect she does her best work when her imagination must stretch to work within limits. All artists are limited, but I'm guessing the limits involved in a Malle fragrance and something for YSL are two different species of constraint.

Anyone familiar with Tresor and Yvresse will feel right at home with Jaipur. There are differences, and comparing these fragrances, which at first might seem slightly interchangeable, underscores their subtle distinctions. Yvresse is spicier than you realize; Tresor more oriental. Jaipur isn't at all spicy, really, but like many of Grojsman's scents it has a boozy aspect I like, one also found in Paris and Yvress; thus its appropriateness for this time of year. Like another wintertime favorite of mine, Clinique Wrappings, it is both cool and warm, the equivalent of flushed cheeks coming in from the cold or the sensation of your face heating up after a few cocktails. Jaipur is the punch at the Christmas party, and someone, bless him, did us the favor of spiking it.

Simple Pleasure: Ex'cla*ma'tion

I'm not going to embarrass myself by telling you how many fragrances I have, but there are enough that in order to get to the ones in the back of the cabinet I need to take everything out and rearrange. Meticulously. And increasingly, this is no easy task. I think of it like a Rubik's Cube. Many get rotated. I get sick of them for a while, or discover something I'd forgotten. I bring one forward like a stepchild I've neglected out of unfair bias. There are a few, only a few, that remain front and center, where I can get at them regardless of whim or weariness. Exclamation is one of them.

I have no idea why I like this stuff as much as I do. It's not a complex scent. It isn't breaking any new ground. It's simply a gorgeous boost of happy, which is why, on this dreary, muddled Monday morning I want to talk about it. The stuff cuts through the drizzle with the precision of a scalpel on skin. It has a distinct buoyancy to it that I'm hard pressed to find anywhere else. The smell lifts me a little. I think of it primarily as peachy osmanthus and rose with minimal foody accents (cinnamon, vanilla, almond). Nothing new there, but give three cooks the same ingredients and you get three entirely different meals, and if one of those cooks is Sophia Grojsman, Exclamation's creator, at least one of those meals has the very real potential to rise above and beyond its ingredients to far more than the literal sum of its parts.

For many women, this is a nostalgic scent, more sweet than sophisticated. I don't remember Exclamation from my high school years, so there's no such sentimentality for me. How anyone smelled the stuff with a wall of Poison, Paris, and Giorgio in the way is something which would have to be explained to me with scientific lucidity. Setting that aside, I'm not sure I've smelled anything by Grojsman which could be realistically assessed as anything approaching quaint. Exclamation is rich and fairly heady. I continue to think of Grojsman as a major sensualist, and Exclamation does nothing to contradict that evaluation. There are others working somewhere in this vein, with a corresponding richness of sensory detail which could probably be described as super saturation--Francis Kurkdjian and Maurice Roucel, to name just a few--and for a while I wasn't sure what exactly distinguishes Grojsman from them. I'm still not sure, but Renoir comes to mind as a useful means of comparison.

Those two perfumers are full bodied, but Grojsman produces something close to the kind of figures Renoir painted, where the flesh is rendered with a weirdly palpable succulence, and the colors used are more like texture than hue. In some ways it's hard to approach Exclamation as an expression of sensuality, but I suspect most of that is context. Put it in a different bottle, one that isn't a silly if adorable little piece of punctuation, a play on shape and words, but more formal, something by Baccarat maybe, and place the bottle in a different environment, a bit farther away from Shania Starlight and Bratz berry lipgloss, change the name to I don't know....Rapture,maybe...and you're apt to see Exclamation in a very different way.

There's a powdery disposition to Exclamation that isn't baby talcum and comes much closer to the wonderful cakey make-up of Malle's Lipstick Rose. The two have a lot in common. I love Lipstick Rose but probably prefer Exclamation. Lipstick Rose is a much vampier shade of lipstick, a notch or two more garish. Exclamation has a softness to it. Grojsman's work is often faulted for a certain synthetic or chemical quality somewhere in the top notes. You would expect to find that in something as cheaply made and sold as Exclamation. Instead, it's one of her most natural smelling efforts. You can find the notes on Fragrantica but I'll list them here, because I looked for them a long time wondering what they might be. Peach, apricot, bergamot, orris root, jasmine, heliotrope, lily-of-the-valley, rose, vanilla, cinnamon, sandalwood, amber, musk and cedar. Like much of Grojsman's work the fragrance is mostly linear. It does soften considerably into the dry down, where the base notes are a little more pronounced. It last better than most perfumes ten times the price.

Bored to Tears: New Releases, Old Hat

I'm pouting this week, I'm in a funk, I'm almost bored with perfume and I don't know what to do about it, a situation which would have seemed inconceivable to me only several months ago. Is perfume a passing phase--or am I just sick of being disappointed lately? So many of the things I've been looking forward to have turned out to be uninspired. Some of them feel like a slap in the face.

The Alien EDT is nice enough, but where's the promised difference, the guaranteed frisson? To me it smells exactly like Alien EDP--no heavier, no lighter, no woodsier, no more or less presided over by jasmine. I wanted special. I wanted something tweaked, not because I dislike Alien EDP (far from it) but because I wanted to see a perfumer pushing himself, responding to input about the first go round, teasing out something about the first Alien which showed its detractors how wrong they were, proving to them that Alien was wonderful all along, they just hadn't been looking the right way.

To some extent, the seasonal flankers have served this purpose, illuminating the original Alien (2005) with bursts of clarifying light. I particularly liked the first flanker, eau Luminescente, which brought a piquancy into the original's headier mix. But the mission of seasonal flankers seems to be to adapt the original fragrance's attributes into some fantasy vignette of Spring and Summer, a limiting mission, depending how you feel about Spring and Summer (I, for one, resent being asked to retire my jeans, as if I'm just not quite carefree enough otherwise, or inhibited because I won't frolic around in shorts). Key words, like "lighter" and "fresher", prevail over the exercise. For me, the Alien EDT release might have reinterpreted the original in many novel ways, but didn't, making it little better than a wasted opportunity.

I can barely talk about YSL's Parisienne without getting a little ticked off. More than anything, I'm irritated with myself, for having gotten my hopes up. Parisienne is a massive letdown on a number of levels, but the biggest disappointment of all is the fact that my little honeymoon with Sophia Grojsman might now be over. I was naive enough to believe that I would love Parisienne no matter how much of a retread it might be. I've loved every Grojsman perfume I can think of, though many resemble each other enough to keep others from owning several at once. Paris is an iconic favorite of mine. Its intensity, the lush stuff it makes of rose, violet and hawthorn, is a narcotic for me. Though I've loved it since 1983, when it first came out, the smell isn't particularly nostalgic to me. It's too timeless for that. But it makes me intensely happy, speaking to my imagination in a way which would normally require hallucinogens.

How big a part did Sophia Grojsman actually play in the creation of Parisienne? Her collaborator, Sophie Labbé, hasn't done much of anything I've admired or even been vaguely interested in, with the exception of Givenchy Organza. Granted, Organza is so good that its creator wouldn't really need to do much more in life. It has amazing persistence, impressive diffusion. It smells like nothing else, filtered through a series of recognizable motifs. It certainly doesn't smell like anything else Labbé has done. I'm not a fan of most of the Joop fragrances, some of which she's authored. Kylie Minogue Sexy Darling, Givenchy Very Irresistible, Cacharel Amour Pour Homme, Jil Sander Sport for Women and Nina Ricci Permier Jour don't exactly tip the scales in her favor.

My guess is that Sophia Grojsman is credited because Parisienne trades on Paris not only thematically but by using enough of its formula to owe her royalties. There is the faintest ghost of Paris in there, but so dulled down, so muted that to credit Grojsman is somehow discrediting her. The notes of this so-called woody floral are said to be damask rose, violet, peony, patchouli, vetiver, and most intriguingly, "a vinyl accord evoking metal gloss and varnish." Interestingly (and this is practically the only interesting thing about the fragrance for me) Parisienne smells best from the bottle. Smelled from the atomizer, you get the vinyl accord, and it's as wonderfully strange as the copy makes it sound. The problem is that once you apply it to the skin or a testing strip, it becomes the failed prototype for Kylie Minogue's next assault on the mainstream fragrance-buying public.

There are things I like about Parisienne. It isn't horrible, just insipidly pleasant. Some floral, some wood, watered-down whiffs of unusual. It hides on the skin like it's scared to come out and play or has been pushed out on stage in only its underwear. It has zero projection, and even you can't smell it after a few minutes, without making a fool of yourself practically humping your wrist with your nose. It's nice. It's pretty. It bores the hell out of me. Some have expressed dismay at the tone of the Kate Moss advertisements. My guess is that the perfume, whatever it actually does in reality, is named to evoke the stylized debauchery of "La Vie Parisienne", the naughty pre-war French magazine and the equally controversial opera of the same name composed by Offenbach, which featured, among other entertainments, "trollops masquerading as society ladies" and the "frenetic, mad pursuit of fun and pleasure", all of which Moss seems to be channeling in the ads. The actual perfume, unfortunately, is a society lady masquerading as a society lady.

And don't even get me started on masculine releases. Givenchy Play is a joke, as everyone on the boards and blogs, from basenotes to Burr, is remarking. Givenchy Play Intense is the good cop in this scenario, but it too makes you work to love, let alone like it long time. A little Rochas Man, a little Lempicka au Masculin, some Bulgari Black. It comes out doing a snake-charmer's dance with anise, coffee and labdanum, each of which in its way is more over-exposed than even Justin Timberlake, the fragrance's spokesmodel. Like him, Play Intense wishes to be all things to all people. It sings, it dances, it has a sense of humor. It acts, doing a good impression of colognes I like better, then it slinks off the skin in search of God knows what. Maybe it goes looking for Parisienne. Good luck with that.

It probably doesn't take a rocket scientist, or even someone who plays one on TV, to know that YSL La Nuit de L'Homme is going to suck, and suck it does. It smells like everything all at once. It's doing everything it can to impress and please you, boring the shit out of you. The smell of it fills you with a profound despair. So this is what it's come to. I might as well end it all right here. If women think pink pepper is getting old, cross the aisle and walk a mile in my shoes. The terrain: cardamom, as far as the eye can see. To think I actually love cardamom. Every time I go back to L'Essence de Declaration I realize anew how wrong they're getting cardamom these days. Someone please throw that cardamom a life-raft of birch tar.

The question is, what are they getting right? Yesterday I took out my bottle of Organza Indecence. I couldn't believe how rich and gorgeous it was. More specifically, I couldn't believe I'd forgotten. But with so many snoozers on the market, more every day, it's a wonder I can remember liking perfume, ever, at all.

I'd love to hear what you've been disappointed in lately. It would help me feel less alone or, God forbid, misanthropic.

Perry Ellis 360 Degrees (Women)

One of the most interesting things about Sophia Grojsman is how weirdly adaptable her style is. Her dimestore and discount outlet work often smells as wonderful as her more expensive compositions. Many people would disagree with me, but in some ways I feel Exclamation, her cheapo study in rose for Coty, is as impressive as Paris, which Yves Saint Laurent sells for at least four times as much--and it might even be more wearable. Do the differences in quality exist mainly in the marketing campaigns? I'm guessing there's an argument to be made.

Granted, some of the things she did which now litter the shelves of TJ Max were once aimed at a higher economic bracket, the best and most ubiquitous example of which might be Perry Ellis 360 Degrees. Like 360, I suspect that most of these fragrances, once they stopped selling like hotcakes, if they ever did sell like hotcakes, were drastically reformulated. Regulations, at the very least, would have tamed them in the last few years alone. I never smelled 360 back in 1993, when it was first released. I have nothing to compare it to. But more than one customer review I found online accused its makers of tampering so severely with it that it might as well be called 180.

It smells pretty damn good to me. The notes includ melon, tangerine, osmanthus, amazon lily, cool blue rose, muguet, lavender, sage, water lily, amber vetiver, sandalwood, vanilla, and musk. As we all know by now, the sandalwood will be purely synthetic, which doesn't always imply poor quality but in this case, at 12.99 per ounce, certainly must. It doesn't matter much to me. 360 is an odd little thing: a delicate balance of herbal, floral, fruity, and woody, if you can call anything this robust little. It makes a great masculine, never quite floral, never quite citrus. Like everything Grojsman does, it feels lush and slightly over the top, and outlasts the competition. Like Tentations, which Grojsman did for Paloma Picasso, it's an interesting deviation for her, though I can't pinpoint exactly how. I recognized her hand in it instantly, but unlike many of her compositions, which often feel like only slight variations of each other, it feels as if maybe, just maybe, it could have been made by someone else, or with someone else. Weirdest of all, it gets more instead of less intense as it wears down.

Cheap Thrills: Dunhill Desire for a Woman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Kenzo Kashaya: The Sensual World

Kenzo Kashaya was created by Sophia Grojsman in 1994--the same year Cashmere Mist, Havana, G Gigli, Jaipur, CK One, and Iris Silver Mist came out.  It comes in a carnival glass bottle shaped in leaf-like abstractions.  Osmoz classifies the fragrance as Oriental - Floral.  Like all of Grojsman's work, Kashaya is powerful, with impressive if not potentially assaultive sillage and persistence which seems equally tenacious.

Like the bottle, which reflects red, orange, yellow, and fuschia in different combinations, depending on how the light hits it, Kashaya reflects and recalls various characteristics of Grojsman's well known oeuvre.  You can smell everything from Spellbound to Diamonds and Rubies in there, and at first you might even mistake it, as some online have, for Lagerfeld's Sun Moon Stars, which was released a year earlier.  Aside from sharing some inarticulate, decidely Grojsman-esque quality, the two have very little in common.  In fact, Kashaya seems unique for the perfumer, conveying a mood very specific to orientals, a category she hasn't exactly made a name for herself in, aside from random entries here and there, like Tentations, for Paloma Picasso.  Kashaya is less floral than many of Grojsman's fragrances (see Paris, Calyx, Yvresse, Boucheron) and not nearly as spicy (see Tentations and Spellbound).  It has a pronounced, stealthy vanilla accord and a curious mellowness to it, whereas other Grojsman creations persist in a vibrant state of excitement on the skin for hours, thrilled to be there.

For whatever reason, when I go to my perfume cabinet, the things I reach for most often seem to be Grojsman's perfumes.  People detest Spellbound (Oh the clove, the clove!) and yet I grab it even more frequently than the others.  I believe some of this, or a lot of this, has to do with the immediate gratification offered by Grojsman's work.  The very things people complain about (the strength, the projection, et al.) are the things which attract me the most.  Perfumers, like most artists, are eventually referred to with a marketable shorthand.  For the most part, they're much more complicated than the tags applied to them.  Grojsman's reputation is as a sensualist, and she's of course much more too, but there's a lot of truth there; putting Paris up to your nose is indescribably intense.  Yvress is just about the loveliest, most succulent perfume I own.  And Spellbound, as much as it's derided, is shot full of sensual pleasures (and how, which seems to be the problem for some).  It comes down to this for me: these perfumes have openly narcotic properties.

Kashaya is as intensely pleasurable as anything Grojsman's done, and lives uniquely on the skin.    Don't misunderstand: the florals are there, but they're integrated differently than in the compositions where they take or demand center stage.  Those florals are, specifically, jasmine, orchid, tuberose, and carnation (that old Grojsman reliable).  They're laid out against sandalwood, musk, vanilla, and amber in a way which takes them in uncharacteristic directions, playing up different aspects of the Grojsman artistic project.  Personally, I think Kashaya makes a good masculine, but I wear Paris, Yvresse, and Calyx without complication or inhibition, troubling myself not one second over whether or not this "seems" appropriate or can be "justified" theoretically in some way.  Unlike Tentations, Kashaya is still petty easy to find online, and affordable.  It comes in EDT, which lasts just fine.  I always thought EDP was sort of overkill when it comes to Sophia Grojsman.  It's like picturing Picasso's cubist work done in day-glo, neon paint.

Two or Three Scents I've Put in Heavy Rotation Lately

Jil Sander: Scent 79 Woman/Man

Not so distantly related to Chanel No. 19, Scent 79 Woman is a marvel on the skin, balancing fruit (cranberry, peach) and what smells like galbanum against may rose, jasmine, and iris in perfect proportion.  The fragrance lasts forever, not just on the skin but in the 4.2 oz, Noguchi-like bottle, a white, bifurcated block of glass.  Everything about Scent 79 Woman is

 great.  Even the box is unusual, oversized and imposing, a real treat to open up.  The bottle rests inside like a Matryoshka doll.  Scent 79 is quite different, but recalls, for me, Krizia Moods, too.  Moods seems to use linden against fruity elements in a similar way, though animalic notes weigh it down, anchoring it in darker territory, whereas Scent 79 Woman is bright and cheerful, on the surface at least.  It has an interesting, edgy tension.

Scent 79 Man stays much closer to the skin but lasts just as impressively as its sister.  Again, there's a wonderfully unlikely balance, from bottom to top.  The literature on Scent 79 Man implies much development.  I don't experience it, but the balance itself is plenty complicated.  It's an unusual structure, closest I think to Chanel Antaeus, though, again, not animalic in the slightest.  Tobacco, faint hints of leather, angelika, clary sage and frankincense are the things I notice first.  Spending more time with the fragrance, I get the jasmine, violet and iris.  The perfumer behind Man is Marc Buxton. 79 Man is EDP and also 4.2 oz, the bottle black to Woman's white.  Both are available at Neiman Marcus and well worth the 90 bucks. 

Paloma Picasso: Tentations

Months back, I took home a 5 ml sample of Tentations from the local Korean-owned discount fragrance store.  They had many discontinued items but Tentations wasn't one of them.  The sample smelled somewhat off to me and at first I didn't like it.  I felt I should have it, because it's discontinued and it's Sophia Grojsman, whom I love, but doubted I'd buy a full bottle even if one were available.  I couldn't really see any similarities between Tentations and Grojsman's more widely known work, like Paris, or even her more relatively obscure scents, like, say, Yvresse.  A few days ago, I visited the Russian-owned perfume kiosk at the mall and discovered two bottles of Tentations.  Smelling it, I knew instantly that I'd been right about the sample, but it wasn't as far off as I'd imagined it must be.  Truth is, Tentations opens on a weird little medley of notes including peach, pepper, and orange blossom.  Under that you can smell, most immediately, carnation and cinnamon.  The combination of peach and pepper is odd and intriguing, lovelier than you think it could be.  The addition of cinnamon is weirder still.  Carnation only makes things more peppery.  I love Tentations, its rich but subtle spices and the way it plays out quietly on the skin, and I'm baffled why it didn't thrive, where other Grojsman scents, much louder, have demonstrated remarkable longevity in the marketplace.  Tentations, I also realized, is distinctly in keeping with Grosjman's other work.  The peach recalls Yvresse.  The carnation, Elizabeth Taylor's Diamonds and Rubies.  The spices put it right alongside Spellbound, which seems in some ways like Tentations jacked up on steroids.  Like the majority of Grojsman's scents, Tentations lasts well.

This Week At The Perfume Counter: random notes

The Korean perfume store closed its newest location, and the older location does not have Rochas Femme. I purchased it online for next to nothing instead. Roudnitska did the original. The reformulation was done by Olivier Cresp and substitutes cumin for the shock value once provided by now-outlawed animal no-no's. I haven't received the bottle yet but know when I do I'll smell the fragrance wondering what the first Rochas Femme must have smelled like.

I ordered Jacomo Silences. I believe this is the one Luca Turin was crazed over at some point, but I've looked through everything I have on him and can't find a mention of it. Supposedly, green florals with galbanum, so one would think it's a no brainer for me.

The friendly young woman at the Chanel counter in the local department store let me smell the new Chanel No. 5 flanker. It smelled fine. Chanel No. 5 EDP did not, to my nose. Something foul and one dimensional in the heart, after a rich opening full of busy distractions.

One thing I'm fascinated by is the relative ignorance at the perfume retailers regarding concentration. Most of the people I've talked to seem to think the EDP and EDT versions of any given perfume are interchangeable, considerations of strength aside. Both Sephoras here, for instance, place tester bottles on their extravagantly pristine shelves for only one of Chanel No. 5's iterations. This means that someone buying the EDT has no real idea what it smells like until she or he gets it home. Tom Ford's iterations are even more markedly different than Chanel No. 5's, and yet a tester bottle for Voile de Fleur stands in for the Black Orchid EDP, and the two smell nothing alike, not even remotely, but don't try to point this out, because it's futile. When I shop at Perfumania (sigh) I often have to pointedly ask whether the bottle they're spraying on the test strip is EDP or EDT. It never occurs to them to tell me, otherwise.

I smelled the new Lancome. A lot of people must be smelling it, because the testers I've seen are all half empty. Perhaps this is something the perfume companies do? They send the department stores half-empty bottles so that customers will believe something like, say, Magnifique to be a hot commodity. To me the perfume smelled like some sickly sweet something or other I couldn't put my finger on. I liked it--the way a child likes his favorite page in a scratch and sniff book. I'm not sure that's wearable. People like to put cocaine up their noses, too, but they don't want to cover themselves in it. Al Pacino's white-powdered mug in Scarface just popped into my head, so perhaps I'm wrong and haven't spent enough time amongst coke fiends.

I returned Guerlain Heritage because I can always buy it for my friend once Christmas is closer, whereas I'm short on funds now and need money to buy more perfume for myself. The woman who'd sold Heritage to me didn't understand why I was buying it. Strangely, she didn't seem to understand why I was returning it either. I returned Chanel No. 5 too, explaining that I'd purchased these two as bride and groom gifts, and--wonder of all wonders--she already wears Heritage and he already wears Chanel No. 5. I know these salespeople recognize my sickness but I'm helpless to stop myself. It's some reassurance that they must pretend as if they don't recognize my obsessive, unreasonable behavior.

I bought a cheap bottle of Gres Cabaret online because I haven't yet exhausted my need for the perfect dark rose. I smelled many in LA but none knocked me to the floor. Intending to buy Eau d'Italie's Paestum Rose, I got Sienne L'Hiver instead.

I bought Miracle Forever at Perfumania because I needed something right that minute. I was interested in Calvin Klein Euphoria for some reason I don't fully comprehend. Weeks before I'd been interested in Miss Dior Cherie. People online slam such fruity patchouli's viciously, with an open hostility which only piques my interest two-fold. I forgot my wallet so at Perfumania I only had enough cash for the slightly cheaper Miracle Forever. "This smells like Euphoria," the saleswoman exclaimed to her co-worker, amazed. "Can you tell me if that's EDT or EDP?" I asked.

I'm going to venture that people now denigrate these fruity numbers the way others once put down the civet-driven, musked out chypres of yesteryear when maybe refreshing colognes were more sensible or considered more "mature". I'm not yet sure what's so bad about fruity, other than the fact that it's everywhere. Pants are everywhere too. I don't understand the whole mature and immature thing when it comes to fragrances. I don't always understand pants, either.

Getting Miracle Forever home, I realized with a twinge of disappointment that it's very similar to Chanel Allure Sensuelle. I also realized that Beyond Paradise is very close to Gucci Envy, which leads me to suspect that BP has galbanum in it, which no one talks about. Instead they talk about banana and melon, which I don't get in the least.

At TJ Maxx I was obsessed with Anais Anais, Diamonds and Emeralds (recognizably Sophia Grojsman), and Fendi for Men. I managed to get out without purchasing everything I put my nose to, though not empty-handed, mind you. Never empty-handed.

I did not bother smelling Kate Moss, as I'm saving that for a more desperate day.

Staying Power: Fragrances That Last

Ever notice that the perfumes you spend the most money on often seem to be the least likely to persist on your skin, while the cheapos might outlast cockroaches in the event of a nuclear war? For the past several days, we at I Smell Therefore I Am have been spritzing Habanita, the weird, tarry vetiver of which has lingered so tenaciously that it got me reflecting on other equally virulent perfumes. What follows is a highly subjective list based on my own personal preferences and experiences (or lack thereof) in smell:

Estee Lauder Alliage

I lump this into the galbanum camp. Not every fragrance built around this note possesses tenacity (Chanel No. 19, anyone?) but many do. Galbanum can give a perfume quite a lot of kick; witness Sud Est by Romeo Gigli, Chamade, Diesel (the original), Givenchy Insense, Ralph Lauren's Safari, Trussardi Donna, and S.T. Dupont. All of these wear most of the day on my skin. Of the group, Aliage has the most longevity. It's a totally unlikely fragrance in many ways--so wrong it's right. It goes so far over the line that the line isn't an issue anymore.

Paris

Anything by Sophia Grojsman, really. Even Diamonds and Rubies by Elizabeth Taylor, and 360 Degrees for Perry Ellis. Even Coty Exclamation, which puts other, more expensive rose scents to shame. Grojsman's scents have a linear purity to them. They're dense, with a lot going on, but from beginning to end they remain pretty consistent. They're Russian novels, as opposed to beach reads. They have a certain reputation for excess which is fueled by their full bodied construction and near astral projection. But I get tired of all the caveats involved in the appreciation of Spellbound and Paris and Calyx and all the rest of Grojsman's oeuvre. Like Maurice Roucel (see below) she's a brilliant nose, with a baroque sensibility which will inevitably go in and out of fashion. Her perfumes, however, go the distance.

Tocade

And Iris Silver Mist, and Broadway Nite, and Gucci Envy (a member of the galbanum crew), Lolita Lempicka "L", 24 Faubourg, Insolence, Lalique pour Homme, and Missoni. The closest to Roucel in style is Grosjman. Both create fragrances which, whether gourmand or not, have the aromatic headiness of gourmet food, heavy on the butter and cream. This is one of the things which makes Roucel such a brilliant choice for ushering the Guerlain name into the near future. Like their classics, Roucel's compositions are practically edible, with a cake-like texture you can almost sink your teeth into. That said, Roucel isn't to everyone's taste. Personally, I find his perfumes so addictive and decadent that they literally set my teeth on edge.

Yatagan

Many of the old school leathers hang on for dear life. Cuir de Russie, Knize Ten, Rien by Etat Libre d'Orange, Hermes Bel Ami, and Tabac Blond, among them. They mix a petroleum noxiousness with a sweet, sometimes floral counterpoint. Knize Ten and Rien are a little more hard core. Certainly Yatagan. They also last the longest of the above on me.

Body Kouros

And most of Annick Menardo's body of work. Menardo's hallmark is a vanilla dry down, reflecting a penchant for the elaborately edible she shares with Roucel and Grojsman, whether it be the anisic note in Lolita au Masculin or the almond paste of Hypnotic Poison. Vanilla is certainly tasty, but by the time Menardo's constructions have reached their base notes, they've moved in various directions, more an artful tour of the pantry than a sit-down meal. Body Kouros is her strongest to me.