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.

Space Oddity: Vero Kern's Onda Eau de Parfum

 I was excited, in 2010, when Swiss perfumer Vero Kern released eau de parfum concentrations of the three fragrances in her line, Vero Profumo. I'm not much of an extrait wearer, and the cost of Onda, Kiki, and Rubj were steep. I'd smelled them all at Luckyscent in Los Angeles, and thought that Onda was just about the most fantastic thing I'd ever laid hands on. It was smoky and mysterious, a meditation on the darker edges of the olfactory palette. I loved Kiki and Rubj, but for me Onda was one of those fragrances you come across and realize you've been waiting for without knowing it.

Early reports indicated significant differences between these new eau de parfum versions and their extrait counterparts. By introducing a passion fruit note to all three, Kern essentially remixed the scents the way a musician revisits a beloved song with slightly different instrumentation. While passion fruit was said to add something odd to the already profoundly odd Onda, I was skeptical. What I thought I liked best about the extrait was its deep, dark, near-incantatory properties. Onda extrait was some kind of pitch black spell wrought through scent instead of words. Kern stated that the passion fruit added a "sensual and erotic lightness" to the composition. While the original style of the extrait was said to remain intact, the mission of the eau de parfum versions was to render the scents "easier to wear".

I'm no more a fan of the phrase easier to wear than I am extraits, and the idea of these new formulas made me think of David Bowie re recording LOW with Muzak accompaniment. I was worried, and the worry kept me from buying Onda. It didn't help that for a while Luckyscent didn't have tester bottles of the EDPs at Scent Bar. I was so skeptical that I wouldn't even shell out the seven or so bucks for a sample. I knew that, like Bowie, Kern had a sort of bedrock integrity when it came to artistic vision, and that probably anything she did would be at the very least fascinating. Then again, I'd never been a huge fan of Bowie's "Let's Dance" period, and couldn't forget that embarrassing duet with Jagger, which had only been fascinating the way a car crash in reverse might be. Backwards or forwards, a car crash is a mess.

When Andy Tauer and I visited Scent Bar for the release of Tableau de Parfum's Miriam last October, I finally got a smell of Onda EDP, and I didn't know what to think. It was quite different, and I'd built it up or knocked it down in my head for so long that all kinds of mental adjustments were required to even properly apprehend, let alone appreciate, it. We were there about a week, and I kept coming back to it. Ultimately I bought it, and wore it out in the desert a lot when we traveled to Joshua Tree.

Onda EDP was the perfect scent-track for the trip. While there, we talked a lot about the attitudes and emotional effects of the desert landscape, its peculiar, powerful state of mind. It's a bigger than life place - too big and strange to take in all at once, if ever. Ultimately you surrender to it. The dry heat has an insidious effect and after a day in the sun you can easily feel exhaustion, precipitating that surrender with a sudden, out of the blue, immediacy.

Onda is indeed lighter than the extrait, and also, for me, more colorful. I would say...radiantly purplish. That's a horribly inept way to describe a fragrance, but like the desert Onda EDP is next to impossible to put into words. The extrait draws you in to some pitch dark, loamy underworld. It's buried deep in some unconscious territory and feels very gothic. The EDP concentration explodes that soil, sending all its particles airborne. Light from the sun heats and illuminates them, opening it all up without reassembling the constituent parts. The scent remains wonderfully expansive. I could tell you I smell passion fruit. I could say, Hey, there's the vetiver. But you experience this scent all at once, and it's that inability to put it into words, to narrow it down, that matches the extrait's qualities of strangeness, a relation that is more conceptual and philosophic than literal. There's something uncanny about Onda EDP, something at once overwhelming and intimate. I would agree it's sensual. And at this point, having spent a year with it, I would say it isn't just a desert island fragrance for me but the desert island itself.

The addition of a tropical fruit to Onda is no simple happy medium, nor does it produce standard, commercial impressions of the "tropics", with all the attendant coconut and shea butter stereotypes that typically implies. Here passion fruit is a study in what I guess I'd call vibrant decay. In other words, light and dark qualities existing in a tricky dual relationship where the one is viewed through the other no matter how you approach the sum total. Vibrant decay will be as much a turn off to some as easier to wear is to me, but for those who appreciate uncanny exuberance and a certain kind of jolie laide, Onda EDP will feel like a spectral visitation shrouded in ambient light, emerging from a portal no one and nothing else could possibly fit through.