Avon Calling: Occur! (With a Draw, My Door to Yours)

Nearly every American of a certain age remembers the neighborhood Avon lady. Avon, like Tupperware, was a massive Mid Century door to door phenomenon, with millions of dollars exchanged annually, and every home seemed to have at least one Avon item sitting around somewhere, generally in the vicinity of another American mainstay, Estee Lauder merchandise. Avon was famous for its nearly infinite array of collectible bottles - in the shape of owl, telephone, train, auto, peacock, snail, bell, ram's head, et al. My grandmother had a box in her attic full of these bottles. All in their original packaging (NIB as they say on Ebay), they looked as if they'd never been used.

The only Avon fragrances I remember from childhood were twinkly, bonnie type affairs with names like Cotillion, Sonnet, and Field Flowers. Sweet Honesty, which epitomized these, was ubiquitous among little girl tweens I knew, and smelled like something trying to make its mind up between shampoo and seduction. If I did smell any of the more mature fragrances in the brand's line up, I probably lumped them all together under the usual adjectives: powdery, say, or stinky. Years later I moved closer to my grandmother's town and was able to visit more frequently. Scouring local antique shops, I came across what seemed like an endless revolving door of these colorful bottles and perfumes.

I first smelled Occur in one of these shops, in its most recognizable bottle, curved black metal with a gold top. Like a lot of fragrances at the time, it was a "cologne mist spray", which simply feels faulty to someone now used to today's jet stream atomizers. Occur and Timeless (another Avon favorite, related in many ways to Occur) sat together on a glass and gold metal tray in the shop and were more than half empty. They smelled funky to me and I assumed the contents had long ago turned.

That was pretty early on in my renewed acquaintanceship with perfume - long before Habanita, Cuir de Russie, or any number of classics it took me a while to fully appreciate. A lot smelled funky to me; a lot smelled different in a way I wasn't used to and therefore decided wasn't my thing. I smell Occur now and can't believe I didn't love it then, because there's really nothing like it, even now that I've smelled over a thousand perfumes and my idea of "my thing" has expanded to such an extent that I'm just as likely to wear and appreciate an old school animalic as a niche floral. I felt just as turned off, truth be told, when I first smelled Muscs Koublai Khan, but Avon is a lot lower on the totem pole in the cultural imagination than Serge Lutens, so it's much easier to dismiss, and reappraisal is much less likely.

Released in 1962, Occur(!) is, to me, far more satisfying and arresting than Koublai Khan, and really almost every other modern animalic scent I've smelled and loved, short of, maybe, Frances Kurkdjian's Absolue Pour le Soir. There really is no bright up top business happening in Occur. It starts with an odd but well judged combination of indolic, aldehydic florals, spices (cardamom and coriander, both discernible), and, allegedly, bergamot. I challenge you to identify anything resembling bergamot. There really isn't much of an "up top" to Occur in general. It's a basenote enterprise the moment it hits the skin. What I smell, more than anything, or believe I smell, is myrrh, patchouli, civet, oakmoss, vanilla and amber. As with the recently reviewed Epris, by Max factor, Occur's floral components aren't the alpha dogs in this dog park, and they know it.

The secret weapon here is coconut (I'll say that twice. The secret weapon here is coconut), and the combination of coconut, gardenia, jasmine, lily-of-the-valley, and all the above mentioned heavy hitters produces a strange, fascinating effect, fattening up everything with just the right trace of buttery gourmand. Occur is a pretty sultry scent. It's no delicate flower. Yet it isn't exactly a powerhouse either, despite what its ingredients and its initial bombast would lead you to believe, and my praise of its animal hide notwithstanding, it's also incredibly pretty. It soon settles down pretty close to the skin with a leather-infused coconut- and patchouli-centered softness. Like Epris, which is also classified as a floral chypre, Occur seems more like an oriental to me, referencing, among other things, Shalimar, Youth Dew, and another Avon fragrance, released two years earlier, called Unforgettable. With its coconut, almost caramel effect, Occur recalls another of my Max Factor favorites, 1956's fantastic (and, like Occur, fantastically under-appreciated) Primitif. In a wonderful review of Primitif, Yesterday's Perfume called it "deliciously skanky", and the same could be said of Occur. If I were to look for a contemporary kinship I would choose Serge Luten's La Myrrh, which embodies similarly arresting incongruities, and makes them work (nevermind the skank with La Myrrh, which doesn't go there).

Occur is easy to find on Ebay, which has become an online version of the old Avon door to door model. While the black metal bottles are probably the earliest incarnations, their contents are difficult for sellers to judge, generating vague guestimates as to how much juice they contain. The atomizers on those bottles don't always work splendidly, if at all, and vendors don't always test them before listing (and shipping). I've never tried the heptagon shaped glass bottles that come in striped black boxes, with skinny black caps, but they look to date from the eighties or thereabouts (I could be wrong). Most of what lies between will be splash bottles - though the fragrance was recently reissued as part of the "Fragrance Traditions" line up. I've tried the Fragrance Traditions version, and while it's perfectly decent, it doesn't have the full bodied oomph of older formulations, nor their weird piquant high points. What it does have is slightly better longevity, so it's a bit of a six or half dozen kind of thing. If you're lucky, you'll find one of the half ounces perfume oil versions. Whether you opt for boot, bell, candlestick, or bell bottle, look for the vintage, and expect to pay anywhere from 10-30 bucks.

I'm having a good time exploring older, less well known fragrances lately, Avon first and foremost among them. I'd love to hear about older Avon fragrances you've smelled. So far, I've gotten hold of Occur, Timeless, Unforgettable, and Charisma. I'll draw a name from the comments and send off a sample portion of vintage Occur.

Here's a wonderful post on Unforgettable, with some information on the early and contemporary Avon sales model, by Olfacta.

Belle of the Barnyard: Max Factor Epris

If I'd been looking for a spokeswoman in the eighties, and had a sultry perfume to sell, Jaclyn Smith wouldn't have been my first (or second) choice. While not exactly strawberry shortcake, she was never really the let's get right into bed type. Had I seen the Jaclyn-centric ad for Epris before smelling this 1981 Max Factor fragrance, I doubt my curiosity would have been triggered. Fortunately, I found a mini at some antique store last summer, traveling cross country with my mom (I don't advise this, by the way, unless you can keep your travel time down to under five hours or you're going convoy style in separate cars).

Until a week ago, I enjoyed this mini periodically but had no idea what it was, and much as I liked it, I didn't really investigate. I don't think I even checked the bottom of the bottle, where the label indicates the name. I assumed it was some Youth Dew era oriental, a one off that didn't make a wave (though it clearly should have) and barely made a dent in the mass market culture of suburban perfume lovers. At some point I even thought it might actually have been decanted from a larger, more recognizable fragrance by another traveller who, like me, needed some back up on the road. Who knew Epris was listed on Fragrantica all this time, or that I could have very easily looked into it before now?

Fragrantica lists Epris as a chypre floral. My immediate thought, reading this, was that if Epris is a chypre floral, Bandit is a fruitchouli in a faceted pink bottle. Epris doesn't even smell like a floriental to me. It's straight up balsamic oriental, with the usual suspects hiking up their skirts: patchouli, spices (clove, clove, and clove) and a generous scraping of civet and castoreum. It has a leathery feel instantly, rather than drying down to one, and while there are florals in the mix, as in Youth Dew, they've obviously been told to sit down and shut up. This fragrance wants to get horizontal, and it wants to get horizontal now. After gymnastic somersaults through spiced amber and barnyard, it gets a little powdery in the late dry down, as if to say, "Yes, that's my bosom you're smelling."

"Maybe your mother never told you," begins the television ad, "there's more to being a woman than minding your manners." You might easily assume, hearing Jaclyn Smith say this, that she's just sucked on helium. Maybe it's the quality of the recording in the version I watched. Either way, as with the designation "chypre floral", there's a real disconnect between the way the fragrance is made to sound (girly) and the way it actually smells (far end of post pubescent: pun intended). "Being a woman means sometimes taking the first step first," Jaclyn continues, after introducing herself in a sequined, mostly sheer black dress reclining on a plump leather sofa. Again, I would say leap, not step, because Epris is clearly an attack mode type fragrance, with a physical vocabulary ranging from pounce to pulverize.

Epris, says Jaclyn, is a fragrance that understands this "first step first" thing. "Epris is a little unsettling; a little disturbing. Epris is a most provocative fragrance. If mama never told you, I'll tell you: Part of the art of being a woman is knowing when not to be too much of a lady."

Whatever the tone of her voice, at least the dialogue speaks truthfully about the perfume. While the initial impression of Epris is along the lines of Youth Dew, it soon takes a slight but hard left turn toward Tabu, putting itself in park somewhere in between. Even in an era characterized by bold, forceful constructions, Epris was something of an oddball, looking back lustfully not just to Youth Dew (1953) and Tabu (1932) but to one of my all time favorites, Bal a Versailles (1962). It dives straight down to patchouli and animalics without bothering to ask you if you mind. There's that kind of confidence in it. It's on the prowl and thanks you very much for letting it out of the bottle to get the ball rolling, but no time for niceties. It don't mind if it do.

There's a taste for this kind of thing, and not everyone's salivating over it. I'm grateful, because it's scarce online, unless you want to stock up on minis until you have something approximating full bottle. I'm impressed with everything about Epris - the fact that Max Factor produced it, its tenacity, its husky attitude, its uniqueness among its eighties peers as an old school, unapologetic oriental. It's been a long time since I smelled something this good, and I was happy to find a seller online who was offering two one ounce bottles. How much do I like Epris? Better than my favorite Serge Lutens fragrance (a tie between Cedre and Arabie, in case you're wondering). Once again, I'm reminded that some of the most satisfying fragrances have been sold at the drugstore, for a steal, and they didn't even have oud in them.

Colors de Benetton 1987

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Interview with Jack

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

Excessive Indulgence in Sensual Pleasures: Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab's Debauchery

After wearing it for more than a month now, I'm convinced that anyone smelling Debauchery on me wouldn't just be surprised to find out it's an oil, but shocked. I won't get into detailing what makes an oil smell like an oil. I'm not sure I could tell you. And I'm not going to argue that a perfume is preferable to a fragrance oil. I don't believe it is. I happen to like good fragrance oils, and some of my favorite Black Pheonix Alchemy Lab scents could never be mistaken as classic perfumery, a distinction which often appeals to me. They're always something different. What's so unusual about Debauchery is that it smells more like classic perfumery than most of the classic perfumes I've gotten my hands on.

The mix includes civet (synthetic), red Egyptian musk, and opium, but I find it hard to believe there isn't more in there. Black Phoenix oils tend to be pretty complex--or appear to be. They do typically go through various stages, so much so that many reviewers break their assessments down into three categories: in the bottle, wet on the skin, dry on the skin. That's another way of saying top, heart, and base, though the stages play out at different rates. I point all this out because, while it's been my experience that the BPAL oils change a lot as they wear, they aren't exactly shape-shifters. For the most part, they don't start out dog and end up cat.

Not so Debauchery. In the bottle, Debauchery is strictly your "Who farted?" one-liner. I've never smelled such a dose of civet, and I've smelled--and love--Mona di Orio's Nuit Noir, the animalic thrust of which divides people like a brick wall. Debauchery is powerful stuff at first, as if all its component parts were clenched tightly into...a fist. The moment you put it on, everything starts to relax, eventually softening into an unusually sublime wear. Debauchery smells vaguely floral, slightly animalic, musky, even a bit powdery, though by a bit I mean so faintly you'd have trouble putting your finger on why.

It smells to me like what I expect the old-timers will when I finally get my hands on them. I'm often disappointed with those. I won't name names. And it's not always due to reformulation. Debauchery delivers on their promise. I think the fragrance it comes closest to in its dry down is Paco Rabanne's discontinued La Nuit. To give you an idea of La Nuit's character, I offer the following anecdote. I once put some on a friend before we left for the evening. It was summer and we could smell the stuff radiating from her body all night. We stumbled back very late, worn out from walking and sweating and various other nocturnal activities. Not everyone thought La Nuit smelled divine. My friend was attacked by a usually placid chihuahua on our way home. She bent down to pet it after permission and encouragement from the owner. The dog lunged at her as if it had been surprised out of its slumber by a ferocious wild animal baring its fangs, and probably would have torn into her had he or she not been restrained by a leash. Nice little doggy became, in a flash, wolf in sheep's clothing. The owner was shocked silly. He'd never seen anything like it. Neither had we.

By classic, I mean French, and by French I don't just mean French perfumery but French films, French men and women, a stroll along the Seine, a sudden confrontation with the Arc de Triomph after an unexpected turn onto the Champs-Elysees, strong coffee, the rhythmic pull of the language blanketing the air around a American visitor's ear. French iconography, let's say. More than anything I picture that famous image by Robert Doisneau, Le Baiser de l'Hotel de Ville. Nevermind that the image has become something of a cliche representing romantic ideas of Paris. Take any Doisneau photograph, really, like the one above. Debauchery captures that mood for me. The name gives fair warning of the opening. What it doesn't indicate is how fantastic the rest of the experience is.

Black Annis

I've fallen so hard for so many of the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab fragrance oils that it will take me at east a month to really dig into the nature of their appeal. It's a curious line, and I'm sure more than a few fragrance lovers have dismissed them out of hand. How do you classify what they're doing? The volume of their product inevitably seems suspect. The oils themselves often smell crude in the bottle, giving very little if any indication what stories they'll tell on the skin. The image is decidedly Goth, and those who don't view that sub-culture as a harmless, even quaint relic of pre-internet suburban disconnection suspect that its exclusivity isn't imposed but self-ordained, implying an active hostility toward outsiders. For various reasons, Black Phoenix is approached with a preconceived set of dismissals, a phenomenon which can be felt on makeupalley, the pink hues and girly splendor of which would seem diametrically opposed to BPAL's sensibility, like the jock's girlfriend bewildered by a goth peer's heavy eyeliner.

Go to the Black Phoenix forum and you get a totally different impression. Every BPAL release is discussed there, sometimes passionately, often heatedly. Far from sycophantic, the reviews display a wealth of opinion which quickly dispels the stereotype of the Goth as conforming nonconformist. The people who (sometimes lazily) get grouped under Goth aren't a select few--but as author Poppy Brite might tell you, they're a fantastic audience, often as discerning, committed, and articulate as the majority is fickle and indifferent. Part of what bonds them together is the ability to look beneath surface impressions. One way of looking at heavy black eyeliner is to view it as a shorthand. Dismissing the person underneath without going much deeper saves the wearer a lot of time.

But this is all sort of philosophical, suggesting that the Goth sensibility is purely cosmetic and, ironically, superficial, a theoretical exercise. Another way of looking at black eyeliner is: it's gorgeous. Bands like This Mortal Coil aren't thesis papers. They make fantastic music, rich in sensory detail, a sonic gift to the listener. To say they're not for everyone is kind of beside the point, really. As much as I love so many BPAL scents, there are those I can't get behind (March Hare comes to mind). What exactly is for everyone? Certainly not Black Annis, and I won't waste time trying to convince fans of the department store fruity floral to give it a whirl (instead, I recommend Jezebel or Sacred Whore of Babylon) but I do want to bring it to the attention of those who might just truly love it, as I do.

Black Annis is as interesting as just about anything I've smelled from a niche line. Maybe more so. Its challenges are more viscerally palpable than those supposedly presented by more widely known fragrances like Oud 27, Pathcouli 24, Boadicea Complex, Parfum d'Habit, and Rien, to name just a handful off the top of my head, while, for all that, going nowhere near the assault which is Secretions Magnifiques. Black Annis takes something of an adjustment. Like the majority of BPAL fragrances, the smell given off of the bottle is no real indication of where this scent will go; likewise, the list of notes. Try to wrap your mind around damp cave lichen, vetiver, civet, and annis. The combination is something you can only really experience.

On skin, the initial impression isn't much easier to describe. What starts to emerge for me immediately is a fantastic interplay of opposites, what I call barnyard gourmand. I get chocolate and hay, particularly, with a leathery anise chaser. In the spirit of concision, the nearest analogues to this effect are Heeley's Cuir Pleine Fleur and Molinard's Habanita. Black Annis is at first much darker than the former, but they dovetail at certain stages of development, chiefly around this sweetened hay aroma. Habanita is powdery par none, but it too adjusts more gourmand influences with something smokier, resulting in a peculiar density unique to these two scents. After a heady intro, Black Annis softens down to something above a skin scent. Not all of BPAL's fragrances do. Many retain that early vigor.

Though there are comparisons to be made, I've never smelled anything quite like Black Annis. The first several times I smelled it I alternated between disliking it and loving it. Mostly I disliked it. I think that's because it doesn't operate the way most fragrances do, the way I'm conditioned to believe they should. I wasn't looking past the black eyeliner, maybe. I highly recommend getting to know this stuff. All of the BPAL oils come in 5ml apothecary bottles and can be ordered from the website. They're also available as testers.

Four Things I've Been Wearing Lately

Hermes Caleche

Yes, it has that weird, Godzilla synthetic vetiver all the older perfumes have been "updated" with, and it smells a little cleaner than it once did, but I liked it enough to buy a small bottle of soie de parfum. An at first sharper, then mellower floral aldehyde than another favorite, Lancome Arpege (which also has the vetiver in question). Caleche dries down to a warm, subtle but persistent skin scent. Once contained oakmoss, which isn't listed on the box I own. An interesting example of a masculine aldehyde: soapy and robust, then golden-hued and langorous.

Estee Lauder Youth Dew Amber Nude

Like a ghost twin of the original, this Tom Ford-directed flanker to the flagship Lauder fragrance is a sheerer version, spectral by comparison, yet without feeling watered down or otherwise diluted. I was excited to find it in the Duty Free at the Milano airport, in the Lauder section, though Lauder doesn't sell it or stock it anymore elsewhere. The bottle updates its ancestor as well. Amber Nude is boozier than Youth Dew, subtracting some of the balsamic heft which can make YD smell so baroquely excessive on the skin. I prefer the original, as it projects the impression its wearer harbors interesting secrets. But Amber Nude is a nice, refreshingly uncomplicated alternative.

Clinique Wrappings

Oh how I love this stuff. An old reliable for Clinique, sold only during the holidays in the United States. In Europe, it's sold year round. Bracingly green, it comes on like a morning in the woods, cold enough that your breath fogs. Technically a floral aldehyde, it smells very little like one, submerging rose, hyacinth and orris under a carpet of artemisia, lavender, mace, and cedar. The pyramid lists leather, patchouli, and a marine note. I get none of these, which isn't to say they aren't there, just that they're very well integrated. I'd like to know who created it.

Mona di Orio Nuit de Niore

Smelling this, I feel protective, like the drama queen who famously ranted and wailed against Britney's detractors on youtube. Leave Mona ALONE. This reminds me of Bal a Versailles, old and new, but mostly old, thanks to the civet. Nuit lasts, is by turns alarmingly strange and wondrously addictive, is weirdly maligned, and yet people do love Mona's fragrances. Once, in Portland's Perfume House, a woman came in off the street and after smelling Arabie for the first time said she hadn't experienced anything that wonderful since Oiro. The guys at Aedes in NYC sold her on a bottle, and describing it to me her eyes rolled back into her head. I didn't understand this when I first smelled Oiro, months later. But I sprayed some on and went to a movie, and halfway through, I fell in love with the little spot on my hand where I'd sprayed it. Mona's fragrances develop like no other I know. They actually have stages. They're moody little things, deepening on the skin in complicated Escher-like patterns. It's hard to see where they're taking you when you first set out with them. The trend in contemporary fragrance, oft-noted, is geared toward the first ten minutes, a hard sell in the top notes, and chaotic banality in the dry down, such that there is one. Nuit works in direct opposition to this. It doesn't bullshit you. It doesn't pander. It takes its time, and patience pays off in dividends. Supposedly, Aedes has stopped carrying the line, making it even harder to come by in the states. Perhaps the guys behind the counter got tired of batting their heads against a brick wall.