Dandy of the Day

This young man, in our humble but, you should know, widely esteemed opinion, is wearing a cologne which hasn't been invented yet.

Overrated, Underrated

More than a few people have noted a passing resemblance between Chanel Allure Sensuelle and Tom Ford Black Orchid. Both follow a recent trend in feminine perfumery, mixing a floral up top with a grunge accord at the bottom, albeit to varying degrees of success. Both have a candied decadence to them. Both dropped the same year. However, Black Orchid gets all the love, while Sensuelle, which must carry the weight of Coco Chanel on its shoulders, is treated as the ugly step-child.

Let’s be clear: Allure Sensuelle is no Chanel No. 5—but neither is Black Orchid. And while Allure Sensuelle has mastermind Jacques Polge behind it, Black Orchid…doesn’t. Like the new and old versions of Rive Gauche, the two intersect, smelling more like each other at certain points during their respective developments, then less. Both arguably unisex, Black Orchid has the advantage of Tom Ford’s blurred lines behind it, whereas Chanel sells to the gender segregationist set, and therefore plays to half its potential audience.

Despite the bluster of its campaign, signaled by the phallic, rectangular bottle (a bit like Mildred Pierce in her square-shouldered furs) Black Orchid never quite pulls it off. From the moment you spray it on, you can see it has big plans. It screams get out of the way in a coarse baritone vibrato. For the first five or ten minutes it's running off at the mouth, boasting so assertively that you trust it has something to say. It does and it doesn’t. The construction of Black Orchid is comparable to one of those old Rube Goldberg contraptions. In order for the little silver ball to end up in the bucket, everything must be perfectly conceived and constructed. The metal rails must be pitched the right way, lest the ball lose momentum before it hits its mark. The wooden lever that ball is meant to drop on, which will then hit the stick which holds the rubber fist, which will then slam against the button which releases the trap door, and the ball, so it can roll along its merry way, must be flexible enough. You look at a Rube Goldberg construction and it seems fine, everything looks great, until you try it out, at which point it either operates beautifully or things fall apart. Black Orchid is pitched a little too sharply. Certain chutes and ladders have been angled ever so slightly the wrong way, but you don’t know it until you’re rolling along all those rails. The proportions are wrong. You can see the image you’re meant to watch, under sheets of zigzagging static, or you think you can—but whoever tried to fix the picture slammed the side of the TV, rather than taking the time to adjust the knobs.

The heart of the fragrance lingers in gorgeous, twilit territory, where the flowers are nicely complicated, as if turning the lights down low made it as hard to smell as see, and a vivid, earthen woodiness reminds you the ground is underfoot. There’s even a tangy zest somewhere in there—turning the aromatic pungency of a fougere on its head. Wild Orchid lingers, pretending to relax, but only briefly, and the bluster of the opening notes resumes. This is a busy fragrance—places to go, people to see—off it rushes again. That would be fine, were it rushing somewhere half as interesting as the place it’s evacuating. The next thing you know, it’s stuffing its face with food, so furiously that you’d be hard pressed to say what’s on the menu.

Black Orchid’s intentions are fairly clear, and that’s probably a large part of its problem. From the ads and the hype you know what it’s meant to be: a bold, starkly etched fragrance reminiscent of those the great houses once released with the fanfare of the first walk on the moon. And it is reminiscent—like Jessica Rabbit is reminiscent of Rita Hayworth. In order to understand Black Orchid you must hold it up to the classics, and of course it comes off like a caricature. A shame, really, as it isn’t bad—or even mediocre.

The heart of Allure Sensuelle never quite achieves the magic of Black Orchid’s brief, hallucinatory moment of beauty. Arguably more linear, it is a consistent performer. It has some of Black Orchid’s tang but holds on to it until it figures out how to use it. It has the incense on bottom, along with patchouli and vanilla in place of truffle. It’s remarkably similar, but feels confident it has nothing to prove. Someone please tell this fragrance it’s a Chanel. Clearly it didn’t get that memo, which is where its own troubles began. Like Guerlain, the house of Chanel is on thin ice: will it mess with the perfection of its old reliables? Will it continue to produce the kind of quality women the world over have come to expect? Well, yes and no, in no certain order.
Had Allure Sensuelle been release by one of the niche lines this would be a moot issue. It’s a perfectly respectable, even lovely perfume. It draws from various currents of modern perfumery to show the others how it’s done. People expect innovation from Chanel—perhaps unfairly. So a mother lode of aldehydes were dumped into No. 5. So Cuir de Russie is the most exquisite embodiment of luxury between Planet Earth and Pluto. Why must every Chanel fragrance which doesn’t have the good fortune to be a miracle have to be considered a miserable step in the wrong direction?
Allure Sensuelle has its strengths. Its use of vetiver is accomplished and unusual for a feminine perfume, handled with considerable sensitivity to overall development. It has just the right amount of peppery dissonance, is burnished just so with the solar heat of frankincense. It lasts. It is aptly named, managing to achieve an interesting balance between salty and sweet, floral and oriental. It is arguably more androgynous than Black Orchid, and when a man smells it on a woman, he might just be taken aback by unexpected, unfamiliar urges and impulses.
If anything, Chanel must be faulted for its laziness in building a palpable sense of identity around Allure Sensuelle. A simple comparison between the genius of Ford’s creative direction (Black Orchid: vintage glamor, decadent impulses) and Chanel’s proposed fantasy (Allure Sensuelle: exactly…what…exactly when…exactly where and how?) makes clear Allure Sensuelle's true failure.
All the same, you could do much, much worse—in or outside of Chanel.

Will Estee Lauder turn the tide with Sensuous?

I bought a bottle of Sensuous last week. I had no choice. All the perfume blogs were giving Sensuous high marks and describing the fragrance as (paraphrasing here) a “warm, fluid river of wood”….it sounded right up my alley.

So, as I mentioned, I bought it, unsniffed. Sensuous is nice. It’s by no means a “warm, fluid river of wood,” though. I’d describe it as a smooth vanillic fragrance with an ever-so-subtle hint of wood that wears close to the skin. Sensuous smells good, rather more sweet than I expected but it’s a decent fragrance.

What does excite me about Sensuous and also makes me proud of Estee Lauder is that Sensuous is a departure from the now reigning fruity florals (think Del Monte mixed fruit cocktail with syrup in a can) that have dominated the perfume industry for the past decade.

I think Sensuous will be a hit, and I also think it will turn the tide and create loads of copycats churning out their versions of “fluid rivers of wood.” Sensuous could be similar to Thierry Mugler’s Angel, which created a whole new scent category and many copycats. Whether you love or hate Angel, you must admit that it was a phenomenally bold and fascinating fragrance with tremendous success. Everyone knows someone who wears Angel.

So, I applaud Estee Lauder for creating Sensuous. It’s a mainstream, inexpensive fragrance that even perfume snobs might admit to liking. Now for me, I’ll be waiting for Estee Lauder to launch “Sensuous Extreme” or “Sensuous Night,” something less sweet and drier with a lot more wood.

What are you thoughts? Agree, disagree? Do tell....

Update: 10 minutes after posting this it dawned on me what I was expecting Sensuous to smell like. Jo Malone's Dark Amber & Ginger Lily. For Jo Malone, I think Dark Amber is a rather brave departure, too. I've found that I really like it. Given that it's 3:10 AM I think I'll give Jo Malone's Dark Amber a spritz and head to bed. ;-)

Four Your Consideration: Making Faces

Lately, the perfume blogs have been atwitter with feverish speculation about the possibility of Emma Watson, aka Hermione Granger of Harry Potter fame, being selected as the new face of Chanel's Coco Mademoiselle.

Was it true? Would she be the right choice? Was she a deserving receptacle of the brand's illustrious name?

Too young? Too old? Too slutty? Not slutty enough? Cheeky little thing, some complained. The very nerve. Look how her shoulders slouched under the weight of those Chanel dresses she's lately been making appearances wearing, or were they wearing her, as some would suggest?

It turns out not to have been true, and we at the offices of I Smell Therefore I Am breathe a heavy sigh of relief--not because we feel young Emma would be an inappropriate choice for what is surely one of the most important decisions in the world of fragrance, let alone the world at large, but because we simply no longer have to pretend to care.

We understand how essential it is to find a face one can relate to (and by one we mean every one, and by every one we mean every last one). Even the super popular, internationally famous Alan Cumming couldn't sell perfume--not even his own perfume. Selecting the right face is of utmost importance and requires much thought. We understand. Really, though: must we always have the usual suspects? Must we draw the box ourselves three blocks over from the people in the perfume industry in order for them to think outside it?

Here are our humble suggestions, after hours--days, even--of thought and polling and board meetings. We've reached a consensus on a quartet of faces we think might sell perfume in an innovative, arresting way.

Number one:

Why NOT Tina Fey? Because, think about it: who else can you trust? Tina Fey isn't going to put on airs. Tina Fey won't sell you some skanky scrubber she wouldn't be caught dead in. Tina Fey is going to bring a sense of humor to sex appeal. Let's re-envision the Charlize Theron J'Adore commercial. This is how it rolls. Tina Fey is going to come coasting out of the bathroom with toilet paper stuck to her shoe, with everyone looking at her, loving it. Go ahead. Laugh at her. She'll laugh with you. Actually, she's laughing AT you, because the stooge behind you is making rabbit ears over your head, so who's the ding dong now? We at I Smell Therefore I Am have done our market research, and we can assure you: no one in the world is more everywoman than America's own Ms. Tina Fey. She's every woman and every woman is in her, or something like that. We tested Tina in various markets (in our break room, at the water tank, with the Xerox guy and the girl who delivers our Ruben sandwiches) and have discovered that she would work wonderfully as the face of Dzing! (This smells like cardboard!" she'd whisper hoarsely, albeit seductively, then cough). Or how about Lolita Lempicka (only, please: no faerie tutus and glitter dust. Does she look like Tinkerbell to you?). Or even Stetson Man(the tagline: "You know what? This shite ain't bad! I'D do him. I'd get all turned around and do ME if I had this stuff on. What is this stuff, again?")


Number Two:


Seriously, though. Laura Dern. Dern's face is a real face and tells real stories. She tested through the roof with the guy who caters our card games. Here's the thing. Fine, yes, okay, Nicole Kidman looks great in a gown, but the gown provides most of the drama. Laura Dern is strange and sexy and can act the pants off almost anybody you can think of. That little bottle of perfume is going to leap right off the page into the buyer's hand, and when it does it will be one hot potato. Laura Dern understands intrigue and some twisted, kinky s--t (See Rambling Rose, Blue Velvet, Inland Empire, skip the killer dinosaur movie). She doesn't make herself a canvas for the audience's desire and her director's lust. She paints a picture for you. If Tom Ford is half the innovator he considers himself, he will consider Ms. Dern. Who else would bring the right blinding bright darkness to Black Orchid? Who else can make you wonder whether she'll stab you with the sharp end of that Lalique bottle or, um, pleasure herself with it? Or make you feel naughty for even considering such a thing? This is a complicated woman.

Numbers Three and Four:

If there is something the following men cannot sell, by all means, please let us know. We will eat our words. We will eat your words and the words of your friends and enemies. And don't tell us these two won't sell cologne (or perfume for that matter) simply because you don't know who they are. Nobody knows the guy in the Dolce And Gabbana Light Blue ads, and that juice sells like people are on fire and it's the only thing that can put them out. These guys look like they could get you pregnant just by sitting across from you on the subway.


These are merely suggestions, naturally. But can we please stop talking about Emma Watson now?

Dandy of the Day: Patrick Petitjean

Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you the Ted Kaczynski of contemporary fashion: Patrick Petitjean, aged 25, of France. Patrick is versatile. He is Grizzly Adams, the man on the street who just asked you for a dime (you refused), Godspell revival, and Abe Lincoln. He is man, woman, and wolf, all rolled into one. He crosses and confuses gender boundaries and preconceptions. He's the perfect fashion model, we believe, because you can't look at him without imagining he must smell. He brings fashion down to earth, literally, rubbing it in the dirt. Here are the scents we suggest for Patrick Petitjean:


Kenzo Air: all peppery vetiver and arid grit

Comme des Garcon 2 Man: citrus smoke and a singeing incense vaporousness

Baron, The Gentleman: pungent, ever so slightly dysfunctional lavender

Kolnisch Juchten: charred leather and delicious, pickled wine barrel cork

Body Kouros: a slightly sexualized wrestling match with eucalyptus, and the plant is winning

M7: Look what happened to that glass of Coke you left on the table--for twenty years.

Hermes Equipage: Let's take a ride on my horse's saddle. Please sit on your face.

Knize Ten: Welcome to my studio. Sorry about the smell. I've been cleaning my paintbrushes.

Bond No. 9, Broadway Nite: What did you expect me to smell like--armpit?

Going Green, Part Two: Galbanum

With its penetrating, pine-like top note and slightly bitter, woody base, galbanum makes green pop, as if one of the green chypres had slapped you hard in the face with a chunk of bundled stems. Galbanum is a gum resin derived from certain Persian plant species grown abundantly in Iran. Its large flowering heads resemble those of fennel.

The essential oil has long been well-regarded by occultists. Alistair Crowley associated the aroma's properties with air, though it just as readily evokes earth. Depending on who you consult, galbanum is said to be a respiratory aide and an augment to psychic abilities. Pagan witchcraft regards it as a protectant. Perfumers, themselves alchemists of sorts, use it to add a certain kind of magic to their compositions. Part frankincense, part vetiver, its leafy terpenoid astringency ventilates the pastures of Carven’s Ma Griffe, Cellier’s Vent Vert, Ivoire de Balmain, Pheromone, Devin, Chanel No. 19 and, most spectacularly, Estee Lauder’s Aliage, which is more gale force than languid breeze.

Ivoire would fall on one end of the galbanum spectrum, Aliage on the other, with Pheromone following closely behind. Ivoire uses galbanum subtly, like its aldehydes, as a bolster to its floral accord. The effect is a rose bush surrounded by crisp, dry hay. Where Ivoire is ultimately arid, still, and slightly toasted, Vent Vert glistens, shimmering indefinitely with activity. Think of a lime rind rubbed into geranium leaves and you begin to apprehend Vent Vert’s effervescent character. Considered by some the first green fragrance, Vent Vert has a slightly raw dissonance, in large part due to galbanum. Chanel No. 19 is the adult counterpart to Vent Vert, smooth and transparent, a green floral quietly electrified by the glow of camphor.

Vent Vert and Ivoire arrange themselves parenthetically on either side of Gucci Envy for Women, which is something of a happy compromise between the two. All three share floral notes: hyacinth, rose, lily of the valley. Famously obsessed over by Tom Ford and Maurice Roucel, Envy's tall, slender bottle reflects the fragrance’s intrinsic angularity. Even the silver cap references something icily metallic within the construction. Envy is hard to articulate, and that metal sheen might strike you as a powdery hybrid of synthetic iris and musk, until you recognize the presence of galbanum, which like eucalyptus whiffs of menthol. Envy is a gorgeously understated use of the note, tart and dry simultaneously.

Don't be too quick to dismiss Pheromone. It's something of a galbanum retrospective, with florals and frankincense and pungent, sharp greens. This is chartreuse green, a bright landscape painted on black velvet in bold, broad strokes. The results are just this side of over the top - but hands down, the apogee of galbanum’s use in perfumery, still unmatched and, amazingly, still around, is Aliage. Like Envy its notes include peach, rose and jasmine, but Aliage bursts into coniferous territory Envy cautiously skirts, possessing a sucker punch of pine, thyme, vetiver, and oakmoss. Simulating a virtual reality of flowers shellacked in Vick’s Vapo-Rub, it’s like nothing you’ve ever smelled, and strangely familiar. Aliage is shockingly inexpensive.

Galbanum is mercurial, effecting compositions in subtly different ways. It smells modern, though, along with aldehydes, it was the previous generation’s equivalent to the fruity accords which buoy contemporary florals to varying degrees and towards often vastly different ends. The smell is intensely, viscerally green, smelling of grass and aromatic weeds and herbs. It penetrates your consciousness and roots there, a vivid inhalation of the great Out There.

Because People Like Lists: The Best Summer Perfumes

I know you like lists.

I live where it’s hot and very humid, so unlike the rest of the year, I lean towards light, airy florals, green fragrances, dry spices and energizing citrus scents during summer.

Without further adieu, here are my 28 favorite fragrances for summer in alphabetical order:

Ava Luxe Midnight Violet
Bellodgia by Caron
Beth Terry Creative Universe Mare
Beth Terry Creative Universe Vita
Bond No 9 New Haarlem (note: love this in summer but I wear it all year long)
Bvlgari Green Tea
Dawn Spencer Hurwitz Celadon
Diptyque Oyedo
Frederic Malle Carnal Flower (note: love this in summer but I wear it all year long)
Frederic Malle Le Parfum de Therese (note: love this in summer but I wear it all year long)
Givenchy III
Givenchy Organza Indecence
Hermes 24 Faubourg Eau Delicate
Hermes Eau des Merveilles
Hermes Un Jardin Sur La Nil
Jo Malone French Lime Blossom
Keiko Mecheri Osmanthus
L’Artisan Premier Figuer Extreme (must be Extreme concentration)
Les Parfums de Rosine Un Zeste de Rose
Miller Harris Bourbon Geranium
Provence Sante Tilleul
Sage Machado Onyx
Serge Lutens Fleurs d’Oranger
Serge Lutens Datura Noir
Serge Lutens Iris Silver Mist
Soivohle’ by Liz Zorn, Blood Orange & Vetiver
Soivohle’ by Liz Zorn, Jo Jo
Teo Cabanel Alahine

Do you have any suggestions for me?

Fine and Dandy

Trevor Dandy, 1970s gospel singer extraordinaire (here pictured on the cover of his album "Don't Cry, Little Tree") inaugurates I Smell Therefore I Am's "Dandy of the Day" Poster Boy. We imagine someone of Trevor's refined sensitivity might wear L'Artisan's masterpiece Dzing! He would like Dzing! because it smells of wood and sawdust and smoke and animal, and Trevor, consummate tree hugger, could wrap his mind around that. Trevor might also tend towards Byzance, which is sufficiently baroque, its tuberose incense-laden. The women love Trevor, but not as much as the trees.

vintage perfume ad of the day: Calvin Klein Obsession

He put an Olympian in Times Square, a chiseled statue of muscle in bronze, towering over traffic and pedestrians in his tightie-whities, like a closet queen's dream-perversion of the fifty-foot woman. More recently, he pulled the same trick in Hong Kong, going even larger this time. Calvin Klein's ad campaigns have referenced homemade porn, street junkies, and the convoluted mating rituals of the genetically superior. Of all the eighties lifestyle brands (Perry Ellis, Ralph Lauren, et al), his used Bruce Weber most extensively, making the portly photographer of perfection a household name. Together they made anorexics out of fledgling sissies the world over. The ads for Obsession have been much maligned--the parodies on SNL became more famous than the spots themselves--but they were iconic and influential, permeating culture insidiously. They were exquisitely shot, impeccably coreographed, and totally, deeply silly. This one has something to do with a little boy who might be a girl (Klein's or Weber's remembrance of things past?), pining for the woman he or she might become, an athletic, all-American tomboy played by South-African-born supermodel Josie Borain. In an interview published this month, Borain, one-time CK favorite, offers a window onto the 80's scene for which this Obsession ad serves as something of a time capsule: ‘I remember it was at the peak when Reagan was in power and New York was cooking. Property was riding very high, the financial market was making millions and millions – people didn’t know what to do with their money. There was just so much money all over the place, and some of it trickled over into my pocket...’ The Obsession campaign, right down to the name, captured that moment of narcissism and entitlement perfectly. The ad in question plays out like Greek Tragedy, complete with supermodel chorus and spare, Aristotle-on-the-Parthenon-steps settings. Though its references to underground gay iconography were destined to fly right over the heads of the general viewing public, as with most CK ads the uncomfortable suggestion of something illicitly creepy came through very clearly. Now that Klein's creative control has left the building, we're left with six-packs and prespiration, and just how brilliantly conceived and executed some of this sublimely ridiculous top down design was becomes a little more readily apparent.

A Serge Lutens Which I Despise: A Review

I adore Serge Lutens perfumes. I think Mr. Lutens’ work is in a class by itself. I do believe that Lutens has breathed new life into the world of fragrance. There are many perfumers that try to copy his masterpieces, which seems fine to me, at least he’s given them some new material. I enjoy every single one of Lutens fragrances, except one. The one that I don’t like literally turns my stomach. It’s a scrubber to the point of getting a loofah, sprinkling it with and comet, and tearing my skin off. The one which I despise is Miel de Bois. From the description of Miel de Bois (henceforth MdB) I thought it would be enchanting. MdB is described as a warm, woody composition with a very natural treatment of honey. I found the listed notes and they are as follows: top notes of ebony, gaiac and oak wood, middle notes of honey and base notes of beeswax, iris and hawthorn. Still, it sounds pretty nice, doesn’t it? I spritzed myself with MdB while writing this so I would be close to its natural aroma and not writing from memory. At this moment I am nearly gagging and am rather rushing through this so I can scrub it off. MdB smells like a dank, moldy, cobweb filled, mouse infested, 18^th century basement. The stone foundation is falling in and there’s a great deal of moisture building up in all sorts of dangerous spots. A house with a basement like this isn’t safe. I’m surprised it isn’t condemned yet. This house is at the end of the cul-de-sac and an elderly lady has lived here alone 15 years. Family or friends never visit. She’s rarely seen outside of the house. The exterior paint is peeling off in clumps, like a snake shedding it’s skin, and the local painters have long since stopped leaving their cards in her mailbox. Nobody in the neighborhood recalls having been inside the house, but if you’d ask the neighbors they’d say she has at least 20 cats, many feral, and they imagine the house smells thickly of cat urine. You might ask the neighbors why they don’t step in, offer to help this old woman who is elderly and obviously can’t take care of her property, and the neighbors just shrug and mumble something about the curse.

MdB is a curse. Try it if you’re curious. Perhaps you’ll like it. I imagine that someone who adores CB I Hate Perfume Black March might like MdB. To give Mr. Lutens some props for his ghastly creation, I will say that MdB smells like real honey. Not an imaginary clover-sweet fantasy version of honey, but what honey truly smells like if you came upon a bees nest in the woods. So, I’m sure Lutens nailed it, the true essence of honey, and laid this dank, nasty smell upon a bed of a fallen down rotting trees, next to a squirrel with rigor mortis set in, adjacent to some soggy decomposing leaves in late November.

I haven’t eaten honey since smelling MdB.

I’m off to scrub my arm.