Youth Dew Gets A(nother) Face Lift

Recently, I've been exchanging emails with Elena over at Perfume Shrine about a series of mysteries revolving around Youth Dew and its somewhat unknown related iterations, all of which were released during a little blip on the Lauder screen in the mid seventies. It's been fun playing detectives - the fragrances have come and gone, so it's all harmless mystery. Things get a little more serious, I learned, when a more established fragrance is forced into what is considered by its die hard fans a weird sort of early retirement. I'm speaking of the latest Youth Dew reformulation, but I'll get to that.

In 1977, Estee Lauder released Soft Youth Dew, a flanker to her flagship fragrance. At least, I think she did. Pick a day, any day, and run a search on Ebay for Soft Youth Dew. All you're ever likely to find are half ounce gift with purchase bottles. It's almost as if the fragrance was put on a giveaway trial run and quickly considered ill-advised, without ever actually being put on sale. Stranger still, when I did find something other than a half ounce bottle of Soft Youth Dew, it was a vintage tester bottle. The juice in that tester bottle smells very little like the Soft Youth Dew contained in the half ounce bottles, several of which I've smelled. It's much closer to Youth Dew proper, with a hand extending firmly toward Cinnabar.

Cinnabar was released a year after Soft Youth Dew, and the bottle it comes in hasn't changed much over the years. What has changed is the cap, and the name. Soon after the appearance of Soft Youth Dew, Cinnabar was introduced under the title "Cinnabar, Soft Youth Dew Fragrance". The cap for the earliest spray bottles of Cinnabar is identical, except in color, to the cap on my Soft Youth Dew tester bottle. Viewing these together was the first time I'd thought about a direct, explicit connection between Youth Dew and Cinnabar. When you remove Cinnabar's cap, you see that the bottle looks very much like the original bath oil and cologne flacons for Youth Dew. Many people have commented on a connection between the fragrances, but that has always been a perceived connection, based on ingredients and standards of classification. Those earliest bottles for Soft Youth Dew and Cinnabar, as well as the commingling of their names, makes their intrinsic connection crystal clear.

Also clear: Lauder had no apparent problem with a connection being made. Either way, she would succeed: Cinnabar might, on the one hand, trade on the success and lineage of Youth Dew; on the other, it might break new ground as something quite different, for those who didn't really fancy Youth Dew much. Soft Youth Dew disappeared. Youth Dew and Cinnabar prevailed, the latter presenting some formidable competition for Opium, a similar oriental released the year before.

Elena pointed out to me the possibility or probability that Lauder and Yves Saint Laurent might have been in competition over the choice of Opium's inro style tasseled bottle. Had Lauder won, the strategy for Cinnabar's marketing might have been different. Opium, of course, won, but Lauder clearly next bested Yves, choosing a name for her oriental which embodied inro without having to shape itself as one. There was a bit of been there done that to Lauder's decision in packaging Cinnabar anyway. For years she'd been presenting solids of her fragrances in decorative compartments one could attach to a dangling chain. Essentially, as Elena pointed out, the inro-themed idea was first hers. Besides which: While Opium was a provocative name, Cinnabar was a richly evocative one, whose associations reverberated in the consumer's imagination, as opposed perhaps to simply scandalizing or titillating it.

Soft Youth Dew and Cinnabar/Soft Youth Dew Fragrance weren't the first times an Estee Lauder fragrance appeared and disappeared in short order. Soft Youth Dew competed with Lauder's own trio of fragrances: Pavilion, Celadon, and White Linen, one of which will sound very familiar to you, two of which you've possibly never heard. It wasn't the last time the Youth Dew franchise was openly toyed around with, either: years later, Youth Dew Amber Nude was there, then not.

In between all these up front conceptual tinkerings have been behind closed doors tweaks and adjustments - and not just of Youth Dew but of all the Lauder scents. Almost everyone realizes that Youth Dew has changed at least a little over the years. The animalics it originally contained had long since been removed a year ago or less (or more), when the fragrance changed more than ever before. Until this latest change, Youth Dew die hards remained content(-ish). The juice remained that nice dark balsamic brown. Its oils pooled luxuriantly on the skin. Its smell contained a thousand childhoods, and motherhoods, a menagerie of memories and remembered moods.

Want to see a shit-storm? Visit the Lauder page and peruse the customer reviews for Youth Dew. Notice that around this time last year, the objections began. They haven't stopped since. "This is not my Youth Dew," wrote YouthDewGirl, age 55-64, El Cajon, California. "I do not know what Estee Lauder has done to this fragrance but it is terrible now... Bring the old Youth Dew back again!"

"The new generation will never know what they have missed," according to Mother01, age 55-64, Elkton. "They will try the new version and move on, because it is nothing special now. The original scent was used by four generations of women in my family."

You get the picture. So do they. This litany of objections, as several note in the "reviews", demonstrates how savvy the loyal consumer is. The Lauder lady at the counter will tell them nothing has changed, just as I was told yesterday at the mall, but the longtime Lauder buyer smells rat. In a sense, Elena and I have been, in the last few weeks, enacting our own version of this online commiseration, comparing our impressions and theories about Soft Youth Dew and Cinnabar and their relationship to Youth Dew original, testing personal perceptions against those of a peer.

For us, it's innocent sleuthing. To the Youth Dew Loyalist, changes to the formula are a far less entertaining affair. For the Lauder brand, this breach of contract with the consumer is serious business indeed, and if the reviewers honor their word, the company will realize they only thought they knew what a slump in sales truly meant. Reading these reviews I thought, don't mess with loyalty. Then too, I thought that anyone who's ever gotten into an argument with a woman of a certain age should know better than to try to pull the rug out from under one. Tell her you're selling insurance out of Cambodia and need to dip into her pension, maybe, but messing with her fragrance is folly.

Still, I thought, how bad could it be? So I went and smelled it.

I don't think it is bad. In fact, I like it. It's a fine fragrance, better than most, on its own terms. The problem is that Youth Dew can't be separated from its own terms: that's a lesson Lauder might have learned herself with early Cinnabar and Soft Youth Dew, and it's a lesson Tom Ford must have surely learned the hard way with Amber Nude. As the Lauder sales associate told me yesterday, the biggest obstacle for Amber Nude was the fact that no one seemed to be able to figure out it wasn't meant to REPLACE Youth Dew. Thus the constant refrain: What happened to my Youth Dew? Hard to sell a flanker when it sits between the original and its loyalist.

The feelings for and against Youth Dew are strong enough that no side really wants to see something slightly different. Take it or leave it, yes. Six or half a dozen, not so much. "Everything that made Estee Lauder's original fragrance so unforgettable is still here," read the ads for Soft Youth Dew. "It's all just a little s-o-f-t-e-r." Apparently, not soft enough, or too soft altogether when it comes to lovers and haters of the original.

The newest Youth Dew is more leathery to me. It still comes in the Body Satinee, the cream, the dusting powder, the bath oil, the deodorant (head scratcher, that one). All are arguably just as penetrating as Youth Dew's ever been, in any concentration. The oil won't be pooling, but the fragrance sticks around. No more cola colored contents. No more deep, dark, recesses of the earth balsamic structure. It can hardly be said that this Youth Dew is younger, or hipper, less stately than Youth Dews past, so it's hard to believe the changes have been an effort to win new consumers. It's a woody oriental, with less floral decadence than it once, even recently, had. Stealth woody orientals aren't selling like hotcakes, last time I checked.

This version, in fact, reminds me more of an exercise like Amber Nude and Soft Youth Dew than it does a reformulation. In effect, in all but name, a flanker. In some ways it reminds me of the reformulated Magie Noire's relationship to its original. It remains, however dark and oriental, surface bound somehow, lacking that weird vintage resonance. Still, for me, if not for the Lauder website reviewer, it's unmistakably Youth Dew - and latest Youth Dew's version of surface is still far deeper than the majority of contemporary fragrances.

It's interesting to consider what Lauder, still living, might have made of all this - let alone to ponder whether she would have allowed it in the first place. I like to think she learned some kind of lesson with Soft Youth Dew and Cinnabar, though I don't know just what that would be. In truth, her handling of those two related fragrances, however superficially confusing, was done intelligently enough that no existing fragrance was compromised, no established name muddled. It's hard to imagine Estee, who spent so many years building her empire, woman by woman, relationship by relationship, countenancing this kind of maneuver, which amounts to betrayal in the eyes of many of those women. Better to have let Youth Dew die, she might have thought.

Which is exactly what the ladies on Lauder's website are saying.

(Pictured: the changing face of Youth Dew - from Youth Dew to Cinnabar and everywhere in between. Top photo: Cinnabar, Soft Youth Dew Fragrance. Second down: Tester bottle for Soft Youth Dew. Third down: Early bottle for Cinnabar. Fourth down: Early Youth Dew cologne bottle. Fifth down: Magazine ad for Soft Youth Dew. Sixth down: A hybrid Cinnabar/Youth Dew/Soft Youth Dew bottle, with Youth Dew's silhouette, Soft Youth Dew's name, and Cinnabar's branding.)

Rarities: Coty Amaranthe

In 1969, Dina Merrill, until then regarded as a socialite turned model/actress, created a line of cosmetics in association with Coty under the name Amaranthe. Merrill's father was E.F. Hutton (When he talked, people listened). Her mother was cereal heir Marjorie Merriwether Post. During Merrill's childhood, her mother convinced her father to buy out Birds Eye frozen foods. He resisted, thinking frozen foods were a fad with a short shelf life. She insisted, pointing out that shelf life was immaterial when it came to frozen foods, and their fortunes significantly metastasized. Their company eventually became General Foods. You've probably eaten more than a few General Foods products, so you can imagine how wealthy Merrill's family was. Along with that fortune, Merrill inherited her mother's headstrong business sense, making her a logical choice for Coty.

She wasn't simply the name behind Amaranthe, the way Jennfier Lopez and any number of celebrities put their names on beauty products now. Running a company was in her blood. Coty had been bought out by Pfizer in 1963, and was going through the kind of seismic changes representative of the cosmetics industry at large. Those changes required different directions, territory most recently, at the time, epitomized by Revlon. In 1956, Charles Revson had the wisdom to bring Princess Borghese's cosmetics line into his company's portfolio. Borghese was real life Italian royalty and her cosmetics were known in her country as "family secret recipes". My family's secret recipes involve cookies, but the rich roll differently, and the buying public has always been fascinated, to the point of mimicry, with the rich, which might be why cookies cost a fraction of the price on a tube of a royal's lipstick.

Revlon's move wasn't an unmotivated stroke of genius. All of the cosmetics companies were losing ground to Estee Lauder, whose higher price points and limited distribution strategies had changed the playing field. Revlon competed through its Borghese acquisition. Faberge launched the Juliette Marglen division. Max Factor purchased the already established Alexandra de Markoff line. Perfumes and cosmetics had long been endorsed by celebrities, but Lauder was something different, a sort of homespun in-the-know, hands-on magnate - what the British might call a Battle Axe, with flawless make-up on - and the success of her persona forced her competitors to rethink their market profiles - drafting not just endorsements but self styled "creator pioneers".

Dina Merrill wasn't Italian royalty but she was a pretty close stateside approximation, and more than Borghese she touched upon the all-American appeal of Estee Lauder. She supervised the Amaranthe line until the mid -70's, when it folded. In a People magazine article from 1980 she mentioned her frustration with the way department stores allotted floor space to cosmetics companies, calling their practices corrupt. You have to imagine she was referring in a veiled way to Lauder, who, to this day, has the kind of focused presence in department stores that Coty and Revlon can only dream of. While Coty has plenty of celebrity scents represented at the mall, you're just as likely to see its product at Walgreen's, whereas Lauder has, after all these years, maintained its uniquely exclusive, independent counter presence at Macy's and its ilk (not just through Lauder proper but through Clinique, another kind of main street apothecary-in-the-mall brainchild). Lauder had taken the model of the door to door Avon saleswoman - a neighborhood friend bearing tips and trends - and transplanted that living room experience into high end, high volume brick and mortar sales figures.

Merrill's official story differed from Lauder's in the sense she had no real "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" appeal; yet the women shared a unique persona, that of perfectly coiffed business sense steeliness. Ultimately, Merrill might have been the wrong kind of move for Coty in this chess game with Lauder. Like Grace Kelly, Merrill was perceived as a bit of an ice princess shiksa by the American public, with none of Lauder's underdog brunette chutzpah - admirable, but not exactly relatable.

Business sense doesn't necessarily imply audacity, but it did for Lauder, who was perceived in many ways as the woman next door with bright ideas and no nonsense advice. She wasn't above getting her hands dirty, which is a little different than a socialite sitting on the board of directors, high up on a corporate penthouse floor. In all the stories about Lauder you can imagine the feisty click of her fast moving heels. Merrill's are muffled by plush carpet. These aren't nearly the truths of the matter, but Lauder, famously elastic with the truth, knew better than anyone that the buying public didn't go by truth but by appearances, and Merrill's public persona was a lot more patricianly effete.

Amaranthe released one fragrance of the same name, and however lovely, it too was a bit ill-judged. Hate them or love them (I love them), Lauder's fragrances match her persona - strong willed, full of presence and drama, a little bossy, a little intrusive. Even Soft Youth Dew - until then, about the softest Lauder fragrances got - was more shrieking than shrinking violet. It wasn't really until the -90's that Lauder produced anything even remotely resembling something other than bombastic, and it's arguable that even Pleasures and White Linen Breeze had the kind of stealth you could never really misconstrue as anything other than robust.

At the time of its release, Amaranthe had Estee, Youth Dew, and Azuree to compete with in the Lauder line-up. Those fragrances, even then, were slightly old fashioned - high drama balsamic, aldehyde and leather constructions. Amaranthe was old fashioned in a different way - probably closer to Coty's 1913 Muguet de Bois than anything more up-to-date in the brand's fragrance profile. Yet it was hardly outdated, unlike Lauder's output at the time maybe, and in fact more forward thinking, adding to its muguet theme a bright peachy succulence. It thought ahead to the kind of fragrance which is practically ubiquitous today, upbeat and unassuming, but executed it with far more class. Put the name Ralph Lauren on the bottle and it would sell respectably in today's marketplace, I imagine. Amaranthe isn't exactly squeaky clean, though I smell nothing anywhere near animalic in it - but far more than anything Lauder or Borghese produced, it was bright and more arguably classically all-American. It was more mid -50's than late -60's probably, but hardly -30's and -40's like, say, Lauder's bestsellers.

There's nothing even faintly sensual about Amaranthe; nothing close to dramatic. Which isn't to say it isn't wonderful. However familiar in its parts, the whole is something I can't remember smelling before the mid-nineties. Knowing anything about Merrill's persona, it's hard to imagine her approving anything else. Amaranthe is perfectly engineered to express her known cinematic qualities - more blonde than brunette, more reserved than showy, reassuring rather than provocative. In addition to the muguet and its counterpart peach theme, Amaranthe has something subtly lactonic going on. I would call it golden milky, a quality its bottle and packaging somehow reinforce.

The shape of the larger bottle resembled a peach, forcing you to hold it as you would that fruit. Its glass extends this impression further, covered in a rubbery tactile material, showing the "juice" inside - half brandy, half sunshine in color. There's the subtlest trace of high end liqueur in it, as well as whiffs of rose and jasmine, but it steers clear of deep woods and white floral indoles. It isn't in the least declarative. It's what you imagined you might smell if you got close to the face of -50's mainstays like Doris Day and, obviously, Dina Merrill herself, the peachy, good natured cleanliness America wants to believe emanates from the rosy cheeks of its young women. The bosom was left to Lauder, and the success of her fragrances, and the relative failure of Amaranthe, suggests that, however in love with the ideal of a clean-scrubbed face America was, it inevitably stooped to cleavage.

Amaranthe is almost impossible to find now. I found a bottle like the one pictured above on Ebay, reasonably priced.

Miss Habanita: Dark in Broad Daylight

If you've only smelled the reformulation of Molinard's Miss Habanita and been led to believe it has little or no connection to its reason for being, good old smoky Habanita, it's perfectly understandable - and I feel sorry for you. Here's a good, if kind of tragic, example of a careless reformulation, where everything interesting and even remotely complicated has been altogether removed from the fragrance as initially conceived. And for what? It's hard to imagine the current version of Miss Habanita selling any better in the present marketplace than what it replaced might have.

Released in 1994, over 70 years after the release of Habanita, original Miss Habanita is one of my favorites, and the two relate to each other in fascinating ways. Miss Habanita, these days, is a densely sugared white musk affair, chokingly sweet, depressingly banal for something so relentlessly perky. Its fruits are neon jammy, and the neon is right up in your grille. Fruits have been done better, frankly, and original Miss Habanita is still around here and there on Ebay to prove it.

Classified as a fruity chypre, its take on fruit recalls Nina Ricci's Deci Dela, by Jean Guichard, which was released the same year. Deci Dela and Miss Habanita are very similar in their use of steeped fruits over a drier than dry base of oakmoss. This isn't cheery, life affirming succulence. It's darker than that; more earthy. While we're all waxing poetic over our romantic ideas about oakmoss, let's remind ourselves how the Egyptians viewed it. As Edwin T. Morris mentions in Fragrance: The Story of Perfume from Cleopatra to Chanel, it was once an essential part of the embalming process. Egyptians stuffed the cavities of eviscerated corpses with it, preparing for burial and the afterlife. Then as now, it was a good fixative; its antimicrobial properties "serving admirably in the mummifying process". When some people smell oakmoss and say it reminds them of something damp and musty, they're not too far off the mark.

Pretty elemental stuff - as opposed to, say, something slightly smooth and sweet which used to be in a lot of fragrances in much larger quantities. Vis a vis Miss Habanita, let's put it another way: someone took the peach off Mattisse's table, where it fit in with the contrived color scheme, and threw it out in the yard, where time's gotten to it and reminded you that a painting, like mummification, freezes things into a lie. The fragrance sits comfortably somewhere between compote and compost. Original Miss Habanita was a late stage reminder that at one point perfumery had as much to do with the unknown and the unsettling as smelling fancy or clean. Miss Habanita has a little weirdness and mystique in it, mixing the beautiful with the ever so slightly macabre. Listen, don't get me wrong. Miss Habanita isn't that dark. But we've gotten so used to FRUITY FLORAL meaning something much brighter and perkier and airheaded that a recalibration might be necessary before approaching what that used to mean.

Miss Habanita distinguishes itself from Deci Dela further by faithfulness to its source, a composition which itself plumbed the depths of the darker side. I wouldn't say that Miss Habanita is perfect for those who find Habanita a little much, obviously. For one thing, a Miss can get in just as much trouble as a Mrs., if not more. Ideally, appreciating one means appreciating the other. Miss Habanita isn't a refinement or a series of improvements but a way of contrasting certain aspects of the original in refreshing ways.

The moss - and some vanilla - speak to the creamy tobacco of vintage Habanita. Everything anyone might find questionable, if not entirely objectionable, is still there - the leather, the tobacco, the dirtied amber, the palest hint of decayed floralcy - and maybe even amplified in some way by bringing a certain amount of translucence into the equation. I can just as easily imagine Miss Habanita being used to scent cigarettes, as Habanita once was, and Habanita is such a dense proposition that it's easy to forget it also contained peach and orange blossom and plenty else besides, much of which reappears in its progeny to more emphatic effect.

Miss Habanita reminds me of Habanita with the lights suddenly turned up. Everybody's still doing what they were doing in the dark. They haven't had a chance to pretend otherwise yet. It lasts amazingly well, always surprising me by its persistence. It's a wonderful fragrance, full of quiet melancholy. Other than Habanita, there's really nothing quite like it.

I suggest looking for it on Ebay. I've seen it through e-tailers but the bottle you receive is not always the bottle pictured, and a simple exchange of emails with an Ebay seller will reassure you of getting what you pay for. The original formula came in two bottles, one frosted mustard, the other translucent amber. One of these is simpler in design; my favorite of the two, the amber glass, looks exactly like the famous Lalique Habanita bottle graced with water nymphs and has a glittery metallic bronze cap.

The Synaesthesia of Scent

In The Diary of a Nose, perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena writes, "Green is the only color that makes sense as a smell," adding that, in his collection of raw materials, he has different kinds of green including gentle, harsh, smooth, sharp, dense, etc. Among these he has greens "that smell of beans, fig leaves, syringa, ivy, seaweed, elder, boxwood, hyacinth, lawns, and peas."

He might be right, in one sense, given that of all the colors green is used maybe most frequently as a descriptive. Green chypre, for instance - or green floral. When I think of any number of fragrances I picture the color green. I can't talk about, or wear, Jean-Louis Scherrer or Givenchy III without seeing the fields of parched summer grass I remember from my childhood vacations in rural Arkansas. Alliage brings to mind bitter snapped stems. Clinique Wrappings is a shock of fir peeking out from under banks of aldehyde snow; Tauer's Cologne du Maghreb, a dish of fresh herbs. Ellena says every perfumer runs the hazard of conjuring mental images of toothpaste when using mint in a composition, but I smell it in many fragrances and think of herb gardens.

It might be more accurate to say that green is the color that gets the most mileage in the scent vocabulary. Red, for instance, is a little trickier, but some rose-centered fragrances do read to me as red. Une Rose has always brought to mind a deep red velvet when I smell it; Agent Provocateur, a drier shade on the spectrum, like something long sitting out in a potpourri dish. Miss Dior Cherie - don't let's get started on exactly which version - reminds me of fresh strawberries; not just their smell but their damp, staining skins. Lipstick Rose evokes the obvious - but even Arden's Red Door recalls the crimson lipstick my grandmother applied with a brush from its tube.

I often think pink, especially with the contemporary spate of fruity florals. Baby Doll is strictly bright fuchsia tutus and tart berry innards. Yellow crops up every so often too - buttery yellow for certain floral compositions, palest yellow for scents whose vibe feels incredibly buttery to me, whether from orris root or otherwise. Daffodils pop up in my head. More often than anything I imagine golden yellow to orange hues, probably because orientals are one of my favorite types of fragrance. Alahine is golden light at dusk, casting everything in a late afternoon glow. Mitsouko is a brassier shade, something like peaches steeped in liquid sun. I even think of white, when I smell White Linen - something scorched of all color, singeing the senses.

Sometimes I wonder if some of us have a rare offshoot of synaesthesia when it comes to scent. The synaesthete cross-pollinates the senses in ways most people don't. She might see a number and hear it as a sound, for instance. She might see a color and experience it as a smell. What about the other way round, I wonder. What about seeing a scent as a color, as a sort of tinted wash that spreads over our senses? Has anyone seen MARNIE, the Hitchcock film, where Tippie Hedren's kleptomaniac goes into fugues, seeing red when an object or a situation triggers certain emotions? During these episodes the whole screen goes blood red. I wonder if scent is like that for some of us.

It's not quite as cinematic with me, but most of the smells I love do filter the images they conjure through some emotionally corresponding colored lens. When I smell Vent Vert, I do see green - my mind goes right to an analogous image - a field, a spring lawn, fresh shoots proliferating on deciduous branches. It's like that in some way with every scent I smell. So I'm not sure I agree with Ellena, whose own Kelly Caleche tints my imagination a specific sort of pale but vibrant metallic pastel.

Form and Fashion: Balenciaga's Scent Trajectory (With a Drawing)

I've never really seen how the early scents produced under the Balenciaga name had much to do with the designs, let alone mystique, of the man himself. In The Master Of Us All: Balenciaga, His Work Rooms, His World, Mary Blume refers to the couturier's presiding aesthetic as "austere extravagance", demonstrating, again, through the course of the book, for anyone who wouldn't know just by looking at his often structurally oblique clothes, that the man, if not the myth, was virtually intractable.

His garments were often, like something out of nature, unclassifiable works of wonder - and he himself, private to the extreme, offered nothing by way of context or explication. He avoided the public, and he avoided trends. In a world that increasingly, post Dior, valued novelty and an ever changing theme, Balenciaga moved more organically, refining his line at a snail's pace. You look at Dior, Saint Laurent, or Givenchy, several of his contemporaries, and see with each year a new iteration, a different direction. Balenciaga was more of a nautilus, curling outward more and more elaborately over time from some undisclosed axis. Many design strategies of his time - most notably, Dior's New Look - reshaped or remapped the female physique. Balenciaga seemed to dematerialize it, rendering each woman who wore him a floating nimbus of shifting lines and moods. Somewhere inside that cloud, an indivisable idea.

The early Balenciaga fragrances are wonderful, but they seem more like something Dior or Givenchy might have inspired. However wonderful they are, they fall far more easily into categorization than the man or the inimitable clothes he created. His first two fragrances, La Fuite des Heures and Le Dix, were released between 1947 and 1949, more than a decade after the designer had moved from Spain to his Paris atelier. I've never smelled La Fuite des Heures. Released years later for the American market as Fleeting Moment, it has been attributed to Germaine Cellier (of Bandit, Fracas, and Jolie Madam) and described varyingly as a chypre and an aldehydic floral. Le Dix, named after the address at 10 Avenue George V where sat Balenciaga's fashion house, is most definitely an aldehydic floral, emphasis on soft woods and cool violet.

While arguably austere, Le Dix is hardly extravagant. Granted, thanks to No. 5, the fashion at the time was for aldehydic florals, yet something along the lines of the inscrutable woody warmth of Arpege would have made more sense to me. Even compared to Chanel No. 5, Le Dix is delicate and pristine. It's one of my favorite violet fragrances, and has special sentimental value to me, having sat inside my grandmother's medicine cabinet during my childhood in an unmarked miniature bottle, but I would never associate it with anything I've since seen by Balenciaga.

Smelling Le Dix in that unmarked bottle, with no idea where it came from or what it was called, I thought of the fragile vintage tulle dresses housed in an old cardboard box up in my grandmother's attic. You touched them and they started to fall apart, their beads scattering on the floor. Le Dix was something from another time, candied, powdered, and quaint, but indicates none of the sculptural durability of Balenciaga's work. Perhaps this goes toward explaining the earliest ads for the scent, which posed the bottle near the designer's face, lest the link be lost on the consumer, with the simple text: "His creation." It was, in fact, the creation of Roure's Francis Fabron (of L'Air du Temps and L'Interdit).

Le Dix also reminds me of an anecdote from Blume's book regarding Chanel and Balenciaga, once friends, then, abruptly, not. At first an advocate of Balenciaga's artistry, Chanel derided him after a falling out involving a magazine article (was there ever a lifelong friend among Chanel's working relationships?). "To a tough cookie like Chanel," writes Blume, "Balenciaga's vulnerability seemed a weakness. His staff knew it was his strength." Le Dix hints at the vulnerability without underscoring the strength.

After her betrayal, Balenciaga returned to Chanel everything he owned associated with her name, including a portrait of her she'd loaned him, as if to say, "You look at yourself for a change." Anyone can make such a renunciatory gesture. It takes a lot of backbone to enforce it over time, and Balenciaga seems to have, by all reports I can find, never dealing with Chanel again in anything approaching the spirit of their earlier friendship.

He was stronger yet than even that. To the dismay of his friend Givenchy, he attended Chanel's funeral, explaining, "In life there are things one must forget, the ills that people have done to you." It's hard to imagine grudge-holding Chanel appearing at Balenciaga's funeral, had the tables of mortality been turned, and just as hard to imagine that bedrock strength of character smelling Le Dix.

Until the seventies, Le Dix, Fleeting Moment, and a later addition, Quadrille (1955), defined the Balenciaga style through fragrance. Quadrille was rethought (ie reformulated) in the eighties, adapting its mossy chypre structure to the style of those times with an infusion of dark plummy fruits. In either formulation, Quadrille alone comes closest for me to matching or expressing Balenciaga's mystique. You can get a little lost in its moss-laden depths in a way diaphanous Le Dix makes unlikely. Le Dix seems thematically transparent, Quadrille more opaque, its movements more subterranean. Like chiffon, Le Dix seems to hide nothing. Quadrille is sturdier, more voluptuous stuff, recalling the fabrics Balenciaga worked very hard to find - like Gazar, a nubbed silk that took several years to engineer and ably supported the structural folds and contours which became Balenciaga trademarks.

It took a while for the fashions of fragrance to catch up to the fashion of Balenciaga. By then, Balenciaga had closed his salon. By the seventies and eighties, the trend in fragrance was increasingly robust and byzantine, and scents like Ho Hang (1971: a masculine fougere eventually claimed by as many women as men), Michelle (1979: a velvety floriental by Francoise Caron), Portos (1980: a front loaded woody, leathery animalic with a wonderfully pungent cumin accent), and Prelude (1982: an unusual amber pulled in different directions by florals and spices) got closer and closer to the formidable inscrutability that was Balenciaga. These scents required time to understand. Like Balanciaga's constructions - the melon sleeves, the envelope dress, the wedding gown with "coal scuttle" headdress (pictured) - they're at once broadly stroked and infinitely nuanced. The reformulation of Quadrille brought it up to that speed, and taken together these scents, for me, compose a nearly complete and accurate picture of Balenciaga's oeuvre.

Rumba (1989: a rich, patchouli laden floral) tipped the scales to the other side, falling so in step with the trends of its time that, wonderful as it is, it contradicted Balenciaga's singularity. The more recent Balenciaga Paris went full circle, recalling the bright fragility of Le Dix, adding waifish inconsequentiality to Le Dix's ephemeral charms.  Florabotanica put a period on things, and relates to nothing but its own pleasantly content mediocrity. In between, there were Cristobal (1998: floral vanilla), Ho Hang Club (1987: woody leather), and Talisman (1994: early stage fruitchouli), some more decent than others.

(Leave a comment telling me your favorite Balenciaga - or the one you're most curious about - and why, and I'll draw two winners for a sample of one of the following: Le Dix, Quadrille, Cristobal femme/homme, Rumba, Balenciaga Paris, or Prelude)

Ramon Monegal Mon Patchouly: Jasmine in Big Boy Pants

I resisted the Ramon Monegal line for a long time, for several old reliable reasons. The fragrances embody two emerging trends I'm not that eager to embrace - the ever-escalating price point of niche perfumery, and the  overabundance of choice presented by a start-up brand, which can give the impression, right or wrong, of trying to be all things to all people. I suppose all of this might have been mediated by instant love for the scents themselves. But it took me a while to come around to some of the Monegals I now regard as favorites. I went back repeatedly to smell them, and it's probably less accurate to say they grew on me than it is to say I grew into them.

Mon Patchouly is my favorite, by far - though Kiss My Name, a Carolina Herrera-esque fruity tuberose updated with hints of incense, isn't getting kicked out of bed any time soon. When I first smelled it, I was told Mon Patchouly was the brand's biggest seller, and I could see why. At the time, it somehow reminded me of the best mass market masculines - simultaneously familiar and unusual. Each time I came back to smell the fragrance, it surprised me, because while it's very well done and has something referential in it I can't define, it's even more unusual and singular than I initially gave it credit for.

Essentially a well blended study in patchouli, jasmine, and geranium, Mon Patchouly is classified as a Woody Oriental. I don't know why, when I first smelled it, I also thought it was pretty soundly masculine. True, there's some kind of barbershop after shave strain in the fragrance, but these days, I have trouble imagining many men I know wearing it. Like Insense, by Givenchy, it's a little more floral than most men unaccustomed to niche perfumery would feel comfortable wearing. It's constantly threatened with emasculation by that floral influence. That jasmine, however perverted by patchouli and geranium, is ultimately pretty gender bending by mainstream standards.

The patchouli cants things in the direction of classic masculines, but the jasmine is still front and center, singing "I feel pretty" - half in baritone, half in falsetto, like the breaking voice of a teenager who's just started growing facial hair. Mon Patchouly is more skirt and tie than even most niche "masculines" I'm familiar with, no matter how much the geranium underscores the masculine coding. This is all beside the point, unless, like many men out there, you feel a little vulnerable when gender distinctions start dissolving into hazy, free-floating halfway points. For this reason, a scent like Mon Patchouly is even more attractive to me than a wonderful smelling fragrance would otherwise usually be. I like a little anarchy in a scent, especially when it's smuggled in under a frilly skirt.

One thing I look for in a fragrance that costs more than I think it should is tenacity. After that, projection. Mon Patchouly is impressive in both respects. Too impressive (read: oppressive) for some. The customer reviews on Fragrantica alternate between unmitigated love and outright repulsion. I always forget how much some people despise patchouli, even when it's scrubbed clean and smoothed of all rough spots in the lab the way it tends to be these days. Yet it isn't just the patchouli, I suspect. The combination of jasmine and patchouli here is just below well worked out (another reason I like it, but also possibly why some can't tolerate it). Had it been what I felt was thoroughly worked out, I doubt the combination would have retained its slightly off-kilter appeal for me. Worse, for some, that strangeness never wears down into something less strange, which might be why more than one person has compared it to Mugler's Alien and Angel. Admirably, Mon Patchouly bucks another current trend, front loading the formula, which eventually, inevitably, tends to end up in the same banal territory the last fragrance has settled for. If you want to scrub Mon Patchouly within the first ten minutes, you might as well go ahead and do it. It won't be rewarding your patience any time soon.

The presiding combination of jasmine and patchouli - even an apparently squeaky clean patchouli and an indole-free jasmine - has a slight, if delicate, whiff of grunge to it.  This could come from some other player in the mix. I don't discern the alleged oakmoss, but with oakmoss restricted to within an inch of perceptibility, that's at least no surprise. Still, I can't pinpoint amber, vanilla, or olibanum either. Never mind. However exactly it does it, for something which seems to be playing such a familiar tune, Mon Patchouly veers off in some usually uncharted territory. I'll leave the question of whether or not that journey is worth the price of its ticket up to you. Currently, the Monegal line runs $185.00 for a 1.7 ounce bottle. This bottle, by the way, is quite the chunk of glass, reminding me more of a concealed weapon than anything a fragrance might come in. I smelled Mon Patchouly at Luckyscent.

Wind Song: Home Is Where Its Heart Is

I have only the vaguest recollection of the Wind Song now being sold in drugstores. I remember buying it on impulse and, a few days later, returning it with my wits about me. The word that comes to mind is dowdy. Mumsy runs a close second.

So I'm surprised how much I like the vintage version I found in a local antique store for twenty bucks (about all I was prepared to shell out for it, based on my forgettable first encounter). First things first: let's get the bottle out of the way. What even casual vessel fetishist among us could resist the glass crowns which housed these early Prince Matchabelli scents? Who among us wouldn't like this thing sitting out somewhere on the dresser? Seeing pictures of them online, I'd always imagined these bottles were interchangeable with an arguably much more useful half pint of Crown Royale. Holding one in my hand I see how wrong I was.

Wind Song (1953) is unmistakably a floral in the fifties sense of the word. The goody two shoes carnation you expect from a good girl fragrance of that era is front and scenter, and for those who don't like carnation it can be a bit of a deal breaker. That's too bad, because Wind Song has a lot besides dowdy going on, and it does things I don't think I've smelled in any of its contemporaries. After you adjust to the carnation you ascertain some of the bit players who've been drafted in to support and enhance it: coriander, mandarin, tarragon, among them. If the era's aldehydes could be considered knowing and somewhat confidently if not forbiddingly aloof, its orientals thought of as contradictions of the idea that the poodles on its skirts weren't animals but "puppies", Wind Song might be looked at as a sort of Doris Day re-alignment, reaffirming the pleasures of simplicity and subtlety in the midst of these extremes.

Not that Wind Song doesn't have its depths. The joke about Doris Day, the reason she's become shorthand for the naivete of the fifties, is that she was a little, shall we say...white bread? Yet to listen to her voice and to watch the stylized precision of her performances is to remind yourself of her artistry, above and beyond the cliches about her persona. Similarly, the dry down of Wind Song is really something, and that something deepens the first impressions and potential dismissals.

It never fails. Not thirty minutes after applying Wind Song I want to know what "that smell" is and where the hell it's coming from. The note list I've seen for the fragrance lists sandalwood, vetiver, amber, cedar, and vetiver in the base, and at different times I've felt I smelled all of those things. The floral component of Wind Song - which, in addition to carnation, includes some of the usual suspects, rose, jasmine, ylang ylang, orris root - never quite leaves the building. Orris root, particularly, sticks around to sit in the chair provided by the scent's base notes, making its rich, buttery presence felt for the duration. But that combo of amber, woods, and grasses is really the backbone of this fragrance, and in fascinating ways that no oriental or aldehyde could, the combined effect underscores the bedrock strength of the matronly persona. This fragrance, more than most I've smelled from its era, helps me understand why that ideal of the 1950s - the safe, secure, comfort of the home and family - was so seductive and compelling. If home could feel like golden, woodsy Wind Song smelled, why would you ever stray too far from it?

As one of the iconic ads for the fragrance asked: "What makes you the girl he can't get out of his mind?" To which another answered: "Wind Song whispers your message." Wind Song can still be found for...a song...online.  The dry down alone makes it worth far more than the going rate. Like an also cheapo bottle of vintage Avon Persian Wood I found on Ebay recently, Wind Song is the clearest distillation yet for me of sandalwood's inimitably pleasurable attractions.

Radiant Ice: Andy Tauer's Noontide Petals

Watching Noontide Petals evolve over the last year or so has been a real highlight, during a period of time which was often dark and at times felt unendurable. It's hard, inhaling Noontide, to even think dark thoughts, and in some ways, when I've worn it, I've felt I'm under the protection of some kind of doubt-thwarting amulet of light. It's been a powerful corrective, a compass point. All of Andy Tauer's fragrances remind me in some way what happiness should or could feel like - they show the way - but Noontide is unique among them, due in part to  its unequivocal presence at the apex of sheer beatitude.

It's funny to start reading the breaking reviews, after having had what felt like a private relationship with the scent for a time. How can we understand a fragrance when we've barely gotten acquainted with it? We still barely understand it after living with it through full bottles and who knows how many years. Reading these reviews reinforces for me how difficult it is to speak about perfume in any way that penetrates too deeply beyond superficial, deductive or reductive impressions. That isn't to knock bloggers. It's the language we have, and for a long time I wasn't writing about perfume much at all because that language can feel so inept compared to what it is perfume actually does - the verbiage becoming authoritative where it should be mystical, a little too concise where it should be expansive.

We need that ineptitude, I think, and we need to struggle with it, to keep in touch with how powerful scent is, how above and beyond us. Fragrance is one of the last frontiers of the ineffable in my life, at a time where everything feels over explained, over exposed - over in general, before it's properly begun. As much as I poke fun at the self proclaimed last-word authorities in the fragrance-writing community, who participate in this aspect of the zeitgeist, I know we need them too, because nothing reminds you how powerless you are to the sacred inexplicable like a sudden breach with your sense of smug certainty, and all smug certainty is eventually dealt this mortal blow. Give it time. Noontide is so personal to me, and so lived in at this point, so bound up in my memories already, that to hear it described as, essentially, simply a fragrance, with its constituent qualities dissected, feels like wrapping up the events of a year in a single phrase - but I know this is how we do it, if only because we haven't figured out  another way.

I first smelled Noontide Petals in the biting January cold of New York City, back when the fragrance had a different name, a working title. I have to remind myself it isn't still called that - won't ever be called that again. I was making a lot of plans that winter, most of them to do with the Woman's Picture film series and the Tableau de Parfums fragrance line, interlocking collaborative projects Andy and I had started the year before. I'd finished the first film, and we'd released the first related Tableau fragrance. I'd been writing the second film in the series but felt a little stuck. Reconvening with Andy in NYC kicked my mind back into gear, and most of the time we were there I felt like I was on speed. I could barely organize my thoughts; the onslaught was so fast and furious. I only knew I was making a film, and that I'd be making it soon. By April, I was shooting. By May, the shoot had wrapped. It was the biggest film I'd shot to date - the largest cast, the largest crew, the most equipment, the most expensive, the least time.

Noontide informed my year in ways it will probably take me a while to parse, let alone recognize. It walked alongside me in all of that. We all seem to acknowledge that a fragrance lives with you, if you connect with it, eventually encapsulating your past. Sometimes, even if you don't connect with it, it connects with you. I don't think floral, aldehydes, or woodsy base when I think of the fragrance, though I can see those things are all there. Instead, Noontide sets a series of impressionistic memories into motion for me, a sort of hanging, moving Calder sculpture made up of moments in time. I think of renewed energy; the rush of a fruitful collaboration; the boost of a likeminded, ongoing conversation; wind so forceful and cold it sends your face burrowing down into the collar of your jacket, nearly pinning you to the nearest wall. I think of the distant past bearing down with that kind of force as well, I suppose because Noontide instantly reminded me of the fragrances I'd snuck into my grandmothers' rooms to smell as a child. Like few other fragrances, Noontide captured what I remember of those exhilarating, clandestine sniffs.

If I could pinpoint what Noontide does for me intellectually, it would have to do with creating links between the past and the present this way, not just personally but culturally. It isn't just that Noontide Petals is inspired by older fragrances or a period in time. It isn't just that it evokes or recalls - my years or someone else's. Like Miriam, the first fragrance from Tableau, Noontide represents a perfumer paying attention to the past, valuing it, immersing himself in whatever feelings and impressions that process conjures for him. Noontide, for me, speaks somehow to the conscious act of paying attention to where we are by acknowledging where we've been - not an attempt to recreate the past but to try to understand, appreciate, and respect it.  The aldehydic floral, as we knew it, is "a thing of the past" as they say. However out of date, it's also a repository of cultural information. Breathing new life into it feels like a political act to me - the kind only an artist can execute and only creative independence can allow, and it's a way of saying that the past is never out of date really; it keeps spinning back around into view. We're all living in that flux of memory, that constant whir of fugitive moments. Noontide finds that space and casts a gorgeous light on it, preserving it under ice.

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.

Keiko Mecheri Johana

Unless cacao and vanilla combined are to be taken as the new oakmoss, Keiko Mecheri's Johana seems anything but a chypre to me, yet the fragrance continues the trend toward eroding distinctions about what is and isn't one. As with other "modern chypres", Johana seems to think being something means simply saying so. I'm going to let it go for now, even though I don't seem to age in reverse, am not devastatingly handsome, and cannot (yet) fly by flapping my arms, much as I keep saying I do, am, and can.

Johana is a nice scent with an interesting tension between deep/dark and airy/bright. It's hard to make sense of that, which might explain why I alternately admire this fragrance and wonder how I possibly could. In many ways it follows the standard MO of a Keiko Mecheri release: it stays just this side of fascinating, settling for "interesting". But it's pretty interesting, and while I dismissed it at first, I kept coming back to it, and finally (if predictably), I caved.

I haven't had the best luck with Keiko fragrances. I like many of them. There are things I admire in Mogador, Oliban, Loukhoum eau Poudree, Peau de Peche, and several others. Of these, I own Mogador. I wear it once in a while but not often, mainly because, like every other Mecheri perfume I've courted - short of overstay-its-welcome Loukhoum - it doesn't last on me as well as I feel it should. Mogador has a radiant disposition in keeping with the work of Calice Becker, its perfumer, situating it somewhere in the general vicinity of Tommy Girl, J'Adore, and Beyond Love. It doesn't want to get too bogged down in anything heavy, which is nice until you realize that means it ain't sticking around long.

Johana's been a surprise to me, mainly because it does last, but also because there's something pleasurable in it that very few other fragrances reach for me in just this way. The fragrance contains, allegedly, chrysanthemum, galbanum, rose, wisteria, iris, cacao pod, patchouli, incense, sandalwood, and vanilla. Looking at this "pyramid", I'm wondering when or if we'll ever dispense with the nonsense of "notes" in contemporary perfumery. It's like the British Monarchy. Do they really stand for anything, or do we just like the idea? Certainly the word chypre seems to mean nothing by now. Why should the fancy of a pyramid?

I'll play the game, since we're all undecided on that, and tell you I smell, at least, cacao, patchouli, vanilla, and a melange of florals I'm willing to agree falls somewhere between rose and mum. When I spent some time with Johana, I started to suspect it was created by Calice Becker, because it has that weird sunny thing she does so well, only anchored to something moodier by a gourmand gone woodsy foundation. Oddly, while I won't give it "chypre", I can tell you it has another nice tension in it, and in an unexpected, indescribable way: it feels simultaneously contemporary and old fashioned. It loses some of this the longer it sits on you, but that first spray is a little uncanny - grafting a new, bright floral onto something more traditionally (if subtly) balsamic. That's an illusion, because there appears to be nothing remotely balsamic in Johana, but everything's basically an illusion in perfumery (starting at the idea that it should cost as much as it does).

This effect lasts on me for a good thirty minutes or so. After this, Johana remains interesting for different reasons. It becomes another kind of anomaly: a dusted coco fragrance which lifts and amplifies into radiance and just-this-side-of-succulence rather than sinking down into a deep dark gourmand nether region. I like deep dark gourmand nether regions, but this is something different, and I'm all for that. It seems to me that niche lines do dusted chocolate a little heavy or moody to avoid accusations of mall-stream juvenilia. Johana manages to go in the opposite direction in a way that feels sophisticated and fresh.

One thing I do like very much about Keiko Mecheri fragrances across the board - okay, two things: the bottles, and the price point. (Disregard Mecheri's Bespoke line in this equation, btw). Name more than five niche lines charging 115 bucks at 2.5 ounces for a bottle this fantastically formidable and attractive. Something about these bottles looks like what you hope a perfume will smell like. They make their owners look like they know what they're doing. And at this point, 115 bucks is like ten cents in the world of niche perfumery.