Scent and Subversion (23 page)

Perfumer:
André Fromentin

When I was a teenager in Fort Worth, Texas, I was constantly getting into trouble for wearing clothes and accessories—red jackets, weird shoes, no socks—that fell outside of my private school’s uniform code.

Grey Flannel was the scent that taught me perfume could be an invisible form of rebellion—olfactory instead of sartorial. I wore it because I loved the way it smelled (I
remember thinking it smelled like cucumbers and Pimm’s Cups), but also because it was a men’s cologne. Sniffing Grey Flannel now, my rebellion seems pretty tame. This fresh, herbaceous chypre seems as conventionally feminine as it is masculine. Its green, citrusy notes are sweetened by an elegant, old-fashioned whiff of violet, a signifier of retro formality in the middle of bracing freshness. Vanilla joins the comforting chorus started by violet, and in the drydown, all the notes—green, sweet, and mossy—nestle together in comforting harmony.

Top notes:
Green note, galbanum, lemon, petit grain, bergamot

Heart notes:
Violet, rose, clary sage, fern, geranium

Base notes:
Musk cedarwood, moss, tonka

Like Chanel No. 19, there’s an uncanniness to Inoui’s evocation of the forest. But where Chanel No. 19 was muted, vegetal, and ethereal, Inoui is hardy and brisk—its aggressive opening of galbanum and lemon (lightly softened and sweetened by peach) is backed up by a forest whose trees, herbs, and berries are almost medicinal in their aromatics (pine, juniper, cedar). Inoui is a symphony in the key of Fresh.

You almost forget there are florals in this perfume at all, although the quiet jasmine does act as a bridge to the soft, comforting drydown of myrrh, musk, and the subtle-but-present civet, acting, as it always does, to provide a bit of disquiet and moodiness.

I’ve smelled enough perfume to know that if anything has peach and galbanum in it, I’m a goner (Y, Aliage, Givenchy III). These are two great notes that smell great together, whetting the olfactory appetite the way a Negroni aperitif gets your taste buds excited for a big meal.

Thyme paired with jasmine floats through Inoui’s green forest like a soft breeze, though its beauty is primarily austere rather than delicate. Once its piquancy dies down, it still manages, even in the warmth of the base notes, to convey freshness through a kind of powdery, clean-skin scent.

Top notes:
Galbanum, peach, juniper, lemon, green accord

Heart notes:
Pine needles, freesia, thyme, jasmine

Base notes:
Cedarwood, myrrh, musk, civet, oakmoss

Lancetti combines intense green galbanum and citrus with delicate, soft-focus florals. The balancing act between green and powdery and light florals seems characteristic of
1970s feminine fragrances, but in Lancetti’s case, even the chypre base of vetiver and oakmoss can’t keep the scent’s flowery gentleness from dominating. The Silences fragrance by Jacomo, however, reverses this duality …

Top notes:
Galbanum, gardenia, bergamot, lemon, rosewood

Heart notes:
Rose, orris, lily of the valley, cyclamen, jasmine

Base notes:
Oakmoss, musk, vetiver, sandalwood, amber, cedar

Like the Bay City Rollers and feathered hair, Love’s Baby Soft’s iconic pink hue and baby powderiness defined the ’70s for many a teenage girl. (I can barely take a tiny whiff of this stuff without feeling like I’m about to break out in pimples.) What’s fascinating in retrospect is the way that largely masculine notes of the fougère fragrance category exist at the heart of this girly fragrance.

With its combination of lavender and vanilla (standing in for the sweetness and warmth of coumarin from tonka), Love’s Baby Soft transmogrifies from a hairy man getting his hair cut at a barbershop into a fourteen-year-old girl who smells like baby powder and affixes unicorn stickers to her Meade kitten spiral notebook. Even teenage girls in the ’70s were able to get in their perfumes the complexity many grown women are denied in today’s mainstream scents. In Love’s Baby Soft’s drydown, a sophisticated mix of herbaceous fougère, baby powder, and an almondy-vanillic heliotrope that was featured promininently in Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleue mingles like it’s no big deal.

Top notes:
Syringa (a genus that includes lilac), aldehyde, lemon, lavender, rosewood

Heart notes:
Heliotrope, lilac, rose, lily of the valley, orchid, carnation

Base notes:
Vanilla, benzoin, musk

Perfumer:
Vincent Marcello

With bitter herbs touched with hesperidic notes, fresh aromatics, and a mossy-warm leathery base, Yatagan is heir to other chypre animalics like Aramis and, believe it or not, Miss Balmain. (So much for gender consistency in perfume.) The combination of these bracing outdoor notes with the sweet and warm animalic note of castoreum makes Yatagan cuddlier-sounding than its namesake, a curved, Turkish saber used during the Ottoman Empire.

Perhaps like its brother Aramis, who I can only ever picture as a naked Burt Reynolds on a bearskin rug, Yatagan needs only a come-hither stare to stop his
playacting, drop his Yatagan prop, and get down to business. Sporty-fresh and carnal-sexy all in one fell swoop, Yatagan also just happens to be Nasomatto perfumer Alessandro Gualtieri’s favorite vintage scent.

Top notes:
Bergamot, artemisia, wormwood, lavender, petit grain, galbanum, origanum (genus of aromatic herbs including marjoram and oregano)

Heart notes:
Jasmine, vetiver, patchouli, carnation, pine needle, geranium

Base notes:
Olibanum, leather, labdanum, moss, castoreum, styrax, amber, musk

Opulent, mysterious, and restrained, J’ai Osé (“I Dared”) takes a while to get to know. Unlike many scents in today’s crowded marketplace that rush at you with their olfactory elevator pitches in one spritz, desperate to tell you in one breath what they’re all about, J’ai Osé makes you sit a spell to figure it out.

Speaking of spells, J’ai Osé casts a beautiful one. After a rather unpleasant and unpromising opening of harsh aldehydes, J’ai Osé leads you to dark woods. The dryness of vetiver, woods, and patchouli are met with the creamy lush warmth of amber, olibanum, and benzoin. It’s so inky-dark in the J’ai Osé forest that your nose has to adjust to the subtle gradations of accords and notes, like stepping into a dark, seemingly empty room and having to adjust your eyes to see the furniture.

Once you’re fully under its spell and accept its inky atmosphere, the vegetation in its lush forest shows itself—a flash of white jasmine and deep rose, the dusky leafiness of coriander—the restraint of scents exuded in the cold dawn, a bracing mix of beautiful things holding back. Sticking with J’ai Osé’s temporality and style, though, pays back big-time. The drydown blooms with the creamiest jasmine and rose touched by powdery orris. You can see with this fragrance that even as late as the 1970s, perfumers were still allowed to play with time, to actually take their sweet time. It is a great loss that this happens less.

Top notes:
Peach, citrus oils, coriander, aldehyde

Heart notes:
Jasmine, patchouli, rose, orris, cedarwood, sandalwood, vetiver

Base notes:
Amber, olibanum, oakmoss, musk, benzoin

Perfumers:
Jean Amic and Jean-Louis Sieuzac

It now seems quaint that YSL’s American backers at Squibb were mortified both by the perfume’s proposed name and bottle designer Pierre Dinand’s idea for the bottle,
which was based on the Japanese
inro,
a wooden box holding medicines and opium that Japanese samurai hung from their belts. But before women became Dior Addicts, and Tom Ford could boast that his scent Tuscan Leather smelled like high-end cocaine, it first had to be culturally acceptable for a perfume to be named after a drug. Hence, Opium, Yves Saint Laurent’s olfactory Orientalist fantasy, was born.

Opium starts with a sharp blast of aldehydes, like the olfactory representation of a struck match lighting an opium pipe. The perfume gives the impression of being both an experience of seamless sensuousness, as it caresses you with its crushed velvet notes in one touch, and a perfume that unfolds languidly. Both of these befit a fragrance that is supposed to conjure up images of wan, dreamy, supine opium smokers in dens punctuated with curling pipe smoke. Vanillic orange notes recalling spiced tea combine with sweet flowers and subtle fruit notes, warmed by a sensuous and musky base. Raymond Chaillan, who assisted in Opium’s creation, is convinced its formula no longer contains large doses of eugenol (found in clove and carnation), or linalool and limonene, found in lavender and citrus respectively. And according to perfume historian Octavian Coifan, who knew someone involved with its production, Opium was inspired by two French, pre-WWI fragrances.

Top notes:
Aldehydes, orange, pimento, bay

Heart notes:
Carnation, rose, ylang-ylang, cinnamon, peach, jasmine, orris

Base notes:
Benzoin, tolu, vanilla, sandal, patchouli, olibanum, amber, musk
(Notes from Haarmann & Reimer’s guide.)

Notes:
Plum, coriander, lemon, bergamot, clove, cistus, castoreum, myrrh, lily of the valley, cedar

(From Michael Edwards’s
Perfume Legends: French Feminine Fragrances.
)

You can really feel in many 1970s scents a kind of loosening up, a freshness, a breeziness that seems implicitly tied to the women’s movement. Although the notes in Jovan’s Woman suggest something strong and maybe heavy, Woman ends up being remarkably restrained for a perfume that has fruit accords, leafy greens, clove, patchouli, moss, and vetiver. Although sometimes characterized as an Oriental, it really has a chypre character, with a mossy, spicy, and green personality that rises above everything. Sometimes Jovan scents surprise me, and with so many of them around, I would almost argue it’d be worth trying all of them. As it turns out, the nose does know: This fragrance won a couple of FiFi Awards in 1978, including Most Successful Women’s Fragrance and
Best National Advertising Campaign for a Women’s Fragrance. (The Fifi Awards are an annual event sponsored by The Fragrance Foundation that honors the fragrance industry’s creative achievements.)

Top notes:
Aldehydes, citrus oils, leafy green, spicy and fruity accord

Heart notes:
Rose, geranium, clove buds, jasmine, ylang-ylang, orris

Base notes:
Patchouli, vetiver, moss, musk

Perfumers:
Gerard Anthony, Martin Heiddenreich, and Richard Wirtz

For a split second, Azzaro’s opening salvo of basil, lemon, and bergamot recalls Diorella, and even as it developed, that reminder sealed the deal for me. For as complex a formula as Azzaro is, it manages to be well-behaved and even subdued in its complexity, its balancing act a wonder to behold. Mossy, ambery, spicy, and woody, Azzaro is soft-spoken sexy. The leather in Azzaro is supple, broken-in, comforting.

Top notes:
Lavender, bergamot, clary sage, lemon, petit grain, basil

Heart notes:
Patchouli, caraway, juniper berry, sandalwood, cedar

Base notes:
Amber, oakmoss, tonka, musk, leather

This paternalistic 1984 ad for Bill Blass perfume belies the designer’s reputation for wearable, woman-friendly fashions in an era of stiff, over-the-top museum pieces.

Bill Blass smells like it’s on the cusp between the sporty, green chypres for the newly liberated ’70s woman and the sweet scent bombs worn by
Dynasty
-watching, big-shoulder-sporting ’80s divas. A nice floral chypre with a touch of golden pineapple for fruitiness, Bill Blass perfume exudes a fresh, happy warmth that makes this an approachable floral with personality.

Top notes:
Galbanum, pineapple, hyacinth, bergamot, green complex

Heart notes:
Tuberose, jasmine, ylang-ylang, carnation, orris

Base notes:
Musk, sandalwood, cedar, amber, oakmoss