Scent and Subversion (24 page)

Calvin Klein’s first fragrance was my first perfume love. As a little perfume-obsessed tween, I distinctly remember falling for Calvin Klein among the dozens of perfumes I’d spray on myself before I left the mall. I loved the simple, squat, oblong bottle, the perfume’s golden amber hue, and what I concluded—as a child with no reference points for perfume notes—was its apple scent.

Finding it again as an adult, I think I smelled “apple” back then because of the fruity top notes, and I must have sensed that it was no ordinary perfume because of the depth and warmth the spicy/musky base notes gave to the fruit and flowers. Calvin Klein perfume seemed autumnal and sophisticated.

Top notes:
Aldehyde complex, hyacinth, gardenia, peach, raspberry

Heart notes:
Carnation, jasmine, muguet (lily of the valley), rose, orris

Base notes:
Sandalwood, cedarwood, oakmoss, musk, amber

Cinnabar, a spicy/ambery floral Oriental, is a perfect cold-weather comfort scent. It progresses from gourmand warmth to spice to indolic florals / ripe fruit in a seamless and intoxicating way. At first, the volume on amber and vanilla in Cinnabar are turned up to add gourmand richness to the cinnamon note, while the spices and soapy-powdery florals hover in the background.

What you’d normally consider base notes (amber and vanilla) recede as Cinnabar develops; it’s as if the normal sequence of notes moves backward. The indolic florals combined with powdery orris and incense notes take over, drying down to a funky-fruity note of peach, the lingering note of bruised florals remaining steady throughout. An occasional waft of amber/vanilla returns in the drydown, but it becomes a mulling-spice kind of floral, for the most part, as the scent disappears. Although it’s often compared to Opium, according to perfume historian Octavian Coifan, Cinnabar is actually a Youth Dew flanker, the “extreme” version to Soft Youth Dew’s softer flanker. As Coifan describes it, Cinnabar is “a cinnamon orgy on a Youth Dew scented altar.”

Top notes:
Aldehydic notes, bergamot, peach, spicy notes

Heart notes:
Cinnamon, ylang-ylang, clove, orris, jasmine

Base notes:
Amber, patchouli, vanilla, vetiver

This 1978 ad for the “8-hour perfume for the 24-hour woman” depicts the working woman as whirling dervish; “having it all” has never looked so exhausting.

Enjoli starts out in the high, happy register of one of my favorite combinations: galbanum and peach. Its juicy, ripe fruit note balances with green tartness and bergamot—not too sweet, not too sour … just right.

A radiant and uplifting floral heart then announces—via the bridge of powdery-sweet hyacinth and orris—that this is not merely a sport scent like the brisk and wonderful Aliage or the elegant but lighthearted Givenchy III. Nor is Enjoli only a well-behaved floral that speaks only when spoken to. Nope. Hear that thud? It’s the frying pan being thrown onto the stove. The rustle of silk? The nightgown being slipped into …

Introducing: Enjoli’s third act. The one that doesn’t let you forget you’re a man. You know—the sexy part. Mossy and woody, soft and sensual, the drydown has an amazing sandalwood smoothness and lingering spiciness that makes you forget that the perfume started out with a completely different personality.

And let’s not forget the oakmoss! I don’t know how $5.95 a bottle would be adjusted for today’s inflation, but Enjoli was an inexpensive drugstore chypre with balance and chic. A quick tour through today’s Walgreens should tell you that era is over. The crapola they have locked in glass cases? I wouldn’t take any of it from the free bin …

But back to Enjoli. It’s actually kind of remarkable the way Enjoli tries to “have it all,” like the fantasy ’70s feminist the ad is addressing. Its development is an exaggeration of extremes. Its top notes are the go-getting woman working outside of the home, the heart notes traditional florals that tend to hearth and home, and the base notes are warm, spicy, and sensual. (Haarmann & Reimer just blends its parts together and calls it a floral. C’mon, H & R! Maybe today’s Enjoli is that, but my vintage tells a different story.This thing has a lot of spice and woods.)

Top notes:
Bergamot, green note, aldehyde, hyacinth, peach

Heart notes:
Tuberose, jasmine, rose, orris, carnation, orchid

Base notes:
Sandalwood, musk, cedar, oakmoss, amber, vanilla

In the original formulation, Lauren’s spicy marigold, oakmoss, and woody notes balanced out the floral nature of the perfume. The woodsy floral character created a sense that its wearer was elegant and refined but still dynamic and earthy.

Fans of the scent are convinced that the reformulation, according to one person, caused the perfume to “lose its soul.” I picked up a $14 bottle sans box on a sad and disheveled shelf at T.J.Maxx in Los Angeles. Wearing the modern reformulation now, it seems that not only have the floral notes been amped up and the spices toned down, but the reformulation just doesn’t have vintage Lauren’s depth and balance.

Top notes:
Pineapple, spearmint, marigold (tagetes), rosewood

Heart notes:
Cyclamen, rose, jasmine, lily of the valley

Base notes:
Musk, cedarwood, oakmoss, sandalwood

Like a really good Parfums de Coeur remake of Robert Piguet’s Fracas, Madeleine de Madeleine smells to me like a big wad of bubble gum scented with tuberose, mimosa, orange flower, jasmine, and happiness. There might also be oakmoss and sandalwood in the base.

Some scents, if you smell them at certain developmentally important times in your life, imprint on your olfactory brain as “positive” forever, no matter what you subsequently learn about taste or quality. Pleasure is pleasure. As a result, I don’t know if I can write a proper review of this perfume; it’s a perfume associated with a particular time and place, making me unable to objectively assess it.

In a category that I don’t even usually go for (florals), Madeleine de Madeleine nevertheless stuns me with its bodacious, slightly over-the-top, and maybe even tacky beauty. Made by self-described cosmetics “glitter queen” Madeleine Mono, the perfume dazzles with the sensuous sweetness of tuberose, mimosa, and orange flower. A tropical white flower tucked into a disco queen’s hair would smell something like this. Tuberose’s bubblegum facet is prominent, and helps to emphasize the perfume’s sweetness rather than greenness. Madeleine de Madeleine is of questionable taste, like a lot of great things in life.

Perfumer Yann Vasnier sniffed out a rhubarb note, tuberose, fruit notes, spice notes, and styrallyl acetate, which is prominent in gardenia blossoms. He also found it similar to Fracas and Poison.

Notes from retail websites:
Tuberose, mimosa, jonquil, orange flower, rose, jasmine, chamomile, oakmoss

Perfumer:
Gérard Goupy

Magie Noire is in the category of perfumes that actually might scare romantic prospects away rather than attract them. But if you aspire to be a retro femme fatale rather than a fruit cocktail–scented Girl Gone Wild, add this to your arsenal to weed out the wusses from the keepers.

From its animalic rose scent, to its goth name, to its Satanic bottle design, suggestive of blood-red setting suns during harvest—Magie Noire is a perfume to fall in love with.

I write about it as if it’s the first time I’ve smelled it, but in fact, this was my mother’s perfume when I was growing up. I wonder sometimes if I’m so drawn to the chypre category because that’s what my mother wore, and it signifies what perfume is for me, or if, as with food tastes, part of it is genetic and I share her tastes. Whatever the reason, revisiting it in vintage form after becoming a serious perfume collector and developing a better sense of what makes a good fragrance has created a whole other set of associations beyond “Mom.” And thank god for that—who wants to think of her mother as a High Priestess of the Dark Side?

In Magie Noire, there are the narcotic elements of honey, tuberose, narcissus, and rose (a dark, forbidding rose rather than a come-hither one). This is intensified by top notes that don’t sweeten or even introduce the perfume so much as stand behind the heart notes and back up their message of dark beauty. Ripe berries and currants recall magical fairy-tale forests.

By the time you’re hooked by the perfume’s confusing sensuality, the way a bug might be attracted to a carnivorous plant, you’re happy to be dissolving in its poison if that means lolling about in patchouli, civet, and castoreum. This stuff leaves me bewitched, bothered, and bewildered. Although Magie Noire is categorized as a floral Oriental, its personality to me is chypre.

Top notes:
Cassis, bergamot, hyacinth, raspberry, green note

Heart notes:
Honey, jasmine, lily of the valley, tuberose, narcissus, orris, rose oriental

Base notes:
Patchouli, castoreum, civet, vetiver, musk, oakmoss, benzoin

Mollie Parnis was an American designer, and like her namesake perfume, she’s been largely forgotten in the canon. It’s a shame more people don’t know about this beautiful fragrance, because it could teach those overbearing “fruitchoulis” the kids are wearing these days a thing or two.

A rich, waxy peach that perfumer Yann Vasnier describes as “lactonic” morphs into an almost candied, Jolly Rancher-esque tartness. Throw a lush gardenia and a spicy base into the mix, and Mollie Parnis will tickle the edges of your olfactory brain with pleasure. There are certain perfumes that take me to the point of wanting to drink them, even though I know my desire is in vain. This is one of them.

Mollie Parnis’s spice reads as mossy/patchouli to me, so perhaps we can categorize it as a fruity-floral chypre. Vasnier notes something interesting that’s almost impossible to
not
notice after you look for it: Mollie Parnis’s odd, hovering mushroom note that gives this otherwise “girly” perfume an uncanny, humid, and savory quality.

Notes from
Yann Vasnier:
Fruit notes, lactones, peach, gardenia, spices, osmanthus, mushroom note

Perfumer:
Nicolas Mamounas

Certain secret societies have initiation rites or hazing rituals to test the worthiness of its potential members. Because civet greets you at the doorway chez Mystère, plunging its wearer into its civety netherworld from the beginning, you might be inclined to back away slowly, stammering that you have the wrong address before, horror-movie style, you book it in the other direction. That would be a shame, however, because the longer you linger in Mystère’s world, the more beautiful it gets.

Luscious citrus notes join with bitter galbanum and rich florals as the backbone of a perfume that nevertheless emphasizes its base. And what a base it is. It’s hard to imagine a series of notes more anathema to the 1990s office scent perfume genre than Mystère’s dusky coriander, spicy carnation, and musk/moss/incense.

Once you’re initiated into Mystère’s dark and beautiful world, you can settle into its lush kingdom of spices, comforting moss, and rich balsams.

Top notes:
Coriander, hyacinth, citrus oils, green notes

Heart notes:
Rose de Mai, jasmine, tuberose, orris, carnation, ylang-ylang, lily of the valley

Base notes:
Cedar, oakmoss, patchouli, sandalwood, musk, civet, styrax

Pheromone opens with a mouthwatering galbanum-citrus combo followed by sharp, luscious aromatic and floral notes. A mossy, ambery, resiny base rises up to meet those already-complex top notes, butching up the perfume’s femininity like a leather jacket over a sheer floral dress.

As Pheromone dries down, its beautiful symphony of greens, florals, and animal notes gets turned down, and they settle themselves into a mossy-warm bed. An occasional disquieting note wafts in that I can only describe as savory and meaty, even garbagey. It must be an indolic facet of one of the floral notes, or maybe musk. Hours into applying Pheromone, I can smell a veil of complex florals over my skin, sweetened and warmed by its animal notes and earthy spice.

I wonder if Pheromone is not as talked about as I think it deserves to be because of its misleading name. (Shouldn’t a perfume called Pheromone be muskier?) Either that, or because it’s in that strange category that I love, and will probably never come back into fashion: the green floral-animalic chypre. They’re not really conventionally feminine perfumes (Joy is a feminine perfume), nor could you call them masculine. No, the floral-animalic chypre perfumes are the Lipstick Lesbians of the feminine perfume categories, enjoying the conventions and trappings of femininity while not quite sticking to the program.

Pheromone is still being produced today, and this is the description on Marilyn Miglin’s website: “A blend of 179 rare essences including flower, roots, wild grasses, exotic barks, seeds, rare wine resins and essential oils from France, Italy, Belgium, Madagascar, Portugal and Egypt.” One perfume forum commenter remembers that Pheromone was once marketed with an Egyptology angle. Miglin apparently claimed that, with the help of Egyptologists, she was able to learn the names of seven sacred oils writ in hieroglyphics, oils that served as the basis for Pheromone.

Top notes:
Bergamot, green notes, lemon, aldehyde, galbanum, juniper berries

Heart notes:
Jasmine, magnolia, narcissus, rose, orris, ylang-ylang, carnation, hyacinth, lily of the valley

Base notes:
Cedarwood, musk, vetiver, olibanum, myrrh, amber, oakmoss