Scent and Subversion (31 page)

When I was a kid, I used to love this strange candy at my corner store that consisted of flavored water injected into a wax cylinder. Usually, the candy was very sour or bright, which wildly and wonderfully contrasted with the wax you’d chew to get into the juicy center.

That’s what Ça Sent Beau (“It Smells Good”) reminds me of: a juicy, fruity floral (and not just any floral, a one-two tuberose/jasmine punch brightened by mandarin and orange blossom) embedded in beeswax, amber, and heavy musk. You can smell the sharpness of fruit, orange blossom, tuberose, and lily of the valley, but they’re clouded, enriched, thickened by an inexplicable waxy heaviness. A beautiful chypre base keeps the perfume from being confectionary. It smells good, indeed.

Top notes:
Fruit complex, spice, notes, bergamot, mandarin, green complex, orange blossom

Heart notes:
Tuberose, lily of the valley, jasmine, rose, carnation, coriander, cumin, orris, cedarwood, sandalwood

Base notes:
Vetiver, patchouli, moss, amber, musk

Perfumer:
Jean-Paul Guerlain

When I first smelled Samsara a few years ago, I concluded that it was a polite jasmine scent without much character. It didn’t seem to make the most of the opportunity it had to express in perfume form the dramatic Buddhist notion of
samsara,
or the endless cycle of birth and suffering and death and rebirth.

I still don’t know if a perfume can express samsara, but my thinking on Samsara has itself cycled to a new place. Did I get a better version of Samsara? Was my first sniff of a reformulated Samsara, without the depth? Or perhaps it is I who have become deeper, more open, about what I can appreciate, if not wear?

All I know is, the second time around, Samsara won me over. Its top notes momentarily reference the fruitiness of many 1980s scents, but its main character is
a buttery-rich sandalwood infused with decadent jasmine. Smooth and slightly spicy, Samsara is an ’80s power fragrance with more class than crass.

Top notes:
Bergamot, lemon, green note, peach, tarragon

Heart notes:
Jasmine, rose, ylang-ylang, orris, carnation

Base notes:
Sandalwood, vanilla, benzoin, amber, musk, tonka

Calvin Klein’s CK One is the representative 1990s “clean” scent. Stripped of any olfactory representations of the body in its base notes, CK One was marketed as a unisex scent, and even its utilitarian-looking, nondescript bottle seems bare.

Perfumer:
Ilias Ermenidis

A fresh, happy, green floral, Byblos’s mandarin note is enriched by rose, lily of the valley, bright raspberry, and a warm orris base that fattens it up a bit. One of the earliest fruity florals whose category, alongside clean scents, went on to dominate the 1990s.

Top notes:
Green note, bergamot, mandarin, cassis, peach, marigold (tagetes)

Heart notes:
Mimosa, lily of the valley, orris, rose, orchid, heliotrope, lily, violet

Base notes:
Vetiver, musk, raspberry

Perfumer:
Jean-Claude Delville

Here is the Big Bad Eighties in perfume form: a collision of soaring green candied fruits—peach, plum, and cassis—with old-school lipstick and cosmetic face powder. Strong, but beautiful for its type.

Top notes:
Cassis, peach, plum, green note, tagetes, coriander

Heart notes:
Rose, tuberose, ylang-ylang, carnation, jasmine, orris, heliotrope

Base notes:
Vetiver, cedar, civet, musk amber, vanilla, tonka

Time was seriously out of joint for the Jil Sander house nose if you situate a few of Sander’s perfumes in the context of their respective decades. In the 1980s, when huge fruity florals were taking over the smellosphere, in waltzed Jil Sander Woman 2. With its dry mossy/leathery personality, JSW2 stood out like a severe-looking conceptual artist from Berlin smoking a cigarette in the middle of a
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
party hosted by Robin Leach.

Jil Sander Woman 3 at least tried to chat with a few ladies with poofy sleeves and big hair, having a touch of fruit and friendliness herself. But then, just as the 1990s rolled around and began to get more minimalist and clean, and
Dynasty
dresses were replaced by minimalist black-and-white, along comes Jil Sander No. 4, right at the cusp, a fruity floral of no particular distinction acting like nothing had changed since the 1980s.

Top notes:
Plum, peach, anise, mace, coriander, bergamot

Heart notes:
Rose, tuberose, ylang-ylang, pimento, orris, jasmine, carnation, orange blossom, heliotrope

Base notes:
Cedar, sandalwood, vanilla musk, amber, tonka, civet

Perfumer:
Jean-Pierre Bethouart

Does anyone do pepper and carnation fragrances better than Caron? To add to their peppery roster of Poivre and Bellodgia, Parfum Sacré (“Sacred Perfume”) ups the ante with a smidgen of cardamom, a gorgeous velvety rose dusted with powdery-woody orris, and a decadent balsamic base.

Released on the cusp of the over-the-top 1980s with the clean and minimalist 1990s, Parfum Sacré is practically anachronistic in the 1990s, a doomed historical figure in the movies knowing that his demise is near. By turns elegant and opulent, with a warm mix of spices, indolic florals, and woody balsams, Parfum Sacré seduces with its embarrassment of riches.

It’s the skanky civet and musk that meet you at the door to this gilded palace, however, that give this perfume a thrilling dimension it wouldn’t have without them. Like a 1-percenter inviting some artistic riffraff he met at the local watering hole to his fancy home for a dinner party, Parfum Sacré knows that there’s nothing more elegant than to invite the demimonde to your soirée. Sacrilege, after all, is just the flip side of sanctity. Perhaps one commenter on a perfume forum said it best: “It smells of sacred mysteries and incense, much like the inside of an Orthodox church—if that church were being run by Mary Magdalene.”

Top notes:
Lemon, pepper, mace, cardamom, aldehyde

Heart notes:
Orange blossom, rose, jasmine, rosewood, ylang-ylang, orris, carnation

Base notes:
Vanilla, myrrh, amber, musk, civet, cedar

Perfumer:
Dominique Ropion

Categorized as a green floral, the sweetness and fruit note in Safari dominate its greenness, which is surprising given how galbanum is an opening note. Although there’s a significant—and welcome—touch of spice from carnation and styrax, you’ll have to like your green florals on the sweet side to get along with Safari.

Top notes:
Galbanum, green note, mandarin, hyacinth, aldehydes

Heart notes:
Rose, lily of the valley, narcissus, carnation, jasmine, orris, orchid, honey

Base notes:
Cedar, vetiver, moss, tonka, vanilla amber, styrax

Perfumer:
Sophia Grojsman

A powdery apricot-rose that dries down to a musky vanilla, Trésor has a romantic, waxy quality to it, like vintage scented lipstick or face powder. Its dose of syrupy-sweet violet-rose is headache-inducing for some, and suspends everything in a synthetic cloud that is hard to get past. More of a 1980s than a 1990s scent.

Notes:
Rose, heliotrope, orris, apricot, iris/violet, sandalwood

Perfumer:
Elie Roger

With its oddly prosaic name and season-bending freshness, Clinique’s Wrappings is offered only during the holiday season, and tends to be pretty hard to find even then at Clinique counters. A few Clinique sales associates didn’t even know what I was talking about when I asked if they had a tester bottle and at the San Francisco Macy’s, a (criminal) Wrappings fan had swiped theirs.

Wrappings starts off green and herbaceous, with the freshest facets peeking out of its juicy, spicy floral bouquet. It seems more like a summer than a winter scent. (It has that ’90s-style ozonic quality I don’t particularly like, but that just ups the ante on its freshness.) The drydown is my favorite part: mossy and dry with a touch of leather, its top and heart notes softened by orris and pleasantly powdery.

Top notes:
Green note, artemisia, aldehydes, lavender, mace

Heart notes:
Cyclamen, rose, jasmine, orris, hyacinth, carnation, ozone

Base notes:
Cedar, patchouli, leather, moss, marine, musk

Perfumer:
Dominique Ropion

The olfactory version of a last gasp, Amarige represents the beginning of the end of the big fruity floral of the 1980s. With a jumble of synthetic-smelling fruit notes that smell as jarring as spandex shorts with headbands and fanny packs now look, Amarige’s predictable progression into a tuberose-sweet floral heart and vanilla/amber woody base makes it hard to separate from its sisters (Cabotine, Giorgio, Animale, etc.). Tuberose can usually do a lot of olfactory damage on its own to sensitive noses, but just in case, Amarige threw in chemical-laden reinforcements.

Amarige’s sandalwood and cedar base at least helps redeem it by providing depth and texture to the chemical stew that bubbles at its heart. Once you’re well ensconced in its fruity world, like a cult member who has been thoroughly brainwashed, you might begrudgingly appreciate Amarige. But it’s hard to imagine this style of sweetness will ever come back to perfume, even ironically.

Top notes:
Plum, peach, orange blossom, violet, green notes

Heart notes:
Ylang-ylang, jasmine, tuberose, rose, orchid, carnation

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

Perfumer:
Jean Guichard

A sumptuous Oriental perfume smoking a berry-scented hookah in Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium den, Asja balances spicy carnation/cinnamon with a sandalwood-smooth balsamic base. Just don’t judge a perfume by its bottle, unless you want your perfume bottles to look like two laquered miso soup bowls stacked together.

Top notes:
Bergamot, green notes, peach, apricot, raspberry

Heart notes:
Rose, carnation, lily of the valley, jasmine, orris, orchid, cinnamon, honey

Base notes:
Vanilla, benzoin, styrax, cedar, sandalwood, amber, musk

Perfumer:
Ann Gottlieb

One of the first aquatic, clean, and fruity-floral fragrances of the 1990s, a scent category that came to be an olfactory version of white noise. Fresh, pleasant, and, because functional fragrances like shampoo came to take on these clean scents, redolent of freshly washed hair.

Top notes:
Peach, melon, green note, bergamot, apricot

Heart notes:
Rose, lily of the valley, orris, cyclamen, heliotrope, ylang-ylang, rosewood, carnation

Base notes:
Cedar, vanilla, amber, musk, sandalwood

Perfumers:
Jean-Claude Jitrois and Jean-Claude Ellena

From its rad bottle to its oddball scent—it smells like a fantastic version of a green fragrance tree–scented New York City cab—Jitrois is a truly strange beast.

Fresh, sharp, green, and rich with luscious-sweet gardenia in the opening, Jitrois transforms into something altogether surprising in the drydown. (Perhaps we are given a hint by the gorgeous bottle that not all will remain the same: One side is rippled and rough, as if it were raw material, and the other side is smooth and refined, as if civilized by the left side.)

I thought at first that I was smelling tarragon, combined with new-car smell, and it turns out that I’m not entirely wrong: Jitrois starts off with green notes and coriander. It dries down to a pretty intense animalic base that is synthetic-smelling but familiar somehow, and hence, not entirely unpleasant. Those dissonant notes—green and sweet from gardenia, and a mossy leather base—recall 1944’s Bandit in its homage to leather (designer JC Jitrois’s material of choice, as it turns out).

Top notes:
Bergamot, green note, gardenia, coriander, aldehyde

Heart notes:
Jasmine, carnation, rose, lily of the valley, orris

Base notes:
Patchouli, leather, moss, castoreum, amber, labdanum, civet

Perfumer:
Dominique Ropion

Krazy by Krizia shares its DNA with its precursor, 1981’s Must de Cartier, the amber Oriental perfume that dared to combine what Luca Turin referred to as the “indigestible” combo of bitter green galbanum with ambery vanilla accords. In fact, Krazy is closer to 1985’s Anne Klein II, with its emphasis on amber, over Must’s Shalimar-like vanilla. And both perfumes are steeped in 1980s intensity, the sweetness in both, even more so in Krazy, is ratcheted up a notch.

Although there’s civet, patchouli, sandalwood, and cedar in Krazy, at a certain point in the drydown, all I smell is a fun and fruity amber shot through with vanillic notes. Krazy doesn’t always mean deep.

Top notes:
Green notes, bergamot, mandarin, rosewood, peach, cassis, lemon

Heart notes:
Jasmine, lily of the valley, rose, orris

Base notes:
Patchouli, cedar, vanilla, benzoin, tonka, ambrein, musk

Black, inky, and goth, L’Arte di Gucci is an Edward Gorey-esque animalic-rose chypre with a cult following among certain perfume lovers. In my fevered imagination, its rose comes from the rose bushes surrounding the dilapidated and haunted Victorian home of Merricat, the witchy protagonist from Shirley Jackson’s
We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

A fruit note is prominent in the beginning, flanked by herby coriander and bright and green notes, but it’s of the Lancôme Magie Noire dark-woods character rather than the froufrou fruit variety. Patchouli rises up almost immediately, cloaking the bright top notes and taking them down to the Underworld with its other beautiful poisonous-smelling flowers and woody, masculine smells. As L’Arte di Gucci dries down, the rose just radiates from its dark lair lined with leather, vetiver, musk, and oakmoss, the patchouli prominent throughout.

For some strange reason, this beauty was discontinued—and resurrected, one could argue, in Calvin Klein’s Angel-esque Euphoria in 2005. I wonder if a stake was driven through its dark-rosed heart around the time CK One (the reference scent for all clean scents to come) came around in 1994.

Top notes:
Fruit note, bergamot, aldehyde, coriander, green note

Heart notes:
Rose, jasmine, geranium, tuberose, orris, lily of the valley

Base notes:
Patchouli, vetiver, leather, amber, musk, oakmoss