Scent and Subversion (32 page)

Perfumers:
Olivier Cresp and Yves de Chiris

With its alien, star-shaped “lay down” bottle and unearthly pale blue juice (a first for perfume), Angel announced its landing on Earth as an unusual event before anyone even smelled the innovation inside. Although Angel smells nothing like a vintage perfume, Olivier Cresp and Yves de Chiris did borrow a page from the old-school playbook when composing it: They dared to overdose, and they combined unusual notes together.

Gourmand accords—including an unusual cotton-candy accord supplied by ethyl maltol—combine with honeyed berries and an overdose of patchouli to create a scent at once sexy, fun, earthy, and uncanny. Angel, in other words, did not get the memo that the ’90s were going to be about “clean and transparent.”

Angel has been called the first of a perhaps unfortunate perfume category—the “fruitchouli” (the portmanteau word combining “fruit” and “patchouli”) and has spawned imitators far and wide, from Calvin Klein’s tamer Euphoria to Viktor & Rolf’s Flowerbomb. Angel, however, does what those watered-down versions don’t do. It creates a pastiche of moods as well as scents. Its “celestial” top notes, as Mugler called them, are remote and cold; its gourmand accords, comforting and childlike; and the patchouli overdose grounds the perfume with earth and spice. That everyone across the land now wears Angel should not make you forget that it is a landmark in perfumery.

Top notes:
Bergamot, helional, jasmine, hedione

Heart notes:
Red berries, dewberry, honey

Base notes:
Patchouli, vanilla, coumarin, chocolate, caramel

(Notes and anecdotes from Michael Edwards’s
Perfume Legends: French Feminine Fragrances.
)

Perfumer:
Jean-Claude Ellena

Like a palate cleanser after an incredibly rich meal, Bulgari’s Au Thé Vert Au Parfumée arrived in the early 1990s at around the same time scent bombs like Amarige were still being produced. This wan, gentle little thing was like a Zen temple next to the Trump Towers of its day, and in its famous or infamous minimalism, it both hearkened back to restrained perfumes like Chanel No. 19 and looked forward (for better or worse) to the
clean scents of the 1990s, a good two years before CK One had come onto the scene and added androgyny to the mix.

With a joyous, lemony-herbal top note with prominent ’70s-esque coriander, Au Thé Vert then moves to green parts of lily of the valley and a minimal floral bouquet. It’s the incensey-woodsy base that gives this perfume its kick and its exoticism. It’s almost a perfume version of Spanish chef Ferran Adrià’s meals encapsulated in foam. Easily underestimated, but pioneering and beautiful, Bulgari’s Au Thé Vert Au Parfumée really did help put the brakes on ’80s excess by stripping down, sitting in a lotus position, and lighting some incense. That this bred, ironically, an excess of minimalism is not its fault.

Top notes:
Coriander, orange blossom, mandarin orange, bergamot, cardamom, lemon

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

Base notes:
Sandalwood, amber, musk, green tea, woods, cedar

Perfumer:
Christopher Sheldrake

Of the many praises I’ve heard about Christopher Sheldrake’s Féminité du Bois, not one that I’ve found mentions that it smells like a poetic perfume rendition of a woman’s nether regions.

Like Belgian surrealist painter Paul Delvaux’s association of women with woods, Féminité du Bois is Femininity in the Key of Woods. Cumin is often referred to as a body odor note—disparagingly by those who hate it, and as a compliment by those who love it, as I do, when properly balanced in a perfume. Like civet, musk, or castoreum, those legendary notes that make a perfume “animalic,” the cumin puts this perfume into a “human animalic” (humanimalic?) category.

Sensual and intense, Féminité du Bois comes on strong. But after the intial blast of cumin, you can smell a whiff of medicinal menthol mixed with cedar, cardamom, cinnamon, honey, beeswax, and plum. There’s a hint of sexuality, after which time it all dries down into something quite soft, if still a bit spicy. To echo the perfume’s sexual connotations, the 4 ml. mini parfum bottle I own looks like a tiny, phallic mushroom shoot, with a naturalistic little curve that hints at a woman’s body but looks more like something organic growing out of the ground. Plummy, woody, mysterious.

Top notes:
Peach, bergamot, rosewood, tarragon, cardamom

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

Base notes:
Cedarwood, sandalwood, patchouli, musk, amber, civet, vanilla

Perfumer:
Jacques Cavallier

In discussing the perfume he wanted with perfumer Jacques Cavallier, it’s said that Japanese designer Issey Miyake, famous for his minimalist yet sculptural, pleated clothes, asked for a perfume that was “as clear as spring water,” combining the spray of waterfall, flowers, and forest. One of the first late-’80s, early-’90s Calone-driven acquatics, L’Eau d’Issey has a light melon and transparent leafy greenness with a seaweed/salt note characteristic of this synthetic. (The arochemical Calone smells of cucumber, melon, and a marine-like salt spray.)

Top notes:
Green note, melon, orange blossom, lemon, peach, rosewood, tagetes

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

Base notes:
Cedar, amber, musk

Perfumer:
Christian Mathieu

When Kenzo’s Parfum d’Été (“Summer Perfume”) opens, a candied, violet-like accord blasts out, edged with a very sharp greenness that keeps it from being cloying. That almost-screeching green note becomes more herbaceous and less artificial-smelling, giving Parfum d’Été’s sweetness a touch of dried coriander, or what my Haarmann & Reimer guides call “leafy green.” Although Parfum d’Été is quite sweet at the beginning, it’s also pitched toward green, and floating in the direction of light, transparent florals—lily of the valley, cyclamen, rose. (Those flowers bloom as the perfume progresses, warmed up by amber.)

I like the way that you can still distinguish the predominant notes even in the drydown—the fruit, the florals sweetened by hyacinth, and the leafiness that keeps it fresh and true to its intended season. It’s a charming little green fruity-floral with a quirky personality and enough subtlety to work in the summer heat.

Top notes:
Leafy green, peach, hyacinth, rosewood

Heart notes:
Lily of the valley, cyclamen, rose, jasmine, ylang-ylang, orris

Base notes:
Sandalwood, musk, cedar, amber

Perfumer:
Jean Kerléo

Sublime makes an imperious entrance into a decade that will make her as incongruous as a dolled-up Alexis Carrington walking into an after-hours cocaine party on the Lower East Side. After all, 1992 was the year CK One launched and kicked this grand ’80s style of perfume to the curb.

This doesn’t mean that Sublime isn’t sublime. With accords that recall Must de Cartier’s juxtaposition of galbanum and vanilla, Sublime starts with an intense opening of sweet mandarin and sharp green notes. It quickly becomes spicy, creamy, and woody-ambery while the mandarin continues to cut through the buttery base. When I smell Sublime, I think of that Dior commercial for J’Adore perfume that shows Charlize Theron strutting down the halls of Versailles in a ball gown. As she walks, she pulls off her accessories one by one—earrings, necklace, bracelet—as she says, “Gold is cold. Diamonds are dead.” And I think of all of the notes we will not see for a while in perfume as the clean, unisex, office scents take over.

Top notes:
Bergamot, mandarin, coriander, green note

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

Base notes:
Sandalwood, vetiver, cedar, tonka, styrax, vanilla, musk, amber, civet

Perfumer:
Sophia Grojsman

(The name, and perhaps formula, were changed to Yvresse after Champagne producers threatened Saint Laurent with lawsuits. This review is for Champagne.)

Champagne lies somewhere between the sour-sweet tropical-fruit lusciousness of Calyx (1986) and the rose-violet floral joy that is Paris, Grojsman’s other ultrafeminine rose-hearted scents. What it also has in common with those scents is Grojsman’s ability to create uncanny bouquets, to make the familiar strange, alien, exotic, and shot through with exuberance. “Brooding” is just not a mood you’re going to find in Grojsman’s oeuvre.

Although Champagne is sometimes characterized as a fruity chypre, it seems more like a fruity Oriental perfume to me. Peach and apricot are exoticized with green notes and anise, giving its gorgeous rose-violet heart a push into alien floral territory. And its complex base seems too powdery and creamy to be a chypre: It’s a dizzying
combination of animalic (from castoreum and styrax, which gives the base a creamy, even waxy warmth some compare to lipstick or crayons), balsamic, woody, and mossy, with a continuation of subtle spice from carnation, cinnamon, and patchouli.

I was expecting effervescence from Champagne, a translation in the notes of the bubbles and lightness of the celebratory drink that was originally its namesake. But Champagne gives me something even better—it feels itself like a celebration, with an all-at-onceness of notes and accords that bubble up to gorgeous fun. As I sniff the drydown, I can smell perfectly formed rose petals touched by anisic, spiced fruit and surrounded by an ambery Oriental warmth.

Top notes:
Green notes, peach, apricot, anise, cumin, violet

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

Base notes:
Vanilla, patchouli, cedar, styrax, benzoin, oakmoss, musk, amber, castoreum

Perfumer:
Michel Almairac

A surprisingly demure and nineteenth-century perfume for the early 1990s in its top notes, Eau de Gucci reads as delicately sweet, with hyacinth, ylang-ylang, and jasmine leading the way. Green and fruity top notes remind us that it is modern (and possibly hearkening back to the 1980s), while its woody/ambery base keeps it from being cloying. Eau de Gucci practically walks you through twentieth-century perfumery, from top to bottom.

Top notes:
Bergamot, galbanum, green notes, fruity notes, lemon, hyacinth

Heart notes:
Jasmine, lily of the valley, rose, orris, ylang-ylang, tuberose

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

Perfumer:
Nathalie Feisthauer

Nuits Indiennes (“Indian Nights”) is an Oriental perfume in the grand tradition, a David Lean film in Cinemascope with lots of desert scenes and teeming throngs in town squares filled with exotic, ingredient-stocked markets. How does Feisthauer evoke an Indian night? By surrounding a heliotrope center like chewy marzipan with lush florals and a boozy-amber-woody base with civet. What gives it away as an early-1990s scent is that era’s love for fruity top notes. Here, they’re prominent, but greened to keep them from being too cloying. Powdery, sweet, and gourmand, Nuits Indiennes is a perfume
for those for whom size (and projection) matter. For some reason, one year later, Nuits Indiennes was renamed and relaunched (but not reformulated) as Nuits de Scherrer.

Top notes:
Bergamot, lemon, mandarin, green notes, peach, aldehyde, fruity note

Heart notes:
Jasmine, lily of the valley, rose, ylang-ylang, lilac, heliotrope

Base notes:
Sandalwood, cedar, vanilla, benzoin, ambrein, musk, tonka, civet

Perfumer:
David Apel

That Sunflowers would sit next to Silences in my Haarmann & Reimer guide under the floral-green category is a testament to how broad perfume categories are, as well as to the differences between the 1970s and the 1990s.

Where Silences is extreme, forbidding, and mysterious, Sunflowers is amiable, inviting, and ordinary, like a lovely face that adheres to the rules of symmetry in a world where beauty is defined by excess or imperfection. Pleasant, but undistinguished.

Top notes:
Green note, lemon, rosewood, orange blossom, fruit note, mandarin

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

Base notes:
Cedar, musk, amber, moss

Perfumers:
Alberto Morillas and Harry Fremont

I like to rag a lot on CK One for being the perfume that ushered in the clean office scent to the late twentieth century, but when I really give it a chance, minus its cultural meaning, it’s quite a lovely and happy fragrance. A complex citrus, CK One soars with orange, lemon, and bergamot notes enhanced by aromatic fruits (papaya, pineapple) and greened by lily of the valley and probably galbanum. As bright and oily as freshly grated citrus rinds, with only the greenest iterations of lily and rose, and warmed by the subtlest chypre base, CK One—famously marketed as a unisex fragrance—is practically an eau fraîche in the style of Ô de Lancôme, or Eau Dynamisante (but not quite as herbaceous).

Top notes:
Bergamot, cardamom, mandarin orange, lemon, pineapple, papaya, green notes

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

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