Scent and Subversion (33 page)

Perfumer:
Jean Guichard

People often complain that they hate perfumes that smell synthetic. But what if a perfume is made intentionally to smell synthetic? I can’t guess at the intention of Eden’s author, Jean Guichard, but I think that an aspect of Eden is too weirdly synthetic to have been an accident. Why would a perfumer want the flowers in his Garden of Eden to smell like overheated plastic? And why on earth do I kind of dig it?

Eden’s heart and base are classic ’80s. It’s a big, gourmand Oriental. But something very strange happens at the beginning. The top half of Eden smells like it’s made of hot plastic soured by green notes and herbalized by anise (from tarragon). These alien top notes join with their more earthbound counterparts: a sumptuous floral heart that is softened and fattened by orris, drying down to a fruit-sweetened, mossy gourmand base reminiscent of Loulou, also a Jean Guichard creation. But no matter how beautiful its heart and base are, that herbal, hot-plastic note (which reminds me a little of unripe mango skin) announces a wonky, artificial, and compelling accord that haunts the rest of the perfume.

Eden was released the same year as CK One, and although Eden and CK One would seem, initially, to be diametrically opposed, they both introduced different versions of unnatural. In CK One’s case, it offers up clean and androgynous as something to aspire to in the olfactory realm. The baroque, hyper-gendered stylings of the ’80s were denuded with CK One, and the scentless, sex-ambiguous body was laid bare.

Eden repudiates the natural not through disembodied, but rather artificial-smelling accords. Its wet, plastic, anise-licorice smell travels through to the drydown, which is mostly classically ’80s in its loud too-muchness. Scents from the 1990s attempted to get rid of human smells in order to make way, as perfume historian Octavian Coifan muses in a dystopian prediction, for a computerized generation preparing for a disembodied, virtual future.

It could be argued that some perfumers introduced strangely plastic notes to 1980s and ’90s fragrances when they could have just as easily created “natural” smells. Synthetic and unnatural were introduced as a virtue—not synthetics in place of more-expensive ingredients, but rather perfumers making the aesthetic choice to create accords that smell synthetic. Think of Poison’s sickly-sweet tuberose/grape bubblegum accord, or Angel’s bizarre cotton candy / patchouli accord.

The Eden Jean Guichard has proposed for us—in keeping with Angel and Poison—is a garden of plastic delights.

Top notes:
Bergamot, lemon, mandarin, green note, peach, tarragon, orange blossom

Heart notes:
Tuberose, jasmine, lily of the valley, rose, ylang-ylang, orris

Base notes:
Cedar, patchouli, sandalwoood, musk, moss, vanilla, tonka, amber

Perfumer:
Olivia Giacobetti

Premier Figuier, Olivia Giacobetti’s Garden of Eden fragrance, in contrast to Guichard’s interesting artificial Eden, has one tree—a fig tree. The school of naturalism to which it belongs is in sharp contrast to Eden’s postmodern expressionism.

A beautiful compromise between the sweet, gourmand 1980s and the clean, fresh 1990s, Premier Figuier (“First Fig”) is as much a special, landmark perfume as Sophia Grojsman’s Calyx, both for making complexity look (or smell) simple, and for making elegant notes that, in others’ hands, could become cloying and cliché. (It’s not Giacobetti’s fault that we are now saturated with fig scents; remember, hers was “le premier.”)

Premier Figuier evokes every part of the fig tree—its sweet fruit, its green leaves, the tree’s bark, and, via almond milk and coconut, fig’s sensuous mouth feel and what she’s described as “the white milk at the tip of its stem.” The fig tree, she says, “is absolutely my totemic tree, the one from my childhood … This evokes my first memories of the Mediterranean, my first taste of happiness.” You can feel and smell that sense of Edenic childhood in the pure and almost elemental notes of this iconic perfume.

Notes:
Fig, fig leaf, milk of almond, sandalwood, coconut

Perfumer:
Maurice Roucel

Named after the address of Hermès’s flagship store in Paris, 24, Faubourg starts with sunny orange blossom and decadent jasmine, warmed by amber and a touch of spice from patchouli. Like a jaunty print on one of Hermès’s scarves, 24, Faubourg’s sunniness is tempered by its formality and rich materials. This could be considered matronly and a little forbidding by some.

Notes:
Orange blossom, jasmine sambac, iris, ambergris, vanilla

Perfumer:
Jacques Cavallier

It’s hard to believe that it’s been eighteen years since Poème came out, but one whiff, and the fruity-floral gourmand automatically dates itself. The first note sounded is a lovely, sourish-green black currant, followed by a juicy lineup of fruit and intensely indolic and sweet white flowers. A gourmand drydown gives the notes a place to rest their heads. In the intervening years, this style of perfume has crept into functional scent territory, so it’s a little hard to smell this without associating it with synthetics and shampoo.

Top notes:
Black currant, mandarin, bergamot, and peach

Heart notes:
Orange blossom, clove, freesia, jasmine, and tuberose

Base notes:
Vanilla, tonka bean, amber, musk

Gourmand without being overbearing, Jungle L’Éléphant’s spiced mango heart is rounded off with the almondy goodness of heliotrope and the richness of vanilla. Cardamom, clove, and licorice pull the fragrance in a direction that seems at once elegant, playful, and exotic, as if Willy Wonka decided to take the children to a foreign land instead of the Chocolate Factory. The spicy drydown smells like chai or spiced cookies.

Top notes:
Mandarin, cardamom, cumin, clove

Heart notes:
Ylang-ylang, licorice, mango, heliotrope

Base notes:
Patchouli, vanilla, amber, cashmere

Perfumer:
Maurice Roucel

A tart green rose that soars with galbanum and coriander and then plummets to earth with a dissonant powdery-anise accord, with facets of celery and violet leaf, Envy mimics the bipolarity of its namesake emotion. It feels like two different perfumes, so violently does its first half differ from its second. Because I love the galbanum and rose opening, this powdery-licorice base tempers my affection for this scent, but I admire its dramatic two-act play.

Notes:
Green notes, coriander, cumin, hyacinth, lily of the valley, rose, jasmine, magnolia, iris, woods, musk

Perfumer:
Dominique Ropion

Like Jungle L’Éléphant, Jungle Le Tigre thinks outside of its perfume-category box by evading the heaviness that comes with being designated an “Oriental” perfume. Le Tigre starts off with a jubilant mix of kumquat, tangerine, and orange made elegant with the warmth of apricot-like osmanthus and sharp ylang-ylang. Amber and cinnamon unifies Le Tigre with its heavier L’Éléphant brother. With this duo, Ropion pulls off quite a feat: He creates a happy
Jungle Book
bestiary that’s playful, chic, modern, and something even more elusive for perfume—charming.

Top notes:
Kumquat, tangerine, and orange

Heart notes:
Osmanthus, ylang-ylang

Base notes:
Amber, cinnamon

Perfumer:
Annick Menardo

Powder, tea, rubber, leather, savory-smoke, tar, lemony-bergamot, vanilla …
Wow.

A masterpiece of twentieth-century perfumery, Bulgari Black is one of those “Where were you when you first smelled it?” kind of fragrances for me. In fact, I was at Nordstrom’s in San Francisco with a friend in the men’s department when the fantastic Thierry de Baschmakoff bottle caught our eye. Squat and round, with a silver cap, rubber-encased glass with a bit of clear glass peeking out of the top, this fetish-like object beckoned us to it. It was confused love at first spray. Powdered rubber and a smoky, meaty-smelling lapsang souchang tea note snake around the perfume’s more-conventional base notes of bright bergamot and vanilla/amber. Bulgari Black is an updated Shalimar for romantic types who frequent leather and latex fetish bars. It’s also the smell of a bat’s powdered, webbed wings as it flies around Manhattan in an urban goth fantasy …

Top notes:
Lapsang souchang accord, bergamot

Heart notes:
Jasmine

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

Perfumer:
Jacques Cavallier

Reminiscent of the scent of xí muôi, the Vietnamese preserved-plum snack I used to eat as a child that assaulted the palate with a difficult mix of salt, licorice, and dessicated plum, Le Feu d’Issey (“Issey’s Fire”) confronts the nose with some intensely conflicting information. (It’s this perfume that prompted Luca Turin to rhapsodize that perfume was “the most portable form of intelligence.”)

At the heart of Le Feu d’Issey’s pyre is a smoky, milky rose surrounded by an extraordinarily complex mélange of gourmand sweetness, saltiness, and savoriness. Gauiac wood provides the savory smoke; anise adds a dissonant herbal aspect; and vanilla, caramel, and coconut create the lush gourmand accords that are this perfume’s centerpiece. As if Le Feu d’Issey were not complex enough, there’s also a smell of wet and burnt woods. A love-it-or-hate-it perfume that is likened by some haters to baby vomit. Proceed with caution. (Le Feu d’Issey is almost impossible to find, unless you want to spend $300-plus for a bottle. Blood Concept’s RED+MA, a woody, spicy lactonic, and similarly challenging perfume, would make a good substitute.)

Top notes:
Bergamot, coconut, rosewood, anise

Heart notes:
Jasmine, rose, milk, caramel

Base notes:
Cedar, sandalwood, guaiac wood, vanilla, musk

Perfumer:
Christopher Sheldrake

With its atavistic embrace of animal notes (albeit in synthetic form) that hearkened back to vintage perfume styles and even to the nineteenth-century dandy’s love of musk, civet, and ambergris, Muscs Koublaï Khän not only subverted the clean, office-scent genre, but also sounded a dissonant note in the same decade in which bland pop celebutante Paris Hilton came to fame. It smells like wet fur, unwashed hair, and cedar chips, combined with the faintest, softest hint of something sweet and powdery, like wild honey and pollen. Its combination of conventional floral notes with animalic notes also evokes the smell of a man who has just taken a shower and decided to exercise without deodorant, the metallic twang of his body odor, ripe with olfactory facets of cumin and hamster cage, radiating through the fresh, powdery soap he’d just used.

Thirteenth-century ruler of the Mongol Empire in China and nephew of Ghengis, Koublaï Khän isn’t exactly the aspirational figure most people fantasize about being when spritzing on perfume, and it’s hard to imagine a focus group okaying the idea of creating a perfume that evokes a musky, thirteenth-century warmonger. And yet Muscs Koublaï Khän led the way for a future wave of “skank” perfumes, as they’re affectionately called, including the mania for the difficult, earthy oud wood note that rages on today.

Notes:
Civet, castoreum, cistus labdanum, ambergris, Moroccan rose, cumin, ambrette seed (musk mallow), costus root, patchouli

Perfumer:
Christine Nagel

What a strangely dry and intellectual name for such a sexy, spicy scent. This gourmandish woody-spicy Oriental has a peppery, smoky character that cloaks the florals in a garment of dark mystery. The blast of pepper and spices coincides with the earthy, smoky character of guaiac wood and patchouli in the base, giving the perfume a dirty edge that distinguishes it from other, more eager-to-please Oriental perfumes. It’s less difficult than Issey Miyake’s gorgeous Le Feu d’Issey, although it shares its rose, pepper, amber, and guaiac wood notes.

Several times in Theorema’s drydown, I smelled what seemed like smoky leather or earth combined with the comforting gourmand notes of amber and benzoin. (The balance of disquiet and comfort is part of what makes Theorema so exciting and actually untheoretical/cerebral.) Benzoin can impart a creamy vanilla or chocolate note to perfumes, and in Theorema’s case, it combines with a candied orange note that smells like Terry’s Orange Chocolate candies.

As many have said elsewhere, Theorema is a wonderfully comforting winter scent. Hours later on my skin, it smells like milky, spiced rose.

Top notes:
Citrus, orange blossom, nutmeg, pepper, cardamom, rosewood, rose hips

Heart notes:
Jasmine, rose, osmanthus, ylang-ylang, cinnamon, spices

Base notes:
Benzoin, guaiac wood, sandalwood, amber, patchouli

Perfumer:
Michel Almairac

In ads for Gucci Rush, a bright red tint washes over the entire image of a woman’s face thrown back in ecstasy, eyes closed, with parted lips. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to guess what’s going on: She is either in the throes of an orgasmic rush or a drug rush.

Rush, the perfume, lives up to the metaphor of its name, in that its beautiful notes seem to come at you all at once, rushing forth as if from a higher altitude, their elevation probably due to aldehydes. Milky, peachy, and with a dose of syrupy florals, Rush is cut with a bit of warmth and spice from coriander and patchouli. It never fails to give me a perfume high. The spell may not last long for me, but even after it settles on my skin, that hit of happiness continues for anyone who nuzzles up against my neck.

Top notes:
Gardenia and freesia

Heart notes:
Jasmine, Turkish rose, coriander

Base notes:
Vanilla, patchouli, vetiver