Scent and Subversion (39 page)

T
he moment I caught a whiff of my first vintage perfume, I was hooked. But to follow my nose and undertake the daunting task of writing a book on the subject required inspiration, encouragement, and support. I would like to express my gratitude and thank the following people who provided all of that in spades.

A big thanks to my glamorous mother, Phuoc Babcock, for your love and support. And because of your Charlie, Magie Noire, Scherrer 1, and Diva-wearing self, I love perfume!

Huge thanks go to my best friends Galadrielle Allman and Catherine Zimmer. I would not have been able to write this book without your love and hand-holding. You both encouraged me to just go for it and were always there for me when I needed you. I love you both.

A shout out goes to my San Francisco and New Orleans crews for their friendship and for letting me spray them, sniff them, and talk to them (ad infinitum!) about perfume: Donna Allman, Tina Boudreaux, Ari Braverman, Misty Costanza, Jonno d’Addario, Debbie de la Houssaye, Noelle Deltufo, Lake Douglas, Jordan Flaherty, Leah Foster, Melissa Hung, Lisa Julien, Brie Mazurek, Elizabeth Pearce, Aesha Rasheed, Richard Read, Elizabeth Steeby, and all my other cute SF/NOLA peeps. You know who you are!

I’m eternally grateful to Gordon Warnock, former literary agent at Andrea Hurst Management and now at Foreword Literary Management, for seeing possibility in my book proposal and getting me my first book deal.

And thank you to the Globe Pequot Press/Lyons Press team for being my first publisher, with special thanks to editors Mary Norris and Ellen Urban for your patience, kindness, and editorial support.

I am also so grateful to both Elizabeth Townsend-Gard, Associate Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Tulane Center for Intellectual Property Law & Culture, and Zachary Christiansen, Chief Legal Engineer of the Durationator Software Project, now Associate Attorney for Bowler & McKinney, APLC, for schooling me on the basics of copyright law and guiding me through the confusing steps of getting permissions for the perfume ad images I wanted to use for my book. Thanks to both of you,
Scent and Subversion
is teeming with beautiful ads!

A big thank you also goes to all the perfume brands who kindly gave me permission to use their historical perfume ads for the book.

Thanks to Octavian Coifan, Alessandro Gaultieri, Christophe Laudamiel, Antoine Lie, Sissel Tolaas, Yann Vasnier, and Martynka Wawrzyniak for letting me interview them about
scent and perfume. And to both Octavian and Yann—thank you so much for sniffing the vintage perfumes I sent you and decoding their notes!

A huge thanks and shout out to the ultra-talented perfume bloggers who help to promote passionate and educated scent-loving with their amazing writing, and whom I learn from every day: Denyse Beaulieu, Octavian Coifan, Gaia Fishler, Victoria Frolova, Avery Gilbert, Donna Hathaway, Wendy Holden, Michelle Krell Kidd, Robin Krug, March Moore, Brian Pera, Katie Puckrik, Lucy Raubertas, Angela Sanders, Patty White, and so many others.

Thanks are also in order to the loyal, whip-smart, and witty commenters on my blog, YesterdaysPerfume.com, from whom I’ve learned so much—and from whom I was gifted so much perfume! Your insights on and enthusiasm for perfume spurred me to go deeper and further. With special thanks to Anne-Marie Conde, Brigitte Denniston, Heather Dwyer, Sheila Eggenberger, Carol “Mals86” Guthrie, Robin Karnes, Tommie-Jean Roosmann, Juliana Sadock Savino, Melissa Tait, Mary Vines, and Christine West. Thanks also to Guy Bertrand for supplying me with notes and translations from the
Dictionnaire des Parfum de France
and Bruce Bolmes of SMK-Fragrance for providing me with vintage samples of animalic tinctures.

From the beginning, when I began to write about perfume, Leslie Ann White and her husband, Allen, of MiniaturePerfumeShoppe.com have provided me with friendship and untold numbers of vintage perfume vials and mini bottles. Thank you!

Much appreciation goes to MX Justin Vivian Bond, Chandler Burr, Katie Puckrik, and Dita Von Teese for reading portions of my manuscript and writing such wonderful blurbs. Your bold ideas have inspired me, and I’m honored to have your words on my book.

Thanks also to Chandler Burr, Tania Sanchez, and Luca Turin for awakening my dormant love for perfume with your lyrical, thought-provoking, and often hilarious words. Your attention to perfume as an art, a language, and a cultural force that is woven into the fabric of our lives and memories informed the seriousness and passion with which I approached perfume.

Thanks to all my Indie Gogo supporters and donors who helped finance my last leg of perfume research, with special thanks to Michelle Crosby, Christopher Dommermuth, Sheila McLaughlin, and Kim Nguyen (who also happens to be my cousin!).

Thanks and kisses to darling little Flippy, whose kitty cologne smells like sunshine and love.

A big thank you to beautiful, haunting, raucous, and decadent New Orleans for being the perfect city in which to dream and write about perfume.

And last but not least, thank you to all perfumers—past and present—for the sacred and important work you do to keep our senses and imaginations alive and enlivened.

H
ere are some terms you will encounter frequently when reading about perfume. They include perfume ingredients, descriptors (i.e., “herbaceous,” “indolic,” etc.), perfume categories, and methods of extracting scents from plants. This list doesn’t purport to be comprehensive, and the definitions are cursory, but they should help you get through the average blog post on perfume, and they will help to clarify descriptions in this book. Hopefully, the ingredients will sound evocative enough that you’ll want to smell them.

Absolute:
The residue left over from solvent extraction of scents using materials like hexane and methyl alcohol from fragrant materials. They’re more concentrated than essential oils, and because the temperature used to process them is lower than the steam distillation used to process essential oils, absolutes have a scent closer to the original.

Accord:
The scent that results when a perfumer combines three or more notes together to create a scent distinct from the individual notes. Accords can be abstract scents, and they can be specific scents. Gardenia, for example, is often a constructed accord in perfume because the yield is too low and expensive for extraction from the gardenia itself.

Aldehydes:
Aromatic chemicals isolated for the first time in the nineteenth century, but that also occur naturally. Certain aldehydes provide an increased diffusiveness, sparkle, and lift to perfumes, most famously in Chanel No. 5. Aldehydes C-12 and lower add sparkle to fragrances, and aldehydes C-14 and higher add fruit notes (for example, the peachiness of Mitsouko’s C-14 aldehyde).

Amber:
An accord in perfumery that is supposed to recall the qualities of ambergris. Amber is often constructed with labdanum, Tolu balsam, or Peru balsam. It’s often an accord in Oriental perfumes.

Ambergris:
A highly prized perfume ingredient consisting of the oxidized excretion from a sperm whale. It is rarely used in its natural form in perfumery because of its rarity, exorbitant cost, and concerns about sourcing ambergris from live whales rather than from shore-found ambergris. It’s said to have an earthy, sweet, tobacco, and pleasantly animalic scent. It primarily works to bring out other notes in perfumery rather than to impart a particular scent on its own. Aged ambergris and ambrox, a synthetic substitute, according to Bo Jensen, have the following facets: “1) wet mossy forest soil, 2) strong tobacco, 3) balsamic sandalwood, 4) warm animal musk, 5) seaweed/ocean, and 6) fecal.”

Ambrein:
The primary scented molecule in ambergris, isolated and used in perfumery. It’s warm, sweet, vanillic, and ambery, with facets of spice and tobacco.

Animalic:
A term used to describe fragrances with animal ingredients in natural or synthetic form, including civet, castoreum, musk, or ambergris. The voluptuous, erotic, and sometimes disturbing quality of animalic perfumes can register in an olfactory way, as something “dirty” or animal-smelling, or as a feeling, a mood, or a quality. Sometimes, it can be both.

Animalis:
A base created by Synarome with civet, castoreum, musk, and other animalic notes with a fatty, almost intoxicatingly voluptuous quality. It’s in vintage Baghari and Visa, both by Robert Piguet. To smell a perfume with Animalis in its base is to truly understand what an old-school animalic perfume is.

Artemisia:
Artemisia oil, or
Armoise
in French, comes from steam-distilling white wormwood, a shrub that grows wild in North Africa and the Middle East. The best known form of Artemisia is
Artemisia absinthium,
(aka “grand wormwood” or “absinthe wormwood”), which was in the alcoholic drink Absinthe made notorious in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by writers and artists. In perfume,
Artemisia herba/alba
imparts a green, cool, slightly camphoraceous scent and is a note in many grand chypres, including Jolie Madame, Bandit, Azurée, Sikkim, and Aramis.

Balsam, balsamic:
The resin from the bark of trees and shrubs (Peru, Tolu, styrax) that have a rich vanilla scent.
Balsamic
is a term used to describe perfumes with the soft, ambery aspects these resins impart.

Base note:
The most molecularly heavy ingredient in a perfume formula, and the longest lasting. Base notes can exalt other perfume notes, fix them (make them longer-lasting), and impart their own particular scent. In the perfume pyramids that sketch out a perfume’s ingredients, base notes are featured in the bottom row.

Benzoin:
A sweet, balsamic resin used in incense and as a base note in perfume for its vanillic scent and fixative properties. Also known as
styrax
because it comes from the bark of the styrax tree.

Bergamot:
The essential oil from the peel of the nonedible
Citrus aurantium
fruit that looks like a small orange. Its sweetish, mellow lemony scent is a crucial top note in perfumery.

Birch tar:
Dry-distilled from birch bark, birch tar was used in leather fragrances to impart an earthy, smoky, savory note, as in vintage Rive Gauche, Shalimar, and Annick Goutal’s Eau du Fier. It’s been all but banned for use in perfumery by the IFRA. Birch absolute smells like campfire smoke: warm, savory, and hickorylike.

Calone:
A synthetic “marine” note that is supposed to evoke the freshness of the ocean. There is a slight watermelon facet to calone. This was a ubiquitous note in the 1990s, in fragrances such as Cool Water and L’Eau d’Issey.

Cardamom:
An intensely aromatic, sweet spice from the ginger family, in the form of a pod filled with seeds.

Carnation:
A smoky, sweet, and clove-like scent, the latter facet due to Eugenol, the primary component of clove.

Cassis/black currant bud:
A sharp, fruity, almost cat-urine-like scented perfume note. In Magie Noire.

Castoreum:
An oily secretion from the abdominal sacs of beavers. Its warm, musky scent with facets of fruit and tobacco is often used to make leather fragrances. Both the vintage castoreum and synthetic-blend castoreum I’ve smelled had a dark, almost soy sauce–like savoriness. German chemist Henri J. Hoffmann described castoreum as being “sharp and burning with a creosote or tar-like note, reminiscent of the ‘glowing’ odour emanating from birch tar or Russian leather.” Paloma Picasso’s Mon Parfum was overdosed with castoreum.

Chypre:
A perfume category named after the Greek island of Cyprus. It characteristically has citrus top notes such as bergamot, contrasted with a mossy base of oakmoss and patchouli. In 1917, François Coty’s Chypre launched the category, which waned in popularity in the 1990s. IFRA restrictions on the amount of oakmoss and treemoss in perfumes (except in synthetic form) that went into effect in 2010 means that no true chypres will ever be made again.

Cistus (Labdanum):
A resin from the rockrose bush, traditionally gathered from goats’ beards as they fed on the plant. Labdanum is said to be the note closest to the scent of ambergris. Creamy, soft, vanillic.

Civet:
In classical perfumery, the cream harvested from the anal gland of the mongoose-like civet animal, often described as cat-like. Fecal-smelling when undiluted, civet “rounds” out other notes when used judiciously. Famous as an overdosed note in Guerlain’s Jicky (1889), it is considered one of the first abstract modern scents. Civet is primarily in synthetic form now. I’m coming around to the belief that civet is added to perfume not just for a little stink, but for a host of psychological effects that can best be described as subliminal tension. It was even used in classic clean scents such as Estée Lauder’s White Linen.

Clove:
An aromatic spice similar to cinnamon, but less sweet. Its primary component is Eugenol. Caron’s Poivre and Bellodgia have prominent clovey aspects due to carnation, which also has Eugenol.

Coniferous:
A term used to describe scents with notes such as pine, spruce, and juniper. Shiseido’s Inoui (for women) made gorgeous use of notes conventionally used in masculine fragrances.

Costus:
An African ginger root whose oil smells like human warmth: sebum from hair and skin; some say dust. A human “animalic.” In Lanvin’s Rumeur, Nina Ricci’s Fille d’Eve, and Scherrer 1.

Coumarin:
With a sweet scent described as smelling like new-mown hay, coumarin was used in perfumery for the first time in Fougère Royale (1882), and has come to be a primary ingredient in the fougère catgory of perfumes. It’s found in many natural substances, but in particularly high concentrations in the tonka bean.

Cuir:
The French word for leather.

Cumin:
An aromatic spice used often in Indian cuisine that smells similar to underarm/body odor. It’s used in perfume to impart an erotic body-odor note. In Shiseido’s Féminité du Bois and reformulations of Rochas’s Femme.

Drydown:
This term refers to the scent that remains when your perfume “dries down” on your skin, that is, after the top notes and middle notes have begun to evaporate and the heavier base notes become more prominent.

Essential oil:
The oils obtained from a variety of plants via steam distillation or expression (from a citrus fruit rind).

Facet:
A term borrowed from gemology to describe the many scent dimensions one perfume note, molecule, or ingredient may have. For example, geranium is often described as having a lemon facet, as well as a rosy one. Labdanum has vanilla and cinnamon facets.

Floral:
A perfume category whose predominant scent comes from floral notes. Florals can be described as fresh, green, or fruity, etc., depending on the other notes in the composition.

Fougère:
The French word for “fern,” this fragrance category was introduced with Houbigant’s nineteenth-century fragrance Fougère Royale (1882), which was a fantasy fern fragrance, given that ferns don’t have a recognizable smell. It includes notes of bergamot, oakmoss, lavender, and coumarin.

Frankincense:
A gum resin from a small shrub that since ancient times has been used for incense. Sweet, spicy, smoky, sharp, and even slightly lemony, it is often used, along with
other resins like labdanum and myrrh, in Oriental fragrances. Also called olibanum (
Boswellia carteri
).

Galbanum:
A gum resin from the giant fennel
Ferula gummosa,
steam-distilled for its essential oil. Bitter, herbaceous, and almost chalky, this is the note that is often present in perfume formulas described as “green.” Germaine Cellier used an overdose of galbanum in Pierre Balmain’s Vent Vert, and it greened up Silences by Jacomo and Lancetti by Lancetti.

Gardenia:
A creamy, white floral whose extraction yields too little to be worth the cost for commercial perfumery; gardenia accords are constructed instead.

Geranium:
A flower with a lemony-rosy scent.

Gourmand:
A modern scent category with notes that smell like food, often confectionary; for example, chocolate, vanilla, and cotton candy.

Green:
A term used to describe scents that recall the fresh, aromatic scents of herbs, leaves, and grasses. Galbanum is the ur-green note.

Guaiac wood:
The steam-distilled essential oil from tree bark. An intensely smoky scent, used to great effect in Theorema and Le Feu d’Issey.

Habanolide:
One of many synthetic musks, with a warm, sweetish, powdery quality.

Headspace technology:
A form of olfactory photography,
headspace
is a method of capturing the scent molecules from scented things, whether organic (a flower whose scent can’t be extracted traditionally) or inorganic (dirt). Basically, a bell-jar-like apparatus is placed over the scented object and the molecules are extracted and saved. After the molecules are painstakingly analyzed and noted, a synthetic version can be re-created by perfumers.

Heart note/middle note:
In the perfume pyramid, heart notes are often floral notes and have duration/volatility/weight somewhere between top notes and base notes.

Hedione:
A synthetic perfume note (methyl dihydrojasmonate) that smells of radiant jasmine. Used in both Eau Sauvage and Diorella to create a transparent jasmine.

Heliotrope:
A purple flower originally from Peru with vanilla, caramel, and almond-cherry facets. Its scent cannot be extracted from the flowers, so synthetic heliotropin substitutes for it.

Herbaceous:
A term describing the scent of aromatic herbs such as lavender, sage, basil, and bay leaf.

Hesperidic:
Describes citrus notes in perfume.

IFRA:
The International Fragrance Association is the perfume industry’s global regulatory body whose purpose is to test fragrance materials for safety and possible allergenic concerns. Much controversy has stemmed from its decision to mandate limited use of classical fragrance ingredients such as oakmoss and jasmine absolute, which perfumers say has created limited perfume palettes and wiped out whole categories of perfume (chypre), threatening the continued creation of classic fragrances with those ingredients.