Prada No. 5 Narciso

Narcissus is one of those brand of soliflores that people either love or hate. I have yet to encounter a happy middle ground.

On the face of it, it would seem that any floral accord which strays into the province of the indolic runs the risk of alienating certain people who “think” they like white florals when what they truly like are scrubbed-up florals done in cosmetics labs. Real flowers aren’t hygienic-smelling at all. They grow in the dirt: they co-exist with decaying plants, animals, and minerals. They have “complexity” in their blood, or roots, or phylum or whatever you call it.

Prada’s No. 5 Narciso, one of the quietly released perfumes available exclusively in select Prada boutiques and Liberty of London, is, like its bedfellows Oeillet, Fleur d’Oranger and Cuir Ambre, a vintage-styled gem. This is narcissus in the late morning, when you take a few steps in the kitchen yard and run your hand through the green stalks. The perfumer manages here to imbue the green-sweet-polleny solvent-extracted narcissus poeticus note with a certain sunniness, owing to the inclusion of orange blossom absolute, beeswax absolute and narcissus tazzeta.

If that isn’t special enough, after about fifteen minutes on my skin the vetiver peeks through the flowers, dry and spicy, mimicking human perspiration. All in all, this is a very human scent, neither vaunting prettiness or brute strength. (Personally, I’d have gone with some oakmoss in the base for a chypre effect.) It speaks clearly and, on a warm summer morning, you find yourself listening.

Prattling Violet

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, to prattle is “to talk or chatter idly or meaninglessly; babble or prate.” (And you, dear reader, already are thinking that this is going to be a bad review. Patience, s’il te plaît.) Annick Goutal’s singularly impressive Duel, conceived by Isabel Doyen in collaboration with Annick’s daughter Camille, constellates its elements –– birch tar, green maté leaf absolute, Paraguay seed, orris, and musk –– around a dusky violet heart. It is a strange effect, to say the least; strange but not unwelcome. Indeed, Duel is a misnomer of sorts; for the fragrance transports me not to a scene of drawn pistols at dawn, but, rather, to the slapping of gloves that preceded it. Duel reeks of the libertine and his illicit “freedoms,” the panoply of liberties he’s taken with his rivals’ sweethearts. His britches make the ladies (and a few of the footmen) swoon, while gentlemen of his rank and station affect quizzical expressions at the violet spray in his lapel. Rumor has it, he’s no shrinking violet.

Parfum d’Empire Cuir Ottoman

Leather in summer. Sounds like the title of a German mountain film or an avant-garde poem from the Weimar Republic. Inevitably, these are the words that come to mind when I think of Parfums d’Empire Cuir Ottoman.

For some reason, here I am reminded of Etat Libre d’Orange Jasmin et Cigarette. It inhabits an olfactory space where delicacy vies with debauchery. While one is a leather scent and the other a tobacco scent, they allow us a casement-view into their twinned identities. And, often, I have found them appealing to the same noses. The genius of Jasmin et Cigarette is the amped-up, fruity jasmine. Bananas and Beaujolais. The genius of Cuir Ottoman is the double-caress of Indian and Egyptian jasmine absolute and cool, powdery orris in its disjointed-yet-instantly-appealing heart. Like Jasmin et Cigarette, Cuir Ottoman eschews the indolic, sweaty-body aspect of jasmine for something pretty but not prettified.

After a while, Cuir Ottoman sticks close to its leather base. It never strays into the bejeweled Orientalist realm but, rather, remains Parisian through and through. For those who would find themselves seduced merely by the name, a caveat: this is not Serge Lutens territory. The Ottoman Empire minus the hair and the ointments and the camel dust. Think of Proust’s “petite bande” on the boardwalk at Balbec transformed into a band of enchanted lederhosen-clad Bavarian youth—Hedi Slimane-thin––beholding the Golden Horn and the minarets of Sultanahmet for the very first time.

Vétiver Véritable

Vetiver (Chrysopogon zizanioides) is a material of aristocratic mien but humble means. Used to stanch water erosion in the tropics, vetiver traditionally has been utilized in everything from window shades to grass mats. The dried roots resemble a tangle of vermicelli and possess a intoxicating sweet-smoky-woody-earthy aroma touched with a nose-tingling bitterness and a bit of licorice. Vetiver has been the subject of many a post on Vetivresse, and understandably so. The market seems to have reached vetiver saturation, with more than a handful of very pleasant renditions available. The venerable house of Chanel has recently entered the fray with Sycomore, a Sheldrake-Polge collaboration, which, if I were to give vetiver advice to a fragrance neophyte, would fall high on my short list of benchmark vetivers. While it bears little resemblance to its forebear, Chanel’s 1930 version, it is dark and smoky and sophisticated: a welcome anodyne to the present surfeit of bland men’s colognes. Sycomore is a dashing sports car of scents, tuxedo black with touches of glinting eighteen-karat gold and a little splash of mud on the fender. It possesses better-than-average sillage and tenacity, and, in its behemoth atomizer, is vetiver enough to sustain you for a couple of years.

Image: courtesy of Chanel

Parfums 06130: Lierre Rose

For a second there, I thought I would subtitle this review “When Natural Just Isn’t Enough.” (Well, I guess I just did.) Lierre Rose (the name means “Ivy-Rose”) was created in 2007 by Jacques Chabert, uncle of Nicolas Chabert the founder of Grasse-based Parfums 06130. Chabert worked with Jacques Polge on the EDP update of Chanel Cristalle and with Jean-Paul Guerlain on Samsara (1989). His Lierre Rose for 06130 is a pretty enough rose, which in no exaggeration reminds me of the smell of a newish bathroom in a Cote d’Azur luxury high-rise. It succeeds in making high-quality natural materials smell mundane, even cheap. This is disconcerting for a brand that seemingly prides itself on remaining outside the beck and call of the vast mass-market middle ground; for that same middle ground is what enabled Chabert to make a name for himself in the first place.

Lierre Rose starts out with something interesting: a slightly camphorous cardamom note playing counterpoint to an intoxicating tuberose-rose-violet triad. But all too quickly it gets muddled, where one or more of the elements should stand out. I wish it would have been the greener, earthier aspect of the Grasse violet absolute, but instead it’s just a sort of creamy floral fuzzfest dusted with jasmine. Where there could have been boldness, sultriness even, there’s scented-candle insufferableness. Lierre Rose had my hopes up, but ultimately she just turned out to be a pretty girl who wouldn’t leave the bathroom.

$145 for a peck on the cheek? She should have been chypre.

Uriental

Yves Saint Laurent lived his life as in a dream. And for forty years he succeeded in giving the world a privileged glimpse of what he saw each day in that lush and, often, dangerous place.

He represented la belle France’s uneasy relationship with her colonial past, even as he lusted for the charms of an even earlier colonial era (that of his decadent forebears, Flaubert and Pierre Loti). Likewise, he craved the very things that a provincial upbringing kept at arm’s length: exceptionalism and cultural subversion.

He embodied both Schéhérazade and her Sultan – the sentence of death commuted, then reinstated by his whim: the sentence becoming, like the sentence of YSL’s beloved Proust, a golden thread sewn onto our living hearts.

So what shall it be to acknowledge the master’s leave-taking? Champagne or a little Opium?
(I shall let you choose, but I’m pushing the latter.)

Here’s to you, M. Laurent.

Dame of the Rose

Jean-Paul Guerlain’s Nahéma parfum (1979) was unarguably one of the biggest, sexiest, most luxurious rose fragrances ever created. And one of the most terribly timed releases in perfume history. Its muse, the actress Catherine Deneuve, strangely was endorsing a competitor at the time of its release. Over the years, though, it has garnered its admirers.

Years before Sophia Grojsman’s Paris and Trésor, Nahéma redeemed roses from a boudoir dripping in frillies. Much of this has to do with the amplification that JPG was able to effect in the execution of his idea. Other commentators – Luca Turin among them – have honed in on the painterly quality of this scent, and they aren’t unjustified in this. Damascones, the molecules isolated from rose oil by Firmenich in the late 70s, lent a golden, autumnal complexity to something that could quite easily have been frou frou. Alpha-damascones lent a ripe, bursting peachiness while beta-damascones bolstered the sandalwood in the base with a warm, dusky quality.

All this, blended with Bulgarian rose otto and ylang ylang, succeeded in conjuring up the Arabian Nights sort of woman that Guerlain envisioned. Sadly, women at this time had their sights on the Far East and were more enamored of Opium-dreams than roseate visions.

Nahéma deserves more serious reappraisal than it’s getting. The materials and craft of this fragrance are sans égal, and it doesn’t suffer from the additions and detractions of pervasive reformulation. It would be marvelous on a younger woman and is a shoe-in for the Insolence crowd.

Making Hay

A few things come to mind:
Cutting it.
Summer of ’02.
Dornach, Switzerland.
The onerous task of running in front of the bailer.
Raking the stray blades into clean rows.
Blazing sun beating down on me in farm clothing.
Running behind the bailer straightening the bails.
Taking refuge under shady cherry trees.
Thinking of lunch.
Sneezing.

A few years later, I ventured into Santa Maria Novella’s Soho boutique and sampled their eau de cologne, Fieno (Hay), hoping to rekindle fond memories of simpler times. I can’t say it embodied what I thought it would. Rather, its clean, powdery and slightly green character captured an aspect of hay as, say, I’d imagine a hay-scented soap to smell. There was even a sweetness to it. Why does hay automatically get associated with a dry-ish summer barnyard? Come to think of it, there were many days – this being Switzerland and all – when the sun wouldn’t come out and there I’d be with these marvelous respiring dairy cows (Holsteins for the most part), watching them eat as I threw the beautiful green blades into their manger. Something in Fieno (as I wear it today in the triple extract concentrate) brings back that moment, the cooling breeze coming in through an open barn door and wafting over the freshly cut hay. Its sweet herbaceous character, accented by myrtle, is the essence of such days and the respite they gave from the sun’s rays. A summer must-have, for sure. I wish it came in soap and shower gel, too.

“1000”

Now, here’s a fragrance that Luca Turin really did a disservice to. He didn’t pan it. Rather, as with too many perfumes in his (and Tania’s) guide, he awarded it four stars, threw off some gnomic wit, and basically told us nothing. Yes, to his point, perhaps it is a little “dated,” but to call it tired would be like calling Garbo tired instead of retired. And, happily for us, 1000 is far from either. Created in 1972 by the great Jean Kerléo (incidentally, founder of the Osmothéque in Versailles), 1000 was one of those scents for which the brief must simply have read, “Mind not the cost.”

For me, it is a most-welcome stop on the road to the perfect floral chypre. Elegant, subtle and understated (compared, say, with the exuberance of Joy), it invites us into a bright, burnished environment of apricot-ey osmanthus, jasmine absolute de Grasse (as opulent here as in vintage No 5 extrait de parfum), rosa centifolia, rosa damascena, violet leaf absolute, patchouli, oak moss and sandalwood. On my skin, the heart notes seem to go on for decades.

Certainly not a bargain to procure, be assured that the quality of the naturals here is unimpeachable. If you like Mitsouko, a bottle of this shouldn’t far off in your future. And it’s still available in the extrait de parfum. Who can guess for how long?

A Glass of Milk

And a piece of toast. (Be not afraid, I shan’t channel Gertrude Stein.) I’m just trying to wrap my mind around two genre-bending gourmands which use milk-and-toast accords in novel ways: Serge Lutens Douce Amère (2000) and Thierry Mugler Miroir des Envies (2007). Neither is on my usual bill of fare, being neither vintage nor terribly atmospheric. My tastes run to moody perfumes, perfumes that evoke paintings, landscapes, a longed-for past, even music. Douce Amère and Miroir des Envies are un-nostalgic scents which speak to me, rather, as a mother to her child in what, for lack of a more apt term, I will call “kitchen tones.” They invite us to a table. But not just any table.



Christopher Sheldrake’s Douce Amère owes much of its intrigue to wormwood, which, by sheer dint of the name, could not be farther from such a comforting place as the kitchen table. But dried fruits and spices conspire there to make artemisia absinthium a companionable bedfellow. Far indeed are we from the artemisic opening of, say, Yatagan. Rather, we are presented with something resembling a blanc-mange in which almonds have been replaced with licorice and the top has been lightly dusted with jasmine and some type of sharp, dark chocolate. After a few minutes on the skin Douce Amère settles down to light cedar and slightly sweet spiced milk. It is creamy and lovable and addictive – a pleasant alternative to scents with powdery drydowns, like Lorenzo Villoresi’s Teint de Neige.



As for the toast (what wine geeks call pain-grillé), perfumers Louise Turner and Christine Nagel of Givaudan succeed in serving it up in their brilliant, otherworldly tour de force for Thierry Mugler: Miroir des Envies (Mirror of Desires). Given a Givaudan lab with all the great naturals and premium synthetics I don’t know what would possess me to do bread, but these gals obviously knew what they were doing. Toast is one of those things that I like to taste in a good glass of Meursault or Champagne, but on the skin I’d never have imagined how well it works with a jasmine-dominated floral accord. And what’s more, it’s surprisingly unisex. Put this on the list with L’Artisan Parfumeur’s bready iris Bois Farine and reacquaint yourself with the aroma. Clearly, those envies wanted something crunchy (knackig as the Germans say) to sink their teeth into.

Jeepers Chypres!

It takes a lot to excite me. Chalk that up to New York jadedness or whatnot. In a world of perfume junkies (bless their hearts) who constantly talk up the next new “masterpiece” and who throw the word “lemming” around with such abandon as to give the animal-rights folks a fright, it takes a real shiver-me-timbers scent to make an outstanding impression.

It was, then, with a great sense of fear and loathing that I ordered some samples of the super-exclusive line of “vintage-ey” extraits de parfums from Auguste, an unknown French perfumer who purports to have used les anciennes grimoires to concoct a chypre, an oriental, and a cuir de Russie. Grimoire, I love it. (Cut to a gallic Gargamel in front of some bubbling Turk’s head.)

What does it mean, this chic for vintage? Is it a cry for an authenticity (of the emotional sort) so lacking in the development of today’s perfumes? I dare say it isn’t some rummage-sale sort of mentality. Face it, people want designer clothing; they want labels, names if you may, not quaintness; but they want authenticity in the foods they prepare and the scents they wear.

Auguste, despite the sanctimoniousness of its venture (its almost audible straining at Preservation), has done something very, very right in the genre of the vintage chypre. Esprit de Chypre is like a miniature stumbled upon in some provincial museum. It communicates the chypre concept in an appealing and very wearable way. It isn’t an academic exercise, a caprice of the genius-mind gone amok. From the start, with its sucker-punch of lemon, bergamot, through the floral heart (lovely ylang ylang), down to the leathery labdanum and oakmoss (yes, oakmoss) base, Esprit de Chypre is a Twenties flapper who wants to get behind the wheel and drive straight through the night to Vienne. Lovers of vintage Tabac Blond, Sycomore and En Avion, not to mention the cut of an old Chanel original, will swoon over this. It’s like smelling back into time while perched (firmly) on the precipice of the future.

Ahem, lemmings, if you buy one thing this year, let it be this. Who knows how long it will be around for. Such a pity, then, they didn’t get the bottle quite right.

The Search for...

My search for the perfect fragrance was a search for authenticity. Raised in the Eighties and Nineties in an affluent suburb about fifty miles from the city, I had learned about fragrances at an early age on trips with my mother to the local Saks and Bloomingdale’s. I had learned that they were about how you looked, how you made your money and how you attracted the opposite sex. By and large, they seemed to be about fulfilling the expectations created by magazine advertisements. The formula was something like that dress, that car, that house and that man. And the formula was a work of genius. Everybody wanted evidence of it in their daily lives.

It wasn’t until much later, in graduate school, that I began to think about fragrance as something that expressed the individual or that gave its wearer pleasure before anyone else. I had smelled a very fine patchouli fragrance on another guest at an East Village dinner party. Earthy, dark and pungent, it complemented her little black dress, her silver jewelry and her foreign accent. The next weekend I made a point of visiting the women’s fragrance counter at Barneys and asked the salesperson to guide me through the various renditions of patchouli. After about an hour-and-a-half I put my finger on Etro’s Patchouli, a complex patchouli with citrus and floral notes. It became my winter scent. Friends would pull me close for a kiss and then linger over my overcoat collar or cashmere scarf. Some would comment on the strangeness of it, the singularity of it. After all, it was 2001. The era of innocuous aquatic men’s scents was in full swing. If something didn’t reek of Dolce & Gabbana Pour Homme, it was exemplary.

That spring, as the weather changed I realized that the patchouli wasn’t working. This time, instead of going to Barneys I went to the Etro boutique. I tried about five more of their fragrances and this time bought a bottle of Vetiver. Little did I know how important that bottle would prove to be. Vetiver, I learned, was a root much prized in India, Southeast Asia and Indonesia for staving off erosion. In many of those same places, it was used to make floor mats and shades, which incidentally worked well against mosquitoes. On me, it was austere and manly but in an introverted sort of way. I decided it would be my fragrance signature. I still knew relatively little about its importance in perfumery.

As the years went by and I came closer to finishing my doctorate, I acquired a number of different styles and “arrangements” of vetiver. There were the classical ones, like Givenchy and Carven; the wildly popular tobacco-inflected ones, like Guerlain; the dirty, sweaty ones like Maître Parfumeur et Gantier Route du Vétiver; and the seaside ones, briny and brisk, like Annick Goutal Vétiver and The Different Company Sel du Vétiver; and even the seductive Oriental ones, like Montale Vétiver Sables and Serge Lutens Vétiver Oriental. At each step of the way, I yearned for a vetiver to call my very own. Earthiness here appealed more to me than high polish. Somehow a touch of dirt brought nature back into my life in the concrete jungle and didn’t toy with my own body’s scent. But this dirt––this root system, rather, with the dirt still clinging––was maddeningly elusive.

And then, this past summer, I found it. After sniffing hundreds of different vetivers, I came upon a new one right back where I had started ten years before: Nasomatto Absinth. It was an unexpected surprise. Rooty, nutty and mushroomy, it captured my attention immediately. Finally, I thought, here’s what the French call sous-bois (“undergrowth,” “forest floor”). But the real surprise came when I realized that the unadulterated vetiver for which I’d yearned all those years was unattainable without the help of things like patchouli, bergamot and wild fennel. Where Paradise was lost, the art of perfumery had begun.