"The Fourth Taste" By Luca Turin
At my first piano lesson, the teacher played two very short and easy pieces, one by Haydn, the other by Bartók and asked me to choose which one I wanted to learn. It felt like an important decision, possibly laden with long-term consequences. I went for Bartók, partly because of the beautiful reddish-brown cover of the Mikrokosmos edition, partly because to me the two pieces respectively tasted sweet and bitter, and I liked bitter. Years later, Bartók still feels like musical Fernet-Branca. His disdain for schmaltz, and the speed with which he pounces on his own lyrical lapses give his music an odd moral quality. But what, if anything, is moral about Fernet-Branca ? Simple: the bitter taste modality has evolved over millions of years to warn us of alien molecules that will cross into the bloodstream and do things inside you, good or bad. You won’t know which till you’ve tried. Bitter is the taste of things that are eaten not as food but as medicine for body and soul. It is the taste of adventure, of risk. If sweetness is sin, bitterness is virtue.
Not surprisingly, in our fearful, cozy culture, bitterness has a bad press, nowhere more than in perfumes ruled by sweet vanillin, lactones (peach) and more recently by the candyfloss note of maltol. Guerlain, the great virtual konditorei who started it all with Jicky in 1889, only ever did two totally unsweetened perfumes: Djedi and Sous le Vent. The former was reissued a few years ago and was a tremendous animalic vetiver, correctly described by Guerlain’s Roja Dove as “the driest perfume of all time”. But dry isn’t necessarily bitter, and vetiver, with its liquorice aspect, does not quite carry the menace of a true alkaloid.
A friend recently sent me a small sample of vintage Sous le Vent, however, and that was a revelation. Faced with Coty’s austere Chypre (1917), Jacques Guerlain first succumbed to his usual temptation, and added peach to get Mitsouko (1919). When he revisited the problem fourteen years later, he pushed in the opposite direction as far as he could and obtained the bitterest, most uncompromising marvel. You could add two drops of it to a glass of gin and quaff it on the verandah. Amazingly, Guerlain plans to reissue it next year, though whether such manifest poison can slip by EU safety rules remains to be seen.
December 1, 2005
November 1, 2005
"The Lost Chord" By Luca Turin
"The Lost Chord" By Luca Turin
When I was sixteen, I went on holiday in Spain with a group of kids. Despite the reassuring brochure intended for the parents (healthy and abundant food, constant supervision), we made non-stop mayhem. There was, as always, an eye in that storm. At its center stood a serious, quiet, beautiful girl with dark hair in a ponytail, dark blue eyes and red lips. I adored her from a distance, sat next to her watching TV the evening of the first moon landing and was not spoken to more than twice. On the train back, the others seemed to stand aside when time came to share sleeping births. We ended up facing each other all night in silence, our noses an inch away from each other, and the air in between crackling with an energy science cannot yet measure. She wore a strange perfume I hadn’t noticed before, that felt to me like one of those blue chords Thelonious Monk invented: unresolved, and strangely at peace. At the Gare de Lyon, my parting shot was to ask her what her perfume was. She said Imprévu , by Coty.
Twenty years later, I managed to get hold of Imprévu, by then discontinued and hard to find. I smelled it every which way, but that chord was not in there. Unaccountably, she seemed to have lied. The chord has chimed past me perhaps three times since then, and every time I failed to find out what it was. By then I had noticed something strange. Every fragrance has two faces: one for every day, and another one it shines on you perhaps once a year, as if lit from within by some mysterious joy. I first noticed this with my scooter, whose exhaust smoke, usually flat and oily, very occasionally came across as richly aromatic, a laughing smell of open road. This got me worried: suppose the Chord was actually the transfigured face of something I smelled rarely anyway. How would I ever figure it out ? A month ago, while on holiday in the Austrian Alps, I smelled it again. It came from a woman in the cablecar line. This time, I was not going to let it slip by. My wife Desa asked in German. The woman looked a little surprised that anyone should be sniffing the air near her, but the answer came: “a body cream by Dieter”… Desa wasn’t sure of the second half by the time she came back to tell me. Reader, please help. Monk’s hands are poised above they keyboard.
When I was sixteen, I went on holiday in Spain with a group of kids. Despite the reassuring brochure intended for the parents (healthy and abundant food, constant supervision), we made non-stop mayhem. There was, as always, an eye in that storm. At its center stood a serious, quiet, beautiful girl with dark hair in a ponytail, dark blue eyes and red lips. I adored her from a distance, sat next to her watching TV the evening of the first moon landing and was not spoken to more than twice. On the train back, the others seemed to stand aside when time came to share sleeping births. We ended up facing each other all night in silence, our noses an inch away from each other, and the air in between crackling with an energy science cannot yet measure. She wore a strange perfume I hadn’t noticed before, that felt to me like one of those blue chords Thelonious Monk invented: unresolved, and strangely at peace. At the Gare de Lyon, my parting shot was to ask her what her perfume was. She said Imprévu , by Coty.
Twenty years later, I managed to get hold of Imprévu, by then discontinued and hard to find. I smelled it every which way, but that chord was not in there. Unaccountably, she seemed to have lied. The chord has chimed past me perhaps three times since then, and every time I failed to find out what it was. By then I had noticed something strange. Every fragrance has two faces: one for every day, and another one it shines on you perhaps once a year, as if lit from within by some mysterious joy. I first noticed this with my scooter, whose exhaust smoke, usually flat and oily, very occasionally came across as richly aromatic, a laughing smell of open road. This got me worried: suppose the Chord was actually the transfigured face of something I smelled rarely anyway. How would I ever figure it out ? A month ago, while on holiday in the Austrian Alps, I smelled it again. It came from a woman in the cablecar line. This time, I was not going to let it slip by. My wife Desa asked in German. The woman looked a little surprised that anyone should be sniffing the air near her, but the answer came: “a body cream by Dieter”… Desa wasn’t sure of the second half by the time she came back to tell me. Reader, please help. Monk’s hands are poised above they keyboard.
October 1, 2005
"Perfume Time" By Luca Turin
"Perfume Time" By Luca Turin
A senior technician I once met in a fragrance firm decided to take an evening course in chemistry. When the exam came, he was asked to identify four unknowns using a roomful of instruments made available to him. Instead, he just smelled them and wrote down the (correct) structures. Smell miraculously enables us to see molecules, and the rules of perfumery are those of the invisible world. A molecule has an odor character (peach, salami, vanilla), a volatility (how long it takes to evaporate, from seconds for small molecules to days for big ones), and an intensity (roughly how little of it you can detect).
Spraying a perfume on warm skin is like firing a starting pistol on a beach crowded with different kinds of birds: the little ones start first, the herons and pelicans take a lot longer. Incidentally, if the beach were a smelling strip and a musk molecule was the size of a pelican, the smelling strip would be 200 kilometers across. Suppose now that you figure out an accord that requires an exact mix of birds of different sizes in flight towards your nose. That mix is going to happen only at a fixed time after the starting pistol, and may only last a few seconds. For example the smell of lychees absolutely requires, in a fruity mix, the presence of a hummingbird sized molecule called dimethyl sulfide. It lasts seconds on the skin, which is why lychee is a fleeting topnote. Conversely, you cannot have a musk topnote unless, as in Helmut Lang’s Velviona, you only put one ingredient in the mix. Perfumers know all these things empirically, but amazingly the only serious study of this was done in the mid-eighties at the great (and now extinct) firm of Roure. A young trainee was put in charge of measuring odor value (volatility vs intensity) for hundreds of pure molecules. The result of years of drudgery was a chart that you still see on office walls at Givaudan R&D (they bought Roure). It is supposed to be a secret, but photocopiers have put it in most perfumers’ hands.
Digest it (few have), and you have mastered Perfume Time. You can then make fragrances without scenery changes and intermissions, where every successive instant merges with the next one like chord modulations in late Richard Strauss. Prime examples: Calice Becker’s two Beyond Paradise fragrances. The name of the trainee who compiled the chart ? You guessed it.
A senior technician I once met in a fragrance firm decided to take an evening course in chemistry. When the exam came, he was asked to identify four unknowns using a roomful of instruments made available to him. Instead, he just smelled them and wrote down the (correct) structures. Smell miraculously enables us to see molecules, and the rules of perfumery are those of the invisible world. A molecule has an odor character (peach, salami, vanilla), a volatility (how long it takes to evaporate, from seconds for small molecules to days for big ones), and an intensity (roughly how little of it you can detect).
Spraying a perfume on warm skin is like firing a starting pistol on a beach crowded with different kinds of birds: the little ones start first, the herons and pelicans take a lot longer. Incidentally, if the beach were a smelling strip and a musk molecule was the size of a pelican, the smelling strip would be 200 kilometers across. Suppose now that you figure out an accord that requires an exact mix of birds of different sizes in flight towards your nose. That mix is going to happen only at a fixed time after the starting pistol, and may only last a few seconds. For example the smell of lychees absolutely requires, in a fruity mix, the presence of a hummingbird sized molecule called dimethyl sulfide. It lasts seconds on the skin, which is why lychee is a fleeting topnote. Conversely, you cannot have a musk topnote unless, as in Helmut Lang’s Velviona, you only put one ingredient in the mix. Perfumers know all these things empirically, but amazingly the only serious study of this was done in the mid-eighties at the great (and now extinct) firm of Roure. A young trainee was put in charge of measuring odor value (volatility vs intensity) for hundreds of pure molecules. The result of years of drudgery was a chart that you still see on office walls at Givaudan R&D (they bought Roure). It is supposed to be a secret, but photocopiers have put it in most perfumers’ hands.
Digest it (few have), and you have mastered Perfume Time. You can then make fragrances without scenery changes and intermissions, where every successive instant merges with the next one like chord modulations in late Richard Strauss. Prime examples: Calice Becker’s two Beyond Paradise fragrances. The name of the trainee who compiled the chart ? You guessed it.
September 1, 2005
"Le Parfum Idéal" By Luca Turin
"Le Parfum Idéal" By Luca Turin
In 1991, while in Moscow for work, I visited an antique store at the back of the Metropol Hotel. There, enclosed in a silk-lined yellow and black box, was an unopened Baccarat crystal bottle of Houbigant’s Parfum Idéal (Paul Parquet, 1900). Houbigant had done good business in Russia before the revolution, and this bottle had survived it and two world wars. How much ? 100 dollars. I shelled out immediately, to the horror of the saleswoman who thought it decadent not to haggle over three months’ pay. At the time, the Osmothèque (see last month) had just taken possession of the Houbigant archive. The curator, former Patou in-house perfumer Jean Kerléo, was puzzling over the Parfum Idéal formula: it was full of forgotten “bases” made by extinct firms. Without the actual perfume. even the normally all-knowing Grasse old hands couldn’t help.
I gave my bottle to the Osmothèque, they opened it for analysis and sent me back a sample. It was as good as new, a huge, sweet, buttery floral that brought to mind Sydney Smith’s description of paradise as “Foie gras to the sound of trumpets”. The reconstructed Idéal is now in the Osmothèque collection. A few weeks ago, I smelled another survivor, a perfume rebuilt from a sample found in the wreck of the Titanic. It had belonged to the perfumer Adolphe Saalfield, who made it to New York but lost his luggage. Same period, different smell, same glorious feeling. I was lamenting the fact that they didn’t make stuff like this any more, when two unusually plain bottles arrived in the post to prove me wrong.
One was Jeffrey Dame’s Wanderlust. Dame runs a perfumery forum called perfumeoflife. After years of bringing the aficiòn together, often to gripe about modern fragrances, he lost patience and made his own “super-fume”. It’s an unashamedly retro floral oriental. It is not particularly original, nor is it meant to be, but it smells sumptuous. The other is René Laruelle’s Jardin des Floralies. Laruelle renelaruelle@hotmail.com is a legend in his own time. His fragrances have never been sold in shops. Despite this, two of his creations (Jardin and Baiser de Soie,) made it into the Osmothèque collection. Jardin was composed in 1991 around the idea of Osmanthus flowers, for his goddaughter’s fifteenth birthday. A timeless Chypre, it sits somewhere between the extinct Diorama and the first Dioressence, but with a sensational complexity that these two (relatively) mass-produced fragrances never achieved, even in their heyday.
In 1991, while in Moscow for work, I visited an antique store at the back of the Metropol Hotel. There, enclosed in a silk-lined yellow and black box, was an unopened Baccarat crystal bottle of Houbigant’s Parfum Idéal (Paul Parquet, 1900). Houbigant had done good business in Russia before the revolution, and this bottle had survived it and two world wars. How much ? 100 dollars. I shelled out immediately, to the horror of the saleswoman who thought it decadent not to haggle over three months’ pay. At the time, the Osmothèque (see last month) had just taken possession of the Houbigant archive. The curator, former Patou in-house perfumer Jean Kerléo, was puzzling over the Parfum Idéal formula: it was full of forgotten “bases” made by extinct firms. Without the actual perfume. even the normally all-knowing Grasse old hands couldn’t help.
I gave my bottle to the Osmothèque, they opened it for analysis and sent me back a sample. It was as good as new, a huge, sweet, buttery floral that brought to mind Sydney Smith’s description of paradise as “Foie gras to the sound of trumpets”. The reconstructed Idéal is now in the Osmothèque collection. A few weeks ago, I smelled another survivor, a perfume rebuilt from a sample found in the wreck of the Titanic. It had belonged to the perfumer Adolphe Saalfield, who made it to New York but lost his luggage. Same period, different smell, same glorious feeling. I was lamenting the fact that they didn’t make stuff like this any more, when two unusually plain bottles arrived in the post to prove me wrong.
One was Jeffrey Dame’s Wanderlust. Dame runs a perfumery forum called perfumeoflife. After years of bringing the aficiòn together, often to gripe about modern fragrances, he lost patience and made his own “super-fume”. It’s an unashamedly retro floral oriental. It is not particularly original, nor is it meant to be, but it smells sumptuous. The other is René Laruelle’s Jardin des Floralies. Laruelle renelaruelle@hotmail.com is a legend in his own time. His fragrances have never been sold in shops. Despite this, two of his creations (Jardin and Baiser de Soie,) made it into the Osmothèque collection. Jardin was composed in 1991 around the idea of Osmanthus flowers, for his goddaughter’s fifteenth birthday. A timeless Chypre, it sits somewhere between the extinct Diorama and the first Dioressence, but with a sensational complexity that these two (relatively) mass-produced fragrances never achieved, even in their heyday.
August 1, 2005
"The Perfume Museum" By Luca Turin
"The Perfume Museum" By Luca Turin
Why are some Arts taken seriously, and others left unmolested? Consider it took photography a century to earn the finery of respect: books, museums, collectors, auctions, reviews, university jobs. It was initially deemed “too easy” as compared to painting, but when people began to accumulate snapshots they slowly realized that good ones seldom happen by accident. If one minimally defines Art as something that is both difficult and beautiful, perfumery qualifies. Seriousness is another matter. Perfumery is not a hobby, so nobody understands quite how tricky it is. Evolution is a great perfumer (Gardenias!), and many assume perfumers just imitate nature. Add to that the fact that perfume is now as transient as fashion, and all the conditions are met for low esteem. A good indication is the scarcity of perfume museums. Most (Paris has one, Grasse several) are concerned with bottles, and end in a shop. There the punters can relieve their frustration of having bought nothing (and smelled nothing) for the previous half-hour by gorging on multicoloured soaps to give to relatives and other people they don’t like. The main Grasse museum used to let visitors look at a perfumer at work behind glass, like some panda. Like pandas, the poor man usually took refuge in the back room.
The exception is the Versailles Osmothèque, created in 1990 by the French Society of Perfumers to serve as an archive of past creations. It houses a miraculous 334 disappeared fragrances ranging from celebrities like Coty’s 1911 Le Styx to obscure masterpieces like Nicky Verfaillies’s 1980 Grain De Sable. What is it like to visit? Well, for a start it’s not really a museum, but a refrigerated room in a basement of the ISIPCA perfume school. Can visitors smell everything ? No: Only members of the French Society of Perfumers can visit individually and ask to smell specific fragrances. Public group visits are allowed, during which a selection is shown accompanied by an interesting lecture on the history of perfumery. Can one buy the stuff ? Of course not. The whole operation runs on a shoestring budget and rests entirely on voluntary work. At a recent perfumer’s congress, I visited the modest stand of the Osmothèque tucked away in a corner. Several thousand perfumers attended, but only a handful came to smell their own history. It is amazing that the memory of an industry that is the glory of France commands so little funding. If they had 1% of the budget of Pierre Boulez’ IRCAM, things would be very different. An idea: put post-serialist nonentities in a refrigerated basement in Versailles, and open a perfume museum opposite the Centre Pompidou.
Why are some Arts taken seriously, and others left unmolested? Consider it took photography a century to earn the finery of respect: books, museums, collectors, auctions, reviews, university jobs. It was initially deemed “too easy” as compared to painting, but when people began to accumulate snapshots they slowly realized that good ones seldom happen by accident. If one minimally defines Art as something that is both difficult and beautiful, perfumery qualifies. Seriousness is another matter. Perfumery is not a hobby, so nobody understands quite how tricky it is. Evolution is a great perfumer (Gardenias!), and many assume perfumers just imitate nature. Add to that the fact that perfume is now as transient as fashion, and all the conditions are met for low esteem. A good indication is the scarcity of perfume museums. Most (Paris has one, Grasse several) are concerned with bottles, and end in a shop. There the punters can relieve their frustration of having bought nothing (and smelled nothing) for the previous half-hour by gorging on multicoloured soaps to give to relatives and other people they don’t like. The main Grasse museum used to let visitors look at a perfumer at work behind glass, like some panda. Like pandas, the poor man usually took refuge in the back room.
The exception is the Versailles Osmothèque, created in 1990 by the French Society of Perfumers to serve as an archive of past creations. It houses a miraculous 334 disappeared fragrances ranging from celebrities like Coty’s 1911 Le Styx to obscure masterpieces like Nicky Verfaillies’s 1980 Grain De Sable. What is it like to visit? Well, for a start it’s not really a museum, but a refrigerated room in a basement of the ISIPCA perfume school. Can visitors smell everything ? No: Only members of the French Society of Perfumers can visit individually and ask to smell specific fragrances. Public group visits are allowed, during which a selection is shown accompanied by an interesting lecture on the history of perfumery. Can one buy the stuff ? Of course not. The whole operation runs on a shoestring budget and rests entirely on voluntary work. At a recent perfumer’s congress, I visited the modest stand of the Osmothèque tucked away in a corner. Several thousand perfumers attended, but only a handful came to smell their own history. It is amazing that the memory of an industry that is the glory of France commands so little funding. If they had 1% of the budget of Pierre Boulez’ IRCAM, things would be very different. An idea: put post-serialist nonentities in a refrigerated basement in Versailles, and open a perfume museum opposite the Centre Pompidou.
July 1, 2005
"Vanity" By Luca Turin
"Vanity" By Luca Turin
Vanity is such a pervasive force that if some day cosmologists tell us the Big Bang was just God’s way of showing off, no one will be surprised. A microscopic example: bespoke perfume. Until recently, you had to marry a perfumer in order to get your very own smell. Even then, if it was any good, it would likely end up in shops. Annick Goutal’s Sables was composed for her husband, and Edmond Roudnitska’s Parfum de Thérèse is available at Frédéric Malle. Both were once precious tokens of true love. Failing that, you could go to a market in Cairo and have an “expert” mix you something that will stun flies at ten paces. Now there is another way: some perfumers, and indeed some great perfume houses are doing individual perfumes. Prices range from expensive (8000 €) to jaw-dropping (43.000 €). At the cheaper end of the scale, Quest’s Francis Kurkdjian, creator among other things of Le Mâle and of Dior’s recent (and excellent) Eau Noire works freelance a couple of days a week. At the expensive end, Jean-Michel Duriez, Patou’s in-house perfumer will spend as much as two years putting together your unique fragrance. Judging from his past form (Yohji Homme among others), it may be money well spent, though so far only women can apply. Guerlain and Cartier are rumored to be getting into the act.
I confess to being unmoved by all this. From an aesthetic standpoint, perfume is a shared, industrial product, more like wine, music and books than like a painting or a jewel, and there is something ugly about asking a great artist to do one just for you. From a commercial standpoint, I couldn’t figure out what makes these well-paid professionals (and the houses that employ them) do such a thing. After all, why waste a good idea on some rich bitch when you can have everyone wearing it ? I asked around, and some answers emerged. First, the daily grind of the perfumers’ job, making things that smell good with 100$/kg to spend on the formula, i.e. using ingredients that mostly smell less than great, is getting depressing. All involved in bespoke perfumes relish the opportunity to use great raw materials, ignore all “health” regulations and travel back in time to the golden age of fragrance. Second, the firms need to put some prestige back into their tarnished “exclusive” image, and this may be a cost-effective way of doing so. I wish them luck, but I’ll carry on looking for Lucien Lelong’s Elle,Elle on ebay (maximum bid, 200 €). That one feels like it was made just for me when I was six years old, and I never even met Mr Lelong.
Vanity is such a pervasive force that if some day cosmologists tell us the Big Bang was just God’s way of showing off, no one will be surprised. A microscopic example: bespoke perfume. Until recently, you had to marry a perfumer in order to get your very own smell. Even then, if it was any good, it would likely end up in shops. Annick Goutal’s Sables was composed for her husband, and Edmond Roudnitska’s Parfum de Thérèse is available at Frédéric Malle. Both were once precious tokens of true love. Failing that, you could go to a market in Cairo and have an “expert” mix you something that will stun flies at ten paces. Now there is another way: some perfumers, and indeed some great perfume houses are doing individual perfumes. Prices range from expensive (8000 €) to jaw-dropping (43.000 €). At the cheaper end of the scale, Quest’s Francis Kurkdjian, creator among other things of Le Mâle and of Dior’s recent (and excellent) Eau Noire works freelance a couple of days a week. At the expensive end, Jean-Michel Duriez, Patou’s in-house perfumer will spend as much as two years putting together your unique fragrance. Judging from his past form (Yohji Homme among others), it may be money well spent, though so far only women can apply. Guerlain and Cartier are rumored to be getting into the act.
I confess to being unmoved by all this. From an aesthetic standpoint, perfume is a shared, industrial product, more like wine, music and books than like a painting or a jewel, and there is something ugly about asking a great artist to do one just for you. From a commercial standpoint, I couldn’t figure out what makes these well-paid professionals (and the houses that employ them) do such a thing. After all, why waste a good idea on some rich bitch when you can have everyone wearing it ? I asked around, and some answers emerged. First, the daily grind of the perfumers’ job, making things that smell good with 100$/kg to spend on the formula, i.e. using ingredients that mostly smell less than great, is getting depressing. All involved in bespoke perfumes relish the opportunity to use great raw materials, ignore all “health” regulations and travel back in time to the golden age of fragrance. Second, the firms need to put some prestige back into their tarnished “exclusive” image, and this may be a cost-effective way of doing so. I wish them luck, but I’ll carry on looking for Lucien Lelong’s Elle,Elle on ebay (maximum bid, 200 €). That one feels like it was made just for me when I was six years old, and I never even met Mr Lelong.
June 1, 2005
"Vulgar women" By Luca Turin
"Vulgar women" By Luca Turin
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Men want to impress, women to please. Men suffer from a style shortage, women from a surfeit. You’d expect these differences to matter when it comes to vulgarity, and they do. In women’s perfumes “vulgar” was violets (1900), then sweet amber (1920s) then “fur perfumes” (1950-60), then big green things (1970s) then loud red ones (1980s), then thin pink ones (1990s). It now takes two forms best illustrated by reference to toe-curling (and extinct) musical forms: the medley and the love duet. For those too young to have endured either, here’s how they worked. The duet paired a breathy soprano with a big pour-him-on-the-pancakes male voice, one answering the other before finishing together against a sunset glow of canned strings. The medley swept up the garbage after a busy summer of hits, and allowed you to listen to 12 of them in the time that it took you to name one.
In perfumery, the medley carries on undiminished. When feminine perfumes try to be “all things to all men” they are by definition in call-girl chic territory, a style the French, perhaps mindful of the customer base, often equate with luxury. In the trade, medleys are known as soups, because they’re made of scraps. Two classic soups were Oscar de la Renta’s Volupté and Christian Lacroix C’est la vie. Recent examples include Organza (Givenchy), a fragrance that puts you off vanilla for months at a time, and Magic (Céline), a gallant attempt at using every chemical in the perfumer’s palette simultaneously. and lately the appalling Attraction (Lancôme), a loud mess from topnote to drydown.
The “love duet” type rests on a case of mistaken identity. In the beginning there was the wonderful Angel, virginal white flowers mixed with a barrel-chested oriental bass. Angel was no duet: it was a transvestite, a gorgeous blonde with a five o’clock shadow and a wicked laugh. Inspired by Angel but trying to be more presentable, Chanel took equal parts of Allure and Guerlain’s Héritage for men and mixed them. Out came Coco Mademoiselle, an unexpected success. The effect, initially impressive, soon becomes tiresome. Unlike Angel, it feels both mawkish and butch, like high-heeled trainers or a 4WD with bull bars on the school run. Chanel tried to fix that with CM 1.1, also known as Chance, but it still crashes. So does everyone else, most recently Prada. Give up, guys: the only thing that’s worse than repeating a joke is leaving out the punchline.
article in german | larger print | smaller print | print
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Men want to impress, women to please. Men suffer from a style shortage, women from a surfeit. You’d expect these differences to matter when it comes to vulgarity, and they do. In women’s perfumes “vulgar” was violets (1900), then sweet amber (1920s) then “fur perfumes” (1950-60), then big green things (1970s) then loud red ones (1980s), then thin pink ones (1990s). It now takes two forms best illustrated by reference to toe-curling (and extinct) musical forms: the medley and the love duet. For those too young to have endured either, here’s how they worked. The duet paired a breathy soprano with a big pour-him-on-the-pancakes male voice, one answering the other before finishing together against a sunset glow of canned strings. The medley swept up the garbage after a busy summer of hits, and allowed you to listen to 12 of them in the time that it took you to name one.
In perfumery, the medley carries on undiminished. When feminine perfumes try to be “all things to all men” they are by definition in call-girl chic territory, a style the French, perhaps mindful of the customer base, often equate with luxury. In the trade, medleys are known as soups, because they’re made of scraps. Two classic soups were Oscar de la Renta’s Volupté and Christian Lacroix C’est la vie. Recent examples include Organza (Givenchy), a fragrance that puts you off vanilla for months at a time, and Magic (Céline), a gallant attempt at using every chemical in the perfumer’s palette simultaneously. and lately the appalling Attraction (Lancôme), a loud mess from topnote to drydown.
The “love duet” type rests on a case of mistaken identity. In the beginning there was the wonderful Angel, virginal white flowers mixed with a barrel-chested oriental bass. Angel was no duet: it was a transvestite, a gorgeous blonde with a five o’clock shadow and a wicked laugh. Inspired by Angel but trying to be more presentable, Chanel took equal parts of Allure and Guerlain’s Héritage for men and mixed them. Out came Coco Mademoiselle, an unexpected success. The effect, initially impressive, soon becomes tiresome. Unlike Angel, it feels both mawkish and butch, like high-heeled trainers or a 4WD with bull bars on the school run. Chanel tried to fix that with CM 1.1, also known as Chance, but it still crashes. So does everyone else, most recently Prada. Give up, guys: the only thing that’s worse than repeating a joke is leaving out the punchline.
May 1, 2005
"Vulgar Men" By Luca Turin
"Vulgar Men" By Luca Turin
In what turned out to be largely fictional memoirs written after the first Gulf War, a British Special Forces soldier recalled how he was captured, blindfolded and interrogated by Iraqi police. One of the few credible things in his account was that all the while he could smell the awful after-shave the policeman wore, which added to his distress. But suppose the interrogator had been a dandy in the mold of Turkish Bey José Ferrer in Lawrence of Arabia wearing, say, Guerlain’s Mouchoir de Monsieur. Would that have made life easier ? For that matter, what do elite UK forces wear when interrogating suspects ? I’ll bet our guy took a hard look at his bathroom shelf when he got home.
In seduction as in intimidation, intent is everything. A hack from Men’s Health, a magazine notable for the pectorals on its cover, wrote to me asking “How can a man maximize the influence of his cologne choices to attract the women he’s really interested in ?” Efficient mating strategies are good in principle, but this one is doomed. Waste time wondering which “cologne” pulls better, and your genes will spread only by lucky accident. A perfume should be right for the man, not for the job. Men’s fragrances fall in three categories, two easy, one hard, with some overlap between them. Category one: things that just smell great, like Chanel Pour Monsieur, De Nicolai’s New York, Guerlain’s Jicky, Dior’s Jules, etc. There are only two ways to screw up with these: if you put too much on, or if the rest of you is less evolved than the perfume. Category two: "monogrammed slippers" stuff like Floris 89, Eau d’Hermès, Paco Rabanne Pour Homme, Guerlain’s Habit Rouge etc.. These come with a fondness for biography, stocks pages and sighing labradors, and have nothing further to contribute to propagating the species.
The third category is the trickiest: "Young Buck". This is where most men (even gay ones, surprisingly) need a course in self-awareness. The guiding principle is: if you think you should be wearing it, don’t. Perfumes like Miyake’s Eau Bleue, Saint Laurent’s Kouros, Lapidus Pour Lui are fashion accessories. Like most couture for women, they are not meant to be helpful, but to measure how much strain your beauty can take. Unless you’re made of pure, self-confident gold, stay away from their dissolving aqua regia. And, as you get ready to go out, consider Emmanuel Bibesco’s famous question: "Pourquoi pas rien ?".
In what turned out to be largely fictional memoirs written after the first Gulf War, a British Special Forces soldier recalled how he was captured, blindfolded and interrogated by Iraqi police. One of the few credible things in his account was that all the while he could smell the awful after-shave the policeman wore, which added to his distress. But suppose the interrogator had been a dandy in the mold of Turkish Bey José Ferrer in Lawrence of Arabia wearing, say, Guerlain’s Mouchoir de Monsieur. Would that have made life easier ? For that matter, what do elite UK forces wear when interrogating suspects ? I’ll bet our guy took a hard look at his bathroom shelf when he got home.
In seduction as in intimidation, intent is everything. A hack from Men’s Health, a magazine notable for the pectorals on its cover, wrote to me asking “How can a man maximize the influence of his cologne choices to attract the women he’s really interested in ?” Efficient mating strategies are good in principle, but this one is doomed. Waste time wondering which “cologne” pulls better, and your genes will spread only by lucky accident. A perfume should be right for the man, not for the job. Men’s fragrances fall in three categories, two easy, one hard, with some overlap between them. Category one: things that just smell great, like Chanel Pour Monsieur, De Nicolai’s New York, Guerlain’s Jicky, Dior’s Jules, etc. There are only two ways to screw up with these: if you put too much on, or if the rest of you is less evolved than the perfume. Category two: "monogrammed slippers" stuff like Floris 89, Eau d’Hermès, Paco Rabanne Pour Homme, Guerlain’s Habit Rouge etc.. These come with a fondness for biography, stocks pages and sighing labradors, and have nothing further to contribute to propagating the species.
The third category is the trickiest: "Young Buck". This is where most men (even gay ones, surprisingly) need a course in self-awareness. The guiding principle is: if you think you should be wearing it, don’t. Perfumes like Miyake’s Eau Bleue, Saint Laurent’s Kouros, Lapidus Pour Lui are fashion accessories. Like most couture for women, they are not meant to be helpful, but to measure how much strain your beauty can take. Unless you’re made of pure, self-confident gold, stay away from their dissolving aqua regia. And, as you get ready to go out, consider Emmanuel Bibesco’s famous question: "Pourquoi pas rien ?".
April 1, 2005
"Dream Team" By Luca Turin
"Dream Team" By Luca Turin
Twelve years have passed since Shiseido opened its Paris Salons in the Jardins du Palais Royal. Right from Day One it was clear that Shiseido’s design supremo Serge Lutens was fully in control, and therefore that no shortcuts would be allowed. Bottles, packaging, decoration, dress of the sales assistants, light level, every exquisite detail added to the dark, intoxicating spell of the place. Few in 1992 believed that Lutens could keep up the promised pace of at least two new perfumes a year for long. Twenty-eight perfumes later, we are blessed with the most coherent modernist oeuvre since Ernest Daltroff’s glorious years at Caron (1904-41). Daltroff was a perfumer, Lutens is not, someone had to translate his vision into fragrances. The Aaron to Lutens’ Moses is Chris Sheldrake of Quest International, probably the most skilled natural-products perfumer around.
What have they created ? Simply put, a new style of perfumery. Considered as music, perfumes sing melody (Diorissimo’s coloratura soprano), harmony (Beyond Paradise’s angelic choir) or some counterpoint in between (most others). By contrast, each of the Lutens-Sheldrake perfumes explores a different timbre. Opening the bottles is like blowing into a weird instrument made of an uncommon material: out comes a loud, steady, startling note. Devotees of the Saint-Saëns school of perfumery have called them unfinished and disparaged them as "bases", i.e. building blocks. That is missing the point. Bases are meant to be mixed, whereas what Lutens wanted, and got, was each idea (or raw material) fleshed out precisely to the point where it ceases to need company but retains its soul entire.
It doesn’t always work, and for example I find the florals, Un Lys, Sa Majesté la Rose and Fleurs d’Oranger a little trite in a white-lace sort of way. But was there ever a more brazenly animalic confection than Muscs Koublaï Khan, a sunnier homage to the nostalgic plushness of hay than Chergui, or a more accurate rendition of the rubbery heart of tuberose than Tubéreuse Criminelle ? The latest two (2004) are outlier points, unusually abstract and apparently prompted by a desire on Lutens’ part to step back from the (delightful) orientalism of most of his creations. Chêne is an astringent, almost bitter tincture of oaks and the mosses that festoon them in primeval European forests. Daim Blond (blonde suede) is a rethink of that most refined of all perfume styles, the leather chypre, stripped of... everything that Chêne contains. It is almost as if these two magicians had taken an axe to Bandit and found that the halves scuttled away, each with a life of its own. The fairy tale continues.
Twelve years have passed since Shiseido opened its Paris Salons in the Jardins du Palais Royal. Right from Day One it was clear that Shiseido’s design supremo Serge Lutens was fully in control, and therefore that no shortcuts would be allowed. Bottles, packaging, decoration, dress of the sales assistants, light level, every exquisite detail added to the dark, intoxicating spell of the place. Few in 1992 believed that Lutens could keep up the promised pace of at least two new perfumes a year for long. Twenty-eight perfumes later, we are blessed with the most coherent modernist oeuvre since Ernest Daltroff’s glorious years at Caron (1904-41). Daltroff was a perfumer, Lutens is not, someone had to translate his vision into fragrances. The Aaron to Lutens’ Moses is Chris Sheldrake of Quest International, probably the most skilled natural-products perfumer around.
What have they created ? Simply put, a new style of perfumery. Considered as music, perfumes sing melody (Diorissimo’s coloratura soprano), harmony (Beyond Paradise’s angelic choir) or some counterpoint in between (most others). By contrast, each of the Lutens-Sheldrake perfumes explores a different timbre. Opening the bottles is like blowing into a weird instrument made of an uncommon material: out comes a loud, steady, startling note. Devotees of the Saint-Saëns school of perfumery have called them unfinished and disparaged them as "bases", i.e. building blocks. That is missing the point. Bases are meant to be mixed, whereas what Lutens wanted, and got, was each idea (or raw material) fleshed out precisely to the point where it ceases to need company but retains its soul entire.
It doesn’t always work, and for example I find the florals, Un Lys, Sa Majesté la Rose and Fleurs d’Oranger a little trite in a white-lace sort of way. But was there ever a more brazenly animalic confection than Muscs Koublaï Khan, a sunnier homage to the nostalgic plushness of hay than Chergui, or a more accurate rendition of the rubbery heart of tuberose than Tubéreuse Criminelle ? The latest two (2004) are outlier points, unusually abstract and apparently prompted by a desire on Lutens’ part to step back from the (delightful) orientalism of most of his creations. Chêne is an astringent, almost bitter tincture of oaks and the mosses that festoon them in primeval European forests. Daim Blond (blonde suede) is a rethink of that most refined of all perfume styles, the leather chypre, stripped of... everything that Chêne contains. It is almost as if these two magicians had taken an axe to Bandit and found that the halves scuttled away, each with a life of its own. The fairy tale continues.
March 1, 2005
"Grassroots" By Luca Turin
"Grassroots" By Luca Turin
Vetiver has a status apart in perfumery. It is one of the few materials for which there is no good synthetic substitute. It comes from a weed beloved of civil engineers that grows like hell, has a huge root system (where the smell resides) and so holds earthworks together. It has such a strong personality that vetiver fragrances are basically arrangements rather than compositions, which is why almost all are named Vetiver with different spellings. The big question is, as with cocoa, just how much arrangement is enough. Some say none: vetiver has its “black chocolate” fanatics, forever searching for something in a bottle which smells like the dried roots. Nothing does. When I was a kid, my mother used to send me down the street to buy bundles of vetiver roots from a proto-hippy store to put in linen drawers. No extraction method known to man gives that light, fresh, liquorice-and-earth, warm but austere, in a word intelligent smell. The perfumer has two options: retreat and declare victory, i.e. add a touch of lavender and call the result Vetiver (black chocolate); Or earn his keep and compose full-score for bass clarinet and orchestra (Milka with nuts and raisins).
Experts agree that the best classical vetiver of all time was Givenchy’s, which never sold well but was kept in production because Hubert de Givenchy wore it. When he passed away, so did the fragrance. Next best was a tie between the strikingly fresh and carefree Carven and the excellent, darker and richer Guerlain. Then came the Lanvin, a bit more cologne-like, and all sorts of no-holds-barred vetivers from niche firms, among which Annick Goutal (spicy and salty), Maitre Gantier (patchouli-like), and others. More recently some serious work has been done at both ends of the spectrum. Dominique Ropion has composed a Vetiver Extraordinaire for Frédéric Malle which sets a new standard for accuracy. In a very different vein, Serge Lutens’ Vetiver Oriental focuses on one of the hidden facets of vetiver, a ginger-like, buttery sweetness. At the other extreme, I received in the mail a few weeks ago an excellent durchkomponiert vetiver called One by Hannes B. which Google tells me is a Zurich men’s outfitter. Lastly, Guerlain has just released what they call Vetiver pour Elle which is basically the pour lui with a touch of added jasmine. It smells wonderful. In its infinite wisdom, Guerlain wants to sell it only in duty-free shops and for a limited time, so take a cheap flight to somewhere interesting and get it.
Vetiver has a status apart in perfumery. It is one of the few materials for which there is no good synthetic substitute. It comes from a weed beloved of civil engineers that grows like hell, has a huge root system (where the smell resides) and so holds earthworks together. It has such a strong personality that vetiver fragrances are basically arrangements rather than compositions, which is why almost all are named Vetiver with different spellings. The big question is, as with cocoa, just how much arrangement is enough. Some say none: vetiver has its “black chocolate” fanatics, forever searching for something in a bottle which smells like the dried roots. Nothing does. When I was a kid, my mother used to send me down the street to buy bundles of vetiver roots from a proto-hippy store to put in linen drawers. No extraction method known to man gives that light, fresh, liquorice-and-earth, warm but austere, in a word intelligent smell. The perfumer has two options: retreat and declare victory, i.e. add a touch of lavender and call the result Vetiver (black chocolate); Or earn his keep and compose full-score for bass clarinet and orchestra (Milka with nuts and raisins).
Experts agree that the best classical vetiver of all time was Givenchy’s, which never sold well but was kept in production because Hubert de Givenchy wore it. When he passed away, so did the fragrance. Next best was a tie between the strikingly fresh and carefree Carven and the excellent, darker and richer Guerlain. Then came the Lanvin, a bit more cologne-like, and all sorts of no-holds-barred vetivers from niche firms, among which Annick Goutal (spicy and salty), Maitre Gantier (patchouli-like), and others. More recently some serious work has been done at both ends of the spectrum. Dominique Ropion has composed a Vetiver Extraordinaire for Frédéric Malle which sets a new standard for accuracy. In a very different vein, Serge Lutens’ Vetiver Oriental focuses on one of the hidden facets of vetiver, a ginger-like, buttery sweetness. At the other extreme, I received in the mail a few weeks ago an excellent durchkomponiert vetiver called One by Hannes B. which Google tells me is a Zurich men’s outfitter. Lastly, Guerlain has just released what they call Vetiver pour Elle which is basically the pour lui with a touch of added jasmine. It smells wonderful. In its infinite wisdom, Guerlain wants to sell it only in duty-free shops and for a limited time, so take a cheap flight to somewhere interesting and get it.
February 1, 2005
"Two Guys" By Luca Turin
"Two Guys" By Luca Turin
Estée Lauder and Guerlain have something in common: they are not fashion houses, and ultimately live or die by the fortunes of their fragrances alone. Both have recently come out with new perfumes “for men”, respectively called Beyond Paradise Men and L’Instant Pour Homme. There is something comical about this recycling of names from feminine to masculine: the Lauder hints that one of the pleasures of the afterlife may turn out to be a segregation of the sexes, while the Guerlain name has the stern ring of a “Be Brief” sign facing the visitor on the CEO’s desk. Both are wonderful perfumes.
Let me start with the Guerlain, since I have been critical of their recent work. It is hard to find fault with this one. For a start, the black packaging is exquisite. For the first time in years a Guerlain has a look (slightly Chanel-inspired, to be sure, but who cares ?) at once distinctive, classy and coherent. Now for the smell: on skin, it is like watching a perfect Olympic dive from the 10-meter board. It goes from fresh-citrusy in the manner of Shalimar Lite to a suave-sandalwood reminiscent of Samsara Lite via two half-twists, one of anise and one of vetiver. Elbows tucked in all the way, perfect entry, no splash. One immediately wants a replay in slow motion: spray it on fabric and marvel at how it’s done. Two other things are noteworthy about l’Instant Homme. First, and that is a sign of a really good fragrance, it smells good even in the thumbnail-sized versions of deodorant, shower gel etc. It’s like Barber’s Adagio in Quartet form: they’ve got the tune right. Second, whereas the medley of Guerlain quotations in L’instant Femme hinted at someone with a past but no future, here in a masculine context they suggest a guy who has learnt some of his art de vivre from women and isn’t ashamed to admit it.
The Lauder, very differently, also follows Ernst Haeckel’s law according to which development recapitulates evolution. Part of the trick is to be discerning about which life forms you include on the way. This one morphs from Cool Water to Hugo Boss Adam via Grey Flannel with the seamless grace that is Calice Becker’s hallmark. Unlike the Guerlain, which has a familiar cool-to-warm arc, Beyond Paradise Men never leaves the primeval ocean to bask on the beach: it manages to remain grey-green, indistinct and misty from topnote to drydown. Both fragrances show the reverence for history that informs classicism. Both, I wager, will be classics.
Estée Lauder and Guerlain have something in common: they are not fashion houses, and ultimately live or die by the fortunes of their fragrances alone. Both have recently come out with new perfumes “for men”, respectively called Beyond Paradise Men and L’Instant Pour Homme. There is something comical about this recycling of names from feminine to masculine: the Lauder hints that one of the pleasures of the afterlife may turn out to be a segregation of the sexes, while the Guerlain name has the stern ring of a “Be Brief” sign facing the visitor on the CEO’s desk. Both are wonderful perfumes.
Let me start with the Guerlain, since I have been critical of their recent work. It is hard to find fault with this one. For a start, the black packaging is exquisite. For the first time in years a Guerlain has a look (slightly Chanel-inspired, to be sure, but who cares ?) at once distinctive, classy and coherent. Now for the smell: on skin, it is like watching a perfect Olympic dive from the 10-meter board. It goes from fresh-citrusy in the manner of Shalimar Lite to a suave-sandalwood reminiscent of Samsara Lite via two half-twists, one of anise and one of vetiver. Elbows tucked in all the way, perfect entry, no splash. One immediately wants a replay in slow motion: spray it on fabric and marvel at how it’s done. Two other things are noteworthy about l’Instant Homme. First, and that is a sign of a really good fragrance, it smells good even in the thumbnail-sized versions of deodorant, shower gel etc. It’s like Barber’s Adagio in Quartet form: they’ve got the tune right. Second, whereas the medley of Guerlain quotations in L’instant Femme hinted at someone with a past but no future, here in a masculine context they suggest a guy who has learnt some of his art de vivre from women and isn’t ashamed to admit it.
The Lauder, very differently, also follows Ernst Haeckel’s law according to which development recapitulates evolution. Part of the trick is to be discerning about which life forms you include on the way. This one morphs from Cool Water to Hugo Boss Adam via Grey Flannel with the seamless grace that is Calice Becker’s hallmark. Unlike the Guerlain, which has a familiar cool-to-warm arc, Beyond Paradise Men never leaves the primeval ocean to bask on the beach: it manages to remain grey-green, indistinct and misty from topnote to drydown. Both fragrances show the reverence for history that informs classicism. Both, I wager, will be classics.
January 1, 2005
"The secrets of candle fragrances" By Luca Turin
"The secrets of candle fragrances" By Luca Turin
My hero Michael Faraday [1791-1867] led a strangely blameless life. That may explain why, despite his eminence as a scientist, there are no best-sellers or movies about him. Poor and unschooled, he became the greatest experimenter ever, and once noted in his diary something everyone needs to know: “Nothing is too wonderful to be true”. One of the oddities of this gentle genius was his love for candles. About them he wrote his only book, compiled from yearly lectures he gave to children. He told the kids candles were “the most open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy”. I often wonder what he would have made of scented ones, for through them what he helped create (we call it chemistry and physics) is now softly revealed to us by smell as well as light.
What makes a scented candle work is that the fragrance enjoys only the briefest moment of freedom between its solid prison of wax and its gaseous annihilation in the flame. Only the small pool of molten wax is fluid enough for fragrance molecules to swim to the surface, where heat helps them take flight. Aside from a gradual crescendo when the candle is lit, which cleverly keeps us unaware of what is taking place, the release of perfume is, like the flame, gracile but steady. The fragrant pool is constantly renewed, so the fragrance is unchanging, without topnotes or drydown. Candle fragrances are not melodies, but sostenuto organ chords.
Candles are, of course, terribly passé: “Air care” (the very term stinks) is now a huge and trashy market. Tasteful (i.e. hideous) plastic devices, some electrically powered, daily release tons of garish smells into the troposphere. Most smell “good” only in comparison with whatever pestilence they are meant to hide. There is also the innumerable progeny of the late and unlamented hippy joss-sticks, and they smell like gift shops in US malls: nauseating. A few perfumers, however, take candles as seriously as Michael Faraday did. One is Ormonde Jayne, situated 100 metres from the magnificent Royal Institution where he lived and worked, close enough for his ghost which (his successor assures me) still walks the corridors to pay a visit. Try her unforgettably sultry Ormonde (get the perfume too while you’re at it) and the laughing Sampaquita. The other is Patricia de Nicolai: her Maharadjah festoons the house with invisible glitter, while her Vetiver de Java was once accurately described to me by a friend as “good enough to start a minor religion”. Both firms have Web sites.
My hero Michael Faraday [1791-1867] led a strangely blameless life. That may explain why, despite his eminence as a scientist, there are no best-sellers or movies about him. Poor and unschooled, he became the greatest experimenter ever, and once noted in his diary something everyone needs to know: “Nothing is too wonderful to be true”. One of the oddities of this gentle genius was his love for candles. About them he wrote his only book, compiled from yearly lectures he gave to children. He told the kids candles were “the most open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy”. I often wonder what he would have made of scented ones, for through them what he helped create (we call it chemistry and physics) is now softly revealed to us by smell as well as light.
What makes a scented candle work is that the fragrance enjoys only the briefest moment of freedom between its solid prison of wax and its gaseous annihilation in the flame. Only the small pool of molten wax is fluid enough for fragrance molecules to swim to the surface, where heat helps them take flight. Aside from a gradual crescendo when the candle is lit, which cleverly keeps us unaware of what is taking place, the release of perfume is, like the flame, gracile but steady. The fragrant pool is constantly renewed, so the fragrance is unchanging, without topnotes or drydown. Candle fragrances are not melodies, but sostenuto organ chords.
Candles are, of course, terribly passé: “Air care” (the very term stinks) is now a huge and trashy market. Tasteful (i.e. hideous) plastic devices, some electrically powered, daily release tons of garish smells into the troposphere. Most smell “good” only in comparison with whatever pestilence they are meant to hide. There is also the innumerable progeny of the late and unlamented hippy joss-sticks, and they smell like gift shops in US malls: nauseating. A few perfumers, however, take candles as seriously as Michael Faraday did. One is Ormonde Jayne, situated 100 metres from the magnificent Royal Institution where he lived and worked, close enough for his ghost which (his successor assures me) still walks the corridors to pay a visit. Try her unforgettably sultry Ormonde (get the perfume too while you’re at it) and the laughing Sampaquita. The other is Patricia de Nicolai: her Maharadjah festoons the house with invisible glitter, while her Vetiver de Java was once accurately described to me by a friend as “good enough to start a minor religion”. Both firms have Web sites.
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