"L’Artisan Parfumeur 30 years later" By Luca Turin
The first “niche” perfumery, in a field by now synonymous with frantic novelty and six-day -wonders, is thirty years old and still going strong. In 1976 Jean Laporte had the idea of creating bold, transparent, highly colored, deceptively simple perfumes that did not belong in the French Mainstream and to sell them to the (by then solvent) 1968 generation. The packaging was as clever as the compositions: Laporte made liberal use of synthetic materials, yet his boutiques had a cozy, floral, natural-feeling potpourri look to them, miles away from luxury goods. Having discovered a new continent, this latter-day Coty populated it with odd creatures: his Vanilia was the first vanillic to use huge amounts of the candyfloss material ethyl maltol and is still the most euphoric perfume in existence. His first big hit was Mûres et Musc (1978), associating galaxolide, a powerful synthetic musk with red berry undertones, to yet more red berry heart notes in a formula that still works fine.
A series of successes, oddly unacknowledged by the industry, made L’Artisan millions. Laporte is a true fragrance fanatic: a decade ago, he organized an astonishing exhibition in Paris in which all the great natural raw materials of perfumery were presented together with superb specimens of the live plants whence they came, all in full bloom. It was a logistical miracle, and a feast for eye and nose. Laporte started out as a chemist and once told me that his first olfactory experiment as a child involved putting cabbage leaves into an empty metal box and letting them rot for months, releasing on the way, as he put it, “most of sulfur chemistry.”. He left in 1989 to found Maître Gantier et Parfumeur, plowing a parallel furrow. After his departure, L’Artisan Parfumeur changed owners and seemed to lose its way, then recovered with a hit-and-miss string of very fashionable, slightly arty fragrances among which Olivia Giacobetti’s excellent Premier Figuier and Dzing!.
By this time (in the late 90’s), the niche competition was fierce, and within it the natural-materials tendency was in the ascendant. L’Artisan cleverly made use of the best talent available, that of Bertrand Duchaufour and Jean-Claude Ellena. Never underestimate the French gift for refinement: from Debussy to Nouvelle Cuisine, they do fresh, spare, subtle beauty like nobody else. No fragrance better illustrates this, and better exemplifies what amounts to a new school, than Duchaufour’s sensationally beautiful Timbuktu (2004). It is a vetiver, but unlike any other, with a cool, rosy, dawn-like radiance that makes you want to buy twenty years’ worth in case L’Artisan is ever bought by LVMH.
December 1, 2006
November 1, 2006
"An open letter to Mr Harf" By Luca Turin
"An open letter to Mr Harf" By Luca Turin
Dear Mr. Peter Harf, Chairman and CEO, Joh A. Benckiser, GmbH, and Chairman of Coty Inc.:
A strange thing happened recently, which you may find interesting: Lancôme released La Collection, a set of five classic fragrances restored to full glory. Lancôme, a second-rank name in fragrance, had so far shown no interest in its past. It had no need to. But when it did, the result was wonderful. My immediate thought when I smelled them was this: Why not Coty ?
Coty today is owned and run by the German private-equity company Benckiser. In 1905, the firm was started by the greatest perfumer who ever lived, François Coty. All who care about perfume know his masterpieces, which changed the world: L’Origan, Ambre Antique, L’Aimant, Chypre, Emeraude, etc. Yet all have vanished except Emeraude and L’Aimant, and the survivors smell nothing like the real thing. Let us be frank, Mr. Harf: Coty fragrances have been crap for twenty years.
There was one missed opportunity to fix this problem. Some years back I met Coty’s nephew, Stéphane. Because of his surname, he was allowed to sell "Stéphane Coty" fragrances without fear of retribution. He planned to reissue the Coty greats under different names. That was the good news. The bad news was that the impossibly handsome and charming Stéphane Coty had no sense of smell. He smoked forty Gauloises Maïs a day. What the perfume suppliers sold him was what the French call fonds de cuve, which had probably been sitting in a warehouse for thirty years. He was also a delightfully inefficient businessman: he once delivered a bottle across Paris in his sports car to a friend of mine who had failed to find it in the only place that stocked his products, the Bon Marché. He soon went bust.
Mr Harf, it is now up to you to restore Coty’s greatness.
You must reissue Coty classics in the original formulations. Do not let anyone tell you it can’t be done, because it’s done already. As it happens, I have before me four smelling strips of the “confidential” Coty reconstructions done by perfumer Daphné Bugey at Firmenich last year. They are Emeraude, la Rose Jacqueminot, L’Origan and Jasmin de Corse. They are all in full conformity with IFRA rules, and could be on the market in short order if you say so. How do they smell ? Heavenly. They will be an object lesson to all those who hide behind modern regulations to deface the great monuments of fragrance. Spare no expense in this labor of love. Neither will your customers.
Dear Mr. Peter Harf, Chairman and CEO, Joh A. Benckiser, GmbH, and Chairman of Coty Inc.:
A strange thing happened recently, which you may find interesting: Lancôme released La Collection, a set of five classic fragrances restored to full glory. Lancôme, a second-rank name in fragrance, had so far shown no interest in its past. It had no need to. But when it did, the result was wonderful. My immediate thought when I smelled them was this: Why not Coty ?
Coty today is owned and run by the German private-equity company Benckiser. In 1905, the firm was started by the greatest perfumer who ever lived, François Coty. All who care about perfume know his masterpieces, which changed the world: L’Origan, Ambre Antique, L’Aimant, Chypre, Emeraude, etc. Yet all have vanished except Emeraude and L’Aimant, and the survivors smell nothing like the real thing. Let us be frank, Mr. Harf: Coty fragrances have been crap for twenty years.
There was one missed opportunity to fix this problem. Some years back I met Coty’s nephew, Stéphane. Because of his surname, he was allowed to sell "Stéphane Coty" fragrances without fear of retribution. He planned to reissue the Coty greats under different names. That was the good news. The bad news was that the impossibly handsome and charming Stéphane Coty had no sense of smell. He smoked forty Gauloises Maïs a day. What the perfume suppliers sold him was what the French call fonds de cuve, which had probably been sitting in a warehouse for thirty years. He was also a delightfully inefficient businessman: he once delivered a bottle across Paris in his sports car to a friend of mine who had failed to find it in the only place that stocked his products, the Bon Marché. He soon went bust.
Mr Harf, it is now up to you to restore Coty’s greatness.
You must reissue Coty classics in the original formulations. Do not let anyone tell you it can’t be done, because it’s done already. As it happens, I have before me four smelling strips of the “confidential” Coty reconstructions done by perfumer Daphné Bugey at Firmenich last year. They are Emeraude, la Rose Jacqueminot, L’Origan and Jasmin de Corse. They are all in full conformity with IFRA rules, and could be on the market in short order if you say so. How do they smell ? Heavenly. They will be an object lesson to all those who hide behind modern regulations to deface the great monuments of fragrance. Spare no expense in this labor of love. Neither will your customers.
October 1, 2006
"Guerlain’s Biogenetic Law" By Luca Turin
"Guerlain’s Biogenetic Law" By Luca Turin
Given my fondness for both cars and perfumes, it was inevitable I should end up daydreaming parallels between coachbuilders and fragrance houses. Thus Dior is the refined and ladylike Carrozzeria Touring, Caron the shockingly angular Fratelli Zagato, and Guerlain the endlessly graceful Pininfarina. Like Farina, Guerlain never starts with a blank sheet of paper, but with a blurred filigree of everything they ever built. Then they stretch it this way and that, removing old and adding new features as taste evolves, before bringing it all into soft focus. As with Farina, continuity is dynastic: the mantle passed from “Pinin” to Sergio, and now to his son. But after five generations, no Guerlain seems to be willing to take over from Jean-Paul when he retires. There are two possibilities: either put fragrances out to tender like most other brands, and lose know-how and artistic coherence, or hire an in-house perfumer as Cartier, Patou and now Hermès have done. Who? Maurice Roucel must be the prime contender. He has a string of masterpieces behind him, from the forgotten Lyra (Delon) to 24 Faubourg (Hermès) via Envy (Gucci) and Tocade (Rochas). He has shown he can do things exactly in the Guerlain manner (L’Instant), though so far with unexciting results. His very French style of perfumery, that of a man who likes to make women feel gorgeous, suits the house perfectly.
Now comes his long-awaited Insolence. Once you get past the insane press-pack (lights and music when you open the perfume box), the first impression is odd. Roucel daringly breaks with the current obsession with prettiness up front. In the grand old manner, the first few minutes are all wrong: cloying violets in a cloud of hairspray. Insolence is going to be a hard sell unless the staff gets proper training. At t=300 seconds, when the tremendous rush of topnotes slows down and Insolence hits its loping stride, you realize you’re zipping along in one of the best-engineered fragrances in living memory. The reference to Guerlain’s past is clearly l’Heure Bleue, but with a powder-blue respray. For the next couple of hours Insolence shifts back and forth between that and a shimmering, ghostly echo of Amarige’s tuberose. Roucel’s hallmark ingredient, magnolia leaf, works wonders at making this big four-seater GT feel lighter and smaller than it is. If l’Instant was a Peugeot 406, this one is the family Ferrari, the 612 Scaglietti. Great from some angles, wrong from others, but overall fascinating to watch in motion. It’s not a 330 GTC (that was Chamade), but would you turn it down as a present?
Given my fondness for both cars and perfumes, it was inevitable I should end up daydreaming parallels between coachbuilders and fragrance houses. Thus Dior is the refined and ladylike Carrozzeria Touring, Caron the shockingly angular Fratelli Zagato, and Guerlain the endlessly graceful Pininfarina. Like Farina, Guerlain never starts with a blank sheet of paper, but with a blurred filigree of everything they ever built. Then they stretch it this way and that, removing old and adding new features as taste evolves, before bringing it all into soft focus. As with Farina, continuity is dynastic: the mantle passed from “Pinin” to Sergio, and now to his son. But after five generations, no Guerlain seems to be willing to take over from Jean-Paul when he retires. There are two possibilities: either put fragrances out to tender like most other brands, and lose know-how and artistic coherence, or hire an in-house perfumer as Cartier, Patou and now Hermès have done. Who? Maurice Roucel must be the prime contender. He has a string of masterpieces behind him, from the forgotten Lyra (Delon) to 24 Faubourg (Hermès) via Envy (Gucci) and Tocade (Rochas). He has shown he can do things exactly in the Guerlain manner (L’Instant), though so far with unexciting results. His very French style of perfumery, that of a man who likes to make women feel gorgeous, suits the house perfectly.
Now comes his long-awaited Insolence. Once you get past the insane press-pack (lights and music when you open the perfume box), the first impression is odd. Roucel daringly breaks with the current obsession with prettiness up front. In the grand old manner, the first few minutes are all wrong: cloying violets in a cloud of hairspray. Insolence is going to be a hard sell unless the staff gets proper training. At t=300 seconds, when the tremendous rush of topnotes slows down and Insolence hits its loping stride, you realize you’re zipping along in one of the best-engineered fragrances in living memory. The reference to Guerlain’s past is clearly l’Heure Bleue, but with a powder-blue respray. For the next couple of hours Insolence shifts back and forth between that and a shimmering, ghostly echo of Amarige’s tuberose. Roucel’s hallmark ingredient, magnolia leaf, works wonders at making this big four-seater GT feel lighter and smaller than it is. If l’Instant was a Peugeot 406, this one is the family Ferrari, the 612 Scaglietti. Great from some angles, wrong from others, but overall fascinating to watch in motion. It’s not a 330 GTC (that was Chamade), but would you turn it down as a present?
September 1, 2006
"Blue" By Luca Turin
"Blue" By Luca Turin
Bees specialize in flowers, and for some flowers the feeling is mutual. Bees only see ultraviolet (if you wear sunscreen, you’ll look streaky black to them), blue, and green. Lavender, the bluest of all blue flowers, wastes no time attracting less industrious insects and turns entire swathes of Haute Provence Apis mellifera Blue. I must have been a worker bee in a previous life, hence my laziness in this one: I love both the smell and the color. It is hard to unlearn an association once you’ve made it, but I swear even if it turned out the stuff came from hibiscus blossoms I would still find the smell of lavender, (and for that matter the electric sound of bees) intensely blue.
My anglophile grandfather always insisted on using on Yardley’s English Lavender (not bad, but no longer great). I followed his advice until I hit upon Caron’s Pour un Homme, and stayed with that until recently. Of late, though, it seemed to me that something less sophisticated, less yellow-vanillic (aptly, Pour un Homme is colored green), was called for, a really simple lavender. This is not as easy as it seems. Excellent grades of steam-distilled lavender oil come from all over the world, but adding just the right amount of other stuff to turn lavender into a real perfume is tricky. It is an uncooperative perfumery note, halfway between top and middle. It doesn’t quite fly off in seconds the way citrus does, but fades by the time you finish breakfast. Merely extending it with woody or herbaceous notes won’t do: wrong color.
What makes a great lavender is good fixation, that mysterious process by which heavy molecules make lighter, flightier ones stay longer. After smelling a dozen lavenders that fade to purple or gray, I think I may have found the true-blue best. It comes from Caldey Island, in Wales, and is sold by the monks that inhabit it (at www.manufactum.de, a,mong other places). Caldey Island Lavender has an exquisite quiet, musky drydown. It was composed by Flemish freelance perfumer Hugo Collumbien, now 89 years old. I called him up to ask how he did it, and he explained he used the best stuff from Sault, in the Vaucluse. I worked up the courage to ask what he’d used as a fixative: the legendary musk Exaltolide, now synthetic but originally found in the musk rat. What works for bees and rats works for us.
Bees specialize in flowers, and for some flowers the feeling is mutual. Bees only see ultraviolet (if you wear sunscreen, you’ll look streaky black to them), blue, and green. Lavender, the bluest of all blue flowers, wastes no time attracting less industrious insects and turns entire swathes of Haute Provence Apis mellifera Blue. I must have been a worker bee in a previous life, hence my laziness in this one: I love both the smell and the color. It is hard to unlearn an association once you’ve made it, but I swear even if it turned out the stuff came from hibiscus blossoms I would still find the smell of lavender, (and for that matter the electric sound of bees) intensely blue.
My anglophile grandfather always insisted on using on Yardley’s English Lavender (not bad, but no longer great). I followed his advice until I hit upon Caron’s Pour un Homme, and stayed with that until recently. Of late, though, it seemed to me that something less sophisticated, less yellow-vanillic (aptly, Pour un Homme is colored green), was called for, a really simple lavender. This is not as easy as it seems. Excellent grades of steam-distilled lavender oil come from all over the world, but adding just the right amount of other stuff to turn lavender into a real perfume is tricky. It is an uncooperative perfumery note, halfway between top and middle. It doesn’t quite fly off in seconds the way citrus does, but fades by the time you finish breakfast. Merely extending it with woody or herbaceous notes won’t do: wrong color.
What makes a great lavender is good fixation, that mysterious process by which heavy molecules make lighter, flightier ones stay longer. After smelling a dozen lavenders that fade to purple or gray, I think I may have found the true-blue best. It comes from Caldey Island, in Wales, and is sold by the monks that inhabit it (at www.manufactum.de, a,mong other places). Caldey Island Lavender has an exquisite quiet, musky drydown. It was composed by Flemish freelance perfumer Hugo Collumbien, now 89 years old. I called him up to ask how he did it, and he explained he used the best stuff from Sault, in the Vaucluse. I worked up the courage to ask what he’d used as a fixative: the legendary musk Exaltolide, now synthetic but originally found in the musk rat. What works for bees and rats works for us.
August 1, 2006
"Into the Ninth" By Luca Turin
"Into the Ninth" By Luca Turin
There is a slice of Paris, roughly the 9th arrondissement, stretching from behind the Galeries Lafayette to the dizzying railway cut of Place de l’Europe, that belongs in a city one quarter the size. You pass faded offices under flickering neons, hairdressers showing photographs of ugly hairdos nobody will request, driving schools with cut-open engines in the window, shops that still sell stamps and coins long after the last collector died. This is where, in years past, some perfume stores stocked the products of fallen firms like Lubin (the cheerily sad Gin Fizz) or Houbigant (the sinister Duc de Vervins). The Ninth is where French glory slowly fades to blue in shop windows, where disheveled glamour goes to die. It is my melancholy duty to report that I lately saw Parfums Balmain pass by Rue Lafayette, at dawn, looking haggard.
The telltale signs of decadence had been there for some time. For a start, the packaging hadn’t been changed for a decade. There was no need to, it looked great. But when that happens in a country like France, obsessed with sprucing up, you start to worry. And sure enough, the last two fragrances, Balmya and Eau d’Amazonie, were cheap, thin little things. Oddly, Pierre Balmain (clothes, watches) seems to be doing well, with prosperous-looking ads everywhere. Unlike Worth, Fath and Grès, where the fashion house went belly-up leaving the perfumes stranded, it seems Balmain just stopped caring.
Ironically, Balmain had caught the modernisation mumps early and seemed in great shape. The great Vent Vert, Germaine Cellier’s masterpiece, was beautifully reengineered by Calice Becker fifteen years ago. She also did the lemon-sandalwood Monsieur Balmain, still the sunniest masculine around. Jolie Madame, Cellier’s other great (a more civilized version of Piguet’s Bandit), is still in the range. And then there’s Francis Camaille’s Ivoire, the last of the monumental soap statues of the eighties. A range like that deserves to survive and expand.
When I was trying to contact Parfums Balmain, I was bounced around from phone number to phone number until I came to the firm that has recently acquired the license, and they sent me the full range. I asked what other brands they represent. My heart sank when they told me: Ungaro and Rykiel. It seems these former grands seigneurs now sit across each other in the tumbril, hands tied, on their way to the Ninth.
There is a slice of Paris, roughly the 9th arrondissement, stretching from behind the Galeries Lafayette to the dizzying railway cut of Place de l’Europe, that belongs in a city one quarter the size. You pass faded offices under flickering neons, hairdressers showing photographs of ugly hairdos nobody will request, driving schools with cut-open engines in the window, shops that still sell stamps and coins long after the last collector died. This is where, in years past, some perfume stores stocked the products of fallen firms like Lubin (the cheerily sad Gin Fizz) or Houbigant (the sinister Duc de Vervins). The Ninth is where French glory slowly fades to blue in shop windows, where disheveled glamour goes to die. It is my melancholy duty to report that I lately saw Parfums Balmain pass by Rue Lafayette, at dawn, looking haggard.
The telltale signs of decadence had been there for some time. For a start, the packaging hadn’t been changed for a decade. There was no need to, it looked great. But when that happens in a country like France, obsessed with sprucing up, you start to worry. And sure enough, the last two fragrances, Balmya and Eau d’Amazonie, were cheap, thin little things. Oddly, Pierre Balmain (clothes, watches) seems to be doing well, with prosperous-looking ads everywhere. Unlike Worth, Fath and Grès, where the fashion house went belly-up leaving the perfumes stranded, it seems Balmain just stopped caring.
Ironically, Balmain had caught the modernisation mumps early and seemed in great shape. The great Vent Vert, Germaine Cellier’s masterpiece, was beautifully reengineered by Calice Becker fifteen years ago. She also did the lemon-sandalwood Monsieur Balmain, still the sunniest masculine around. Jolie Madame, Cellier’s other great (a more civilized version of Piguet’s Bandit), is still in the range. And then there’s Francis Camaille’s Ivoire, the last of the monumental soap statues of the eighties. A range like that deserves to survive and expand.
When I was trying to contact Parfums Balmain, I was bounced around from phone number to phone number until I came to the firm that has recently acquired the license, and they sent me the full range. I asked what other brands they represent. My heart sank when they told me: Ungaro and Rykiel. It seems these former grands seigneurs now sit across each other in the tumbril, hands tied, on their way to the Ninth.
July 1, 2006
"The Belle Epoque" By Luca Turin
"The Belle Epoque" By Luca Turin
While smelling some leather perfumes recently, I looked up quinoline, the molecule that gives them their bitter, distinctive smell: it was discovered by Zdenko von Skraup in 1880. Small wonder they call it the Belle Epoque! The last fifty years of the long nineteenth century (1789-1914) gave us half of physics and mathematics, and a huge slice of chemistry, the latter mostly from Germany and Austria. The perfumery timeline is amazing: between 1868 (coumarin, the smell of fougères) and 1908 (undecalactone, the peach in Mitsouko) chemists discovered all the bones of modern perfumery, about fifty synthetics that defined the Golden Age. Very few of these chemicals were found by fragrance specialists, and almost all by accident. Chemists were just busy making things, and some of them smelled good and made their creators (or their employers) very rich.
In those days, there were no regulatory costs, no safety tests. If you put the thing in a fragrance and nobody dropped dead (no one ever did), you had a product. How things have changed. Today the cost of worldwide certification of a new product, before you find out whether anyone even likes it, is upwards of € 1M. Unless it is a blockbuster, you’ll get your money back fairly slowly. Few completely new molecules are being released. Maybe the industry has entered an age of diminishing returns. The perfumer’s palette is supposedly too large already, at somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 materials, and all the big composition firms are removing the seldom used items from their inventories. Everyone is running for cover; your best-selling product could give six rats a rash and end up on Europe’s least-wanted list next time the suits meet in Brussels.
I should know: I’ve just spent the last four years devising replacements for some of the most popular molecules in fragrance history, now classed as allergens. My job has been great fun, interesting science, clever chemistry and good business, but it’s essentially conservation, not construction. Just when you might think there are no new smells left to be discovered, a perfumer friend points out the existence of a new musk called Musk KS, made by Grau Aromatics in (of course) Germany. I ordered a sample, and it is stunning: hugely powerful, earthy, unlike any other. Then I saw the chemical structure. Never was a more optimistic molecule made: it contains two bromine atoms and a nitro group. These are things that give armchair safety experts night sweats. But Grau KG, god bless them, made it, made sure it was safe, and now sells it. Maybe another Belle Epoque is coming.
While smelling some leather perfumes recently, I looked up quinoline, the molecule that gives them their bitter, distinctive smell: it was discovered by Zdenko von Skraup in 1880. Small wonder they call it the Belle Epoque! The last fifty years of the long nineteenth century (1789-1914) gave us half of physics and mathematics, and a huge slice of chemistry, the latter mostly from Germany and Austria. The perfumery timeline is amazing: between 1868 (coumarin, the smell of fougères) and 1908 (undecalactone, the peach in Mitsouko) chemists discovered all the bones of modern perfumery, about fifty synthetics that defined the Golden Age. Very few of these chemicals were found by fragrance specialists, and almost all by accident. Chemists were just busy making things, and some of them smelled good and made their creators (or their employers) very rich.
In those days, there were no regulatory costs, no safety tests. If you put the thing in a fragrance and nobody dropped dead (no one ever did), you had a product. How things have changed. Today the cost of worldwide certification of a new product, before you find out whether anyone even likes it, is upwards of € 1M. Unless it is a blockbuster, you’ll get your money back fairly slowly. Few completely new molecules are being released. Maybe the industry has entered an age of diminishing returns. The perfumer’s palette is supposedly too large already, at somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 materials, and all the big composition firms are removing the seldom used items from their inventories. Everyone is running for cover; your best-selling product could give six rats a rash and end up on Europe’s least-wanted list next time the suits meet in Brussels.
I should know: I’ve just spent the last four years devising replacements for some of the most popular molecules in fragrance history, now classed as allergens. My job has been great fun, interesting science, clever chemistry and good business, but it’s essentially conservation, not construction. Just when you might think there are no new smells left to be discovered, a perfumer friend points out the existence of a new musk called Musk KS, made by Grau Aromatics in (of course) Germany. I ordered a sample, and it is stunning: hugely powerful, earthy, unlike any other. Then I saw the chemical structure. Never was a more optimistic molecule made: it contains two bromine atoms and a nitro group. These are things that give armchair safety experts night sweats. But Grau KG, god bless them, made it, made sure it was safe, and now sells it. Maybe another Belle Epoque is coming.
June 1, 2006
"Battery-powered ice cubes" By Luca Turin
"Battery-powered ice cubes" By Luca Turin
In the last two weeks, seven parcels came full of fragrances and press releases, accompanied by charming hand-written notes recommending the contents to my nose. This being spring, most of the fragrances were “summer flankers”, i.e. famous names flanked with words like été or légère. The summer perfume traces its origin to Kenzo’s 1993 Parfum d’Eté, absurdly released for Christmas in a stroke of marketing genius. What is a summer perfume ? What, if anything, is wrong with simply wearing Bal à Versailles, Vanilia or Diorissimo with sandals ? Does anybody need a purpose-built summer thing? Probably not. But marketing reveals its truest purpose only when no discernible need exists.
The canonical summer perfume should in principle be light, fresh and carefree. In perfumery language, that means topnotes only. But these have to last, otherwise the punters complain. So only the most powerful synthetics are used, to ensure they last the distance. Result: a tinny, hissy, loudhailer timbre that sets your teeth on edge. This chalk-on-blackboard perfumery comes in three varieties. 1- Less is More (example: Kouros Eau d’Eté), where the perfumer takes a perfectly good fragrance, dilutes it by half with 98% alcohol and throws in a citrus top note that says fresh for ten seconds, before going home after a good day’s work. 2- The Big Lie school, e.g. (Guerlain’s Grosellina and Tutti Kiwi) where you put a picture of fruit (redcurrants and kiwis) on the packet and bravely fill the bottle with something that bears no relation to either. Aqua Allegorias, except when Mathilde Laurent composed them (Pamplelune), have always hovered on the edge of crudeness. These two make Champs Elysées look like a classic.
Finally, there is the High-Concept school, the sort of desperate stuff that comes out of a meeting of eight overpaid people around a tasteful oval table. Carolina Herrera’s 212 On Ice is a good example: the bottles (two small things) are inserted into something that looks like a large pill, itself inserted between the two halves of a large and heavy plastic ice cube. The fragrances are dismal, indeed set new standards in that direction.. But, and this is where others fear to tread, the press pack comes with a tray of plastic ice cubes, each containing a watch battery. If you press the little button, LEDs turn on that allow you to see a backlit 212 floating inside your drink. I pressed the button. The battery was as dead as the perfume.
In the last two weeks, seven parcels came full of fragrances and press releases, accompanied by charming hand-written notes recommending the contents to my nose. This being spring, most of the fragrances were “summer flankers”, i.e. famous names flanked with words like été or légère. The summer perfume traces its origin to Kenzo’s 1993 Parfum d’Eté, absurdly released for Christmas in a stroke of marketing genius. What is a summer perfume ? What, if anything, is wrong with simply wearing Bal à Versailles, Vanilia or Diorissimo with sandals ? Does anybody need a purpose-built summer thing? Probably not. But marketing reveals its truest purpose only when no discernible need exists.
The canonical summer perfume should in principle be light, fresh and carefree. In perfumery language, that means topnotes only. But these have to last, otherwise the punters complain. So only the most powerful synthetics are used, to ensure they last the distance. Result: a tinny, hissy, loudhailer timbre that sets your teeth on edge. This chalk-on-blackboard perfumery comes in three varieties. 1- Less is More (example: Kouros Eau d’Eté), where the perfumer takes a perfectly good fragrance, dilutes it by half with 98% alcohol and throws in a citrus top note that says fresh for ten seconds, before going home after a good day’s work. 2- The Big Lie school, e.g. (Guerlain’s Grosellina and Tutti Kiwi) where you put a picture of fruit (redcurrants and kiwis) on the packet and bravely fill the bottle with something that bears no relation to either. Aqua Allegorias, except when Mathilde Laurent composed them (Pamplelune), have always hovered on the edge of crudeness. These two make Champs Elysées look like a classic.
Finally, there is the High-Concept school, the sort of desperate stuff that comes out of a meeting of eight overpaid people around a tasteful oval table. Carolina Herrera’s 212 On Ice is a good example: the bottles (two small things) are inserted into something that looks like a large pill, itself inserted between the two halves of a large and heavy plastic ice cube. The fragrances are dismal, indeed set new standards in that direction.. But, and this is where others fear to tread, the press pack comes with a tray of plastic ice cubes, each containing a watch battery. If you press the little button, LEDs turn on that allow you to see a backlit 212 floating inside your drink. I pressed the button. The battery was as dead as the perfume.
May 1, 2006
"Simplexity" By Luca Turin
"Simplexity" By Luca Turin
Blue at one end and red at the other like a carpenter’s pencil, the word simplexity was coined by artist Laura Duke to denote the combination of cool blue elegance and teeming red intricacy that science uncovers everywhere. It also applies to art: the best creations consistently combine clear structure with rich detail. In perfumery, simplexity is present even at the level of the most basic building blocks: Two different grades of lavender oil, though identical at the blue end, will nevertheless feel different, because each red end writes its own signature. Put the two substances in your analytical equipment, turn up the magnification to the maximum, and you will see, nestled against the Everest peak of linalool, a range of foothills. These are the impurities whose presence or absence determines whether the view looks like Kashmir or the Moon. Perfumes are now made by aromachemical companies, by chemists striving for purity: blue. Flowers, by contrast, are living things striving to attract bees, and bees like complex: red. For chemists and accountants, natural materials are a complicated red scribble: they have good years and bad years, quality control is a constant worry, prices fluctuate. This has been the driving force towards all-blue perfumes that are either bare or fake.
But as always, just when one is about to give up, proof emerges that chemical poetry has not run out of words. Two wonderful fragrances have come my way, significantly both composed by relative beginners. Both exhibit the telltale shimmer of simplexity, and never smell the same two days in a row. One is Andy Tauer’s Air du Désert Marocain. He is a Zurich-based self-taught perfumer. L’Air du Désert is his second fragrance, an austere, woody-balsamic accord sweetened with just enough amber and vanilla to wrap a smile on its noble bone structure. It is probably the best fragrance to come out of amateur hands since Coty quit his day job at Antoine Chiris et Compagnie and composed La Rose Jacqueminot in 1904. The other is Chinatown, from the brash, humorous and very successful New York firm Bond No.9. It was composed by Aurélien Guichard, son of Jean, Givaudan’s great perfumer. Aurélien is, I am told, in his twenties, and Chinatown is his first masterpiece. It has been described as gourmand, i.e. foody-sweet, but that is missing the point. What Chinatown does is put a new shine on the Clausewitzian notion that what lovers enjoy doing at 3 AM is the continuation of dessert by other means.
Blue at one end and red at the other like a carpenter’s pencil, the word simplexity was coined by artist Laura Duke to denote the combination of cool blue elegance and teeming red intricacy that science uncovers everywhere. It also applies to art: the best creations consistently combine clear structure with rich detail. In perfumery, simplexity is present even at the level of the most basic building blocks: Two different grades of lavender oil, though identical at the blue end, will nevertheless feel different, because each red end writes its own signature. Put the two substances in your analytical equipment, turn up the magnification to the maximum, and you will see, nestled against the Everest peak of linalool, a range of foothills. These are the impurities whose presence or absence determines whether the view looks like Kashmir or the Moon. Perfumes are now made by aromachemical companies, by chemists striving for purity: blue. Flowers, by contrast, are living things striving to attract bees, and bees like complex: red. For chemists and accountants, natural materials are a complicated red scribble: they have good years and bad years, quality control is a constant worry, prices fluctuate. This has been the driving force towards all-blue perfumes that are either bare or fake.
But as always, just when one is about to give up, proof emerges that chemical poetry has not run out of words. Two wonderful fragrances have come my way, significantly both composed by relative beginners. Both exhibit the telltale shimmer of simplexity, and never smell the same two days in a row. One is Andy Tauer’s Air du Désert Marocain. He is a Zurich-based self-taught perfumer. L’Air du Désert is his second fragrance, an austere, woody-balsamic accord sweetened with just enough amber and vanilla to wrap a smile on its noble bone structure. It is probably the best fragrance to come out of amateur hands since Coty quit his day job at Antoine Chiris et Compagnie and composed La Rose Jacqueminot in 1904. The other is Chinatown, from the brash, humorous and very successful New York firm Bond No.9. It was composed by Aurélien Guichard, son of Jean, Givaudan’s great perfumer. Aurélien is, I am told, in his twenties, and Chinatown is his first masterpiece. It has been described as gourmand, i.e. foody-sweet, but that is missing the point. What Chinatown does is put a new shine on the Clausewitzian notion that what lovers enjoy doing at 3 AM is the continuation of dessert by other means.
April 1, 2006
"Natural Perfumery" By Luca Turin
"Natural Perfumery" By Luca Turin
There are now officially four kinds of perfumery: normal, niche, vintage and natural. Normal is what you find everywhere; niche is what you hope others won’t find; vintage is what you find only if you know what to look for. Where’s the natural stuff ? In health stores, next to the rock-salt lamps. They carry aromatherapy oils, so people have had access to a wide range of plant extracts previously accessible only to perfumers. This happened at a time when this wonderful-smelling stuff has almost disappeared from the mainstream. The big six perfumery firms are aromachemicals manufacturers, and it is in their interest to keep naturals, with their attendant problems of price and quality fluctuations, to a bare minimum. Just how bare that minimum can be has become clear in the last five years, during which the cost of a “fine fragrance” formulation has gone down by half and the quality by nine tenths. Good perfumes have almost disappeared: there are 500 launches each year, but only a dozen are worth smelling twice.
Capitalism hates a vacuum: by popular request, aromatherapists have started composing fragrances. Unsurprisingly, their creations are supposed to be Good For You. This marketing strategy is no worse than the usual “Wear this and every man/woman will lust after you”, and just as easy to disprove empirically. But never mind the therapy, how’s the aroma? I recently received a sampler of the work of several US-based natural perfumers. Some were inept. Some were imitations of well-worn themes, i.e. recipes lifted from a book, competently executed with natural materials. Some were not natural at all, either knowingly (crooks are uniformly distributed among the population) or unknowingly (including among fragrance suppliers).
But a tiny number smelled good in a surprisingly new way. I’ve always believed perfumery is virtual cuisine, not pornography for the nostril, and these fragrances confirmed this. Natural perfumery may be waiting for another Guerlain, armed not with vanilla, but this time with a spice no-one outside Szechuan Province has yet heard of. But hasn’t all this all been done already before the invention of chemistry ? Surprisingly, no. Serious natural perfumery was indigenous to only a handful of countries, each using a small number of traditional ingredients. New extraction methods and global trade now conspire to provide an unprecedented palette. Natural perfumers claim not to be bound by the aesthetic criteria of classical perfumery: if it survives EU regulations and New Age nonsense, their art may yet deliver on this promise.
There are now officially four kinds of perfumery: normal, niche, vintage and natural. Normal is what you find everywhere; niche is what you hope others won’t find; vintage is what you find only if you know what to look for. Where’s the natural stuff ? In health stores, next to the rock-salt lamps. They carry aromatherapy oils, so people have had access to a wide range of plant extracts previously accessible only to perfumers. This happened at a time when this wonderful-smelling stuff has almost disappeared from the mainstream. The big six perfumery firms are aromachemicals manufacturers, and it is in their interest to keep naturals, with their attendant problems of price and quality fluctuations, to a bare minimum. Just how bare that minimum can be has become clear in the last five years, during which the cost of a “fine fragrance” formulation has gone down by half and the quality by nine tenths. Good perfumes have almost disappeared: there are 500 launches each year, but only a dozen are worth smelling twice.
Capitalism hates a vacuum: by popular request, aromatherapists have started composing fragrances. Unsurprisingly, their creations are supposed to be Good For You. This marketing strategy is no worse than the usual “Wear this and every man/woman will lust after you”, and just as easy to disprove empirically. But never mind the therapy, how’s the aroma? I recently received a sampler of the work of several US-based natural perfumers. Some were inept. Some were imitations of well-worn themes, i.e. recipes lifted from a book, competently executed with natural materials. Some were not natural at all, either knowingly (crooks are uniformly distributed among the population) or unknowingly (including among fragrance suppliers).
But a tiny number smelled good in a surprisingly new way. I’ve always believed perfumery is virtual cuisine, not pornography for the nostril, and these fragrances confirmed this. Natural perfumery may be waiting for another Guerlain, armed not with vanilla, but this time with a spice no-one outside Szechuan Province has yet heard of. But hasn’t all this all been done already before the invention of chemistry ? Surprisingly, no. Serious natural perfumery was indigenous to only a handful of countries, each using a small number of traditional ingredients. New extraction methods and global trade now conspire to provide an unprecedented palette. Natural perfumers claim not to be bound by the aesthetic criteria of classical perfumery: if it survives EU regulations and New Age nonsense, their art may yet deliver on this promise.
March 1, 2006
"Sublime" By Luca Turin
"Sublime" By Luca Turin
Thirty years ago, most fine fragrance perfumers were Frenchmen, steeped in that enduring mixture of lust, fascination and scorn towards women locally celebrated as galanterie. I once wrote a letter to the great Edmond Roudnitska asking him to come give a talk on perfumery. He mistook the handwritten final a of my first name for an e and wrote back a letter informing me (Luce is a feminine name in France) that “though a scientist, I was nonetheless a woman”, etc. Embarrassed, I dropped the invitation. Yet his generation, for all its fossil ideas, seldom stooped to the sort of mawkish Barbie-pink trash that is now the staple of emancipated sexiness. Instead, they designed their greatest creations to adorn chessboard queens, dashing in all directions chewing up pawns, chased by panting, step-at-a-time kings. Bernard Chant’s Cabochard, Guy Robert’s Dioressence, Roudnitska’s Diorama were offerings to goddesses, not presents to women. How did this Pantheon die out ? Demeter went first: the last opulent florals Fidji, First, and Chloé show signs of overripe decadence, and are variations on earlier agrestic glories (Joy, Fleurs de Rocaille). Then came the obese Junos of the eighties: Giorgio, Poison and Opium, painted harlots that soon collapsed under their own weight. By the nineties a new race of synthetic Titans (Angel, Boucheron) was in the ascendant, and among the old divinities only the martial and the fleet of foot were left standing. Saint Laurent’s Rive Gauche (Diana) remained true to its sleek, magnificent form until it was defaced by the Taliban of EU regulations two years ago. The last intact monumental sculpture seems to be Patou’s Sublime, and its survival is no accident. Patou was always an anomaly: an in-house perfumer (then Jean Kerléo), slow to create and slow to trash, no fashion collections to speed up the pace of life, a launch every few years. Sublime, probably Kerléo’s greatest creation, is a wonderful case of mistaken identity: the luminous buttercup color of the packaging, the exotic-fruit bottle, everything screams éternel féminin. But the fragrance tells a different story: arrestingly handsome rather than pretty, completely abstract despite being made largely of natural materials (jasmine and vetiver), this Minerva of fragrances in full armour and helmet passes the hardest test for any feminine fragrance: it makes a sensational masculine. Roudnitska would probably have hated the notion, but Sublime illustrates the admission of defeat voiced by the public womanizer and closet homosexual Louis Aragon: “La femme est l’avenir de l’homme”.
Thirty years ago, most fine fragrance perfumers were Frenchmen, steeped in that enduring mixture of lust, fascination and scorn towards women locally celebrated as galanterie. I once wrote a letter to the great Edmond Roudnitska asking him to come give a talk on perfumery. He mistook the handwritten final a of my first name for an e and wrote back a letter informing me (Luce is a feminine name in France) that “though a scientist, I was nonetheless a woman”, etc. Embarrassed, I dropped the invitation. Yet his generation, for all its fossil ideas, seldom stooped to the sort of mawkish Barbie-pink trash that is now the staple of emancipated sexiness. Instead, they designed their greatest creations to adorn chessboard queens, dashing in all directions chewing up pawns, chased by panting, step-at-a-time kings. Bernard Chant’s Cabochard, Guy Robert’s Dioressence, Roudnitska’s Diorama were offerings to goddesses, not presents to women. How did this Pantheon die out ? Demeter went first: the last opulent florals Fidji, First, and Chloé show signs of overripe decadence, and are variations on earlier agrestic glories (Joy, Fleurs de Rocaille). Then came the obese Junos of the eighties: Giorgio, Poison and Opium, painted harlots that soon collapsed under their own weight. By the nineties a new race of synthetic Titans (Angel, Boucheron) was in the ascendant, and among the old divinities only the martial and the fleet of foot were left standing. Saint Laurent’s Rive Gauche (Diana) remained true to its sleek, magnificent form until it was defaced by the Taliban of EU regulations two years ago. The last intact monumental sculpture seems to be Patou’s Sublime, and its survival is no accident. Patou was always an anomaly: an in-house perfumer (then Jean Kerléo), slow to create and slow to trash, no fashion collections to speed up the pace of life, a launch every few years. Sublime, probably Kerléo’s greatest creation, is a wonderful case of mistaken identity: the luminous buttercup color of the packaging, the exotic-fruit bottle, everything screams éternel féminin. But the fragrance tells a different story: arrestingly handsome rather than pretty, completely abstract despite being made largely of natural materials (jasmine and vetiver), this Minerva of fragrances in full armour and helmet passes the hardest test for any feminine fragrance: it makes a sensational masculine. Roudnitska would probably have hated the notion, but Sublime illustrates the admission of defeat voiced by the public womanizer and closet homosexual Louis Aragon: “La femme est l’avenir de l’homme”.
February 1, 2006
"Guerlain revisited" By Luca Turin
"Guerlain revisited" By Luca Turin
Faithful readers will recall a Duftnote a year ago expressing alarm at the impending “modernization” of the Guerlain classics to bring them in line with EU regulations. Things have moved on since then: instead of a callow youth to oversee the job, Guerlain relented and hired the great Edouard Fléchier. Fléchier, a wonderfully inventive perfumer (Poison, Une Rose, etc. ) and Grasse veteran with more experience of naturals than just about anyone alive, has been at it for a year. To date, there is no sign of any planned release of new-and-improved fragrances. Guerlain’s attitude also seems to have changed, from secretive to openly defensive. I recently gave a lecture in Paris to an audience of perfumers and, during the questions, made an offhand remark about Guerlain’s Chamade and Chant d’Arômes having been changed long ago. Days later I got a phone call from Fléchier himself asking me to account for my words. I explained what I meant (Chamade less powdery, Chant d’Aromes less peachy, nothing to do with his work) and the conversation took an unexpected turn.
Guerlain, it seems, feels unfairly singled out for criticism, at a time when everyone is messing with their old formulae to either cheapen them or bring them in line with regulations. True, Guerlain are getting a lot of flak, but only in proportion to the importance of the masterpieces in their safekeeping. Which would you most worry about: the Uffizi hosing down its Botticellis, or the Hirshhorn Museum scrubbing its Julian Schnabels down to the bare velvet? Fléchier insisted that they were working very hard at making sure no damage would be done, and I believe him.
But can they do it ? I’ll bet oakmoss, birch tar etc. simply cannot be replaced. What then ? Plenty, as a matter of fact. For a start, be more open about the whole process. I suggested to Fléchier, and later to Guerlain’s head of PR that they (at long last) explain to their customers what the problem is, and humbly let them decide: Mitsouko with a health warning, or Mitsouko after plastic surgery ? For that matter, why not both ? For example, the Parfum in each line could be the original, with the EdT and EdP revised and “safe”. I think the best course of action would be for Guerlain to invite every perfume journalist on earth to visit the works, let Fléchier explain the problem, have the regulatory people explain the options, and see what King Customer decrees. Welcome to the modern world.
Faithful readers will recall a Duftnote a year ago expressing alarm at the impending “modernization” of the Guerlain classics to bring them in line with EU regulations. Things have moved on since then: instead of a callow youth to oversee the job, Guerlain relented and hired the great Edouard Fléchier. Fléchier, a wonderfully inventive perfumer (Poison, Une Rose, etc. ) and Grasse veteran with more experience of naturals than just about anyone alive, has been at it for a year. To date, there is no sign of any planned release of new-and-improved fragrances. Guerlain’s attitude also seems to have changed, from secretive to openly defensive. I recently gave a lecture in Paris to an audience of perfumers and, during the questions, made an offhand remark about Guerlain’s Chamade and Chant d’Arômes having been changed long ago. Days later I got a phone call from Fléchier himself asking me to account for my words. I explained what I meant (Chamade less powdery, Chant d’Aromes less peachy, nothing to do with his work) and the conversation took an unexpected turn.
Guerlain, it seems, feels unfairly singled out for criticism, at a time when everyone is messing with their old formulae to either cheapen them or bring them in line with regulations. True, Guerlain are getting a lot of flak, but only in proportion to the importance of the masterpieces in their safekeeping. Which would you most worry about: the Uffizi hosing down its Botticellis, or the Hirshhorn Museum scrubbing its Julian Schnabels down to the bare velvet? Fléchier insisted that they were working very hard at making sure no damage would be done, and I believe him.
But can they do it ? I’ll bet oakmoss, birch tar etc. simply cannot be replaced. What then ? Plenty, as a matter of fact. For a start, be more open about the whole process. I suggested to Fléchier, and later to Guerlain’s head of PR that they (at long last) explain to their customers what the problem is, and humbly let them decide: Mitsouko with a health warning, or Mitsouko after plastic surgery ? For that matter, why not both ? For example, the Parfum in each line could be the original, with the EdT and EdP revised and “safe”. I think the best course of action would be for Guerlain to invite every perfume journalist on earth to visit the works, let Fléchier explain the problem, have the regulatory people explain the options, and see what King Customer decrees. Welcome to the modern world.
January 1, 2006
"Mozart in the Bottle" By Luca Turin
"Mozart in the Bottle" By Luca Turin
It may be that beauty, like energy, follows a conservation law: once created, it gets endlessly recycled but never destroyed and eventually ends up as diffuse aesthetic warmth. The conductor Sir Thomas Beecham (1879-1961), upon receiving get-well cards, once apparently asked from his sick-bed “Anything from Mozart?” Had he lived longer, say into the 1980s, the answer might have been “No Sir, but his low-temperature heirs Abba and Elton John send their regards”. What survives of the boy genius ? Among other things, a reliance on the fifth, the handspan interval at the core of what we call Classical music.
Suppose now that the fifth is a preexisting, mathematically satisfying proportion. Then those who believe, as I do, that we smell the vibrations of molecules are faced with an interesting question: are there similar rules of molecular harmony, i.e. chords that sound good to our nose ? The consonant octave can be ruled out: smells do not repeat themselves when the frequency is doubled. But the fifth is another matter. I recently had a brain scan that revealed no major anomalies, yet it has always seemed self-evident to me that Mozart’s lighter music was fruity, and conversely that fruit, especially fruit salads, had a Mozartian character.
Remarkably, there may be a good reason for this: the two characteristic vibrations of esters and lactones, the molecular structures that are responsible for 90% of fruity smells, are placed almost exactly a fifth apart. This idea will remain at the border between speculation and fantasy until we figure out how smell works. In the meantime, it is possible to at least enjoy liquid fifths in a variety of styles. Perfumers generally shy away from overtly fruity perfumes, because most are commercial flops: women do not generally want to smell like tinned fruit. Instead, they add discreet touches of various esters to their compositions. Salicylates, for example, give the original Je Reviens (forget the modern one, buy some vintage on ebay) its mysterious green glow. Octin carbonates, are responsible for the peppery edge of such fragrances as Dior’s Fahrenheit. The greatest of all is Firmenich’s Hedione, a molecule without which modern perfumery would be impossible. First used in Eau Sauvage in small amounts, it now constitutes as much as half of modern florals. There is one fragrance, however, which throws all caution to the wind and uses every fifth in the perfumer’s orchestra: my favorite fruity, Jacomo’s Paradox for women, is the closest you can get to Mozart without using your ears. It can be found on their website.
It may be that beauty, like energy, follows a conservation law: once created, it gets endlessly recycled but never destroyed and eventually ends up as diffuse aesthetic warmth. The conductor Sir Thomas Beecham (1879-1961), upon receiving get-well cards, once apparently asked from his sick-bed “Anything from Mozart?” Had he lived longer, say into the 1980s, the answer might have been “No Sir, but his low-temperature heirs Abba and Elton John send their regards”. What survives of the boy genius ? Among other things, a reliance on the fifth, the handspan interval at the core of what we call Classical music.
Suppose now that the fifth is a preexisting, mathematically satisfying proportion. Then those who believe, as I do, that we smell the vibrations of molecules are faced with an interesting question: are there similar rules of molecular harmony, i.e. chords that sound good to our nose ? The consonant octave can be ruled out: smells do not repeat themselves when the frequency is doubled. But the fifth is another matter. I recently had a brain scan that revealed no major anomalies, yet it has always seemed self-evident to me that Mozart’s lighter music was fruity, and conversely that fruit, especially fruit salads, had a Mozartian character.
Remarkably, there may be a good reason for this: the two characteristic vibrations of esters and lactones, the molecular structures that are responsible for 90% of fruity smells, are placed almost exactly a fifth apart. This idea will remain at the border between speculation and fantasy until we figure out how smell works. In the meantime, it is possible to at least enjoy liquid fifths in a variety of styles. Perfumers generally shy away from overtly fruity perfumes, because most are commercial flops: women do not generally want to smell like tinned fruit. Instead, they add discreet touches of various esters to their compositions. Salicylates, for example, give the original Je Reviens (forget the modern one, buy some vintage on ebay) its mysterious green glow. Octin carbonates, are responsible for the peppery edge of such fragrances as Dior’s Fahrenheit. The greatest of all is Firmenich’s Hedione, a molecule without which modern perfumery would be impossible. First used in Eau Sauvage in small amounts, it now constitutes as much as half of modern florals. There is one fragrance, however, which throws all caution to the wind and uses every fifth in the perfumer’s orchestra: my favorite fruity, Jacomo’s Paradox for women, is the closest you can get to Mozart without using your ears. It can be found on their website.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)