"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.
January 1, 2006
December 1, 2005
"The Fourth Taste" By Luca Turin
"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.
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.
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.
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