"Dreamjob" By Luca Turin
Last week I visited two US universities, MIT and Georgetown, to give talks and meet graduate students on their way to molecular biology and chemistry PhDs. On both occasions, I was approached by students (one from Lausanne, one from Beirut) who, very shyly and tentatively, explained to me that their dream was to become perfumers. I was surprised that people who had worked so hard to belong to a scientific elite should actually wish to do something completely different. Nevertheless, they wanted advice, and I gave them some: I tried to talk them out of it. In my opinion, they would be wasted on Britney Spears Incurious Red.
Scientists are not always the most cheerful of people, but as a group I find them less cynical than perfumers, which suggests that they are getting more fun from their profession. Also, I don’t think perfumery is a level playing field, and what the students said confirmed this. They wrote left and right and got no answers. They had both eventually figured out that there is only one proper, open perfumery school on earth, the Isipca in Versailles, but that most of the teaching there is done in French. Other than that, the big five firms have internal schools, but none of their websites has a link that says, “Want to become a perfumer?” Those who train in the internal schools seem to do so in addition to whatever their normal job is, marketing, evaluation, compounding, and learn it as a craft rather than an art or a science.
Imagine if physics were only taught at General Electric, and only after hours. Imagine learning cuisine if there were only five good restaurants on earth. Small wonder so many of the young perfumers are sons and daughters of people in the same profession. That is the surest sign that some talent is being wasted. I asked the great perfumer Françoise Caron once how she had got into it. She explained to me that when she grew up in Grasse, the choice for an adolescent was either to steal motorcycles or to go into perfumery, and she didn’t like bikes. What the world needs is an international school of perfumery where the whole complicated shebang, from art history to chemistry via composition, is taught in English to those who can pay the fees or are sent there on scholarships from perfumery firms. All I ask is to be a member of the jury that awards the prize for Best First Fragrance.
November 1, 2007
October 1, 2007
"Eminenences Grises" By Luca Turin
"Eminenences Grises" By Luca Turin
Graham Greene once complained that, having struck it rich with his early novels, he moved to Cap Ferrat only to discover he was the poorest man on the peninsula. Science often works like that: you think you’ve cracked a problem and feel ready to turn on cruise control to coast for a while, when a strange fact comes up, sits at the back of the lecture hall and asks a question that reveals the depth of your ignorance. My day job is to design molecules for fragrances and flavors. I naively thought that if I could come up with something that smells good, is powerful, non-toxic and cheap to make, I would pretty much earn my keep. I was wrong. Time and again, the most experienced perfumers at fragrance firms ask for something completely different and far more mysterious. They want an “effect” material, not a smell.
Effect materials are as old as perfumery itself, and the first such were natural musks. By itself, natural musk has a strange, not particularly strong, not especially pleasant smell of unwashed underwear. But spray it on one wrist and overlay it with a well-known fragrance, and spray the fragrance alone on the other wrist for comparison. The absence of musks is akin to shutting one eye when looking into a 3-D viewer. The scene is the same, but the depth is gone. Other, equally legendary molecules have different effects. Salicylates turn the most banal floral composition into a real perfume, with majestic weight and sweep. Hedione has a magical ability to make things glisten, to fill the spaces between perfume components with a fresh, liquid air. Iso-E Super, long before Julian Schnabel got the idea on canvas, allowed perfumers to paint on black velvet.
But here’s where it gets strange. As it happens, some of these molecules are odorless to some people, including of course perfumers. This is particularly common with salicylates and musks. The perfumer Guy Robert once explained to me that he could not smell benzyl salicylate at all, but could instantly recognize its presence in a perfumery composition. He used a wonderful image: “I recognize it as if it were a friend seen from behind in a crowd, by the cut of his shoulders”. What is going on? Some blind people know that a light is there, even though they can’t see it. Do we have detectors other than those of smell to tell us a chemical is in the air ? What do these molecules have in common? This Rosetta Stone awaits a Champollion, who is probably in year 1 at ETH as I write.
Graham Greene once complained that, having struck it rich with his early novels, he moved to Cap Ferrat only to discover he was the poorest man on the peninsula. Science often works like that: you think you’ve cracked a problem and feel ready to turn on cruise control to coast for a while, when a strange fact comes up, sits at the back of the lecture hall and asks a question that reveals the depth of your ignorance. My day job is to design molecules for fragrances and flavors. I naively thought that if I could come up with something that smells good, is powerful, non-toxic and cheap to make, I would pretty much earn my keep. I was wrong. Time and again, the most experienced perfumers at fragrance firms ask for something completely different and far more mysterious. They want an “effect” material, not a smell.
Effect materials are as old as perfumery itself, and the first such were natural musks. By itself, natural musk has a strange, not particularly strong, not especially pleasant smell of unwashed underwear. But spray it on one wrist and overlay it with a well-known fragrance, and spray the fragrance alone on the other wrist for comparison. The absence of musks is akin to shutting one eye when looking into a 3-D viewer. The scene is the same, but the depth is gone. Other, equally legendary molecules have different effects. Salicylates turn the most banal floral composition into a real perfume, with majestic weight and sweep. Hedione has a magical ability to make things glisten, to fill the spaces between perfume components with a fresh, liquid air. Iso-E Super, long before Julian Schnabel got the idea on canvas, allowed perfumers to paint on black velvet.
But here’s where it gets strange. As it happens, some of these molecules are odorless to some people, including of course perfumers. This is particularly common with salicylates and musks. The perfumer Guy Robert once explained to me that he could not smell benzyl salicylate at all, but could instantly recognize its presence in a perfumery composition. He used a wonderful image: “I recognize it as if it were a friend seen from behind in a crowd, by the cut of his shoulders”. What is going on? Some blind people know that a light is there, even though they can’t see it. Do we have detectors other than those of smell to tell us a chemical is in the air ? What do these molecules have in common? This Rosetta Stone awaits a Champollion, who is probably in year 1 at ETH as I write.
September 1, 2007
"Calone" By Luca Turin
"Calone" By Luca Turin
In August 1966, chemists at the drug giant Pfizer filed a patent for a strange molecule that looked like a tranquilizer (distantly related to Valium) and smelled like nothing on earth, or “melon” as they prosaically described it. Pfizer had bought the venerable Grasse firm of Camilli Albert Laloue two years earlier, so they handed the beast over to their perfumed friends who christened it Calone after the firm’s initials. There it slept for twenty years, while the patent ran out. Then in 1989 perfumer Yves Tanguy understood that the time for watery notes had come and composed New West. Within three years Escape, Kenzo Homme and Eau d’Issey had put Calone at the forefront of perfumery, where it still is. I received an exceptionally pure sample from an Italian manufacturer yesterday. Open the cardboard box, and you smell it already. Open the plastic bag containing the sealed plastic bottle, and you smell it still, but no stronger. Open the bottle, and everyone on the block smells it, but still quiet. This is the olfactory equivalent of a rumour, a whisper that spreads far and wide without ever being spoken out loud. What does it smell of ? No matter: what matters is that it is distance-independent, like light through a transparent medium, like a deity seeing through perfume’s soul.
Synchronicity: I called Mark Buxton, a Symrise perfumer who did many Comme des Garçons fragrances and, almost alone, created the new aesthetic of transparent woody florals that everyone is imitating. I asked him how it all started. He said “Calone”. He hated the smell but loved the effect, that quiet, penetrating radiance. He composed Jacomo’s superbly transparent Anthracite Homme in 1990, and spent the best part of the ‘nineties trying to achieve a midnight version of Calone’s metallic sheen using clear, salubrious, woody-smoky notes and dark flowers. Buxton does not like opaque florals, does not think fragrance has a sex, and clearly has a romantic ideal of perfume: like a revelation, a fragrance should be at once disturbing and self-evident. Rei Kawakubo of CdG picked his composition saying that it was “like a drug: I want more”. Strangely, the Ravel to Buxton’s Debussy works on the same floor: Bertrand Duchaufour, author of Timbuktu and the other great exponent of the Night Sky school. I asked Buxton whether there had been mutual influence. He dismissed this politely, and explained that, in aesthetics as in engineering, problems sometimes have only one solution: they both found it.
In August 1966, chemists at the drug giant Pfizer filed a patent for a strange molecule that looked like a tranquilizer (distantly related to Valium) and smelled like nothing on earth, or “melon” as they prosaically described it. Pfizer had bought the venerable Grasse firm of Camilli Albert Laloue two years earlier, so they handed the beast over to their perfumed friends who christened it Calone after the firm’s initials. There it slept for twenty years, while the patent ran out. Then in 1989 perfumer Yves Tanguy understood that the time for watery notes had come and composed New West. Within three years Escape, Kenzo Homme and Eau d’Issey had put Calone at the forefront of perfumery, where it still is. I received an exceptionally pure sample from an Italian manufacturer yesterday. Open the cardboard box, and you smell it already. Open the plastic bag containing the sealed plastic bottle, and you smell it still, but no stronger. Open the bottle, and everyone on the block smells it, but still quiet. This is the olfactory equivalent of a rumour, a whisper that spreads far and wide without ever being spoken out loud. What does it smell of ? No matter: what matters is that it is distance-independent, like light through a transparent medium, like a deity seeing through perfume’s soul.
Synchronicity: I called Mark Buxton, a Symrise perfumer who did many Comme des Garçons fragrances and, almost alone, created the new aesthetic of transparent woody florals that everyone is imitating. I asked him how it all started. He said “Calone”. He hated the smell but loved the effect, that quiet, penetrating radiance. He composed Jacomo’s superbly transparent Anthracite Homme in 1990, and spent the best part of the ‘nineties trying to achieve a midnight version of Calone’s metallic sheen using clear, salubrious, woody-smoky notes and dark flowers. Buxton does not like opaque florals, does not think fragrance has a sex, and clearly has a romantic ideal of perfume: like a revelation, a fragrance should be at once disturbing and self-evident. Rei Kawakubo of CdG picked his composition saying that it was “like a drug: I want more”. Strangely, the Ravel to Buxton’s Debussy works on the same floor: Bertrand Duchaufour, author of Timbuktu and the other great exponent of the Night Sky school. I asked Buxton whether there had been mutual influence. He dismissed this politely, and explained that, in aesthetics as in engineering, problems sometimes have only one solution: they both found it.
August 1, 2007
"Orange Free State" By Luca Turin
"Orange Free State" By Luca Turin
Good judgment is often little more than the wise exercise of prejudice. Under pressure of time, most of us are scrupulously fair only when given no alternative. André Gide apparently never even opened the parcel containing the manuscript of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, and based his snap rejection on Proust’s unremarkable early works. When I first came across Etat Libre D’Orange, I assumed on the basis of past experience that this niche perfumery firm had all the hallmarks of the classic snob-value ripoff: great names and high concept, crap fragrances. But I’m co-authoring a perfume guide, so I gave them a try.
In fairness to curmudgeons, they do lay it on thick: the perfumes are called Putain des Palaces, Nombril Immense, Don’t get me wrong baby I don’t swallow, etc. Their website is awash with the most hackneyed eroticism of the “no joys without toys” variety, and their motto is “le parfum est mort, vive le parfum”. All this Dada stuff had me betting on the perfumes being either hideous or dull. I had neglected two factors: 1) talented perfumers, especially young ones, have for some time been working for niche brands because it’s more fun; 2) just as important, good artistic directors, tired of working on Britney Spears’ ninth fragrance, are starting their own firms. We now have both Stravinskys and Diaghilevs out there looking for trouble.
Etat Libre d’Orange, clearly a low-fat company, sent twelve of those tiny sample vials that seem designed to prevent the smelling of perfume, with miniature handwritten labels and two postcards with the names of the fragrances. After deciphering the labels and cursing the vials, I started smelling the stuff with an anticipatory scowl. There are few greater pleasures than pessimism disproved. All but two of their fragrances are of a very high level, and the best are the work of two young Givaudan perfumers, Antoine Lie and Antoine Maisondieu. The masterpiece is, in my opinion, Lie’s Sécrétions Magnifiques, helpfully illustrated on the website by a schoolboy drawing of an ejaculating penis. What he has done is revolutionary: he has used a nitrile as a main note in a fine fragrance. In plain language, he has put a loud note of harbor bilge in an elegant floral and made it fly. The list of really bad smells that make good fragrances better was never long: indole and skatole, both naturals, contained in flowers and shit. Now there are three. Mark my words: perfume will never be the same.
Good judgment is often little more than the wise exercise of prejudice. Under pressure of time, most of us are scrupulously fair only when given no alternative. André Gide apparently never even opened the parcel containing the manuscript of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, and based his snap rejection on Proust’s unremarkable early works. When I first came across Etat Libre D’Orange, I assumed on the basis of past experience that this niche perfumery firm had all the hallmarks of the classic snob-value ripoff: great names and high concept, crap fragrances. But I’m co-authoring a perfume guide, so I gave them a try.
In fairness to curmudgeons, they do lay it on thick: the perfumes are called Putain des Palaces, Nombril Immense, Don’t get me wrong baby I don’t swallow, etc. Their website is awash with the most hackneyed eroticism of the “no joys without toys” variety, and their motto is “le parfum est mort, vive le parfum”. All this Dada stuff had me betting on the perfumes being either hideous or dull. I had neglected two factors: 1) talented perfumers, especially young ones, have for some time been working for niche brands because it’s more fun; 2) just as important, good artistic directors, tired of working on Britney Spears’ ninth fragrance, are starting their own firms. We now have both Stravinskys and Diaghilevs out there looking for trouble.
Etat Libre d’Orange, clearly a low-fat company, sent twelve of those tiny sample vials that seem designed to prevent the smelling of perfume, with miniature handwritten labels and two postcards with the names of the fragrances. After deciphering the labels and cursing the vials, I started smelling the stuff with an anticipatory scowl. There are few greater pleasures than pessimism disproved. All but two of their fragrances are of a very high level, and the best are the work of two young Givaudan perfumers, Antoine Lie and Antoine Maisondieu. The masterpiece is, in my opinion, Lie’s Sécrétions Magnifiques, helpfully illustrated on the website by a schoolboy drawing of an ejaculating penis. What he has done is revolutionary: he has used a nitrile as a main note in a fine fragrance. In plain language, he has put a loud note of harbor bilge in an elegant floral and made it fly. The list of really bad smells that make good fragrances better was never long: indole and skatole, both naturals, contained in flowers and shit. Now there are three. Mark my words: perfume will never be the same.
July 1, 2007
"Clean" By Luca Turin
"Clean" By Luca Turin
A clever scientist in charge of improving the smell of clean clothes at a major soap manufacturer explained to me recently that his task was made difficult not just by cost, environmental regulation and the fact that soap powder is already near-perfect, but by a fundamental problem: cleaning fabric essentially means removing oily stuff, and fragrance is oily. Devising a perfume that hangs on to the fabric in the wash like a limpet in a gale is not easy. He summed it up thus: “We take smell out, and then put it back in”. This got me thinking about the fact that we do the same thing every time we take a shower. We wash off the smell and dirt (and, in my opinion, some of our soul, though it seems to grow back), then towel down and spray some smell back on.
But the soaps, shampoos and conditioners you use are not unscented. If they were, they’d smell faintly bad. So it’s really a three-stage process: wash off body smells and stale perfume, replace with a temporary, stand-in fragrance that says “clean”, then cover that with another smell. Note that proper fragrance, like makeup, is unclean. When you pick a shirt and find it stained with face powder or smelling of perfume, it means it’s dirty. At no time was this more true than in the ‘eighties, when fragrances of exceptional power and persistence like Opium, Poison and Giorgio ruled the earth. When the great Issey Miyake decided to make his own fragrance in 1990, he wanted it to smell of water, and by then everyone agreed. His Eau d’Issey was a huge success.
The young today still don’t want to smell dirty like Mom. How do you sell them fragrance? Classic soap fragrance was just scaled down perfume, so just scaling it back up clearly wouldn’t do. Maybe the perfect clean perfume, like those strangely beautiful “average” faces that come from mixing a hundred photographs by computer, might just be the sum total of everything you use when washing. What would that smell like ? Oddly enough, like a soapy fruit salad. Since the early ‘seventies and L’Oréal’s first apple-scented shampoo, fruity notes have invaded the bathroom. The US firm of Bath & Body Works was among the first to see this. They brought out a line of cheap soapy-fruity-floral fragrances a few years back and made a fortune. Now eighty percent of new launches are loud fruity florals. Which means shampoo now smells dirty. Another wash cycle is about to start.
A clever scientist in charge of improving the smell of clean clothes at a major soap manufacturer explained to me recently that his task was made difficult not just by cost, environmental regulation and the fact that soap powder is already near-perfect, but by a fundamental problem: cleaning fabric essentially means removing oily stuff, and fragrance is oily. Devising a perfume that hangs on to the fabric in the wash like a limpet in a gale is not easy. He summed it up thus: “We take smell out, and then put it back in”. This got me thinking about the fact that we do the same thing every time we take a shower. We wash off the smell and dirt (and, in my opinion, some of our soul, though it seems to grow back), then towel down and spray some smell back on.
But the soaps, shampoos and conditioners you use are not unscented. If they were, they’d smell faintly bad. So it’s really a three-stage process: wash off body smells and stale perfume, replace with a temporary, stand-in fragrance that says “clean”, then cover that with another smell. Note that proper fragrance, like makeup, is unclean. When you pick a shirt and find it stained with face powder or smelling of perfume, it means it’s dirty. At no time was this more true than in the ‘eighties, when fragrances of exceptional power and persistence like Opium, Poison and Giorgio ruled the earth. When the great Issey Miyake decided to make his own fragrance in 1990, he wanted it to smell of water, and by then everyone agreed. His Eau d’Issey was a huge success.
The young today still don’t want to smell dirty like Mom. How do you sell them fragrance? Classic soap fragrance was just scaled down perfume, so just scaling it back up clearly wouldn’t do. Maybe the perfect clean perfume, like those strangely beautiful “average” faces that come from mixing a hundred photographs by computer, might just be the sum total of everything you use when washing. What would that smell like ? Oddly enough, like a soapy fruit salad. Since the early ‘seventies and L’Oréal’s first apple-scented shampoo, fruity notes have invaded the bathroom. The US firm of Bath & Body Works was among the first to see this. They brought out a line of cheap soapy-fruity-floral fragrances a few years back and made a fortune. Now eighty percent of new launches are loud fruity florals. Which means shampoo now smells dirty. Another wash cycle is about to start.
June 1, 2007
"Not even wrong" By Luca Turin
"Not even wrong" By Luca Turin
Like a flu that’s been going round and catches up with you just when you thought you dodged it, I finally saw Perfume yesterday. The occasion was a private screening arranged by the Sunday Times to show the movie to four perfume experts and sample their reactions. Two of them were friends I hadn’t seen for ages, and the Times promised champagne and sandwiches, so I agreed to come. It turned out only Evian and no food was on offer. Had there been champagne I would have laughed all the way, instead I grimly clutched my mineral water.
Storyline. The boy develops a fabulous sense of smell because he was born in a fish market. Lucky for him: had he been delivered at a Guerlain store he might have been left anosmic for life. To him smell behaves like sound: he smells a passenger in an approaching carriage from a mile away. I generally feel that if you’re allowed to mess with the laws of physics, you should do something more interesting than flare your nostrils. He grows into an adolescent so gifted he replicates a complex perfume in thirty seconds merely by picking out its ingredients in stoppered bottles and mixing them in the right proportions. Surprisingly, he then asks the owner of the bottles to train him as a perfumer, like the Archangel Gabriel applying for fencing lessons.
He likes the smell of girls, though mysteriously he seems to find it evenly spread on their bodies. No fan of sustainable agriculture, he kills them. They tend to be virgins. By a small leap of logic much beloved of bigots through the ages, the deceased virgins’ smell represents Innocence. Once he has scraped off enough innocence from the young ladies (looked like an eighth of an ounce per virgin, they must have had oily skin) he mixes it all. Instead of smelling like a Moscow bus at rush hour, the mixture causes everyone, from police sergeant to executioner (he has in the meantime been caught) to fall to his knees in adoration.
Mercifully, side effects kick in: the crowd assembled to witness his execution starts tastefully fornicating on the village square. Innocence would never get EU approval: too unstable. The hero empties the rest of the virgin absolute on his head and dies smothered by a crowd trying to get into his knickers. The lights went on. The fourth person present, an Industry Representative, opined that the film gave an accurate idea of the power of fragrance. I left.
Like a flu that’s been going round and catches up with you just when you thought you dodged it, I finally saw Perfume yesterday. The occasion was a private screening arranged by the Sunday Times to show the movie to four perfume experts and sample their reactions. Two of them were friends I hadn’t seen for ages, and the Times promised champagne and sandwiches, so I agreed to come. It turned out only Evian and no food was on offer. Had there been champagne I would have laughed all the way, instead I grimly clutched my mineral water.
Storyline. The boy develops a fabulous sense of smell because he was born in a fish market. Lucky for him: had he been delivered at a Guerlain store he might have been left anosmic for life. To him smell behaves like sound: he smells a passenger in an approaching carriage from a mile away. I generally feel that if you’re allowed to mess with the laws of physics, you should do something more interesting than flare your nostrils. He grows into an adolescent so gifted he replicates a complex perfume in thirty seconds merely by picking out its ingredients in stoppered bottles and mixing them in the right proportions. Surprisingly, he then asks the owner of the bottles to train him as a perfumer, like the Archangel Gabriel applying for fencing lessons.
He likes the smell of girls, though mysteriously he seems to find it evenly spread on their bodies. No fan of sustainable agriculture, he kills them. They tend to be virgins. By a small leap of logic much beloved of bigots through the ages, the deceased virgins’ smell represents Innocence. Once he has scraped off enough innocence from the young ladies (looked like an eighth of an ounce per virgin, they must have had oily skin) he mixes it all. Instead of smelling like a Moscow bus at rush hour, the mixture causes everyone, from police sergeant to executioner (he has in the meantime been caught) to fall to his knees in adoration.
Mercifully, side effects kick in: the crowd assembled to witness his execution starts tastefully fornicating on the village square. Innocence would never get EU approval: too unstable. The hero empties the rest of the virgin absolute on his head and dies smothered by a crowd trying to get into his knickers. The lights went on. The fourth person present, an Industry Representative, opined that the film gave an accurate idea of the power of fragrance. I left.
May 1, 2007
"Reviewer Heaven" By Luca Turin
"Reviewer Heaven" By Luca Turin
Tania Sanchez (my co-author) and I have started work on a perfume guide to come out next year in the US. On the minus side, there are several hundred not-even-wrong fragrances to get through. On the plus side, it is wonderful to get packages containing entire collections all in one go. Firms have a soul, and you need to see it entire to understand it. You then realize that Guerlain, Chanel, Hermès did not get where they are by accident.
Smelling the Guerlain collection shipped fresh from the factory in Orphin, near Paris, was a revelation. Guerlain, like food firms, should put dates on bottles. I had often heard, and never believed, that fragrances made with naturals change a lot in the first six months, as wine does. The family resemblance of fresh Guerlains is even stronger than usual, as if the Guerlinade base that is common to all of them was the first to fade. Some are so rich and complex that we decided to let them sit in a dark room for a few months, till they calm down and pull themselves together.
Another surprise was that some Chanel open secrets came our way. They first sent No. 5 Eau de Parfum, and it smelled completely wrong. I assumed another act of vandalism had taken place and was already planning a “Free the Chanel Five” campaign. Then the Parfum and Eau de Toilette arrived a few days later. After checking with the Chanel engine room, I finally understood that all the while No. 5 was actually three different perfumes: the Parfum is the 1921 original, and smells fresh as paint and unchanged from day 1. The Eau de Toilette is what I thought No. 5 was, all soft and peachy, a fifties mom in a fur coat coming to tuck you in bed before going to the theatre. The Eau de Parfum is, in my opinion, an eighties lapse of judgment.
It’s early days yet, but in six weeks the size of my perfume collection has doubled to about 1400, and the postman rings almost every day with a wry look, hands me a parcel and says wearily “More perfumes for you” as if praying I will soon find an aftershave to my liking. A few days ago came a big parcel from the small but fiercely dedicated Omani firm of Amouage. They make the fabulous Gold, once the most expensive fragrance in the world, for what has now become a reasonable price. The bottles are lead crystal, and the box was almost too heavy to lift. Was there ever a better job?
Tania Sanchez (my co-author) and I have started work on a perfume guide to come out next year in the US. On the minus side, there are several hundred not-even-wrong fragrances to get through. On the plus side, it is wonderful to get packages containing entire collections all in one go. Firms have a soul, and you need to see it entire to understand it. You then realize that Guerlain, Chanel, Hermès did not get where they are by accident.
Smelling the Guerlain collection shipped fresh from the factory in Orphin, near Paris, was a revelation. Guerlain, like food firms, should put dates on bottles. I had often heard, and never believed, that fragrances made with naturals change a lot in the first six months, as wine does. The family resemblance of fresh Guerlains is even stronger than usual, as if the Guerlinade base that is common to all of them was the first to fade. Some are so rich and complex that we decided to let them sit in a dark room for a few months, till they calm down and pull themselves together.
Another surprise was that some Chanel open secrets came our way. They first sent No. 5 Eau de Parfum, and it smelled completely wrong. I assumed another act of vandalism had taken place and was already planning a “Free the Chanel Five” campaign. Then the Parfum and Eau de Toilette arrived a few days later. After checking with the Chanel engine room, I finally understood that all the while No. 5 was actually three different perfumes: the Parfum is the 1921 original, and smells fresh as paint and unchanged from day 1. The Eau de Toilette is what I thought No. 5 was, all soft and peachy, a fifties mom in a fur coat coming to tuck you in bed before going to the theatre. The Eau de Parfum is, in my opinion, an eighties lapse of judgment.
It’s early days yet, but in six weeks the size of my perfume collection has doubled to about 1400, and the postman rings almost every day with a wry look, hands me a parcel and says wearily “More perfumes for you” as if praying I will soon find an aftershave to my liking. A few days ago came a big parcel from the small but fiercely dedicated Omani firm of Amouage. They make the fabulous Gold, once the most expensive fragrance in the world, for what has now become a reasonable price. The bottles are lead crystal, and the box was almost too heavy to lift. Was there ever a better job?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)