"Jasmin et Cigarette" By Luca Turin
Sitting at the bus stop one sunny, quiet morning three weeks ago, I noticed an elderly lady next to me, far too crisply dressed for the shabby neighborhood and smoking a cigarette held very close to the tips of her fingers , her hand arched beyond flat, as in fifties ads. She was wearing a houndstooth jacket and a sweet, powdery, grown-up perfume which could have been the old Dioressence. A breeze suddenly mixed the plume from her cigarette with the fragrance and made me realize how much I missed smoke in public places. Now it is gone, we can see that smoke was the speech of smell, exhaled with every word. It was the olfactory equivalent of a group conversation which you could chose to listen to or treat as noise. It said you were in company, and could speak (or wear perfume) frankly to someone next to you without being overheard. Walk into a pub these days and the clear air feels oddly silent. Any smell of food or fragrance stands naked and precise, like a medical photograph.
Filtering out detail softens the edges of things and focuses our mind on structure, on melody, on the essential. They pipe white noise into open-plan offices so that people do not feel exposed. Painters stand back and blink when looking at a work in progress. The tinkle of glasses in jazz clubs never got in the way of the music. But it was more than that. Some fragrances from that period seem to have been designed with smoke in mind to be mixed at the time of use, one half of some ambient gin and tonic. It was as if the composed smell needed an audience: perfume supplied the music, smoke the crowd noises. This mysterious love affair between speech and music is what sends a shiver down your spine when in a movie the soundtrack fades into a conversation.
It is perhaps no accident that some of the greatest perfumers alive are dedicated smokers. You can see them in the street in the fragrance district of midtown Manhattan, smelling strips in one hand, cigarette in the other, watching a crew dig up the road. I have always believed that smoke helped their art. To be sure, nobody is going to much miss emphysema and lung cancer, and the ritual post-coital cigarette must be on its way out (what replaces it?). But the surest sign of a new era comes from a young perfumer working for Etat Libre d’Orange, Antoine Maisondieu. He has composed a fragrance that addresses the problem: Jasmin et Cigarette.
August 1, 2008
July 1, 2008
"Caravelle" By Luca Turin
"Caravelle" By Luca Turin
Recently, while perusing an oddly melancholy book titled "Classic Early Airliners 1958-1979," full of slightly faded, bluish photographs of long-scrapped aircraft parked in front of long-demolished airport terminals, my eye fell on one particular Air France Caravelle, F-BHRV. It was named "Provence," first flew in 1960 and was melted down in 1980. I distinctly remember taking that very aircraft several times, climbing up the forward air-stair, reading the name in a blood-red, clumsily streamlined engineer’s typeface, hearing the stewardess saying, "Bonjour Madame, Bonjour Monsieur," in that uniquely French timbre that has the festive, slightly indecent euphoria of wine gurgling out of a bottle. And I remember the smell of Air France airliners, a simple cologne, but dignified, perhaps with a touch of lavender or chypre in the background.
What the voice and the cologne told you, as you passed the threshold of the small forward door, was that although the ground you had just left might be a distant land, you were now in France, as if the aircraft were an inviolate embassy carrying French air wherever it went. I imagine one could still locate in retirement, phone, and cause to be called in from the garden those who can answer questions about the odd triangular shape of the Caravelle’s windows. I’m pretty sure a Balmain archivist could locate the drawings of the powder-blue uniforms. And of course the fill-your-glass voice still exists, though the French have since added a voiced "e" at the end of bonjour. But I doubt very much anyone at Air France could help you find out what that cologne was. Thus go smells, transiently trapped air, forever essential, forever unnoticed.
My mother told me that one night fifty years ago in Egypt, by the kindness of an archaeologist friend, she witnessed the removal of stone slabs covering an area of pristine sand in which the footsteps of a priest had been imprinted three thousand years earlier. The team frantically took photographs under the floodlights until the gentle night breeze erased the dance. Some people have tried to retrieve from ancient pots the sounds and voices that were around when they were turned, recorded by air pressure on the potter’s hands as on a wax cylinder. When I see a diver’s watch on someone’s wrist, I wonder about the trapped Swiss or Japanese air it imprisons, and what it would smell of if we were small enough to find out.
Recently, while perusing an oddly melancholy book titled "Classic Early Airliners 1958-1979," full of slightly faded, bluish photographs of long-scrapped aircraft parked in front of long-demolished airport terminals, my eye fell on one particular Air France Caravelle, F-BHRV. It was named "Provence," first flew in 1960 and was melted down in 1980. I distinctly remember taking that very aircraft several times, climbing up the forward air-stair, reading the name in a blood-red, clumsily streamlined engineer’s typeface, hearing the stewardess saying, "Bonjour Madame, Bonjour Monsieur," in that uniquely French timbre that has the festive, slightly indecent euphoria of wine gurgling out of a bottle. And I remember the smell of Air France airliners, a simple cologne, but dignified, perhaps with a touch of lavender or chypre in the background.
What the voice and the cologne told you, as you passed the threshold of the small forward door, was that although the ground you had just left might be a distant land, you were now in France, as if the aircraft were an inviolate embassy carrying French air wherever it went. I imagine one could still locate in retirement, phone, and cause to be called in from the garden those who can answer questions about the odd triangular shape of the Caravelle’s windows. I’m pretty sure a Balmain archivist could locate the drawings of the powder-blue uniforms. And of course the fill-your-glass voice still exists, though the French have since added a voiced "e" at the end of bonjour. But I doubt very much anyone at Air France could help you find out what that cologne was. Thus go smells, transiently trapped air, forever essential, forever unnoticed.
My mother told me that one night fifty years ago in Egypt, by the kindness of an archaeologist friend, she witnessed the removal of stone slabs covering an area of pristine sand in which the footsteps of a priest had been imprinted three thousand years earlier. The team frantically took photographs under the floodlights until the gentle night breeze erased the dance. Some people have tried to retrieve from ancient pots the sounds and voices that were around when they were turned, recorded by air pressure on the potter’s hands as on a wax cylinder. When I see a diver’s watch on someone’s wrist, I wonder about the trapped Swiss or Japanese air it imprisons, and what it would smell of if we were small enough to find out.
June 1, 2008
"Skin Physics" By Luca Turin
"Skin Physics" By Luca Turin
I was in New York City with my coauthor Tania Sanchez for the launch of the new perfume guide, and the publisher had scheduled a medieval ordeal for us: 30 or so interviews of 5-9 minutes each in quick succession for a total of four hours. The way this is done now is from your hotel room by digital link with a switchboard that hands you over to one station after another, like air traffic control during a transcontinental flight. This being the morning, the hosts that came on air were invariably chirpy to the point of discomfort. But the hard part was that they all asked the same two questions: Are celebrity fragrances uniformly bad ? Do fragrances smell different on different people ? The answer to the first is that celebrities have little control over the fragrance that bears their name, so the stuff cannot be worse than average, i.e. awful. The second question is trickier. I have long assumed that everything fragrance marketing says must be exactly wrong. It turns out to be more like a mythomanic friend of mine who would tell outrageous stories about herself to the point where at long last you ceased to believe her, precisely when the most outrageous of her tales (e.g. dancing on the tables at the Café Royal) turned out to be confirmed by several eyewitnesses. There must be some truth to the skin chemistry thing: in the final stages of fragrance composition perfumers always rope in their colleagues to bare their arms for spraying to see the range of effects obtained. They would not do it if there was no variation. So what exactly happens ? I object to the term chemistry, since no two-electrons bonds are made or broken, but I’m happy with the idea of skin physics. Your skin is made up of proteins and fats. Like silk knickers (silk is, after all, caterpilar protein) or butter, it will therefore absorb odors. The extent to which it does so will depend on complex factors such as how hard you rubbed the skin, and how much fat you’ve added (lotion) or taken off (soap). This will unquestionably affect the most volatile parts of the fragrance, i.e. the first ten minutes. Whether it messes with the rest needs to be tested by proper experiment and for all I know is already the subject of a 200-page internal report at Givaudan. But try to explain this to people stuck in morning traffic.
I was in New York City with my coauthor Tania Sanchez for the launch of the new perfume guide, and the publisher had scheduled a medieval ordeal for us: 30 or so interviews of 5-9 minutes each in quick succession for a total of four hours. The way this is done now is from your hotel room by digital link with a switchboard that hands you over to one station after another, like air traffic control during a transcontinental flight. This being the morning, the hosts that came on air were invariably chirpy to the point of discomfort. But the hard part was that they all asked the same two questions: Are celebrity fragrances uniformly bad ? Do fragrances smell different on different people ? The answer to the first is that celebrities have little control over the fragrance that bears their name, so the stuff cannot be worse than average, i.e. awful. The second question is trickier. I have long assumed that everything fragrance marketing says must be exactly wrong. It turns out to be more like a mythomanic friend of mine who would tell outrageous stories about herself to the point where at long last you ceased to believe her, precisely when the most outrageous of her tales (e.g. dancing on the tables at the Café Royal) turned out to be confirmed by several eyewitnesses. There must be some truth to the skin chemistry thing: in the final stages of fragrance composition perfumers always rope in their colleagues to bare their arms for spraying to see the range of effects obtained. They would not do it if there was no variation. So what exactly happens ? I object to the term chemistry, since no two-electrons bonds are made or broken, but I’m happy with the idea of skin physics. Your skin is made up of proteins and fats. Like silk knickers (silk is, after all, caterpilar protein) or butter, it will therefore absorb odors. The extent to which it does so will depend on complex factors such as how hard you rubbed the skin, and how much fat you’ve added (lotion) or taken off (soap). This will unquestionably affect the most volatile parts of the fragrance, i.e. the first ten minutes. Whether it messes with the rest needs to be tested by proper experiment and for all I know is already the subject of a 200-page internal report at Givaudan. But try to explain this to people stuck in morning traffic.
May 1, 2008
"Cut and Paste" By Luca Turin
"Cut and Paste" By Luca Turin
Some years ago, when internet translation tools first appeared, I used to play a little game by taking a piece of text and having Babelfish translate it back and forth from, say, French to English twenty or thirty times. I was interested to see whether it would converge to a stable text, slowly drift like chinese whispers or explode into experimental literature. It mostly converged, usually to a text that had the slight, giddy slack in the steering that you encounter in user manuals for Lithuanian lasers and Chinese aircraft: factually accurate, even pedantic, but still undefinably odd. A similar thing seems to be happening in fragrance. When they arrive at work and put their coat on the stand, perfumers these days find a stack of gas chromatography printouts on their desk, typically molecule-by molecule analyses of successful fragrances annotated by people whose job it is to figure which exact mixture of synthetics and naturals went into the original thing. It is then a fairly simple matter for the perfumer to cut and paste any accord into a new composition, and to create a new hybrid, not from first principles but from ready-made building blocks: the head of Jennifer Lopez, the shoulders of Sarah Jessica Parker and the tennis legs of Britney Spears. These permutations become perfumes that are themselves analyzed, cut and pasted, released and so iterated ad infinitum.
Is the process converging ? I believe so: synthetic fragrances are getting more complex because everybody benefits from the tricks invented by everybody else. The botanical vocabulary of, say, white florals is now converging towards a truly abstract bouquet made entirely from non-existent flower species. The transvestite descendants of Angel, which initially smelled like a guy morphing into a woman now smell like a crowd out on the town. Masculines are converging towards a photofit of the ideal culprit, the sort of guy his own mother wouldn’t recognize in a lineup. What force keeps perfumes from becoming completely identical within a genre ? My perfumer friend Calice Becker explained to me recently that within each of the five large firms that dominate the industry, perfumers have no access to their colleagues’ compositions, much less of course to GC traces. The bigger the firm, the bigger its perfumers’ blind spot and the more creative they have to be. This suggests that the cure for the lack of originality in this business would be the consolidation of the Big Five into one or two huge firms employing thousands of perfumers all kept ignorant of each other. Mergers and Acquisitions will save perfumery.
Some years ago, when internet translation tools first appeared, I used to play a little game by taking a piece of text and having Babelfish translate it back and forth from, say, French to English twenty or thirty times. I was interested to see whether it would converge to a stable text, slowly drift like chinese whispers or explode into experimental literature. It mostly converged, usually to a text that had the slight, giddy slack in the steering that you encounter in user manuals for Lithuanian lasers and Chinese aircraft: factually accurate, even pedantic, but still undefinably odd. A similar thing seems to be happening in fragrance. When they arrive at work and put their coat on the stand, perfumers these days find a stack of gas chromatography printouts on their desk, typically molecule-by molecule analyses of successful fragrances annotated by people whose job it is to figure which exact mixture of synthetics and naturals went into the original thing. It is then a fairly simple matter for the perfumer to cut and paste any accord into a new composition, and to create a new hybrid, not from first principles but from ready-made building blocks: the head of Jennifer Lopez, the shoulders of Sarah Jessica Parker and the tennis legs of Britney Spears. These permutations become perfumes that are themselves analyzed, cut and pasted, released and so iterated ad infinitum.
Is the process converging ? I believe so: synthetic fragrances are getting more complex because everybody benefits from the tricks invented by everybody else. The botanical vocabulary of, say, white florals is now converging towards a truly abstract bouquet made entirely from non-existent flower species. The transvestite descendants of Angel, which initially smelled like a guy morphing into a woman now smell like a crowd out on the town. Masculines are converging towards a photofit of the ideal culprit, the sort of guy his own mother wouldn’t recognize in a lineup. What force keeps perfumes from becoming completely identical within a genre ? My perfumer friend Calice Becker explained to me recently that within each of the five large firms that dominate the industry, perfumers have no access to their colleagues’ compositions, much less of course to GC traces. The bigger the firm, the bigger its perfumers’ blind spot and the more creative they have to be. This suggests that the cure for the lack of originality in this business would be the consolidation of the Big Five into one or two huge firms employing thousands of perfumers all kept ignorant of each other. Mergers and Acquisitions will save perfumery.
April 1, 2008
"Bath Salts" By Luca Turin
"Bath Salts" By Luca Turin
I hold the view that souls are slightly soluble in water, and that one has to be careful taking long hot baths for fear of emerging diminished in wit and energy, and the difficulty of growing back a decent-size aura in time for supper. This point of view seems similar to one held by the British, whose pharmacies sell a vast array of bath salts. These have, according the the writing on the packaging, the ability to soak away aches and pains, though strangely they make no mention of spiritual side-effects.
I had been using my kids’ strawberry-scented shampoo for months as a luxurious foam bath when I came upon a new and improved bath salt by the venerable firm of Radox. Bath salts are a peculiar thing: they dissolve in a cloud of tiny bubbles, make the bath water cloudy, colored and fragrant, and produce no foam. They also tend to leave a bit of grit at the bottom of the tub as a reminder that there is no such thing as a perfectly comfortable moment, barring the use of certain opiates. This one contains thyme, is colored an intense sky blue, has a little transparent window on the front of the box to prove it, and is called Muscle Soak, which, in combination with the picture of herbs on the box, was a little too reminiscent of a marinade to be entirely reassuring. Nevertheless I poured a generous dose into the bath, whereupon I was overcome by a full-size Proustian Moment and cried aloud, "Stergene!"
Aeons ago, when I first got to University, I moved into a bare, modern little room in a dormitory. It had a bed, a sink and a desk. I loved having my entire life within arm’s reach. There, because I had been indoctrinated by my mother in not subjecting wool sweaters to a machine wash, which would reliably turn them into oven mitts, I used to (rarely but carefully) wash my sweaters in the sink in cold water, using a dark blue liquid detergent called Stergene. The salubrious, clean smell of it was for me what incense is for devout Orthodox Christians: a soul-cleansing ritual. That blue Stergene was discontinued thirty years ago, and I had given up on ever encountering its smell again, since for some reason perfume nuts do not sell vintage detergents on ebay. But lo! The exact smell of Stergene has reincarnated, come back to me like an avatar, only in this life I’m the sweater.
I hold the view that souls are slightly soluble in water, and that one has to be careful taking long hot baths for fear of emerging diminished in wit and energy, and the difficulty of growing back a decent-size aura in time for supper. This point of view seems similar to one held by the British, whose pharmacies sell a vast array of bath salts. These have, according the the writing on the packaging, the ability to soak away aches and pains, though strangely they make no mention of spiritual side-effects.
I had been using my kids’ strawberry-scented shampoo for months as a luxurious foam bath when I came upon a new and improved bath salt by the venerable firm of Radox. Bath salts are a peculiar thing: they dissolve in a cloud of tiny bubbles, make the bath water cloudy, colored and fragrant, and produce no foam. They also tend to leave a bit of grit at the bottom of the tub as a reminder that there is no such thing as a perfectly comfortable moment, barring the use of certain opiates. This one contains thyme, is colored an intense sky blue, has a little transparent window on the front of the box to prove it, and is called Muscle Soak, which, in combination with the picture of herbs on the box, was a little too reminiscent of a marinade to be entirely reassuring. Nevertheless I poured a generous dose into the bath, whereupon I was overcome by a full-size Proustian Moment and cried aloud, "Stergene!"
Aeons ago, when I first got to University, I moved into a bare, modern little room in a dormitory. It had a bed, a sink and a desk. I loved having my entire life within arm’s reach. There, because I had been indoctrinated by my mother in not subjecting wool sweaters to a machine wash, which would reliably turn them into oven mitts, I used to (rarely but carefully) wash my sweaters in the sink in cold water, using a dark blue liquid detergent called Stergene. The salubrious, clean smell of it was for me what incense is for devout Orthodox Christians: a soul-cleansing ritual. That blue Stergene was discontinued thirty years ago, and I had given up on ever encountering its smell again, since for some reason perfume nuts do not sell vintage detergents on ebay. But lo! The exact smell of Stergene has reincarnated, come back to me like an avatar, only in this life I’m the sweater.
March 1, 2008
"Do-it-yourself-Parfum" By Luca Turin
"Do-it-yourself-Parfum" By Luca Turin
I consider made-to-measure perfumes as silly as having a novel written specially for you, and find most all-natural perfumes invertebrate. The combination, a bespoke natural perfume, was therefore as irresistible to me as a roadside sign in Bourgogne saying “pick your own escargots”. However, the perfume guide I’ve just finished co-writing does include one brand of natural fragrances, those from profumo.it. The guy who makes them, Dominique Dubrana, is a French-born self-taught perfumer (www.profumo.it). His compositions just happen to be really good. He called me up recently and suggested I look at a new feature on his website. On it you can now compose your own fragrance by ticking boxes of raw materials in seven different categories: flowers, spices, trees, fruity, special, resins and pheromones. Each category contains from 6 to 13 possibilities. Picking just one in each would afford you just under six million choices. Knowing my skepticism, he offered me a free try (the finished product, no matter what’s in it, retails for 165 €).
I picked rose, chamomile, carrot seed, sandalwood, tonka, benzoin and castoreum. This was a little disingenuous on my part, because I had once seen all these in Jean Carles’ recipe for Lucien Lelong’s magnificent Elle,Elle and wanted to see whether Dubrana’s creation would spontaneously gravitate towards that paragon of sentimental perfection. What money buys you on the profumo website is Dubrana’s time and skill as well as the raw materials. What I like about this is the absence of any irrelevant claptrap: childhood memories, astrological signs, personality types, palmistry, etc. But it does require a little knowledge of what the materials smell like. The aromatherapy rack at your local hippie store will help with most of them, and you can read about the rest on wikipedia. I assume Dubrana picked the menu carefully, and would probably tell you if your chosen combination was guaranteed to smell awful.
Today the perfume came in the post. Dubrana had warned me that, to his surprise, it smelled of violets. The combination of boozy rose, rooty carrot seed and the blowsy warmth of chamomile smelled iris-like to me. It was oddly satisfying to spray from a bottle labeled Luca (by rights they should all be called Dominique, but who’s going to argue?). Much more important, it was a kissing cousin of Elle, Elle and exactly, uncannily my kind of perfume: transparent, melancholy and on the edge between woods and flowers. Not for the first time, I have to eat my words.
I consider made-to-measure perfumes as silly as having a novel written specially for you, and find most all-natural perfumes invertebrate. The combination, a bespoke natural perfume, was therefore as irresistible to me as a roadside sign in Bourgogne saying “pick your own escargots”. However, the perfume guide I’ve just finished co-writing does include one brand of natural fragrances, those from profumo.it. The guy who makes them, Dominique Dubrana, is a French-born self-taught perfumer (www.profumo.it). His compositions just happen to be really good. He called me up recently and suggested I look at a new feature on his website. On it you can now compose your own fragrance by ticking boxes of raw materials in seven different categories: flowers, spices, trees, fruity, special, resins and pheromones. Each category contains from 6 to 13 possibilities. Picking just one in each would afford you just under six million choices. Knowing my skepticism, he offered me a free try (the finished product, no matter what’s in it, retails for 165 €).
I picked rose, chamomile, carrot seed, sandalwood, tonka, benzoin and castoreum. This was a little disingenuous on my part, because I had once seen all these in Jean Carles’ recipe for Lucien Lelong’s magnificent Elle,Elle and wanted to see whether Dubrana’s creation would spontaneously gravitate towards that paragon of sentimental perfection. What money buys you on the profumo website is Dubrana’s time and skill as well as the raw materials. What I like about this is the absence of any irrelevant claptrap: childhood memories, astrological signs, personality types, palmistry, etc. But it does require a little knowledge of what the materials smell like. The aromatherapy rack at your local hippie store will help with most of them, and you can read about the rest on wikipedia. I assume Dubrana picked the menu carefully, and would probably tell you if your chosen combination was guaranteed to smell awful.
Today the perfume came in the post. Dubrana had warned me that, to his surprise, it smelled of violets. The combination of boozy rose, rooty carrot seed and the blowsy warmth of chamomile smelled iris-like to me. It was oddly satisfying to spray from a bottle labeled Luca (by rights they should all be called Dominique, but who’s going to argue?). Much more important, it was a kissing cousin of Elle, Elle and exactly, uncannily my kind of perfume: transparent, melancholy and on the edge between woods and flowers. Not for the first time, I have to eat my words.
February 1, 2008
"Cinq Bis" By Luca Turin
"Cinq Bis" By Luca Turin
There is a fellow in Mexico who inherited a perfume store from his grandparents and has been selling the contents piecemeal for several years. He initially had no idea about fragrance, and tentatively put some pre-WWI Parfums de Rosine unopened bottles up for sale on ebay with a starting bid of 99 cents. They went for about a thousand each, at which point he wised up and understood he was a millionaire. He later left ebay and now has his own website (eurofinegifts.com). Last week my coauthor Tania Sanchez was looking at the stock. She bought, among other things, a small bottle of Molyneux’s Numéro Cinq, a perfume I’d always heard about but never smelled.
There are two mutually exclusive stories about Numéro Cinq, and I do not know which is true. The first is that Captain Edward Molyneux, after losing an eye and gaining a Military Cross in the Great War, opened a fashion boutique in Paris in 1919. He befriended Chanel who had just done the same, and together they hatched the idea of each bringing out a perfume called No 5 the same day in 1921, to see who would win. The outcome of that contest is no longer in doubt, but this version of the story says that Molyneux’ Cinq was far ahead of Chanel’s for several years. The other (recorded in Nigel Groom’s excellent Perfume Handbook) is that Molyneux brought out several perfumes at once in 1925 named after different addresses of the firm: 3, 14 and Numéro Cinq, referred to as “Le Parfum Connu” to avoid troubles with Chanel. Either way, fashion designers clearly had more of a sense of humor then than now.
There is no question that Chanel had a better eye: the Molyneux looks drab. But the fragrance! I expected something dated and derivative, and was taken by surprise: Numéro Cinq is surpassingly beautiful and strange, the only example I know of an iris oriental. Assuming the fragrance wasn’t changed, the uncertainty about its age then becomes as exciting as the discovery of an Egyptian mummy clutching an iPod. 1921 is when the first oriental, Coty’s Emeraude, came out. 1925 is the birth date of its famous successor Shalimar. If Molyneux’ 5 dates from 1921, perfume history needs to be rewritten. If it dates from 1925, then both it and Shalimar were copying Emeraude, and the question is: why did Molyneux’ line die out ? Maybe the joke backfired, and everything would have been different if Captain Molyneux had said “Numéro Six”.
There is a fellow in Mexico who inherited a perfume store from his grandparents and has been selling the contents piecemeal for several years. He initially had no idea about fragrance, and tentatively put some pre-WWI Parfums de Rosine unopened bottles up for sale on ebay with a starting bid of 99 cents. They went for about a thousand each, at which point he wised up and understood he was a millionaire. He later left ebay and now has his own website (eurofinegifts.com). Last week my coauthor Tania Sanchez was looking at the stock. She bought, among other things, a small bottle of Molyneux’s Numéro Cinq, a perfume I’d always heard about but never smelled.
There are two mutually exclusive stories about Numéro Cinq, and I do not know which is true. The first is that Captain Edward Molyneux, after losing an eye and gaining a Military Cross in the Great War, opened a fashion boutique in Paris in 1919. He befriended Chanel who had just done the same, and together they hatched the idea of each bringing out a perfume called No 5 the same day in 1921, to see who would win. The outcome of that contest is no longer in doubt, but this version of the story says that Molyneux’ Cinq was far ahead of Chanel’s for several years. The other (recorded in Nigel Groom’s excellent Perfume Handbook) is that Molyneux brought out several perfumes at once in 1925 named after different addresses of the firm: 3, 14 and Numéro Cinq, referred to as “Le Parfum Connu” to avoid troubles with Chanel. Either way, fashion designers clearly had more of a sense of humor then than now.
There is no question that Chanel had a better eye: the Molyneux looks drab. But the fragrance! I expected something dated and derivative, and was taken by surprise: Numéro Cinq is surpassingly beautiful and strange, the only example I know of an iris oriental. Assuming the fragrance wasn’t changed, the uncertainty about its age then becomes as exciting as the discovery of an Egyptian mummy clutching an iPod. 1921 is when the first oriental, Coty’s Emeraude, came out. 1925 is the birth date of its famous successor Shalimar. If Molyneux’ 5 dates from 1921, perfume history needs to be rewritten. If it dates from 1925, then both it and Shalimar were copying Emeraude, and the question is: why did Molyneux’ line die out ? Maybe the joke backfired, and everything would have been different if Captain Molyneux had said “Numéro Six”.
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