"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.
September 1, 2005
August 1, 2005
"The Perfume Museum" By Luca Turin
"The Perfume Museum" By Luca Turin
Why are some Arts taken seriously, and others left unmolested? Consider it took photography a century to earn the finery of respect: books, museums, collectors, auctions, reviews, university jobs. It was initially deemed “too easy” as compared to painting, but when people began to accumulate snapshots they slowly realized that good ones seldom happen by accident. If one minimally defines Art as something that is both difficult and beautiful, perfumery qualifies. Seriousness is another matter. Perfumery is not a hobby, so nobody understands quite how tricky it is. Evolution is a great perfumer (Gardenias!), and many assume perfumers just imitate nature. Add to that the fact that perfume is now as transient as fashion, and all the conditions are met for low esteem. A good indication is the scarcity of perfume museums. Most (Paris has one, Grasse several) are concerned with bottles, and end in a shop. There the punters can relieve their frustration of having bought nothing (and smelled nothing) for the previous half-hour by gorging on multicoloured soaps to give to relatives and other people they don’t like. The main Grasse museum used to let visitors look at a perfumer at work behind glass, like some panda. Like pandas, the poor man usually took refuge in the back room.
The exception is the Versailles Osmothèque, created in 1990 by the French Society of Perfumers to serve as an archive of past creations. It houses a miraculous 334 disappeared fragrances ranging from celebrities like Coty’s 1911 Le Styx to obscure masterpieces like Nicky Verfaillies’s 1980 Grain De Sable. What is it like to visit? Well, for a start it’s not really a museum, but a refrigerated room in a basement of the ISIPCA perfume school. Can visitors smell everything ? No: Only members of the French Society of Perfumers can visit individually and ask to smell specific fragrances. Public group visits are allowed, during which a selection is shown accompanied by an interesting lecture on the history of perfumery. Can one buy the stuff ? Of course not. The whole operation runs on a shoestring budget and rests entirely on voluntary work. At a recent perfumer’s congress, I visited the modest stand of the Osmothèque tucked away in a corner. Several thousand perfumers attended, but only a handful came to smell their own history. It is amazing that the memory of an industry that is the glory of France commands so little funding. If they had 1% of the budget of Pierre Boulez’ IRCAM, things would be very different. An idea: put post-serialist nonentities in a refrigerated basement in Versailles, and open a perfume museum opposite the Centre Pompidou.
Why are some Arts taken seriously, and others left unmolested? Consider it took photography a century to earn the finery of respect: books, museums, collectors, auctions, reviews, university jobs. It was initially deemed “too easy” as compared to painting, but when people began to accumulate snapshots they slowly realized that good ones seldom happen by accident. If one minimally defines Art as something that is both difficult and beautiful, perfumery qualifies. Seriousness is another matter. Perfumery is not a hobby, so nobody understands quite how tricky it is. Evolution is a great perfumer (Gardenias!), and many assume perfumers just imitate nature. Add to that the fact that perfume is now as transient as fashion, and all the conditions are met for low esteem. A good indication is the scarcity of perfume museums. Most (Paris has one, Grasse several) are concerned with bottles, and end in a shop. There the punters can relieve their frustration of having bought nothing (and smelled nothing) for the previous half-hour by gorging on multicoloured soaps to give to relatives and other people they don’t like. The main Grasse museum used to let visitors look at a perfumer at work behind glass, like some panda. Like pandas, the poor man usually took refuge in the back room.
The exception is the Versailles Osmothèque, created in 1990 by the French Society of Perfumers to serve as an archive of past creations. It houses a miraculous 334 disappeared fragrances ranging from celebrities like Coty’s 1911 Le Styx to obscure masterpieces like Nicky Verfaillies’s 1980 Grain De Sable. What is it like to visit? Well, for a start it’s not really a museum, but a refrigerated room in a basement of the ISIPCA perfume school. Can visitors smell everything ? No: Only members of the French Society of Perfumers can visit individually and ask to smell specific fragrances. Public group visits are allowed, during which a selection is shown accompanied by an interesting lecture on the history of perfumery. Can one buy the stuff ? Of course not. The whole operation runs on a shoestring budget and rests entirely on voluntary work. At a recent perfumer’s congress, I visited the modest stand of the Osmothèque tucked away in a corner. Several thousand perfumers attended, but only a handful came to smell their own history. It is amazing that the memory of an industry that is the glory of France commands so little funding. If they had 1% of the budget of Pierre Boulez’ IRCAM, things would be very different. An idea: put post-serialist nonentities in a refrigerated basement in Versailles, and open a perfume museum opposite the Centre Pompidou.
July 1, 2005
"Vanity" By Luca Turin
"Vanity" By Luca Turin
Vanity is such a pervasive force that if some day cosmologists tell us the Big Bang was just God’s way of showing off, no one will be surprised. A microscopic example: bespoke perfume. Until recently, you had to marry a perfumer in order to get your very own smell. Even then, if it was any good, it would likely end up in shops. Annick Goutal’s Sables was composed for her husband, and Edmond Roudnitska’s Parfum de Thérèse is available at Frédéric Malle. Both were once precious tokens of true love. Failing that, you could go to a market in Cairo and have an “expert” mix you something that will stun flies at ten paces. Now there is another way: some perfumers, and indeed some great perfume houses are doing individual perfumes. Prices range from expensive (8000 €) to jaw-dropping (43.000 €). At the cheaper end of the scale, Quest’s Francis Kurkdjian, creator among other things of Le Mâle and of Dior’s recent (and excellent) Eau Noire works freelance a couple of days a week. At the expensive end, Jean-Michel Duriez, Patou’s in-house perfumer will spend as much as two years putting together your unique fragrance. Judging from his past form (Yohji Homme among others), it may be money well spent, though so far only women can apply. Guerlain and Cartier are rumored to be getting into the act.
I confess to being unmoved by all this. From an aesthetic standpoint, perfume is a shared, industrial product, more like wine, music and books than like a painting or a jewel, and there is something ugly about asking a great artist to do one just for you. From a commercial standpoint, I couldn’t figure out what makes these well-paid professionals (and the houses that employ them) do such a thing. After all, why waste a good idea on some rich bitch when you can have everyone wearing it ? I asked around, and some answers emerged. First, the daily grind of the perfumers’ job, making things that smell good with 100$/kg to spend on the formula, i.e. using ingredients that mostly smell less than great, is getting depressing. All involved in bespoke perfumes relish the opportunity to use great raw materials, ignore all “health” regulations and travel back in time to the golden age of fragrance. Second, the firms need to put some prestige back into their tarnished “exclusive” image, and this may be a cost-effective way of doing so. I wish them luck, but I’ll carry on looking for Lucien Lelong’s Elle,Elle on ebay (maximum bid, 200 €). That one feels like it was made just for me when I was six years old, and I never even met Mr Lelong.
Vanity is such a pervasive force that if some day cosmologists tell us the Big Bang was just God’s way of showing off, no one will be surprised. A microscopic example: bespoke perfume. Until recently, you had to marry a perfumer in order to get your very own smell. Even then, if it was any good, it would likely end up in shops. Annick Goutal’s Sables was composed for her husband, and Edmond Roudnitska’s Parfum de Thérèse is available at Frédéric Malle. Both were once precious tokens of true love. Failing that, you could go to a market in Cairo and have an “expert” mix you something that will stun flies at ten paces. Now there is another way: some perfumers, and indeed some great perfume houses are doing individual perfumes. Prices range from expensive (8000 €) to jaw-dropping (43.000 €). At the cheaper end of the scale, Quest’s Francis Kurkdjian, creator among other things of Le Mâle and of Dior’s recent (and excellent) Eau Noire works freelance a couple of days a week. At the expensive end, Jean-Michel Duriez, Patou’s in-house perfumer will spend as much as two years putting together your unique fragrance. Judging from his past form (Yohji Homme among others), it may be money well spent, though so far only women can apply. Guerlain and Cartier are rumored to be getting into the act.
I confess to being unmoved by all this. From an aesthetic standpoint, perfume is a shared, industrial product, more like wine, music and books than like a painting or a jewel, and there is something ugly about asking a great artist to do one just for you. From a commercial standpoint, I couldn’t figure out what makes these well-paid professionals (and the houses that employ them) do such a thing. After all, why waste a good idea on some rich bitch when you can have everyone wearing it ? I asked around, and some answers emerged. First, the daily grind of the perfumers’ job, making things that smell good with 100$/kg to spend on the formula, i.e. using ingredients that mostly smell less than great, is getting depressing. All involved in bespoke perfumes relish the opportunity to use great raw materials, ignore all “health” regulations and travel back in time to the golden age of fragrance. Second, the firms need to put some prestige back into their tarnished “exclusive” image, and this may be a cost-effective way of doing so. I wish them luck, but I’ll carry on looking for Lucien Lelong’s Elle,Elle on ebay (maximum bid, 200 €). That one feels like it was made just for me when I was six years old, and I never even met Mr Lelong.
June 1, 2005
"Vulgar women" By Luca Turin
"Vulgar women" By Luca Turin
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Men want to impress, women to please. Men suffer from a style shortage, women from a surfeit. You’d expect these differences to matter when it comes to vulgarity, and they do. In women’s perfumes “vulgar” was violets (1900), then sweet amber (1920s) then “fur perfumes” (1950-60), then big green things (1970s) then loud red ones (1980s), then thin pink ones (1990s). It now takes two forms best illustrated by reference to toe-curling (and extinct) musical forms: the medley and the love duet. For those too young to have endured either, here’s how they worked. The duet paired a breathy soprano with a big pour-him-on-the-pancakes male voice, one answering the other before finishing together against a sunset glow of canned strings. The medley swept up the garbage after a busy summer of hits, and allowed you to listen to 12 of them in the time that it took you to name one.
In perfumery, the medley carries on undiminished. When feminine perfumes try to be “all things to all men” they are by definition in call-girl chic territory, a style the French, perhaps mindful of the customer base, often equate with luxury. In the trade, medleys are known as soups, because they’re made of scraps. Two classic soups were Oscar de la Renta’s Volupté and Christian Lacroix C’est la vie. Recent examples include Organza (Givenchy), a fragrance that puts you off vanilla for months at a time, and Magic (Céline), a gallant attempt at using every chemical in the perfumer’s palette simultaneously. and lately the appalling Attraction (Lancôme), a loud mess from topnote to drydown.
The “love duet” type rests on a case of mistaken identity. In the beginning there was the wonderful Angel, virginal white flowers mixed with a barrel-chested oriental bass. Angel was no duet: it was a transvestite, a gorgeous blonde with a five o’clock shadow and a wicked laugh. Inspired by Angel but trying to be more presentable, Chanel took equal parts of Allure and Guerlain’s Héritage for men and mixed them. Out came Coco Mademoiselle, an unexpected success. The effect, initially impressive, soon becomes tiresome. Unlike Angel, it feels both mawkish and butch, like high-heeled trainers or a 4WD with bull bars on the school run. Chanel tried to fix that with CM 1.1, also known as Chance, but it still crashes. So does everyone else, most recently Prada. Give up, guys: the only thing that’s worse than repeating a joke is leaving out the punchline.
article in german | larger print | smaller print | print
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Men want to impress, women to please. Men suffer from a style shortage, women from a surfeit. You’d expect these differences to matter when it comes to vulgarity, and they do. In women’s perfumes “vulgar” was violets (1900), then sweet amber (1920s) then “fur perfumes” (1950-60), then big green things (1970s) then loud red ones (1980s), then thin pink ones (1990s). It now takes two forms best illustrated by reference to toe-curling (and extinct) musical forms: the medley and the love duet. For those too young to have endured either, here’s how they worked. The duet paired a breathy soprano with a big pour-him-on-the-pancakes male voice, one answering the other before finishing together against a sunset glow of canned strings. The medley swept up the garbage after a busy summer of hits, and allowed you to listen to 12 of them in the time that it took you to name one.
In perfumery, the medley carries on undiminished. When feminine perfumes try to be “all things to all men” they are by definition in call-girl chic territory, a style the French, perhaps mindful of the customer base, often equate with luxury. In the trade, medleys are known as soups, because they’re made of scraps. Two classic soups were Oscar de la Renta’s Volupté and Christian Lacroix C’est la vie. Recent examples include Organza (Givenchy), a fragrance that puts you off vanilla for months at a time, and Magic (Céline), a gallant attempt at using every chemical in the perfumer’s palette simultaneously. and lately the appalling Attraction (Lancôme), a loud mess from topnote to drydown.
The “love duet” type rests on a case of mistaken identity. In the beginning there was the wonderful Angel, virginal white flowers mixed with a barrel-chested oriental bass. Angel was no duet: it was a transvestite, a gorgeous blonde with a five o’clock shadow and a wicked laugh. Inspired by Angel but trying to be more presentable, Chanel took equal parts of Allure and Guerlain’s Héritage for men and mixed them. Out came Coco Mademoiselle, an unexpected success. The effect, initially impressive, soon becomes tiresome. Unlike Angel, it feels both mawkish and butch, like high-heeled trainers or a 4WD with bull bars on the school run. Chanel tried to fix that with CM 1.1, also known as Chance, but it still crashes. So does everyone else, most recently Prada. Give up, guys: the only thing that’s worse than repeating a joke is leaving out the punchline.
May 1, 2005
"Vulgar Men" By Luca Turin
"Vulgar Men" By Luca Turin
In what turned out to be largely fictional memoirs written after the first Gulf War, a British Special Forces soldier recalled how he was captured, blindfolded and interrogated by Iraqi police. One of the few credible things in his account was that all the while he could smell the awful after-shave the policeman wore, which added to his distress. But suppose the interrogator had been a dandy in the mold of Turkish Bey José Ferrer in Lawrence of Arabia wearing, say, Guerlain’s Mouchoir de Monsieur. Would that have made life easier ? For that matter, what do elite UK forces wear when interrogating suspects ? I’ll bet our guy took a hard look at his bathroom shelf when he got home.
In seduction as in intimidation, intent is everything. A hack from Men’s Health, a magazine notable for the pectorals on its cover, wrote to me asking “How can a man maximize the influence of his cologne choices to attract the women he’s really interested in ?” Efficient mating strategies are good in principle, but this one is doomed. Waste time wondering which “cologne” pulls better, and your genes will spread only by lucky accident. A perfume should be right for the man, not for the job. Men’s fragrances fall in three categories, two easy, one hard, with some overlap between them. Category one: things that just smell great, like Chanel Pour Monsieur, De Nicolai’s New York, Guerlain’s Jicky, Dior’s Jules, etc. There are only two ways to screw up with these: if you put too much on, or if the rest of you is less evolved than the perfume. Category two: "monogrammed slippers" stuff like Floris 89, Eau d’Hermès, Paco Rabanne Pour Homme, Guerlain’s Habit Rouge etc.. These come with a fondness for biography, stocks pages and sighing labradors, and have nothing further to contribute to propagating the species.
The third category is the trickiest: "Young Buck". This is where most men (even gay ones, surprisingly) need a course in self-awareness. The guiding principle is: if you think you should be wearing it, don’t. Perfumes like Miyake’s Eau Bleue, Saint Laurent’s Kouros, Lapidus Pour Lui are fashion accessories. Like most couture for women, they are not meant to be helpful, but to measure how much strain your beauty can take. Unless you’re made of pure, self-confident gold, stay away from their dissolving aqua regia. And, as you get ready to go out, consider Emmanuel Bibesco’s famous question: "Pourquoi pas rien ?".
In what turned out to be largely fictional memoirs written after the first Gulf War, a British Special Forces soldier recalled how he was captured, blindfolded and interrogated by Iraqi police. One of the few credible things in his account was that all the while he could smell the awful after-shave the policeman wore, which added to his distress. But suppose the interrogator had been a dandy in the mold of Turkish Bey José Ferrer in Lawrence of Arabia wearing, say, Guerlain’s Mouchoir de Monsieur. Would that have made life easier ? For that matter, what do elite UK forces wear when interrogating suspects ? I’ll bet our guy took a hard look at his bathroom shelf when he got home.
In seduction as in intimidation, intent is everything. A hack from Men’s Health, a magazine notable for the pectorals on its cover, wrote to me asking “How can a man maximize the influence of his cologne choices to attract the women he’s really interested in ?” Efficient mating strategies are good in principle, but this one is doomed. Waste time wondering which “cologne” pulls better, and your genes will spread only by lucky accident. A perfume should be right for the man, not for the job. Men’s fragrances fall in three categories, two easy, one hard, with some overlap between them. Category one: things that just smell great, like Chanel Pour Monsieur, De Nicolai’s New York, Guerlain’s Jicky, Dior’s Jules, etc. There are only two ways to screw up with these: if you put too much on, or if the rest of you is less evolved than the perfume. Category two: "monogrammed slippers" stuff like Floris 89, Eau d’Hermès, Paco Rabanne Pour Homme, Guerlain’s Habit Rouge etc.. These come with a fondness for biography, stocks pages and sighing labradors, and have nothing further to contribute to propagating the species.
The third category is the trickiest: "Young Buck". This is where most men (even gay ones, surprisingly) need a course in self-awareness. The guiding principle is: if you think you should be wearing it, don’t. Perfumes like Miyake’s Eau Bleue, Saint Laurent’s Kouros, Lapidus Pour Lui are fashion accessories. Like most couture for women, they are not meant to be helpful, but to measure how much strain your beauty can take. Unless you’re made of pure, self-confident gold, stay away from their dissolving aqua regia. And, as you get ready to go out, consider Emmanuel Bibesco’s famous question: "Pourquoi pas rien ?".
April 1, 2005
"Dream Team" By Luca Turin
"Dream Team" By Luca Turin
Twelve years have passed since Shiseido opened its Paris Salons in the Jardins du Palais Royal. Right from Day One it was clear that Shiseido’s design supremo Serge Lutens was fully in control, and therefore that no shortcuts would be allowed. Bottles, packaging, decoration, dress of the sales assistants, light level, every exquisite detail added to the dark, intoxicating spell of the place. Few in 1992 believed that Lutens could keep up the promised pace of at least two new perfumes a year for long. Twenty-eight perfumes later, we are blessed with the most coherent modernist oeuvre since Ernest Daltroff’s glorious years at Caron (1904-41). Daltroff was a perfumer, Lutens is not, someone had to translate his vision into fragrances. The Aaron to Lutens’ Moses is Chris Sheldrake of Quest International, probably the most skilled natural-products perfumer around.
What have they created ? Simply put, a new style of perfumery. Considered as music, perfumes sing melody (Diorissimo’s coloratura soprano), harmony (Beyond Paradise’s angelic choir) or some counterpoint in between (most others). By contrast, each of the Lutens-Sheldrake perfumes explores a different timbre. Opening the bottles is like blowing into a weird instrument made of an uncommon material: out comes a loud, steady, startling note. Devotees of the Saint-Saëns school of perfumery have called them unfinished and disparaged them as "bases", i.e. building blocks. That is missing the point. Bases are meant to be mixed, whereas what Lutens wanted, and got, was each idea (or raw material) fleshed out precisely to the point where it ceases to need company but retains its soul entire.
It doesn’t always work, and for example I find the florals, Un Lys, Sa Majesté la Rose and Fleurs d’Oranger a little trite in a white-lace sort of way. But was there ever a more brazenly animalic confection than Muscs Koublaï Khan, a sunnier homage to the nostalgic plushness of hay than Chergui, or a more accurate rendition of the rubbery heart of tuberose than Tubéreuse Criminelle ? The latest two (2004) are outlier points, unusually abstract and apparently prompted by a desire on Lutens’ part to step back from the (delightful) orientalism of most of his creations. Chêne is an astringent, almost bitter tincture of oaks and the mosses that festoon them in primeval European forests. Daim Blond (blonde suede) is a rethink of that most refined of all perfume styles, the leather chypre, stripped of... everything that Chêne contains. It is almost as if these two magicians had taken an axe to Bandit and found that the halves scuttled away, each with a life of its own. The fairy tale continues.
Twelve years have passed since Shiseido opened its Paris Salons in the Jardins du Palais Royal. Right from Day One it was clear that Shiseido’s design supremo Serge Lutens was fully in control, and therefore that no shortcuts would be allowed. Bottles, packaging, decoration, dress of the sales assistants, light level, every exquisite detail added to the dark, intoxicating spell of the place. Few in 1992 believed that Lutens could keep up the promised pace of at least two new perfumes a year for long. Twenty-eight perfumes later, we are blessed with the most coherent modernist oeuvre since Ernest Daltroff’s glorious years at Caron (1904-41). Daltroff was a perfumer, Lutens is not, someone had to translate his vision into fragrances. The Aaron to Lutens’ Moses is Chris Sheldrake of Quest International, probably the most skilled natural-products perfumer around.
What have they created ? Simply put, a new style of perfumery. Considered as music, perfumes sing melody (Diorissimo’s coloratura soprano), harmony (Beyond Paradise’s angelic choir) or some counterpoint in between (most others). By contrast, each of the Lutens-Sheldrake perfumes explores a different timbre. Opening the bottles is like blowing into a weird instrument made of an uncommon material: out comes a loud, steady, startling note. Devotees of the Saint-Saëns school of perfumery have called them unfinished and disparaged them as "bases", i.e. building blocks. That is missing the point. Bases are meant to be mixed, whereas what Lutens wanted, and got, was each idea (or raw material) fleshed out precisely to the point where it ceases to need company but retains its soul entire.
It doesn’t always work, and for example I find the florals, Un Lys, Sa Majesté la Rose and Fleurs d’Oranger a little trite in a white-lace sort of way. But was there ever a more brazenly animalic confection than Muscs Koublaï Khan, a sunnier homage to the nostalgic plushness of hay than Chergui, or a more accurate rendition of the rubbery heart of tuberose than Tubéreuse Criminelle ? The latest two (2004) are outlier points, unusually abstract and apparently prompted by a desire on Lutens’ part to step back from the (delightful) orientalism of most of his creations. Chêne is an astringent, almost bitter tincture of oaks and the mosses that festoon them in primeval European forests. Daim Blond (blonde suede) is a rethink of that most refined of all perfume styles, the leather chypre, stripped of... everything that Chêne contains. It is almost as if these two magicians had taken an axe to Bandit and found that the halves scuttled away, each with a life of its own. The fairy tale continues.
March 1, 2005
"Grassroots" By Luca Turin
"Grassroots" By Luca Turin
Vetiver has a status apart in perfumery. It is one of the few materials for which there is no good synthetic substitute. It comes from a weed beloved of civil engineers that grows like hell, has a huge root system (where the smell resides) and so holds earthworks together. It has such a strong personality that vetiver fragrances are basically arrangements rather than compositions, which is why almost all are named Vetiver with different spellings. The big question is, as with cocoa, just how much arrangement is enough. Some say none: vetiver has its “black chocolate” fanatics, forever searching for something in a bottle which smells like the dried roots. Nothing does. When I was a kid, my mother used to send me down the street to buy bundles of vetiver roots from a proto-hippy store to put in linen drawers. No extraction method known to man gives that light, fresh, liquorice-and-earth, warm but austere, in a word intelligent smell. The perfumer has two options: retreat and declare victory, i.e. add a touch of lavender and call the result Vetiver (black chocolate); Or earn his keep and compose full-score for bass clarinet and orchestra (Milka with nuts and raisins).
Experts agree that the best classical vetiver of all time was Givenchy’s, which never sold well but was kept in production because Hubert de Givenchy wore it. When he passed away, so did the fragrance. Next best was a tie between the strikingly fresh and carefree Carven and the excellent, darker and richer Guerlain. Then came the Lanvin, a bit more cologne-like, and all sorts of no-holds-barred vetivers from niche firms, among which Annick Goutal (spicy and salty), Maitre Gantier (patchouli-like), and others. More recently some serious work has been done at both ends of the spectrum. Dominique Ropion has composed a Vetiver Extraordinaire for Frédéric Malle which sets a new standard for accuracy. In a very different vein, Serge Lutens’ Vetiver Oriental focuses on one of the hidden facets of vetiver, a ginger-like, buttery sweetness. At the other extreme, I received in the mail a few weeks ago an excellent durchkomponiert vetiver called One by Hannes B. which Google tells me is a Zurich men’s outfitter. Lastly, Guerlain has just released what they call Vetiver pour Elle which is basically the pour lui with a touch of added jasmine. It smells wonderful. In its infinite wisdom, Guerlain wants to sell it only in duty-free shops and for a limited time, so take a cheap flight to somewhere interesting and get it.
Vetiver has a status apart in perfumery. It is one of the few materials for which there is no good synthetic substitute. It comes from a weed beloved of civil engineers that grows like hell, has a huge root system (where the smell resides) and so holds earthworks together. It has such a strong personality that vetiver fragrances are basically arrangements rather than compositions, which is why almost all are named Vetiver with different spellings. The big question is, as with cocoa, just how much arrangement is enough. Some say none: vetiver has its “black chocolate” fanatics, forever searching for something in a bottle which smells like the dried roots. Nothing does. When I was a kid, my mother used to send me down the street to buy bundles of vetiver roots from a proto-hippy store to put in linen drawers. No extraction method known to man gives that light, fresh, liquorice-and-earth, warm but austere, in a word intelligent smell. The perfumer has two options: retreat and declare victory, i.e. add a touch of lavender and call the result Vetiver (black chocolate); Or earn his keep and compose full-score for bass clarinet and orchestra (Milka with nuts and raisins).
Experts agree that the best classical vetiver of all time was Givenchy’s, which never sold well but was kept in production because Hubert de Givenchy wore it. When he passed away, so did the fragrance. Next best was a tie between the strikingly fresh and carefree Carven and the excellent, darker and richer Guerlain. Then came the Lanvin, a bit more cologne-like, and all sorts of no-holds-barred vetivers from niche firms, among which Annick Goutal (spicy and salty), Maitre Gantier (patchouli-like), and others. More recently some serious work has been done at both ends of the spectrum. Dominique Ropion has composed a Vetiver Extraordinaire for Frédéric Malle which sets a new standard for accuracy. In a very different vein, Serge Lutens’ Vetiver Oriental focuses on one of the hidden facets of vetiver, a ginger-like, buttery sweetness. At the other extreme, I received in the mail a few weeks ago an excellent durchkomponiert vetiver called One by Hannes B. which Google tells me is a Zurich men’s outfitter. Lastly, Guerlain has just released what they call Vetiver pour Elle which is basically the pour lui with a touch of added jasmine. It smells wonderful. In its infinite wisdom, Guerlain wants to sell it only in duty-free shops and for a limited time, so take a cheap flight to somewhere interesting and get it.
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