"Simplexity" By Luca Turin

"Simplexity" By Luca Turin

Blue at one end and red at the other like a carpenter’s pencil, the word simplexity was coined by artist Laura Duke to denote the combination of cool blue elegance and teeming red intricacy that science uncovers everywhere. It also applies to art: the best creations consistently combine clear structure with rich detail. In perfumery, simplexity is present even at the level of the most basic building blocks: Two different grades of lavender oil, though identical at the blue end, will nevertheless feel different, because each red end writes its own signature. Put the two substances in your analytical equipment, turn up the magnification to the maximum, and you will see, nestled against the Everest peak of linalool, a range of foothills. These are the impurities whose presence or absence determines whether the view looks like Kashmir or the Moon. Perfumes are now made by aromachemical companies, by chemists striving for purity: blue. Flowers, by contrast, are living things striving to attract bees, and bees like complex: red. For chemists and accountants, natural materials are a complicated red scribble: they have good years and bad years, quality control is a constant worry, prices fluctuate. This has been the driving force towards all-blue perfumes that are either bare or fake.

But as always, just when one is about to give up, proof emerges that chemical poetry has not run out of words. Two wonderful fragrances have come my way, significantly both composed by relative beginners. Both exhibit the telltale shimmer of simplexity, and never smell the same two days in a row. One is Andy Tauer’s Air du Désert Marocain. He is a Zurich-based self-taught perfumer. L’Air du Désert is his second fragrance, an austere, woody-balsamic accord sweetened with just enough amber and vanilla to wrap a smile on its noble bone structure. It is probably the best fragrance to come out of amateur hands since Coty quit his day job at Antoine Chiris et Compagnie and composed La Rose Jacqueminot in 1904. The other is Chinatown, from the brash, humorous and very successful New York firm Bond No.9. It was composed by Aurélien Guichard, son of Jean, Givaudan’s great perfumer. Aurélien is, I am told, in his twenties, and Chinatown is his first masterpiece. It has been described as gourmand, i.e. foody-sweet, but that is missing the point. What Chinatown does is put a new shine on the Clausewitzian notion that what lovers enjoy doing at 3 AM is the continuation of dessert by other means.

"Natural Perfumery" By Luca Turin

"Natural Perfumery" By Luca Turin

There are now officially four kinds of perfumery: normal, niche, vintage and natural. Normal is what you find everywhere; niche is what you hope others won’t find; vintage is what you find only if you know what to look for. Where’s the natural stuff ? In health stores, next to the rock-salt lamps. They carry aromatherapy oils, so people have had access to a wide range of plant extracts previously accessible only to perfumers. This happened at a time when this wonderful-smelling stuff has almost disappeared from the mainstream. The big six perfumery firms are aromachemicals manufacturers, and it is in their interest to keep naturals, with their attendant problems of price and quality fluctuations, to a bare minimum. Just how bare that minimum can be has become clear in the last five years, during which the cost of a “fine fragrance” formulation has gone down by half and the quality by nine tenths. Good perfumes have almost disappeared: there are 500 launches each year, but only a dozen are worth smelling twice.

Capitalism hates a vacuum: by popular request, aromatherapists have started composing fragrances. Unsurprisingly, their creations are supposed to be Good For You. This marketing strategy is no worse than the usual “Wear this and every man/woman will lust after you”, and just as easy to disprove empirically. But never mind the therapy, how’s the aroma? I recently received a sampler of the work of several US-based natural perfumers. Some were inept. Some were imitations of well-worn themes, i.e. recipes lifted from a book, competently executed with natural materials. Some were not natural at all, either knowingly (crooks are uniformly distributed among the population) or unknowingly (including among fragrance suppliers).

But a tiny number smelled good in a surprisingly new way. I’ve always believed perfumery is virtual cuisine, not pornography for the nostril, and these fragrances confirmed this. Natural perfumery may be waiting for another Guerlain, armed not with vanilla, but this time with a spice no-one outside Szechuan Province has yet heard of. But hasn’t all this all been done already before the invention of chemistry ? Surprisingly, no. Serious natural perfumery was indigenous to only a handful of countries, each using a small number of traditional ingredients. New extraction methods and global trade now conspire to provide an unprecedented palette. Natural perfumers claim not to be bound by the aesthetic criteria of classical perfumery: if it survives EU regulations and New Age nonsense, their art may yet deliver on this promise.

"Sublime" By Luca Turin

"Sublime" By Luca Turin

Thirty years ago, most fine fragrance perfumers were Frenchmen, steeped in that enduring mixture of lust, fascination and scorn towards women locally celebrated as galanterie. I once wrote a letter to the great Edmond Roudnitska asking him to come give a talk on perfumery. He mistook the handwritten final a of my first name for an e and wrote back a letter informing me (Luce is a feminine name in France) that “though a scientist, I was nonetheless a woman”, etc. Embarrassed, I dropped the invitation. Yet his generation, for all its fossil ideas, seldom stooped to the sort of mawkish Barbie-pink trash that is now the staple of emancipated sexiness. Instead, they designed their greatest creations to adorn chessboard queens, dashing in all directions chewing up pawns, chased by panting, step-at-a-time kings. Bernard Chant’s Cabochard, Guy Robert’s Dioressence, Roudnitska’s Diorama were offerings to goddesses, not presents to women. How did this Pantheon die out ? Demeter went first: the last opulent florals Fidji, First, and Chloé show signs of overripe decadence, and are variations on earlier agrestic glories (Joy, Fleurs de Rocaille). Then came the obese Junos of the eighties: Giorgio, Poison and Opium, painted harlots that soon collapsed under their own weight. By the nineties a new race of synthetic Titans (Angel, Boucheron) was in the ascendant, and among the old divinities only the martial and the fleet of foot were left standing. Saint Laurent’s Rive Gauche (Diana) remained true to its sleek, magnificent form until it was defaced by the Taliban of EU regulations two years ago. The last intact monumental sculpture seems to be Patou’s Sublime, and its survival is no accident. Patou was always an anomaly: an in-house perfumer (then Jean Kerléo), slow to create and slow to trash, no fashion collections to speed up the pace of life, a launch every few years. Sublime, probably Kerléo’s greatest creation, is a wonderful case of mistaken identity: the luminous buttercup color of the packaging, the exotic-fruit bottle, everything screams éternel féminin. But the fragrance tells a different story: arrestingly handsome rather than pretty, completely abstract despite being made largely of natural materials (jasmine and vetiver), this Minerva of fragrances in full armour and helmet passes the hardest test for any feminine fragrance: it makes a sensational masculine. Roudnitska would probably have hated the notion, but Sublime illustrates the admission of defeat voiced by the public womanizer and closet homosexual Louis Aragon: “La femme est l’avenir de l’homme”.

"Guerlain revisited" By Luca Turin

"Guerlain revisited" By Luca Turin

Faithful readers will recall a Duftnote a year ago expressing alarm at the impending “modernization” of the Guerlain classics to bring them in line with EU regulations. Things have moved on since then: instead of a callow youth to oversee the job, Guerlain relented and hired the great Edouard Fléchier. Fléchier, a wonderfully inventive perfumer (Poison, Une Rose, etc. ) and Grasse veteran with more experience of naturals than just about anyone alive, has been at it for a year. To date, there is no sign of any planned release of new-and-improved fragrances. Guerlain’s attitude also seems to have changed, from secretive to openly defensive. I recently gave a lecture in Paris to an audience of perfumers and, during the questions, made an offhand remark about Guerlain’s Chamade and Chant d’Arômes having been changed long ago. Days later I got a phone call from Fléchier himself asking me to account for my words. I explained what I meant (Chamade less powdery, Chant d’Aromes less peachy, nothing to do with his work) and the conversation took an unexpected turn.

Guerlain, it seems, feels unfairly singled out for criticism, at a time when everyone is messing with their old formulae to either cheapen them or bring them in line with regulations. True, Guerlain are getting a lot of flak, but only in proportion to the importance of the masterpieces in their safekeeping. Which would you most worry about: the Uffizi hosing down its Botticellis, or the Hirshhorn Museum scrubbing its Julian Schnabels down to the bare velvet? Fléchier insisted that they were working very hard at making sure no damage would be done, and I believe him.

But can they do it ? I’ll bet oakmoss, birch tar etc. simply cannot be replaced. What then ? Plenty, as a matter of fact. For a start, be more open about the whole process. I suggested to Fléchier, and later to Guerlain’s head of PR that they (at long last) explain to their customers what the problem is, and humbly let them decide: Mitsouko with a health warning, or Mitsouko after plastic surgery ? For that matter, why not both ? For example, the Parfum in each line could be the original, with the EdT and EdP revised and “safe”. I think the best course of action would be for Guerlain to invite every perfume journalist on earth to visit the works, let Fléchier explain the problem, have the regulatory people explain the options, and see what King Customer decrees. Welcome to the modern world.

"Mozart in the Bottle" By Luca Turin

"Mozart in the Bottle" By Luca Turin

It may be that beauty, like energy, follows a conservation law: once created, it gets endlessly recycled but never destroyed and eventually ends up as diffuse aesthetic warmth. The conductor Sir Thomas Beecham (1879-1961), upon receiving get-well cards, once apparently asked from his sick-bed “Anything from Mozart?” Had he lived longer, say into the 1980s, the answer might have been “No Sir, but his low-temperature heirs Abba and Elton John send their regards”. What survives of the boy genius ? Among other things, a reliance on the fifth, the handspan interval at the core of what we call Classical music.

Suppose now that the fifth is a preexisting, mathematically satisfying proportion. Then those who believe, as I do, that we smell the vibrations of molecules are faced with an interesting question: are there similar rules of molecular harmony, i.e. chords that sound good to our nose ? The consonant octave can be ruled out: smells do not repeat themselves when the frequency is doubled. But the fifth is another matter. I recently had a brain scan that revealed no major anomalies, yet it has always seemed self-evident to me that Mozart’s lighter music was fruity, and conversely that fruit, especially fruit salads, had a Mozartian character.

Remarkably, there may be a good reason for this: the two characteristic vibrations of esters and lactones, the molecular structures that are responsible for 90% of fruity smells, are placed almost exactly a fifth apart. This idea will remain at the border between speculation and fantasy until we figure out how smell works. In the meantime, it is possible to at least enjoy liquid fifths in a variety of styles. Perfumers generally shy away from overtly fruity perfumes, because most are commercial flops: women do not generally want to smell like tinned fruit. Instead, they add discreet touches of various esters to their compositions. Salicylates, for example, give the original Je Reviens (forget the modern one, buy some vintage on ebay) its mysterious green glow. Octin carbonates, are responsible for the peppery edge of such fragrances as Dior’s Fahrenheit. The greatest of all is Firmenich’s Hedione, a molecule without which modern perfumery would be impossible. First used in Eau Sauvage in small amounts, it now constitutes as much as half of modern florals. There is one fragrance, however, which throws all caution to the wind and uses every fifth in the perfumer’s orchestra: my favorite fruity, Jacomo’s Paradox for women, is the closest you can get to Mozart without using your ears. It can be found on their website.

"The Fourth Taste" By Luca Turin

"The Fourth Taste" By Luca Turin

At my first piano lesson, the teacher played two very short and easy pieces, one by Haydn, the other by Bartók and asked me to choose which one I wanted to learn. It felt like an important decision, possibly laden with long-term consequences. I went for Bartók, partly because of the beautiful reddish-brown cover of the Mikrokosmos edition, partly because to me the two pieces respectively tasted sweet and bitter, and I liked bitter. Years later, Bartók still feels like musical Fernet-Branca. His disdain for schmaltz, and the speed with which he pounces on his own lyrical lapses give his music an odd moral quality. But what, if anything, is moral about Fernet-Branca ? Simple: the bitter taste modality has evolved over millions of years to warn us of alien molecules that will cross into the bloodstream and do things inside you, good or bad. You won’t know which till you’ve tried. Bitter is the taste of things that are eaten not as food but as medicine for body and soul. It is the taste of adventure, of risk. If sweetness is sin, bitterness is virtue.

Not surprisingly, in our fearful, cozy culture, bitterness has a bad press, nowhere more than in perfumes ruled by sweet vanillin, lactones (peach) and more recently by the candyfloss note of maltol. Guerlain, the great virtual konditorei who started it all with Jicky in 1889, only ever did two totally unsweetened perfumes: Djedi and Sous le Vent. The former was reissued a few years ago and was a tremendous animalic vetiver, correctly described by Guerlain’s Roja Dove as “the driest perfume of all time”. But dry isn’t necessarily bitter, and vetiver, with its liquorice aspect, does not quite carry the menace of a true alkaloid.
A friend recently sent me a small sample of vintage Sous le Vent, however, and that was a revelation. Faced with Coty’s austere Chypre (1917), Jacques Guerlain first succumbed to his usual temptation, and added peach to get Mitsouko (1919). When he revisited the problem fourteen years later, he pushed in the opposite direction as far as he could and obtained the bitterest, most uncompromising marvel. You could add two drops of it to a glass of gin and quaff it on the verandah. Amazingly, Guerlain plans to reissue it next year, though whether such manifest poison can slip by EU safety rules remains to be seen.

"The Lost Chord" By Luca Turin

"The Lost Chord" By Luca Turin

When I was sixteen, I went on holiday in Spain with a group of kids. Despite the reassuring brochure intended for the parents (healthy and abundant food, constant supervision), we made non-stop mayhem. There was, as always, an eye in that storm. At its center stood a serious, quiet, beautiful girl with dark hair in a ponytail, dark blue eyes and red lips. I adored her from a distance, sat next to her watching TV the evening of the first moon landing and was not spoken to more than twice. On the train back, the others seemed to stand aside when time came to share sleeping births. We ended up facing each other all night in silence, our noses an inch away from each other, and the air in between crackling with an energy science cannot yet measure. She wore a strange perfume I hadn’t noticed before, that felt to me like one of those blue chords Thelonious Monk invented: unresolved, and strangely at peace. At the Gare de Lyon, my parting shot was to ask her what her perfume was. She said Imprévu , by Coty.
Twenty years later, I managed to get hold of Imprévu, by then discontinued and hard to find. I smelled it every which way, but that chord was not in there. Unaccountably, she seemed to have lied. The chord has chimed past me perhaps three times since then, and every time I failed to find out what it was. By then I had noticed something strange. Every fragrance has two faces: one for every day, and another one it shines on you perhaps once a year, as if lit from within by some mysterious joy. I first noticed this with my scooter, whose exhaust smoke, usually flat and oily, very occasionally came across as richly aromatic, a laughing smell of open road. This got me worried: suppose the Chord was actually the transfigured face of something I smelled rarely anyway. How would I ever figure it out ? A month ago, while on holiday in the Austrian Alps, I smelled it again. It came from a woman in the cablecar line. This time, I was not going to let it slip by. My wife Desa asked in German. The woman looked a little surprised that anyone should be sniffing the air near her, but the answer came: “a body cream by Dieter”… Desa wasn’t sure of the second half by the time she came back to tell me. Reader, please help. Monk’s hands are poised above they keyboard.