"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.
June 1, 2007
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?
April 1, 2007
"Due Credit" By Luca Turin
"Due Credit" By Luca Turin
Faithful readers will remember that in the Nov 2004 Duftnote I wrote that Guerlain was preparing to reformulate several of its perfumes, most notably Mitsouko (1919), probably the best perfume on this earth. Mitsouko and all other fragrances derived from the legendary Chypre (Coty 1917) contain three basic ingredients, namely bergamot, labdanum and oakmoss. The problem was that oakmoss was thought to contain “resin acids”, and these are sensitizers. With repeated exposure a very few people can develop a nasty skin response to the stuff.
The place where you find the most resin acids is the rosin used by violinists to give friction to the bow. Allergies can be added to their long list of sufferings among which neck abrasions, poor posture, wearing ill-fitting black clothes and having to play Alban Berg’s Concerto. Much smaller amounts of resin acids are contained in perfume. But now that most real dangers (cholera, Russian tanks) are gone, EU politicians have found that several small fears can propel careers as nicely as one big one, and have been regulating all the horrible chemicals in our lives.
The fun part was that by the time the EU got round to restricting oakmoss, it turned out that the culprit was the cheaper tree moss with which it was frequently adulterated. But reversing legislation is as hard as putting toothpaste back in the tube, and perfumers had to work with the rules. Guerlain appears to have initially taken a typically LVMH approach, i.e. do a quick-fix replacement in the hope that nobody would notice, on the principle that if the CEO can’t tell the difference who the hell is going to disagree? But a lot of people were upset by the news, including some NZZ readers who wrote to Guerlain and got blah-blah answers back. Guerlain got very angry and quietly hired a young guy to do the dirty deed.
Then some in-house people refused to mess with the formula and walked out, at which point Guerlain brought in the great Edouard Fléchier to fix the problem. He appears to have worked on it for a couple of years. Two days ago I got the new stuff, and it gives me great pleasure to report that Fléchier has done the impossible. The new Mitsouko conforms to all the rules and smells sensational, ever so slightly different, more bread-like up top, a touch less sweet below and with a slightly stronger iris note in the middle. If I had to choose between the old and the new, regardless of habit, I might pick the new. Bravo.
Faithful readers will remember that in the Nov 2004 Duftnote I wrote that Guerlain was preparing to reformulate several of its perfumes, most notably Mitsouko (1919), probably the best perfume on this earth. Mitsouko and all other fragrances derived from the legendary Chypre (Coty 1917) contain three basic ingredients, namely bergamot, labdanum and oakmoss. The problem was that oakmoss was thought to contain “resin acids”, and these are sensitizers. With repeated exposure a very few people can develop a nasty skin response to the stuff.
The place where you find the most resin acids is the rosin used by violinists to give friction to the bow. Allergies can be added to their long list of sufferings among which neck abrasions, poor posture, wearing ill-fitting black clothes and having to play Alban Berg’s Concerto. Much smaller amounts of resin acids are contained in perfume. But now that most real dangers (cholera, Russian tanks) are gone, EU politicians have found that several small fears can propel careers as nicely as one big one, and have been regulating all the horrible chemicals in our lives.
The fun part was that by the time the EU got round to restricting oakmoss, it turned out that the culprit was the cheaper tree moss with which it was frequently adulterated. But reversing legislation is as hard as putting toothpaste back in the tube, and perfumers had to work with the rules. Guerlain appears to have initially taken a typically LVMH approach, i.e. do a quick-fix replacement in the hope that nobody would notice, on the principle that if the CEO can’t tell the difference who the hell is going to disagree? But a lot of people were upset by the news, including some NZZ readers who wrote to Guerlain and got blah-blah answers back. Guerlain got very angry and quietly hired a young guy to do the dirty deed.
Then some in-house people refused to mess with the formula and walked out, at which point Guerlain brought in the great Edouard Fléchier to fix the problem. He appears to have worked on it for a couple of years. Two days ago I got the new stuff, and it gives me great pleasure to report that Fléchier has done the impossible. The new Mitsouko conforms to all the rules and smells sensational, ever so slightly different, more bread-like up top, a touch less sweet below and with a slightly stronger iris note in the middle. If I had to choose between the old and the new, regardless of habit, I might pick the new. Bravo.
March 1, 2007
"The One" By Luca Turin
"The One" By Luca Turin
While flying for the price of a beer from London to a quiet Italian airport recently, I noticed that the flight attendant was wafting a pleasant, slightly bland fragrance all the way down the aisle. Two hundred nautical miles later I figured out what it was. The trick never fails: 1- Hmm, that’s nice ! 2-What the hell is it ? 3-(belatedly) CK One ! On the return flight, I sprayed some on at the duty-free and marveled at this piece of quiet genius. CK One is not so much a perfume as a chemical time machine. Most fragrances happily operate on a logarithmic time scale, each successive phase occupying a span ten times longer than the previous one: six minutes of topnotes, an hour of heart, and the rest of the day for drydown. A lot of interesting things can happen during scene changes, for example in the first half-hour of Patou’s EnJoy or the first three of Guerlain’s Insolence. Some fragrances manage time differently, by fading seamlessly from one accord to another, similar one, for hours on end, as, for example, in J’Adore or DK Gold. But cKOne takes a different tack, by stopping time altogether. In the Eighties, this used to be called linear perfumery, and was usually applied to big-hair contraptions that, alas, froze the clock at 11 on a Saturday night. The rest of the time, they worked like heels and a gold lamé dress on the morning train to work. Instead, CK One takes a soapy, fresh topnote and fleshes it out with a skin-toned ensemble of middle and drydown materials. Every one is picked for its radiance, so the chord can then be heard just as clearly thirty paces away as up close. Something then instructs the all the components of CK One to hold hands and fly off in formation. Because of this, the mix in the air is unvarying, and time forever stands still at 8AM: the frozen morning of a day full of promise. There is a similar case of brilliant, maybe fortuitous chemical engineering, this time in flavors. An expert told me that the secret of Coca Cola resided, not, as many people think, in some magic ingredient, but in the fact that while the chemical composition of the flavor changes wildly between mixing in Atlanta and sipping in Bangalore six months later, the taste itself does not budge. Could it be that the chemical key to glory for both Coke and CK One, the whispered message our nose loves to hear, is the same: Stay Young Forever ?
While flying for the price of a beer from London to a quiet Italian airport recently, I noticed that the flight attendant was wafting a pleasant, slightly bland fragrance all the way down the aisle. Two hundred nautical miles later I figured out what it was. The trick never fails: 1- Hmm, that’s nice ! 2-What the hell is it ? 3-(belatedly) CK One ! On the return flight, I sprayed some on at the duty-free and marveled at this piece of quiet genius. CK One is not so much a perfume as a chemical time machine. Most fragrances happily operate on a logarithmic time scale, each successive phase occupying a span ten times longer than the previous one: six minutes of topnotes, an hour of heart, and the rest of the day for drydown. A lot of interesting things can happen during scene changes, for example in the first half-hour of Patou’s EnJoy or the first three of Guerlain’s Insolence. Some fragrances manage time differently, by fading seamlessly from one accord to another, similar one, for hours on end, as, for example, in J’Adore or DK Gold. But cKOne takes a different tack, by stopping time altogether. In the Eighties, this used to be called linear perfumery, and was usually applied to big-hair contraptions that, alas, froze the clock at 11 on a Saturday night. The rest of the time, they worked like heels and a gold lamé dress on the morning train to work. Instead, CK One takes a soapy, fresh topnote and fleshes it out with a skin-toned ensemble of middle and drydown materials. Every one is picked for its radiance, so the chord can then be heard just as clearly thirty paces away as up close. Something then instructs the all the components of CK One to hold hands and fly off in formation. Because of this, the mix in the air is unvarying, and time forever stands still at 8AM: the frozen morning of a day full of promise. There is a similar case of brilliant, maybe fortuitous chemical engineering, this time in flavors. An expert told me that the secret of Coca Cola resided, not, as many people think, in some magic ingredient, but in the fact that while the chemical composition of the flavor changes wildly between mixing in Atlanta and sipping in Bangalore six months later, the taste itself does not budge. Could it be that the chemical key to glory for both Coke and CK One, the whispered message our nose loves to hear, is the same: Stay Young Forever ?
February 1, 2007
"Chanel Six" By Luca Turin
"Chanel Six" By Luca Turin
There has been a change of plans. The world will not end just yet. Some weeks ago, after two long conversations with normally stoic perfumers, I had concluded that great perfumery was essentially over and I might as well take up Tuvan throat singing as my next hobby. Picture this: Serious perfumes used to take at least a year to compose. For major brands, that time is now typically down to three months. Small wonder the greatest perfumers now do unpaid niche work to put a little fun back into their lives.
Then came a divine surprise: Chanel sent me an embarrassingly luxurious package containing six fragrances to be added to their boutique line. I had no idea what to expect. Recently, Chanel’s successes (Chance, Allure Sensuelle) were a bit like Apple’s iPod: nice earners but nothing revolutionary. While Guerlain and Hermès did confidential lines of fragrances, Chanel held back. But then I thought it typical of a perfectionist family firm to take its time over such things. I had also heard that the brilliant Chris Sheldrake, the nose behind Serge Lutens’s perfumes, had joined Jacques Polge at Chanel. I wondered what was brewing.
As I quickly went through the package, my mood broke through the clouds, going from overcast to what aviators call "severe clear" in minutes. In my opinion, these six permanently change the landscape of perfumery by proving that there is, after all, a modern Grand Manner. They are Coromandel, a soft patchouli in the style of Lutens’s Borneo 1834, but more refined; No. 18, an iris-rose that sits next to the defunct Iris Gris in heaven; 28 La Pausa, an iris-violet named after a house Coco Chanel owned; Bel Respiro, a fresh-aldehydic named for another house; and an Eau de Cologne that goes straight to the top of its class.
Every one of these is as good as it gets, but one gave me an emotion I hadn’t felt for years. It was the thrill of feminine beauty, the pang of pain and longing you get in Rear Window when Grace Kelly breezes in, throws her coat on a chair and saunters over to give James Stewart a kiss. It is 31 Rue Cambon, after Chanel’s Paris address, and the best Chypre in thirty years. With current perfumery restrictions on oakmoss, a new great Chypre had seemed impossible. Remarkably, Chanel used a pepper-iris accord instead to achieve a classical effect in a completely novel way. If you only have room for six perfumes in your life, clear your shelf.
There has been a change of plans. The world will not end just yet. Some weeks ago, after two long conversations with normally stoic perfumers, I had concluded that great perfumery was essentially over and I might as well take up Tuvan throat singing as my next hobby. Picture this: Serious perfumes used to take at least a year to compose. For major brands, that time is now typically down to three months. Small wonder the greatest perfumers now do unpaid niche work to put a little fun back into their lives.
Then came a divine surprise: Chanel sent me an embarrassingly luxurious package containing six fragrances to be added to their boutique line. I had no idea what to expect. Recently, Chanel’s successes (Chance, Allure Sensuelle) were a bit like Apple’s iPod: nice earners but nothing revolutionary. While Guerlain and Hermès did confidential lines of fragrances, Chanel held back. But then I thought it typical of a perfectionist family firm to take its time over such things. I had also heard that the brilliant Chris Sheldrake, the nose behind Serge Lutens’s perfumes, had joined Jacques Polge at Chanel. I wondered what was brewing.
As I quickly went through the package, my mood broke through the clouds, going from overcast to what aviators call "severe clear" in minutes. In my opinion, these six permanently change the landscape of perfumery by proving that there is, after all, a modern Grand Manner. They are Coromandel, a soft patchouli in the style of Lutens’s Borneo 1834, but more refined; No. 18, an iris-rose that sits next to the defunct Iris Gris in heaven; 28 La Pausa, an iris-violet named after a house Coco Chanel owned; Bel Respiro, a fresh-aldehydic named for another house; and an Eau de Cologne that goes straight to the top of its class.
Every one of these is as good as it gets, but one gave me an emotion I hadn’t felt for years. It was the thrill of feminine beauty, the pang of pain and longing you get in Rear Window when Grace Kelly breezes in, throws her coat on a chair and saunters over to give James Stewart a kiss. It is 31 Rue Cambon, after Chanel’s Paris address, and the best Chypre in thirty years. With current perfumery restrictions on oakmoss, a new great Chypre had seemed impossible. Remarkably, Chanel used a pepper-iris accord instead to achieve a classical effect in a completely novel way. If you only have room for six perfumes in your life, clear your shelf.
January 1, 2007
"Perfume’s perfumes" By Luca Turin
"Perfume’s perfumes" By Luca Turin
I’ll start with an admission: I couldn’t finish Patrick Suskind’s book, and won’t see the movie until they show it on airplanes and I’m stuck in 44F. The sex-drugs-and-minuet thing bores me. However, one good thing came my way when the film was released: a limited-edition red plush boxed set from Thierry Mugler. Ah, the joys of being a perfume critic ! It retails for €550 and I get to play with it for free. It contains fifteen fragrances composed by "The Christophs", Laudamiel and Hornetz, illustrative of various scenes in the movie. They both work for the great fragrance composition firm IFF, and this was clearly a labor of love (they pitched it to the filmmaker, not the other way round) as well a couple of years’ work.
Laudamiel’s style is so distinctive I knew some of this was his work even before I looked at the beautiful website. What he excels at is bold, steely, transparent accords that feel like architect sketches for a penthouse flat flying in earth orbit. One third of the fragrances in the box are in this manner. Another third are lavish, classical set-pieces in period dress, all of them good. The remaining third are literal depictions, the best being a cobbler’s shop (Atelier Grimal), a wonderful, bitter leather accord, and another, depressingly entitled Human Existence, which contains the biggest, most fecal dose of civet in living memory . The centrepiece of the boxed set is a fragrance called Aura. There is nothing sketchy about this one, a melancholy milky-powdery heliotrope note reminiscent of Guerlain’s Après L’Ondée. Aura is the only one that will be sold separately, and apparently is to be used in conjunction with other fragrances, though it smells fine to me as is.
Who will buy this thing ? I would, for the sheer fun of it. Every year, at my children’s school, I do a two-hour presentation to the 6-year-olds explaining what perfume is about. Usually I cobble together bottles of raw materials, but next time I’ll just bring the red box. The range of abstract and real, old and new is a perfect showcase of what makes modern perfumery exciting, from strange and powerful synthetics to exotic, top-flight naturals. But there’s another reason to shell out: the bottle labelled Salon Rouge contains the most vertiginously beautiful accord I’ve smelled in years, supposedly made of davana fruit and sandalwood. If I could play the game in reverse and choose the film scene it illustrates, it would be Harold Lloyd dangling from the hands of a huge clock twenty floors up.
I’ll start with an admission: I couldn’t finish Patrick Suskind’s book, and won’t see the movie until they show it on airplanes and I’m stuck in 44F. The sex-drugs-and-minuet thing bores me. However, one good thing came my way when the film was released: a limited-edition red plush boxed set from Thierry Mugler. Ah, the joys of being a perfume critic ! It retails for €550 and I get to play with it for free. It contains fifteen fragrances composed by "The Christophs", Laudamiel and Hornetz, illustrative of various scenes in the movie. They both work for the great fragrance composition firm IFF, and this was clearly a labor of love (they pitched it to the filmmaker, not the other way round) as well a couple of years’ work.
Laudamiel’s style is so distinctive I knew some of this was his work even before I looked at the beautiful website. What he excels at is bold, steely, transparent accords that feel like architect sketches for a penthouse flat flying in earth orbit. One third of the fragrances in the box are in this manner. Another third are lavish, classical set-pieces in period dress, all of them good. The remaining third are literal depictions, the best being a cobbler’s shop (Atelier Grimal), a wonderful, bitter leather accord, and another, depressingly entitled Human Existence, which contains the biggest, most fecal dose of civet in living memory . The centrepiece of the boxed set is a fragrance called Aura. There is nothing sketchy about this one, a melancholy milky-powdery heliotrope note reminiscent of Guerlain’s Après L’Ondée. Aura is the only one that will be sold separately, and apparently is to be used in conjunction with other fragrances, though it smells fine to me as is.
Who will buy this thing ? I would, for the sheer fun of it. Every year, at my children’s school, I do a two-hour presentation to the 6-year-olds explaining what perfume is about. Usually I cobble together bottles of raw materials, but next time I’ll just bring the red box. The range of abstract and real, old and new is a perfect showcase of what makes modern perfumery exciting, from strange and powerful synthetics to exotic, top-flight naturals. But there’s another reason to shell out: the bottle labelled Salon Rouge contains the most vertiginously beautiful accord I’ve smelled in years, supposedly made of davana fruit and sandalwood. If I could play the game in reverse and choose the film scene it illustrates, it would be Harold Lloyd dangling from the hands of a huge clock twenty floors up.
December 1, 2006
"L’Artisan Parfumeur 30 years later" By Luca Turin
"L’Artisan Parfumeur 30 years later" By Luca Turin
The first “niche” perfumery, in a field by now synonymous with frantic novelty and six-day -wonders, is thirty years old and still going strong. In 1976 Jean Laporte had the idea of creating bold, transparent, highly colored, deceptively simple perfumes that did not belong in the French Mainstream and to sell them to the (by then solvent) 1968 generation. The packaging was as clever as the compositions: Laporte made liberal use of synthetic materials, yet his boutiques had a cozy, floral, natural-feeling potpourri look to them, miles away from luxury goods. Having discovered a new continent, this latter-day Coty populated it with odd creatures: his Vanilia was the first vanillic to use huge amounts of the candyfloss material ethyl maltol and is still the most euphoric perfume in existence. His first big hit was Mûres et Musc (1978), associating galaxolide, a powerful synthetic musk with red berry undertones, to yet more red berry heart notes in a formula that still works fine.
A series of successes, oddly unacknowledged by the industry, made L’Artisan millions. Laporte is a true fragrance fanatic: a decade ago, he organized an astonishing exhibition in Paris in which all the great natural raw materials of perfumery were presented together with superb specimens of the live plants whence they came, all in full bloom. It was a logistical miracle, and a feast for eye and nose. Laporte started out as a chemist and once told me that his first olfactory experiment as a child involved putting cabbage leaves into an empty metal box and letting them rot for months, releasing on the way, as he put it, “most of sulfur chemistry.”. He left in 1989 to found Maître Gantier et Parfumeur, plowing a parallel furrow. After his departure, L’Artisan Parfumeur changed owners and seemed to lose its way, then recovered with a hit-and-miss string of very fashionable, slightly arty fragrances among which Olivia Giacobetti’s excellent Premier Figuier and Dzing!.
By this time (in the late 90’s), the niche competition was fierce, and within it the natural-materials tendency was in the ascendant. L’Artisan cleverly made use of the best talent available, that of Bertrand Duchaufour and Jean-Claude Ellena. Never underestimate the French gift for refinement: from Debussy to Nouvelle Cuisine, they do fresh, spare, subtle beauty like nobody else. No fragrance better illustrates this, and better exemplifies what amounts to a new school, than Duchaufour’s sensationally beautiful Timbuktu (2004). It is a vetiver, but unlike any other, with a cool, rosy, dawn-like radiance that makes you want to buy twenty years’ worth in case L’Artisan is ever bought by LVMH.
The first “niche” perfumery, in a field by now synonymous with frantic novelty and six-day -wonders, is thirty years old and still going strong. In 1976 Jean Laporte had the idea of creating bold, transparent, highly colored, deceptively simple perfumes that did not belong in the French Mainstream and to sell them to the (by then solvent) 1968 generation. The packaging was as clever as the compositions: Laporte made liberal use of synthetic materials, yet his boutiques had a cozy, floral, natural-feeling potpourri look to them, miles away from luxury goods. Having discovered a new continent, this latter-day Coty populated it with odd creatures: his Vanilia was the first vanillic to use huge amounts of the candyfloss material ethyl maltol and is still the most euphoric perfume in existence. His first big hit was Mûres et Musc (1978), associating galaxolide, a powerful synthetic musk with red berry undertones, to yet more red berry heart notes in a formula that still works fine.
A series of successes, oddly unacknowledged by the industry, made L’Artisan millions. Laporte is a true fragrance fanatic: a decade ago, he organized an astonishing exhibition in Paris in which all the great natural raw materials of perfumery were presented together with superb specimens of the live plants whence they came, all in full bloom. It was a logistical miracle, and a feast for eye and nose. Laporte started out as a chemist and once told me that his first olfactory experiment as a child involved putting cabbage leaves into an empty metal box and letting them rot for months, releasing on the way, as he put it, “most of sulfur chemistry.”. He left in 1989 to found Maître Gantier et Parfumeur, plowing a parallel furrow. After his departure, L’Artisan Parfumeur changed owners and seemed to lose its way, then recovered with a hit-and-miss string of very fashionable, slightly arty fragrances among which Olivia Giacobetti’s excellent Premier Figuier and Dzing!.
By this time (in the late 90’s), the niche competition was fierce, and within it the natural-materials tendency was in the ascendant. L’Artisan cleverly made use of the best talent available, that of Bertrand Duchaufour and Jean-Claude Ellena. Never underestimate the French gift for refinement: from Debussy to Nouvelle Cuisine, they do fresh, spare, subtle beauty like nobody else. No fragrance better illustrates this, and better exemplifies what amounts to a new school, than Duchaufour’s sensationally beautiful Timbuktu (2004). It is a vetiver, but unlike any other, with a cool, rosy, dawn-like radiance that makes you want to buy twenty years’ worth in case L’Artisan is ever bought by LVMH.
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