"Nombre Noir" By Luca Turin
Disregarding market laws, in 1994 I wrote that Shiseido’s Nombre Noir was the best fragrance ever. At about the time a friend walked off with my bottle, Shiseido took it off the market and all known stock was destroyed. Perfume collectors took notice; soon I could not afford it even at eBay auctions and lost one for $800, an insane sum, to a Swiss buyer. My entire stock consisted of the dregs of an eau de toilette bottle that had been badly stored. I had lately given up and tried not to think about it.
Last week, after a twelve-year drought, on successive days two friends showered me with enough Nombre Noir to last several lifetimes. The first gave me in a plain atomizer a generous decant from her personal stock. The second was Evan Izer. He lives in Brooklyn, in a spotless loft filled with objects he has amassed over the years, mostly ‘fifties, none showy, all solid, every one embodying the optimistic nobility of great design. He collects vintage perfumes on eBay-not with the sporadic excitement of the beginner or the jaded lust of the rich expert, not because they are rare, not because of the bottles, but because the genie they imprison has the power to make the air he breathes more beautiful.
He never spends large sums on them, and in fact almost every one of his finds is ludicrously cheap. Like a seasoned hunter, he tricks his quarry, typing in search words with mistakes like Gueblain (a misreading), Hicky (a mistyping), indicators of the careless, inexpert seller. He asked me over for tea, which he served in a beautiful black Wedgwood service that took him a decade to put together, and talked about his finds as if they had mysteriously appeared by his bed while he slept.
He first produced a huge four-ounce crystal bottle of perfect Emeraude from the ‘fifties, bought for $60. After a long pause, he averred that he seemed to find himself in possession of four unopened half-ounces of Nombre Noir parfum. He said “four” in the tone of a person who keeps hamsters and is concerned at the rate at which they breed. These came from a basement in the United Arab Emirates, which must have been air-conditioned, because they were perfect. Graciously pretending not to know what it meant to me, he gave me one: the Sainte Chapelle stained glass in liquid form.
January 1, 2008
December 1, 2007
"Amouage" By Luca Turin
"Amouage" By Luca Turin
In fifteen years of fragrance reviewing, I have only accepted one invitation to a proper perfume launch somewhere exotic, and that was for Amouage’s 25th anniversary, about which more below. I should add that I only received one other invitation during that period. It involved spending two days in Portofino covered in cucumber slices, and on day 3 giving a lecture on cucumbers.
The story of Amouage is remarkable. Twenty five years ago an Omani prince decided that his country, renowned since Egyptian times for the quality of its frankincense, home to the unique Green Mountain rose and on whose beaches half the world’s ambergris lands at random, needed a perfume firm that would take on the world’s greatest.
He commissioned the great perfumer Guy Robert and gave him that rarest of all fragrance briefs: an unlimited budget. The result was Gold, a magnificent fragrance based on Oman’s three great raw materials. For a time Amouage Gold was the most expensive fragrance on earth, but in recent years it has become possible to spend a great deal more and get a whole lot less. Later Amouage fragrances were less good, (though Dia for men is a paragon of dry darkness), and the recent Reflections were simply awful. A new art director has taken charge and wants to put Amouage back on track. I had rehearsed a speech exhorting him to hire the orientalist perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour for his next fragrance.
Clearly, Arabs invented luxury: every palace dreams of being the Alhambra, every bedroom a sheikh’s tent and all jewelry aspires to being sold by weight and poured into cupped hands. All else is merely luxury goods, not the real thing. LVMH executives should visit an Omani perfume store. The lead crystal bottles sitting on blue silk in wooden caskets look like presents from a future without moving parts. Half a dozen grades of the amazing rotten oud wood are available for burning. A large bottle on the shelf says "ambergris". Full of the cynical skepticism that comes from spending more than a week in the fragrance industry, I ask to smell it. It is top-class ambergris, and I treat myself to an ounce of raunchy oil.
Later, at a reception under the moon and fireworks, in a crowd peppered with bodyguards bearing silver daggers, we watched Guy Robert showered with applause. Then, like kids leaving a birthday party, we collected a bag with the two new fragrances and could smell them at last. To my relief both were very good. The feminine is a Diorella with tuberose. The masculine is a lovely incense composition, by Bertrand Duchaufour.
In fifteen years of fragrance reviewing, I have only accepted one invitation to a proper perfume launch somewhere exotic, and that was for Amouage’s 25th anniversary, about which more below. I should add that I only received one other invitation during that period. It involved spending two days in Portofino covered in cucumber slices, and on day 3 giving a lecture on cucumbers.
The story of Amouage is remarkable. Twenty five years ago an Omani prince decided that his country, renowned since Egyptian times for the quality of its frankincense, home to the unique Green Mountain rose and on whose beaches half the world’s ambergris lands at random, needed a perfume firm that would take on the world’s greatest.
He commissioned the great perfumer Guy Robert and gave him that rarest of all fragrance briefs: an unlimited budget. The result was Gold, a magnificent fragrance based on Oman’s three great raw materials. For a time Amouage Gold was the most expensive fragrance on earth, but in recent years it has become possible to spend a great deal more and get a whole lot less. Later Amouage fragrances were less good, (though Dia for men is a paragon of dry darkness), and the recent Reflections were simply awful. A new art director has taken charge and wants to put Amouage back on track. I had rehearsed a speech exhorting him to hire the orientalist perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour for his next fragrance.
Clearly, Arabs invented luxury: every palace dreams of being the Alhambra, every bedroom a sheikh’s tent and all jewelry aspires to being sold by weight and poured into cupped hands. All else is merely luxury goods, not the real thing. LVMH executives should visit an Omani perfume store. The lead crystal bottles sitting on blue silk in wooden caskets look like presents from a future without moving parts. Half a dozen grades of the amazing rotten oud wood are available for burning. A large bottle on the shelf says "ambergris". Full of the cynical skepticism that comes from spending more than a week in the fragrance industry, I ask to smell it. It is top-class ambergris, and I treat myself to an ounce of raunchy oil.
Later, at a reception under the moon and fireworks, in a crowd peppered with bodyguards bearing silver daggers, we watched Guy Robert showered with applause. Then, like kids leaving a birthday party, we collected a bag with the two new fragrances and could smell them at last. To my relief both were very good. The feminine is a Diorella with tuberose. The masculine is a lovely incense composition, by Bertrand Duchaufour.
November 1, 2007
"Dreamjob" By Luca Turin
"Dreamjob" By Luca Turin
Last week I visited two US universities, MIT and Georgetown, to give talks and meet graduate students on their way to molecular biology and chemistry PhDs. On both occasions, I was approached by students (one from Lausanne, one from Beirut) who, very shyly and tentatively, explained to me that their dream was to become perfumers. I was surprised that people who had worked so hard to belong to a scientific elite should actually wish to do something completely different. Nevertheless, they wanted advice, and I gave them some: I tried to talk them out of it. In my opinion, they would be wasted on Britney Spears Incurious Red.
Scientists are not always the most cheerful of people, but as a group I find them less cynical than perfumers, which suggests that they are getting more fun from their profession. Also, I don’t think perfumery is a level playing field, and what the students said confirmed this. They wrote left and right and got no answers. They had both eventually figured out that there is only one proper, open perfumery school on earth, the Isipca in Versailles, but that most of the teaching there is done in French. Other than that, the big five firms have internal schools, but none of their websites has a link that says, “Want to become a perfumer?” Those who train in the internal schools seem to do so in addition to whatever their normal job is, marketing, evaluation, compounding, and learn it as a craft rather than an art or a science.
Imagine if physics were only taught at General Electric, and only after hours. Imagine learning cuisine if there were only five good restaurants on earth. Small wonder so many of the young perfumers are sons and daughters of people in the same profession. That is the surest sign that some talent is being wasted. I asked the great perfumer Françoise Caron once how she had got into it. She explained to me that when she grew up in Grasse, the choice for an adolescent was either to steal motorcycles or to go into perfumery, and she didn’t like bikes. What the world needs is an international school of perfumery where the whole complicated shebang, from art history to chemistry via composition, is taught in English to those who can pay the fees or are sent there on scholarships from perfumery firms. All I ask is to be a member of the jury that awards the prize for Best First Fragrance.
Last week I visited two US universities, MIT and Georgetown, to give talks and meet graduate students on their way to molecular biology and chemistry PhDs. On both occasions, I was approached by students (one from Lausanne, one from Beirut) who, very shyly and tentatively, explained to me that their dream was to become perfumers. I was surprised that people who had worked so hard to belong to a scientific elite should actually wish to do something completely different. Nevertheless, they wanted advice, and I gave them some: I tried to talk them out of it. In my opinion, they would be wasted on Britney Spears Incurious Red.
Scientists are not always the most cheerful of people, but as a group I find them less cynical than perfumers, which suggests that they are getting more fun from their profession. Also, I don’t think perfumery is a level playing field, and what the students said confirmed this. They wrote left and right and got no answers. They had both eventually figured out that there is only one proper, open perfumery school on earth, the Isipca in Versailles, but that most of the teaching there is done in French. Other than that, the big five firms have internal schools, but none of their websites has a link that says, “Want to become a perfumer?” Those who train in the internal schools seem to do so in addition to whatever their normal job is, marketing, evaluation, compounding, and learn it as a craft rather than an art or a science.
Imagine if physics were only taught at General Electric, and only after hours. Imagine learning cuisine if there were only five good restaurants on earth. Small wonder so many of the young perfumers are sons and daughters of people in the same profession. That is the surest sign that some talent is being wasted. I asked the great perfumer Françoise Caron once how she had got into it. She explained to me that when she grew up in Grasse, the choice for an adolescent was either to steal motorcycles or to go into perfumery, and she didn’t like bikes. What the world needs is an international school of perfumery where the whole complicated shebang, from art history to chemistry via composition, is taught in English to those who can pay the fees or are sent there on scholarships from perfumery firms. All I ask is to be a member of the jury that awards the prize for Best First Fragrance.
October 1, 2007
"Eminenences Grises" By Luca Turin
"Eminenences Grises" By Luca Turin
Graham Greene once complained that, having struck it rich with his early novels, he moved to Cap Ferrat only to discover he was the poorest man on the peninsula. Science often works like that: you think you’ve cracked a problem and feel ready to turn on cruise control to coast for a while, when a strange fact comes up, sits at the back of the lecture hall and asks a question that reveals the depth of your ignorance. My day job is to design molecules for fragrances and flavors. I naively thought that if I could come up with something that smells good, is powerful, non-toxic and cheap to make, I would pretty much earn my keep. I was wrong. Time and again, the most experienced perfumers at fragrance firms ask for something completely different and far more mysterious. They want an “effect” material, not a smell.
Effect materials are as old as perfumery itself, and the first such were natural musks. By itself, natural musk has a strange, not particularly strong, not especially pleasant smell of unwashed underwear. But spray it on one wrist and overlay it with a well-known fragrance, and spray the fragrance alone on the other wrist for comparison. The absence of musks is akin to shutting one eye when looking into a 3-D viewer. The scene is the same, but the depth is gone. Other, equally legendary molecules have different effects. Salicylates turn the most banal floral composition into a real perfume, with majestic weight and sweep. Hedione has a magical ability to make things glisten, to fill the spaces between perfume components with a fresh, liquid air. Iso-E Super, long before Julian Schnabel got the idea on canvas, allowed perfumers to paint on black velvet.
But here’s where it gets strange. As it happens, some of these molecules are odorless to some people, including of course perfumers. This is particularly common with salicylates and musks. The perfumer Guy Robert once explained to me that he could not smell benzyl salicylate at all, but could instantly recognize its presence in a perfumery composition. He used a wonderful image: “I recognize it as if it were a friend seen from behind in a crowd, by the cut of his shoulders”. What is going on? Some blind people know that a light is there, even though they can’t see it. Do we have detectors other than those of smell to tell us a chemical is in the air ? What do these molecules have in common? This Rosetta Stone awaits a Champollion, who is probably in year 1 at ETH as I write.
Graham Greene once complained that, having struck it rich with his early novels, he moved to Cap Ferrat only to discover he was the poorest man on the peninsula. Science often works like that: you think you’ve cracked a problem and feel ready to turn on cruise control to coast for a while, when a strange fact comes up, sits at the back of the lecture hall and asks a question that reveals the depth of your ignorance. My day job is to design molecules for fragrances and flavors. I naively thought that if I could come up with something that smells good, is powerful, non-toxic and cheap to make, I would pretty much earn my keep. I was wrong. Time and again, the most experienced perfumers at fragrance firms ask for something completely different and far more mysterious. They want an “effect” material, not a smell.
Effect materials are as old as perfumery itself, and the first such were natural musks. By itself, natural musk has a strange, not particularly strong, not especially pleasant smell of unwashed underwear. But spray it on one wrist and overlay it with a well-known fragrance, and spray the fragrance alone on the other wrist for comparison. The absence of musks is akin to shutting one eye when looking into a 3-D viewer. The scene is the same, but the depth is gone. Other, equally legendary molecules have different effects. Salicylates turn the most banal floral composition into a real perfume, with majestic weight and sweep. Hedione has a magical ability to make things glisten, to fill the spaces between perfume components with a fresh, liquid air. Iso-E Super, long before Julian Schnabel got the idea on canvas, allowed perfumers to paint on black velvet.
But here’s where it gets strange. As it happens, some of these molecules are odorless to some people, including of course perfumers. This is particularly common with salicylates and musks. The perfumer Guy Robert once explained to me that he could not smell benzyl salicylate at all, but could instantly recognize its presence in a perfumery composition. He used a wonderful image: “I recognize it as if it were a friend seen from behind in a crowd, by the cut of his shoulders”. What is going on? Some blind people know that a light is there, even though they can’t see it. Do we have detectors other than those of smell to tell us a chemical is in the air ? What do these molecules have in common? This Rosetta Stone awaits a Champollion, who is probably in year 1 at ETH as I write.
September 1, 2007
"Calone" By Luca Turin
"Calone" By Luca Turin
In August 1966, chemists at the drug giant Pfizer filed a patent for a strange molecule that looked like a tranquilizer (distantly related to Valium) and smelled like nothing on earth, or “melon” as they prosaically described it. Pfizer had bought the venerable Grasse firm of Camilli Albert Laloue two years earlier, so they handed the beast over to their perfumed friends who christened it Calone after the firm’s initials. There it slept for twenty years, while the patent ran out. Then in 1989 perfumer Yves Tanguy understood that the time for watery notes had come and composed New West. Within three years Escape, Kenzo Homme and Eau d’Issey had put Calone at the forefront of perfumery, where it still is. I received an exceptionally pure sample from an Italian manufacturer yesterday. Open the cardboard box, and you smell it already. Open the plastic bag containing the sealed plastic bottle, and you smell it still, but no stronger. Open the bottle, and everyone on the block smells it, but still quiet. This is the olfactory equivalent of a rumour, a whisper that spreads far and wide without ever being spoken out loud. What does it smell of ? No matter: what matters is that it is distance-independent, like light through a transparent medium, like a deity seeing through perfume’s soul.
Synchronicity: I called Mark Buxton, a Symrise perfumer who did many Comme des Garçons fragrances and, almost alone, created the new aesthetic of transparent woody florals that everyone is imitating. I asked him how it all started. He said “Calone”. He hated the smell but loved the effect, that quiet, penetrating radiance. He composed Jacomo’s superbly transparent Anthracite Homme in 1990, and spent the best part of the ‘nineties trying to achieve a midnight version of Calone’s metallic sheen using clear, salubrious, woody-smoky notes and dark flowers. Buxton does not like opaque florals, does not think fragrance has a sex, and clearly has a romantic ideal of perfume: like a revelation, a fragrance should be at once disturbing and self-evident. Rei Kawakubo of CdG picked his composition saying that it was “like a drug: I want more”. Strangely, the Ravel to Buxton’s Debussy works on the same floor: Bertrand Duchaufour, author of Timbuktu and the other great exponent of the Night Sky school. I asked Buxton whether there had been mutual influence. He dismissed this politely, and explained that, in aesthetics as in engineering, problems sometimes have only one solution: they both found it.
In August 1966, chemists at the drug giant Pfizer filed a patent for a strange molecule that looked like a tranquilizer (distantly related to Valium) and smelled like nothing on earth, or “melon” as they prosaically described it. Pfizer had bought the venerable Grasse firm of Camilli Albert Laloue two years earlier, so they handed the beast over to their perfumed friends who christened it Calone after the firm’s initials. There it slept for twenty years, while the patent ran out. Then in 1989 perfumer Yves Tanguy understood that the time for watery notes had come and composed New West. Within three years Escape, Kenzo Homme and Eau d’Issey had put Calone at the forefront of perfumery, where it still is. I received an exceptionally pure sample from an Italian manufacturer yesterday. Open the cardboard box, and you smell it already. Open the plastic bag containing the sealed plastic bottle, and you smell it still, but no stronger. Open the bottle, and everyone on the block smells it, but still quiet. This is the olfactory equivalent of a rumour, a whisper that spreads far and wide without ever being spoken out loud. What does it smell of ? No matter: what matters is that it is distance-independent, like light through a transparent medium, like a deity seeing through perfume’s soul.
Synchronicity: I called Mark Buxton, a Symrise perfumer who did many Comme des Garçons fragrances and, almost alone, created the new aesthetic of transparent woody florals that everyone is imitating. I asked him how it all started. He said “Calone”. He hated the smell but loved the effect, that quiet, penetrating radiance. He composed Jacomo’s superbly transparent Anthracite Homme in 1990, and spent the best part of the ‘nineties trying to achieve a midnight version of Calone’s metallic sheen using clear, salubrious, woody-smoky notes and dark flowers. Buxton does not like opaque florals, does not think fragrance has a sex, and clearly has a romantic ideal of perfume: like a revelation, a fragrance should be at once disturbing and self-evident. Rei Kawakubo of CdG picked his composition saying that it was “like a drug: I want more”. Strangely, the Ravel to Buxton’s Debussy works on the same floor: Bertrand Duchaufour, author of Timbuktu and the other great exponent of the Night Sky school. I asked Buxton whether there had been mutual influence. He dismissed this politely, and explained that, in aesthetics as in engineering, problems sometimes have only one solution: they both found it.
August 1, 2007
"Orange Free State" By Luca Turin
"Orange Free State" By Luca Turin
Good judgment is often little more than the wise exercise of prejudice. Under pressure of time, most of us are scrupulously fair only when given no alternative. André Gide apparently never even opened the parcel containing the manuscript of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, and based his snap rejection on Proust’s unremarkable early works. When I first came across Etat Libre D’Orange, I assumed on the basis of past experience that this niche perfumery firm had all the hallmarks of the classic snob-value ripoff: great names and high concept, crap fragrances. But I’m co-authoring a perfume guide, so I gave them a try.
In fairness to curmudgeons, they do lay it on thick: the perfumes are called Putain des Palaces, Nombril Immense, Don’t get me wrong baby I don’t swallow, etc. Their website is awash with the most hackneyed eroticism of the “no joys without toys” variety, and their motto is “le parfum est mort, vive le parfum”. All this Dada stuff had me betting on the perfumes being either hideous or dull. I had neglected two factors: 1) talented perfumers, especially young ones, have for some time been working for niche brands because it’s more fun; 2) just as important, good artistic directors, tired of working on Britney Spears’ ninth fragrance, are starting their own firms. We now have both Stravinskys and Diaghilevs out there looking for trouble.
Etat Libre d’Orange, clearly a low-fat company, sent twelve of those tiny sample vials that seem designed to prevent the smelling of perfume, with miniature handwritten labels and two postcards with the names of the fragrances. After deciphering the labels and cursing the vials, I started smelling the stuff with an anticipatory scowl. There are few greater pleasures than pessimism disproved. All but two of their fragrances are of a very high level, and the best are the work of two young Givaudan perfumers, Antoine Lie and Antoine Maisondieu. The masterpiece is, in my opinion, Lie’s Sécrétions Magnifiques, helpfully illustrated on the website by a schoolboy drawing of an ejaculating penis. What he has done is revolutionary: he has used a nitrile as a main note in a fine fragrance. In plain language, he has put a loud note of harbor bilge in an elegant floral and made it fly. The list of really bad smells that make good fragrances better was never long: indole and skatole, both naturals, contained in flowers and shit. Now there are three. Mark my words: perfume will never be the same.
Good judgment is often little more than the wise exercise of prejudice. Under pressure of time, most of us are scrupulously fair only when given no alternative. André Gide apparently never even opened the parcel containing the manuscript of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, and based his snap rejection on Proust’s unremarkable early works. When I first came across Etat Libre D’Orange, I assumed on the basis of past experience that this niche perfumery firm had all the hallmarks of the classic snob-value ripoff: great names and high concept, crap fragrances. But I’m co-authoring a perfume guide, so I gave them a try.
In fairness to curmudgeons, they do lay it on thick: the perfumes are called Putain des Palaces, Nombril Immense, Don’t get me wrong baby I don’t swallow, etc. Their website is awash with the most hackneyed eroticism of the “no joys without toys” variety, and their motto is “le parfum est mort, vive le parfum”. All this Dada stuff had me betting on the perfumes being either hideous or dull. I had neglected two factors: 1) talented perfumers, especially young ones, have for some time been working for niche brands because it’s more fun; 2) just as important, good artistic directors, tired of working on Britney Spears’ ninth fragrance, are starting their own firms. We now have both Stravinskys and Diaghilevs out there looking for trouble.
Etat Libre d’Orange, clearly a low-fat company, sent twelve of those tiny sample vials that seem designed to prevent the smelling of perfume, with miniature handwritten labels and two postcards with the names of the fragrances. After deciphering the labels and cursing the vials, I started smelling the stuff with an anticipatory scowl. There are few greater pleasures than pessimism disproved. All but two of their fragrances are of a very high level, and the best are the work of two young Givaudan perfumers, Antoine Lie and Antoine Maisondieu. The masterpiece is, in my opinion, Lie’s Sécrétions Magnifiques, helpfully illustrated on the website by a schoolboy drawing of an ejaculating penis. What he has done is revolutionary: he has used a nitrile as a main note in a fine fragrance. In plain language, he has put a loud note of harbor bilge in an elegant floral and made it fly. The list of really bad smells that make good fragrances better was never long: indole and skatole, both naturals, contained in flowers and shit. Now there are three. Mark my words: perfume will never be the same.
July 1, 2007
"Clean" By Luca Turin
"Clean" By Luca Turin
A clever scientist in charge of improving the smell of clean clothes at a major soap manufacturer explained to me recently that his task was made difficult not just by cost, environmental regulation and the fact that soap powder is already near-perfect, but by a fundamental problem: cleaning fabric essentially means removing oily stuff, and fragrance is oily. Devising a perfume that hangs on to the fabric in the wash like a limpet in a gale is not easy. He summed it up thus: “We take smell out, and then put it back in”. This got me thinking about the fact that we do the same thing every time we take a shower. We wash off the smell and dirt (and, in my opinion, some of our soul, though it seems to grow back), then towel down and spray some smell back on.
But the soaps, shampoos and conditioners you use are not unscented. If they were, they’d smell faintly bad. So it’s really a three-stage process: wash off body smells and stale perfume, replace with a temporary, stand-in fragrance that says “clean”, then cover that with another smell. Note that proper fragrance, like makeup, is unclean. When you pick a shirt and find it stained with face powder or smelling of perfume, it means it’s dirty. At no time was this more true than in the ‘eighties, when fragrances of exceptional power and persistence like Opium, Poison and Giorgio ruled the earth. When the great Issey Miyake decided to make his own fragrance in 1990, he wanted it to smell of water, and by then everyone agreed. His Eau d’Issey was a huge success.
The young today still don’t want to smell dirty like Mom. How do you sell them fragrance? Classic soap fragrance was just scaled down perfume, so just scaling it back up clearly wouldn’t do. Maybe the perfect clean perfume, like those strangely beautiful “average” faces that come from mixing a hundred photographs by computer, might just be the sum total of everything you use when washing. What would that smell like ? Oddly enough, like a soapy fruit salad. Since the early ‘seventies and L’Oréal’s first apple-scented shampoo, fruity notes have invaded the bathroom. The US firm of Bath & Body Works was among the first to see this. They brought out a line of cheap soapy-fruity-floral fragrances a few years back and made a fortune. Now eighty percent of new launches are loud fruity florals. Which means shampoo now smells dirty. Another wash cycle is about to start.
A clever scientist in charge of improving the smell of clean clothes at a major soap manufacturer explained to me recently that his task was made difficult not just by cost, environmental regulation and the fact that soap powder is already near-perfect, but by a fundamental problem: cleaning fabric essentially means removing oily stuff, and fragrance is oily. Devising a perfume that hangs on to the fabric in the wash like a limpet in a gale is not easy. He summed it up thus: “We take smell out, and then put it back in”. This got me thinking about the fact that we do the same thing every time we take a shower. We wash off the smell and dirt (and, in my opinion, some of our soul, though it seems to grow back), then towel down and spray some smell back on.
But the soaps, shampoos and conditioners you use are not unscented. If they were, they’d smell faintly bad. So it’s really a three-stage process: wash off body smells and stale perfume, replace with a temporary, stand-in fragrance that says “clean”, then cover that with another smell. Note that proper fragrance, like makeup, is unclean. When you pick a shirt and find it stained with face powder or smelling of perfume, it means it’s dirty. At no time was this more true than in the ‘eighties, when fragrances of exceptional power and persistence like Opium, Poison and Giorgio ruled the earth. When the great Issey Miyake decided to make his own fragrance in 1990, he wanted it to smell of water, and by then everyone agreed. His Eau d’Issey was a huge success.
The young today still don’t want to smell dirty like Mom. How do you sell them fragrance? Classic soap fragrance was just scaled down perfume, so just scaling it back up clearly wouldn’t do. Maybe the perfect clean perfume, like those strangely beautiful “average” faces that come from mixing a hundred photographs by computer, might just be the sum total of everything you use when washing. What would that smell like ? Oddly enough, like a soapy fruit salad. Since the early ‘seventies and L’Oréal’s first apple-scented shampoo, fruity notes have invaded the bathroom. The US firm of Bath & Body Works was among the first to see this. They brought out a line of cheap soapy-fruity-floral fragrances a few years back and made a fortune. Now eighty percent of new launches are loud fruity florals. Which means shampoo now smells dirty. Another wash cycle is about to start.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)