Cheap and Cheerful

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Depending on where you buy perfume you may or may not have noticed the mind boggling jump in prices. If you buy a bottle of your old standby from Nordstrom or Neimans every year or so, you probably haven’t noticed much difference. However, if you dip your toe in the waters of niche perfumers (e.g. anything that has relatively small distribution and doesn’t have a designer or celebrity name on the label) you’ve seen prices go from spendy to very high to obscene.

While mainstream perfumes may not have increased as dramatically in price, their formulas have compensated by becoming appallingly cheap. According to Chandler Burr, the big labels now typically spend roughly 70% less on the actual perfume than they did in the 90s. If you’ve smelled Dior’s Sauvage, you know what I mean. I personally don’t know how in ten years that house went from Dior Homme (2005), which is chock full of the good stuff, to something that smells like someone misplaced half the formula.

Certainly, we need Amouage and Frederic Malle and Serge Lutens, all of whom require that you pay through the nose (pun definitely intended). But they do usually deliver the goods, albeit, at around $300 a bottle. Still, if great perfume is to be relevent for the average person it can’t cost your monthly food budget. Duh. Duhsville.

There are some reasons to hope. A few major perfume houses still use good raw materials to make a reasonably-priced product. Estee Lauder is one. You can buy a masterpiece from Calice Becker (Beyond Paradise) or Sofia Grojsman (White Linen) for less than $50. In the niche market Gorilla Perfumes does proper fragrance for a song. And Patricia de Nicolaï‘s Parfums de Nicolaï has turned out affordable bottles of the highest quality juice since the 80s.

Despite what all the legends and lore would have us believe, a high price tag and a good wallop of “natural oils” (which could very well mean precisely nothing) doesn’t mean that the stuff in the bottle is good or even expensive to make. The house of Creed is an excellent example, with their criminally inaccurate claims of using only the best naturally-derived ingredients. All companies lie, even Chanel and Frederic Malle. Unfortunately, the only way to keep from getting swindled is a critical nose and plenty of homework.

Masculin Féminin

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For a good time, find someone who’s really into perfume and say something about “men’s cologne” or “women’s perfume.” If your mark looks particularly unlikely to offend, say something like “rose is for old ladies” or “men should never wear florals.” With any luck their blood pressure will spike and you’ll be treated to a mini rant, complete with detailed examples and historical information. They might even force you to smell something!

Classifying perfume as “for men” or “for women” is like saying Joni Mitchell is just for women or The Stones are just for men. One perfume sales rep told me that more than 60% of his female clientele buy “masculine” perfume. Women, it seems, are more confident in their ability to make White Steel Sport Extreme their own. If more men bought perfume without looking at the bottle, I’m sure you’d smell more syrupy florals in the locker room.

Many companies have wised up. These days, only the most staid labels put “for men” or “for women” on the bottle. Most niche companies never did. Serge Lutens is famous for saying that his whole line is unisex. Bona fide smell genius Mark Buxton, who essentially created the blueprint for the entire Comme des Garçons line, puts it this way, “Why can’t a man wear muguet (lily of the valley)? Is a woody note more masculine?  Why the separation? I don’t get it. You wear what you like.”

Crucially, it’s hard to have much fun if you only shop in the men’s section. The palette of materials in “perfume for men” cuts out almost all of the good stuff: nothing radiant, nothing too sweet, nothing too challenging, and certainly nothing overtly floral. Moreover, since the vast majority of men’s fragrances work so hard not to offend, you’ll need to branch out if need wit, mystery, or actual romance. Generally these days, the men’s department is pretty grim.

The distinction between masculine and feminine fragrance is not completely without basis. Men and women smell differently, especially as the day goes on: the former with a diffusive, buzzy ripeness, and the latter more piquant. Therefore, masculines tend to expand with time, while feminines–the good ones at least–simply soften and glow. It’s the reason some florals disagree with me by the end of the day. The sweet rose in Une Rose or 100% Love crops up like a high-frequency peak amid my low-frequency funk. But really, so much depends on climate and culture. Middle Eastern men are famous for wearing whatever they please, while many Asian cultures avoid personal fragrance altogether.

Beyond the realm of merely unisex perfume–which, historically speaking, has existed far longer than “gendered” perfume–lies a small patch of fragrances that seem to be both masculine and feminine at once. Amouage’s Lyric Man, one of my all-time favorites, is by turns robust and gentle, vegetal and sweet. Just when you think you’ve got it pinned down it changes. All this with a deceptively simple composition, albeit one with the very best raw materials.

You don’t know iris (pt. 2)

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Check out Part One here.

Chanel’s 28 La Pausa is undeniably lovely. But if fault must be found I’d say it’s a bit too genteel, a bit too fancy. It’s also clearly a perfume in the classic Chanel mold, intended to be effortlessly wearable and unobtrusive. Serge Luten’s Iris Silver Mist is another beast altogether. In so many ways it is the polar opposite of 28 La Pausa: brutal, unabashedly vegetal, and tricky as hell to wear.

Most of the Lutens line is concerned with celebrating the less polite facets of a given natural raw material. Very few–Sarrasins is one exception–smell like conventional perfume compositions. Papa Serge, undisputed king of the kooky perfume mystics, would go even further. He would say that his perfumes unearth the true metaphysical nature of their components. For once, it’s not marketing dreck. Though Lutens has turned out his fair share of crap, the good stuff is truly otherworldly. As one sales associate put it to me, “he lives somewhere between the 13th and 14th century.” Oh, and he hates vaporiser bottles.

None of which really prepares you for Iris Silver Mist. If 28 La Pausa is fancy-aunt-on-the-weekend Iris Silver Mist is villain-in-drag-at-a-funeral. You can practically hear the pipe organ. At least some of its harrowing timbre comes from synthetics, which here act like a sustain pedal, drawing out the chorus until it reaches the rafters. The synthetics in the composition are vital to the overall effect, making out louder, grander, and more poetic than even the best iris could do on its own.

If Lutens wanted an iris to scare the kids by God he got it. He demanded that iris be reckoned with on its own terms, neither succumbing to dreariness nor bent and reformed into luxury. Instead he offers a powdery, shimmering force, beautiful but utterly unsettling. Wearability was therefore not his first concern, and those looking for comfort will want to look elsewhere.

Like any good work of art it does get under your skin. I find myself drawn to it again and again. Not for the pure pleasure of wearing it, although it is pleasurable, but to solve the mystery at its core. In other words, I wear it to learn its secrets. Was there ever a better reason to wear perfume?

 

You don’t know Iris (pt. 1)

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Until fairly recently iris was one of the most expensive raw materials in a perfumer’s palette. As soon as someone made a decent synthetic iris, however, the note began cropping up everywhere, from Olivier Polge‘s fantastic Dior Homme to Prada’s rather dull Infusion d’Iris. Still, most of us have never smelled the real thing, partly because it’s so expensive and partly because good iris always smells so melancholy. Teary eyes don’t sell perfume.

Many perfumers take that melancholy quality as a challenge. The immortal Iris Gris, which is considered one of the very best perfumes of all time, included a peach note, supposedly–I have not smelled it–making it warm and cheery. Violet, too, pairs well with iris, adding a carefree bouyance that nonetheless obscures some of the iris’s natural gifts. The braver perfume houses have put out irises paired with materials like patchouli (Le Labo’s Iris 39), which emphasize rooty, earthy notes. The bravest of all have dared to pair it with banana, an odd but utterly winning combination.

Enter Chanel’s 28 La Pausa (apparently named for one of Coco Chanel’s homes, blah blah blah…), which packs a hefty dollop of top quality iris. 28 La Pausa blows straight past melancholy and arrives instead in pure bliss. Harnessing that peculiar magic that seems readily on hand at Chanel, the dreariness and isolation are transformed into a secret little holiday. In typical Chanel fashion, 28 La Pausa is more abstract than it is representational. It’s as if the prodigously gifted Chanel braintrust managed to make that most finicky of flowers do their bidding. I actually felt my eyes roll back in my head with pleasure as I smelled it for the first time. You’ll never wear anything like it.

Of course, pure luxury isn’t everyone’s thing. And that kind of demure beauty easily falls into preciousness in the wrong hands. So many niche firms have churned out faithful, expensive irises, that nonetheless fail to break any new ground. Like vetiver, in all but the most skilled hands, iris is just iris.

But if you hanker for a wholly different breed of iris, you’re in luck. Part Two digs into Serge Luten’s Iris Silver Mist, which turns every tricky facet of the iris root (the breadiness, the carrotiness, the metalicness) up to an ear-splitting 11, with miraculous results. Stay tuned…

“…Cuz I’ll replace you!…with THE NIGHT!”

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Dominique Ropion‘s oud monster The Night is not available for sale on the Frederic Malle website. I had to ask to smell it at the Barneys in Beverly Hills. The excellent sales associate (Malle reps are always the best) was more than happy to retrieve a shiny gold box from one of a dozen identical white drawers and spray a bit on a testing strip. She was even kind enough to send me home with a tiny sample. So far, I’ve eked out a few cautious wearings.

For some time now, niche and mainstream outfits alike have pumped out bottles with “oud” on the label (or aoud, or oudh, as the case may be), attempting to court both those with a fetish for exoticism and the people who came up with oud perfume in the first place. In almost all cases, it isn’t real oud, but no one seems to mind. Despite the heavy saturation of “ouds,” there is still room in the ultra-high-end of the market. With a purportedly unprecedented dose of 60% Cambodian oud, and a spit-take-inducing $800 price tag, The Night was clearly intended to be the final word in Western oud perfumery.

If you’ve spent any time with Ropion’s Portrait of a Lady, you’ll find the melody at the core of The Night familiar. However, instead of patchouli you get oud as no Western perfumer has previously dared. Montale’s Aoud Cuir d’Arabie, my previous landmark for supremely animalic oud, came to mind when I first put the smelling strip to my nose. But on skin, the story changes. While Aoud Cuir certainly smells animalic, The Night smells like an actual animal. Every terrible thing to which you’ve heard oud compared (bad cheese, dirty band-aids, good cheese) are all beautifully apt, but instead of recoiling I leaned in. The initial blast is still unlike anything I’ve ever smelled, producing a physical sensation of glee. Nothing was ever this dangerous. Have you ever been to a My Bloody Valentine concert? It was kind of like that.

For Ropion and Malle it must have been a thrilling exercise, and the grand result is stunning and virtuosic. The combined perfectionism of Malle and Ropion has produced an exquisitely executed take on the classical oud and rose combo, a seamless cloak of oud and deep resins with sparkling red jewels. The music of the composition as it moves from the teeming salvo of the opening to the quiet, but still dangerous dry down is superbly accomplished. But at the end of the day, do we really care about how “good” something is? Don’t we really just want something to move us? On that score, I may still prefer Montale’s Black Aoud, certainly not cheap, but vastly more affordable than The Night. Black Aoud strikes a perfect balance between synthetic and natural, between good taste and bad. While The Night is a perfume of unquestionable sophistication and sensuality, Black Aoud is a perfume for adventure.

If you’ve just bought your bottle of The Night, I applaud you. If you balk at both the price and the uncompromising oudiness, fear not. There are many other fantastic options out there. My two favorites are Montale’s Black Aoud and Elie Saab Essence No. 4 Oud, the first being relatively easy to find and the latter devilishly tricky. And if you like the smell of The Night but can’t or won’t go full oud, opt instead for Malle’s Portrait of a Lady, which is apparently just as popular with men as with women.

Leather in Moonlight

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Sadly, Serge Lutens’s dark beauty Sarrasins is hard to come by. A scant three or four stores in the US carry it, and while it may be easily scooped online, actually smelling it is out of reach for most people. Even among the Lutens collection it’s a bit of an outlier. Its wearability and abstraction recall Chanel, which uncoincidentally is where its composer Christopher Sheldrake spent the mid 00s hard at work launching the Exclusifs collection. Incidentally, that initial launch of 31 Rue Cambon, Coromandel, 28 La Pausa, Eau de Cologne, Bel Respiro, and No. 18 occurred in the same year as Sarrasins, a slew of work which could respectably comprise an entire CV.

Based on the internet consensus, diminished distribution isn’t needed to ensure the scarcity of Sarrasins: very few people actually admit to liking the stuff. Generally, even the aficion seem to prefer Lutens’s A La Nuit, which Luca Turin rightly dubs “death by jasmine.” Far be it from me to tell you that the juice you love is crap, but far be it from you to tell me that Sarrasins, one of the most gobsmackingly beautiful, inventive, and thought-provoking perfumes I’ve ever smelled is anything short of genius. (And if you are one of those unfortunate people who laments the overuse of the word genius, I apologize. I think you people should use it more.)

Sarrasins opens with an explosive jasmine, certainly lifelike, but also powerfully evocative. I even imagine a fresh dusting of sparks as the opening settles. The scent eventually morphs into a slightly sweet leather with tangy balsamic facets. Indeed, even the woody notes in Sarrasins are powerfully suggestive, aching and keening like the smell of a freshly cut tree. It is important to note that while some (even Luca Turin) describe it as a “floral leather,” that descriptor is misleading. Sarrasins is decidedly not the obvious floral with a leather base. Instead, it progresses from floral to leather, suggesting some kind of transformation. The effect is like watching jasmine undergo a metamorphosis, from flower into a leathery skin.

Here the simple idea of jasmine into skin begins to take on a poetic resonance. Metamorphosis is a provocative theme, and Lutens uses it to show a surprising connection between two materials which on the surface could not be more different. This kind of didactic trick was accomplished at least once before by Lutens and Sheldrake. Their La Myrrhe moves seamlessly from choking aldehyde fireworks to crisp, sweet myrrh: a perfect marriage of the chemical and the mystical.

However, in Sarrasins Lutens’s poetic message is even sharper, more coherent, and more insistent. The composition feels streamlined and incredibly refined, with all arrows leading in one clear direction. In the words of Stephanie Zacharek (speaking about Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth), Lutens “pulled off the difficult feat of using pure sensation to make us think.” Consider me converted.

Old School

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I recently looked at my perfume collection and found it to overwhelmingly contain bottles from niche companies. I’m not some sort of niche snob. The trouble is I can’t think of a truly great mainstream masculine since Dior Homme, and while there have been great feminines, none has felt like the right fit. Admittedly, niche offers its own headaches, with obscenely high prices and a strong whiff of pretension. However, they do still put decent money into the formula, and can be relied upon to take some real risks.

Buying older formulas is tricky. I recently smelled a vintage bottle of Habit Rouge Eau de Cologne, which must have dated from the 80s or earlier. While the new formula is probably the best it can be, given regulations, cost, etc., that old juice blows it straight away. The opening is properly delicate and believably citrusy, and the whole effect is smooth and near edible, with that refined resinous core. There’s also a elegant off-the-cuffy-ness to the old stuff which cannot be found in, say, the current Eau de Parfum formula. At the end of the day I had to admit that it wasn’t a case of old vs. new (the new formula is still streets ahead of almost everything else on the market), I just wasn’t a Habit Rouge guy.

I ran into similar problems test driving a few more masculine classics. Kouros, though stonkingly good, smelled a little dated to me. Eau de Guerlain felt too dandyish for me to pull off. Pour Monsieur just made me hanker for a vintage bottle of Nicolaï’s New York, which is far more welcoming and friendly. I had given up the search when I accidentally happened upon a charming little perfume shop in San Francisco called Tigerlily. Their stock was good and the sales associate was uncharacteristically warm and game for a conversation about perfume. The jewel of the shop is a wall of vintage bottles, including Chanel, Guerlain, and–probably my favorite–Shiseido’s Femininité du Bois, in that funky, asymmetrical bottle. Hidden in the corner was something unexpected, a small selection of bottles from Caron’s illustrious range.

These days Caron is generally overlooked. Not just because their distribution is relatively small, but because apparently (I cannot claim first hand experience) some fairly horrific reformulations have rendered one of the greatest legacies in perfume completely unrecognizable. I had heard that the masculines still contain some of the old magic, and while I cannot comment on the old version, I can unequivocally attest that Yatagan is alive and well.

Yatagan kicks the door open with a cacophony of aromatic, coniferous resins. Soon a properly wicked and beguiling artemisia melody takes over and leads you into a smoky, animalic drydown with plenty of oakmoss. Notably, though it was composed around the same time as Kouros, it feels wholly contemporary. Yatagan is in fact the great granddaddy of currently popular incense and animalic perfumes, paving the way for Muscs Koublaï Khan, Bois de Encens, and so many others.

I cannot tell you how glad I am that this stuff is still around in its present form. Of course it smells fantastic, and like Muscs Koublaï Khan, it is quite polite until you get into close range. Yatagan is also beautifully smooth in the transitions and holds up well into the drydown. I can imagine it might seem underpowered compared to the vintage stuff. But these days, the present state of Yatagan is a welcome surprise and relief. It is still among the very best I have smelled in any catagory, and those looking for dry aromatic woods need look no further.