The Softest Sell


– when image is everything
At one important point in Quantum Demonology, one of the characters says “I can believe anything for at least five minutes, it’s all in the persuasion.”

So if you stop to think about it a little further, would you not agree with the statement that nowhere is that persuasion more emphatic than with …perfume? That art most ephemeral of all, fleeting as a spring wind, yet a perfume can engrave itself upon your memory and your emotions in such a visceral manner, it might as well be hewed in Carrara marble by Bernini to endure for eternity.

We buy, consume, wear perfume for so many reasons – to reflect our many and often disparate selves on any given day, to celebrate spring, summer, fall…or the first snow. We wear perfume to seduce and entice, or simply to seduce and entice ourselves into a newer, better self, however we choose to define it. We use perfume to define or emphasize a mood, a feeling, a certain emotion. As in…

“Today, you don’t want to mess with me. I am cool, confident and completely collected. Today, I wear Chanel no. 19.”

Or…

“Tonight, it’s you and me. The world stops at the door. Tonight, there are no…cell phones, no Twitter feeds, no Facebook status updates. Tonight, there is only now. So tonight, I shall wear Tabac Blond, for you alone…”

So by association, and by associating all the images conjured up in naming only two perfumes, two whole movie trailers play in the reader’s mind…Armani suit, well-behaved hair, an impeccable presentation of the ten most relevant facts a client needs to know to take the bait and pay the bills. Don Draper, eat my dust!

Or something black and slinky, something altogether different for an altogether different purpose…some time definitely after dark.

At least, that’s what yours truly tells herself in front of the perfume cabinet. Your mileage – or your perfumes – may vary.

But in choosing, buying, consuming perfume – whichever one you choose for whatever reason – you are buying into not just the juice, you are choosing, buying and wearing an entire aesthetic, as well. This was brought to my attention by some of the comments I received for my blog on Etat Libre d’Orange’s ‘Vraie Blonde’. Which got me thinking…and as we all know, that means trouble!


Behold, one of the glories of the twentieth century – Jacques Guerlain’s immortal ‘Mitsouko’, beloved, worshiped and adored by perfumistas and normal women alike since its creation in 1919. Because…it’s perfect. It is every bottled aspiration any woman and many men could ever hope to have, and – it’s Guerlain, who broke new ground in a world of ostensible soliflores with the still very modern ‘Jicky’ in 1887, and even then, they had been in business for over sixty years. Guerlain, to our jaded minds, wafts heritage, class, refined taste and a certain refined aesthetic native to France especially, where all aspects of life are sensual pleasures to be celebrated, explored and taken to entirely new heights. Buy a Guerlain perfume – almost any Guerlain – and you are buying an entire history in a bottle, all wrapped up in the heady aura of…Mitsouko, Shalimar …It is a compliment to your most excellent, discerning taste in that most excellent, ephemeral art form that is – perfume. In the unlikely if not implausible event anyone says it smells ‘weird’, please, just shoot that ignoramus on sight!

At the other end of that same super-sophisticated aesthetic spectrum, we have…the line of Serge Lutens. Whereas Guerlain has its nineteenth-century heritage to claim as its own, Serge Lutens as a perfume house has only existed since 2000, and yet, it would be fair to say that few other lines – and indeed few other perfume houses – have done so much to explore and even refine the singular and very personal aesthetic inclinations and preoccupations of M. Lutens and his perfumer Christopher Sheldrake. The brand, the concept, the very perfumes themselves are unique and uniquely intriguing, not least because this is not a mainstream brand, and these perfumes are nowhere near mainstream.

Yet the branding – of a super-luxurious, super-exclusive, inside secret of the cognoscenti fits the perfumes, even though many of them are challenging, shapeshifting, mercurial creatures who seem to take a life of their own on skin and bloom in ways we may or may not like. A Serge Lutens perfume can be difficult in a way no Guerlain can, can be downright obstinate and insistent and you can likewise insist that this…thing…on your skin is a horror story not even John Carpenter could cook up, until that one day, that one day you catch yourself thinking – as with Tubéreuse Criminelle pictured above…whoever could have guessed that gasoline and mentholated mothball could evolve into such peerless beauty? So you are hooked forever-and-a-day, and there is no cure, no panacea, no balm for that spot on your soul that only a Lutens could find and appease.

Meanwhile, we’re still in luxury territory, still within the safe and beautiful confines of sophistication and discernment and our own most excellent taste. There’s no disparity between the juice and the brand, nothing we need to outright reject, because it’s still…perfume. A necessary adornment and the only accessory that really matters, as Coco Chanel once said.

Perfumes came and went, perfume houses bloomed and died, all of them to the last bottle catering to our need for definition, our hunger for the extraordinary, the necessary, the hotly coveted…luxury, even if it were the only luxury we could afford, even if we would never wear or afford haute couture in our lives, we could aspire and breathe in that rarified air and for a moment believe ourselves to be…rare, exclusive sophisticates.

But times were changing, people’s perceptions of luxury and branding were changing – even luxury brands were – and are – becoming watered-down commonplaces, available to anyone with enough rubber credit and a bad case of the ‘screw-it-and-I’m-worth it’s. Other lines joined the fray in upping the ante to maintain that exclusivity, through price tag or limited distribution, all to better separate the plebes from the patricians, the cognoscenti from the clueless. Some of those lines merit their outrageous price tags, and some are just more…noisy hype in a world where everything is hyped as ‘luxury’, to the point where it can be hard to define what the word even means any longer.

Which was where that blog entry came in. Because in the comments, I came across several statements that quite simply stopped me in my tracks. It was a Japanese ‘satori’ moment, an ‘Aha!’ moment, when with a few select words, my entire perspective on perfume changed. Possibly forever.

In an Internet age, when everything new-ish is so five minutes ago, when chocolate, bath towels and even something so mundane as toilet paper can be marketed as ‘luxury’, along came …you guessed it…another perfume house, and this time, nothing ever would be quite the same again.

Enter the renegade perfume house of Etat Libre d’Orange, and pictured above, quite possibly the most universally reviled and deplored perfume ever created. No one who has ever experienced it can forget it, and many simply don’t have the stomach to try. It doesn’t even stop with the perfume itself. It’s the entire concept of the line. Because some of the comments stated quite unequivocally that the brand itself and its marketing concept was enough to reject the line entirely, and that was what stopped me cold.

Etat Libre chose a very different approach to marketing themselves as the Next New Kid On the Block. Instead of über-sophistication and exclusivity, they chose to sell themselves on shock value – and a certain adolescent – or tongue-in-cheek, if you prefer – image, and a definite salacious slant. With names such as ‘Putain de Palaces’ (Palace Slut), ‘Don’t Get Me Wrong (Baby I Don’t Swallow’) or even the infamous ‘Secretions Magnifiques’, they turned perfume marketing and branding entirely on its head, and even managed to raise quite a few hackles in the process by challenging all preconceptions as to what constitutes ‘perfume’ – that it must be beautiful, it must be luxurious, it must by definition be a continuation on an eternal theme – to smell good. And anything that smells…good must perforce be marketed like perfume has been marketed since the beginning of time – with the aesthetic we have come to associate with….perfume. Sacred, special, sophisticated, mirroring back to us our own…sanctity, uniqueness, sophistication.

Not so, if Etat Libre is anything to go by. They may have advertising copy Beavis and Butthead could have written (on a good day), their perfumes may have salacious names, and one of them may indeed be the bottled Texas Chainsaw Massacre in full Technicolor, 3-D and Smellavision, but all the same, they are doing quite well for themselves in spite of – or because of – that iconoclasm that dared to question our preconceptions of perfume and perfume marketing.

I have no problem with either personal choice and preference or iconoclasm – I actually gravitate toward it more often than not. If some would prefer to reject Etat Libre’s creations simply for their Beavis and Butthead aesthetic, well – it’s a free country, right? We’re inundated with choices every day. The old cliché – to each his or her own – is nowhere more true than in perfume. One woman’s Poison is another woman’s Obsession, etc.

Personally, I would never write off a new experience of any kind I might stand to learn something from. (If nothing else, I could always use it in a novel!) I would never reject an entire line on principle, because in my daily life, no one would ever know about my super-deluxe-exclusive-only-available-every-other-decade-limited-edition-and-distribution-vintage-in-18K gold-bottled…perfume. My surroundings would pass their judgment something along the lines of…good/bad/yuck/let-me-rip-off-your… etc. Which is fine by me.

What is very fine indeed by me is the occasional…huh-huh…Beavis..check-this-out-dude…reminder that sometimes, marketing can take itself too seriously, perfumes can certainly take themselves too seriously, and what we really need to do is just…chill out, laugh and let our hair down a little. There is a space and a headspace for our longing for the ephemeral dream that is perfume, for that flawless, shining moment of transcendent beauty that gives us such joy simply to exist, to live and to breathe! There is a place for our inner teenaged longing for irreverence and off-color, too, should we be that way inclined.

And above all, sometimes we need a reminder – that it’s only perfume, people! The softest sell of all!

Images:
Illustration for Le Galion’s ‘Snob’ by C. Maurel, 1957, belledepub.free.fr.
Vintage Guerlain Mitsouko, guerlainperfumebottles.webs.com
Limited edition Serge Lutens Tubéreuse Criminelle, megsmakeup.com
Etat Libre d’Orange Secretions Magnifiques, Etat Libre

Devilscent – Part Three


– Meanwhile, from the producer and his accomplice…

I never know when I’ll look up from my notebook or my laptop and there he’ll be on one of my kitchen chairs, tipped back against the wall, giving me his best dirty-boy look. He’s usually looking at the increasing pile of samples in boxes piled up on my printer. To be fair, I haven’t seen him in a while. Sometimes, he looks like himself, sometimes like one of his many disguises. Last night, he looked like himself, or at least that self I’ve come to know.

“You’ve got a surprise coming in the mail, baby.”

I looked up from the blog I was reading, and considering the bombshell I was trying to imagine from the words on that blog, that says a lot.

“I do?” This had been known to happen. Surprises usually came in windowed envelopes and were also known as ‘bills’. On rare occasions, they came in bubblepack envelopes from remote locations and had been known to cause spontaneous whoops of joy and a flurry of air guitar. “Oh, hell. It’s you again.”

“Yeah. Miss me?” The grin on his face was nowhere near five years old, but more like fifteen. It would be better described as a leer.

I’m not stupid. This was an entity – or a muse – that could cause writer’s block, imagination overload, impulse CD and DVD buys and the creation of a certain type of literature I could only publish under a pseudonym. “Always.”

“Cool! As I said, Doc Elly’s been busy. She’s found a few things to…throw in the mix. The ball is rolling, baby. This will be good.”

“Really? Like what?”

The chair landed with a thud on its legs and he leaned closer. His voice dropped lower. “Stuff no one else has ever used. And stuff that’s rarely used. Special stuff.”

“Oh! Did she say anything else?”

“Well, not exactly. She posted a cute picture of a satyr playing the pipes for a swooning mortal.”

“I saw that. I don’t know that you make me swoon.” I closed my laptop with a click. “Maybe you should.”

“Maybe…” The Devil helped himself to my lone glass of Friday night prosecco. “And maybe you should watch a little less TV and write a little more, read a few less blogs.”

“Oh, c’mon. It was one documentary. It was Sir Richard Burton, the explorer. I had to see that.”

He laughed. “Here’s what I know. I’ve been asleep on the job. There’s a perfume to make. We’ve got…something going on in that little black box.”

“The bass line. Wasn’t that what you called it?” It was more like a hard rocking lineup to die for, but I didn’t say that. He was the Devil. No reason to point out the obvious.

“A little drum, a lot of bass…we need more…percussion. Some rhythm, the beginnings of a riff, a melody line. A perfume that’ll make the whole world swoon.”

“I thought that was your job.” I reached out for my glass of prosecco, but he refused to hand it over.

“It is.” He drained the glass and placed it back on my desk. “Here’s your job.” He opened up my laptop, typed the password I didn’t need to tell him, and I found myself looking at an empty Word page.

“Write about it, baby.” He stood up, walked over and whispered in my ear. “You know you want to.”

When I looked up again, he was gone. I knew he would be back. He wanted to smell what happened next with that little black box.

Image: Hezico’s Tarot

Zeta Winners!


I’m beginning to see the appeal of random.org! Choosing a winner was agonizing, since all of your replies were so compelling, so creative and so…darned good, it was nearly impossible to make a decision! If I could have had my way, I would have had samples for each and every one of you, and alas and alack…I have only two!

So before I incriminate myself further, let me say this:

Thank you, each and every one of you, for all of your creative, inspiring odes to Spring and your comments on my review. I had to choose two, but if I could have…

The winners are:

Undina and a.k.a Warum

Congratulations to both of you! Please contact me with your address information at tarleisio at gmail dot com.

Life’s a Peach!


A review of Etat Libre d’Orange’s ‘Vraie Blonde’

Scandinavia, any red-blooded male will tell you, is the natural habitat of The Blonde. Tall, short, silver, bronze, amber and every shade not even L’Oreàl has discovered yet. Pixie blondes, mermaid blondes and suicide brunettes with fair roots.

Blonde may be a state of mind or just a moment, and blondes have more fun, right?

I doubt it, but bear with me. I’m having a moment and I am…a blonde.

There are even perfume blondes…Daim Blond, Bois Blond, Tabac Blond, or even Chanel no. 5 by way of association with one of the world’s most famous ever (bottled) blondes, which is beyond horrible on this particular blonde. Scents of suede, woods, tobacco or aldehydic florals, they’re not really about being blonde at all.

Which is not something you could ever say about Etat Libre d’Orange’s Vraie Blonde.

Etat Libre is a line that tends to make a lot of people, well, nervous. Nervous to have their scented bubbles burst, their preconceptions challenged by whatever true-crime movie ELdO bottles up and unleashes upon an unsuspecting planet.

If that’s your idea of Etat Libre d’Orange, stop right there. Vraie Blonde isn’t one of those.

Instead of distance and glacial perfection à la Grace Kelly or Catherine Deneuve (my all-time favorite blonde), this blonde is flirty, peachy, utterly and completely approachable. Instead of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this is the best kind of Thirties screwball starring Carole Lombard. Blonde, yes, kooky, yes, but smart and sassy too, and if all she wants is to have a good time and let her hair down, who am I to argue?

I was…surprised, and that’s a good thing. I like surprises. I like knowing that there are knock-your-socks-off, opulent Orientals, I like knowing about immensely complex perfumes that are never the same from wear to wear, I like instant sex appeal and I like happy-go-lucky florals, too. I like don’t-mess-with-me leathers and chypres. Help me, someone, I love them all.

Do you know, sometimes I just want to let my own hair down, drink slightly too much champagne and be…well, blonde, too! Certainly if champagne is involved. Among other things.

Out of the bottle, Vraie Blonde is a bubblefest of aldehydes and a hint of champagne. Rose and white pepper are in the mix, too, says Fragrantica, but what I get is…peach. Not too sweet, definitely not canned, but sun-warmed, perfectly ripe and right off the vine, ready to slice into the chilled glass of bubbly on that golden summer evening when your most pressing intellectual concern is to savor the moment and dish all the off-color jokes unfit to print.

Later, the bubbles fizz and soften to a slightly smoky finish where I can detect a suggestion of patchouli and a hint of myrrh that stays close to the skin, but not so close someone else can’t appreciate it. On my skin, it lasts about three hours, which is just right for two bottles of champagne, a pound of peaches and my repertoire of dirty jokes.

Vraie Blonde makes me laugh. Laugh at the absurdities of life and the seriousness of love, laugh at myself and laugh in good company. Laugh because this is a good night, and great champagne, and peel me another perfect peach, would you, darling? You are a peach of a guy. There’s more champagne and life’s a peach, and did I ever tell you about the time I pulled a Lady Godiva by accident when the horse rode off with my clothes one day at the beach, so I had to chase after it, right, which was when these two dishy police officers showed up. So I said to the horse, and whoever says that horses can’t laugh is dead wrong…

What did you expect? I am a blonde, after all, ornamental topiary included!

Thank you, Etat Libre. I shall henceforward never write you off as gimmicky again. I didn’t expect to like this so much as I did, and I certainly didn’t expect this reminder of one very important fact.

Sometimes, life’s a peach!

Thanks to Dee who sent it…tongue-in-cheek and with a wink!

Notes according to Fragrantica: Aldehydes, Champagne Cognac Liqueur, Rose, Vine Peach, White Pepper, Myrrh, Patchouli

Linden Calling – and a giveaway!


– a review of Andy Tauer’s ‘Zeta’

Spring…has sprung, and as it has, as it does every time and every year, it takes me by surprise. The Japanese cherry trees are bursting out in all their girlish, pink powder puff blossoms, the morello cherries are dusting off those winter blahs in blinding, bridal white, and everywhere I turn, nature has exploded in every shade of tender green.

Two short months from now, high summer will arrive. When everything that grows and everything that lives is at its most alive and aware, when the trees turn a darker, denser shade of green and the linden trees begin to bloom.

Summer has so many scents and smells. The sharp tang of cold lemonade on a hot day, fresh-mowed grass after rain, the coconut aroma of sunscreen and that salty kiss of sea and sand, the sharp smell of ozone during a thunderstorm or the verdant zing of a tomato plant soaked in earth and sunshine. All of them evoke ‘summer’ in whatever sense of the word, but to me, nothing quite spells ‘summer’ and ‘magic’ quite so much as linden trees in bloom.

In my native Denmark, you will find linden trees nearly everywhere you go. The long driveways of centuries-old manor houses are planted with linden trees and so are winding country roads, city parks are packed with them, apartment buildings have them planted in courtyards and playgrounds. Linden trees and linden blossom everywhere, and no one I know can resist them when they bloom in all their gold-green glory, even for a moment. Toddlers and tearaways alike will stop in their tracks, look up, and for once be entirely present to breathe in that complex, green, heady scent.

This is what Andy Tauer chose to recreate in ‘Zeta’. In a unique correspondance with natural perfumer Mandy Aftel and thanks to Nathan Branch, we have been privy to their creative processes from the beginning, as they both chose their individual interpretations and the challenges they encountered and shared along the way.

Many linden-themed perfumes choose the green route, and forget that linden blossoms positively drip nectar as they bloom, nectar that is often used in linden blossom honey, with a unique flavor and aroma all its own.

Zeta is not one of those. If you’re familiar with Andy Tauer’s creations, you know they are often tenacious, bold and sometimes with the half-life of certain radioactive isotopes.

A bright green zap of bergamot wakes you up right out of the bottle, but this is no usual citrus, because in no time at all, a flawlessly orchestrated linden blossom accord grows and blooms by the heat of your skin, so much, you look around and wonder where you are. It’s much less sharp and loud than most linden blossom perfumes, and right when you, too, are caught dead in your tracks to just this one moment breathe…that honeyed nectar drips down upon you and wraps you in a gold-green glow as soft as a two-ply cashmere shawl, as sweet as a drop of honey on your tongue, and as heated as a perfect high summer day. Zeta isn’t just olfactory sunshine, it is olfactory heat, but it’s never obvious, it’s never loud and it’s never overwhelming. Instead, it’s ethereal as air. I can imagine Titania in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ dabbing this behind her ears, before she quarreled with Oberon.

Meanwhile, one very mortal human – yours truly – is blown away by two things. First, that linden blossom can be so heartstoppingly beautiful, so green, so sweet and so soft. And second…

I am the original Honey Monster. There are a few notes in perfumery I can’t personally stand to wear, and I tend to avoid those when I can. And then there is the one note that refuses to wear me under any circumstances and in any form. (Maybe I was a queen bee in an earlier life. I wouldn’t be surprised!)

Honey. Honey is amped up to 11+ on my skin, it grows and grows and grows like some sentient, alien life form until it’s all I can smell and all I will smell – for days. Even if this honey is unlike any other honey I’ve met in perfumery, even if it’s more blossom nectar than honey…this love affair, alas, is very much unrequited. So I shall take solace in those other Tauers that do love me and my Honey Monster skin, but I say this now – Zeta is as incomparable, as beautiful and as perfect as the warm shade under a blooming linden tree on that one day of the summer that you will never, ever forget.

But once in a high summer moon, a perfume can be created with such care, such love and such utter joy, it takes your breath away and makes you grateful to be alive to share such marvels, to sense and appreciate that alchymistic ease with essence and oil, plant and potion, regardless of whether or not you can wear it. It’s a testament to both the spirit of the concept – the genie in the bottle, if you will – and the spirit of the perfumer, and Zeta has so much utter joie de vivre, I’m amazed to find it confined to such a tiny glass vial.

Therefore, because it’s Spring, because this perfume is Spring personified as well as the liquid embodiment of Summer, and because I am a firm believer in the rule of ‘Give!’, since it rhymes with ‘Live!’, Scent Less Sensibilities is hosting its first ever giveaway. I have two retail samples of ‘Zeta’ to give away to my readers. I could be boring, and let random.org determine the outcome. I could use my magic 8-ball, or even my Tarot cards. I have a better idea. I will send each of those two samples – that I won fair and square myself – to the two most creative continuations of the sentence ‘I love Spring because…’

So I do. Sometimes, it’s pretty…magnificent to be reminded!

For as Pablo Neruda once wrote…

Let the wax raise 

green statues, let the honey 

drip in infinite tongues, let the ocean be a big comb

and the Earth a tunic of flowers…


And Andy Tauer responded:

“Linden shade in June –
sweet rose petals and the light
of Syracusa.

A winner will be announced on May 4th.