Serge Lutens

The Incomparable Khadine


– a review of Serge Lutens’ ‘Ambre Sultan’

When you become a true, obsessive perfumoholic, you read…a lot about perfume. Perfume blogs, perfume discussions, Basenotes, Fragrantica, The Perfume Magazine, and whatever articles that might pop into my newsfeed about…perfume.

An article in the UK newspaper The Guardian last December really piqued my interest. It was, among other things, a breakdown of perfumes suitable for the holiday season, and one in particular caught my interest by claiming this perfume was nothing less than that elusive Holy Grail…Sex in a Bottle.

Right. And I’m Queen Marie of Roumania.

Amber perfumes – remember, this was less than a year ago – in particular made me run for the hills screaming. No thank you. I’m too blonde, they’re too obvious and animalic, and besides, my mother wore and loved Shalimar. You know how that goes – anything chère Maman wore is forever out of the question.

But a few days reflection made me reconsider. It was a Lutens/Sheldrake creation, and those two have done more to shift my perspectives than any other perfume duo in terms of redefining perfume artistry. I will always, but always give them the benefit of a doubt. They have surprised me, delighted me, transported me, appalled me, challenged me and seismically shifted my olfactory universe forever. Chère Maman has been gone these thirteen years, so maybe it was time to…grow up? Maman did not wear Serge Lutens. (Trust me, she would have!)

Not to mention, as a woman ‘d’un certain age’ myself, surely I needed all the help I could get? Out came my little book of perfumes, the one it had taken me two weeks to gather up the nerve to ask for. There it was…

Ambre Sultan. In wax, it was…very, very good. I tracked down a small decant, and I do mean…small. There be dragons in that uncharted territory, and who knew what to expect? A man-eating monster? A chimaera? Medusa on the skin? Remember, this was a Lutens. Or was it really…the odorata sexualis of a woman, that particular fragrance Al Pacino refers to in ‘Scent of a Woman’ that transcends perfume, culture, ego, objections and neocortex in one fell swoop and makes a man think…

“This one. Oh, yes.”

I took a deep, deep breath when my decant arrived. I sprayed carefully. Whereupon Wolverine’s father immediately expressed his extreme displeasure, to put it diplomatically, and opened all the windows – in January.

Pity the man. He hates Fracas, too.

Anything my soon-to-be former husband hated on first sniff had to have something to recommend it!

I sniffed. Earthy, herbal, even borderline green at the opening. I was hugely surprised. I then proceeded to spend the better part of an evening with my nose glued to my wrist in a gesture dedicated perfumoholics know all too well.

Ambre Sultan that first, fatal night was a revelation. From that green, herbal blast all the way to the sweet splendor of its peerless golden drydown, it was astounding and surprising. It was one of the most beautiful things I had sniffed in my life. Even so – it is…an amber. Perfume Kryptonite for this Wonder Woman.

No amber could be that good. I had to wear it properly – the total full-body spray – or I couldn’t form an opinion.

That was a night I slept on the sofa. But the day that preceded it was the day I fell helplessly in love – forever.

The wonders of some other fabled ambers I have yet to try. I haven’t experienced Maitre Parfumeurs et Gantier’s Ambre Precieux, Goutal’s Ambre Fetiche, or Parfums d’Empire’s Ambre Russe. I’m sure they’re spectacular. Some day, I would like to try them, and I probably will.

But for this former amber hater, the platinum standard of amber perfumes, the Incomparable Khadine of ambers will always, but always be…Ambre Sultan.

The Incomparable Khadine…a Turkish word that translates as ‘lady’, was also used in the heyday of the Ottoman Empire to denote the Sultan’s favorite concubine, no small distinction when the harem of Topkapi contained over three hundred women, all intent on capturing the Sultan’s attention.

The incomparable Khadine that is Ambre Sultan is not, to the best of my knowledge, an olfactory recreation of the scent of a woman. It wears unisex – I can see this on a man equally well. Heaven forfend I ever meet any short Italianate Big Cheese wearing this, though. I can’t be held accountable for the consequences. They might be lethal.

If you’re looking for a magic carpet ride in a bottle that will take you away from all you think you know of ambers and much you might assume of perfume, look no further. The Khadine is nothing if not surprising, like all the most fascinating women – and perfumes, too.

It opens with a big, borderline bitter blast of green, dry herbs…oregano, which is quite detectable, bay leaf, coriander, myrtle and angelica. At this stage, it seems intimidating, even medicinal. Behind it, the merest hint of amber, veiled just enough to suggest other, sweeter marvels, but a Lutens perfume never gives it all away at the outset. It will take your time as it pleases and reveal itself as it wants, and all you can do is marvel at the view from your magic carpet. Don’t be deterred by the oregano, or even the bay leaf. Pizza will be the last thing on your mind. The coriander and myrtle restrain them, while the angelica with its licorice facet nudges at the wonders to come.

As the Khadine dances across your skin as smoothly as silk, after a good long while, the veil is lifted, an inch at a time, the herbs of the opening fade softly like stars in a morning sky, and the dazzling heart shines through – amber in all its golden magnificence, a sophisticated, grown-up, outrageously opulent amber. Like the gem that also gives this genre its name, different shades that here are different facets of the notes come forth to allure and recede to tantalize you further…dark patchouli, labdanum, styrax…and as even they bloom, the floorshow isn’t over yet.

Many hours later, when you’ve resigned yourself to thinking this is as good as any amber can get, the far drydown – a sweet, smoky mélange of tolu balsam, benzoin, sandalwood, musk and vanilla – lets the final veil drop, and the Khadine stands still before you – as delicious as a first, heated kiss, as deeply satisfying as the twenty-fifth that follows.

Is it that elusive beast – Sex in a Bottle?

Purely in the interests of scientific research you understand, I wore this to work last week. Now as you know, I’m no shy, blushing violet. I am also…‘d’un certain age’. And single. A fatal combination. I did nothing else to add to my own dubious allure except wear my everyday makeup – and Ambre Sultan. Enough to… make a statement. I walked home that day with four invitations – one for coffee, one for a movie, and two for dinner. Not so bad for a humdrum Wednesday.

They’re so sweet when they’re young!

If I were to write my own personal list of perfumes that qualify as ‘Sex in a Bottle’ – in fact, that’s a future blog post I have planned – Ambre Sultan would make it into my current top three. That does not explain why I love it with such a fury, why I’m so passionate about the perfumes of Serge Lutens in general or why I hope never to be without it for the rest of my unnatural lifespan.

Many of my Lutens favorites are infinitely much more than simply ‘sexy’. They challenge me, they tell me continually evolving stories, they change and shapeshift in a way few other perfumes do. Ambre Sultan is no exception to that rule. There is nothing like it in the golden world of ambers. It is flawless art and it is an immortal perfume and it is, to my decidedly biased mind, one of the greatest perfumes created in the past twenty years.

There are many amber perfumes around. Some are very good, some might well be spectacular, but there is only one…incomparable Khadine.

Ambre Sultan.

Notes:
Oregano, bay leaf, coriander, myrtle, angelica, patchouli leaves, amber, cistus labdanum, styrax, Tolu balsam, benzoin, sandalwood, vanilla, musk.

Ambre Sultan is available in the export line of Serge Lutens fragrances in many locations, as well as from the Serge Lutens website.

Image: Detail of ‘L’Apparition’, (1876) watercolor by Gustave Moreau.

Thanks to the fabulous Sevim Türkyilmaz for clarifying the concept of ‘Khadine’.

Dianthus in Abstract


– a review of Serge Lutens’ ‘Vitriol d’Œillet’

Life, John Lennon said once, is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. For my first review since Tuesday and some badly needed days off, I had, don’t you know, other plans…Plans to do a grab bag of mini reviews of whatever random samples my greedy little hands hauled out of the ‘yet to try’ cakebox, just so I could ease myself into the swing of things again. That should teach me.

Once in a while, something happens in a stop-press moment, where you just have to give up, give in and roll with it. Like yesterday, when the only thing in my mailbox was a plain padded envelope postmarked Paris, and I just knew it…drop everything, stop the press, OMG!!!….it’s le nouveau Serge Lutens…Vitriol d’Œillet!

Understand, I don’t do this for just anyone. But if I can blame any perfume house for my slippery slide into Vice I Can Ill Afford, it would be Serge Lutens. It was M. Lutens and his eponymous perfumes that reeducated my nose and realigned my amygdala and made me appreciate things I could have sworn I hated until that day I didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t even live without them.

So there I was yesterday afternoon, dancing around my living room like a Red Injun on the warpath with this plain white envelope. Breaking my rule of one perfume free day a week to clear my nose, tearing it open, yes, that’s what it is, extricating that tiny little sample vial and applying a discreet spray and…

What?

I had to sit down. I had to sit down for a moment, take a deep breath or two, a sniff or three at my wrist, and… laugh.

Laugh, because once again a Lutens perfume has pulled the rug from beneath my feet and foiled all my expectations and misconstrued ideas as to what an ‘angry carnation’ might be. If press releases and debates among perfumistas were anything to go by, this could be the most exciting thing to happen to carnation since…CdG Series 2 Red maybe? Poison, vitriol, acid, caustic, passion…there was no shortage of adjectives and similes on several social networks as to what an ‘angry carnation’ might be.

In my own head, I had an idea that it might be something the editor in my story, nicknamed ‘Caustic Cyd’, would wear for intimidation purposes.

Instead, I had a bad fit of the giggles. I always had an idea there were puns in those bottles and not just their names but puns of an olfactory kind, an unexpected twist on expectations as to what a perfume can be without ever compromising on a vision, a bit of strange, another, more compelling kind of beauty.

Carnations have all sorts of connotations, political, personal or in perfumes. Once upon a time, said Theophrastus, they were sacred to Zeus/Jupiter, later they were purloined and dyed green by the aesthetes of Oscar Wilde’s age (There’s a wicked parody in Robert Hichens’ book ‘The Green Carnation’), used as a symbol of a mother’s love, or in wedding bouquets to symbolize love, fascination and distinction, or alternately, if they’re variegated, an elegant way to say ‘your love cannot be returned.’

Trust the French to put another twist on the carnation. Purple carnations in France are traditionally used in funerals and symbolize misfortune and bad luck.

This vitriol of carnation is dyed a delicate, rather wistful violet hue…

First, forget everything you’ve heard. In fact, forget everything you know about carnation and carnation perfumes. The glories of, say, Caron’s ‘Tabac Blond’, or their famous carnation soliflore ‘Bellodgia’, forget Floris’ ‘Malmaison’, forget Nina Ricci’s ‘L’Air du Temps’ or Etro’s ‘Dianthus’. Please do forget the clove/cinnamon RedHot that is the Comme des Garcons’ Red Series version. Vitriol is nothing like it, and like none of them. It doesn’t have the vintage perfume-y vibe of Tabac Blond or Bellodgia, nor the lush floral bouquet of L’Air du Temps, and certainly not, at least to my nose, anything remotely resembling RedHot. It doesn’t smell old-fashioned in the slightest, and it doesn’t smell like anything else modern, either.

It starts out with a searing punch in the nose of pepper, black pepper, the sweeter and softer pink pepper, and an airy, fragrant carnation as they once were in some expensive florist’s, as cool and as fresh as the dew that still clings to those pinked petals. I do mean it smells fresh, and I do mean it is cool, but wait for it, this is a Lutens, after all, and soon enough, a fiery sotto voce whisper of cayenne pepper kicks up its heels and dances out into the limelight for a pas de deux cancan with that frilly flower as it whirls around and around a still clove center that spins it like a pinwheel. Now peppery, now fiery, now with a slight touch of dentist’s office and oil of cloves, but even as it heats up, it also manages to keep its cool. If that sounds like a contradiction, it’s precisely the kind of contradiction no other perfume house does quite so elegantly.

As it dries down, the clove grows stronger and a bit more emphatic, the nutmeg and the cayenne add a slightly human touch before fading away to a cool, powdery, nutmeg-woody whisper of past dreams of pinks. No floral notes are listed, so I must be imagining that light touch of rose and something that could be a suggestion of violet or is it orris for that melancholy air, that wistful, final wink of fire and pepper.

This won’t knock anyone sideways with sillage, so if that’s what you expect, you will be disappointed.

I can honestly say I wasn’t. Easily unisex, easily wearable, and easily blowing my preconceptions to frilly smithereens, it took me a while to understand the joke. The vitriol is that this is an abstract carnation, a deconstructed dianthus, taken apart to atoms and rebuilt from scratch into another, different kind of pink, an unusual carnation with tiny cayenne teeth to remind you that no matter how beautiful, no matter what color or associations you find in those toothsome petals, it still has enough fire to punch you in the nose if it so pleases!

Nothing like a carnation with an attitude problem. ‘Caustic Cyd’ wouldn’t wear this, but I certainly would, at the drop of a violet carnation…

Notes: Nutmeg, clove, black pepper, pink pepper, cayenne pepper.

‘Vitriol d’Œillet’ is in the export line of Serge Lutens perfumes, and will be made available worldwide in September. For European customers, It can be bought now from the Serge Lutens website.

Invisible Armor


– a review of Serge Lutens’ ‘Chêne’

The problem with being a certified perfumoholic is how it can spill over in unexpected ways into other aspects of life and associations that don’t have too much to do with perfume and more to do with what that particular scent and mood represents.

Once upon a time not too long ago, I wrote a nothing little short story that grew legs in no time and kept on walking, before it hopped, skipped, ran and evolved into a full-blown novel that wasn’t at all what even I expected. These were before the days of perfume blogging, before the days of friends on several sides of three oceans and help for desperate situations. These were the days when I debated with myself for weeks before I finally gathered up the courage to send an email to a perfume house so impossibly refined and indubitably sophisticated, I agonized over a French dictionary and my own oxidized French for three whole nights before I just gave up the ghost and wrote them in English.

Time to email Parfums Serge Lutens and request the famous Petit Livre des Parfums. I was some sort of grownup now, and I was getting awfully peeved at reading so many purple-prosed reviews of Lutens perfumes on perfume blogs and not having a clue. Nothing could be that good. I was too old to be that intimidated.

In no time, I received a nice, fat, fragrant envelope and a nicely signed card that I still own today, and braced myself for this Brave New World ahead. I knew that this was…a moment from which I could never turn back, and my olfactory universe would never be quite the same again.

One in particular caught my attention out of the many that I felt I must some day own, or else die with a severe sense of deprivation. As a perfume, it checked all the right boxes. Green, smoky, both ephemeral and earthy, it was like nothing else I had ever smelled, and evoked an emotion I had never felt before. It made me feel stronger, walk taller, it made me feel…invincible.

Chêne. A liquid ode to the mighty oak tree in all its aspects – the green of the leaves, the smell of sap, the sweet, vanilla-tinged fragrance of its wood. It was…love at first sniff.

It wasn’t long before a large decant found its way into my greedy little hands and Chêne found its way onto my green-craving skin. I never suspected I would enjoy feeling quite so much like Joan of Arc at the moment she walks into the French camp and demands a horse and an audience with the French king. Suddenly, I was Boudicca and Hippolyta and the living embodiment of every female warrior who ever breathed, and there would be no tragic ending here, no chink in this armor. I would never be punished for my transgression in thinking I was equal to anything or anyone, and I would not be intimidated…ever again.

Back to those ever-colder, ever-darker November nights not so long ago, wrestling with the Devil and a few demons of my own making, trawling the murky depths of my subconscious for a story I didn’t even know I needed to tell. Over the next few months, perfume too began weaving its seductive trail through the storyline…as the description of a mood or invocation of an atmosphere, as a bribe, or as a foreshadowing of events to come.

Above them all stood Chêne, my protagonist’s favorite. At her first meeting with a prestigious New York literary agent, she reflects…

I wiped my sweaty palms on my skirt, pulled at my suede boots and tried to forget a bra strap was slowly but surely sliding down my left shoulder. I should have worn something else besides Chêne, something safe and innocuous and familiar, but Chêne was my invisible armor.


And at a much later point in the story, after triumph and tragedy, the Devil, no longer what even he once was, decides to pay a visit and remembers:

Skin like silk, a perfumed promise of deliverance, that low, feline growl at the back of her throat, that green and sappy, sweet and smoky trail of Chêne at the back of her neck that drove me mad.


It’s no coincidence at all that the three perfumes my protagonist specifically describes as wearing at different times in the story are all Lutens/Sheldrake creations, nor that when the Devil takes a four-year vacation, he leaves with a bell jar of Chêne, one reminder of that latter-day Joan of Arc who stole the heart he didn’t think he had.

Herbal and green, Chêne starts as a surprise and ends as an aria to all the glories of the wood it celebrates. Cedar and thyme and a deliciously boozy rum dance out into the air off my skin. Instead of slouching, I stand up straighter. When first the birch and next what must be immortelle arrive, I’m talking back, I feel safe and protected and somehow invincible. Life can throw me whatever surprises it likes. Nothing will occur that I can’t handle. My invisible armor sparkles in the sunlight that bounces off the leaves.

Many hours later, the rum, birch, immortelle and sap give way to a furry tonka bean and smoky, burning wood, the scent of a bonfire flaming on a Midsummer’s Eve beneath the boughs, but this is no heretic burning at any stake for her hubris at challenging the status quo, this is a celebration of life and every living creature that breathes and loves. The eerie, earthy, aroma of sap and all that grows, the scent of the oak itself, sacred to Jupiter, and an intimation to be aware that not all that rustles in the undergrowth may be benign. Some creatures may bite, some may sting and all of them are hungry for that taste of green, effervescent life.

If ever a perfume smells…atavistic, this would be it. Proud and pagan, unapologetic and primeval, this is the quintessence of Wood, quintessence of Oak, a sophisticated ode to all that grows just below our ability to articulate it.

Nevertheless, we can grasp it, we can understand it, we can look up in awe at that majestic, sacred tree …and feel its essence in our bones and in that ancient part of our memories that hides just beyond our words.

Wearing Chêne, I can go out into the world and meet…literary agents, editors, Very Important People of any stripe, and present them with the Ten Most Important Reasons I Should Be Heard, and more to the point – knowing that I will be. I’m a latter-day Joan of Arc, although I won’t burn at any stake for my hubris and my own choice of divinity might be unorthodox. Yet I can accomplish whatever I choose with whomever I meet.

Now, Your Majesty, I shall need a horse and a sword. Where did you say those cowardly, lily-livered Anglais were hiding?

Notes according to Basenotes:
Sap, cedar crystals, black thyme, silver birch, rum, beeswax, oak, undergrowth note, tonka.

Chêne is available in the export line of Serge Lutens perfumes, available at Luckyscent, Aedes, and at Barneys NY. It is also available from the Serge Lutens website.

Image of Joan of Arc from Wikimedia Commons

Raspberry and Plums


– Perfume and the generation gap
Yesterday after work, I had a meet up with a female friend and mentor of mine, who takes a keen interest in perfume, this blog and yours truly, not necessarily in that order. To that end, I brought a bag packed with most of my sample and decant collection, which for reasons I have yet to fathom seems to be growing exponentially. All through the morning, a few of the other ladies, all of them in their twenties, eyed that bag and wondered at those boxes, until one of the girls finally summed up the courage to ask what was in them. It was our lunch break. I hauled them out…

Most of these lovelies know nothing of niche perfumes, and all of them have never known the heyday of broad-shouldered Perfume with a capital P. What they do know is that yours truly is the local Sillage Monster. They know I never wear the same thing two days in a row, they know I wear…a lot of it at any given time, and they know I sure as shinola don’t smell anything like their mothers…so their curiosity was killing them.

One girl – let’s call her Annie – opened up a box containing various Lutens, Amouage, my Atelier decant and the results of a sample spree at First in Fragrance. “I always wondered,” she said, “what it is about you and your taste in grandmother perfumes.”

“Grandmother perfumes?” I asked. Having recently acquired a young and ardent lover, ‘grandma’ anything was the last thing on my mind.

“Yeah,” piped in let’s-call-her-Beatrice, “they’re, like, heavy and heady. We can smell you after you leave the room.” She grabbed my decant of Boxeuses, sniffed, and wrinkled her nose.

I nodded toward the gang of testosterone in the room. “I haven’t heard any complaints so far.” Two of those guys still had fond memories of the day I showed up in a cloud of Bandit. They had been happy to say good morning ever since. My male boss on the other hand, took me aside later that day and told me I really shouldn’t wear Bandit to work. It was too…distracting. Score one for Piguet!

“Well, they wouldn’t, would they?” sneered Annie. She was still miffed I had scored a lover who was seriously cute and just her type. “Phew…” this was her reaction to my beloved ‘Ubar’, “damn, this stuff is…awful.”

“Only because you think you’re supposed to smell like watered down raspberries-with-rose,” I said.

“I hate those,” Beatrice reached for my purse spray of Lutens’ Fleurs d’Oranger and inhaled. “Holy…cow. So that’s what that was.” She bravely sprayed a wrist. “Oooooh. Wow. Gotta say it, this is sexy.” She didn’t stop sniffing. Her eyes were shining. When the jasmine and tuberose began their little pas-de-deux with a flurry of nutmeg and ambrette, she stared at her wrist as if she couldn’t believe such marvels existed.

“Too much.” Annie shook her head. She opened up another box and hauled out a white bag emblazoned with the Etat Libre d’Orange logo and ‘Le parfum est mort – vive le parfum.”

It figured the first one she would pull out would be ‘Secretions Magnifiques’. “Look…this one has a…” she waved the little booklet around. Our table erupted. “Yes, it does.” I snatched it away from her. “Trust me, you really don’t want to open that one.” Luckily, there was plenty else to distract her. ‘Rossy de Palma,’ ‘Vraie Blonde’ and ‘Nombril Immense’ were quickly discarded. ‘Noël à Balcon’ found favor, and so did ‘Encens et Bubblegum’ and ‘Jasmin et Cigarettes’. “This, stated Annie with finality, “is more like it!” She dabbed a little on one wrist. “I like it more and more…How much is 100 euros again?”

Beatrice was feeling adventurous. I knew it was the ‘Fleurs d’Oranger’. ‘Like this’ was inhaled. Her eyes opened wider. She grabbed the little glossy black box and took off the rubber bands. “So this is the one you’re working on for your book…” She took off the lid. There was no need to sniff, because the bass line of the Devil’s scent wafted in all its potent extrait strength glory all around the table. One four-letter word escaped her. “That’s the general idea,” I said. “You mean…” Annie’s eyes were as big as saucers, “people will actually buy this stuff? Like, pay money for it? And…” her voice dropped to a whisper as she tried to grasp that idea, “Like…wear it, too?”

“Well, it’s not finished yet…this is just the foundation, so to say…or the first draft.”

Meanwhile, a sweetheart Sri Lankan we’ll call Cherry, inhaled deeply. “This…she stated with millenia of heady Hindu perfumed history dancing in her head, “is…good. Really, really, good.”

“Have I got something for you…” I opened up Doc Elly’s box and located ‘Siam Proun’. “Here, try this.” “Oh! Oh!”. Cherry was in the grip of some powerful emotion she didn’t quite have the words for in Danish. She muttered something in Tamil. “It smells like…love, and home, and everything beautiful! Like something Saraswati would wear!”

“You’re learning, sweetheart!” I gave her a hug. “Then you shall have it!” She already owned ‘Gujarat’. She had been a darling ever since. If I gave her Siam Proun, she might let me snag a few of her pistachios.

“Pooh….” Annie waved her hand. “Too…much, if you ask me.” She sniffed her jasmine and cigarette-infested wrist. “Where can I buy this? And how long until payday, anyway?”

Beatrice turned the decant of ‘Fleurs d’Oranger’ over and over in her hands. Every so often, she sniffed at her wrist. Then, she straightened her shoulders, tossed back her ponytail, and sprayed the other wrist. “No such thing as too much, if this is what it smells like!”

I almost regretted not bringing ‘Ambre Sultan’, but there were maybe five sprays left, and they were m-i-n-e.

“Well…” Annie gathered up the mess of Etat Libres and put them back in their bag. “That was…an education.”
“What I want to know…” Beatrice sniffed again. She’d trail that sillage for the rest of the day and love every millisecond. “Is how do you write about it?”

“Yeah!” echoed Annie and Cherry, “How do you? Write about it?”

I gathered up decants and purse sprays and sample bottles and put everything back in the bag. “Search me. I don’t know. I just open up a sample or a bottle and…let my nose do the talking!”

“I know how you scored that cutie…” grumbled Annie. She pointed an accusing finger at the bag. “It was one of those…grandma fumes!”

Not true, but I’d never tell…


Later, after a decadent chocolate cake and a lot of laughter, my mentor – we can call her Denise – and I settled down with the boxes.

Denise is a few years older than I, a lot more settled and yet – she has never lost that sense of fun and mischief, which is one reason we get along so well. We hit it off instantly, that cold February day we met, and we’ve hit it off in a big way ever since. I adore her for the way she can rearrange my mental furniture in new and more efficient settings, and for letting me be myself. Once the mentor part is out of the way, we park business where it belongs and get back to the important stuff – like friendship.

She told me of a recent visit to Strange Invisible Perfumes in Venice Beach, and then went through my sample boxes.

“You know…I went to Luckyscent’s Scentbar in West Hollywood, I went to Sephora, and I went to that store in Venice Beach, and I even blazed through duty-free in Los Angeles and Amsterdam, but it’s gotten to where I don’t dare to buy perfume these days unless you’re with me. You know…” her brown eyes danced across the table. “Because you know what real women like!”

“To smell womanly, you mean?”

“Yes, to be…unique, to feel special, to feel…just a bit better than yourself!” She inhaled Andy Tauer’s ‘Incense Extreme’. “I remember you wore this the day we met.”

“I did.” And frequently ever since.

She found ‘Fleurs d’Oranger’. “OMG…this should be banned.” She sprayed an elbow.

“You realize that once you start batting for Team Lutens and Sheldrake, it’s over,” I said. “You’ll never be the same again, you’ll be corrupted for life, it’s the road to perdition…”

“Good!” She let it settle and opened ‘Ubar’. “I can see why this made you cry. Wow, it’s stunning. Just…” she breathed in. “Stunning. I can see why mainstream is so incredibly boring after this.” Her face had the word ‘epiphany’ written large all over it.

“Well, I like a challenge, and a journey in the bottle,” I said.

She eyed my decant of ‘Boxeuses’ and opened it. “I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it.” She sprayed a wrist. “Are there laws against this anywhere? If there aren’t, there should be!”

“Only in Canada…and Detroit,” I said.

“I can’t get over how incredible this is!” She sniffed. And sniffed her elbow, where ‘Fleurs d’Oranger’ bloomed its siren song. “I can’t decide. They’re both so gorgeous…” She had a faraway look in her eyes. “Second opinion!” She jumped up and consulted her hunky husband in the other room. A few minutes later, she came back. “He said ‘Boxeuses’, so ‘Boxeuses’ it is!

Before I left, she had me write down the web address of Serge Lutens. Less than an hour later, I received a text message while standing in the checkout line at my local supermarket. “Just bought Boxeuses! Can’t wait! And I can’t thank you enough, either!”

A convert to niche, to Lutens, and to plummy, yummy leather. And a bevy of beauties who realized that maybe there was more to perfume than raspberry and watery rose. Jasmine and cigarettes, jasmine and tuberose, plummy, yummy leather and priapic artwork thrown in, too!

Not so bad for a humdrum Thursday…

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