Update: Check out Basenotes' interview with James Heeley from Esxence (the Milan perfumery trade show), here.
The closing commentary in my post on the Aftel lecture may have given the impression that my appreciation of scents is strictly egalitarian – that my nose is entirely unbiased and unconvinced by anything beyond the smell of the juice itself. That impression is actually pretty far from the truth. I’m a self-admitted snob. While I’m skeptical of most marketing gimmicks and breathless PR-speak, I’m also a total sucker for thoughtful packaging and quickly impressed by conspicuously high price points, low production volumes and other easy markers of exclusivity.
For shame! Every time I caress a neatly detailed flacon or
thrill to the lovely hue of the precious liquid inside, Luca Turin’s crabby
voice pops up in the back of my head and commands me, harshly, to follow
nothing but my nose. It’s a mandate I completely understand, especially given
the general consensus among olfactorati that the words “niche” or “independent”
or “exclusive” no longer mean much. Spend fifteen minutes on any fragrance
discussion board and you’ll find hundreds of voices insisting that a certain
mainstream $30 scent smells as good as, if not better than, a near identical
“niche” scent that costs four or five times as much.
I’m sure many of them are right. It’s not inconceivable
that an inexpensive mainstream fragrance could be transcendent, and I know first-hand
that there are fragrances marketed (and priced) as the most innovative, avant-garde
juice money can buy while smelling as cheap as a ten year-old bottle of Acqua
di Gio. Many argue that this resounding lack of truthfulness with which 99% of
perfumes are presented to the consumer is a desperate attempt by the industry
to maintain an aura of romance and mystery about their product. I would add
that the frequently bemoaned over-saturation* of both the mainstream and niche
markets, in producing a need for every new release to distinguish itself somehow, only contributes to the
problem. My skepticism of any grandly-introduced new fragrance, as a result, extends
both upmarket and down.
On the other hand, my own experience has borne out that a
higher price more often than not still yields noticeably higher-quality
materials, more risk taking, and a prioritizing of artistry over mass appeal.
Hence my curiosity is most often aimed at the more rarefied end of the
fragrance market. That being said, here are three fragrances I’m looking
forward to trying as soon as I can get my snobby little hands on them:
Oranges
and Lemons Say the Bells of St. Clement’s, by Heeley – Named for an old English nursery rhyme, this is the
latest from the eponymous perfume line by James Heeley, an English expat in
Paris and designer by trade who’s known for (among other things) his zinc vases
and perhaps the world’s butchest tea service. I’m generally not crazy about
citrus-dominant scents, but knowing how deftly Heeley handled incense in his Cardinal and the well-judged balance of
leather and powdery florals in the equally good Cuir Pleine Fleur, I’m quite keen to see what he’s done with
“oranges, lemons and Earl Grey tea.” Now Smell This lists additional notes of
bergamot, neroli, petitgrain, ylang ylang, oakmoss and vetiver, none of which I
can argue with. I suspect it will go in one of two directions: 1) yet another
clever ‘modern’ twist on a classical eau de cologne formula; or 2) somewhere
entirely different.
Tilda
Swinton: Like This, by Etat
Libre d’Orange – What a trend, this celebrity scent business! At first I
was surprised, and not pleasantly, that at a time when even Jennifer Aniston is
jumping on the bandwagon, a house as stridently avant-garde as Etat Libre d’Orange (who made a name for themselves by dropping a semen accord in their
infamous Secretions Magnifique)
would pull the same trick. Fortunately for snobs like me, house founder Etienne
de Swardt partnered not with an Aniston-caliber figure, so to speak, but
instead with one whose image dovetails impeccably with the house’s own. One
would expect as much from the folks whose prior two muses were Rossy de Palma
and Tom of Finland.
Work it, girl
On top of choosing an appropriately edgy celeb
(unimpeachable indie-cred! androgynous six-footer! polyamorous firecrotch!),
they took on the challenging notes of pumpkin and immortelle, and grounded the
concept in a love poem by Rumi. Business as usual, then. Other notes include
yellow mandarin, ginger, rose, neroli, vetiver, heliotrope and musk. Sounds rather
sexy, but rightly in that singular ‘Tilda’ way – much like her reading of the
poem itself. Have a listen for some mid-week thrills (or, perhaps, chills).
Spray to
Forget, by Reed Seifer
– Moving even further off the beaten path, here’s an amateur effort by a
non-perfumer. Seifer, the graphic designer behind last year’s
“optimism”-branded metrocards, created this fragrance in
conjunction with the 2010 Armory Show, for which he designed the ‘identity’
(pardon my squeamishness at design vernacular). As its name suggests, the blend of unidentified essential oils is intended to function as a palette cleanser for the memory – an intention
that obliquely challenges the proximity of the olfactory cortex to the amygdala
and other memory centers. And yet, in this era of the individual, is it not
tempting to think of our sense of smell as a means to renewal? On a more
tangible level, this will be my first sampling of a fragrance that relies on
water – purified and “magnetized” – instead of alcohol as its solvent (I
haven’t yet made it to Christopher Brosius’ Williamsburg gallery). And lest you
think it couldn’t get any wackier, that water was steeped for several days with
tension-relieving black tourmaline and Herkimer diamonds. Here’s hoping one of
the 500 limited-edition bottles (for an outrageously reasonable $25) is still available.
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* I didn’t originally intend to address this point in
depth, but I think it’s important to note that the insane expansion of the
niche perfume market – arguably guilty of the most vacant perfume verbiage out
there – has been driven in large part by a flourishing online community of
self-educated aficionados who, ironically, long to know exactly what perfumes
are actually made of. If locavores can reliably trace every crumb of what they
eat back to the very soil from which it grew, why shouldn’t a perfume house let
its customers know, for example, the geographic origin of the iris roots from
which its preferred iris essence is extracted? Or how many years those roots
were dried and cured? And which producer performed the steam extraction? In
fairness, some perfume houses do include some of this information, especially
when they want to highlight the quality of a particular raw material, but
generally speaking it’s all the same carefully worded bullshit that continues
to inspire the annual “Prix Eau Faux” on Now Smell This.