Late Summer Survival Guide, or What to Wear When the World's Ending

Maybe it’s insensitive to be writing about perfume when London is burning and our economy back home is imploding – again. But write about perfume I will. Between these doomsday scenes and the hottest, most humid New York summer in years, it’s been quite comforting to come across some lovely warm-weather scents.

Heeley Hippie Rose

Many of James Heeley’s perfume concepts straddle the line between formal and colloquial. The exquisite church incense of Cardinal, the weightless ‘tiger balm’ of Esprit du Tigre, and of course the nursery rhyme namesake of Oranges and Lemons Say the Bells of St. Clement's – they reference the commonplace through exercises in luxury.

So it goes for Heeley’s latest, the sweetly named Hippie Rose, inspired by Antonioni's dusty, sun-bathed imagining of hippies in the American West in Zabriskie Point. Hippie-chic is nothing new, nor are fragrances centered on rose and patchouli. Yet Heeley somehow makes these ideas new by conforming them to the house’s ultra-smooth style – putting a nice green bergamot up front, sweeping away the patchouli’s dirtier facets, smoothing over the rose’s harsher edges with mellow incense and vetiver, wrapping it all up in a sheer woody-amber accord. The rose in this case is Bulgarian rosa damascena – a wise choice because it’s always struck me as the ‘wildest’ smelling rose; plays well with others, so to speak; and avoids both the unflinching, cold perfection of Turkish rosa damascena and the ultra-femme, honeyed sweetness of the Grasse rosa centifolia.

Hippie Rose is an extremely fine execution of an idea that, frankly, never really got me going. Unfortunately, another feature of the Heeley line is frustratingly short longevity, and like a pretty flower (or pretty hippie) in the California desert, this one’s prone to withering in the heat.

Eau d’Italie Jardin du Poete

I was going to write about Eau d’Italie’s latest perfume via an open letter to Bertrand Duchaufour, its frighteningly prolific perfumer. Duchaufour was behind countless splashy niche debuts from the past two years, and a few in the near future: The Different Company's upcoming Oud Shamash; L'Artisan's Traversée du Bosphore, Nuit de Tubereuse and hyper-exclusive Mon Numéro series; Amaranthine and Sartorial for Penhaligon's, along with that house's Anthology series; 1697, Frapin's ode to cognac; Parfums MDCI's tribute to the French pear dessert, La Belle Helene; the list goes on. And don't even get me started on that bottled female orgasm for Marc Atlan. Really, Bertrand? Essentially, Duchaufour seems to have achieved the positioning of a movie director who can afford to choose only the most compelling jobs offered to him. Good for you, Bertrand!

I ditched the sassy open letter idea because, truthfully, that skyrocketing reputation isn’t undeserved: most of the perfumes I listed above are expertly crafted, if not everyone’s cup of tea. Perfect proportion and complexity of development are what I see as Duchaufour’s signature strengths, and Jardin du Poete is no exception, despite being less overtly ‘daring’ than his other perfumes for Eau d’Italie. Bracing citrus (primarily green orange) and a green bouquet of mint and basil give way to a cold spice mix of cardamom, pink pepper, and angelica, and some ‘wet’-feeling floral notes. The scent quickly moves on to a drier, warmer and sweeter phase, with a remarkably light immortelle note that manages not to wipe out the freshness of the opening, buttressed by moss and hay. 

There is a lot going on in this production ‒ perhaps too much. As impressed as I am by the scent’s rendering of a Mediterranean garden, I don’t know that a scent for the stickiest days of summer needs to be all that complex or cleverly referential.

Atelier Cologne Trèfle Pur

In contrast to Jardin du Poete, this little wonder is perfectly happy being discreet. In fact, it shares a number of notes with Jardin: cool, greenish basil and cardamom, and a mossy drydown. But it’s not as aggressively pristine as Duchaufour’s olfactory landscaping, and feels ‒ true to the Atelier Cologne concept – like a traditional eau de cologne with a bit of extra oomph and longevity, rather than a full-figured eau de parfum.

The basil and cardamom tint and refine the opening bitter orange; the heart pairs clover absolute (fainter than I’d wish, to be completely honest) with violet leaves and beautiful Tunisian neroli. Patchouli, moss and light musk round out the final phase, with glimmers here and there of the bitter green opening. The development is as leisurely and seamless as a Mercedes transmission. Trèfle Pur was composed by Jerome Epinette, best known for authoring almost all of Byredo’s perfumes (which makes me eager to give that whole line a more-than-cursory smelling).

Heeley Hippie Rose - $185 for 100 ml at LuckyScent.

Eau d’Italie Jardin du Poete - $140 for 100 ml at Aedes.

Atelier Cologne Trèfle Pur - $165 for 200 ml / $60 for 30 ml at Bergdorf Goodman

Telling Stories: Gorilla Perfume Pop-Up Shop and Gallery

(Updated with further thoughts on The Smell of Weather Turning)

My trudging work week ended yesterday with an unexpectedly pleasant surprise. The earth-loving artisans at Lush turned three floors of a building on Crosby street into a makeshift gallery to launch a number of new scents in their Gorilla Perfume fragrance line. Groovy!

The exhibit comprised a series of rooms dedicated to particular fragrances, each one furnished with an illustration of what inspired the scent (live dancers in one room, audio recordings of thunder in another, a bubble machine, dirty bathroom sinks, etc.) and a VERY friendly storyteller ready to translate smell into narrative.

In my typically nerdy fashion, I prodded these ladies and gentlemen for as much nerdy detail about the perfumes as I could, but they seemed far better-versed in the stories than the hard facts. After a while I didn’t even mind, because the stories (all drawn from the global adventures of Lush co-founder Mark Constantine and his son Simon, who author the perfumes themselves) were at the very least entertaining, and more importantly, in most cases they really did seem to relate to the final product, rather than feeling like a cut-throat marketing move. Kudos to these Willy Wonkas, then, for giving their scents more of a soul than one is apt to find in most perfume these days.

A fine example is The Smell of Freedom, which combines three olfactory portraits of people who have suffered extreme hardship into a ‘triptych’ of sorts. The scents were based on a Tibetan monk (clove, black pepper, ginger-honey tea), an Australian Aboriginal (fire tree, lemon myrtle, lemongrass) and a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner (oudh, jasmine, orris and sustainable Australian sandalwood). Each of the three portraits is available as a perfume oil in addition to the combined scent sold in an atomizer bottle.

Other highlights were the new Imogen Rose, a blushing Damascus rose swathed in vetiver, bergamot and soft ambrette; Dirty, a slyly marine-tilting alternative to Axe aimed at unshowered dudes; and three custom scents blended for an actress, an heiress and a dutchess (all of whose hair Mark Constantine had tended to in the 70s), each made available to the public for the first time and exclusively at this gallery for a properly luxurious $2,400 a pop.

My clear favorite, though, and the one that coaxed my credit card from the safety of my wallet, is The Smell of Weather Turning. The perfumers were encouraged to create this ‘thunderstorm in reverse’ by an employee of theirs who is also a white witch. They drew further inspiration from the musician Simon Emmerson, who is a member of an order of druids, as well as a dream Mark Constantine had at an Iron Age inn in Finland where they were fed nettles and dark rye bread.

All of these experiences led Mark to insist on only using materials that would have been available 5,000 years ago in the fragrance, and they pulled it off with aplomb.  Weather Turning turns up an herbal bouquet of English peppermint, chamomile and nettle that anchors quickly to a heart of stately oakwood mixed with what I smell as mossy notes, which provide just the slightest hint of marine saltiness. These first phases bring it initially close to Dirty, an older scent from Lush’s now-closed Be Never Too Busy To Be Beautiful line that Luca Turin dubbed “marine mint.” Where the newer scent differs is in the sweet hay and beeswax absolutes underneath, as warm and dry as anyone could want. The combination imparts both a vague smokiness and creaminess to the last (and longest-lasting) phase, and the beeswax seems to fix the entire composition in place. Those herbs that kick everything off don’t so much collapse into this last phase as they do sink slowly into it, such that one can still apprehend their dull silhouette many hours after their opening act. Minty scents rarely work well on my skin, but Weather Turning marks a bewitching (see what I did there?) halfway point between fresh and cozy. Wearing it out of the exhibit, it actually made me feel at home in the otherwise oppressively humid, pre-storm Manhattan night.

Some of the Gorilla perfumes will be available in Lush stores, but all of them, aside from the “three ladies”, can be purchased from the Gorilla Perfume website in 30 ml bottles or as solids. Many of the former Be Never Too Busy To Be Beautiful perfumes (Dirty and Ladyboy among them) are also available on the site.