Winter Wardrobe, Part 3: The Gift Certificate

(In which I solicit the sage advice of my dear readers)

Update: The winner, by one vote, is Cozé. Thanks to everyone who voted!

You read it right. My big holiday gift this year was a generous gift certificate to Lucky Scent, run by the good people behind L.A.’s brick-and-mortar Scent Bar, where I once spent almost three hours on a stool sniffing whatever the patient ‘bartender’ could think to hand me before I made off with a bottle of Sel de Vetiver (it was December, but Celine Ellena’s beach-skin and salted caramel miracle made enough sense on the West Coast to warrant the splurge).

But now I need your help, reader. As I mentioned in my last post, I hate making decisions, so I’ve turned to you (and to Polldaddy) to help me decide how I should spend my Lucky Scent dollars. I’ve already winnowed down my initial list of around two dozen candidates by eliminating any scents I can buy locally in New York (Fille en Aiguilles, Sienne L’Hiver, Shiloh, anything from Le Labo or CB I Hate Perfume) and, in a mostly gestural nod to practicality, anything that’s occasional, extravagant or simply expensive enough that I couldn’t bring myself to drop my own hard-earned dollars on it, much less 'free' money (Absolue Pour le Soir, Stoned, Comme des Garçons x Stephen Jones, etc.). Maybe that’s the kind of thing gift certificates are for, but I’m determined to buy something I’ll get a lot of mileage out of, so to speak, rather than something merely to prove what a robust aficionado I am.

The elimination process has left me, bizarrely, with a choice between two scents from the same house: Pierre Guillaume’s Parfumerie Générale.  I’ve been acquainting myself slowly with Guillaume’s numbered portfolio and “Private Collection” of fragrances, and have grown to recognize the ultra high-quality sense of cohesion in them, which no doubt arises from his background as a skilled chemist. His technical prowess goes beyond the expert linking of disparate ingredients to the interaction of those ingredients with environmental factors like light and heat; many of his scents utilize a proprietary process called “photo-affinage,” whereby “olfactory peaks”  are smoothed out by ultraviolet radiation. He’s also the pioneering beneficiary of a new extraction technology that’s enabled him to plant alarmingly accurate fresh fruit accords among the "olfactory spheres" in his newly-launched second brand, Huitième Art Parfums.

Guillaume’s body of work appeals to me not because it’s the work of a “rockstar” like Francis Kurkdjian or even an avant-gardist like Geza Schoen or the Antoines (Lie & Maisondieu), but because it’s the work of a committed nerd – albeit a French nerd, meaning a sexy one. Rather than proposing the sort of arch-cerebral, almost confrontational ideas that sprout incessantly in the overcrowded world of niche perfumery (ambrox trend, anyone?), he reserves his skill and talent for exploring subtle, precious moods and emotions with a cartographer's precision.

And with apologies for that sycophantic introduction, here are the two candidates:

Private Collection: L’Ombre Fauve
Its name translates to something like “beastly shadow”, and true to form, this scent is dark, dense and alternately scary and cuddly. The official list of five notes (amber, musks, wood, incense and patchouli) suggests a simple, minimal construction – a notion quickly belied by the sheer opulence of the experience, from the first spray to the lingering whiff you’ll get on your coat collar two days later. Animalic musks and patchouli do much to expand the powdery amber and wood, but the true heart of L’Ombre Fauve is an otherworldly tint or texture that repeatedly makes the quietest of entrances and exits. Many fans call it the “fur” or “wild animal” note. Some call it “metallic.” Luca Turin (a fan himself) calls it “raspy.” Whatever it is, however he did it, Guillaume managed to make a sweet ambery oriental that doesn’t bore me to tears after ten minutes.

02: Cozé
Despite its salutatorian name, Cozé is actually the fragrance that launched Parfumerie Générale. Originally a blend that Guillaume had created solely for his own and his father’s personal use, it caught the attention of a Swiss art collector and perfume enthusiast who all but demanded it for himself and his circle of connoisseurs. Surprisingly easy to wear, Cozé subjects the dozy herbal funk of PG’s exclusive hemp seed oil extraction to a Kevyn Aucoin-worthy makeover involving heady pimento, camphoreous patchouli and an especially bitter dose of coffee and chocolate. A heavily-refined mossiness sets the overall tone – somewhere between a misty forest and a hotboxed Bentley. “Hippie luxury,” this scent seems to argue, is not a contradiction.

And now to the poll! Thanks for reading and voting, and of course, feel free to suggest other ideas in the poll box or in comments.

Translating Margiela

I.

Shall we get right to it? (untitled), the first fragrance from Maison Martin Margiela, was composed by the gifted Daniela Andrier, a watercolorist of a perfumer and the author of Prada’s madly successful Infusions series, and it proceeds something like this: a splash of fresh wet green to start; soft, cuddly resins wrapping a statuesque bigarade; a polite suggestion of jasmine and warm cedar; pretty-but-anemic musk and a drop of sweat. It generates more than decent sillage, but after the opening blast of galbanum fades (it doesn’t take long), all I smell from a distance is pillow-soft amber and bitter orange. If I really hound my wrist I get the faintly animalic musky base and traces of incense.

These are lovely notes, every one, and elegantly interwoven, yet I’m left wishing for twice the effect packed in half the volume, and more importantly, something to skew it a degree or two off-trend. (untitled) is a very nice fragrance, but in the way that a Margiela t-shirt is just a ‘very nice’ t-shirt.

Luckily for the Diesel Group (Maison Martin Margiela’s new corporate parent), very nice is plenty good enough for a lot of people – especially, I would wager, the kind of people who prize expensive simplicity and prefer to smell ‘like nothing.’ I can’t help wondering, though, what might have been if the same devil-may-care daringness had been applied to this project as has been devoted to the house’s most thought-provoking designs. What if the bracing, bitter green notes were prolonged, kept aloft by brighter, headier incense instead of giving way to the woody-floral heart? Or what if the musks were even dirtier, saltier, suggestive of a wet animal coat made strangely desirable (think of the wet fur facet of L’Artisan’s Méchant Loup)?

I’m not suggesting either of these ideas would be better than what ended up in the bottle. The trouble with (untitled) is that I can’t seem to find its identity. It somehow feels overdone and incomplete at the same time. And while I know it’s splitting hairs to say so, even the way it was introduced lacked the intelligence and straightforwardness on which la Maison stakes its reputation.

Last week’s event at the New York Margiela store, for example, featured no experiential process by which to try the scent, unless you want to count the precious scented cloth buttons that were pinned to lapels here and there. Unlike the comparably lavish Paris launch, there was no tower of bottles, no flashy reveal, and no white confetti either. There was merely a pair of tester bottles on a sober white pedestal – arguably more in sync with the house’s aesthetic and yet not very exciting – and a surplus of hors d’oeuvre-bearing waiters. I was kind of hoping I would have to follow the scent across an unlit room to its source on the gaunt neck of a nude model, or something to that effect. I gave up a ticket to Die Zauberflote so I could attend, for pete’s sake! Admittedly, that imaginary scenario is more for-its-own-sake wackitude than something actually meaningful, but surely the passing of lukewarm beet canapes isn’t the only alternative.

Conversely, the house appeared intent on taking its fragrance seriously even if no one else cared to. The testers bottles were accompanied by a handful of small vials bearing samples of (untitled)’s featured raw ingredients (galbanum, galbanum resinoid, bigarade orange, lentiscus resinoid (mastic), and incense) – a thoughtful way of being informative that, by my count, about three partygoers took advantage of. Considering the fashion-oriented crowd and the mill-about, free champagne mood of the gathering, that forlorn display seemed to cry out for all the perfume geeks who weren’t there. It worked as a visual reminder of the house’s preoccupation with construction and process, but then if they really wanted (untitled) to live up to its name and “to hold different meanings for different people” (which itself is not a particularly unique sentiment about perfume), they might have considered not publicizing the list of notes at all, as Hermès did with their new Voyage.

I like (untitled) more than I’m letting on. But at the end of the day, I would’ve believed any number of other designer names slapped on the smart, paint-dipped lab bottle, and I find it difficult to believe (as the house insists) that Martin Margiela himself had anything to do with the project.

II.

The most curious part of the whole enterprise, though, is the deliberately obfuscated marketing copy being used to promote it. In the interest of mining the true intentions behind (untitled), I took the liberty of translating a few breezy excerpts into more everyday statements:

“Everyone can feel called into question by a colour, a shape or a garment… We wanted to give perfume the same chance. Stripped of any reference to an influence of precise climate, (untitled) can be interpreted and worn for all occasions by every one of us.”

Translation: “Everyone can feel befuddled from time to time by our most overwrought pieces. We wanted to disorient our audience with perfume as well, except in the sense that it has little to do with our founder’s vision, which really no longer directs the house anyway, you see. (untitled) takes Margiela into an entirely new market, bearing an instantly familiar, purely pleasurable character.”

• • •

“For its first olfactive creation, Maison Martin Margiela has chosen to strike out on a new path, reformulating the forgotten green fragrances that symbolised the femininity of the 1970s… The principal element of this woody green floral is Galbanum, a fine and rare raw material. Its incisive notes are boosted with the bitterness of box green, the vibrancy of lentiscus and incense, and the smoothness of bitter orange. Like a huge armful of plants harvested just after the rain, its raw state recalling pared-down garments and hems cut open, emblematic signatures of Maison Martin Margiela.”

Translation: “For our first scent we chose to try one of those green fragrances we learned about. It’s said they are reminiscent of a perfumery style from the ‘70s, and we totally heart the idea of ‘reinterpreting’ and ‘reinventing’ things from the past… The best way of blasting someone with green freshness is evidently a double-hit of galbanum, which is suitably uncommon and smells enough like wet plants that people can describe it as something other than just ‘clean.’ Then we loaded up on that awesome bigarade and some other, more subdued notes that make it smell discreetly expensive.”

• • •

“Faithful to its philosophy of metamorphosis, of finding a ›second life‹, Maison Martin Margiela turns this exhumed classical foundation upside down, and contrasts it with resonances of sweet jasmine and musky cedar. Its striking pedigree is then edged with a dense, almost filmy warmth.” (weird emphasis theirs)

Translation: “We had this retro style that we needed to bring into the ‘now’, so we included some airy jasmine and cedar notes for that luxury soap feeling, and finally some slightly dirty white musk that makes people think of their own skin. We figured that would make it attractive to people who are too cool or too confident or simply embarassed to wear perfume."

• • •

“I know that perfume must not follow a fashion or a trend, but an instinct. This first perfume expresses a femininity which does not fit into formal categories… I am grateful to Maison Martin Margiela for whispering the formula for this perfume into my ear.”  -- Daniela Andrier, perfumer

Translation: “I know that it’s important to this brand to believe in themselves as perfectly unique, so I designed their first perfume to evoke the kind of woman who works hard at her ‘effortless’ look, and is willing to go a few weeks without washing her hair for that bit of grit. I’m grateful that the imprimatur of a brand like Margiela made this gig a walk in the park. I mean, really, who’s going to object to galbanum two ways with an orange julius on top?”

• • •

“By creating fragrances woven in the most beautiful raw materials and melted with poetic impetus that is found in the inspired wearer, perfume can be saved from the terrible trivialization that threatens it. This is how I wrote the formula for this first perfume for Maison Martin Margiela, with that special grace that comes with the perception of the obvious, that clarity that gives us wings in the wonderful encounters of our lives.” -- Daniela Andrier

Translation: “I feel so fortunate to have been selected for this project. Thank the lord Diesel put up enough cash to give it some teeth! And all you catty perfume freaks who think I’ve cloned an easy hybrid of all my recent work can screw off and die. You know it's good! And it was actually a very welcome break from simply formulating the next flavor of Prada-ade.  But, please, don’t tell Miuccia. A girl has to eat, right?”

• • •

(untitled) is available in 30ml, 50ml and 75ml sizes at Maison Martin Margiela boutiques and online at Colette.

Gettin' Nerdy: Part 1 - Mandy Aftel at the American Museum of Natural History: Silk Road Aromatics (and the Puzzle of Luxury for Everyone)

The more I learn about fragrance and perfumery, the more I awaken to the irony of how unimportant it seems the human sense of smell has become. The bewildering variety of air fresheners and odor neutralizers at our disposal suggest that we are as reluctant to explore the world by smelling as we are eager to explore it by seeing, hearing and tasting. (I’m aware, of course, that 80 percent of experiencing any given ‘flavor’ relies entirely on our sense of smell, but we still mentally attach the experience to our mouths, and still call it ‘tasting.’ I’ll be coming back to this in Part 2.) And yet smelling is arguably our most visceral and emotionally connected sense, to the extent that we have built up a fortress of Febreze and Glade plug-ins around us to protect ourselves from olfactory discomfort.

Two recent lectures I attended touched on this idea that we don’t really smell much these days (and often prefer to smell nothing), but from vastly different perspectives. The first was given in late January by natural perfumer Mandy Aftel in conjunction with AMNH’s Silk Road exhibition. She outlined the history of some of the oldest perfume ingredients, and lamented modern perfumery’s lack of the crucial ‘otherness’ that these aromatics brought to the ancient and medieval people priveleged enough to enjoy them. The historical presentation was nicely informative, and I was not surprised by how dim a view of modern perfumery the lecture implied. It occurred to me in retrospect, though, that Aftel seemed to be arguing on one hand for a broader and deeper appreciation of fragrances among society at large, while on the other hand emphasizing the tradition of fragrance as an exclusive luxury.

More on that later. First, the fun bits.

To go along with her powerpoint, Aftel passed around scent strips bearing essences from her personal library. The aromatics she covered can be loosely categorized as flowers/leaves, resins, spices and and animal essences.

Rose (vs. synthetic rose)

The first strip to come ‘round was a natural rose essence, accompanied by a synthetic one. Before I got my hands on them I was imagining how fun it might have been for Aftel to mislabel the strips intentionally and fool a whole room of sycophants, and their bored boyfriends, into thinking a natural rose was synthetic and vice versa. Alas, there was no mistaking them for what they were. The synthetic rose was distinctly flat, monotone and familiar as the smell of dish soap, whereas the natural rose was much more dimensional, full-bodied and contained a rich variety of trace notes (honey, tobacco, earthy notes).

Looking back, I’m keenly aware that there was no mention of where that particular synthetic rose fell along the undoubtedly vast spectrum of synthetic roses. Was it a BMW rose or a Hyundai rose? My feelings suggest the latter. And so I’m also wondering if a higher quality synthetic rose, the cream of the crop, perhaps, could rival the presence and individuality of Aftel’s natural essence. Or could a blend of several synthetics, for that matter, achieve the same nuance and authentically ‘rose-y’ effect?

Resins

Much to my delight (I’m a huge geek for resins and balsams: labdanum, benzoin, elemi, opoponax…the list goes on), some frankincense and myrrh were passed around in their natural form – small beads of resin – rather than on scent strips.

The frankincense was a variety harvested from Boswellia sacra trees in Oman (Aftel called it “the Mercedes of resins”), and the little resin beads smelled surprisingly fresh and almost gingery, but also dry and a bit dusty. It took a lot of willpower not to dig for my lighter and fire up one of the resin beads, just to see how the smell of the raw frankincense translated into white smoke. (The smell of that smoke, and not the raw resin, is the signature aroma most often associated with frankincense and frequently the aesthetic target of incense accords in perfumery.)

Frankincense on the left, myrrh on the right

Unlike frankincense, the myrrh gave me a sense of transcendence without the aid of combustion. It seemed a bit more pungent, a bit woody, and it produced a feeling both contemplative and sharp. Evidently myrrh was used often in mummification and other rituals that sought to create a passage from one time or world to another. That’s not surprising in the least. It’s hard to describe the smell of myrrh further than simply to admit that its mystical dimension is undeniable.

Spices

Cinnamon, black pepper, ginger and saffron were the most popular (and most expensive) spices transported along the spice routes between Asia and Europe.  Accordingly, the cinnamon and black pepper that were passed around smelled many times more exotic than what I have in my spice cabinet.

In addition to being unexpectedly sweet and rich, the natural cinnamon had an appealing mustiness to it – a still-dirty, unrefined quality that reminded me of Antoine Maisondieu’s terrific bay leaves in Monocle Scent Two: Laurel. The black pepper was equally rich, strikingly floral, and at times a bit chocolatey.

Animalics

I’m planning  to write a separate post on my favorite heavily animalic perfumes because I’m totally gay for the funk, too. In her lecture Aftel focused on three animalics: musk, civet and ambergris. (I was disappointed that she didn’t say much about castoreum, traditionally harvested from beavers and used to spectacular effect in Maurice Roucel’s Musc Ravageur for Frederic Malle.) Natural musk comes from Asian musk deer, and has been almost entirely replaced by synthetic recreations of the muscone compound. (If you’re game, Perfume Shrine has a great piece on the chemical structure of the most commonly used synthetic musks, here.) The practice of harvesting civet from the perineal glands of civet cats is similarly on its way out as synthetic civet compounds continue to impress.

The most interesting, and rarest, of the animalics is ambergris, a sperm whale secretion that hardens and cures under the marine sun for years before washing up on a beach. Before its origin was discovered, people speculated that it was petrified elephant dung or possibly a mysterious tree excretion. Natural ambergris is extraordinarily expensive, in part because it can’t quite be actively harvested. (Most online sellers of ambergris insist that theirs is certified “flotte”, or ‘floating’ ambergris that has occurred naturally and involves no interaction with any animal.) It’s also extremely potent. Scent strips dipped in a natural ambergris tincture were the last to be passed, and the smell was mesmerizing – both aquatic and earthy, a bit sweet, vaguely medicinal, nowhere near as funky as musk or civet but still decidely animalic.

Apparently it tastes amazing, too. After the lecture I met a blogger named Deana, who had been chronicling her recreation of Cosimo de Medici’s 15th century hot chocolate recipe, which includes ambergris and jasmine absolute. One of the methods Deana used to incorporate the ambergris (she ordered it from New Zealand) was to melt a small piece in a spoon and then let it cool, so that the spoon was coated with a hard shell of ambergris. She then simply used the spoon to stir the hot chocolate, and said the effect of that alone was near life-changing.

Another use of this bizarre substance that I found particularly interesting was the wearing of “ambergris apples,” otherwise known as pomanders (from the French “pomme d’ambre”). These were little chunks of ambergris and sometimes other aromatic substances, usually enclosed in a perforated metal globe and worn around the neck or on a belt as a simple way to alleviate unpleasant odors or to ward off infection and evil spirits. Man, if a pomander could protect me from the crazies on the subway, I swear I’d have five of them swinging from me at all times.

The Smell of Class

In discussing pomanders, Aftel noted that the spherical enclosures themselves, the product of intricate metalwork and often inlaid with precious stones, were both a powerful status symbol and a mark of individuality. It was just one of numerous examples in her presentation that positioned aromatics as an exclusive luxury – one of the themes I mentioned earlier on. She frequently mentioned that aromatics commanded exorbitant prices everywhere they were imported, noting, for instance, that in 15th century England a half kilo of ginger cost as much as a whole sheep.

Aftel also showed a painting of ancient Egyptian women at a party, adorned with what looked like conical hats. They were in fact solid animal fats perfumed with resins and oils, molded into cones and worn on the head so that they would scent one’s hair and face as they melted. Aftel said she believes this practice to be the “first perfume.”

Some very casual research indicates that these “scent cones” were in fact not a luxury but instead almost ubiquitous; it seems even servants wore them (and little else). This is an example of an even stronger theme in Aftel’s talk: that historically, perfume wasn’t an afterthought, but a given. She spoke poetically about how medieval people were obsessed with pleasurable olfactory sensations, owing to the “panoply of smells” both good and bad that were an unavoidable fact of life for them, and argued against the “neutral non-smell of modernity” into which we retreat from the real olfactory world.

Those two themes seem at odds to me – to suggest on one hand that everyone should be more in tune with and appreciative of our senses of smell while with the other selling perfumes that cost as much as $56 per milliliter. It’s even more troubling considering how dismissive Aftel was of mainstream perfumery and synthetic aroma chemistry (“just not my thing,” she said nonchalantly), i.e. the industry that convinces the mainstream consumer to smell at least something. It would seem, given the dense clouds of Axe invading middle school locker rooms across the country, that maybe Aftel shouldn’t strike such a pessimistic tone about the assumed neglect of our noses.

I don’t mean to be harshly critical, and in fairness, during the Q&A portion Aftel did recognize the creative potential of synthetics and their usefulness in replacing naturals that are either too expensive or banned by IFRA. I also admire that she approaches perfumery from as knowledgeable a perspective as she does (and I’m actually dying to try her “Cognac” and “Cepes and Tuberose”). I just think that if one wishes for the world at large to rediscover a love of fragrances, it would follow to appreciate all efforts toward that goal, as unsophisticated and ‘unnatural’ as the results often are.

I also think I really must attend my next party with a cone of perfumed animal fat on my head, rivulets of the stuff streaming down my face like fragrant tears.

Coming up in Part 2: Jelly beans, aldehydes and a French man with a mohawk.

Credits
Painting of deer: William Daniell (1769-1837) - Musk Deer, and Birds of Paradise (via Wikimedia Commons)

Image of myrrh via Herbology Manchester

Image of pomander via Wartski