Two Things that Make Me Happy (and One That Doesn't)

1) The packaging of Annick Goutal's upcoming Le Mimosa - Yes, the latest Goutal limited edition soliflore comes in the same fluted bottle as any old Goutal, but is anyone else kind of swooning for that dotted ribbon like I am? If I were a woman -- well, let's not go that far. But I encourage all my spring-loving female friends, come March, to buy a bottle of this, have a healthy spritz and repurpose the ribbon around the wrist or wherever it can be worn most saucily. (The fragrance, by the way, sounds nice as well: the eponymous ingredient backed up by iris, peach and sandalwood; green / fruity / powdery / milky seems to be the intended effect.)

2) The availability of Chanel's entire Les Exclusifs collection in a 75 ml size for $110 - I've always been impressed with how reasonably priced Les Exclusifs are ($210 for 200 ml) relative to other limited-release prestige lines like the Hermessence collection ($235 for 125 ml) or Tom Ford's Private Blend ($185 for 50 ml or *$480* for 250 ml in what looks like a brown glass whiskey decanter). But $210 is still a hefty amount to part with, and prior to now, Chanel's 200 ml-or-nothing! sizing has been pretty much the only deterrent to Sycomore and Cuir de Russie hopping right off the Saks counter into my man-tote. In other words, thank goodness Chanel finally caught on.

3) The new "Glee" fragrances to be made available soon by Boots in the UK - I am an unabashed anglophile, I love Boots, and I"m even addicted to "Glee" (addicted in the way one is addicted to crystal meth, I'll warn you), but I couldn't fight a wave of genuine depression at the thought of plucky British 12-year-olds sullying their (and everyone else's) noses with a £10 novelty spray called Divas Free your Glee. Yes, I know perfume needn't be haughty or expensive to be enjoyed, but nevertheless suspect that with these, there's definitely a reason they're only £10...

Feed Your Inner Fanboy: Etat Libre d’Orange Homage Series

I’m desperately trying to squeeze another post in before September ends, in part because I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t like the archive list to suggest I’m more prolific a blogger than I am, and also because one of these fragrances launched this month. Since I’ve very little time left, I’ll try to make it quick.

I know it might seem a little heavy on the Etat Libre d’Orange here, to the point that one could call me a ELd’O fanboy, but I tell you, Etienne de Swardt helms one of the few perfume brands that take real risks and make hefty statements. Additionally, I get a feeling that it’s the kind of brand that wouldn’t mind its admirers being referred to as ‘fanboys.’ (Come to think of it, Fanboy would be a great name for an ELd’O fragrance.) That’s probably because they do it themselves, having slowly but steadily produced a series of special editions that pay tribute to various artists, most recently including Tilda Swinton’s Like This.

The series started, though, with Tom of Finland, dedicated to the erotic artist -- a cool and bright lemon splashed over a muddle of iris, vanilla, tonka, suede notes and resins, spiked with sharp and/or green notes, like pine, saffron, pepper and galbanum. A dose of aldehydes makes it smell clean and raunchy at the same time.

The second in the series is named for Rossy de Palma, the Spanish actress best known for her roles in Almodóvar films. The scent, I think, is the best in the series, including the two new ones I’m discussing below. Givaudan whizzes Antoine Lie and Antoine Maisondieu, both credited for this one, took a classically beautiful Bulgarian rose and made up its face into almost a drag version of itself, using smooth, milky spices (ginger and cardamom), a slightly slutty jasmine, clean patchouli and cocoa. 

I had an opportunity earlier in the summer to smell the fourth and fifth in the series, which are both being launched this season. The ‘holiday’ timeframe will see the release of Josephine Baker,  a sweet-citrusy, cheekily ‘tropical’ confection that smells like a coconut foam. But the 10th of this month saw the release of Sex Pistols, and while I bet any actual Sex Pistols fanboy would engage in a good bit of teeth-gnashing if s/he came across the twee plaid-capped bottle, it’s the better of these two by a mile. Up front it’s lemon and some very strong black pepper, which lingers admirably through an odd-but-it-works dried fruit note (“prune” as you’ll see if you scrutinize the graphic up close), some faint leather and patchouli, a nicely funky ambrette, and the heliotrope that wraps it all together. Like in Tom of Finland, some aldehydes of the fatty variety soap things up a bit and keep the jammy prune note and sweet heliotrope from feeling too dense. 

Hey, I got through it all with a half-hour left before October starts!

Etat Libre d’Orange Sex Pistols is available at Henri Bendel in New York. Most of their other fragrances are available online at Lucky Scent.

Summer Crudité with a Side of Chandler Burr

A number of my friends have been talking up the local CSAs and farmshares they’re participating in this summer – something I have neither the discipline nor creativity to make the most of (what in the world would I do with two pounds of garlic scapes that will go bad in a week?). Luckily, while they’re congratulating each other for their armloads of sustainably-grown produce, I’ve got my own veggies to go on about. They're found in Tilda Swinton: Like This by Etat Libre d’Orange and I ♥ Les Carottes by Honoré des Prés.

An Anti-Celebrity Fragrance

Like This, an homage to actress Tilda Swinton from iconoclastic house Etat Libre d’Orange, is one I’ve been very keen to smell, but also suspicious of in the same way I’m suspicious of all celebrity scents. After its stateside launch at Henri Bendel in New York last week, I’ll concede that Mathilde Bijaoui's work was worth the wait. Tilda herself was there, stone-faced and fauxhawked, esconced on a high railed balcony overlooking the main floor, where she conducted a minimum of press interviews. Since I’m not ‘press’ by any stretch of the imagination, I didn’t get a chance to fawn over her, but I did manage to get a sorry iPhone picture of this rather puzzling display:

Given that they’re nowhere in the official notes listed for Like This, what’s with the carrots? The real star of the show here is the pumpkin accord – fleshy, sweet and quite vegetal. Immortelle makes a star turn, but in an uncharacteristically supporting role. Yes, it’s just as ‘everlasting’ here as it is in other immortelle fragrances, accounting for 95% of the scent’s 12-hour longevity. But it’s not working quite so hard to stand out from all the other ingredients, or simply to overwhelm them as immortelle is prone to doing. It harmonizes with them instead, providing a complex canvas for an accent of ginger and deepening the richness of the pumpkin. This spiced pumpkin-immortelle cocktail follows some mellow citrus top notes and works its way towards a soft, smooth base of rose, vetiver, heliotrope and clean musk.

Like This is a challenging fragrance, clearly meant to be an artistic reach rather than a crowd-pleaser. It differs in that respect from virtually all other celebrity fragrances, and also in the sense that it actually reflects the aesthetic character of its namesake: striking, strange and desirable.

A Short Scene in a Department Store

The best part of this whole affair, though, was that I got to meet one of my perfume heroes – Chandler Burr, author, journalist and scent critic for T magazine, whose “Scent Notes” are the genesis of my now full-blown obsession with perfume. I greeted him on his way out with a crack in my voice and some egregiously untrimmed nosehairs, and he was gracious enough to speak to me for about 45 mortifying seconds. It went something like this:

INT. HENRI BENDEL, 2ND FLOOR – DAY

ARTHUR hovers by the elevator as CHANDLER BURR approaches.

ARTHUR

Excuse me, are you Chandler Burr?

CHANDLER

(leaning down because he is very tall)

Yes.

ARTHUR

Hi. Sorry to be a creepy hanger-on; I just wanted to say hello and that your column in T  is what got me interested in perfume.

CHANDLER

Oh, great. … That’s what we try to do.

ARTHUR

Can I ask what you think of the fragrance?

CHANDLER

I love it. I know Tilda and can tell you that she was very involved in every part of the process, and the fragrance is such a surprise. It’s a spicy, [something I can’t remember], abstract expressionist gourmand.

ARTHUR

I’m impressed with how they used immortelle.

CHANDLER

Yes. I do not like immortelle, and I think it’s great here.

ARTHUR

Yeah, I really love this line. I own Fat Electrician, [mumbling sheepishly]…

The elevator dings: going down.

CHANDLER

I’ve got to run, sorry.

ARTHUR

Sure, nice to meet…

CHANDLER turns and gets on the elevator.

ARTHUR (cont’d)

…you.

What’s Yr Take On Giacobetti?

(Bonus points for anyone who gets the musical reference in that subhead!)  I bought I ♥ Les Carottes without having smelled it for two reasons: 1) I love root smells, and 2) it was authored by Olivia Giacobetti. I don’t regret it in the least. If Like This is – as Mr. Burr sensibly suggests – an exercise in abstract expressionism, then Giacobetti’s new scent for French indie organic line Honoré des Prés is an equally captivating stab at something like photorealism.

Using carrot seed oil, sweet orange and a beautifully rooty iris, Giacobetti has created an uncompromised olfactory expression of newly-pulled, dirt-covered carrots. The impression is immediate, with a strong anise-y aspect accompanying the raw sweetness. Earthy patchouli and Madagascan vanilla are the only fixatives, and make for an unfussy and comfortable drydown.

The literalism and simplicity of this perfume is very representative, I find, of Giacobetti’s style. Whether it’s the wet-cardboard marvel of her Dzing! for L’Artisan, or the grey pepper and driftwood of her Preparation Parfumée for Andrée Putman, her compositions are unfailingly straightforward and stray not an inch from their strict intentions.

I ♥ Les Carottes is one of the three Honoré des Prés scents that comprise their new “We Love New York” collection, and they’ve really squeezed the theme dry. The flacon comes lodged in an HdP branded coffee cup, nestled inside a crumpled brown bag. The promotional copy even includes an anecdote about Olivia Giacobetti cooking and freezing and re-cooking organic carrots grown in Harlem (eh?). I interpreted it as a cheeky admission that I could get the same results from splashing an orange-carrot Jamba Juice all over my torso.

Most cryptically, the blurb goes on to reference the “it-carrot culture”… Do I take that to mean I’m among those manning the prow of some carrot moment? Or perhaps the more appropriate question would be whether these two examples consitute a trend: is 2010 the year of the vegetable gourmand? I wouldn’t be disappointed.

Etat Libre d’Orange Tilda Swinton: Like This is $100 for 50 ml, at Henri Bendel or LuckyScent. Honoré des Prés I ♥ Les Carottes is about $80 for 50 ml, at Colette.

A heartfelt thank-you to Lendon Flanagan for the I ♥ Les Carottes photo.

The Smell of Deep-Fried Marc Jacobs

As can be expected given today's prurient pop cultural tastes, most of the online chatter about Marc Jacobs's upcoming men's fragrance, Bang, is about his near-full monty ad.  Personally, I'm amazed that someone found an even more tasteless way than Tom Ford to juxtapose a flacon and a crotch.  I'm also impressed at how, with this ad, Marc Jacobs is straddling (heh) the line between 'designer' and 'celebrity' fragrance. But I think the honors for most entertaining response to the ad goes to Michael K at DListed: "Based on this ad, Marc's nectar probably smells like Jiffy Pop, butt sweat, Molly McButter sprinkles, and cups of grease from the jar my abuelita keeps under her sink. Basically, this is what I wish my apartment will smell like on a Friday night, but it ends up reeking like lonely tears and burnt Hot Pockets."

Alas, if Michael K had read just a bit further he might have discovered that Bang will not, in fact, have a butt sweat accord. Rather, it features a trio of peppercorns (black, pink and white -- evidently MJ likes pepper), er, "primal masculine woods", elemi, benzoin, vetiver, white moss and patchouli.  Peppery top notes and a vetiver-moss-patchouli dry down sound pretty on-trend for an explicitly masculine scent to me, so I'm wondering if the elemi and benzoin will have that great sweet-medicinal character to give it something different or, conversely, if they will manifest as a disappointing approximation of cheap vanilla extract.  To be priced at $55 / $75 for a 50 ml or 100 ml eau de toilette, Bang was created by Ann Gottlieb, author of (among other commercial powerhouses) CK be and Sarah Jessica Parker's Covet.  So yeah, I'm guessing cheap vanilla extract.

An Upturned Nose: Three Scents I'm Eagerly Awaiting

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.

--------------------------------

* 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.

Next Week: Catch Beyoncé’s Fever in Union Square

Get excited, guys.

On February 2nd, New Yorkers will catch the fever as Beyoncé turns up the heat in Union Square. To celebrate the launch of her debut fragrance, Beyoncé Heat, the visionary artist is illuminating the central destination with fiery red light and smoky fog, infusing the winter landscape with a steamy, sexy aura that embodies Beyoncé's unique appeal…

The unprecedented, spectacular display will vividly capture the spirit of Beyoncé Heat, creating a dramatic play of light that promises to turn heads and pique curiosity. The radiant spotlights transforming Union Square will serve as a luminous backdrop to the Beyoncé Heat launch party, where luminaries from the worlds of music, film, and media will gather to toast Beyoncé's latest venture. (via pr newswire)

You heard right. Thanks to an obviously crack PR team at Coty, Union Square will become the steamy red-light district it was clearly meant to be… Honestly, I have only high hopes for B’s temporary light-up (from 6 pm to midnight), not only because it will provide a relieving distraction from Union Square’s established steaming visual display, but also because I’m so taken with the idea of a perfume launch slamming its drama into the faces of several hundred thousand freezing New Yorkers while at the same time providing an extremely private venue for all of the luminaries who are dying to know before anyone else what in the world “red vanilla orchid” and “giant sequoia milkwood” smell like.

I don’t have a lot of love for celebrity fragrances for essentially the same reasons that – of all people – John Mayer recently pointed out. But all cynicism aside, I suppose I shouldn’t deny the possibility that Heat will in fact smell good. If Hilary Duff and Britney Spears Midnight Fantasy are good enough for Chandler Burr, who am I to write off Heat as sensationally marketed junk?

In the meantime, have a look at the official commercial, shot by “Single Ladies” video director Jake Nava:

Girl! If you are so hot that you’re streaking your walls with cinder and melting the floor, perhaps you should leave the house in search of a stiff breeze. I sympathize, believe me. Sometimes, after tucking into some devilish pad kee mao, for example, I look exactly like that (minus the silk robe and writhing).