Yesterday's Perfume

Djedi by Guerlain (1926)

 Djedi was an ancient Egyptian soothsayer and magician famed for being able to make the dead come back to life. Quite a name for a perfume, but then again, Djedi isn't just any perfume. Like Chanel No. 19, it creates a disquieting atmosphere as soon as you put it on. The balsamy spiciness of vetiver is attended by a hint of clove and vanilla (not in the official list of notes), after which the comforting rank of civet darts around in the back like the actual animal. The rest of the Djedi rests on a chypre leather base.

With rose, vetiver, musk, oakmoss, leather, civet, and patchouli, Djedi has been described as "the driest perfume of all time," (Roja Dove), a "tremendous animalic vetiver" (Luca Turin), and an animalic chypre. 

The magic in Djedi is its ability to be both dramatic and quiet about it, like a secret pagan ritual going on under cover of darkness, with little fanfare. 

We don't see Djedi performing his magic rituals, but we note the curling smoke, the burning incense, the fragrant oils, the portent of something heavy and dark. We sense this as if we were intruders on an unseen and unseeable act of alchemy, something happening behind a curtain, just outside our purview.

If Djedi were on a color wheel, there would be nothing bright, but everything rich and deep: chartreuse, saffron, sable brown, inky black.

Adjectives I've read that describe Djedi: medicinal, smooth, earthy, oriental, mysterious. I think of the forest in Guillermo del Toro's film Pan's Labyrinth filled with creatures that are beautiful, terrifying and remote, in a fairy tale land we can only wonder about. I loved this Basenotes reader's comment: "It seems to tap into the limbics more than most, and work on a deeper level where the true power of perfume lies." I like the idea that there are certain perfumes that get stuck in our craws a litte bit deeper than others, that leave an imprint and truly make an impression. Djedi is one of those perfumes.

Image from: Vetivresse

Chanel No. 19 (1971)

Chanel No. 19 was composed by Henri Robert to commemorate Coco Chanel’s eighty-seventh birthday on August 19. Although its strange coldness has prompted many reviewers to conjure up the somewhat sexist image of a ruthless businesswoman who would wear this "in 3 inch stilettos and pencil skirts" (Tania Sanchez in Perfumes: The Guide), to me, its earthy, rooty notes suggest a witch in an enchanted forest rather than a bitch in a boardroom. 

I won a mini bottle of the vintage stuff, and expecting something bright, green and fresh, I put it on only to turn my nose at its oily, dusty rootiness. Back to the pile of perfumes for later inspection. Something's off, I thought. There's galbanum in this — why isn't it tooting its horn? Unlike Vent Vert, whose galbanum was flanked by an entire orchestra of notes to make it sing, Chanel No. 19 lurks quietly in dark woods.

Top notes: galbanum, neroli, bergamot
Heart notes: jasmine, rose, lily of the valley, iris
Base notes: vetiver, sandalwood, leather, musk

Woody, oily, and vegetal, with muted florals and a hint of fresh cut leaves and watery cucumber, Chanel No. 19's song sounds like piano notes played with the damper pedal down. This is a perfume that manages to seem both light and dark at the same time, like the moss, damp leaves, and mushrooms on a forest floor shaded by a canopy of trees. It is luxuriant, but not dazzling or bright, like semi-precious stones before they're polished, when their opacity hints at their rawness. 

Chanel No. 19's minimalism reminds me of Jean-Claude Ellena's perfumes, what one reviewer called a  nouvelle cuisine of perfumery. Instead of fresh or sunny notes, as there are in his Bulgari creation Eau Parfumée au Thé Vert, Chanel No. 19 has a diluted, earthy, vegetal transparency like freshly sliced root, or moss that has just been unmoored from its base at a tree. It doesn't release its scent right away. (I wonder if Ellena was inspired by Chanel No. 19? They seem like similar fragrances, Au Thé Vert the sunny, happy fragrance and Chanel No. 19 the melancholy, poetic one.)

I can't wait to get my reference Iris fragrance — the legendary Iris Gris by Jacques Fath. Although it imparts a dusty, rooty smell and by nature is rooted in the earth, Iris always manages to smell a little uncanny, otherworldly, moody, and even spooky, hence all the references to enchanted forests and witches.

In an interesting way, it's what Chanel No. 19 holds back — comforting sweetness, melody, and light — that is its virtue. You wouldn't ask atonal music for a melody, an herbal tincture for sugar, or a fairytale witch for kindness. It's what we deem missing (what is, in fact, its restraint) that makes this a haunting fragrance. From a pure scent standpoint (as you can see, it is easy to get lost in its connotations), the disquieting nature of the top and heart notes subside into a dreamy, comforting base of incredibly subtle leather and woods. From what I've read, it's this last part that is missing in the reformulation. It is hard to imagine this fragrance being true to itself without the woods and leather.

 Although I dismissed Chanel No. 19 at first as disturbing, the more I think about it and let it breathe on me, the more I love it. It's just hard to imagine when this scent would be appropriate; perhaps if I were casting spells and reading tarot cards. This is the Empress card, or the evil witch from Snow White. Cold, poetic, beautiful, bewitching.

UPDATE: THIS is why you need to try different concentrations of perfume...I won a vintage EDT Chanel No. 19, and I really pick up the leather and vetiver in this. It's even more beautiful than the EDP I originally based this review on! Wonderful multifaceted green combined with salty, scratchy vetiver. One thing is reconfirmed from trying this concentration: Ellena definitely had 19 in mind when composing Eau Parfumée au Thé Vert. The Chanel No. 19 EDT version is like a ray of sunlight in the dark, damp EDP forest...So beautiful I could cry.

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 "[P]erfume is, among other things, the most portable form of intelligence." — Luca Turin, Perfumes: The Guide.

I feel this is the place to address this arresting quote from Luca Turin (written in a review of Issey Miyake's Le Feu D'Issey). Chanel No. 19 was a similar fragrance for me, astounding me with its suggestiveness, its intelligence, its moods, its significations. I pondered this perfume as deeply as a film, book or song that moved me. It's been one of the many revelations for me in discovering perfume in this sensual/cerebral manner that there is, in fact, a limbic intelligence that we don't cultivate enough. Perfume is the perfect vehicle for exercising this intelligence and articulating what it has to tell us.

Here are thoughts from others on Chanel No. 19:

From Fragrantica: "Merges aggressive green note of galbanum and woody dusky note of iris as a harmonious bridge between delicate floral heart and leathery-woody base."

From Basenotes reviewers: (1) "I divide perfumes in categories by characters...Mothers- Chanel 5, Lovers (Agent Provocateur, Fracas)), virgins (Blush, Daisy). "And then there are business women, or bitches, as I prefer (Chanel 19, Cristalle)...the kind of women who always look perfect, wear suits, and give orders. They are indepedent and cold. They don't need anyone, including men." (2) "I find it harsh, sharp, and annoying, like something rotting, plants in a forest."

Tania Sanchez: "Striking and admirably dissonant portrait" "from the silvery hiss of its nail-polish remover beginnings to its poisonously green floral heart. It now lacks its former leathery chypre intensity and instead what it does now is peter off in clean vetiver. For all its springtime references, white flowers and leafy greenery, it keeps you in a boardroom in 3 inch stilettos and pencil skirts.  Haughty and immune to sweetness, with a somewhat antiseptic air, this extraordinary perfume appeals to anyone who has ever wished to know what it is to be heartless."

 

Habanita by Molinard (1921)

Originally marketed in 1921 to perfume cigarettes, Habanita came in scented sachets you could put into a pack of cigarettes or as a liquid you could apply to your cigarettes with a glass rod to "perfume the smoke with a delicious, lasting aroma." (Thanks to Now Smell This for the historical information.) By 1924, Molinard turned their scent into a perfume to be worn rather than smoked, but the decadent connotations still remain within.

Smoky, fruity, and floral notes rest on a base of vanillic, creamy benzoin and leather, making Habanita a complexly comforting scent of sweetness and warmth. A haze of tobacco smoke and the earthiness of leather tie together what starts out sharp (vetiver), gliding later into what one reviewer described as jammy sweetness, another reviewer likening it to a fruit compote. (As the perfume dries down, it smells almost exactly, to me, like the foil that lines a pack of cigarettes.)

Top note: Vetiver, peach, strawberry, orange blossom
Middle note: Rose orientale, ylang-ylang, orris, lilac
Base note: Leather, vanilla, cedarwood, benzoin

I'm not a huge fan of wearing scents that smell of tobacco and leather (unless something extraordinary is going on around this base) although I love the idea. What might at first sniff seem like sensuality in Habanita comes across instead as gourmand, and the tobacco smoke and leather suggest powderiness rather than roughness. So instead of being the dangerous perfume a femme fatale would wear, Habanita signifies comfort — like being stuck in a cafe in Paris on a cold day, comfortably trapped in a room filled with cigarette smoke, an old lady's violet-scented dusting powder, and the aroma of buttery baked goods.

Several commenters said Habanita's scent reminded them of a souk in Morocco, or the Turkish candies called loukoum. I can see faintly what they mean, but Serge Luten's more intense and haunting Chergui — also with tobacco, leather, and gourmand notes — more accurately recalls the exotic. Habanita is simpler, quieter, a haiku to Chergui's epic romance. (Notice in this ad from 1938 that a woman's form rises like smoke from the bottle.)

Fille d'Eve by Nina Ricci (1952)

I love animalic perfumes. I first discovered this category while reading perfumer Frederic Malle's column in Allure magazine, and it's not an exaggeration to say that it launched my obsession with vintage perfumes.

Malle discussed ingredients that add a stink, a funk, something animal-like to perfumes, and he claimed that many of the most interesting and complex perfumes of the past had these animal bases as part of what made them beautiful (unlike American perfumes, which tend to scream out flowers, soap, and cleanliness). Guerlain's Jicky (1889) and its unmistakable use of civet, for example, smells downright urinous and wrong when whiffed by an American used to, say, Tommy Girl. But once you familiarize yourself with these notes, you may fall in love with them (or the idea of them) as I did, searching around for as many examples as you can. At the very least, if you love perfume, I would think you'd have to at least grudgingly admire animalic notes.

Animalic refers to the basenote ingredients vintage perfumes often contained that are now (with the exception of ambergris) banned in perfume in nonsynthetic form — civet (an oil from the poor civet cat's anal gland), castoreum (a cream-like substance from the castor sac of a beaver, which imparts a leather-like scent), musk ( obtained from the male musk deer's gland) and ambergris (the upchucked, floating-in-the-ocean for a while, sundried stomach product of a whale).

Civet, musk, and castoreum exist in synthetic form now, largely because to extract them from the live animal is cruel in the extreme. It is with a slightly shameful ambivalence that I search out vintage perfumes with these ingredients before they were banned, much as a woman who wears vintage furs may proclaim her conscience is clean because the fur is from the past.

But to get to the matter at hand after this ridiculously long preamble, animalic, I'd like to think, can also refer to any smell that suggests the human animal, too — human bodily secretions. Which brings me to the ingredient Costus Root that I know about now thanks to the fount of knowledge that is Octavian from 1000Frangrances. In his charming post Meet Mr. Costus!, Octavian says that Costus Root is an olfactory "metaphor for hair." He continues, " Its smell is strange, a curious mix between violet/orris and hair, sebum, dust, vetiver and everything that is opposed to the clean ideal. It is not dirty by nature. It has also a slight resinic note, like myrrh, elemi or opopanax."

Among the perfumes he says used Costus with great success: Fille d'Eve, Musc Koublai Khan, Scherrer, the first Diorama, the first Cabochard, Rumeur. I can say without a doubt that having experienced vintage Rumeur, and now Nina Ricci's Fille d'Eve, Costus might be one of my favorite animalic ingredients, and as a bonus it's cruelty-free! (Oddly, though, IFRA is banning Costus Oil now in favor of its synthetic. Why?)

I cannot find the notes for Fille d'Eve but I can describe it. It starts off very brightly, with an herby, citrus, sweet flower note (tuberose? jasmine? orange blossom? bergamot?) that is very sparkling and feminine. The perfume exists for me in the drydown, though, when the Costus rises up like the sebum on head of a well-washed beauty on her third day without bathing. I find I almost have a fetish for hair that smells slightly dirty and greasy, particularly if you can still smell traces of the shampoo from the last wash.

As the clean, white flowers fade, the velvety sebum scent takes over and Fille d'Eve becomes a gorgeous skin scent, a smell someone would have to lean in close to get a whiff of. There's something very sexy to me about the idea that you'd wear a perfume not to mask your own gorgeous dirty smells with aldehydic flowers, but to enhance them. Thanks to Fille d'Eve, I now know that the unusual, dark ingredient that I found so intoxicating with Rumeur is Costus, as well. I can't wait to get my Scherrer and Diorama and in the meantime I'm going to revisit Lutens' MKK, vintage Cabochard, and of course, the temptress Fille d'Eve.

UPDATE: Octavian at 1000Fragrances was kind enough to send me the notes to Fille d'Eve!

Bergamot, lemon, jasmine, honeysuckle, rose, peach, plum, oak moss, balsamic-incense notes, amber, animalic musk. 

"Daughter of Eve: From Paris...the most tempting perfume in the world in the most exciting presentation this side of Paradise. The provocative Lalique apple, 25.00 and 14.50. Apple purse flacon, 4.50. Miniature apple leaf, 2.00 From Paris also...Fille d"eve Eau de Toilette."

Visa by Robert Piguet (1947)

Please note: I wrote this post a few months into my vintage obsession, and it turns out I received the reformulated Visa, not the vintage. (As I suspected.) I'm waiting to hear back about getting the vintage stuff, so stay tuned for an update!

Perhaps there is nothing new under the sun. I received my little glass vial of vintage Visa (there is a reissue no one seems that thrilled about) and lo and behold my nose said, "What is Thierry Mugler's Angel doing in here! Should I demand my money back from The Perfumed Court?!" (The Perfumed Court, along with eBay and Sarah's Perfumes, are my official dealers, if you will.)

 

Seriously, this stuff smells like Angel! Or Angel smells like this stuff! It's treacly sweet with tons of warmth and spice. A real va-va-va-voom fragrance, not for the faint-of-heart.(Please note, the gourmand Angel perfume has no florals. Its notes consist of honey, chocolate, caramel, vanilla, patchouli, and sandalwood.)

Top notes: White vineyard peach, pear, violet leaves, italian bergamot, yellow mandarin
Heart notes: Ylang-ylang, rose, orange flower absolutes
Base notes: Patchouli, sandalwood, vetiver, moss, vanilla, benzoin, leathery notes

There is a lot going on here, but if you give it a chance, the dry down's sensuality might have you hooked. Unlike Angel's, whose patchouli is more prominent in the drydown, I can really smell the velvety, boozy richness of benzoin and vanilla balanced with the spice of patchouli, leather, moss and vetiver.

This is an incredibly sexy perfume, and it seems to me someone got very rich coming up with its simulacrum. (According to the perfume blog Bois de Jasmin, although this perfume is attributed to Germaine Cellier — on Basenotes, among other places — Osmotheque in Paris believes its rightful perfumer is actually Ma Griffe's Jean Carles. That makes more sense to me; Visa smells kind of trashy-sexy to Germaine Cellier's more intellectual-sexy.)

Image from Grain de Musc.

Lauren by Ralph Lauren (1978)

It might seem like heresy to throw in a review of Ralph Lauren's big '80s style perfume Lauren among reviews of classics like Diorella and Vent Vert. But if this blog is about vintage perfume, as much as it pains me to date myself, Lauren is more than 30 years old, and in my eyes — it's vintage. 

Lauren can be called a vintage perfume for an even more compelling reason than its technical age: because of the memories and associations that have undoubtedly accumulated in many a woman's mind around this scent. Honestly, who the heck wears Lauren anymore, except maybe a bunch of Texans who grew up unable to smell anything but this (or Giorgio — ugh!) in the halls of their high schools?

I never owned Lauren, but my associations with it are powerful, as is my memory of it. So powerful, that just a few months ago, thinking about it, I looked it up and as soon as I saw the ruby-colored, square bottle with the gold cap, my mind reconstructed a memory of the scent. Rose, spice, woods; a strangely masculine floral. And then there was the ad. The model had long dark brown hair, blue eyes that stared impassively at the viewer, and I could swear she was next to a horse. (The Ralph Lauren brand seemed to strongly need to associate itself with the horsey set, so in that world men are rugged and gorgeous, and the women are, too, in that "I just got through riding my horse through the woods" kind of way.)

Fans of the scent are convinced that there's been a reformulation that, according to one person on Basenotes, has caused the perfume to lose its soul. I picked up a fourteen dollar bottle  (sans box) on a sad and disheveled shelf (is there any other kind there?) at TJ Maxx in Los Angeles. Wearing it now, I do sense that the florals have been amped up and the spices toned down. What I loved about the original version was the spicy marigold, oakmoss and and woody notes balanced out the floral nature of the perfume. This woodsy floral character created a sense that its wearer was feminine, elegant and refined but dynamic and earthy. (Update: I got a vintage mini and I would say the primary difference is that the ingredients in the original have more depth, seem of higher quality and the notes are better balanced than in the reformulation.)

Top notes: Pineapple, spearmint, marigold (tagetes), rosewood
Heart notes: Cyclamen, rose, jasmine, lily of the valley
Basenotes: Musk, cedarwood, oakmoss, sandalwood