Yesterday's Perfume

Opium by Yves Saint Laurent (1977)

"What do you think when you think of the Orient?" - Pierre Dinand

"Flowers of fire." - Yves Saint Laurent

Before women became Dior Addicts, it first had to be culturally acceptable for them to indulge in Opium, Yves Saint Laurent's olfactory Orientalist fantasy that married spicy, fruity florals with  classic Oriental base notes such as vanilla, amber, myrrh, and frankincense.

In an age now where anything goes (there is a perfume called Vulva, after all, and Kate Moss's heroin chic look helped CKOne become a success), it sounds quaint that YSL's American backers at Squibb were mortified by the drug name he chose after seeing bottle designer Pierre Dinand's sketch.

Dinand's idea was to create a perfume bottle based on the Japanese inro, a wooden box holding medicines and opium that Japanese samurai hung from their belts. Undeterred by Squibb, YSL wouldn't budge: "It is Opium or nothing," he said, no doubt with a flourish.

(From Haarman & Reimer's guide) Top notes: Aldehydes, orange, pimento, bay

Heart notes: Carnation, rose, ylang-ylang, cinnamon, peach, jasmin, orris

Base notes: Benzoin, tolu, vanilla, sandal, patchouli, olibanum, amber, musk

(From Michael Edwards' Perfume Legends) Top notes: Aldehydes, tangerine, plum, pepper, coriander, lemon, bergamot

Heart notes: Clove buds, jasmine, cinnamon, rose, lily of the valley, ylang-ylang, peach, myrrh

Base notes: Benzoin, vanilla, patchouli, oppoponax, cedar, sandalwood, cistus labdanum, castoreum, musk

Opium starts with an initial sharp blast of aldehydes (perhaps the fire in YSL's "flowers of fire" metaphor) or an olfactory representation of a struck match lighting an opium pipe. The perfume gives the impression of being both an experience of seemless sensuousness as it caresses you with its crushed velvet notes in one touch and a perfume that unfolds languidly. Both of these befit a perfume that is supposed to conjure images of wan, dreamy, supine Opium smokers in dens punctuated with curling pipe smoke.

Vanillic orange notes recalling spiced tea combine with sweet flowers and subtle fruit notes, warmed by a sensuous and musky base. (The heaviest of the perfume category, Oriental perfumes contrast the freshness of citrus with amber-vanilla and/or the spiciness of notes such as clove, mace, and cinnamon, often combined with animalic notes and high percentages of floral accords.*)

Opium is a perfume gem, and I imagine you'd have to be the same type of woman who could unselfconsciously wear an emerald or ruby in order to wear Opium. Just as there is "statement jewelry," Opium is a statement perfume. A beautiful work of art, but for me, not wearable art.

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I've been interested in the idea of synaesthesia for some time, and although it's a rare, involuntary neurological condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the senses of another (seeing sound, tasting shapes), synaesthetic impulses (by necessity) arise for those of us who love writing about perfume.

Some perfumes, after all, smell green, round, angled, saturated, and so on. And perfume is marketed synaesthetically: from the shape of the bottle to the name of the perfume and the color of the juice, we're invited to picture, taste, hear or feel a substance that we actually can only smell. (In "Synaesthesia, Metaphor, and Right-Brain Functioning," a cognitive psychologist argues that metaphor, "the expression of similarity among dissimilars," is itself a synaesthetic impulse.)

All this came to mind when I was reading about the making of YSL's Opium in the exorbitantly priced but must-have perfume book Perfume Legends by Michael Edwards. (Seriously, Mr. Edwards, $225 for a used book? Are these pages made from the dried, pressed tears of unicorns?)

Opium, which is said to have brought rich, Oriental fragrances back in vogue and upped the ante on how perfumes were marketed, was the perfect confluence of scent, name and bottle. I wonder what I would have thought of it if I didn't know its name and back story.

When the bottle designer Pierre Dinand asked Saint-Laurent his thoughts about the Orient, his answer derived from the visuals you experience when you close your eyes and, in his words, "push on your eyeballs, and you will see the flowers of fire." In Perfume Legends, Dinand says, "He was right. I saw an explosion of yellow, red and blue. And so the red and gold flowers of fire on the Opium box were Yves' idea. I absorbed his words and symbols: the orientalism of Napoleon III, pompoms, Japan, China, red, purple, gold, flowers of fire, then translated his perceptions into a number of bottle options."

Think about how complex this synaesthetic act is: to take ideas, colors, impressions, whole cultures, objects and images, and "translate" them into a bottle and into a fragrance. (Jean-Louis Sieuzac was the perfumer.)

Explaining your impressions of perfume is a murky business, particularly trying to figure out where they're coming from. What exactly is it I'm smelling when I smell a perfume: the notes I can single out/decode? The connotations the name and bottle — shape, color — have constructed for me? The discourse I've read around it that inevitably leaks into my understanding or — all of the above? Or only some of the above, sometimes? In Opium's case, the answer is all of the above.

But is this a bad thing? I've heard calls for perfume reviews that derive from blind sniff tests in order to maintain some sort of purity in the review, but this seems to miss the point of perfume. Perfume is a story told in notes, yes, but sometimes it's also the fantasy behind it that helps the juice come to life for the perfume lover. Perfume, to me, is a mute, invisible cinema with its own narrative and a lavish set full of actors. Sometimes that cinema comes alive on its own — Chanel No. 19, for me — but at other times, as in this case, I need YSL to name it Opium, to hear the phrase "flowers of fire" in my mind, and to picture Jerry Hall reclining in ecstasy surrounded by brocaded velvet and jewels.

* Oriental perfume description from Haarman & Reimer Fragrance Guide.

** Photo of Pierre Dinand sketch from Perfume Shrine.

Poison by Christian Dior (1985)

It's hard to believe that Poison is already 25 years old. This much-maligned and equally beloved 80s scent bomb with a bad reputation still grips my imagination. With its aubergine-colored, fairy tale apple meets vintage apothecary bottle with a crystalline stopper, Poison is nothing if not provocative. You either love it or hate it — usually for the same reasons!

Top notes: Coriander, pimento, plum, anise, mace, rosewood, carnation

Heart notes: Rose, tuberose, ylang-ylang, carnation, cinnamon, jasmine, lily of the valley

Base notes: Cedarwood, vetiver, sandalwood, musk, heliotrope, vanilla, opoponax

Rich, woody, spicy, sweet (it's practically dripping with narcotic tuberose) and berry-like (occasionally veering into a grape bubblegum accord), Poison is like Shiseido's Feminite du Bois with the cedarwood turned down and the tuberose-jasmine turned way, way up. (Think of FdB, which Poison precedes, as Poison's sophisticated French cousin; she's something of a minx as well, but she hides it a little better.) The continuum of berry-like scents from Femme, to Magie Noire, Poison and Feminite du Bois, shows the versatility of the berry/Prunol note as well as its goth-erotic sensibility.

Tuberose is the perfect floral for Poison to showcase, since this often sickly sweet flower, at certain angles and ripeness, can exude a poisonous-seeming sour twang. Like certain poisons whose sweetness hides their toxicity, tuberose initially hides its narcotic, deadly intent. When I smell this facet of tuberose, I think of a snake coiling its tail in anticipation of a venomous strike. Like tuberose, jasmine is two-faced, sweet and friendly and then indolic — aka fecal/meaty/funky. Both of these beauties are the Mata Haris of the floral note world, initially gorgeous but capable of treachery and trickery.)

Although Poison comes on strong, the scent balances its intensity with a symphony of background notes that keeps it from being one-dimensional. In addition to tuberose's minor key twist, Poison's spice (cinnamon, coriander, carnation), woods, and musk temper its floral sweetness. If anything, there's so much going on it can be bewildering to figure out what grips you so. And although there's an assault at the beginning, once the genie's out of the bottle, she mellows out with an opiate-like softness, partly sweet, partly woody, musky and incensey. (Maurice Roucel's Musc Ravageur creates a similar impact thanks to cinammon and musk — but with a more minimalist olfactory palette that emphasizes its bass notes/base notes oudh/guaiac wood rather than the wind section siren song that is Poison's narcotic floral heart.)

What follows are some of the best snippets of reader-reviews I could find on Basenotes and Fragrantica. It's a tribute to Poison's impact that it's hard to tell sometimes which are compliments and which are disses.

You can get vintage minis of Poison on eBay or The Miniature Perfume Shoppe, where I got mine. There might be a reformulation, so stick to vintage, but also remember that vintage Poison has, as one Basenotes reader said, "almost nuclear longevity and sillage." How much of the stuff do you really need? I will proudly (but judiciously) wear this stuff out in the world, detractors be damned! But I promise, Luca Turin, I will not wear it to dinner.

From Basenotes:

"Spray this in Mumbai and it will climb Mount Everest." "These top notes are both fascinating and revolting." "...Suddenly grabs a hold of you and drags you straight to grape city." "Wearing Poison is like being with a bold, abrasive best friend that you love anyway...Like this friend, just when Poison begins to annoy, it does something amazing and makes you fall in love with it again." "Only to be worn if you're in a daring mood."

From Fragrantica:

"Vomit worthy." "So many notes. It also made me itchy." "Some people smell like pure sex wearing this — others smell like rotting fruit.""It is the thickest, darkest, loudest, meanest, most devilish perfume I ever set my nose on. The juice was drained from the gigantic flower grown on a planet outside of our galaxy, where no other creature has set foot before...There is no antidote."

Styx by Coty (1911)

Random vintage perfume bidding on eBay has led me to some great finds. A few weeks ago, I bid on two vintage Coty micro-minis: Paris (1921) and Styx (1911). I paid less than five bucks for both of them — and they are pristine!

Of the two, Styx is by far my favorite. I pulled out Emeraude (1927), L'Aimant (1927), and L'Origan (1905) for comparison, since Styx seems to share their genetic code of creaminess, gentle sweetness and the je ne sais quoi golden Coty touch. It's closest to L'Origan, particularly in its striking violet note, but with an added dark side, befitting a perfume that invokes the river snaking between earth and the underworld Hades.

I couldn't find the notes for Styx, or any information at all, really, but I'm going to take a stab at it and say that it might have the following notes: bergamot, ylang-ylang, a violet note (methyl ionone as L'Origan has?), orris, amber, vanilla, patchouli, sandalwood, musk.

Emeraude was sparkling and surprisingly civety (I hadn't sniffed it in a while). L'Aimant was softly radiant, and L'Origan was rich and powdery sweet. Styx had an incensey, spicy quality woven into its L'Origan likeness of bright bergamot and ylang-ylang followed by by violet, vanilla, creamy orris and musk. (I would be very surprised if it didn't have patchouli.)

Bois de Jasmin has said that the novelty of L'Origan was its combination of essential oils and new synthetics such as nitromusks, coumarin, vanillin, and methyl ionone, which imparts a woody/violet scent. That heady base is definitely recognizable in Styx, with the violet note quite prominent from the beginning.

Is Styx a Floriental? An Oriental? Is there oakmoss here, which is part of the spiciness, darkness and richness I smell, putting it somewhere between an Oriental and a Chypre? It's hard to say, as I am not an expert nose, but I will say that its moody darkness makes it one of my favorite Cotys, and perhaps, next to Chypre de Coty, one of the most modern of his early 20th century perfumes. On a cold, rainy day like I'm experiencing in New Orleans today, Styx is more like heaven than hell.

Colony by Jean Patou (1938)

Can you love a perfume while hating its marketing? Is it possible to separate the two?

These are the questions I ask with respect to Colony, Jean Patou's wonderfully weird pineapple-leather/chypre that celebrates France's colonization of the tropics ("Capturing the hushed mystery of far-off isles"). At the same time that Colony celebrates colonialism, it unwittingly exposes — in its juxtaposed notes, its advertising, and its Baccarat-designed bottle — the ambiguity and violence at the heart of the colonial enterprise.

Top notes: pineapple, ylang-ylang
Heart notes: carnation, iris, vetiver and opoponax
Base notes: leather, musk, oakmoss (from Fragrantica)

In the ad to the left, it's unclear if the eyes peering out mysteriously over a pineapple-shaped bottle of perfume belongs to the colonized or to the white colonizer (now made "dark and mysterious" herself thanks to her mere proximity to The Other). Either way, racialized darkness is at the heart of the colonial fantasy. Whether the face emerging from the darkness is black or white, Colony invites its wearer to be touched by the "exotic."

But that's the context. What about the fragrance? Robert Piguet's Bandit meets Dole's canned sliced pineapples, Colony hits my nose with rubber, chypre mossiness/woods, and a tart-turned-golden-sweet pinapple note, finally drying down to rich amber and benzoin. (Not incidentally, pineapple and rubber are two exports from colonized countries.)

Colony anticipates Bandit's leather/rubber accord by about six years. (Imagine that scent, if you've had the pleasure of sniffing it, with pineapple. It doesn't sound like it would work, but it's a weirdly inspired combination.)

In an amazing post on Colony (to which I am indebted) that examines the perfume in the context of France's colonial history, Brian from the blog I Smell Therefore I Am explains that Colony was Jean Patou's homage to the French Colonial Expo of 1931. The "Exposition Coloniale Internationale" had an explicit task: to explain to France and the world — at a time when people were voicing critiques — why France's colonial efforts were positive for all involved, while ignoring the violence done to the language, culture, and autonomy of its territories' inhabitants.(Here's a gimlet-eyed assessment of France's brutal history in tropical Africa.)

Colony, like France's Colonial Expo of 1931, tries to express an uncomplicated synergy between the colonizer and the colonized through its "grafting the fruity tang of pineapple onto classic French school of perfume" (Brian again.) At the same time, the contrast between pineapple (representing the fruit from the tropical colony) and the leather/chypre-esque base shows that there is no easy relationship between the notes. They're interesting together, but you're always aware of the odd juxtaposition.

In an interesting observation on the bottle, Brian notes that the Baccarat-designed bottle is in the shape of a pineapple — but that it also looks like a hand grenade. The design version of a Freudian slip, this visual pun celebrates France's spoils from the tropics while intimating that they were gained through violence.

Too much analysis, you say? Perhaps Jean Patou's Colony cannot bear the weight of what might seem like a belabored deconstruction of its notes, advertising, and bottle, but I agree with Brian that a corrective is needed against viewing perfume as if it existed outside of history or context.

"When people discuss Colony," he says, "they tend to characterize it as a snapshot of a certain period in perfumery, as if perfume were made in a vacuum, untouched by current events and popular trends, and might best be evaluated simply by looking at fragrances themselves...Thus, the imagery used to describe Colony tends to center around blonde women in haute couture khaki, sipping cocktails from decorative coconut shells on the veranda of some unspecified exotic locale..."

I think this raises another interesting point: when cultural context is brought up in connection to perfume, it's often in terms of gender only and not race or politics. (This is mostly because the marketing around perfume tends to play up gender; only a few perfumes I can think of — White Shoulders, Dana's Platine, and Versace Blonde — explicitly reference race as a marketing ploy.) In discussions of Colony, the "blonde women...on the veranda of some unspecified exotic locale" trope combines gender and race in an interesting way. "Blonde women" (read: white women) become the beneficiaries of colonial domination, as many films such as Indochine, Chocolat, and Out of Africa suggest.

For me, knowing Colony's back story doesn't temper my love for the perfume itself. It is an oddly beautiful perfume that takes chances that work; I've smelled nothing like it before. It's both sunny and tough, naturalistic and artificial. It also doesn't resemble any pineapple-scented perfumes I've smelled, such as Scherrer II. (That pineapple chypre, which I'll review soon, is so overwhelmed by pineapple that its chypre quality almost gets lost.)

So if Colony's problematic history doesn't change my feelings for the juice itself — why bother analyzing the rest of it? I would argue that like any text (a film, a song, a photograph, a book), perfume is a cultural artifact that can be read and decoded. The juice hits my heart, but the story feeds my head and enriches my understanding of the perfume and its place within perfume history.