Yesterday's Perfume

Amazone by Hermès (1974)

It's hard to imagine that a non-niche perfume for women would be released today that smells like Amazone. It's not girly enough (some readers on Fragrantica thought it was for men), and it is something of an acquired taste, even for me.

When I first put it on, I mistook the herb-y vetiver in Amazone for coriander, and just as I was wrapping my head around it, I caught hyacinth underneath its earthy scent, as well as the clean-green scent of galbanum and an initially surprising warm berry sweetness from black currant. Jasmine, lily of the valley, and rose bloom in a bright, fresh way alongside those notes, balancing them with some conventional perfume femininity.

Top notes: Hyacinth, galbanum, cassis (black currant), bergamot

Heart notes: Jasmine, lily of the valley, orris, rose

Base notes: Oakmoss, cedarwood, vetiver, amber (Perfumer: Maurice Maurin)

I love the smell of vetiver, which imparts a dry-grass, herbaceous note. (It actually is a tall grass, originating from India.) When it's in feminine fragrances as a predominant note, as it is in the 70s floral-green chypre Amazone, it connotes a can-do woman, earthbound, grounded, and maybe even tomboyish in an elegant way.

Herbaceous, floral, and dry (yet shot through suddenly with lush, juicy fruit), Amazone reminds me a little of Weil's 1945 ode to the savanna, Antilope. (The latter had galbanum, farnesiana, acacia, and oakmoss — surprisingly, no vetiver, but a dry grass/hay smell nevertheless.)

Neither girlish nor womanly, Amazone's persona is in keeping with Hermès's attempt to construct gender in fragrance around the idea of a particular class of woman, the "horsey" Parisian set whose wealth and femininity are anything but conspicuous.

So how does Hermès signify this complex class attitude into a perfume? Conventional feminine perfume notes (jasmine, lily of the valley, rose) + prominent conventionally earthy "masculine" note (vetiver) +  classical, a little reserved, mature fragrance family (bergamot/oakmoss chypre structure) + a touch of  sensuality (cassis/black currant) et voila — a woman who's a bit above it all. She doesn't really have to care.

The last time I was on a horse, he was leading me around; I'm not particularly aspirational, especially when it comes to being "understated" so as to signify a particular class; and I like a more outré scent that dares to be tacky for the sake of being original. Although I like Amazone's warmth and restraint, where would I wear it? Maybe to go to the library? Or to a museum? Or to bed, as I'm about to? Yes, that sounds nice.

(Grab a vintage mini from the nice folks at Miniature Perfume Shoppe.)

Silences by Jacomo (1978)

Some women are scared of scents that are too green, or whose predominant notes include violet leaves, herbs, cut grass notes, or galbanum, a bitter aromatic gum resin that famously greened up Chanel No. 19, Bandit, and Vent Vert.

To those folks I say, I'm sorry. Silences is not going to change your mind. First off, Silences by Jacomo is green to the extreme, so green that in my oft-mentioned Haarman & Reimer fragrance "Duftatlas" fragrance family chart, it's clinging to the side of the green end of the floral spectrum like a weird sea creature suctioned to the side of an aquarium.

With a bitter, herbaceous almost chalky galbanum beginning, Silences starts off with a tiny drop of sweetness from orange blossom, but then throws lemon and bergamot into the mix just so that you know it's not kidding around about this "green" business. (Galbanum resin is obtained from the Persian ferrula gummosa plant you see to your right.)

A soft, almost powdery whisper of orris bridges the green with the delicate and clean florals rose, lily of the valley, and jasmine. By the time it dries down, this austere beauty is delicately soapy, spicy and soft all at once.

Top notes: Galbanum, bergamot, green notes, orange blossom, lemon

Heart notes: orris, jasmine, rose, lily of the valley, hyacinth

Base notes: Moss, sandalwood, cedar, musk (Perfumers: Gerard Coupy and Jean-Claude Niel)

In Vent Vert, galbanum signaled the Rites of Spring, the rawness and near-savagery of things coming to life. In Chanel No. 19, as in Silences, galbanum suggests contemplation, stillness, and — well, silence.

More so than Chanel No. 19, though, and I'm not sure how the perfumers achieved this, Silences feels as one Basenotes reader put it, "melancholic," and another, "pensive." To those descriptors, I would add, "spooky."

I That's right, Silences is a beautiful and yet spooky perfume. From its opaque, black, urn-like bottle to its name, which is a little deathly, Silences is something of a surreal perfume. It''s connected to life, with green notes and florals that signify renewal, yet it's oddly disconnected from the familiar, a little uncanny. (It reminds me of a Rene Magritte painting: so realistic as to be unfamiliar, i.e. surreal. In this painting, "The Voice of Space," abstract spheres hover above a realistic field, rendering it strange.)

I don't know if there's an outer limits of green outside of which, if you travel, you reach the Twilight Zone, but if there is, Silences is there, waving its green flag.

When I began thinking about Silences a few hours ago, wearing it, sniffing it, reapplying it, etc., I was going to begin this post by saying that green fragrances are like the short haircuts of the perfume world, appreciated by the few who know you don't have to be conventionally "feminine" to be sexy. Sometimes cerebral, slightly intimidating fragrances can be just as sexy, I would have continued, providing the icily gorgeous Catherine Deneuve in "Belle de Jour" as an example.

But the longer I wore Silences and took in the mood it conjured, I realized this wasn't just a green perfume of the fresh, wild and raw Vent Vert variety. This is a perfume so bitter, bracing and sour that it lives up to the review Tania Sanchez (I think unfairly) gave to Chanel No. 19 in Perfumes: The Guide. And mind you — the following is an endorsement for Silences, a perfume I will definitely be wearing this spring/summer: "This extraordinary perfume appeals to anyone who has ever wished to know what it is to be heartless." 

 

Azurée by Estee Lauder (1969)

Azurée, Estee Lauder's late-sixties chypre/floral animalic, is a complex beauty. At first sniff, it sends your olfactory brain off into multiple directions at once rather than staying in one fragrance category.

Top notes: Aldehydes, bergamot, artemesia, gardenia

Heart notes: Jasmine, geranium, cyclamen, orris, ylang-ylang,

Base notes: Leather, patchouli, oakmoss, musk, amber

Bracingly citrusy and herbal (bergamot/artemesia), vaguely tropical and candied (the sweetness and lushness from the gardenia/amber), Azurée ends with a a bone-dry, bitter-green leather accord that is Bandit-like (yet softer) in its elegance and austerity.

One of the most intriguing aspects about Azurée for me is that although the forals are flanked on either side by dry notes, there's a rich, momentary gourmand quality to the scent because of the sweet amber and perhaps how it combines with gardenia and ylang-ylang. For a brief second in the midst of these florals-in-the-desert, a beguiling and fleeting Oriental quality wafts into the perfume, as if Azurée had tucked a piece of caramel candy into its otherwise dry floral pocket. The hint of sweetness rounds out the florals and dry woodsy leather, making Azurée momentarily an olfactory puzzle.

Azurée makes me think of a suntanned woman on vacation in the sixties, in a deep blue floor-length maxi, kohl-rimmed eyes and frosty lipstick. (See Lauren Hutton in '69 above.) She's stepping out onto the deck of her hotel balcony, the hot wind joining her perfumed, suntanned skin, her dressed cinched with a leather belt to give her some edge. Because of the way its notes seem conspicuously separate and dissonant at the beginning (only to marry together gorgeously in the end), Azurée is like a color-blocked Mod dress or Twiggy's makeup, to your right.

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One of the wonderful things about writing about perfume has been having the chance to converse with other perfume-lovers. In exchanges with readers in the comments section of Yesterday's Perfume, or in personal emails with perfume bloggers, and even through meetings in person (I'm talkin' to you Lucy,  Leah and Rita), I have had the pleasure of bonding with some smart and creative people who indeed stop to smell the roses (and the amber, patchouli and civet).

Azuree was sent to me by Wendy from the perfume blog, Qwendy: Shoes, Cake, and Perfume. She'd been raving about it for a while and we finally did some perfume swaps. (Here's her great post on '70s scents and Estee Lauder scents in particular.) I am in debt to her for introducing me to this perfume, which I otherwise probably wouldn't have gotten to for a while. It's on my list of favorites now and I'm so happy to have a chance to review it. Thanks, Wendy! It's perfume friends like you that keep me blogging!

Paris by Yves Saint Laurent (1983)

How does a perfumer compose a fragrance that smells like joy, hope, and innocence? Ask Sophia Grojsman, the nose behind beauties such as Calyx, White Linen, and Eternity. "Joy" was the first word that came to mind when I revisited her perfume Paris, the rose-based scent that doesn't so much scream rose as it does interpret, with the help of other notes, what rose stands for in the popular imagination.

Green, fresh, and bursting with sweet — but not oppressive — florals (hyacinth, violet, heliotrope, ylang-ylang), Paris knocks you over with its good mood.If you've ever been to Paris in the spring, you know the kind of blinding beauty it can offer. At times it can seem like everything about Paris was made to give you sensory pleasure — the food, the architecture, the smells — and Grojsman's Paris translates that flash of joy into perfume notes.

Violet and hyacinth bloom most prominently around Paris's intense rosiness, while cedar and sandalwood give it an almost cinammony spice. The drydown is a powdery whisper of musk and orris, which soften the perfume's floral brightness. (This stuff is powerful, though; a little goes a long way. I couldn't wear it — I'm not a fan of florals — but I appreciate this beauty.)

Top notes: Green notes, bergamot, hyacinth, blossom-calyx notes

Heart notes: Violet, damascenia rose, orris, jasmine, linden, lily, lily of the valley, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Musk, cedarwood, moss, sandalwood, heliotrope

What's interesting to me about Paris is how recognizable the floral notes are, and yet together their composition signifies an idea, a mood, a place. It's also a painterly fragrance. You can almost "see" the artist painting her canvas with flowers — a giant rose with a dab of lily here, a splash of violet there, creating (to mix metaphors) a kind of musical tension in its notes that evokes a happy, almost bittersweet mood, like a bubble that just might burst or happiness that surely couldn't sustain itself. 

A work of art — Grojsman's Paris proves that rose is a rose is a rose not all roses are created equally .

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You can snag a cute little bottle of Paris at The Miniature Perfume Shoppe site. I think the bottle with the all-black cap is the vintage/un-reformulated version.

Wild Vintage Perfume Bottles: A Sampler

On a whim recently, I broke down and got a mini version of Jean-Paul Gaultier's perfume Fragile (1999). I had no idea what kind of perfume was inside, and I didn't care: the bottle is in the shape of a snow globe that encases a tiny woman in a black evening gown, her arms akimbo, surrounded by glittery confetti.

Fragile's whimsical bottle departed from a decades-long marginalization of unusal bottles in favor of a focus on the scent or on the perfume's invisible attributes as dreamed up by its marketers. (Niki de Saint Phalle's snake-bottle [1982] and Salvador Dali's lips bottle [1983] come to mind as other exceptions, and it's no surprise that both Saint Phalle and Dali were visual artists.)

I've come across many a "figural" perfume bottle while trawling the Internet for vintage perfume. Whether they're Avon owls or Lucien Lelong castles whose columns are individual perfumes, there's something both silly and wonderful about these perfume presentations. They don't take themselves too seriously and they get their audience inducted visually — before they've even smelled the scent — into the perfume's fantasy world.

So without further ado, here are a few of the wildest and most charming vintage perfume bottles I've come across. (Most of them seem to be from Lucien Lelong):

Lucien Lelong's Orgeuil mechanical automaton. Wind it up and a nice-smelling couple dance through perfume eternity. (I think Fragile was inspired by this bottle.)

Lucien Lelong again, this time, for Tailspin.The perfume is housed in (why not?) a plastic case shaped as a stack of poker chips.

I've seen children's play sets that seem better constructed than this perfume castle from Lucien Lelong, but I give its creators points for trying.

There are correspondences between perfume and music: both are composed of notes (musical and olfactory), a series of which can create chords/accords, their compositions unfold through time, have registers, pitches, and moods, and it's very hard to explain the elusive but powerful effect they have on how we feel. Here's a crude figural perfume bottle that pays homage to the music/perfume association:

Shock value often comes in the form of perfume names and brands, nowadays.Take the perfume brand, Juliette Has a Gun. Cool name, but all its perfumes have pretty boring bottles. Not boring: Avon Wild Country Cologne in the shape of a Derringer gun.

Samsara by Guerlain (1989)

A few years ago before I became a perfume obsessive, I traveled to Morocco. I'm glad I had enough presence of mind to go to the perfume section of the ancient souk in Fez and pick up scents with the kind of quality and concentration you'd have to pay an arm and a leg for elsewhere: sandalwood, sandalwood oil, amber oil, dried rose petals, frankincense, and myrrh, just to name a few things I snagged. If I'd known better, I would have searched out much more: oudh, ambergris...(Read Lucy of IndiePerfumes' account of our visit to Enfleurage in NYC where you can get all these things and more.)

At one point, the perfume seller lit what looked like a sparkly rock. (I know now it was frankincense.) The fragrance it emitted is one I will not soon forget: spicy, warm, sweet, and vanillic. It was magical.

With this in mind, I was looking forward to my Miniature Perfume Shoppe shipment of Samsara, Guerlain's ambery Oriental perfume highlighting jasmine, ylang-ylang and sandalwood with a warm tonka and musk base. Alas — disappointment.

Top notes: Bergamot, lemon, green note, peach, tarragon

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, ylang-ylang, orris, carnation

Base notes: Sandalwood, vanilla, benzoin, amber, musk, tonka

In terms of making the most of its Oriental notes and expressing in perfume form the Buddhist notion of "samsara," (the endless cycle of birth and suffering and death and rebirth), Guerlain's strangely inert and wishy-washy Samsara is a missed opportunity. How do you mess up (and messing up includes the cardinal sin of being boring) a perfume with such rich ingredients and such an evocative name? Perhaps it was perfume by corporate committee, a bunch of suits putting together ideas and notes intellectually but without passion?

Samsara is a polite jasmine scent with with a slightly spicy Oriental base. Maybe it's just me, but I really don't get much else. Not every fragrance has to have a story or a mood — but a personality would be nice.

At once rough and smooth, good sandalwood oil (not unlike patchouli) has a kind of tough beauty that is characteristic of woody scents. As I sniff my Moroccan bottle now, I can see why, for a while after I came home, I'd put this oil straight onto my skin, its smooth spicy sweetness lulling me to sleep some nights. (It starts smelling a little acrid after a while, though, so it's better in a blended scent.)

In Buddhist thought, samsara has a number of meanings. It can be the inevitable chain of birth, life, death, reincarnation, or it can signify the cycle of suffering Buddhists believe occurs as a result of our living trapped in delusions, endlessly seeking gratification and pleasure.

If Samsara had been more interesting, it could have used its interesting notes in some way to express one or more of these meanings of samsara — either by contrasting decadent notes with austere ones to represent the pleasure/pain of samsara, or by overloading on decadent notes to signify samsara's indulgent connotations.

Instead, Guerlain decided to make up its own Bizarro World definition of samsara. (Samsara as "serenity." Really, guys?). Even with that revision, I'm not sure how the perfume's notes signify or play off each other. Just to get a sense of how bland Samsara is — pick up any Serge Lutens Oriental fantasy fragrance (Chergui, Arabie, Muscs Kublai Khan) and compare it to Samsara. It's the difference between "meh" and "Oh, my God what is this?"

So you know how I feel about this perfume that's been stripped of any significance or edge, connotatively or olfactively — let's now take a look at the advertisement. Ad execs may have wanted to project "a sense of serenity," but all I see is a strangely-coiffed lady-bot who looks like she's on 'luudes. Oh, the '80s.

Here are a couple contrasting reviews from Basenotes readers to balance out my strong dislike for utter indifference to Samsara:

(TDDanae likes it): "The beautiful smell of Sandalwood and Vanilla are toned down ever so slightly with Jasmine and Ylang Ylang. It does not smell floral, but the florals are just barely there enough to take any sharp edges off the Sandalwood and Vanilla. This ends up being such a delicate oriental blend that I certainly hope they never quit making it or change the formula because it is just perfect."

(Angelica dislikes it): "Some years ago I worked at a major museum where we would have big galas, and most of the ladies who attended were very wealthy and of a certain age. They all had near-identical ash blonde heavily highlighted, big, highly coiffed, hair. A hair helmet really. We took to calling this 'international hair,' which carried with it a whole host of associations.

And so I have come to the conclusion that Samsara is the oriental for women with international hair. It is well-mannered. And lest that indolic jasmine or sultry sandalwood should offend, there is a massive overlay of orris to keep it all in place, just as a robust application of Elnett will do for your coiffure."

Tabac Blond by Caron (1919)

For anyone who's ever enjoyed the deliciously naughty pleasure of smoking (I know, I know, it's bad for you), you'll know that one of its unfortunate side effects is waking up to a pile of clothes that smell like a combination of perfume and cigarettes.

And yet...

That olfactory trace of a vice-filled night out can bring great pleasure by evoking memories of living for the moment, of drawing in the heat and toasted flavor of tobacco deep into your lungs, of smoky kisses between peaty sips of scotch, and of coming back home too late to bother with removing your makeup.

Perhaps more than any other infamous tobacco classic (Habanita, Cuir de Russie, Jolie Madame or Scandal — but not Bandit, sorry), Tabac Blond lives up to these smoke-filled images of livin' la vida loca, only, instead of evoking stale cigarette smoke, at its heart is the rich, toasted caramel smell of rolling tobacco.

Composed by the wonderful Ernest Daltroff, who, as the nose for Narcisse Noir, seems to have specialized in creating perfumes for minxes-gone-wild, Tabac Blond paid homage to the scandalous bad girls who smoked cigarettes in the teens and '20s.

Notes from Perfume Shrine: Leather, carnation, linden, iris, vetiver, ylang-ylang, cedar, patchouli, vanilla, ambergris, musk (I detect civet)

Unlike Cuir de Russie and Scandal, scents whose overly-cloying floral notes reveal that they don't have the courage of their tobacco convictions, Tabac Blond's tobacco and leather notes aren't upstaged by florals. It starts off with ylang-ylang and leather, and moves into a wonderful powdery yet sharp (some have said metallic, Caron website says "coppery") smoke note that continues to sing through to the vanillic, clove-y, spicy and warm drydown. (I detect some civet dirtiness; most lists of notes I see exclude it, but Olfactarama includes it.)

Note-wise, I prefer Habanita and its comforting, more legible tobacco presence, and if you want a shocking tobacco scent, look no further than Bandit's badass wet ashtray meets leather and isobutyl quinoline. But in terms of projecting dark, sultry, and yet refined, you can't do much better than Tabac Blond; it's the most well-rounded of the vintage tobacco perfumes, in my opinion — tobacco softened, feminized, and beautified while still retaining some roughness. (OK — scratch that; I love Rumeur more. Tabac Blond is the second best well-rounded vintage tobacco perfume.)

Although the "blond" in the name refers to light tobacco, I think of brunettes when I think of this scent, specifically, Ava Gardner (below) and Linda Fiorentino (right).

Perfume writer Denyse Beaulieu has said that, historically, Tabac Blond was "meant to blend with, and cover up, the still-shocking smell of cigarettes: smoking was still thought to be a sign of loose morals."

Now? Tabac Blond and its homage to disreputable women is considered a classic. I shall refrain from saying that we've come a long way, baby.

(Please note: Vintage Tabac Blond is very, very hard to come by these days. The Perfumed Court seems to have only the reformulated version; I've yet to run into a mini; and eBay auctions for TB typically end with a winning bid above $300. This current eBay auction features Tabac Blond extrait. With 3 days left to go, there are already 24 bids and the current price is $200(!). I'm reviewing an Eau de Parfum from an unknown era [maybe 60s or 70s?], but definitely pre-reformulation. I got it from Quirky Finds, and I think she still has one for a reasonable price. Go get it!)

The photo of this beautiful vintage bottle of Tabac Blond courtesy Aromablog.ru