Yesterday's Perfume

Perfume Haikus Are Fun

Recently, Now Smell This had a fun perfume haiku challenge, and what a challenge it was! For a lady like myself who likes to go on and on, suddenly, I had to reduce my impressions of a perfume into three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. (I've written lengthier reviews on all of these, by the way.)

Challenging, but doable. Here are some I came up with, and I'm thinking it wouldn't hurt to include a haiku with every perfume review from now on! (We'll see if I actually do it.)

As for the Mitsouko ad...it's so gorgeous, and possibly the only perfume ad I've seen with an Asian woman in it. Too bad she's also styled like she's going to be in the next Shogun television miniseries, but, I guess you take what you can get.

So without further ado(s), my haikus.

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Fille d’Eve by Nina Ricci

Lover’s dirty hair
Skin plus yesterday’s perfume
Chic can be sexy

 

Giorgio by Giorgio of Beverly Hills

Bubble-headed scent
You’ve been stinking three decades
Please go away now

 

Bandit by Robert Piguet

Leather tobacco
Tied with a green rubber bow
Ends warm and mossy

 

Eden by Cacharel

Top smells like plastic
Humid tropical fruit heart
Still, it intrigues me

 

Diorella by Christian Dior

Shows you how to look
At both garbage and flowers
Vintage one’s better

 

What Perfume Did Your Mother Wear?

The question might suggest that your mother doesn't wear perfume now, but I don't mean it to. I mean — what perfume did she wear when you were little and she was the most important woman in your life?

I talk a lot about my mother and her perfume choices, but that's because my mother was — and is — a woman who loves perfume. It is part and parcel of the feminine things I associate her with — makeup, heels, fragrance. And it definitely influenced me.

Femme was a perfume she wore before she was a mother. I also recall Charlie and Enjoli when she was a single mother going back to college. Then, there were a succession of big perfumes — Scherrer, Diva, Angel. She's backed off from the big scents, and now prefers light, fresh scents like Bulgari Eau Pafumée Au Thé Vert. (A funny story about Scherrer. She can't stand any of the vintage perfumes I now love, and the last time I visited her, she asked me if I wanted Scherrer I, otherwise, she was going to throw it out! Ack! Don't throw out vintage perfume!)

I wrote about a friend's desire to smell Fleeting Moment again because her mother, who'd passed away when she was eight, had left behind a tiny, empty bottle whose residue was still fragrant. It was one of the few, tangible things she had of hers.

And then there is the ex. While thinking of this post, I remembered an odd ex-boyfriend who wore a very feminine, vintage-smelling spicy, balsamic, oriental perfume that was totally incongruous with his appearance — tall, masculine, New England preppy. "What is that?" I asked him once. "I'm not sure, but it's my mother's perfume." (These are the sorts of moments when not asking a lot of questions is probably for the best.)

At the time, I thought it was wonderfully eccentric that a straight man would unselfconsciously wear a woman's perfume — his mother's perfume! It somehow made him seem even more masculine, in a strange way, because it seemed so daring. It became (perversely enough), the scent I associated with him, and I know if I ran into it again, I would immediately think of him (and I guess, unwittingly, his mother). Now, what Freud would have to say about that tangled mess, I'll leave to the experts.

In any case, I am curious what your associations are with your mother's perfume. I find myself, like the old boyfriend, wanting to wear the perfumes my mother wore. Do you remember what perfume your mother wore? Are you going to get her perfume for Mother's Day, coming up on May 8th? What do you think she'd like now?

(There are so many great comments below! If you'd like to read them all, be sure to click on "Next" after the last comment on this page.)

Enjoli by Charles of the Ritz (1978)

Just like the exhausted woman in this classic perfume ad, Enjoli works overtime to please. Its top notes bring home the bacon, its heart notes fry it up in a pan, and its base notes never let you forget you're a man...as it were.

Top notes: Bergamot, green note, aldehyde, hyacinth, peach

Heart notes: Tuberose, jasmine, rose, orris, carnation, orchid

Base notes: Sandalwood, musk, cedar, oakmoss, amber, vanilla

What I mean to say is that Enjoli starts out in the high and happy register of one of my favorite combinations — galbanum and peach. I love the juicy ripe fruit note balanced with green tartness and bergamot. Not too sweet, not too sour, just right.

A radiant and uplifting floral heart soon announces — via the bridge of powdery-sweet hyacinth and orris — that this is not merely a sport scent like the brisk and wonderful Aliage or the elegant but lighthearted Givenchy III.

Nor is Enjoli only a well-behaved floral that speaks only when spoken to. Nope. Hear that thud? It's the frying pan being thrown onto the stove. The rustle of silk? The nightgown being slipped into...

Introducing: Enjoli's third act. The one that doesn't let you forget you're a man. You know — the sexy part. Mossy and woody, soft and sensual, the drydown has an amazing sandalwood smoothness and lingering spiciness that makes you forget that the perfume started out with a completely different personality.

And oakmoss! I don't know how $5.95 a bottle would be adjusted for today's inflation, but Enjoli was an inexpensive drugstore chypre with balance and chic. A quick tour through today's Walgreen's should tell you that era is over. The crapola they have locked in glass cases? I wouldn't take any of it from the free bin...

But back to Enjoli. It's actually kind of remarkable the way Enjoli tries to "have it all," like the fantasy 70s feminist the ad is addressing. Its development is an exaggeration of extremes. Its top notes are the go-getting woman working outside of the home, the heart notes traditional florals that tend to hearth and home, and the base notes are warm, spicy and sensual. (Haarman & Reimer just blends its parts together and calls it a floral. C'mon, H&R! Maybe today's Enjoli is that, but my vintage tells a different story.This thing has a lot of spice and woodiness: oakmoss, sandalwood, carnation, and cedar.)

And now onto the infamous ad/earworm in the tv commercial seen below. It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized the jingle was based on a Peggy Lee song, with lyrics added and changed, including "I can bring home the bacon..." If you ever wanted to understand the critique of the idea that women can "have it all," just check out this ad here.

Basically, what does the liberated 70s woman get for trading in her 50s Betty Draper days of stay-at-home momhood smoking cigarettes, minding the kids, cooking and cleaning, and developing the kind of hysterical neurosis that only 5-trips-a-week to the shrink can cure?  More work! In fact, a 24-hour day of working and pleasing! (And seeing the actress in the ad in triplicate makes me think of the movie Sybil, about a woman with multiple personality disorder. "Having it all" can also mean becoming schizophrenic and psychotic!)

Sigh. I get tired just watchin' that lady. But I haven't tired of this wonderful little relic from the past. Like Charlie, Enjoli was a perfume my mother wore in her single mom days while getting a college degree, and she'd probably been enticed by its attempt to recognize how hard she was working. She still wanted to smell good, though, and Enjoli smells good.

Ad courtesy: Glen H. Sparky's Flickr

 

Aviance by Prince Matchabelli (1975)

 

“I’ve been sweet, and I’ve been good/I’ve had a whole, full day of motherhood/But I’m gonna have an Aviance night!

(Male voiceover) Prince Matchabelli brings you Aviance, a radiant new perfume…that LASTS…through the night. And what a way to start it…

 …Yes, I’m gonna have an Aviance night! (Male voice singing) Oh, yeah…we’re gonna have an Aviance night…”

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The idea that pheromones could be bottled up and put in perfume so that people would inexplicably lust after you was pretty big in the 70s. Aviance by Prince Matchabelli missed an opportunity to make that dubious claim, because it certainly has had, for me, the Pheromone Effect. For several days now, I've been having a straight-up, punch-drunk mad affair with this beauty. I didn’t know what Huffing was until I met Aviance.

It is so beautiful, so weird, and so right, I can't believe there’s hardly any information out there on it. Part of this makes me worry that perhaps it’s just a really cruddy perfume I happen to like. (We know there’s at least one in a perfumaniac’s perfume wardrobe!) If that’s the case, I’ll let it be Aviance. But I doubt it; I think this one’s an overlooked beauty.

Aviance is characterized by my Haarmann & Reimer guide as an aldehydic floral, but it is so much spicier and headier than that. (It’s more like Tabu or Dioressence in character, made for a sexy Tarot card-reading gypsy type. Its deployment of musk and cinnamon notes reminds me, in its effect anyway, of Frederic Malle’s Musc Ravageur, even though it’s intensely floral, too.)

Aviance starts off aldehydic and leafy green, and combined with lily-of-the-valley, for a moment it feels fresh and light. Radiant rose and jasmine benefit from the delicate touch of the top notes’ freshness, but its spicy, animalic, and disturbingly rich base casts a spell of erotic mystery over its initial floral lightness.

I’m not sure where the animalic, dirty part of this perfume comes from. The musk? That would make sense, because the last time I smelled this kind of fatty, erotic richness, I was sniffing vintage Chanel No. 5 extrait’s powerful nitromusks. Maybe it’s from what the H&R guide calls Aviance’s “aldehyde complex,” since some aldehydes are described as smelling like “snuffed candles.” The Pheromone Effect could also come from the Tonka bean note. (Tonka beans are the seeds of the Dipteryx Oderata, a legume tree. They’re sometimes described as an earthier vanilla scent — skanky and animalic.) In Aviance, tonka’s almondy, vanillic, clove-and-cinnamon-like facets definitely take the floral brightness to a seedier part of town.

Green, floral, spicy-woody, and dirty-rich, Aviance definitely smells perfume-y and vintage, but I love how forward it is. The priceless television ad above tells us everything we need to know about its personality. Like the 70s woman who was just getting permission to like sex rather than just see it as a chore (as the 50s woman was supposed to do), Aviance has been sweet and good (conventional florals, innocent and transparent notes of green and lily-of-the-valley) but she’s ready for an Aviance night. Presumably, that means hot, sweaty sex from her leering husband who nods in approval of her kitchen striptease.

And the ad’s not wrong: Aviance sure does LAST a long time. Nudge nudge, wink wink. (But seriously, if I put this on at night, the next morning, there’s a gorgeous, lightly floral and sandalwood spice veil on my skin.)

If Charlie was for the liberated woman who didn’t need a man (hey, she practically WAS a man named Charlie), Aviance was for the liberated gal who was still home-makin’ and takin’ care of babies — but don’t think the sexual revolution passed her by. (And is Aviance not the best stage name ever? The next time some weird dude talks to me and asks my name, I'm going to whisper, "Aviance. The name's Aviance.")

So after Charlie and Aviance, who’s next? Why, the Enjoli woman who brings home the bacon, of course. Stay tuned…

Giorgio by Giorgio of Beverly Hills (1981)

It was the decade of Dynasty (1981- 1989), Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous (1984 - 1995), Falcon Crest (1981 - 1990) and other rich-people porn for aspirational types. And it got off to one hell of a smelly start.

 

You know it. You may love it. But once you put it on, you won't be able to get away from it, and those around you may hate you forever. That's right — I'm talking about Giorgio. Giorgio of Beverly Hills. 

 

In the late '70s, Gale and Fred Hayman* decided they needed an exclusive fragrance for their clothing boutique on Rodeo Drive. This exclusive fragrance, ironically (or, more likely, intentionally), ended up scenting every magazine, mall, big-haired salad eater, and Gucci bag-carrying Texas** debutante in the 80s like the "airborne toxic event" that threatens the characters in Don DeLillo's surreal fantasia on consumerism and suburbia in White Noise.

 

This airborne toxic event Giorgio starts off with a bright hit of green, followed by a massive synthetic-smelling accord of fruit notes + orange blossom + every cloyingly sweet facet that could be wrenched from Giorgio's florals: tuberose, gardenia, ylang-ylang, and jasmine. There's something kind of pleasant*** about the powdery and slightly rich (amber/vanilla), musky and sandalwood dry down, but you can't really experience it because the  tuberose-gardenia-fruit monster stuns your nose into submission.

 

Top notes: Green note, bergamot, fruit note, orange blossom, aldehyde

Heart notes: Tuberose, gardenia, ylang-ylang, orchid

Base notes: Sandalwood, cedarwood, musk, amber, moss, vanilla

 

Giorgio doesn't really develop so much as Enter the Building and stage a sit-in demanding to be noticed: inert, bright, soapy, floral, and in-your-face sweet. It’s sunny and pretty in the way an immaculately made-up face photoshopped within an inch of its life in a magazine is pretty, or the way a bubble-headed beauty who will not stop smiling but who has absolutely nothing interesting to say is pretty. There is no movement, multidimensionality, or life inside.

 

Giorgio is always described as a "big" scent, like many 80s scent bombs, but it's not Giorgio's bigness or boldness that bothers me. I like the perverse Poison (in small doses). And what some say is Giorgio's reference scent, Fracas, is as alive as a carnivorous plant. It’s Giorgio's inorganic obtrusiveness that offends. And it gives me an almost instant headache.

 

I may just be unable to objectively assess Giorgio’s aesthetic merits because there was a time growing up in Texas that I simply could not get away from it. It arrived with every fashion magazine that came in the mail in scent-strip form. (It was, in fact, the first perfume that advertised itself not only through an image and a tagline, but also by actually smelling up the room.) You couldn't go to the mall without being inadvertantly sprayed with it. And on top of everything, its celebration of "exclusivity" (it's from Rodeo Drive!) turns me off, and its name makes me chuckle. (If you've ever watched soap operas, it's as if Giorgio is being positioned as the "exotic" European dude who ends up stirring up trouble for the townsfolk in Port Charles.)

 

Giorgio set the volume way up (hence all the references to "loud" scents), and other scents followed suit (among them Obsession, the aforementioned Poison, Amarige, et al). It actually makes sense that by the 90s, our exhausted noses were proffered androgynous office scents that had wiped off all their fuschia lipstick and purple eye shadow and retired their sequined evening gowns.

 

Improbably, Giorgio is still available, but to me, it smells as dated as Robin Leach's sign-off sounds: "Champagne Wishes and Caviar Dreams!"

 

*Apparently, Giorgio's phenomenal success coincided with the breakup of the Gale and Fred Hayman marriage.

** Apologies to Texas, but this is where I grew up.

*** I wanted to say something nice, and this is all I could come up with.

****Perfumes got so strong/loud in the 80s that New York restaurant owners were putting signs in their windows that said, "Please no wearers of Passion, Giorgio or Poison." Ha! (This tidbit from Susan Irvine's Perfume: The Creation and Allure of Classic Fragrances.)