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.

Comments

[Select Perfume]

nice blog...Like it alot

[Angela Cox]

That is Jerry Hall ? I prefer the advert for the male version with the gorgeous Rupert Everett !. I enjoyed what you had to say ,sadly Opium has always given me a headache but I am tempted to buy a smal size for my daughter as often I can bear perfumes secondhand that would set of my headaches.

[Perfumaniac]

Angela, Opium doesn't give me a headache, but alas, it's just not a perfume I ever feel like ever wearing. It seems to sit on my skin rather than blending with it and developing in an interesting way. Maybe it would smell nice on someone else? Who actually wears Opium anymore?

[Elizabeth]

My favorite Opium advertisement is the photo of Sophie Dahl. Shocked me, yes, and took my breath away.

[Perfumaniac]

For some reason, Elizabeth, the way her body's positioned, she always looked to me like she was about to give birth! It is a shocking ad, though, I agree.

[mary]

My boyfriend gave this to me when I was twenty-one or two. He said it was the only hard drug he wanted to do with me. I loved the scent: it's heavy and mysterious and redolent of a deep, rich knowing. I only wore it in cold weather - it was too much for me in the heat.

I'm loving these perfume posts, they're so informative and lyrical (and hysterical! "Are these pages made from the dried, pressed tears of unicorns?") at the same time.

[Perfumaniac]

Mary, Its hard to imagine wearing this in the heat, but it is beautiful and Im sure someone could pull it off in any weather. For me, Id feel like I had to be in silk robes, reclining in a Chinese opium den, not a care in the world. Id love to get a whiff of it on the bold person who could wear it...

[robin]

So interesting about the Japanese inro and its influence on the Opium pure parfum bottle design. I find the Opium parfum packaging - the bottle with cord & tassle + the oval box - to be one of the most beautiful parfum presentations out there. Truth be told, I'm totally a sucker for big tassles...the way they hang there with no other purpose but to appear decadent. I love it! (The Le Tabac Blond box tassle is my second favorite). I just found this pic of an inro...it looks so much like the Opium parfum:

http://www.valuethisradio.com/images/20050922wthbig.jpg

The yellow rosette on the inro even mirrors the circular window on the front of the Opium bottle showing the amber juice inside. Fascinating. Thanks so much for the great review!

[Aquaria]

I used to wear Opium, but then it took on a very obnoxious base note of used underwear for me.

Even now, I couldn't wear it after some idiot doused herself in the stuff one day, and came into the post office where I worked. She had so much of the perfume on that it filled the space in about 10 seconds and caused people to RUN out of the room--including me, who was trying to put mail in boxes, and a co-worker. When she left, we went back in and the smell was still strong enough to make us gag. We opened the door, but the smell was so bad so long that we were having to turn away customers for nearly two hours.

From one woman wearing perfume in a small space for about ten minutes.

I had to go home, eventually, because the strength of the smell burned my eyes, nose, mouth, throat and lungs so badly that I got bronchitis by the time those two hours were up.

Some people really shouldn't be allowed near a perfume bottle.

Ever.

[Carrie]

I bought my first bottle a few months after it was released, so that would have been early 1978 and I would have been 22. I used to wear it to work, but you could get away with that in the late 70s and early 80s as long as you used a light hand. It got compliments, that's for sure! Opium for me has always been 'spray and walk-through' if I'm going out, or douse myself full on if I'm staying home and by myself.

Until recently, the last bottle I bought was in 2005, and when my then 21 year old daughter moved away she took it with her. This year I got a couple bottles of vintage spray. I didn't even realize it had been reformulated until a few months ago. I guess the new version would be ok, if you weren't familiar with the old. The old is a masterpiece! Especially when it was first released. There was a minor reformulation in the 1980s, I can remember the difference between my first bottle and the next. I'd love to be able to smell the original from 1977 again. *sigh*

[Perfumaniac]

Hi Carrie, I was too young to wear Opium, but what a brilliant perfume and marketing campaign. I would have been first in line to buy this! I have a cute little vintage mini, and will sniff it and think about the good ol' days when women could go to work smelling like Opium!

[Anna]

hello,
i'm a happy opium wearer since many many years day by day
it is my skin. I dont smell the initial head nor do the
others , it's the only juice i can wear spontanously
without fakeness or 'statements'as u called it.
why n earth should one want to make a statement?
Maybe when iwas 18 and Diorella addicted.
I am an artist also so i know the 'statements
it would be a shame to waste even 15 min of your life with
statements, or fake smells.
The thing is : we all have different colours of skin
and we react chemicly differently.
Also i wanna have fun with myself, i combine opium with some other stuff. But i would feel very uneasy with
the flowergroup cause it doesnt fit me.
Diorella is still my big love i make paintings abut here
i smell her i associate and write and stuff, but: I CAN NOT WEAR IT because it does not blend + then i''m overconscious. I must say this : the original Opium is
indead somethingvery very very special, it makes me cry
but it has also a tragic note, ashy and animallike.
The reformula for the modern age abusers is much lighter
they took the depression out of it, and i swear YSL
knew what a depression is, but i prefer melancholy.
Every creation comes out of the ashes of melancholia.
Anyway, they took it out. Its much easier ,sweater,
and fugitive now. I wear it cause i have no choice, like i said i cant stand others on my skin,but it's manageble and its my secret what lays beyond my skin,not on but dep under my bodycells there is the real creation of my personal imagination.It is art.
Still.

[anna]

Yes,
we must never finish our originals, smell out of the vintage bottle like i do.
indeed ther have been at least 2 changes over the years.
the 1977 is .......it is , it just is Art.
I prefer to wear a dropoil of something else but there must remain a leftover in the bottle.
Take care,

[anna]

And yes, i just go to work like everybody.
What's this fuzz bout u can't do this or u cant do that,
i really dont understand the stiffiness that evaporate
from this pages. You really can do a lot, i wear patchouly
in everyday, theres no police to arrest me.
I even rread the review on Aromatics-Clinique u wrote and
i tell u : that is a very very nice smell, even older ladies wear it here , now that is just a NORMAL
scent. I reverse the situation for u: u should try to
judge the modern crap-smells instead of being preconcepted about very good smells likeYSL or Clinique..
Start choosing a side. You dont need to make it duller than it already is.. For the rest you can smell and formulate very well. Thank u its nice.