Scent and Subversion (29 page)

The love child of Coriandre and Paloma Picasso’s Mon Parfum, Sinan has everything the adventurous chypre lover would want: soul, depth, eroticism, and wearability, with a whiff of the exotic. This spiced chypre, shot through with angular green florals, is the olfactory equivalent of putting on a turquoise-blue caftan and wearing big gold hoop earrings. (Think of brocaded silk, or Loulou de la Falaise during Yves Saint Laurent’s Orientalist phase.)

Sinan starts off green and herby, and its coriander, although prominent, is dosed with a lighter hand than it is in Coriandre. Geranium’s piquancy, lily of the valley’s green facet, and ylang-ylang’s sharp sweetness—all are lightly cloaked with the musty damp herbaceous blanket that is coriander.

Top notes:
Bergamot, green note, coriander, aldehydes, rosewood

Heart notes:
Rose, geranium, lily of the valley, jasmine, orris, ylang-ylang, cardamom

Base notes:
Patchouli, vetiver, amber, moss, musk, cistus

Perfumer:
Dominique Ropion

Ysatis is not only a pleasure to pronounce (look in the mirror, purse your lips, and whisper “Eee-saht-ees, by Jee-vahn-shee” just for kicks), it is also a gorgeous and sensual floral. The surprise (and indispensable) note is coconut, giving the perfume a hint of richness, fat, and calories. It acts like a soft-focus camera lens to blur the crisp florals and give them a vaguely nutty, milky, and ever-so-slightly sweet tropical feel that could have veered into gourmand territory but stops short. It’s Ysatis’s hint of the tropical that makes it interesting, and its sexy drydown is my favorite part. That’s when the notes, all tucked into bed and spooning together, melt onto your skin.

Top notes:
Green note, aldehydes, fruit note, rosewood, coconut

Heart notes:
Tuberose, jasmine, narcissus, carnation, rose, ylang-ylang

Base notes:
Patchouli, sandalwood, castoreum, civet, oakmoss, amber, honey, cistus

Subtle, by ’80s standards, the distinguished and lovely Anne Klein II bowed to the decade’s passion for Oriental fragrances with amber-colored hues but comes out unscathed: It doesn’t smell too outré or dated.

Anne Klein II starts off surprisingly green, and then transitions to a beautiful blend of flowers. Orange blossom and ylang-ylang in particular continue to peek through the perfume’s third stage, which is the perfume’s primary character: creamy, ambery, woody, and orris-caressed vanilla.

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

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

Base notes:
Vanilla, amber, sandalwood, musk, patchouli, civet, benzoin

Perfumer:
Jean-Paul Guerlain

Not many scents have mint notes in them—not only because of the association mint has with things like toothpaste, and, in England, cleaning products, but because it would take a steady hand to figure out how much to add in order to keep mint from taking over. But Derby, Guerlain’s chypre leather, puts peppermint to good use. What would otherwise be a beautiful but typical chypre leather transforms, through the addition of peppermint, into something sparkling, shot through with a cold, almost metallic quality, as if something otherwise dark were lit from within.

Top notes:
Bergamot, lemon, artemisia, peppermint (fresh herbaceous)

Heart notes:
Pimento, rose, pepper, mace, jasmine

Base notes:
Leather, vetiver, sandalwood, patchouli, moss (leathery, mossy, woody)

Perfumer:
Jean Guichard

Three words: spiced, honeyed leather. (It’s also a contemporary version of Schiaparelli’s 30s scent, Shocking.)

Top notes:
Citrus, basil

Heart notes:
Rose, honey

Base notes:
Oakmoss, woods, leather, patchouli, civet

Perfumer:
Jean Guichard

Until I picked it up recently, I hadn’t sniffed Obsession since the 1980s, so I was surprised at how restrained it seems to be in hindsight, and how well it’s held up. Part of Obsession’s success lies in its ability to take you in two olfactory directions at once: It balances a sensual, ambery, and powdery base with a radiating orangey heart that’s kept fresh with green notes and bright fruit. Spice and animal warmth never threaten to undo the paradoxical green freshness at its heart. Although updated with the ’80s obsession with bright fruit accords, its Shalimar-like structure of bright/sensual/animalic is familiar, and it works.

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

Heart notes:
Jasmine, ylang-ylang, rose, cedarwood, sandalwood

Base notes:
Vanilla, amber, musk, moss, civet

For many, this monster floral is aptly named. It is a true love-it-or-hate-it fragrance. (Ad from 1985)

Perfumer:
Edouard Flechier

It’s hard to believe that Poison is almost thirty 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!

Rich, woody, spicy, and occasionally veering into a grape-bubblegum accord, Poison is like Shiseido’s Féminité du Bois with the cedarwood turned down and the tuberose-jasmine turned way, way up. The continuum of berrylike scents from Femme, to Magie Noire, to Féminité du Bois, shows the versatility of the berry/Prunol note, as well as its goth-erotic sensibility.

Although Poison comes on strong, the scent balances its intensity with a symphony of background notes that keeps it from being one-dimensional. Poison’s spice (cinnamon, coriander, carnation), woods, and musk temper its floral sweetness. It mellows out
with an opiate-like softness, partly sweet, partly woody, musky, and incensey. Perfumer Edouard Flechier confirms that IFRA restrictions have continuously changed its original formula since its inception.

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

Perfumer:
Isabelle Doyen

If bigness is the mark of a 1980s scent, then Sables (“Sands”) is very much of its time. This out-of-character Goutal fragrance for men explodes on your skin with the smells of burnt sugar, fenugreek, the savory-sweet Immortelle flower, buttery sandalwood, and amber, like a dessert doused with brandy and lit on fire.

In addition to its bigness, Sables also smells like a twenty-first-century unisex niche perfume, its striking weirdness due in part to its being built around the maple syrup/savory bacon/ham note of the Immortelle flower. (This “Everlasting” flower is notorious for challenging perfumers to construct something that doesn’t simply smell like Sunday brunch.) Sables’s slight anisic, herbaceous, and celery-like scent recalls the dried cooking herb, fenugreek, which is used in curries and Middle Eastern cooking
.

The perfume’s heat—suggested in notes like cinnamon and pepper—is also the metaphorical heat from sand dunes, summer, and perhaps the oft-imagined “exotic” winds that carry floral and food spices from markets across stretches of desert. It places itself, then, in the middle of this recurring trope in perfumes such as Lucien Lelong’s Sirocco and Serge Lutens’s olfactory Orientalist fantasy, Chergui (2001), both names for hot, Moroccan desert winds. (Speaking of Serge Lutens, his Christopher Sheldrake–composed Santal de Mysore [1991], with its buttered popcorn and cumin notes, smells like a toned-down homage to Sables, minus the cinnamon and maple syrup.)

Sables takes a few tries to get, and you might just end up appreciating it without loving it, but that it came out in the 1980s—the era of big flowers and big fruit—is a testament to Isabelle Doyen’s prescience, brilliance, and daring. (Get thee to an Annick Goutal counter and try this stuff! Miraculously, it’s still around.)

Notes:
Immortelle, cinnamon, pepper, black tea, sandalwood, amber

Perfumer:
Sophia Grojsman

Equal parts guava and grapefruit, Sophia Grojsman’s stunner Calyx is arguably one of the best of its fruity genre. Its genius? Reproducing the funky fruit-going-bad ripeness of tropical fruits like guava, jackfruit, and durian. Added to Calyx’s overripe sweetness—more aromatic than sweet—is the bitter freshness of a grapefruit accord so authentic-smelling I can almost taste the rind.

Calyx’s initial slightly rotting fruit note dips down low, like an orchestra that opens by allowing the musical saw to sound its first wavering, carnivalesque note. Once the rest of its song gets back on its feet to a “normal” register, that fruit-on-the-verge-of-going-bad note lingers, coloring the way the rest of Calyx’s fruity floral notes are experienced.

With as much fruit that’s packed into this perfume, you’d think that it would be cloying and overbearing, like the fruit bombs that stink up Sephora’s perfume aisles today. But, again, Calyx’s intelligence belies its often ditzy fruity-floral perfume category.

Top notes:
Peach, apricot, cassis, green notes, tagetes (marigold), spearmint, bergamot

Heart notes:
Lily of the valley, lily, jasmine, rose, cyclamen, melon, orris

Base notes:
Cedar, musk, moss, raspberry

JSW3 starts off with a juicy galbanum-laced start, its pronounced masculine feel (perhaps) from the coriander, rosewood, and bay leaf combo. JSW3’s heart is gorgeous: It retains traces of the green, fresh top notes, and then moves to a powdery orris that transitions to spring-fresh florals. By the time it begins to dry down, you feel you’ve been on a roller-coaster ride of personalities. As the fresh green opening hovers over florals and powder, its animalic base rounds it all off with with a mossy, incensey, leathery, creamy sandalwood finish.

As much as I like Jil Sander Woman 3, it confuses me a little. Its pieces don’t fit together or even clash in a way that makes sense. It feels unfinished, although each time I sniff my wrists I get something gorgeous. It resembles a scent you could find at Barneys now—niche, and a little experimental.

Top notes:
Green note, bergamot, coriander, aldehyde, rosewood, bay

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

Base notes:
Patchouli, castoreum, sandalwood, olibanum, benzoin, amber, moss, vanilla

Perfumer:
Alberto Morillas

There was once a myth that the panther was the one animal that smelled so amazing that its prey would voluntarily approach it just to catch a whiff of its narcotic fragrance. It seems that Cartier missed an opportunity to make this perfume as animalic as its name suggests. Instead, Panthère is a voluptuous, complex, sweet floral that dries down to woods, and balances fruit notes with white flowers.

Top notes:
Karo Karounde, tagetes, peach, mace

Heart notes:
Coriander, jasmine, gardenia, rose, heliotrope, carnation, ylang-ylang

Base notes:
Cedar, sandalwood, patchouli, moss, musk, amber, vanilla, tonka

Perfumer:
Jean Guichard

Known as the “King of the Shoulder Pads,” and an influence on wild designers like the late Alexander McQueen, Claude Montana gifted the 1980s with extreme, sculptural silhouettes and shoulder pads Lady Gaga eagerly borrowed from. But alas, the House of Montana, founded in 1979, went kaput in 1997.

Parfum de Peau starts off with tangy green notes, ripe cassis, and peach, laid over a veil of pepper and spices (cardamom). The unspecified green note almost has a vegetal green pepper smell—an odd note to marry with ripe fruit! Spicy ginger, sandalwood, and carnation join classic florals to the divine base that lasts for hours and evolves into a true “parfum de peau” (skin scent/perfume).

Depending on when I sniff my arm, Parfum de Peau gives me spicy fruit, an intense rose, or the amazing spicy-woody-powdery, animalic base that makes this perfume more of a floral Oriental to me than a fruity chypre, as
the Haarmann & Reimer Fragrance Guide
classifies it. (Or it’s some hybrid of both.)

What makes this fruity concoction sexy rather than innocent or cloying is its animalic nature. Cardamom and cassis are both notes that can reference the body, BO in the first instance and urine (cat pee, specifically!) in the second. Joined with the more-obvious animalics—castoreum and civet—you can see why this is not a perfume to put on before you go to church on Sunday.

Parfum de Peau represents everything the 1980s stands for in the popular imagination: It’s loud, daring, and cacophonous. But it’s also incredibly beautiful, and I’ve had
it on my mind since I put it on last night. Even though the version I have is a mere eau de toilette, I can smell its subtle woody-ambery powderiness on my skin almost an entire day later.

Top notes:
Peach, cassis, pepper, green note, plum, cardamom

Heart notes:
Ginger, rose, tuberose, jasmine, ylang-ylang, carnation, sandalwood

Base notes:
Patchouli, vetiver, civet, castoreum, amber, musk, olibanum (frankincense)