Scent and Subversion (38 page)

In 1973, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna limited the trapping of the musk deer, and in most countries today, it is illegal to trade in natural musk, except in very limited quantities. As a result, almost all musk in perfume and household products is now synthetic, and even though musk has been found in trace amounts in human fat, blood, breast milk, water, and even fish, IFRA considers the synthetic musks in perfume and household products safe.

The first synthetic musk was discovered by scientist Albert Bauer, who had been experimenting with TNT. The first nitro musk, as it came to be known, was a happy, fragrant byproduct. According to IFRA, synthetic musks shouldn’t be considered a single group because they lack a common chemical structure. In fact, what ties this bewildering array of synthetic musks in fragrance together is solely their musky scent—and yet even what constitutes “musky scent” is varied. When we think of musk, we often think of its animalic, bodily, erotic connotations, but some synthetic musks smell clean and in fact are
used in detergents and other household cleaning products. Synthetic musks in perfume have fixative powers because their molecules are heavy and they make fragrances last longer. They can play up top notes or work in the background. Depending on which musk or musks are used in a fragrance, they can be fresh, clean, animalic, fruity, floral, creamy, powdery, dry, woody, or ambery.

Certain synthetic musks, because of their ubiquity in cleaning products, are associated with cleanliness itself. While some perfumers may highlight a fragrance’s dirtiness with animalic musks like Muscone, there are also so-called “white musks,” like Galaxolide, that impart a subtle, clean scent. Again, the Scented Salamander’s Marie-Hélène Wagner has something interesting to say, lamenting that musk’s animalic connotations are lost on a deodorant-obsessed younger generation:

I
am an accidental connoisseur of perfume. I didn’t know I was the “collector” type until I started buying vintage and niche perfume. There’s an addictive quality to the hunt, the find, the purchase, and the joyous first sniff. With vintage perfume, the idea that I could be holding one of the last remaining versions of a scent makes me feel like a keeper of the sacred perfume-culture flame. There have been times, with rare scents like Jacques Fath’s Iris Gris or Guerlain’s Djedi, that I felt like one of those colonial explorers who caught the last glimpse of a dodo bird before it became extinct forever.

There are various ways to learn about perfume, and rather than provide you with a step-by-step method, I’ll lay out here what I think connoisseurship requires. Depending on how you choose to go about it, what you’re willing (or not willing) to spend, and where you live, this could either be a very expensive proposition or a relatively inexpensive one.

Consider the following a perfume version of the game, “Choose Your Adventure.”

Learn the basic categories of perfume.
In 1983, industry expert Michael Edwards updated the perfume classification system with his famous “Fragrance Wheel,” which is online with commentary (
http://www.fragrancesoftheworld.com/fragrancewheel.aspx
).

His classification system puts all perfumes in five main categories—Floral, Oriental, Woody, Fresh, and Fougère—with subdivisions in each one. The last category, Fougère, comprises all aspects of each of the other four. For example, florals can be fruity, soft (with aldehydes), or Oriental (with spices and vanilla). Woods can be dry (with cedar, tobacco, burnt wood, and leather) or mossy (with oakmoss, amber, citrus, floral, woods, musk). As a beginner, your best bet is going to be to keep it simple. Does it smell sweet, floral, green, spicy, rich, leathery, woodsy? Then try to fit your perceptions into these formal categories.

Sniff as many perfumes in as many categories as you can.
This can start at the mall. Take a notebook, write down the perfume and your impressions. Look it up on Basenotes.net
or Fragrantica.com, or read a blogger’s description. Find out the perfume notes. Does any one note stand out?

You can expand your research by beginning to collect decants,
or small 1 ml. vials, from the numerous decanting sites that abound online, and which I’ve listed in this book. Some even organize bundles of vials into educationally useful categories, like “Top 10 Vintage Perfumes” or “Top 10 Niche Perfumes.” This can be a great way to get started.

Look at the perfume pyramids that list perfume notes
if you want to delve into perfume appreciation further. Although some people pooh-pooh these lists as often being marketers’ fantasies of what is actually found in perfume (I’ve actually seen “angel’s skin” listed as a perfume note in a press release), they’re often pedagogically useful for the budding perfume lover and can help you understand why a series of perfumes smell similar and how they’re different (example: Diorella and Eau Sauvage; Miss Balmain, Aramis, Sikkim, and Fête de Molyneux; Angel and Flowerbomb).

Begin to smell essential oils
like ylang-ylang or clary sage, and perfume molecules such as aldehyde C-14, the famous peach aldehyde. These are readily available (and quite cheap) on the websites listed below. You’re essentially training your nose to detect these scents in perfume.

Here are some scent/perfume descriptors to get you started:
floral, fruity, sweet, green, fresh, light, cool, bright, delicate, sheer, sultry, erotic, animalic, aldehydic, powdery, sensual, warm, balsamic, radiant, aromatic, anisic, herbal, medicinal, coniferous, sour, camphory, minty, herbaceous, dusty, urinous, fatty, balsamic, buttery, smoky, vegetal, resinous, round.

“To be a nose you have to practice, just like a pianist plays his scales,” says Jean-Pierre Royet, a neuroscientist at the Claude-Bernard University in Lyon, France, who spearheaded a scientific study to determine if certain people have an innate superiority when it comes to smelling
.
His conclusion? Perfumers have more nuanced senses of smell not because they were born that way, but because they have trained their noses. People who continually sniff and remember scents, Royet determined, can actually conjure the scent from memory, to the point where the same area in their brain lights up whether they are actually sniffing the scent or simply remembering it.

If you’d like to become a champion scent-lete, or at least understand your favorite perfumes better, below is a list of some useful notes to start your nose-training with. On your mark, get ready … Sniff!

Bergamot, clary sage, jasmine, rose, geranium, ylang-ylang, lavender, coriander, petit grain, galbanum, tuberose, orris, cardamom, patchouli, oakmoss, Peru balsam, labdanum, benzoin, cedar, sandalwood, olibanum, styrax (liquid amber), myrrh, vetiver, tonka beans (I find these at witchcraft stores a lot!), civet (synthetic), castoreum (synthetic), Animalid (synthetic musk blend), costus, aldehyde C-14 (peach).

And read, read, read: blogs, books, perfume forums.
One of the most pleasurable things about my foray into perfume has been meeting, virtually or in real life, some of the most creative and kind people I’ve ever met: perfume lovers! They’ve inspired me with their humor and amazing insights right from the beginning.

•
   
www.bojensen.net
: In my recommended reading list, I suggested
Perfume and Flavor Materials of Natural Origin
by Steffen Arctander for its wonderful description of natural perfume notes. The book is quite expensive, however, so if you’d like to read an occasional quote of his descriptions, along with other useful information about perfume notes, this is an excellent online reference.

•
   Perfumer’s Apprentice: Perfumer Jean Carles (Ma Griffe, Tabu) was also a wonderful teacher. This site has Jean Carles’s method of teaching perfumery in PDFs you can download. This could also be useful as an exercise for the perfume lover who wants to improve her nose (
http://shop.perfumersapprentice.com/perfumersworkshop/carles.html
).

•
   For those who want to go subatomic with smell, Google the article entitled “Understanding the Underlying Dimensions in Perfumers’ Odor Perception Space as a Basis for Developing Meaningful Odor Maps” by Manuel Zarzo and David T. Stanton (you can download it in PDF form). They research the idea of “smell-mapping.” Even if you don’t read it, it’s worth checking out Stephan Jellinek’s brilliant and trippy “odor effects diagram” that divides perfume’s effects into four quadrants: narcotic, sweet (soft); its opposite, stimulating, bitter (active); erogenous, alkaline, animal (rich, musk, vanilla); and its opposite, antierogenous, sour, refreshing (citrusy).

•
   “Rallet No1 to Chanel No5 versus Mademoiselle Chanel No1” by Philip Kraft, Christine Ledard, and Philip Goutell is a PDF that can be purchased on
www.perfumerflavorist.com
.

•
   Stephen Fowler’s “Musk: An Essay,” is one of the most entertaining reads on the subject I’ve ever encountered. Originally published in
Juice
magazine’s Issue #3 (1995), it’s posted in its entirety here:
www.pheromonetalk.com/parfum/musk-essay-1923-print.html
.

•
   This is a wonderful source of quotations, anecdotes, historical facts, and book recommendations on the subject of ambergris:
http://www.netstrider.com/documents/ambergris/books
.

•
   There’s a beautiful perfume appreciation essay by the ambient musician Brian Eno called “Scents and Sensibilities” worth checking out (
http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/detail92.html
).

I
f you love perfume, smelling the classics, obscure gems, and old favorites is a great way to deepen your perfume knowledge. Encountering a vintage perfume like Guerlain’s Shalimar (1925), and then sniffing Bulgari Black (1998), which is a contemporary riff on that classic Oriental fragrance, is like recognizing that the blue dress Naomi Watts wears in David Lynch’s
Mulholland Drive
is a visual quote of the one Kim Novak wore in Alfred Hitchcock’s
Vertigo
. How are Shalimar and Bulgari Black different? What are their similarities? What do you make of the updated notes, and what do you think they mean? For the perfume nerd, teasing out the answers to these questions can be a huge part of the pleasure of collecting vintage perfume.

If art collectors buy pieces whose colors have faded or whose corners have broken off, vintage perfume collectors have it even worse. Some say that a perfume smells good for about six months to a year if properly stored away from heat and light. After that, it can start to evaporate, even in the bottle, and its volatile top notes can start “turning.” So you may not sniff an exact version of what a flapper in the 1920s may have smelled, but if you choose wisely, you can get a pretty good impression. An imperfect glimpse of Lanvin’s Rumeur (1934), or Balmain’s Vent Vert (1947), or (if you can get your hands on it) Guerlain’s Djedi (1926), is definitely better than none.

Here are some tips on how to get started on your vintage perfume journey:
First off, where should you shop for vintage? Estate sales, garage sales, flea markets, and antiques malls are fun places to start if you want to be surprised by a find.

If you’re looking for something in particular, you can check out some reputable perfume-decant websites that specialize in niche and vintage perfumes, as well as the online vintage perfume retailers I’ve listed below. Some Etsy sellers have also started to sell decants and full bottles of vintage perfume.

And there’s always good ol’ eBay. Choose a seller with a high score and positive ratings. Ask a lot of questions: Does the perfume still smell relatively fresh? Has it been stored away from heat and light? (You can also tell that by the color of the juice. If it’s way darker than the original juice, it’s probably off.) Does the seller accept returns? Make sure you know what the perfume smells like before you invest in a full bottle. In all my four years of collecting vintage, I’ve only had to ask for one refund, because I knew the juice was new and not vintage.

And finally, after you get a little collection going, you can swap with perfume friends in groups on Makeup Alley, Fragrantica, Basenotes, and Facebook.

•
   Start off small, with a decant or mini, or even an almost-empty bottle with just enough perfume left. (I see a lot of almost-finished bottles of perfume on eBay, and they’re an economical way to try a vintage you might be curious about.) You can try an old favorite, or something your mother may have worn, or a classic you’ve read about. There’s no point in spending $100 on a vintage perfume someone raved about on a perfume forum only to find you don’t like it. I was thrilled to find a mini of my first perfume love: Calvin Klein’s little-known first perfume, which was a gorgeous floral chypre from 1980.

•
   In addition to decants, minis, and used bottles of vintage, perfume nips are a fun way to try out vintage, and they seem to be all over the Internet. “Nips” is a patented name for perfume samples that come from around 1930 to the 1950s, a precursor to the vials with removable caps we have now. They were narrow little tubes made of plastene or glass, measuring about three inches long, filled with perfume. In order to sample the perfume, you would break off both ends and pour the perfume onto your skin. Sometimes, several different brands of perfume came in one plastic case, so their tips were color-coded to allow you to identify the brand. Otherwise, one brand of several nips came housed in cardboard tubes like miniature poster containers.

Nips were often given away as promotional gifts by companies that had nothing to do with perfume, like airlines or car dealerships. I even saw a nips case with the following etched on the back:
FLINT TELEPHONE EMPLOYEES CREDIT UNION
. (How glamorous!)

The great thing about nips is, because the perfume is sealed inside with no air to damage it, what you’re smelling is almost identical to a brand-new perfume. The downside? Once you crack that nip open, there’s no closing the genie bottle, so you’d better enjoy those few whiffs. It was definitely worth it for me, for example, to crack open an Evening in Paris nip and to smell the rainbow of fruit notes that came out of it like a Technicolor cartoon.

•
   Buy sample vials of vintage perfume. I’ve been seeing more of these on eBay and vintage perfume websites. They were once free, but, hey, now they’re rare.

•
   I’ve been able to try multiple vintage perfumes with those wonderful coffrets or gift boxes that have either a collection of mini perfumes from one brand, say, Estée Lauder, or a variety of perfumes. For example, I have a couple of those “Les Meilleurs Parfums de France” coffrets with seven to ten 2 ml. vintage perfumes such as Cabochard, Baghari, Antilope, Miss Balmain, and Ma Griffe. They’re getting more and more expensive, though.

•
   If you’re ready to invest in a full bottle, educate yourself. The Internet is your friend. What year was the perfume released? (Basenotes.com, Fragrantica.com, and numerous other perfume websites, including mine, YesterdaysPerfume.com, will provide the date.) Then, go to eBay—or Hprints.com, if it’s a French perfume—to look for a corresponding perfume ad. It will usually feature an image of the bottle along with a date for the ad. Some perfume bottles look exactly the same from first release to ten reformulations later, so this method of dating a bottle won’t help. But when they change (i.e., Balmain’s Vent Vert bottle), this is one way to find out the date of your perfume. A sealed, boxed bottle of perfume is more likely to hold up than a vintage perfume that’s been opened without its box, but the price is going to reflect that.

•
   Sometimes the color of the perfume (or “juice”) will tell you its age, too. For example, vintage Chanel No. 19 is straw colored, not green as it is now.

•
   No doubt sniffing the classics is a must. (I’ve listed a few must-sniffs below.) But the longer I collect vintage perfume, the more I realize that once you have a few of the classic, iconic vintages under your belt, the real exploration begins with obscurer scents, which you can often find for relatively cheap prices on eBay.

For example, figure out which perfume category you like the best, get the Haarmann & Reimer perfume guide, which lists perfume pyramids and organizes perfume into its fragrance category (floral, green, chypre, Oriental, etc.), and start collecting some obscure perfumes in that category. I’ve found some incredible vintage perfumes that way, particularly in the green and chypre animalic category (both of which are my favorite styles). Lanvin’s rich leather-tobacco-plum-vanilla Rumeur (1934), Trussardi’s Trussardi for Women (1984), and Scherrer 1 (1979) were just a few of the beauties I fell in love with that not everyone was chasing after.

Other tips for dating vintage perfume:
Perfume bottles that have stoppers with plastic dowells were made after 1970. If the bottle or box features a zip code, it was made after 1963. It’s a recent bottle if the percentage of alcohol is labeled on the bottle with the “%” symbol. The bottle is from the 1940s if you see any of the following: “SDA” (specially denatured
alcohol) on the label; a federal excise tax statement; or the term “dram” to indicate how much perfume is in the bottle. (A dram or drachm is about 5 ml.) If the perfume has a stopper, the numbers on the bottom should match the numbers on the bottom of the bottle’s stopper. Ground-to-fit stoppers are rarely used today, and for the most part, this numbering exists only on pre-1950s vintage perfumes. (Helen Farnsworth, a perfume bottle collector who, with her husband, Craig, also has an amazing collection of vintage perfume ads, provided this last set of tips for dating vintage perfume.)

The following is just a suggested list; I’m sure there are vintage perfumes I love that I’ve left off! To make it easier, I’ve listed them under their fragrance categories.

Floral:
Joy by Patou, Fracas by Piguet, My Sin by Lanvin

Leather:
Cuir de Russie by Chanel, Peau d’Espagne by Santa Maria Novella, Empreinte by Courrèges, Azurée by Estée Lauder, Aramis, Miss Balmain

Animalic:
Jicky by Guerlain, Narcisse Noir by Caron, Baghari by Piguet, Muscs Koublaï Khän by Serge Lutens

Green:
Silences by Jacomo, Vent Vert by Balmain, Inoui by Shiseido

Chypre:
Diorella by Dior, Chanel No. 19, Paloma Picasso, Mitsouko by Guerlain, Scherrer No.1

Fruity:
Calyx by Prescriptives, Parfum de Peau by Claude Montana, Colony by Patou, Premier Figuier by L’Artisan

Citrus:
Ô de Lancôme, Eau Sauvage by Dior

Woody:
Féminité du Bois by Shiseido, Samsara by Guerlain, Theorema by Fendi

Oriental:
Jicky and Shalimar by Guerlain, Emeraude by Coty, Tabu by Dana, Toujours Moi by Corday, Sirocco by Lucien Lelong, Opium by Yves Saint Laurent, Bulgari Black

Fougère:
Fougère Royale by Houbigant, Canoe by Dana, Love’s Baby Soft

Ambergris.fr

BoisdeJasmin.com

Cafleurebon.com

ChandlerBurr.com

FirstNerve.com (about scent culture)

GlassPetalSmoke.com (about flavor and scent)

GraindeMusc.com

IndiePerfume.com

ISmellThereforeIAm.blogspot.com

KatiePuckrikSmells.com

Legerdenez.blogspot.com

NSTPerfume.com

1000Fragrances.blogspot.com

Olfactorama.blogspot.com

PerfumePosse.com

Perfumesmellinthings.blogspot.com

Pinkmanhattan.blogspot.com

SorceryofScent.blogspot.com

TheAlembicatedGenie.com

Themuseinwoodenshoes.com

TheNonBlonde.com

The Scented Salamander (Mimifroufrou.com/scentedsalamander)

Basenotes.net

Encyclopedia:
http://perfumeintelligence.co.uk/

Facebook Perfume Groups

Fragrantica.com

MakeupAlley.com

PerfumeofLife.com

Etsy.com

SurrendertoChance.com

ThePerfumedCourt.com

ThePoshPeasant.com

MiniaturePerfumeShoppe.com

QuirkyFinds.com

Luckyscent.com

SurrendertoChance.com

ThePerfumedCourt.com

ThePoshPeasant.com