There would always be a Tobler’s chocolate orange in my Christmas stocking when I was a kid. (Evidently, Tobler’s Chocolate Orange is now Terry’s Chocolate Orange. Tobler’s sounded much more distinctive. Might as well have just called it Tim’s Chocolate Orange.)
I would open the blue box, remove the chocolate orange, feeling its satisfying weight in my palm. I would then thwock it violently against a table (it almost always took several thwocks for me to get the pieces to separate, not being an expert in the art of blunt trauma), unwrap it (the wrapper resembled a basketball more than an orange), and enjoy each wedge of creamy chocolate with its hint of orange flavored deliciousness. I loved the gimmick of breaking into and “peeling” the candy, the globe of chocolate separating into the sections – I’m a sucker for the whole orange mimicry. Others might think, “this is way too much work for a freaking piece of candy,” but I appreciate the theater.
Fendi Theorema smells like opening a Tobler chocolate orange on Christmas morning near the tree. The creamy orange and chocolate blend together with a hint of pine and vanilla to make this one of the most comforting scents I have ever encountered. Theorema feels like more of a memory than a fragrance, and I cannot imagine wearing it any time except to bed. This works out well, since the smell lasts approximately as long as a gnat’s breath on my skin, so I end up falling asleep before it disappears completely. From other reviews I have read, this longevity problem is rather common with Theorema. I sniffed a sample of the EDP for this review.
Here is a quote from a New Yorker profile of actress Nina Arianda. Arianda describes how she prepared to audition for the role of Vanda in “Venus in Fur,” which opens on Broadway November 8th:
[Arianda] also found a suitable scent for Vanda. ”Perfume is a big thing for me,” she said. ”I have to smell right. It has to smell like her.”
Later in the article Arianda discloses that she wore “Juicy Couture and a mixture of fresh-cut grass honey-dew melon essence” while playing Billie in “Born Yesterday,” because the fragrance is “very split and confused,” like the character. But she is superstitious and won’t give away Vanda’s scent. I am intrigued…
What does northern New Mexico smell like? It smells like high desert, a soft carpet of pine needles in the forest, wild blue-silver sage, chicken fried steak with white gravy, animal dung, the exhaust of freight trucks, desert roses, red and green chile sauce, the dusty dog napping in the shade of an abandoned blown out saloon, cedar wood incense, the cool and musty archival preservation of museums, hot highway asphalt, potter’s clay, fresh blue corn Tewa fry bread with honey, the jasmine vines growing near the hotel pool, and, occasionally, the wildfire burning in Arizona.
La Chamade, the film based on the novel by Françoise Sagan, begins and ends with seduction: the first (see clip above) comes via a bag of chips, a rag-tag café street band, and a hand in the wind above a convertible top, and the second by way of a glass of champagne, Mozart, and a head stuck out of a speeding luxury automobile. The seductee (but isn’t she also the seducer?) caught in this circular tale is Lucile, played by Catherine Deneuve. She begins the film weary of a kept life with her rich lover Charles (played knowingly and sadly by Michel Piccoli), so she seeks passion in the arms of Antoine (Roger Van Hool), a poor (well, in comparison to Charles) young editor. The story moves from there through its circle, but the plot and the romances are not all that interesting. The character of Lucile, however, fascinates. Who is she, and what does she want? And how does she subsist solely on whiskey and champagne? Deneuve plays her as inscrutable, spoiled, dreamy – frustrated but unaware of why. Defined by the men in her life, she embodies the words ennui and ambivalence. With no target for her passion, she futilely launches it all at Antoine. She uses a quote from Faulkner to justify living a life of leisure and pleasure. She doesn’t know what she wants, but two things she decidedly does not want are a job and a family. The film ends with her walking, in her beautiful trench coat, down the street – but this is not an open ending, since both Lucile and the audience know what her destination will be. 1968 France was not yet a kind place for working women, but it’s fun to imagine what Lucile would be like with an education and real, interesting career opportunities. A museum curator, perhaps, or a writer. Or maybe she would still choose to be a lady of leisure. Peter Sarstedt’s “Where do You go to My Lovely” would be the perfect song for Lucile, if she came from poverty – it’s fun to think about what her past was like, before she met Charles, and a humble, Holly Golightly beginning must be considered.
I do not see Lucile wearing Chamade the fragrance – it is too cheerful for her. In my humble and limited perfume opinion, she would wear a slightly more melancholy fragrance, like Shalimar, or perhaps Chanel No. 22, with its beautiful florals touched by a hint of dark incense.
Chamade was created in 1969 by Jean Paul Guerlain. I am reviewing the reformulated EDT. Chamade begins green – freshly cut dandelion stem green. Galbanum plays its part in this opening, as does astringent blackcurrant, and supposedly there is hyacinth as well, but the note seems more lilac to me than hyacinth – it’s not nearly so hyacinth-y as Estée Lauder Private Collection, which also has a very green opening. Chamade eases its way through its strange green phase and begins to open into a lovely warm floral heart of rose and jasmine. The blackcurrant and lilac keep things interesting, and soon a hint of that famous vanilla-powder starts to enter. On first wearing, this was when I feared Chamade would turn to all powder on me, like the other Guerlains I have tried thus far, but instead it dried down to a delicate sandalwood tipped sweet by the barest hint of Guerlinade.
The word “chamade” loosely translates as “the rhythm a heart beats when it surrenders to love.” I keep telling myself I am not in love with Chamade. While it did not hit me over the head the way Bois des Îles did, I sure am draining my sample quickly.
Friday night I had dinner with a friend I had not seen in quite some time. She and I met back when I was teaching on Cape Cod. During the summers and on weekends I moonlighted at a leather shop on Main Street in Hyannis; my friend was working there when I started, to make some money while she was in college. We worked together there for three years and had a lot of fun doing it. Here is a picture of me playing dress-up in the store:
If you’ve ever worked in retail or in a restaurant or in any job where you have a lot of contact with the public, you come to realize that people are very similar. We all think we are as original and unique as snowflakes, but I will tell you that 75% of the people who walked in that store would take a deep inhale and say the exact. same. thing: “I love the smell of leather!” As annoying as it was to hear this refrain over and over and over, they were right. The place smelled wonderful – the smooth, tobacco-y, rich smell of leather was so prevalent that it would cling to my clothes and hair after a shift.
Chanel Cuir de Russie is the first leather fragrance I have smelled, and it brings back memories of summer nights spent in that store. It starts out floral and aldehydic, but the leather note jumps in quickly, deepening and adding warmth as the scent develops. This is a classy leather, not a bad-ass leather. It wears as easily as a buttery soft pair of leather gloves and has the patina of a beautiful old wallet. In combination with the florals (well-blended, but I can pick out iris, jasmine, and rose on my skin), the leather today in Cuir de Russie reads as elegant, although I imagine this scent must have been quite daring for its time. Cuir de Russie was crafted in 1924 by Ernest Beaux, the same nose behind my beloved Bois des Îles and many other famous Chanels (including No. 5). I can smell the Beaux pedigree of these scents in their sparkly aldehyde openings and their gorgeous sandalwood drydowns. I am sniffing the 1983 Jacques Polge reformulation of Cuir de Russie, in EDT form.
…people are able to sniff out suitable MHC genomes in prospective partners. A woman, for instance, will prefer the smell of T-shirts that have been worn by men whose MHC genes are appropriately different from her own. Dr Milinski and Dr Wedekind also found an association between a woman’s MHC genes and some of her preferences for perfume. Perception of musk, rose and cardamom is correlated with the MHC. Perception of castoreum and cedar is not.
Women, it seems, choose not the kind of smell they would like on a partner, or even one that might mask a nasty odour of their own, but rather something that matches their MHC. In other words, they are advertising their own scent.
When I ordered my batch of classic samples from The Perfumed Court, I truly thought I would love the Guerlain fragrances more than the Chanel. I don’t know why I thought this. I guessed that Chanel would be all polished boring perfection (ha!), and that the Guerlain line would be darker, more mysterious, slightly melancholy and dangerous. Jeez, it sounds like the fragrance equivalent of Mr. Rochester. What I have learned so far is that while some of these adjectives ring true for Guerlain, another descriptor stands out above all others when it comes to Guerlain on my skin: powdery. Powder, although not always bad, is not my favorite fragrance accord. Thus I learned an important lesson in fragrance sampling: expectations mean nothing.
The famous powdery Guerlinade is present on my skin in L’Heure Bleue, but not in the sweet baby way of Shalimar. L’Heure Bleue smells of hay and dust and autumn leaves. It is a dry fragrance – I imagine that if you were walking in a field or meadow on a cool clear day in autumn, when all of the wildflowers and plants and grasses are brown and crisp under your feet, you would sense some of the dry organic, not un-pleasant rot smell that comes through in L’Heure Bleue. I smell iris, rose, almond flour, face powder, and a bit of skin/scalp in it as well. The skin/musk accord becomes stronger in the dry down. I do not smell the supposed anise note at all, for which I am thankful – anise is one of the few smells/tastes that can literally make me gag. L’Heure Bleue can serve for some as a salve to quiet and calm the jitters, but it can also exacerbate melancholy and moodiness. Some find it claustrophobic and tomb-like. I find my reaction to it changes each time I wear it. I don’t love L’Heure Bleue. Yet. But I appreciate it as a work of art and a challenge.
L’Heure Bleue was created by Jacques Guerlain in 1912 and was named after “the blue hour” between day and night. I reviewed the reformulation in eau de parfum concentration.
I like Estée Lauder fragrances. They throw off great sillage, hold my interest, maintain a consistently high level of quality, are easy to find, and remain relatively affordable. I love the clean smell of Pleasures, and for about three years after college I wore Beyond Paradise exclusively. When my now-husband’s grandmother found out I wore it, that’s all she bought me for Christmas and my birthday. I had a lifetime supply of the stuff. Then the re-formulation gremlins came along and ruined it. Or maybe my taste changed. I won’t say improved because at that point I moved on to wearing Versace Signature exclusively, and now that overly-pretty floral explosion makes my head hurt. At any rate, I am going to review Private Collection, released in 1973 to the public after having been exclusively worn by Estée Lauder herself for a number of years.
Flower arrangement, taken by me.
Private Collection smells like nothing else I have encountered thus far (in my limited perfume experience) and is a great scent for this time of year. At first it smells sharply of hyacinth, and GREEN. Cool early spring morning green – like the green of the crocus and jonquil fingers that are pushing their way up through the soil. Apparently galbanum is responsible for this greeniness. The fact that galbanum is a resin makes sense in that it probably accounts for the pine note that presents itself early on in Private Collection. The fragrance softens and rounds considerably after about 20-30 minutes – at that point I can smell peach, jasmine, rose, and the beginnings of a warm, woody, mossy base with a hint of musk thrown in for good measure. It’s all lovely, strong, and, to my nose, unique. I don’t like assigning gender to fragrance – any person can wear whatever scent they want as long as it makes them happy – but Private Collection truly could be worn quite comfortably by the most masculine of men or the most feminine of women. The first time I wore it I thought it was old-fashioned, but as I have grown more accustomed to this beauty I am embarrassed by my first impression. Private Collection is timeless.
By Maciej Soltynski (Own work) via Wikimedia Commons
I can’t wear a scent in public if I associate it with someone else as their signature fragrance. A dear friend with whom I used to work wore Songes. I didn’t realize this until I received my first batch of fragrance samples back in January. Annick Goutal Songes was the first one I tried. This was the first time I really smelled a fragrance develop as if it were telling a story – the slightly vanillic big jasmine opening, the saltiness that kicks in after about five minutes (Annick Goutal Eau du Sud has salt in it as well – I think it adds a lovely coastal depth, a sense of place to the scent), right before the jasmine becomes deeper, creamier, more heady – perhaps this is the frangipani making its entrance? All my novice nose knows is the jasmine. Which is fine, because I am finding that I adore jasmine. When the dry down arrives, a peppery dry warm wood note peeks out on my skin from underneath the fading silk of the florals, tickling my nose a bit – it is this note that immediately brings my friend to mind. After the first test from my sample vial, I sent her a message out of the blue – I needed to know – did she wear Songes? She did. Score one for Melissa’s nasal passages.
I appreciate Songes for reminding me of my friend and also for showing me the journey a fragrance can take on skin.
In the 2009 movie An Education, set in 1961 Britain, teen-aged Jenny Mellors goes to Paris with her con artist lover. There is a scene where her classmates are giving her money for various Parisian items before she leaves, and all of them request a bottle of Chanel No. 5. When she returns, Jenny offers up a bottle of the famous fragrance to her teacher as a gift.
I won’t give anything else away about the film (it’s a very good film). I wonder how many bottles of No. 5 have been given and received over the years. Books have been written about the perfume’s history and its marketing campaigns are legendary. What is the big deal here?
I am reviewing from a sample vial of eau de parfum. No. 5 is pretty, for certain. It wears close to the skin and has an air of exclusivity about it – a slight superiority complex. Because of its beguiling but hands-off feel, I would not describe No. 5 as a particularly warm fragrance. The famous aldehydes make the florals sparkle, and the gentle sandalwood and vetiver base has a slightly powdery finish. It is a very versatile scent and is not in the least bit dated. You could wear it anywhere in any season, and in this sense it is a true classic.
What I do not understand is the number of women who rush to claim No. 5 as their signature scent when so many other people already wear it. Wouldn’t it be infinitely more interesting to find something to wear that isn’t advertised so heavily and isn’t half so popular? On the other hand, if you truly do love the way this stuff smells, or if it conjures up memories of your mother of grandmother, or if you love the history behind it, then by all means, have at it. I would much rather be stuck on a train with a bunch of people wearing the lovely No. 5 than with a crowd wearing the latest celebrity fruity floral fragrance disaster.
Here is a great song from the soundtrack of An Education. I’d never heard of Duffy before, but I love her voice – she has the whole Lulu “To Sir with Love” vibe going on, but with a slightly harder edge.
