Perfume Lover

Angel vs. Chanel No. 5 and Observations on Classic Scents

2008-05-03T13:48:00.000-07:00

Why do the French know so much about perfume? Last month's poll about favorite perfume pitted Angel against Chanel No. 5 and resulted in an exact match.

Chanel No. 5 is a classic perfume. Created in the 1920s, it has been on the market nonstop since then and continues to wow perfume snobs and drugstore divas alike.

Angel is a much newer arrival, but it is currently the number one scent in France. Which brings me to why the French know so much about perfume. They consistently seem to create the winners (both Chanel No. 5 and Angel originated in France) and know the difference between an ordinary scent and a classic.

More than half a century separates Chanel No. 5 from Angel and if you are familiar with these two fragrances, you know that they are worlds apart. Chanel No. 5 is a "sparkling floral" with notes of a then brand-new synthetic molecule known as aldehyde.

Coco Chanel was decidedly anti-green in her sentiments. She wanted her signature scent to smell like something completely un-natural although she meant "un-natural" in the sense that she wanted a man-made, synthetic, "created" scent, much in the way art is a "created" thing. Take a bunch of sunflowers and put them in a pitcher on a table and you have nature. Let Van Gogh paint them, and you have art. Coco Chanel wanted art in a bottle.

Aldehyde smells like sparkles. That's the best way to put it. There is an effervescent quality to Chanel No. 5 that transcends and even dominates the floral notes. Coco Chanel also wanted a perfume that was the antithesis of what women were wearing at the time. In her day, perfume was heavily floral or spicy and it came in fat little cut-glass bottles with poofy atomizors. Ever notice the Chanel No. 5 bottle? It's a sleek rectangle with no ornamentation. Coco Chanel saw it as modern, the world sees it now as her trademark.

Angel is a perfume by Thierry Mugler. It is also highly original. Monsieur Mugler appears less quoteable than Coco Chanel (who was like the Oscar Wilde of the perfume world) but he was clearly striving to create something that was vastly different than the dominant scents on the market. Mugler is a man of our generation, so he knew all about the fresh scents, the fruity florals, the sugary notes, as well as the classic greens, aldehydes, and florals. It has been said of Angel by Mugler and others that it was an attempt to evoke childhood, but that seems a stretch.

What Angel is what an attempt to go past what perfume had been. Whether or not he succeeded is a matter for great perfume philosophers to ponder, but he clearly created a whole new category to scent. A whiff of Angel is unmistakable. It's different.

Like Chanel, he packaged this creation in an astonishing bottle. The first time I saw a bottle of Angel, I was rather amazed that it did not stand upright as I supposed perfume bottles ought to, but was forced to lay supine on the dresser. You can buy a contraption to hold it upright, but I did not do that. It's a charming bottle to contemplate and it fits nicely in the hand, but it is startlingly different from other scents.

Changing Tastes

2008-03-16T14:56:00.000-07:00

Why do our tastes change? Collectively, we have seen major transitions in the perfume tastes of the world. The world's first cologne (Germany's fabled 4711, still around today) is a citrus; then the world fell in love with florals (also still around today). In the 1920s, adelhydes came into vogue (still around today). By the 1950s, we were all about Orientals. Remember Youth Dew? I bought some Youth Dew last year because I like it but it seemed downright nostalgic. It was almost olfactory history. That kind of scent--deeply Oriental, spicy, strong, sultry, almost dark--is totally out of vogue.

Today, our perfumes smell like food (Sugar and Lemon Sugar by Fresh, Pink Sugar by Aquolina, Almond Cookie by Carol's Daughter, and so on). The trend toward fruity florals is very popular and sometimes we leave out the floral part.

But why does this change? Does it have to do with our collective fashion sense? One would think that perfumes are "invisible fashion" and that people would feel freer to indulge in what suited them rather than the "in" color or hot new style. Is our love affair with food spilling over into fragrance?

While I was pondering this, I had an experience I've heard about but never had personally. A scent that I previously liked and wore (albeit occasionally--I have a pretty big perfume rotation going so I don't often wear the same scent over and over) came up again in the rotation. Without even thinking, I sprayed some on.

Yuck! I suddenly wanted to get it off! I have never had that kind of negative response to a perfume that I previously liked. I'm wondering whether our "nose" changes with our physical condition, diet, health status, and medications we might be taking. Or whether it's a taste thing. This scent seemed suddenly too powdery and there was an odd clunker note in it. Do we lose our preferences for powdery scents the way we might suddenly get tired of our black clothes or our Burberry purse?

2008-02-23T16:02:00.000-08:00

This is a tuberose. It's one of those white florals that can get misused. In fact, when I first heard that Estee Lauder (in the person of her daughter) was going to unveil a new perfume called Tuberose Garden, well I was filled with a desire to yawn.

I mean it sounded ordinary. And for some reason my initial response as I thought, "What does a perfume like Tuberose Garden smell like?" Because my answer was that it would be a cookie-cutter fragrance veering in the direction of little-old-lady scent.

Oh, WAS I WRONG. It's a wonderful scent, glorious. Everything that is good and right and fine about white florals is in this scent. I like it better each time I use it and I loved it the first time. I'm not normally the kind of person who would shop for a perfume that boasted tuberose as an ingredient, so that's why I want to warn you.

This stuff is way better than it sounds. In fact, that's my only issue with this new scent. It has kind of an old-fashioned, overly humble name.

It reminds me of New Orleans, not the post-Katrina place, but the way it was if you lived in one of the residential neighborhoods around the Garden District and you went strolling around on a summer night. It's hot in New Orleans in the summer, even at night, and the humidity makes the air seem fatter than other places. New Orleans is green but not in the modern way; it's green in the ancient way. Even in the city itself, everything is thick jumble of trees and vines and plants. Even the sidewalks are lumpy with tree roots and grass and scraggly flowers trying to burst through them. The humidity turns the darkness thick, so it feels almost like you're wearing it, and the smells of honeysuckle and other people's perfume and rose gardens and plants all get tangled up. You hear some kids off in the distance, laughing too loudly, and you hear a buzzing of insects in the vines overgrowing a porch, but what overwhelms you most of all are all of those flowers and plants in the stillness.

That's what it smells like.

OK, I'll stop now. But it's really what it reminds me of, in the best possible way.

Sniffapalooza

2008-02-23T15:58:00.000-08:00

There really are some great resources online now for men and women of fragrance. One of them is a group that sponsors events for people who love niche fragrances. The group is called Sniffapalooza and you have to check them out at http://www.sniffapalooza.com/.

The next event is in March. It's called Spring Fling and it mainly involves soaking up the sights and smells (in a perfumey kind of way) of New York City. You may still be able to get in.

Sniffapalooza also goes to Europe and has a trip to Florence coming up this summer.

Perfume isn't cheap but the Sniffapalooza events are very reasonably priced. It's worth checking out! I'm going to New York this spring for my first Sniffapalooza.

Niche Fragrances

2008-02-18T15:24:00.003-08:00

Niche fragrance is the term used to talk about scented delights offered by small companies, independent perfumers, and just plain olfactory artists. Most perfume sold in this country is produced by large manufacturers. Now contrary to a lot of people, I have nothing against big manufacturers or small manufacturers or anybody out to make an honest buck. But the deal with a big company making perfume is that they have to appeal to a broad range of consumer tastes.

A niche perfumer does not have the strength or distribution network to stock the shelves of every company across the country. Avon can get into a lot of houses, Estee Lauder can get on every department store perfume counter, but a small perfumer ... well, he or she has to struggle to stay in business. But the benefit of these niche purveyors is that they are more artistically free. They don't have to make a perfume that everybody from your 87-year-old great-grandmother to the bored teenager in science class can all agree on.

That's what happens in commercial industries. It's not so much that everyone loves your product. It's just that you hit on the product that the fewest people hate. You create something that is acceptable.

Niche perfumers, on the other hand, create things that a handful of people can love. But niche perfume is a bit tricky. Since niche perfumeries do not go for mainstream tastes, they can come up with some real odd stuff. You may not want a man's cologne that smells like lilacs or a woman's scent that is made with coffee.

The element of discernment adds a real appeal to the connossieur. Not only do niche perfume mavens find niche perfumers who make exquisite and rare fragrances, they get to sharpen their nostrils (so to speak) by deciding what they like and what they don't.

Interested in niche perfumes? There are lots of companies out there. You can share your own favorites with me. It seems like there are new ones to discover all of the time. Some of my favorites are Neil Morris (nielmorrisfragrances.com) and Bond No. 9 (bondno9.com) but there are tons more!

Men's Perfume, Women's Perfume and Other Myths

2008-01-02T14:55:00.000-08:00

One of the big trends in perfume now is the ambivalent fragrance, the scent that could be for men but might be for women. Back in the 1920s and through the perfume heyday of the 1980s, the fragrance departments were pretty much split on gender lines. Women wore My Sin by Lanvin or Chanel No. 5 and men wore English Leather. There was a pretty strict idea about what scents were feminine, which ones were masculine, and even the uneducated nose could tell them apart.

That all changed some time in the 1990s, as more and more hip scents entered that "green" zone between the male and female aisles of the perfume counter. Women were wearing fresh scents, men were wearing citrus and even subtle florals. Calvin Klein captured part of the feel when he released One.

We might think we're very trendy--inventing the unisex fragrance. Not quite. What was a recent invention was the opposite. The male/female distinction in perfumery is relatively new. In ancient times, scent was scent. Men wore florals. Women and men might very well dip into the very same cologne bottles.

Today, more men are experimenting with scents that might be considered decidedly feminine and not just because of the fancy foo-foo bottles. Florals and fruity scents once deemed very girly are finding their way (in subdued form, usually) into the male fragrance. Women are using more and more fresh and subtle fragrances.

But brave men are wearing women's classics and brave women, well, I don't know what brave women are doing. I doubt that they're slathering on Old Spice. But I think brave women are getting pretty comfortable with ambivalent scents, too.

Perfume Lover Goodies

2007-06-09T12:30:00.000-07:00

Come visit our store on CafePress! Just click that link and you're there. It's a CafePress thing but we got some cool art designed. We've got a mug, a journal, a shirt, and a messenger bag. Also a clock that says, "So many fragrances, so little time."

Amber and Synthetic Ingredients

2007-06-01T15:25:00.000-07:00

Ever wondered about amber? It's an ingredient listed in a lot of perfumes, but all I ever knew about amber was that it was some kind of golden fossilized resin material that, as far as I could tell, didn't smell like anything. Here's a link to a short article on amber: http://www.theperfume-reporter.com/Reviews_Subpage.html

There was a time when perfume ingredients were all natural. Today, synthetic ingredients are not only common, they might even be preferable. Why? The quality of a premium synthetic is going to be much more reliable than natural ingredients. Just as tomatoes don't all taste alike, natural ingredients don't all smell alike.

Another reason in praise of synthetics is that they save the environment. There's no use chopping down sandalwood trees for aromatic bark when we can conjure up great sandalwood aroma in the lab.

As a result, we're ending up with unusual type ingredients. Amber is usually synthetic and isn't even amber at all. Musk is almost always synthetic (if you don't know what real musk is, trust me, you want the synthetic version). And some ingredients today have almost perfumy sounding names like "ozone" or "spun sugar."

Perfume Hungry

2007-05-29T16:17:00.000-07:00

There are lots of perfumes with food notes in them these days (you can read an article on this by Joanna McLaughlin at http://www.theperfume-reporter.com). Harlem from Bond No. 9 has coffee notes. Angel by Thierry Mugler has vanilla and chocolate and the write-up says there is cotton candy there, too. Definitely sugary. And Sugar, Lemon Sugar, and Sugar Blossom from Fresh are all foody.
In Vietnamese, the word for perfume is the same word as for pineapple. Apparently, to the Vietnamese nose, pineapple is the natural fragrance. I don't know any Vietnamese perfumes, but I suspect they might use pineapple the way we use citrus.
I also tried something called Cherry by Masaki. I understand the new Bond No. 9 scent (Coney Island, no, I don't own it...yet) lists as one of its notes, "Magarita Mix."

Bond No. 9 Fashion Avenue

2007-05-28T08:56:00.000-07:00

Bond No. 9 is a favorite house of mine and today I'm test-driving Fashion Avenue. Like most of the niche perfumery's line-up, this is named for a New York neighborhood. The names are charming, but I don't always get the connection. What does Fashion Avenue smell like? Well, the perfume is very unusual. I showed it around to some better noses than I and it always evokes a response of, "That's unusual." One perfumista I gave it to liked it in the bottle but refused to put it on. I thought that was odd. I've known this woman to wear three or four scents at once.

The bottle was left out in the open and she came back to it. Not once, but a couple of times. Sniff. Then she finally took the plunge and put it on. "This really grows on you," she told me. "I like it."

I like it a lot, but it is a bit off-the-beaten-path for some perfumista's who have a certain ideal perfume in their mind. I looked up what the company says about this perfume and it reports that this scent is a blend of mimosa, ylang-ylang, and black currants.

It's one of those unusual scents that doesn't seem mysterious, it's more like something that you haven't seen before. I guess that's what Fashion Avenue is all about, new things, different things, the latest style. I suppose it's a floral, but mimosa is a very un-flowery floral aroma.

I'd classify it as light but not wishy-washy (some light scents are just too meek for my taste), different but altogether winning. There's something very well constructed about these notes.

If you're just so tired of all those mixed-drink scents on the market right now and just don't want to wear the bouquet-of-flowers scent, try this.

New Site with Unusual Perfumes!

2007-05-28T08:51:00.001-07:00

Just found a great new site. It's at http://www.beautyhabit.com. If you go to the fragrance section there are a bunch of relatively off-the-beaten-track perfumes listed. I wish I could get them all today. There's something so hopeful about a new perfume.

Perfume Roulette

2007-05-25T16:42:00.000-07:00

I'm talking about mail order perfume. I love shopping online, mainly because it's the only way to get actual merchandise without having to deal with a brain-dead sales person. That includes for perfume, and there are a couple of great sites out there.

Plus, if you end up wanting something that's too boutiquey, it's very easy to just zip off to a new store by Googling a new perfumery. So now I can shop exclusive New York niche perfumeries without having to submit to the indignities involved in modern air travel.

But there's always a little bit of perfume roulette involved. I've bought a few scents unsmelled. There is great drama in that sort of endeavor, and not a little bit of fun, too, but it's a sort of risk. Even in cases where I have smelled the fragrance before, making the purchase always makes me a bit uneasy since my olfactory memory is no more reliable than the rest of my memory any more.

Fortunately, I have a pretty expansive view of perfume. I like almost everything, at least in some distant, idealized way. And since I tend to be eclectic in all things, I can't imagine anything that smelled at least halfway reasonable that I would not wear at least occasionally.

Even Youth Dew. The first time I smelled this (the original, not the remake called Youth Dew Amber Nude) I thought it was horrible. But for some reason I was attracted to it. So I sampled it off and on and finally took the plunge and bought a bottle. I wore it a few times and now I really love it. Sort of like sushi. The first time I tried it I found it a little disconcerting. Now, don't get between me a a tuna roll.

Burberry Brit

2007-05-25T16:37:00.000-07:00

This was a great surprise. I ended up buying some Burberry Brit because of a lot of reasons, most of which had to do with a gift card, and also because I wanted something different.

It seems like it's been all about fruity florals lately. A fruity floral scent can be a lot of fun (OK, a few of them make you smell like a peach smoothie) and they're definitely very youthful and trendy, but I like a lot of diversity in my fragrance world.

Burberry Brit is a nice Oriental fragrance and there is a powdery base to it from orris root. At least that's my interpreation, I'm no nose. But it's a great scent because it shows that Oriental fragrances don't have to be heavy. This stuff is light and actually seems summery to me.

The bottle is sort of weird, it's all plaided out like the Burberry company is wont to do. At first, I found it a bit jarring but I've put it on my desk and looked at it all day and it looks less overdressed to me now.

Fragrance of the Week

2007-03-01T14:07:00.000-08:00

Well, this week it has to be Chanel No. 5. I know it's a classic, but it's not one of those ho-hum classics, this is a hot classic. It's been on the market since the 1920s.

By the way, it wasn't designed by Coco Chanel. She hired a perfumist by the name of Ernst Breaux to create some fragrances for her. Although years later she would say she named the perfume for her favorite number (and she introduced it on May 5), she had actually asked Breaux to come up with six perfume ideas for her and he labeled them number 1, number 2, and so on. Chanel picked No. 5.

Check out the bottle, also unchanged since the 1920s. It's a very elegant but extremely plain rectangle. Compared to the girly-girly perfume bottles of Chanel's day (and they're coming back now), this was stark.

Chanel No. 5 was purposely "artificial." That's what Chanel wanted and what Breaux, a master perfumist (he also created Evening in Paris) delivered.

Second Perfume Safari

2007-03-01T14:02:00.000-08:00

Britt-Nicole and I went back for a second perfume safari. She wanted to try something new from Lancome (we couldn't remember the name) and I wanted to test Chanel No. 5. I've owned Chanel No. 5 before and wore it plenty of times, but I haven't revisited it in years and I'm terribly into retro-scents. So we went and took a sniff of the stuff.

Wow, both Britt-Nicole and I were stunned--it knocked our socks off. This fragrance is way better than I remembered it and I remembered it quite fondly. It's unbelievable.

Of course, we didn't buy it, for the simple reason that it's never our policy to buy everything we want all at once. We did wander over to the Lancome counter and tried out Hypnose and some other stuff. We settled on Tresor, which is a wonderful fragrance, kind of flowery but with some apricot notes and musk base notes. It's got a lilac scent to it, which sounds old-fashioned, but it really wasn't. Best of all, it wasn't one of those gender-spanning youthful scents. This was clearly woman's perfume.

By the way, our perfume counter now serves coffee, which we think is just too wonderful.

Evening in Paris

2007-02-23T14:30:00.000-08:00

Just ordered an interesting retro-scent from an unusual place. I was looking for Evening in Paris, which was a 1920s fragrance that came in a deep blue bottle. I found it online at The Vermont Store, a sort of Yankee homespun catalog that does have nostalgic products. It just goes to show, you can't tell where retro-scents can be uncovered.

My mom used to have this scent. It hasn't been available in the U.S. since the 1960s, except through www.vermontcountrystore.com. I don't have a clear memory what it smells like. This is sort of perfume roulette.

However, it was created by perfumist Earnest Breaux, whose most celebrated concoction remains Chanel No. 5.

Perfume of the Week

2007-02-18T10:55:00.000-08:00

Technorati Profile

This is my new thing: Perfume of the Week!

This week it's got to be CURIOUS. True, it's a celebrity scent, which is generally overmarketed, and true Brittany is not turning out to be the most stable person who ever got out of Louisiana, but it's a great perfume. It's light but not wispy, perfect for summer, it's smells youthful but not immature, and it comes in a cool bottle.

Perfume Safari

2007-02-18T10:34:00.000-08:00

Britt-Nicole and I went out perfume shopping yesterday. Britt-Nicole is a friend of mine and she likes perfume, but doesn't own enough of it, so we decided to go out and see what we could shake down from the stores. We figured being in the post-Valentine's-Day clean-up phase, we'd get some bargains.

We started out at Walgreen's, not exactly the high end of the perfume universe, but Britt-Nicole likes it there. It's not a bad store if you know what you want. We wanted to try some of Brittany Speer's new fragrance, Curious. The big bottle has the squeezer atomizer on it.

One thing you have to say, cool perfume bottles are definitely back in. Even the little bottle of Curious was still pretty gorgeous. It looked like something that Jeannie in I Dream of Jeannie would have owned. Brittany had just shaved her head that day, which normally I would have taken as a bad omen, but Britt-Nicole isn't that superstitious.

Britt-Nicole bought Curious. She had actually been thinking about buying it before our perfume safari, but it was a nice kickoff to the day.

Having found some loot at Walgreen's, we moved on the CVS, where the nice lady in the store told us to go to a department store. At Walgreen's, they keep perfume under lock and key, but at least they let you smell it. At CVS, you can't even smell it. They'll unlock it only if you're willing to buy it.

So we headed to the mall and went to Dillard's and milled around the perfume display. It can get pretty confusing trying on lots of different scents, so we had the little coffee bean sniffer between rounds to help cleanse our nostrils.

One thing we didn't like: multiple perfumes by the same people with similar names. We wanted to try Burberry. Do you know there's three of them? Just to help you keep things straight, they're all named Burberry. What about Beautiful? Three of them, too.

Even celebrity perfumes now come out in multiple entries. Beyonce has two. So does Brittany.

I couldn't resist some historical hunting. I am very big on retro scents these days, and I really wanted to try out Youth Dew. It's by Estee Lauder, and it was introduced before I Love Lucy was in reruns. Nobody wears this stuff, and I didn't even know what it smelled like.

Well, when you try it, you can understand why this can't be on anybody's top-ten list. It's a wonder that Estee Lauder hasn't quietly retired it.

This perfume was so strange that even Britt-Nicole, who has an admitted affinity for certain "old lady perfumes," found it unpleasant. It's what perfumists would call an "Oriental" scent but there are Oriental scents that are quite pleasant. This stuff was strong and strange. The name seemed bizarre to me, since it smelled neither youthful nor dewy.

Now it isn't wretched or anything like that. It's just not even remotely like perfumes on the market today. The only person I can imagine wearing it is Bette Davis.

I bought some Irresistable, which was left over from the Valentine's Day Massacre. It's a Givenchy scent, very light and summery. We got a bunch of samples and, since we pretty much sprayed ourselves from one end of the counter to the other, we left the store in a big cloud of fragrance.

There is something contagious about perfume shopping. When I bought perfume, a stranger at the counter told me I'd love it. When Britt-Nicole and I stopped for coffee later at a drive-through, the coffee lady asked where we had been and then we discussed perfume. She had Burberry classic at home along with some other scents, but she didn't know about Burberry London.

The weird thing was how excited everyone was. Buying perfume was like a big adventure. You don't get that same kind of response if you go out and buy corn flakes.

Sweet Aldehyde

2007-02-15T09:49:00.000-08:00

I have loved perfumes for years and years and I just learned this. There is a special synthetic fragrance module that allows the scent of a perfume adapt itself, at least somewhat, to your body. This is the fragrance that smells different on different people.

To some extent, all fragrance is unique. The human body's own chemistry, skin condition, pheremones, and other things means that perfume X will smell three different ways on three different people. Of course, good perfume noses can generally tell it's still perfume X, it's just that there will be subtle differences.

Aldehyde takes that to a new level. And it's not even new, it was turn of the 20th century chemistry.

Here's the kicker. Know a big aldehyde fragrance? Chanel No. 5. That's right, one of the most venerable of all perfumes, is actually an aldehyde fragrance. It's not big deal, I guess, a lot of them are.

But this is Chanel No. 5. To me, Chanel No. 5 is the pinnacle of perfumes. It's been around for alf a century, if not longer. It has a cool name (I understand it was named for Coco Chanel's favorite number). Marilyn Monroe wore it. I bet just about every glamourous woman has worn it or would wear it.

Now I find out it's not one of those super-purist kind of perfumes, but a great scent with a synthetic kicker. Not only that, but I also learned that the French perfume industry is known for its use of aldehyde. Another use of chemistry in action!

4711

2007-02-09T16:11:00.000-08:00

I think that a lot of fragrances have an interesting cultural context. In Germany, the original cologne came from the city of Cologne. It was a very light scent; sometimes men can wear it. It's called 4711, named for the street number (it was originally made at 4711 Glockengasse, maybe it still is).

I love the stuff, but that's because I live on the Gulf Coast, which is hot and humid most of the time. You can put 4711 in the refrigerator and then spray it on when it's hot. The light scent in a cold mist is pretty refreshing.

While I find it a fun summer-time fragrance, I just found out that for German people, 4711 is an old lady aroma. They get a whiff of the stuff and they don't think lawn chairs, barbecues, where did I put my sunglasses? They think about their grandmothers.

A German friend of mine (who's lived here at least 20 years) says she would never wear the stuff, although she finally admitted she thought it was kind of a pretty scent. To her, it just said old lady.

Scent Span

2007-02-07T07:37:00.000-08:00

I just heard a new word: scent span. It refers to the service life of a fragrance once it hits your skin.

Some fragrances have longer scent spans than other.

A lot of things can impact scent span. Some are very personal: how acidic your skin is and how much you perspire. Some are environmental: scents last longer in cold weather. And a lot depends on the type of scent you're wearing.

Perfumes, which contain the greatest relative amount of scent in proportion to solution, last longest. Colognes have less scent and are usually mixed with alcohol, which evaporates. Colognes evaporate more quickly on the skin, which creates a nice scent, but it disappears very fast. An oil-based perfume can last all day.

Some people think that scent span is influenced by where you place the scent. A quick spritz with an alcohol-based spray gives you a nice all-over scent but with a very short scent span. Dabbing perfume on pulse points (behind ears, at the base of the throat, on the wrist) is the classic. Knees are also good, but if you do the dabbing method, make sure you're using an oil-based or highly concentrated fragrance.

A long scent span seems like a good idea but in our multi-shower-a-day culture (morning shower, post-gym shower, relaxing bath, occasional dip in the hot tub), there's something to be said for those short scent spans.

Retro-Scents

2007-02-06T10:15:00.001-08:00

Perfumes are sort of like fashions, they tend to come and go. There are a few classics (I'm thinking Chanel No. 5, L'Air du Temps, Y, even Jean Nate) that just seem to always be available. But a lot of great perfumes just sort of fade away.

In the 1960s, a very big perfume was My Sin. The ads always mentioned the manufacturer: it was, My Sin by Lanvin. Around that time, my mother liked Tweed, a perfume that I'm not sure is still around. Coty was selling L'Emeraude.

I recently saw an Avon catalog and saw that Avon only has a couple of "old-time" fragrances in its roster. Timeless has been around for decades; I guess that was named right.

So why is it that Chanel No. 5 has been around forever and other fragrances just don't last that long in the marketplace? Was there something that makes Chanel No. 5 more classic and other scents more trendy?

It seems to me that people are far more loyal to their fragrances than they are to, say, the type of shoes they want to wear to work or the purse they carry. But over time, we shifted away from the old Marilyn Monroe kind of perfume (there's a great quote by her talking about wearing nothing but Chanel No. 5 and a smile) and are headed toward lighter, more diffuse, and more generally acceptable fragrances.

The retros were heavier and less likely to use florals. Today, florals and botanicals are big and fragrances are lighter, even in the way they're delivered. Most people today prefer to squirt on some alcohol-based floral spritz than use real perfume.

It's almost like political correctness has hit the world of perfume. We just don't want to offend, so we'll keep our fragrance light, polite, and just right.

The retros are awesome, though, even if some of them are just not what we would actually want to wear. They were more compelling, more powerful, and they probably made people with allergies sneeze.

The other day I walked into a room where a person with one of those major retro perfumes had been. She was gone, but I could still smell the perfume in the room. It made me smile, because it reminded me of all those big old perfumes people used to wear.