News And Trends

Youth Quake

2010-10-14T10:39:46-07:00

Catch a whiff of Gucci by gucci, an unmistakably modern, youthfully alluring, and downright pretty scent where you are transported into a nightclub with music blasting out of the speakers and cocktails being served, the tiare flower evoking lithe bodies swaying to the rhythm of the song.

Borrowed Elegance

2010-10-13T13:20:41-07:00

Borrowed from an old name, Rumeur by Lanvin, is utterly a modern vibe of elegance with a woody musky composition of magnolia and rose (with their crystalline slightly lemony overtones) marry to classics like jasmine and orange blossom and segue into an abstract base composed of patchouli and musk. A must have staple for styled elegance in every woman’s wardrobe.

The Computer Age

2010-10-04T16:43:51-07:00

Be Seduced by the allure & all-out computer age fashions with a maestro off beat combination of mustards, bordeuxs and perfumes with notes of dark cherry wood undertones. Wear Femme, by Karl Lagerfeld, “Go beyond your past, to create you must break the rules”!

Hip Heritage

2010-10-04T16:27:12-07:00

Falling for this season’s nostalgic mood sets the stage for discovering our mother’s stylist past. Invest in a classic scent, Fracas by Robert Piguet, first issued in 1948. Never tame, full of shocking sensuality, redolent of dusk and heated skin with a fascinating note of tuberose; the “queen of the night” which Victorian girls were forbidden to smell in case they had a spontaneous, much frowned-upon orgasm!

Purple Passion

2010-10-04T15:16:07-07:00

Nothing feels cozier than a warm cable knit cardigan – mix and match your look with a long purple dress, tight purple cardigan with a spritz of something purple! Wear Lola by Marc Jacobs, full of joyful notes of sweet fruits (pear, red grapefruit) with pink pepper accents put a spin in your step, while peony, rose, geranium, couple with vanilla, creamy musk and Tonka bean conspire to give a naughty wink beneath that hip fringe of hair: Lola is a girl full of joie de vivre!

Red-Carpet Ready

2010-10-04T15:05:51-07:00

Matthew McConaughey for Dolce & Gabbana

Red-Carpet Ready! In an elegant tux, Matthew McConaughey fronts the campaign for Dolce & Gabbana’s newest scent, The One Gentleman. “A gentleman has respect for himself, that is the basis of his respect and consideration for others,” he explains of the inspiration behind the new scent. The new juice, which contains notes of pepper, grapefruit, fennel, patchouli and vanilla, will be available late October.

Fall's Sense of Style

2010-09-02T09:47:12-07:00

Fashion & Fragrance

Capture the spirit of Autumn/Winter’s 2010 Runway Collections! Take a front row seat with the editor’s at Perfume.com for hottest fragrances for this year’s coolest trends – from sleek minimalism to indulgent opulence – we have you covered for the season’s Hit List!

Unforgettable Scents

2010-07-13T16:47:53-07:00

Celeb scents come and go, and some truly stand out and make a statement. Beyonce’s first fragrance, Heat, sets itself apart from the crowd with a bold, undeniably sexy, sweet scent that evokes almond macaroons and honeysuckle nectar! A fragrance as hot as the glamourous entertainer that she is. In-stock Now!

Wedding Wardrobe

2010-05-05T15:25:11-07:00

Helping you find the right fragrance to mark the occasion can be an overwhelming task. Our editor’s have carefully selected fragrances that are sure to ignite, delight and commemorate your special day.

European Flair

2010-06-29T11:55:49-07:00

Dose of Style

A chic look with European Flair is a scent with natural notes of leather and wood. The go-to fragrance is She Wood by DSquared2 with a woody base with a feminine touch of vanilla, lemon and jasmine!

Transparency In Effect

2010-06-29T11:22:11-07:00

Dose of Style

This season’s obsession with transparency is in full effect. Discover Stella Nude – an olfactory portrayal of the warmth of naked skin.

Sex and the City 2

2010-05-23T09:50:34-07:00

What Character Are You? Tell Us and Win!

Sex and the City 2, opening Thursday, May 27th, has women cheering everywhere with a ‘Cosmo’ in hand while shining up their favorite pair of Manolo’s.

In great anticipation, Perfume.com is featuring scents to suit Charlotte, Miranda, Samantha and Carrie. Pick your favorite character and discover a selection of fragrances that are guaranteed to inspire a new you!

And just for fun, comment on your favorite character and win their fashionable fragrance wardrobe, a set of 4 fragrances!

Contest ends Monday, May 31st at Midnight, EST. No purchase necessary.

Bang! Marc Jacobs Bares All!

2010-05-23T06:48:26-07:00

Marc Jacobs lastest men’s fragrance, Bang, the designer has striped down and greased up to launch the new fragrance due for release later this July.

“I couldn’t see what I would wear to express this. We tried it with clothes, but it didn’t work. Then Juergen [Teller, who shot the campaign] had the idea for the silver Mylar, and it all came together. The silver Mylar also gives it that flash, that bang … As a word, it has so many connotations, including a sexual connotation.”

“This fragrance ad isn’t about some chiseled face on a beach — that approach wouldn’t be in line with what we’re doing,” said Jacobs. “This fragrance is for a contemporary guy, who, even if he isn’t young, has a younger spirit.” However, he’s realistic about how widely the almost-full monty ad will be shown. “I think more people are going to see [the Midwestern] version of the ad,” he said with a laugh. -Marc Jacobs

The scent has top notes of black, pink and white peppercorns, a heart of primal masculine woods and a drydown of hypnotic elemi resinoid, aromatic benzoin, vetiver, white moss and patchouli.

His last successful cologne, Marc Jacobs for Him, was back in 2002. We’ve been waiting!

Tommy Hilfigers Dreaming

2009-09-15T15:36:57-07:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

There is nothing technically wrong with the juice, as perfume is called by industry people, of Dreaming, the major new Tommy Hilfiger launch. And that raises a question.

This is Hilfiger’s most important new feminine since the brilliant 1996 Tommy Girl, created by perfumer Calice Becker. Tommy Girl set a new standard for American scents as it was exquisitely built and an aesthetic advance: a cool seawater green, a balance of the electrical and the natural. Since then, Estée Lauder, which is Hilfiger’s licensee, has put out assorted seasonals (perfumes sold during a single summer, for example) and flankers (riffs on existing perfumes, the scent equivalent of Spiderman 2). But Dreaming is Lauder’s first truly new creation for the Hilfiger brand in 11 years.

Dreaming was created by perfumer Stephen Nilsen. Nilsen is relatively young, with a young man’s résumé: it’s short and filled mostly with flankers, several of which were for Hilfiger. But he has already proven his talent. He has under his belt the wildly underestimated With Love Hilary Duff and the quietly excellent Moss Breches for Tom Ford’s Private Blend collection.

With Dreaming, Nilsen has created a Lauder perfume: a juice that’s been precisely and closely directed. The Dreaming creative team was led by Evelyn Lauder & Trudi Loren. Both are seasoned professionals. Together, the three have made a scent designed to please millions. The perfume opens with a lovely floral top and goes immediately into a light, sweet drydown with a gentle fruit angle. The press materials list “White Peach” and “Freesia,” though these don’t exist as natural raw materials; they are marketing terms meant to communicate a certain fruitiness and floralcy, and both come through clear as a bell. And that is basically the scent.

A reader of the perfume blog Now Smell This commented on Dreaming last December, two months before the perfume’s February 2008 launch. The comment: “I can honestly say it is delicious! My new favorite parfum!” will be representative of the general reaction. There is no reason that Dreaming should not make a lot of money with first-time buyers, and I would be surprised if it didn’t, in particular in the Asian market, for which it is perfect. It is absolutely plug-and-play accessible, it diffuses nicely, it whispers, it flatters the wearer. There is nothing wrong with it, and nothing to frighten anyone away. The question with a perfume with which there is nothing technically wrong whatsoever is whether it has the personality necessary for the sale of the second bottle.

Polo Black by Ralph Lauren

2009-09-15T15:39:49-07:00

★ ★ Nice Effort

Perhaps one should not be astounded that Doreen Bollhofer*, the creative director of Ralph Lauren’s perfumes, has produced a nice, not-half-bad masculine scent. The surprise is partly a function of the fact that around 90 percent of the scents marketed as masculines range from intentional scent banalities to olfactory amphibious assault vehicles. It’s also relevant that Lauren’s 1978 Polo Green (as the brand now calls it), a masculine previously referred to as Polo, was as ubiquitous among young American males as Rive Gauche was across the Atlantic among young French females ten years earlier.

Rive Gauche has held up well. It remains easily wearable as a chic retro statement. (Yes, this includes men; the stuff is great on guys.) Polo Green, by contrast, burned out its aesthetic viability in part because of its determined, semi-militaristic vision of what constitutes a male fragrance— a sort of green, sort of aggressively fresh aromatic scent with the power of a land mine. To be clear: The perfumer who constructed it, Carlos Benaim, did excellent work. Structurally Polo Green was built like a titanium watch. Stylistically, however, it was a sort of “eau de French military academy.”

Polo Black, on the other hand, is far from green. Black was constructed under Mullarkey’s guidance by the American perfumer Ellen Molner and the French perfumer Pierre Negrin. With the proviso that all perfume categories (floral, oriental, etc.) range from slightly useless to completely meaningless, the surprise here is that Polo Black is a “parfum gourmand,” a culinary perfume where one least expects it. For its first 30 minutes, it is an idea of the delicate sweet smell of a still-warm pastry oven combined with pure, warm, clean man’s skin. There is no cliché “ashtray-in-a-frat-house-at-2 a.m.” smoke, the usual (and boring) semaphore deployed to signal “masculine perfume here!” Mullarkey wisely eschewed this. That said, Polo Black’s main weakness is its, well, weakness— technically the juice runs out of steam rather fast, and it has only moderate diffusion power on skin. The other problem is the drydown; once the 30 minutes are up, Polo Black evolves toward a much more standardized male spice. If only Mullarkey had allowed Molner and Negrin to continue the pastry-oven opening, let it carry the entire story. Polo Black is certainly not an immortal addition to perfume art. But it is pleasant, and as “masculines” go, it makes a decent finishing touch to a man’s body.

Aqva Pour Homme Marine by Bvlgari

2009-09-15T15:44:33-07:00

★ ★ Nice Effort

Bulgari’s new masculine, Aqva Pour Homme Marine, which has been on the market for a few weeks, carries two fingerprints. The first is of its creator, Jacques Cavallier, a prolific perfumer so successful these days that he often seems to generate a quarter of each year’s worldwide fragrance product. The second is the unmistakable scent of a molecule, methylbenzodioxepinone, also known to the trade as Calone. Cavallier, plucked it from the crowd and cast it in starring roles in several of the biggest commercial successes the perfume industry has ever seen. It virtually defined perfume style in the 1990s. Whether Bulgari is making a wise choice in launching an updated 90s scent in 2008 is another question.

Cavallier is, as many of the best perfumers are, an artist and a technician, with mastery of several olfactory archetypes. He created or co-created the vastly underrated edgy-feminine Chic (2002) for Carolina Herrera, the delicious raspberry gourmand Hot Couture (2000) for Givenchy, and Gaultier’s beautifully updated French-traditionalist floral Classique (1993). He has a huge aesthetic range. He can do crass (the mesmerizing neon mango Serpentine for Roberto Cavalli), he can do a supercommercial American mall style (Truth for Calvin Klein, the olfactory equivalent of “The Da Vinci Code”) and he can do excellent high-end luxury (Noir de Noir and Tuscan Leather, both for Tom Ford). But it was with Calone that Cavallier made history. Calone is a synthetic that gives the scent of fresh sea water with traces of ozone. In 1992, Cavallier put it in l’Eau d’Issey for Issey Miyake and then did it again, in 1996, with Acqua di Gio Pour Homme for Armani. The juices headed straight for the top of the charts, and Cavallier is forever linked to an entirely new category of perfume (the marketers were ecstatic) billed as “water” or “marine” fragrances.

Bulgari asked for a Cavallier supermarine, and with Aqva Pour Homme Marine, Cavallier gave it to them. Bulgari’s press releases scatter language about ocean breezes and uses words like “grapefruit” and “neroli” (bitter orange flower), but really what you have here is a fragrance that makes no reference whatsoever to the natural world. Aqva is the blandly handsome son of l’Eau d’Issey, a scent of Coast deodorant soap in an expensive executive gym with powerful central air conditioning. (My guess is that Cavallier has thrown in some salicylates for a flinty mineral feel, a nice touch.) Men will like it; they’ve been conditioned to. It’s a nice masculine. It’s a good example of the category. You simply need to decide how you feel about the category.

C'est La Fete! by Christian Lacroix

2009-09-15T15:50:33-07:00

★ Do Not Inhale

C’est La Fete!, which launched in 2007, is a creation of Inter-Parfums, one of the mid-sized perfume licensees. Its splendid Paris offices are located on the exclusive Rond Point of the Champs-Elysées, in the eighth arrondissement. But Inter-Parfums, which owns Lacroix’s license and creates scents bearing the designer’s name, is under the same, not-so-splendid financial constraints faced by the other licensees (like those of Lauder to LVMH). It takes money to make a perfume; like most things in life, the better the raw materials, the more they cost. There are several ways of dealing with this. One of them is known as front-loading.

C’est La Fête!, by perfumer Jean Jacques, is the best example of a front-loaded perfume I’ve smelled in years. The fragrance opens with sun-drenched sparkling pineapple so juicy you look around for the radiant smile of a Brazilian girl wearing nothing but a string bikini. It is an incandescent debut, a glow of sweet sugary fruit that blooms on your skin, so achingly lovely that involuntarily you smile back. I was in the Delta terminal at JFK airport in a duty free shop opposite Gate 11 when I smelled it. I turned to signal to the young assistant who’d been helping me: “Now here’s something!” And by the time she’d finished with a customer and made it over to me, I smelled my forearm again and realized the money had run out. The raw materials that had performed that glorious opening number had burned off, the less-expensive materials waiting in the wings to carry us through the rest of the story had stepped onto the stage. And there it was: a layer on my skin of allyl caproate, I’m guessing— a perfumery raw material that smells halfway between pineapple and the tin can containing it. It is not an ignoble molecule, but it isn’t particularly attractive in large doses. It smells more of the disadvantaged 20th arrondissement than the chic eighth, and it is decidedly inexpensive. Which helps profits but not perfumes.

Front-loading is the way marketers dazzle consumers just long enough for us to get out our credit cards, buy the perfume and exit the shop. Most customers will be fastened into their seats waiting for takeoff before they realize the name Lacroix has, sadly, guaranteed nothing and that the juice is much, much less than its first splendid come-on.

Fuel for Life Pour Femme by Diesel

2009-09-15T15:52:33-07:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

Diesel puts great stock in weirdness: a calculated, carefully-designed meticulously-crafted weirdness. Its new fragrance, Fuel for Life Pour Femme, smells like canned fruit compote. The smell is “canned” because it’s vaguely metallic. “Fruit” because it’s fruity in the way that Juicyfruit gum is “fruity.” I use the word “compote” because there is absolutely no recognizable fruit species here; not even the hybridized tangelo comes close. But remember, the actual smell is incidental in a perfume like this; its purpose is not to be beautiful, but to be a scent marker, identifying its wearer as part of a tribe, a sort of olfactory cattle brand.

The fragrance was created by the perfumers Annick Menardo and Thierry Wasser, under the creative direction of Karine Lebret and Stephane Demaison, and from the first inhale you instantly understand why Diesel launched it. This branding iron is red hot; Fuel for Life Pour Femme sears the skin instantly and as viscerally as possibly with the brand’s name. Anyone who smells it on you and knows the perfume will nod and give you a quiet smile, “Cool.” Anyone who doesn’t know it will instantly fall on their knees in awe of that weird Diesel feeling. (If the Diesel scent is appropriately accessorized with the Diesel clothes (one gasps in wonderment at the possibility) the coolness might become so critical that fission may spontaneously occur.) On both those levels the scent is effective, and judged purely as an essence of Dieselness, it should receive five stars. On any other level (classic perfume construction, olfactory beauty or what have you) it is either useless or simply irrelevant, voluntarily so. But you may not be interested in it on any other level.

One note: If the feminine version of Fuel for Life shows the brand has guts (and it does) the masculine (also by Menardo, though this time with perfumer Jacques Cavallier) shows that even Diesel fears being truly creative. The terror too great to face? Making something equally odd for men; the masculine version is a single-variable equation of 1990s-style starched metallic spice male eau de cologne with an angle of dental rinse. Stop focusing on the dental rinse; it sounds more interesting than it is. That said, the masculine will have you returning suitably impressed with the vigor of the feminine, a quality that, in a sea of photocopies, is worth three stars alone.

Gucci Envy by Gucci for Women

2009-09-15T16:03:48-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Transcendent

Gucci Envy is not only categorically brilliant as a perfume, it is a masterpiece of olfactory art that deserves to be exhibited at the Modern.

This is what, in a single juice, perfume brands with aspirations to the surreally mind-altering, like Diesel or Comme des Garcons, wish they could create: utterly strange, transmogrifying the very art form itself and pushing it to a new level. It’s also what Hermès often does in its Hermèssences collection: create pure limpid exquisite beauty. Lastly, as unlikely as it seems, it matches the best of the Escada seasonals at their wildest most effervescent fun. (For the record: Envy’s technical scores [persistence, diffusion, and structure] are perfect.)

In 1997, Gucci and its perfumer, Maurice Roucel, beat these other houses (and everyone else) to the punch with this juice, as wonderfully odd as it is oddly wonderful. First, forget any reference to nature. It is interesting how much more difficult it can be to describe a good perfume than a bad one, but it is not surprising: This is in great part because often the good ones incorporate originality, and that is by definition a quality that defies description.

In seeking consistently to avoid references, the novel work evades adjectives. Envy is “green” but only in the most abstracted sense of the word, not the natural raw frozen spring green of the shredded young birch branch but a digital photograph of it. It is “clear” in as far as it is the opposite of the animalic underarm of the early 20th century French school of perfumery. It is “modern,” an even more abstract description of scent, in that it is neither “classic” (see under: the standard of the l’Air du Temps mid-20th century French floral feminine school) nor “old,” which is to say “perfumey,” itself meaning colloquially “old lady” (to use the industry term, “aldehydic”/powdery/heavy). And it is “fresh,” but not in any sense of the standard late 20th century American hygienic school.

So what is it? Envy is a green, fresh, modern, abstract innovation, as enigmatic yet compelling as the floating squares of color in a Rothko and as free of conscious information. It may or may not be ageless. We will see. But it is as remarkable and indefinable as an eclipse.

Fracas by Robert Piguet for Women

2009-09-15T21:57:34-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Transcendent

There are perfume legends, there are perfumer legends, and then there are perfumes that become obsessions. Fracas is all three, which is a hat trick less common that you’d think. Still more extraordinary, Fracas is built on a concept of tuberose, a small white flower (unrelated to rose; the name comes from the Latin word describing the plant’s tuberous root system) that generates an overpowering scent and is notorious among perfumers for being a difficult raw material to master. Which is perhaps why Fracas’ perfumer, Germaine Cellier, managed it.

Born in Bordeaux in 1909, Cellier was a pioneer in every sense: a professional woman, a chemist, an artist working in the olfactory medium, tall, beautiful, abrasive (and possibly lesbian), a brilliant and intellectually voracious friend of Cocteau, a proponent of synthetic raw materials. She was also the creator of a striking style. “She transposed Fauvism and Abstractionism into perfume,” Jeannine Mongin has written. “She created in dissonance.”

And the creations have lasted. During WWII, the designer Robert Piguet asked Cellier for a perfume. She created Bandit for him in 1944. In 1946, she did Coeur Joie for Nina Ricci, and in 1947 the landmark Vent Vert for Balmain. Then Piguet asked her for another scent.

It is possible that the secret of Fracas (1948) is an equilibrium between the power of Cellier’s style and the power of tuberose. Perfumer Aurelien Guichard is the caretaker of the formula, which he calls “incredibly complex.” (Due to bans on various raw materials for toxicology, no mid-century perfume is street legal in its original form, and Guichard is charged with conserving Cellier’s vision while constantly updating it with non-allergenic materials.)

Cellier packed her formula with Indian tuberose absolute, which gives it huge power and “sillage” (the olfactory trail). Like all good perfumers, she was an illusionist. To achieve an even more lifelike, more raw tuberose (this flower smells of armpit, flesh and decay due to heavy molecules called indoles; jasmine is similarly loaded with them), she used an even larger quantity of Tunisian orange blossom absolute, plus some astronomically expensive French jasmine and Italian iris root butter. Add natural violet leaf to give the sweet, heavy scent a refreshingly harsh, wet green aspect, iris for a woody depth, synthetic civet (the smell of unwashed construction worker) for power, the synthetics C18 for an unctuous, milky, soft tropical quality and methyl anthranilate for fizz. The result is a signature, a persistence on skin, and a diffusion that are – all three – astonishing. Another hat trick.

Allure Homme Sport by Chanel

2009-09-15T21:59:25-07:00

★ Do Not Inhale

Scents are constructed with very different philosophies and aesthetics and, as a result, differ fundamentally from one another. The works of every artistic medium, from painting to literature, lie along this continuum. Music, for example, can be pure art (Bach), intellectual art (Schoenberg), political philosophy (Dylan) and commercial product (Ashlee Simpson).

Allure Homme Sport illustrates this better than perhaps any other fragrance. Chanel still puts excellent, expensive raw materials into its juices; Ernest Beaux’s 1922 perfume Chanel No. 22, reedited by Chanel perfumers Jacques Polge and Chris Sheldrake and reintroduced last year, is one of the medium’s greatest works of pure art (it is a floral). Antoine Lie and Antoine Maisondieu’s Rossy de Palma, for Etat Libre d’Orange, is intellectual art (the smells of rose + blood), and Jean-Claude Ellena’s L’Eau d’Hiver for Frédéric Malle is political philosophy (defiant utopianism). Polge’s Allure Homme Sport is commercial product.

That Chanel would launch a scent whose sole reason for existing is to make money is not unreasonable. Chanel is a for-profit company. And Allure Homme Sport is by all technical measures (diffusion, stability, structure) a precision machine. Which is exactly the problem: It is a machine, of a very particular type.

This is Chanel’s version of the masculine cliché, the scent equivalent of “Spiderman 2” and an endlessly repackaged formula. The masculine cliché smells, always, of generic citrus and generic spice with a bit of tin-can metallic. Like a Hollywood action blockbuster, the ingredients are invariable: Throw in some linalyl acetate for fake bergamot, dihydrogeraniol for fake lemon, dihydromercenol for laundry detergent (tennis player in shower) and galaxolide for cheap synthetic musk. You’re done. (There’s nothing wrong with synthetic materials; the failure here is lack of imagination.) The cliché sells (men buy it like automatons) so marketers love it. It’s cheap to make, so accountants love it. It’s easy, so creatives love it. Kenzo’s Pour Homme, loaded with methylbenzodioxepinone to add a fake sea-breeze smell, is permanently atop the bestseller list in France, grinding out cash. Yves Saint Laurent’s Homme is found at Bloomingdale’s on Lexington, Creed’s Acier Aluminium is found at Bergdorf’s on Fifth, and Derek Jeter Driven is found at Walgreen’s everywhere. They all smell exactly the same.

And Chanel’s Allure Homme Sport? Undoubtedly it uses nobler versions of the formula’s raw materials, one of the highest quality versions of the masculine cliché on the market. It doesn’t matter. It isn’t, in fact, perfume. Masculine clichés are widgets. They are an olfactory product that is entirely fungible and could be traded on the Chicago commodities market next to wheat, pork bellies and steel. Allure Homme Sport is a bestseller. It makes Chanel millions of dollars. It is a logical choice to sell it. But it is not a reason to admire that choice aesthetically, and it is certainly not a reason to wear it.

With Love Hilary Duff by Hilary Duff

2009-09-15T22:05:18-07:00

★ ★ Nice Effort

It’s easy to deride celebrity perfumes. Writing about his friendship with Robert Redford in The New Yorker, James Salter said that “when I went into restaurants with Redford, eyes turned to watch as we crossed the room; the glory seems to be yours as well.” But celebrity came with a cost; Salter remembered Redford’s saying of movies: “My presence in something is enough to give it an aura of artificiality.” If people buy celebrity perfumes, it is precisely because the glory seems to be yours as well. Yet the celebrities don’t make the perfumes; professional perfumers do. Celebrity
inexorably lends an aura of artificiality, and not just to the celebrity scent; it extends to us as well. We are, at best, torn.

The fact of the matter is that some celebrity perfumes are just as good as those from fashion designers. Others are better. We often forget that a designer’s name on a scent is no more logical than that of a 20-year-old singer/actress. Before Gabrielle Chanel claimed perfume for fashion designers in 1921, it had been the exclusive territory of perfumers (see: Guerlain, Daltroff, Coty). If fragrance is now to be given to Hilary Duff (whose Wikipedia entry includes the music genre “bubblegum pop”) and her colleagues, so be it. Scents should be judged by the art form’s standard criteria: structure, quality of the raw materials, persistence on skin and diffusion, innovation, beauty.

The fact is that With Love: Hilary Duff is a perfectly good perfume. It was made by Rodrigo Flores-Roux and Stephen Nilsen, the perfumers working under the creative team at Elizabeth Arden, Duff’s licensee. If With Love is not by any means a great scent, it has an absolutely coherent structure, very good persistence on skin and a nice diffusion. With Love smells, interestingly enough, comforting. It’s not identifiably “floral,” not “perfumey” (no aldehydes) and not, honestly, particularly reminiscent of any fragrance I know. It is instead an abstract example of the contemporary naturalist school, a scent one might encounter were one lucky enough to be hugged close to the suntanned neck of a pretty volleyball player on a Malibu beach: a bit of sunscreen, a hint of the breeze from the California hills and the smell of a girl who really knows how to play at the net. Were you not to know the scent’s celebrity origins, you would be left, as she released the hug and rushed happily back into the game, with the impression of olfactory sweetness and the white of her smile. You would not be torn. You would simply smile back.

Un Jardin Apres la Mousson by Hermes

2009-09-15T22:06:07-07:00

★ Do Not Inhale

Reactions to perfumes vary. Delight, disgust, joy, indifference, melancholy, amusement (both negative and positive), rapture. It is in anticipation of these emotions that we eagerly await new works from major artists like Jean-Claude Ellena, Hermès’ in-house perfumer. Art is by definition a profession of risks, and if nobody bats a thousand, Ellena’s risks have often actually altered the art form itself, and his contributions have been major. It is therefore somewhat strange that the primary emotion generated by Ellena’s new Hermès scent, Un Jardin Après la Mousson, is the most profound bafflement.

When I first smelled the perfume a month ago, I felt certain I understood the fascinating risk Ellena had taken. In 1966, after the perfumer Edmond Roudnitska had so brilliantly used the marvelous (and then new) synthetic molecule methyl dihydrojasmonate in Eau Sauvage, Ellena took the same molecule, known as Hedione, in 1993 and managed to revolutionize it: Thé Vert de Bulgari practically created a new school of perfumery. Now, with Mousson, he was (it was obvious, no?) attempting the same feat with methylbenzodioxepinone (trade name: Calone), the synthetic that virtually dominated the 1990s and generated the marine/sea breeze school that exploded with New West in 1990 and continued with Escape and L’Eau d’Issey. These were always perfumes that relied more on special effects than beauty, and Calone is, in its crass ubiquity and base commercial appeal, the olfactory equivalent of corn syrup. But that, I assumed, was the point. The attempt to take this cliché and reimagine it artistically is admirable.

The result, however, is not. Mousson is a failure on every level, and its failure is so strangely complete, so weirdly disorienting, that after I had repeatedly smelled the bottle delivered to my office (put it on colleagues, offered my arm to strangers) I came to distrust that what I was smelling was the intended perfume. Juices do go bad; formulations are faulty. I stopped at Duty Free in Charles de Gaulle to try its sample. It was identical. This leaves us with the scent.

It is not difficult to describe. Mousson (its full name means “A Garden After the Monsoon”) is a relatively literal olfactory sketch of a brackish inlet in summer: sea water diluted with fresh water, a bit of humid ocean breeze, reeds (some slightly decaying) and a vague fresh-greenish smell from the trees in the nearby forest. What is difficult is explaining it. Ellena’s L’Eau d’Hiver is a brilliant, utterly disorienting work of abstract art. Mousson is equally disorienting, but without a hint of brilliance. Ellena’s Bois Farine works innovative magic on the most unlikely of smells: baking flour. Mousson’s Calone theme was already mildly clichéd in 1996 with Polo Sport Woman, and here it is not recreated, not revolutionized, not twisted into any new statement.

Even the lighting feels startlingly wrong. Ellena’s Ambre Narguilé is drenched in warm, thick incandescence, while Un Jardin en Méditerranée is suffused with the purest, lightest natural sunlight. Mousson is lit dimly, with fluorescent tubes housed in aluminum, as if in the drab office of a bureaucrat in some minor Parisian ministry.

The final surprise came when I got a look at a gas chromatograph analysis of Ellena’s formula last week. It contains a huge amount of the molecule Hedione that Ellena so elegantly recast in Thé Vert, some expected materials (lime, bergamot, Melonal for the honeydew sweetnees, violet leaf for the ambiguous green) and some unexpected (I must admit that I failed to pick up the 5 percent vetiver, and only in retrospect does the hint of isobutyl quinoline register as a leathery/earthy note).

What the formula does not contain, however, is the slightest trace of Calone. Which means that Mousson, which smells like a valiant attempt at reinterpreting the 1990s oceanic school, is not even that. I have been at a loss for words before. Never, though, to this degree. I see here virtually total incoherence. I perceive no overriding vision from the artist, no clarity at all. I am baffled.

Dior Addict by Dior

2009-09-15T22:10:27-07:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

Dior Addict is either one of the weirdest traditionalist fragrances ever introduced or one of the most normal of the weirdos. It depends on how you smell it. But be forewarned that Addict is one of those perfumes that constitutes an olfactory Rorschach test: opinions on it vary widely, it never really smells the same to any two people, and if you wear it two days in a row it won’t even necessarily smell the same to you.

Addict was creative-directed by the Dior designer John Galliano and built by the perfumer Thierry Wasser, who was recently snatched up by LVMH’s Francois Demachy and installed as Guerlain’s in-house perfumer. Wasser has now ascended to the ranks of the in-house superelite, which includes Hermès’ Jean-Claude Ellena, Chanel’s Jacques Polge and Christopher Sheldrake, Cartier’s Mathilde Laurent and Jean Patou’s Jean-Michel Duriez. His first official effort at Guerlain, Guerlain Homme, which was unveiled last month, is a nicely serviceable masculine, one that works today but would have worked just as well in the 1960s. Wasser’s Dior Addict, by contrast, was introduced in 2002, would arguably have worked in 1925 as a maximal-minimalist version of Shalimar (take everything out except the ethyl vanillin, pump it full of neon gas and run an electrical current though it) and could conceivably work in 2025. It’s that diaphanous— and that odd.

Yes, Addict is a masterpiece of coumarin (the chewy, taffy-like, vaguely almondy synthetic molecule derived from tonka bean) and vanilla, but what does that get you? To some it reads like a giant, powdery light bulb: warm and formless and slightly alarming. At moments, I have thought of those phenomenally irritating entirely white canvases you see in museums, which force you to conclude that modern art is truly a fraud. At other moments, the thing seems to be generating a wisp of fresh green submerged in sweet vanilla bean, like a scoop of French vanilla ice cream with a tiny green twig snapped in two and accidentally stuck in it. Wasser’s work is technically solid; Addict performs very well on skin, lasting and diffusing like clockwork. Its aesthetics remain the question. But nothing this resolutely indefinable can fail to have value. Stare at this painting and see what you think.

Flower by Kenzo

2009-09-15T22:11:25-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ Excellent

Flower by Kenzo has one of the most astonishing openings of any perfume on the market. If you go to the fragrance counter outside of rush hours, it is entirely possible to spray the tester on your skin, inhale, be transported, rave to anyone near you and sign the credit-card receipt within four minutes, which is the duration of Flower’s glittering, mesmerizing first act.

I assume Alberto Morillas, its perfumer, spent serious time and energy on that curtain-up. Flower could, in its initial unfolding on your skin, be called Stem. It smells not at all of the blossom but of the most marvelous delicate green stalk, fresh and tender, clipped in preparation for display. If the opening doesn’t delight you, you are immune to anything except Bandit and I feel bad for you.

Which is not to say that Flower is necessarily for everyone. Saying who it isn’t for, however, is a bit tricky. This is what’s strange about Flower: it’s not, in fact, a floral in the strict sense of the term. Start with a fact we can all agree on: this is in no way a soliflore (what perfumers call a perfume that mimics the smell of a single flower with (metaphorically speaking) photographic accuracy; some people call Diorissimo a lily of the valley soliflore, though they are mistaken). Flower doesn’t smell like any known flower. Once you’ve said that, the question is whether it intends to. Its name aside, I’m not convinced.

If one is to categorize it, I would hang it next to the brilliant work of abstract art that is Gucci Rush, which smells like being in a fabulous hair salon— the sprays, the shampoos, the metal sinks, the hot blow-dryer air. It’s Flower’s second act that smells like an abstract art concept: the idea of a flower, all the flowers you ever smelled, but perfected, flooded with halogen light (this thing must be loaded with methyl dihydrojasmonate, a molecule like liquid light), smoothed with powder. One understands why it has been on the top of the best-seller lists since its introduction in 2000.

Flower was creative-directed by Patrick Guedj and Odile Lobadowsky, and I imagine they were pushing Morillas with both a single idea: (flower, in the generic sense) and a single word, (transcendence,) but in the imperative, as an order: “Give us floral and take us beyond it. For God’s sake, Alberto, please, no pale daisies (which have no smell), no flowers like bombs going off (tuberose), no sweaty I’ve-just-had-sex-with-an-Italian-cop flowers (jasmine, with its armpit angle), no ladies lunching in some chic cafe (mimosa).” So Morillas went away and came back with what they wanted.

David Foster Wallace wrote a novel about a film so funny it kills those who watch it. Morillas has come up with an analogue in perfume, and this perfume is real. This is a work of scent art so lovely that it captures almost everyone who sprays the tester on their skin.

Infusion dHomme by Prada

2009-09-15T22:12:00-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ Excellent

When Daniela Andrier was speaking with Fabio Zambernardi, Miuccia Prada’s right hand, about possible directions for the new Prada men’s fragrance they wanted to create, Zambernardi proposed a somewhat unusual idea. In 2007, Andrier had created a women’s scent for Prada called Infusion d’Iris; he told her that he had been fascinated by the Prada bath soap scented with the perfume. He proposed a masculine fragrance that smelled like this soap— or, to be more precise, like the skin of a man who had, say, found the soap in a woman’s bath and washed his body with it. Andrier thought about it and went to work.

Infusion d’Homme launched this month, and it is a precision-crafted work of subtlety and restraint. The subtlety makes it interesting, the restraint makes it beautiful, and the fact that there is a perfume of this quality being marketed to men, rather than the half-done garbage that men are usually presented with, makes it extraordinary.

Iris is a difficult material in that is the olfactory equivalent of pearl gray and reads to the nose as almost a relentless uniform wall of scent. But gray, done well, is arguably the most beautiful color. Contrary to universal belief, iris is not a floral but rather a woody scent, from the roots (not the flowers; iris is actually closer to sandalwood than to any flower), carefully aged at least three years. The best-quality iris comes from Florence. Iris is one of the materials that, like vetiver or rose, can be the entire perfume virtually by itself. Dior Homme by perfumer Olivier Polge provides a recent precedent for an iris masculine. It is excellent, but it is different. Polge wrapped Homme’s iris core in an habillage of softness; habiller means “to wear” in French, and many perfumes are structured as habillage around a core, such as Maurice Roucel’s wrapping a milk chocolate scent in a floral/fruit skin for Missoni.

Andrier, by contrast, does more of a study in the raw material. There’s an almost vetiver-like astringency to the creamy woodiness. The approach is entirely direct (quite typical for male scents), the bath soap aspect practical (ditto; if you can imagine “guy beauty,” this is it), the artistry low-key, which is man for “elegant.” Infusion d’Homme has two analogs in other artistic media. One is visual, John Singer Sargent’s painting “Madame X”: the white-gray opalescence of Madame Pierre Gautreau’s breasts and shoulders thrown into relief by her onyx dress. It is not a feminine painting. Both scent and painting are stark. Both are clear. Both are striking, which can be another word for off-putting in their force beneath the elegance.

The other analog is aural art, Ravel’s “Pavane for a Dead Princess.” Mournful, careful, musically pointillist, it weaves an almost relentless wall of sound, a loveliness that is, at the same time, as clear and tactile as a bar of soap found in a bathtub.

Danielle by Danielle Steel

2009-09-15T22:13:10-07:00

★ Do Not Inhale

Danielle Steel stepped from the late-model cherry-red Bentley, the spike heel of her Louboutins skipping over a pile of trash in the gutter and planting itself firmly on the Manhattan sidewalk.

Steel had sold 450 million books. She wore a stunning Oscar de la Renta top that cost lots and lots of money and a big, amazing, tasteless fur coat that cost even more money. Her perfectly tanned face, immaculately made up with Chanel makeup that reflected her Swarovski earrings that cost lots of money, was turned upward to the offices of her perfume licensee, Elizabeth Arden, the company that would be making Danielle by Danielle Steel, the Danielle Steel Perfume.

In the Arden meeting room, Danielle Steel shared her vision with Elizabeth Arden Internal Creative Team. Elizabeth Arden Internal Creative Team listened to Danielle Steel describe the perfume she envisioned. It would be a stunning, amazing perfume! It would be exquisite but avant-garde. It would be timeless but also trendy, classic but also contemporary. (Elizabeth Arden Internal Creative Team nodded its collective head vigorously. Yes, yes! it said.) Young women would wear it, but middle-age women would wear it, too, and everyone would want it and everyone would love it because in the time it had taken to conduct the creative meeting with the Elizabeth Arden Internal Creative Team, Danielle Steel had sold 500 million books.

Elizabeth Arden Internal Creative Team got to work. It put a huge amount of energy into creating the bottle and the cap and the packaging and the ad campaign. Elizabeth Arden Internal Creative Team was very excited about everything. Then it remembered: Oh, yeah. The juice. Almost forgot. It told the perfumer Loc Dong that he would make the juice. Put as much money into the juice as you would put into a scent for a hair gel, went the directive. Loc Dong winced, but that was the way low-quality mass-market celebrity scents were created, so he gathered up the paltry number of cheap, low-quality raw materials at his disposal and, crying bitter tears, began to assemble the perfume.

By the time Loc Dong finished, Danielle Steel had sold 560,000,000,000,000,000,000 books— more books than there are subatomic particles in the universe. Danielle by Danielle Steel was like the pile of trash that Danielle Steel stepped over on her way to the creative meeting. For the first four seconds it smelled sort of vaguely like a kind of flower that you get in a gallon of floral-scented laundry detergent, and then for five seconds it reminded you of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” Then it evaporated, like the prose in a novel by Danielle Steel evaporated from your memory the moment you read it. It was a perfume that, instead of being made by human beings, was made by a faceless, soulless committee like Elizabeth Arden Internal Creative Team. And at that point there was nothing more to say about it.

Eau Parfumee Au The Vert by Bvlgari

2009-09-15T22:14:01-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Transcendent

The story of Jean-Claude Ellena’s Eau Parfumée au Thé Vert is one of the stranger stories in perfumery. Ellena (currently the in-house perfumer at Hermès, but for years one of the hidden perfumers creating scents for other brands) had an idea.

Ellena had a success with his first real perfume, First for Van Cleef & Arpels, a classic French fragrance introduced in 1976 that was very much in the early-20th-century French style (which is to say that First is a pastiche of Guerlain’s Mitsouko (1919) with a slightly modernist simplification. It is, as Ellena says, “bourr” de choses,) stuffed with the thick, plush, crushed-red-velvet and gold-leaf tropes of classic French perfume. Van Cleef had directed him toward this, which is the way virtually all perfumery used to work.

But by 1989, Ellena says, he felt strongly that “it was time for me to show that I have something to say in perfumery, not just what you ask me for.” In the 21st century, perfumers are, happily, increasingly legitimate artists creating works independently (see: Laudamiel, Kurkdjian, Maisondieu, Lie, Roucel, etc.). In the late 20th century, however, this was highly unusual.

Ellena and his wife, Susannah, have long been serious lovers of tea, especially that of the house of Mariage Frères. He would visit the shop, which wasn’t yet as famous as it is now, to take in the wonderful smells, then go to his lab and write short formulas, sketching out the scents he’d smelled in his head. One day he asked Mariage Frères if he could smell all of their teas. They agreed. Ellena spent a morning dipping his nose into 100 of the large metal canisters. He was developing an idea, refining it to a point. The trick he arrived at was mating a synthetic called ionone, which, as far as he knew, had only been used to make the scent of violets, and Hedione (the trade name for the synthetic molecule methyl dihydrojasmonate, originally found in jasmine), a heady, ethereal, glowing smell. He put the two together to make tea, though not a particular kind of tea; it was, as Ellena is careful to explain, the concept of tea.

Dior was then asking for submissions on a major new masculine, to be called Fahrenheit. Ellena submitted his tea fragrance. According to Ellena, Dior loved it and, after changes and questions and a lot of waiting, told him that he had won the brief. He remembers it: going to Paris, drinking Champagne with the Dior bosses, everyone celebrating. The next day, they called to say they’d changed their minds. The marketers were uncomfortable with the abstract quality of Ellena’s juice. They announced that the winners of the brief were Jean-Louis Sieuzac and Michel Almairac, whose submission became the Dior Fahrenheit currently on the market— a huge hit. Ellena was astounded, then crushed.

He approached Yves Saint Laurent with the idea, but, according to Ellena, they said, “No, it’s not for us. It’s too creative.” So he went around to the houses with it, telling them, “I think it’s really something new, something that will work.” He was firmly convinced.

At that moment, knowing nothing of this, the Italian jeweler Bulgari approached Ellena. They were envisioning a nice fragrance that would be sold in some quiet corner of their boutiques, an eau de cologne maybe. Perhaps to scent the stores? And, yes, a few clients might buy some now and then. They did not think of it as a product that would bring in money; it was simply extending the identity of Bulgari. Ellena brought them his draft of the tea scent.

Eau Parfumée au Thé Vert, which became the name of the perfume he ultimately did for them and which was introduced in 1993, is a smell as deep and strong and clear as Turkish seawater. The tea has a bit of the smooth aromatics of Darjeeling but, more, a potent black tea from China; it has only the rough, shiso-leaf texture of green tea, not the scent. There is a vaporous trace of old wood smoke from the fire used to boil this very fresh water, and at the same time the scent is shot through with this shiso freshness, which is why, as Ellena intended, it smells like tea and, simultaneously, it doesn’t. His idea was not to copy reality. His idea was to transform it.

There is a coda. The manager at Bulgari Parfums called Ellena one day to report that the New York store was selling 10 bottles a day. At $350 per bottle. Once Bulgari realized what it had, it sent Eau Parfumée au Thé Vert into the market, and it is still making buckets of money 15 years later. And this was a perfume never meant to be distributed.

Declaration Bois Bleu by Cartier

2009-09-15T22:14:46-07:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

Now here’s an interesting phenomenon.

Flankers are generally perfumes that descend from other, original scents (scents that almost invariably did well at the box office) providing a variation on the theme and thus further commercializing a successful brand. Spider-Man 2 begets Spider-Man 3; Vera Wang Princess of 2004-2006 gives birth to Vera Wang Flower Princess of 2008. And so on.

I can think of one notable exception to the flankers-only-come-from-successes rule: In 2002, Yves Saint Laurent, under the creative direction of Tom Ford and Chantal Roos, launched a masculine by the perfumers Alberto Morillas and Jacques Cavallier called M7 (YSL’s seventh masculine). It was a flop, perhaps (but not necessarily) because it was essentially unwearable, with hints of burning rubber, smoking tar, the pitch in fresh asphalt and charred guiac wood. It was the olfactory equivalent of a Coen Brothers’ film.

Because YSL had invested so heavily in creating the M7 brand, in 2004 Morillas and Cavallier launched M7 Fresh. It was one of the best masculines of the past decade, both a true update of the superior elements of the original and a deep reimagination: the tar and smoke were transformed into a fascinating manliness with a touch of engine oil, like the cold air clinging to a leather-clad guy who’s just dismounted his Moto Guzzi in December. Its failure (and disappearance) are to be lamented.

Flankers are often inferior to their originals. The brands see an opportunity to cash in; the price of formula goes downward to bump profits upward; savvy consumers turn away while the masses suck them down like McFlurries. But occasionally there is a flanker that does what Pixar did with “Toy Story II”: it equals, if not surpasses, the original.

The question is: which kind of flanker did Jean-Claude Ellena (who created Déclaration for Cartier in 1998) make? Cartier has done very well with the original. It’s a fascinating perfume. My memory of Déclaration was that it read rather close to a classic eau fraiche, i.e., a standard citrus + aromatic or herbal. I smelled it again recently and was shocked by the degree to which it is, in fact, a hard-core French masculine. It’s a tiny bit X-rated (the sensual, unwashed-armpit thing; this is simply a serious dose of cumin, which smells like sweat) and elegant in the way that Frenchmen can be elegant: rather strong come-on, slightly overpowering, narcissistic, but alluring if you’re into that sort of thing.

Then in 2001, Ellena did Déclaration’s flanker, Bois Bleu. This one is PG-13, but that simply means the cuminic body odor is gone (some will miss it; more will not). Its personality has been smoothed and calmed and de-Frenchified. As a result, it is much more instantly pleasant; you’ll be quite happy having Bois Bleu sitting next to you at a dinner party or on the subway. (It will also sell well in Asia.) As Morillas and Cavallier did with M7 Fresh, Ellena has taken the fundamentals of the original, cleaned them up, excised the thorny parts, and reimagined and modernized the citrus (in this case with a very nice aquatic trope; think of the original scent washed under a mountain waterfall) and given the whole thing a shine. Newly Windexed glass. Very nice. If more flankers were like this, they’d become something to look forward to.

Clean by Clean for Women

2009-09-15T22:16:09-07:00

★ ★ Nice Effort

Okay, so there are a lot of conceptual collections out there. There’s Etat Libre d’Orange, whose concept is hardcore, often brilliant, art-for-art’s-sake, mercilessly-destroy-the-concept-of-traditional-perfume radicalism. There’s Frédéric Malle, whose marvelous, admirable concept is the pushing to the foreground of individual artists (great perfumers with visions and talent) whom the house publishes as Knopf might publish great novelists; these are perfumes as more traditional scent, art that seduces through beauty. There’s Biehl. Parfumkunstwerke, which is a happy medium: works by talented perfumers that are challenging yet wearable.

Gwen Stefani’s Takashi Murakami-style Harajuku collection is the Superflat of the perfume world, appropriating a Japanese pop-culture phenomenon and intentionally delivering fun kitsch pastiche. Parfums d’Empire imagines the scents of vanished empires, painting olfactory portraits in perfumes out of newly spun memories.

And then there’s Clean . (Full name: Clean Original Eau de Toilette.) Clean’s concept is different versions of getting out of the shower, specifically one involving Ivory soap. I specify Ivory because its scent concept is basically Clean’s: body cream + iris. Though the more precise equation is Clean = (body cream x iris) + (Lemon Pledge : Windex). It’s not Irish Spring, which has that greenish, Pixar-perfected County Cork meadow angle. Also this is not Dove, which is body cream + makeup.

So there you are, dripping on the bathmat, smelling like you’ve climbed out of the rinse cycle of a washing machine. You are clean, clean, clean. God, are you clean. You are Procter & Gamble clean. That’s Clean. And you’d think, “Well, that’s it,” but you’d be wrong: astonishingly, the Clean collection actually manages nuance. Clean Shower Fresh adds a tile cleanser aspect. Shower Fresh for Men adds a tiny drop of Tom Ford For Men. Clean Warm Cotton adds a hot dryer tumbling an almost-finished load of whites— or, more, the smell of the steam in the hot metal air vent. (The perfumers, by the way: Clean was made by James Fuchs. Shower Fresh, John Gamba. For Men, Adriana Medina. Cotton, Michael Carby. Each vision of Clean was creative-directed by Randi Shinder, the brand’s CEO and Founder.)

So let’s get back to fundamentals. Would you want to smell like Ivory and Windex? Sure. Why not? Seriously. There’s a certain appeal. It’s practical or perverse, but it’s an appeal. You could smell like Eau d’Italie Bois d’Ombrie or Chanel 19 or Gucci Envy, but you could also smell like Tide. And people will like it. It will make them very comfortable, and it will make you comfortable. It projects an olfactory image of visceral clarity. It’s up to you. I have nothing more to say on this subject.

Ed Hardy by Ed Hardy for Women

2009-09-15T22:16:35-07:00

★ Do Not Inhale

The Ed Hardy brand is a phenomenon that is, in the context of today’s pop culture, instinctively logical: Here is Hardy, an artist who works in one of the stranger art forms (tattoos, quite elaborate) and on perhaps the strangest of all art media (human skin, still alive, thank you very much) and were you to acquire one of his works of art, you could virtually guarantee a marvelous explosion from your parents. Thus the explosion of the brand. (When I was in Mexico City a few months ago, you couldn’t throw a Dos Equis without hitting a massive Ed Hardy billboard.) On the other hand, were your parents familiar with the depth of Hardy’s artistry, they might applaud your investment acumen.

Hardy’s tattoo apprenticeship was apparently carried out while earning a San Francisco Art Institute B.F.A. in printmaking. He studied traditional Japanese tattoo art in Japan, and his strange work became strangely beautiful and substantive. He has with his wife written, edited and published numerous books on alternative art while curating gallery and nonprofit exhibitions, and is a frequent museum and university lecturer. Hardy mentors younger tattoo artists, though he is reputed to have now turned his focus to printmaking, drawing and painting. So you probably couldn’t get a real Hardy tattoo even if you wanted one. Still, he created real art.

Enter fashion. The flamboyantly French and ardently litigious fashion designer Christian Audigier acquired the rights to commercialize Hardy’s art by plastering it on everything from hoodies to ball caps to leather jackets, and the bottom of the official Web shop of Audigier’s Hardy-exploitation wear has a list of registered trademarks as long as your arm. You can’t get a Hardy tattoo, but you can buy the T-shirt. More axiomatic still are the perfumes. Oh, but you saw that coming a mile away. Audigier has creative-directed two pairs (a feminine and a masculine each) and one wonders if Hardy smelled them before they left the factory. I realize these things are critic-proof (Macy’s can’t keep them on the shelves), but here we go.

Take Audigier’s most recent launches, in December of 2008: Love & Luck for Women and Love & Luck for Men. For the feminine, Adriana Medina has created a very nice copy of Olivier Cresp’s Light Blue (the feminine) for Dolce & Gabbana, simply lowering the volume almost to zero on the green apple (which is what makes Light Blue so good) and substituting a very light, rather diaphanous spice. It’s a nice scent, not a full-fledged perfume as much as a well-executed initial sketch, but this works perfectly for Hardy’s demographic: mass-market teenagers. It precisely gives the perception of wearing scent without actually wearing much. It’s also the best of the four. (It has decent persistence on skin; on the other hand, it diffuses like lead.)

Love & Luck for Men, by Olivier Gillotin, is equally perfect: the masculine cliché of deodorant soap, aluminum and synthetic spice. Mennen Speed Stick on 17-year-old. Commercially savvy and of no interest at all. Good persistence, sadly.

Ed Hardy for Men, the original masculine that debuted 11 months prior, is Gillotin doing another version of the masculine cliché: subtract some of the aluminum et voila. That leaves its mate, the original Ed Hardy for Women .

Which is fake strawberry. Like, the stuff used in Jolly Ranchers. This isn’t even a realist school of perfumery because it’s not perfumery at all. Perfumers and flavorists share many raw materials (a lot of the things in your Diors and Laurens are food grade), and what Audigier has bottled, you can find in the cake mix aisle at D’Agostino. I say Audigier advisedly. Technically, this sugary elixir is attributed to a perfumer, Caroline Sabas. To say that her prodigious talents are wasted here is to misunderstand entirely the marketing premise. Obviously Audigier wanted fake strawberry, and that’s what Sabas gave him. (It’s nice as far as fake strawberry goes, incidentally and probably Sabas’ contribution.) And if you’re wearing your awesome Ed Hardy T-shirt, size small, you’ll probably buy a bottle because the packaging design matches. But it’s not good. Not strangely beautiful. And not substantive.

I Am King by Sean John

2009-09-15T22:17:08-07:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

I Am King , which was creative-directed in an intensely hands-on manner by the artist formerly known as every hip-hop moniker under the sun, is a bit of a revelation.

Unforgivable, a decent 2006 scent made with good materials (not to mention one of the greatest financial successes in perfume’s history) is admired by certain perfumers. (One of the most expert technical scent industry experts told me he considers it “among the great reinventions of the masculine chypre.”) It is looked down upon by others as another traditionalist masculine. I happen to fall into the latter camp.

Unforgivable is a twist on a Creed masculine that the egomaniacal, crassly materialistic Sean John wore and liked; it has, thus, been done before, and to me it smells like it. Its perfumers: Aurelien Guichard, Caroline Sabas, David Apel and Pierre Negrin, building the thing by committee like a roomful of writers pumping out an episode of “CSI: Miami”— filled it with Ambroxan, a modernist-style synthetic that gives a clean smell that is ubiquitous in the men’s aisles; citrus (lots of bergamot, Puff Daddy loves citrus); and damascones, molecules that give a plum-fruit-in-outer-space quality. What comes through, however, is a noirish, Raymond Chandler-meets-Russell Simmons masculine, dark-spicy-clean, asphalt and Pirelli tire on a black Lamborghini. Sensual street. Its strategy was sheer force, like slamming you with the velvet rope guarding a hot nightclub.

In 2007, the same team of perfumers produced Unforgivable Multi Platinum, a rather beautiful scent. Sadly no longer available, Platinum morphed the original into a smoother, more entrancing machine that seduced rather than attacked.

Two months ago, I Am King (a nearly complete reinvention of Unforgivable) arrived, viewable on the roof of every other taxi in New York City. And it is a shock. This is another committee product: Laurent LeGuernec playing forward with Carlos Benaem, Jean-Marc Chaillan and Loc Dong in midfield. Sean Combs (with Estée Lauder’s Karyn Khoury and Trudi Loren lending a guiding hand) issued one central edict: “When I wear this perfume, I want to be lickable.”

The scent departed from there, P. Diddy pushing, smelling and repeatedly rejecting the mods presented to him. “My signature is clean,” Combs told his team. “When you buy a Mercedes, you see immediately it’s a Mercedes, and when you buy Sean John you have to know it’s Sean John. And Sean John is clean.” But is Puffy lickable? It turns out that yes, when Sean John comes out of this bottle he is imminently, marvelously, excitingly lickable, a citrus/lush fruit gourmand where you least expect it blasting from the pump and catching you off guard.

Initially it was the perfumers who were caught off guard. All the scent makers (IFF, Givaudan, Firmenich) were unnerved by Mr. Combs’s idea: How did you mix a hardcore masculine with fruit? The IFF team, which won the brief, wound up pouring in a new hydrofluorocarbon gas extraction of blackcurrant from the natural raw materials company LMR (which IFF owns) that gives a blackcurrant without the cat-pee animalic that sometimes plagues the material, leaving instead a dark, fruity, superclean berry. They also put in a key lime pie accord, a fructose tangerine tart accord and a tingling “candied ozone” effect (trioxygen, O3). Loc Dong spent a month working with IFF’s flavorists. King’s blueprint included an IFF lip-balm scent that, Le Guernec says, “made you want to lick the lips of the person who wore it.” The thing flies; it laughs. Le Guernec told me, “It’s the first fruity/juicy/citrus for men,” and it well may be. In the end, the team lowered the volume on the fruit note a bit (it fatigued the nose), but calibrated it high enough to create a marvelous bracing effect. Sensual clean.

Perhaps the best Fresh Neon masculine since Mugler Cologne, I Am King has the perfectly calibrated accessibility of Light Blue for Women and deserves to be a massive hit. No detergent, no tin can, no cliché, King is as irresistible as a great pop hook. Marketing people often use the obnoxious word “addictive.” This is, finally, that.

The bit of bad news is the drydown, what the scent settles into after an hour or so on the skin. IAK’s drydown is the less innovative Unforgivable trope showing through, as humorless as the tiresome, clichéd press-kit photos of Sean John emerging from a helicopter. These images are as unimpressive visually as the drydown is olfactorily. Some standard woods, boosted slightly with Veramoss (a synthetic oak moss that reads “traditional male”), Suederal, a captive synthetic leather exclusive to IFF, and a trace of LMR labdanum giving the dark chypre effect. The materials are solid, and it’s fine as far as it goes, but it’s all been done.

The solution is simple: Reapply I Am King. The fresh-fruit lusciousness floods the senses, floats on the skin. Audacious. Inventive. And olfactorily impressive.

M by Mariah Carey

2009-09-18T10:25:27-07:00

★ Do Not Inhale

Mariah Carey’s life reads like a deconstructed fairy tale. Columbia Records’ Tommy Mottola discovered Carey in 1988, and her debut album generated five back-to-back No. 1 singles. Then there was her reportedly suffocating marriage to Mottola, which ended in divorce and her departure from Columbia in 2001. Carey was dropped by her next label, struggled through unsuccessful financial deals and suffered a physical and emotional breakdown. Her film project bombed. Then, in 2005, she released “Emancipation,” and was back on top.

Vocally, Carey is extraordinary— her problem has never been talent but rather taste and substance. She has used a sonic register that critics termed “helium pop,” which only dogs and teenagers seem equipped to tolerate. Time magazine described her songs as “often sugary and artificial; NutraSweet soul.” The U.K. magazine New Musical Express called Carey “a purveyor of saccharine bilge.”

When Elizabeth Arden bought Carey’s perfume license, it seemed certain, therefore, that her perfume would arrive as an ultra-sweet neon gourmand. The category is entirely legitimate; the question, as with Carey’s music, was one of taste and substance. We are fortunate that Arden selected the competent perfumers Carlos Benaem and Loc Dong to create M by Mariah Carey , a near-paradigmatic ultra-sweet.

Under the creative direction of Ron Rolleston and Noreen Dodge, Benaem and Dong transposed the helium soprano and immortal lyrics (“It’s just a sweet, sweet fantasy, baby”) into olfactory form with ethyl maltol, the molecule that you taste and smell in cotton candy, and one that I happen to love. When they were done, the perfumers handed Arden a bottled weapon aimed with deadly commercial accuracy at the heart of the Mariah Carey connoisseur. On smelling it one is aware, if not actively afraid, of the possibility of diabetic shock. Its scent is reminiscent of a teenage girl in a summer halter top strolling on a Jersey Shore boardwalk that bathes her in its smells: hot cotton candy, sticky saltwater taffy and a whiff of Mega Hold hair gel heating in the sun.

M is not as good as Caroline Sabas’s Midnight Fantasy for Britney Spears (Spears also works with Elizabeth Arden) but it is recognizably Mariah Carey, and the fact that Carey has sold 200 million albums suggests that bottling Mariah Carey-ness is more important than making a better perfume. Stephen Holden, in The New York Times, once wrote that Carey’s best songs “bring pop candymaking to a new peak of textural refinement.” If Carey is not your thing, you will simply never pick up the bottle; if she is, this scent will indeed be a sweet, sweet fantasy, baby.

Sheer Stella by Stella McCartney (2009 Edition)

2009-09-18T10:28:00-07:00

★ Do Not Inhale

In 2003, the fashion designer Stella McCartney launched her first, eponymous perfume. Creative directors Stella McCartney and Chantal Roos, the legendary perfume executive, worked with the perfumer Jacques Cavallier to produce Stella. It was a pale, dark beauty, a peony and rose that seemed in its initial moments a Romantic Keatsian figurine, a willowy girl smelling of dark flowers with the lovely tinge of blossoms just beginning to wilt, plus the scent of the face powder of a 1930s Hollywood star; as they start to decay, roses give off a wonderful death-rattle pungency. The edge of antique face powder framed it beautifully. The perfume seemed fleeting at first (which is why I initially misunderstood it) and almost untouchable, the fragrance of a nymph on a Grecian urn. But, in fact, Stella had surprising staying power on skin. I remember twice approaching women with the frown I wear when I locate a scent I find mesmerizing and, irritatingly, cannot place, and both times the women replied to my query: “Stella.”

What would possess a brand to destroy its own marvelous creation, to ask its perfumer to take a hatchet and hack out a flanker like Sheer Stella 2009 ? 2009 is the latest in a series. YSL Beauty, McCartney’s licensee, has launched a limited-edition iteration of Stella each year since 2004. Metaphorically this resembles taking an authentic silver chloride Ansel Adams, making 10 successively deteriorating photocopies, then offering the final, vastly inferior version to collectors. Why?

The answer is, of course, money. You put cheaper raw materials in the limited editions than in the original, which lowers your costs and gives you a quick profit bump, and you sell that cheaper product on the back of your quality brand. Each flanker is meant to generate renewed excitement, the disappointment of 2005 washed away by the launch of 2006, which is obscured by the excitement of 2007 and so on. But money is not a good answer. The consumer eventually learns her lesson, and all your profits are offset by the damage to your brand. It is astonishing that Roos and McCartney would ask for this to happen.

I had never smelled any of these editions till I opened this one at my desk. Sheer Stella 2009 has a top that is totally unoriginal and absolutely lovely, one of the most commercial curtain-raisers to come along in a while. And that’s “commercial” in the best sense, a shimmering, juicy, grapefruit peony-rose.

And then, in four minutes, it crashes. Badly. You can actually feel the plunge into a chemical rose, a chemical grapefruit, a wincingly harsh chemical peony. My dumbfounded assistant said, (It’s as if no one tested this on skin.) Is 90 percent of this formula just a particularly cheap grade of synthetic linalool? Can it be possible that Firmenich, Cavallier’s employer and a company that produces exquisite materials, even makes stuff like this? Can this be the most cynical perfume ever produced, a deceitful top note that winks at you exactly long enough to get you past the credit card swipe, then implodes on your wrist? Sheer 2009 is a fragrance that wouldn’t be put in a drugstore shampoo. Enough of these cheap creations, and the original Stella itself will give off a pungent death rattle, decay, and vanish. But the industry has gone from 50 launches a year to over 1,000 today, an unsustainable, unregulated flood of novelties, the whole driven not by serious long-term investments in quality perfumes but rather by marketing and pure, desperate momentum.

Shorting a beauty on the volatile $30-billion perfume market for a quick profit hit is the industry at its most self-deceptive and dishonest. Each iteration is built atop the fake below it, giving the appearance of growth even as the structure hollows out from below. It is, in short, an olfactory Ponzi scheme. And Sheer Stella 2009 is the Bernie Madoff of perfumes.

Black by Kenneth Cole for Men

2009-09-18T10:30:47-07:00

★ Do Not Inhale

Coty, like all companies that license perfume brands (Lauder, LVMH, Clarins, BPI, Arden), thinks extremely hard about the style of its brands’ scents. And Coty owns a lot of scent brands: Davidoff, Calvin Klein, Vera Wang, Marc Jacobs and Kenneth Cole among others. Each brand’s aesthetic course is charted via the influence of a million marketing and corporate factors, but most sail in a generally consistent direction. This is how Coty guides Kenneth Cole. The Kenneth Cole brand occupies an interesting place in the fashion world. It is known for its men’s shoes, followed by its men’s shirts, slacks and accessories (it is almost a shock to discover that Cole makes things for women), in a style cool enough to be cool in Denver and Chicago but not fashion enough to be “fashion.”

The course Coty has set for Cole’s scent collection (I have never gotten the slightest hint that Cole himself is creatively involved in the fragrances) is aimed like one of Tony Stark’s high-tech missiles at the wallets of middle-class American men who buy their scent based on two factors: marketing, and the smell of their laundry detergent, deodorant or the soap in the showers at their gym. Cole’s scents sell extremely well and, because they use what must certainly be the least expensive raw materials available, undoubtedly provide a high profit margin. Coty builds and manages the collection expertly, it is commercially successful and, by any aesthetic measure, it is one of the worst collections of scent on the market.

The core Kenneth Cole aesthetic is (this is semi-metaphorical) aerosol deodorant just sprayed from the aluminum can. This includes both the synthetic “oceanic”-scented molecules like Calone and (the metaphorical part) the smell of the aerosol’s fluorocarbons. Take Reaction, for example. This is the smell of aerosol deodorant freshly sprayed from the can. Shall we delve into this? We shall not. Let’s move on to Black .

This slightly more nuanced scent, created by perfumers Harry Frémont and Sabine de Tscharner, is the smell of deodorant with a synthetic spice angle. And there we have it. It is the scent favored by the former frat-boy/college-football-player/mid-level manager in a tie, intently following the PowerPoint presentation by the regional sales guys at the Tuesday 9 a.m. meeting. He is wearing Kenneth Cole shoes and a Kenneth Cole shirt, he looks like he drinks vodka martinis and, if you’re sitting next to him, he smells like he arrived at the meeting freshly showered from his workout at the gym. Sexy, if that’s your thing. And for millions of men and the women who like them, it is. Coty knows what it’s doing.

Notorious by Ralph Lauren

2009-09-18T10:39:29-07:00

★ ★ Nice Effort

L’Oréal, which licenses Ralph Lauren’s perfume brand, has generally done a very good job for the designer. Among the masculines: the massive, multi-billion-dollar Polo franchise, created in 1978 by the perfumer Carlos Benaum. (Full disclosure: This is the first scent I purchased with my own money, age 17 and feeling very proud.) Among the feminines: The still-gorgeous Lauren, an olfactory mink stole, created the same year by Bernard Chant.

In the popular consciousness, Lauren’s masculine fragrances somewhat supersede the brand’s feminines, rather like the scents L’Oréal creates for another of its licensors, Giorgio Armani. Armani’s people are all but desperate for a major feminine hit (Aqua di Gio for women does well, but nowhere near as well as its masculine counterpart), and L’Oréal’s creative team in charge of the Lauren brand is also eager for a bona-fide feminine blockbuster. It struck out with Glamorous, which is now discontinued and deserved better— an excellent, mass luxury American perfume by Harry Frémont.

The team’s latest attempt is Notorious . The creative director Jennifer Mullarkey, working with the perfumer Olivier Gillotin, has made a strange miscalculation in an otherwise meticulously planned production line of mass luxury scents. Lauren (the perfume) is opulent elegance. Romance is Hamptons evening elegance. Mullarkey is expertly managing a diversification targeted at bringing in teenagers: L’Oréal has been putting out what in the automobile industry are referred to as entry-level models: hot, neon, fruity olfactory candy like Ralph, Ralph Wild and Ralph Rocks. These smell like berries and cupcakes on steroids with Coppertone and a dash of convertible Mustang, and they’re lots of fun.

Notorious? For a start, it smells pale. You’re uncertain that the spray has hit your skin. Lean in close. Yes, something’s there, but it’s detectable in the way that A.M. radio picks up ghostlike murmurings. The technical specs on this machine are subpar. Aesthetically, Notorious breaks as much new ground as next year’s polo shirt. It’s so bland that it’s actually difficult to describe. The perfume is not floral, it’s not fruit, it’s not spice, and it’s not bad exactly, but I’ll be darned if I can say what it is.Though the scent may at first smell sophisticated, you can never really make out what it’s saying. It may appear pretty, but there’s so much Vaseline on the lens that Mickey Rourke could pass for Gisèle Bundchen. Also, it’s as shocking as a poodle. It may be the subtlest of perfumes, or it may be an opulent bouquet of flowers that, to one’s surprise, turns out to have almost no fragrance at all. And, for such profound ambiguity, this perfume may in fact become notorious.

Rose d'Homme by Parfums de Rosine

2009-09-18T10:40:04-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ Excellent

Paul Poiret was the Yves Saint Laurent of his day. In the early 1900s, he threw extravagant parties and became so famous that he was invited to show his collection at the British Prime Minister’s residence. His clothes: innovative, elaborate pieces of draped and billowing fabric— sold for vast sums. In 1911, Poiret launched his perfume collection, named for his oldest daughter, Rosine. The Chanel people chafe when it’s mentioned, but I believe Poiret indeed preceded Coco Chanel by a decade as the first fashion designer to launch a fragrance.

When Poiret hung up his uniform after World War I, he found the house (then in competition with the clean-lined, sporty new designers like Chanel) almost bankrupt. He was in debt, his business partners abandoned him. The house closed in 1929. Poiret died in poverty.

In the late 20th century, a woman named Marie-Helène Rogeon became interested in reviving Poiret’s scents. Rogeon’s grandparents and great-grandparents had been fillers for Poiret, mixing his formulae in alcohol and packaging the perfumes, of which Poiret had created 50. None of the formulae had survived, nor the names of the perfumers, but Rogeon found a text that described the scent of La Rose de Rosine. Rogeon went to the perfumer Francois Robert, son of the great perfumer Guy Robert and a professor at ISIPCA, the Cambridge of perfume schools. Together they reconstructed La Rose de Rosine. It is a beautiful, spherical, perfectly proportioned garden rose with a dry, powdery surface, an effect done with lightly woody natural iris root. In its core is a natural green violet leaf. In 1991, Rogeon relaunched Parfums de Rosine.

Rogeon has since created 21 perfumes, all sold in her store in the Palais Royale (she was there before Serge Lutens). In the U.S., seven are available at Barneys and Aedes de Venustas. The names of Poiret’s perfumes had been trademarked by l’Oreal and other companies, but it turned out not to matter. Rogeon took Poiret’s logo, a modernist-looking rose designed by Paul Iribes, who also did the iconic Lanvin logo of Jeanne leaning down to embrace her daughter, and decided that she would dedicate the entire collection to rose. If rose is your thing (and let me admit that it is mine, hugely so) you have found a garden of delights.

Roseberry, the only perfume not created by Robert (perfumer Pierre Bourdon did the honors here, in 1997), is a rose with a lovely synthetic raspberry-fruit accord and a natural raspberry-leaf absolute whose green freshness contrasts perfectly with rosy floralcy. Compared to the Model T-era rose perfumes, this thing is a 2012 Aston Martin, rose as a sheet of glass, as if Richard Meier designed perfumes.

Rose d’Eté (1998) is l’Eau d’Issey built around a peony-rose core. The name means Rose of Summer, but this is summer experienced as coming from the heat into the air conditioning of a large, clean, white store. Strange and intriguing.

A disappointment is arguably Une Folie de Rose (2004), a rose chypre that’s not quite dirty enough. Conversely, Zest de Rose (2002) is a rose of shadowed lemony citrus framing a strong lapsang souchong tea. If the exquisite Teabox restaurant in Takashimaya on Fifth Avenue had a scent, this would be it.

Perhaps the most ingenious is Rose d’Homme . A rose for men? The idea is terrific; so is the execution. Rogeon and Robert have created a masculine rose, not flowery but floral, masculine with beauty. Think YSL’s Rive Gauche for Men’s great spice deuterated with crushed scarlet petals. A bit lacking in persistence, but let’s call that subtlety. Men will love this and transition, with pleasure, from cynical fragrance clichés like Hypnose Homme. This is a scent like a labyrinth at dusk, a scent to get lost in.

Aromatics Elixir by Clinique

2009-09-18T10:43:08-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Transcendent

The single most persistent and complex problem with criticism of art, in any medium, is arguably the problem of historical context. In what era and under what aesthetic was the object created? And how, then, can we critique it, given that it was conceived for people whose sensibilities differed from ours? Is it successful because it speaks to us now or because it spoke to them then?

Any number of classic perfumes pose this problem. Exhibit A: the prewar Guerlains. If the classics are, to use the industry term, “re-orchestrated” (updated to fit contemporary olfactory style in order to sell better in 2009), then all bets are off. These scents are the equivalent of Beethoven sonatas done as a Jay-Z-produced mash-up. Which is fine (they appeal to the kids and move product) but they’re no longer Beethoven.

On the other hand, to the degree to which these works of scent art are still faithful to their 19th- or 20th-century originals, the historical context problem surfaces. Let’s say we take them on their own terms today, and let’s use Clinique’s Aromatics Elixir as a case in point.

Lauder, which created and owns the Clinique brand (Evelyn Lauder once told me she and Leonard were driving through a small town in France when she saw a sign on a pharmacy: “Clinique” and the brand’s focus and form came to her in an instant), launched Aromatics Elixir in 1971. (Diorella, to give context, was 1972, Opium 1977, and Beautiful 1985.) It was creative directed by the Clinique cofounder Carol Phillips and built by the legendary perfumer Bernard Chant of IFF.

I never liked it. It comes out of the bottle speaking French, loudly, and with a grave formality. They were still using overt animalics in those days (the smell of beaver armpit) which were considered feminine; see Miss Dior of 1947, which has not, in theory, been re-orchestrated and is in my view now unwearable. Spray on Aromatics Elixir , and its floralcy is not what we would recognize today as such, the jasmine hugely indolic (body odor) and the rose drowning in thick sage and oakmoss. The freshness of the vetiver and verbena has unconditionally surrendered to the dark mix. Put it on and return to your grandmother’s era.

But wait, and something happens. Last summer I was in Isham Park, above 207th Street, and smelled a phenomenally seductive scent. It was exquisite. It completely refused the current ultra-neon, sweet pop-music tropes currently in vogue, as well as any trace of freshness or citrus or the anorexic oceanics of the 1990s. It was, rather, a rose-jasminic floral with a touch of aged wood of wonderful heft and substance: completely coherent, with shadows, lights and darks. I followed it about 40 feet and finally stopped before a woman, 50-something. When I asked her what she was wearing, she regarded me skeptically. “Aromatics Elixir.” “When did you put it on?” “A bit over an hour ago.”

It was perfect. Deeper and more thoughtful than 90 percent of the launches in the 21st century, as well as expertly constructed. Judge it by the first hour, and I’d give it, in today’s context, two stars. Judge it after it has unfolded, breathed, burned off the shadows and begun its work, and it has to be five.

CH by Carolina Herrera

2009-09-18T10:43:44-07:00

★ Do Not Inhale

CH , the new Carolina Herrera scent currently in limited distribution at Nordstrom, poses a question: What is Puig, the Spanish perfume licensee that makes Herrera’s scents, doing? And why? Because Puig’s management of the Carolina Herrera feminine perfume collection is a case study in strange, indeed inexplicable, evolution. Or rather devolution.

Puig generally does a very good job with its licensors. It seems unable to get the Nina Ricci brand working again; this house with a single great in its past, the utterly lovely 1948 l’Air du Temps, is so far un-rebootable. But it has gunned Paco Rabanne: One Million is a competent designer masculine and a commercial hit. And it is doing truly spectacular work with Comme des Garcons and Prada, both remarkable, distinct scent collections that expertly reflect their respective brands: Comme’s weird, wonderful, out-of-its-mind beauty and Prada’s slightly strange, remote, Kevlar-coated hauteur.

For Carolina Herrera’s collection, Puig started strong. In 1988 it launched the collection’s first scent, Carolina Herrera. Crafted by Carlos Benaim, Max Gavarry and Rosendo Mateu, Carolina Herrera is gorgeous, a pitch-perfect, post-French luxury feminine, the rich floral-plus-expensive-cosmetics scent done with a certain American sportiness that removes the French pomposity and gives you something marvelously wearable. In 2003, almost the same trio (Gavarry’s son, Clément, stepped in for his father) built Carolina, an excellent follow-up that toned down its predecessor’s richness, bumped up its fresh floralcy and lowered its age by two decades, targeting the taste-conscious daughters of the taste-conscious mothers who wear Carolina Herrera. I believe I have never suggested either fragrance to anyone at a perfume counter without their buying at least one bottle.

And in 2002, under Ann Gottlieb’s creative direction, Puig had Alberto Morillas and Jacques Cavallier build Chic, one of the more underrated commercial avant-gardes. It smells like the light from a prism: glassy, abstract, modernist tints of scent. It was a very good diversification of the portfolio.

But there were stumbles. 1997 brought 212 (the feminine), a pretty little machine, the standard 1990s chassis of l’Eau d’Issey and cK One (oceanic/clean water, with the metal and detergent mercifully removed) onto which a pleasant mild floral has been firmly attached. It’s seamless, even if the floral aspect smells like a hologram of a flower. It fades after about two hours to a pleasant version of itself, then flickers out like a candle. Fine.

Now comes CH. Carolina Herrera’s daughter (also named Carolina Herrera) was the creative director this time, and I’m sorry to say that she (or Puig, or both) is slipping. The thing opens with a chemical-esque fruit-sugar top, Splenda spooned onto cantaloupe and deli plums in Saran Wrap. In about a minute it turns into a less pleasant fruit variation of M by Mariah Carey. Every time I say a perfume is cheap, the perfumers (in this case Olivier Cresp and Rosendo Mateu) protest that the materials are, in fact, expensive. O.K. This smells incredibly cheap. It is not a true neon like Midnight Fantasy nor a fun amusement-park bauble like the vastly superior Kylie Minogue Darling, which is prettier, fresh-grass greener and more natural-smelling. It has no beauty, no elegance and no originality.

So why take a collection from such a height and crash it into the side of a mountain? It’s as though Puig has made both Carolina and Chic disappear. If they weren’t commercial successes, that’s unfortunate, and I do pity the licensee whose client is, it seems, asking for scents that damage the brand, but the licensee needs to manage that. That’s part of the job description. If it puts out another Herrera perfume like CH, Puig may find Nina Ricci a walk in the park by comparison.

Oceans by Nautica

2009-09-18T10:45:07-07:00

★ ★ Nice Effort

Coty, which owns Nautica’s perfume license, presents the brand’s recently launched masculine scent Oceans as a major environmental revolution. As with all public relations, the press release offers the usual gnomic pronouncements: something about “celebrating man’s unity with the water.” (Whatever.) It’s easy to imagine 20 people at the brand’s P.R. agency producing copy, apparently straight-faced, like “The launch of Nautica Oceans marks a true wave of change” and “[it] raises the tide for fragrance.” They then attribute this “quote” to poor Bernd Beetz, Coty’s German C.E.O., who was doubtless unaware of the state of his English. Even the cardboard packaging sports the message “Carton made with wind power in a carbon neutral facility.”

In part, it is authentic. Nautica Oceans is a truly interesting advance toward environmentally friendly fragrance. Virtually all 20th-century perfumes are dissolved in alcohol. (In earlier centuries, vinegar was used.) Making alcohol costs the earth more in materials and energy. Around three years ago, the scent-making company Mane brought Dr. Leslie Smith, who heads Coty’s fragrance technology R&D, a patented technology for dissolving scent in water. It claimed the technology was eco-friendly. Smith was fascinated by the ecological aspect. But he wanted to prove it was the real deal.

So the Mane perfumers Karine Dubreuil and Bertrand Dor, under the creative direction of Coty’s Steve Mormoris and Ruth Sutcliffe, created the perfume formula (its mix of raw materials) and dissolved it in water, and then Smith went at it. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development uses a standard biodegradability measurement, and Smith sent Oceans to an independent lab to have the test applied. Biodegradability is defined quite simply: the amount of your “organic material” (i.e., your rose absolute, synthetic coumarin and so on) that converts to carbon dioxide when exposed to air, water and common bacteria. The O.E.C.D., to define a product as “readily biodegradable,” demands an 80 percent conversion. Nautica Oceans got 100 percent.

In an industry in which certain scent raw materials have been found to remain in the ecosystem, this is welcome news. The technology also turns out to be quite stable. The formula was subjected to “torture testing” to assess stability; Oceans was frozen and thawed five times, and it recovered perfectly. Remarkably, it lasted as long as alcohol-based fragrances. And Oceans moisturized the skin rather than drying it, as alcohol does. Spraying it on is slightly surprising; it comes out less atomized. Otherwise the application is identical.

And then there’s how it smells (oh, yes). Nautica Oceans is a dizygotic twin of every masculine fragrance you smelled in the 1990s: “fresh,” “clean,” “sea breeze” and the rest of that decade’s marketing adjectives. Only it’s a bit better. It offers a quite pleasant version of l’Eau d’Issey, with a nice citrus top that is sort of sweet/tart, and far less detergent-y. (According to the press release, Oceans is supposed to smell like “an actual piece of a sail from the world’s No. 1 racing yacht.” I’m not sure what saltwater-soaked nylon smells like, but see comments on P.R. above.) It’s nice, utterly commercial in the best sense, and it will make any woman who picks it up smile.

The sole problem is a technical one. Oceans lasts very well on skin and coheres structurally throughout— there is no dry-down; it’s exactly the same start to finish, but either these materials cling desperately to skin or Mane has quite a bit of work to do on the diffusion of water-based perfumes. This citrus summer ocean is only perceptible from about two inches away. Presumably men will rarely come into that proximity to most women they encounter. On the other hand, perhaps Oceans really only needs to make one woman smile.

Lucienne by Lucienne von Doz

2009-09-18T10:49:09-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ Excellent

There is rich; and then there is simply elegant, sublime, classic luxury.

The details of the story of this ultraniche perfume read like a Lorenzo da Ponte libretto. Lucienne von Doz (ex-wife of a count, serious opera patron) was going through an old trunk when she came upon a bottle that held a few drops of perfume. It had been made for her mother, a chic, independent New Yorker. Countess von Doz began searching for a perfumer to recreate the scent. She was introduced to Laurent Bruyère (by, naturally, the great nephew of the last Empress of China).

Typical of perfumers, Bruyère has created or co-created within a broad aesthetic range: big feminine commercial (Mugler’s Alien), big masculine commercial (Lauren’s Polo Blue), celebrity perfumes (Jennifer Lopez, Christina Aguilera) and, with Dominique Ropion, the very nice little gourmand Amor Amor for Cacharel. It is safe to say (Bruyère himself says it) that he had never had a patron nor a creative opportunity like von Doz.

What she wanted was an olfactory evocation of her memories of her mother and the glamour of the 1930s. The problem she and Bruyère faced was that while the original scent, which Bruyère dutifully reconstituted, did just that, this literalist approach was both as evocative and as unwearable as a cloche hat. The trick, it turned out, was setting the reincarnated juice in a modern style and structure that conveyed prewar elegance— that and pouring in a phenomenal amount of money. This von Doz readily agreed to.

The result is Lucienne , a floral-fruit structure that is a virtual art history lesson in masterpieces of the classic floral school. Imagine Joy or Chanel No. 5 or l’Air du Temps designed today by Paul Andreu, the architect of Beijing’s brilliant National Centre for the Performing Arts; here is a floating dome of titanium and glass holding productions of Rossini and Verdi.

On the level of its construction, Lucienne is loaded with classic elements: Bulgarian rose absolute, Turkish rose essence and Indian jasmine. In Bruyère’s view, the most important flower is actually a synthetic lily of the valley accord. “Olfactorily speaking, lily of the valley equals rose plus jasmine,” he says. But he also used the latest raw materials: a carbon dioxide extraction of a very peppery, slightly incense-like red berry called schinus molle, synthetic muscone and “most important,” he said, a Firmenich synthetic called Iralia, aka methyl ionone, which Bruyère calls the perfume’s spinal column. He says the resulting juice is one of the most expensive on the market, “identical to a Chanel No. 5.” The structure, at 64 materials, is complex.

In its effect, however, the art director and perfumer have played it straight. There is zero camp value in this fragrance, no irony whatsoever. Its beauty is not found in innovation or artistic daring. Thus it is a four-, not a five-star perfume. The beauty is found rather in the perfection of its execution of an idea most of us are in love with. That it succeeds says everything about von Doz and her brilliant amanuensis. Lucienne is utterly visible without speaking too loudly and subtle without falling into understatement. It has a distinct personality without, thank God, making an issue of it. Lucienne smells of something more important and fundamental than any single material: quality. While being unambiguously classic, it is just as easily unambiguously contemporary for the reason that it is unambiguously beautiful.

Mandorlo di Sicilia by Acqua di Parma

2009-09-30T16:58:09-07:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

There are perfumes built in the classic French fashion, with shiny exteriors of gold and titanium. Wearing them is like wearing a brilliant Cartier ring inlaid with diamonds. You wear these fragrances to show them off. (The French value: the brilliance and ego of the artist.) There are American perfumes that smell like a handsome, showered baseball player, sporty, young and relaxed, and you wear these to assume that identity, as you might wear a polo shirt with a country club logo. (The American genius: self-invention.) Then there are perfumes in the Italian style (often lemon/bergamot citrus scents) that serve as luxury ID badges, and one wears these as one would a beautifully-made Italian dress shirt, to say, “Admire my level of comfort and elegance.” (The Italian obsession: status and the identification of one’s social group.)

Aqua di Parma’s Mandorlo di Sicilia is a perfume after the Italian style in that it is a badge. It signals to people. This particular signal takes the form of a gourmand perfume: it is wonderfully, effortlessly edible. In fact it is positively chewy, a scent to sink your teeth into. But it takes the concept further, and in a slightly different direction. It very nicely escapes both the citrus cliché and being pigeonholed; the scent is as abstract as the concept of “chewiness” itself. It even escapes its name; in Italian, mandorlo is almond tree, but the scent makes only glancing, not literalist, references to this olfactory cue.

Don’t get me wrong. Literalist gourmands can be wonderful. Believe it or not, Britney Spears’ Fantasy, by the perfumer James Krivda, stands on a central scent accord that produces an astonishing olfactory hologram of the smell of a cupcake: the sugary icing, the vegetable oil, the flour. The scent image is as detailed as an HDTV visual image. Mandorlo is not HDTV. There is no vivid image of an almond. There is rather a soothing, reassuring scent that makes you think of warm marzipan.

If the perfume has a weakness it’s its evanescence; it disperses relatively quickly, and you’ll need to reapply to keep it at a decent volume. But as sins go, this is minor. The gentle subtlety more than makes up for its being somewhat fleeting. The sensation on application is of walking into a pastry shop the instant a baker in back has thrown open the doors of the oven: you’re instantly awash in a sweet nutty feast.

Paestum Rose by l'Eau d'Italie

2009-10-01T09:14:46-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Transcendent

One of the problems with classical beauty is, quite simply, that we know it too well. The eye can pass over a Caravaggio painting and not really see it, finding the image too familiar. It is much easier to attract with novelty and flash, but that burns off quickly and leaves a void. The real trick is to combine the two. If an artist can create new beauty with a classic form, he has done something marvelous because his creation is doubly fueled, by the exhilarating thrill of the new and by the visceral power of the old.

For classical beauty in perfume there is ultimately only one scent: rose. Yet the perfume industry (and its marketers) know that rose, like a slightly faded movie star, is a problematic sell to the public. We can smell rose yet, registering it as a known commodity, not really smell it.

The niche Italian house of Eau d’Italie has taken rose and made of it a revelation. Paestum Rose was creative directed by Marina Sersale and Sebastien Alvarez Murena, Eau d’Italie’s founders, and built by perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour. Duchaufour is an expert in shadows (see his Dzongka, done for l’Artisan Parfumeur). He paints olfactory charcoals and grays and deep purples with the smells of smoke and worn wood, a living Old Master of scent, and Paestum Rose is not just perfectly calibrated on a technical level. It is better than that. It is a work of art.

The perfume unfolds with a scented crepuscular darkness, a twilight that is an exact balance of disappearing sunlight and incipient evening. Its rose aspect is ancient, blended with the smell of old stone (Paestum was a classical Roman city known for its roses) yet it also somehow (here’s the trick) smells utterly contemporary. There is no “green stem scent” detail here for a facile thrill, no smell of fresh flower— Duchaufour eschews such easy clichés. Nor is this a “floral” perfume in any obvious way, though it smells, in a sense, like the flower. One October in her apartment in Rome, Sersale showed me a large photograph of a Caravaggio she particularly loves, and I understood. Paestum Rose is a perfume that’s rich and filled with meaning like the intimate opalescent blacks Caravaggio painted, instantly known and strangely unfamiliar. In this perfume we smell ancient beauty made thrillingly new.

Teint de Neige by Lorenzo Villoresi

2009-10-01T09:17:55-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Transcendent

In 1981, a Florentine doctoral student studying ancient philosophy took a trip to the Middle East and visited a local market. There he discovered highly-scented spices and perfume essences, which he brought home with him. He began mixing them to create fragrances. Then he began studying perfumery. In 1990, he began his namesake perfume house.

Lorenzo Villoresi operates out of his family"s 15th century palazzo at Via de Bardi, 14 in Florence. He launched his first perfume collection in 1993 with “Uomo” and “Donna” (Man and Woman), but Villoresi soon began something more interesting: the crafting of two contrasting groups of perfumes.

The first he called his “monothematics,” fragrances, which were interpretations of specific perfume raw materials, precise olfactory concepts. Sandalo, for example (“Sandalwood”), and Incensi (“Incense”), which smelled, as precisely as possible, of sandalwood and incense. The other collection he called “fantasy” perfumes, highly abstract works of olfactory art. Yerbamate, a raw green scent that is one in his fantasy collection, is marvelously strange and slightly alarming. It is as if Villoresi had taken aspects of two powerhouse perfumes (Chanel No. 19’s iris root woody strength and Fracas’ tuberose claws) and made a version out of ripped up green leaves and the shredded fresh green trunks of young trees. Whereas the monothematics were the olfactory equivalent of precise neoclassical paintings by Ingres or David, the fantasy perfumes were abstract Rothkos, those squares of indefinable colors floating in space. What Villoresi himself may be unaware of, however, is that one of his “fantasy” perfumes is actually, at the same time, the perfect “monothematic.”

The perfumer conceived of Teint de Neige, his best-selling perfume world-wide, as an abstract olfactory representation of the sophisticated beauty of the Belle Epoque. First, it is a well-built perfume; Teint de Neige lasts on skin, diffuses beautifully, and is distinct. As for the aesthetics of the thing, its name: “color of snow” (it is a shame that Italian perfumers apply French names to Italian creations, a perverse practice) is conceptual, poetic. And indeed, wear Teint de Neige, and you wear the beautiful abstracted smell of the classic perfumed talcum powders of a previous, vanished age, scented with gentle, sweet, soft-focus flowers exuding melancholy. It has the delicate rosy aroma of some sepia-tinted era in which rose was king and perfumes were of an elegance now antiquated by the brash, strong, movie-screen beauty of the Envys of the world. In this way, Teint de Neige truly is a fantasy. But in another way, it is Villoresi’s most precise olfactory concept, one of the most beautiful monothematics you could hope to smell. Why? Simple: This perfume smells, as precisely as possible, like a memory.

Angel Men Pure Coffee by Thierry Mugler

2009-10-01T09:19:40-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ Excellent

In the only conversation I’ve ever had with the movie critic David Denby, in a kitchen on New Year’s Day, I mentioned some terribly obvious movie that had done extremely well despite Denby’s (and everyone else’s) having ripped it apart. He shrugged. “It’s critic-proof,” he said, and made a round motion with his hands. No point of critical entry. I think the most interesting thing about Thierry Mugler’s Angel Men Pure Coffee, a limited edition scent landing this April and hanging around for a scant four months or so, is that it feels critic-proof as well. It is jarringly direct, like the person blithely unflustered by your eye contact. It is, in its friendly self-assurance, impossible to approach with any kind of critical knife; irritatingly disarming, it is as effortlessly pleasing as it is exasperatingly obvious. The one difference between Pure Coffee and the movie is that this scent is excellent.

Built under the creative direction of Thierry Mugler and Pierre Aulas by perfumers Christine Nagel and Jacques Huclier, what we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is: a cup of coffee. Une tasse de café. At first you frown, hesitate. Are you missing something? Is this a joke? You smell it and think reflexively about getting to work. It’s coffee. (Nagel and Huclier used, among other materials, a natural coffee absolute.) Give it a few seconds, and its ingeniousness starts unfolding from your skin; this tasse de café smells the way the hyper-real close-up photography of Robert Mapplethorpe looks: both absurdly, mockingly literal and overtly surreal in its hyper-literalness. It forces you to reconsider your routine 8:30am scent in a completely new light.

Pure Coffee starts with coffee and then grows. It’s slightly candied by moments, then slightly chocolate at others, which is a very different effect. It’s a distinct chocolate too, oscillating invisibly between semi-sweet, milk, and bitter/black— it brings to mind a pastry chef’s cool, dewy, sugared, cocoa-doped tablet lying freshly made on wax paper.

And the coffee is burnt. Brilliantly, lightly, perfectly burnt. Don’t worry, you’ll absolutely smell that perfume of carbonized char; it is borne elegantly off the skin on Nagel and Huclier’s technically perfect diffusion. It lasts for hours. It melds with other ingredients in their perfect structure. You can be irritated, or worried, or self-conscious at the transposition of the smell of coffee into art. You can mutter about Starbucks. Or you can wear, irony optional, a scent that really should unnerve and comfort you at the same time.

Ballade Verte by Manuel Canovas

2009-10-01T09:22:03-07:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

Manuel Canovas is a French textile house with a Spanish name that produces some of finest, shockingly expensive fabrics in the world. In 2007, the company introduced a collection of five fragrances.

All five were done by perfumers Viviane Romani and Patrick Bodifée under the creative direction of Byron Donics. Two (“l’Ile Bleu” and “Anse Turquoise”) smell cheap and are to be avoided, one (“Route Mandarine”) is a decent classic citrus, the fourth (“Pink Riviera”) is an excellent pink young thing in a shimmery summer dress, the perfume equivalent of laughing with a helium balloon at a party— it is delightfully kitsch. The last is deep and richly woven as a Canovas fabric: Ballade Verte.

Ballade Verte is a classic perfume of the early-20th century French school. It is not innovative (it is emphatically not meant to be) but rather a nice piece of retro work, the olfactory equivalent of vintage couture. “Verte” means green, and this piece is cut from a cloth of what smells to me like the authentic aromatic gum resin galbanum, an ancient raw material from modern-day Iran (if it is not that material, it is an accord that reproduces it). Galbanum, which plays a crucial role in the interesting neo-retro Pucci perfume “Vivara,” is listed as a sweet herb in chapter 30 of Exodus. (“And thou shalt make it a perfume,” God tells Moses, “a confection after the art of the apothecary, tempered together, pure and holy.”) It is, in fact, bitter to the taste, but the scent is like nothing else: deeply, darkly, earthily green, old and musty in the best way, a rich and almost rotting organic green like fresh branches mixed into soil. Dirtier than vetiver, richer than basil, greener than myrrh. Romani and Bodifée have domesticated it a bit here, and the result is a scent to wear on chilly nights at parties in marble halls (perhaps the foyer of the New York Public Library) where the candles burn, the men are wearing black tie, and the women wear long black gowns, pearls, and ancient green galbanum.

Cereus Pour Homme by Cereus

2009-10-01T09:22:39-07:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

The four (so-called) masculine perfumes from the relatively new men’s brand Cereus (launched in November 2007) vary in aesthetic usefulness. All are competent, three are of interest, and two are quite good, which in the scheme of things is a very decent batting average. The collection deserves a solid three stars.

William Rosenbaum and Tina Klem are the creative directors for Cereus who oversaw the work of the four perfumers, and one can sense them planning an intelligently variegated collection. The basic model, Cereus Pour Homme No. 7 created by perfumer Olivier Gillotin, is a standardized masculine, a well-done grandson of the deodorant metallic Cool Water that is perfectly competent, cannily commercial, blandly irrelevant. It is a high-end Davidoff, capturing those men who feel it necessary to recreate, for $125 per 75 ounces, a mass-market experience with better raw materials.

From there, the collection’s trajectory goes upwards. Cereus Pour Homme No. 4 is the handsome fraternal twin of Dolce & Gabbana’s excellent Light Blue. It was an interesting choice to have perfumer Jerome Epinette pay perfumer Olivier Cresp the compliment of reshooting Cresp’s citrus, green apple and cedar story virtually scene by scene. But No. 4 is almost as good as Light Blue, and if its staying power is slightly inferior, it echoes the original in a pleasing, slightly sweeter register.

Likewise with Cereus No. 5, Gabriela Chelariu has worked out a very nice cousin of the excellent Terre d’Hermès, a subtle, pleasing, marvelously modern scent of earth and wood and expertly-chosen spices. It’s a low-voiced scent of excellent chai (the black tea, the cardamom, a hint of the humidity in the South Asian air) without milk. Again, the original Hermès is slightly superior on the technical points, but this is a scent that deserves to be worn, and in its gentleness it may well win its own audience.

The best of the four, however, is the surprise. Cereus Pour Homme No. 11 is anise-like and your reaction to it as it starts to gain altitude, so to speak, will depend on your position on that very particular material. Licorice is determinedly opposed to sensuality. (Caron’s Eau de Réglisse is an example of a slavish fidelity to a central structural placement of anise, and it is highly problematic; the Caron is focused on the olfactory garment itself, rather than the body it clothes.) The Cereus, on the other hand, expertly crafted by perfumer Steven deMarcado, loses the anisic accord once the scent reaches level flight, about fifteen minutes in, and actually becomes a truly marvelous vetiver— what sets in is the scent of crushed astringent root, cool lumber yard and the cold air at 35,000 feet. Lovely.

Herrera by Carolina Herrera for Women

2009-09-15T22:03:38-07:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

I once exited a creative meeting in Paris with Hermès’ in-house perfumer, Jean-Claude Ellena, and heard him make a simple comment. Ellena had presented an iteration of the perfume he was working on to the creative team. The perfume was “not there yet,” but, they all agreed, “ca sent bon.” It smells good. In the hallway, Ellena repeated it with evident relief. As long as he could get them to “ca sent bon,” he said, he knew he was going in the right direction.

In 1988, Carolina Herrera’s fashion house issued her first eponymous perfume, constructed by Carlos Benaim with perfumers Max Gavarry and Rosendo Mateu supporting. Twenty years can prove a long run for a fragrance, allowing cracks to appear and once-fresh faces to fade. In the case of Carolina Herrera, neither has occurred.

I think I am speaking literally when I say that I have never once sprayed this perfume on a woman (or man, for that matter) without hearing, “That smells good.” Benaim has constructed a luxury floral that begins with tuberose, a very particular floral material. But his approach to this raw material is less literalist/realist than, say, Dominique Ropion’s use of tuberose in Carnal Flower (a name that perfectly conveys tuberose’s slightly pornographic edge) for Editions de Parfums. Ropion openly played on the raw, green, untamed aspects of tuberose, its petals hung heavily with thick perfume like pounds of pearl necklaces roping a neck, mixed with the violent, oozing, fresh green sap of tender stems scissored in two.

Benaim, by contrast, has taken tuberose, stripped away its weighty, narcotic aspects and, like an expert olfactory pastry chef, deftly folded it into a sunny, glamorous perfume that is as flawlessly powdered as the face of the movie star at the table next to you, lunching on the roof deck of the Beverly Hills Peninsula. This is what you smell in Carolina Herrera: the star’s tuberose perfume, her makeup, the jasmine on the vines artfully planted around you and the heat of Los Angeles coming off the Maseratis patrolling Wilshire Boulevard below.

Carolina Herrera is not for everyone. Some will prefer smelling the tuberose claws that Ropion shows. Some will find the luxury turned up a bit high. Certainly this is a perfume with a high-gloss polish. But it is a landmark. Chanel’s Allure (1996) and Jennifer Lopez’s Glow (2002), which both expertly use the olfactory theme of makeup, owe a debt to Carolina Herrera. Perhaps it is a perfume that fetishizes the perfect facade. But there is not a crack to be seen.

Midnight Fantasy by Britney Spears

2009-09-18T10:23:04-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ Excellent

Celebrity perfumes occupy a decidedly downmarket place in perfume. According to Karen Grant of the industry tracking company NPD, 46 percent of the premium perfumes (those over $75) sold in 2008 were designer brands. Celebrity perfumes were 1 percent. In other words, if you had money and, presumably, taste, you didn’t buy them. As art (creativity, quality, legitimacy) their reputations are abysmal.

Perhaps this is because Jennifer Lopez and Celine Dion have perfumes but Cate Blanchett and Helen Mirren do not. That reason may be that Lopez has a strongly self-associating demographic eager to monetize her celebrity, whereas Mirren focuses on acting. It may also be that much of celebrity perfumery is unadulterated garbage.

What is fascinating about Antonio Banderas Blue Seduction for Women, to take one example, is that it makes no difference if one is responsive to or conscious of sensory impressions: the thing doesn’t leave any. Or, rather, it gives 60 seconds of vaguely pleasant sugar water and then: signal lost. The perfumer Olivier Cresp built two of the greatest perfumes of the turn of the 21st century, Angel and Light Blue. I can’t begin to imagine what Cresp (to whom this thing is credited, along with, in good Hollywood create-by-committee style, Antonio Puig, Elisabeth Vidal and Rosendo Mateu) did on, to, with or for this project. The only scenario I can imagine is that the licensee gave such a miserably low cost per kilo for raw materials that they were obligated to throw in the cheapest materials around. This scent wouldn’t be used in a Walgreens generic body wash.

This is why the exceptions to the rule are so striking. Elizabeth Arden’s creative team hired the talented perfumer Caroline Sabas to do Midnight Fantasy for Britney Spears , gave her money for the juice and let her do some serious work. The result is both a perfect olfactory incarnation of Spears (on the screen, not behind the wheel of a car) and a chef d’oeuvre of the new neon sweets/ultra-gourmand category.

Sabas has taken ethyl maltol and mounted it like a jewel in an olfactory skein of sugary strawberry, raspberry and mango synthetics. It’s a dentist’s nightmare and a sensorial dream; the stuff explodes delightfully off the skin. If Chanel No. 5 were a Jolly Rancher flavor, this would be it. Moreover, it is excellent technical work. One must, obviously, accept the genre’s aesthetic premise. Here, Sabas has transcended that genre. Two observations: there is no law that celebrity perfumes need be less than designer perfumes; and done well, ultra-gourmands are a marvel. Midnight Fantasy expertly illustrates both.

Red Roses Cologne by Jo Malone

2009-10-01T09:24:02-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ Excellent

The personality of the man or woman whose name is on a perfume bottle is rarely captured in the personality of the liquid inside. Red Roses Cologne by Jo Malone is an exception. In person, Malone is a crisp, practical, straightforward, delightful Englishwoman, and when she was directing her perfumers in the creation of her scents (she left her eponymous house in 2006; Jo Malone Ltd. is now owned by the Estee Lauder Companies) she established an artistic olfactory style that was, at its best, equally direct and delightfully English (the latter a relative rarity quality in a business dominated by the French and the Americans).

One feature of Malone’s perfumes is that they are not perfumes but scents; Malone favored transparent, light-filled, linear works of olfactory minimalism and in urging her clients to “layer” her creations cheerfully contradicted the very French ego-based notion of “Big Creator as Artist with Deep Vision.” Malone’s style could be a liability, and some of her work (and Lauder’s work in her name) elides into aromatherapy. One sometimes has the sensation of smelling a nice olfactory sketch that its designer has neglected to complete. When the style works, as it does here, the result is a pure, contemporary accessibility and a refreshing lack of fussiness and overthinking, scents as plainly alluring as a summer dress.

Here is a 21st-century rose scent that breaks no new aesthetic ground, doesn’t try to, and doesn’t need to. Red Roses uses YSL’s Paris equation of rose + violet leaf, but the variables are a bit lighter here, the math less dense. The result is a straightforwardly lovely scent of garden roses, a peony or two, and the green leaves on the crisp stems.

Under Malone’s creative direction (Red Roses is a 1996 launch), the perfumers Lucien Piguet and Patricia Bilodeau built a work that is rock solid in its construction (this scent gave a performance on my skin quietly superior to virtually any perfume I’ve worn recently, still diffusing, just as lovely, after five hours) and, in its approach, pure prettiness. Summer roses in the afternoon sun. Delightful.

Privet Bloom by Hampton Sun

2009-10-01T09:24:56-07:00

★ ★ Nice Effort

There is a class of fragrance that lies somewhere between perfume and scent. On the one hand, there are classical perfumes: multifaceted works of olfactory art, based on ideas and built with complexes of raw materials, in styles as varied and intellectualized as pointillism and expressionism. On the other, aromatherapy: mono-themed smells, generally built in minimalist (if not inchoate) style and structure, meant simply to hypnotize like the single, pulsing tone of a Buddhist bowl, lulling into a state of non-thought. Where perfumes seek to convey ideas, aromas are designed to produce the opposite outcome, intentionally tamping down thought: the scent concept of being free of scent concepts.

The median approach, falling between these two, seeks to build fragrances that use an idea but are still built from strikingly simple accords, conveying a concept but doing it on an instinctive level. Privet Bloom, which was released in 2007, is a good example.

The first scent to come from Hampton Sun (the luxury products house whose idea is to erase the boundary between skincare and suncare) Privet Bloom as a concept is both elementary and visceral: the creative directors Salvatore Piazzolla and Grant Wilfley asked their perfumer, Stephanie Hakes, for the scent of the spring flowers blossoming on the Hamptons privet bush hedges between the houses. (If its semiotics are less innocent— privet hedges are the kind of genteel barrier that, in the Hamptons, demarcate the shocking incomes generated by a different hedge, the fund kind. The concept is unmistakable.)

As for the scent, Hakes has chosen the most literalist interpretation. It smells, strikingly, like a raw, stripped-down spring bush: the leaves crushed between your fingers, the moist cut stem, with a bit of flower but (and this is impossible, of course) as if you were smelling the scent of the flower as a bud rather than a blossom: this perfume is a green-floral that’s much more green than floral, and a schematic one at that. Hakes has done a sketch, not a painting. Privet Bloom has a rough loveliness and is made, I’m guessing, of the perfumer’s basic floral and green molecules: cis-3-hexenol, geraniol, citral, linalool. But it works. It operates between perfume and smell. There is an idea here. And there is a scent, one so immediate and clear it requires no thought.

David Yurman by David Yurman for Women

2009-10-01T09:27:35-07:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

The caste lines between perfumes: which are niche, which luxury and which mass passing as luxury (currently the industry’s greatest growth sector)— have become increasingly blurred, their defining cues both subtle and contradictory. The new David Yurman scent, which will be available at Yurman retail stores in late June followed by Neiman Marcus and Saks in July, provides an excellent example of how fuzzy it’s gotten. Perhaps this is because its perfumer, Harry Frémont, is one of the art form’s greatest masters at moving between styles and classes.

Perfumers by definition are both aesthetic and psychological chameleons, constantly creating scents for vastly different brands. And while it is possible to go straight from a niche Frederic Malle project to a Lacoste flanker designed for the Wal-Mart shopper, the vertiginous mental drop must be difficult to negotiate. For Frémont, it seems effortless. He is an author of both the androgynous, intentionally abstract modernism of 1994’s cK One and Aramis New West, a reactionary 1988 men’s scent that was crucial in elevating, for a period of time, adamantly mass-market synthetic marine/fake-sea breeze minimalism to the position of obligatory masculine uniform. Frémont can go from standard mass market (Black Kenneth Cole) to expertly faked luxury (the cheap-for-expensive Coach, the scent equivalent of the best Canal Street knock-off handbag) to commercial luxury (Vera Wang’s original, and best, feminine scent) to authentic luxury (the rich, delightfully odd amber Noir de Noir, from the non-gendered Tom Ford Private Blend collection).

Now the Yurman project. Here was a challenge: distilling the essence of a high-end commercial jeweler into scent. Yurman is the Tiffany for people who summer in the Hamptons. (Tiffany is the Zales of people who summer in Cape May.) Yurman jewelry is generally very expensive, well-made and worn at nightclubs within range of Ron Perelman’s house. At the perfume’s recent press launch, Yurman commented, “Whether we sell a ton or none at all doesn’t matter to me! I love it! That’s all that counts.” Sybil Yurman, David’s wife, added, “This wasn’t a brand-building exercise, it was another way of being creative.” Both were delightful, enthusiastic and thrilled with the perfume— understandably so, as Frémont has created a fragrance that, almost more than any other I’ve ever smelled, perfectly distills the brand.

This perfume is not niche. Nor is it mass. It is very expensive, it is precisely positioned to sell a ton, which is of course what counts; companies would be well-advised to avoid pretending their commercial products are some altruistic artwork— and it is one of the most successful brand-building exercises in years, which is very much the other point. It is also very well made. But what is startling is that Frémont’s scent actually morphs into something else mid-flight.

It starts out as a powerful, gold, floral department-store luxury perfume, with the subtlety and style of a Jackie Collins novel. This is the thick floral luxury of calla lilies, gardenias and makeup aimed squarely at those who love Yurman jewelry. Then, about an hour in, the perfume changes. The brassiness drops away, the horns lower their volume, and what emerges is a marvelous wood scent, rich and smooth and quiet, with excellent persistence on skin and (the surprise) subtlety and beauty. Frémont has smuggled authentic luxury into a perfume wrapped up as high-end commercial. Which means the Yurmans, lucky people, have gotten an unexpectedly good perfume.

L'Eau des Hesperides by Diptyque

2009-10-01T09:28:22-07:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

Diptyque is an avant-garde, resolutely chic Parisian scent concern whose perfumes and candles push boundaries, take risks and generally form one of the most interesting collections in the world. Their brilliant Philosykos, created in 1996 for Diptyque by Olivia Giacobetti, is often credited with the late 1990s fig craze. Eau de Lierre is mesmerizing, Olene is wonderfully strange and L’Ombre dans l’Eau is not merely strange but bracingly rebarbative. Against the flood of focus-grouped syrup, the house has resolutely charted noncommercial, inaccessible territory and done it brilliantly. This is why the choice of its latest triptych of launches at first seems odd.

An eau fraiche (“cool water,” the original 17th- and 18th-century scented waters whose basic formulae of lemon, bitter orange, spices and herbs led to modern perfume) is the scent equivalent of vanilla ice cream: You could, but why? Diptyque has just launched not one but three new eaux fraiches, and their response is simple. The first Diptyque scent, created by perfumer Norbert Bijaoui in 1968, was an eau fraiche, called L’Eau de Diptyque. Diptyque has always been obsessed with both its purity and its myth, a narcissistic and unhealthy fixation that led the house into trying to hide its perfumers’ identities. Diptyque claimed the house’s English founder, Desmond Knox-Leet, made the perfume. He didn’t. Knox-Leet was a painter. And an excellent creative director of perfumes.

Today, a much healthier Diptyque is having its new triplets presented by the perfumer who created them, the talented Olivier Pescheux. “The inspiration for L’Eau was potpourri: geranium, lavender and patchouli,” said Pescheux recently at Diptyque’s loft on Madison Park. “For the 40th anniversary, we wanted to make three new perfumes using them.”

The first of these Pescheux based on the 1968 L’Eau, and it is called, clearly enough, L’Eau de l’Eau. Its structure is “classic,” the polite word for traditionalist, which itself is a way of eliding cliché, as the perfume attempts to do. The second is L’Eau de Neroli.

It is the third, L’Eau des Hespérides, that shows what Diptyque can do with a simple eau fraiche. The Hespérides was the mythical Greek garden from which Hercules stole the three golden citrus fruit (to the Greeks they were oranges, not apples), and citrus is the heart of any eau fraiche. Here, Pescheux used bitter orange oil, peppermint oil and immortelle, a flower that gives an astonishing combination of peachy-apricoty fruit, green leaf and ripe human body. The result is an exercise in transcending the genre. This is a quintessential Diptyque: dark, moody, odd, consciously inaccessible, arcane, striking, insistent on its own personality. Imagine the smell of a dentist’s office (dentists historically used clove, and the smell has stuck), only fetishized.

And that’s just the scent. Most eaux fraiches disappear as rapidly as twilight. Pescheux, with startling technical expertise, has created one with excellent persistence on the skin. It stays, proves stable and diffuses perfectly. L’Eau des Hespérides will have fans and detractors, but it brilliantly expands both the genre and the Diptyque collection.

Guaiac by Red Flower

2009-10-01T09:29:52-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ Excellent

The case against organic perfumes is vast and twofold. The first objection involves art. Perfume as an art form (and as a commercial concern) is built on synthetic raw materials. Of course, so are architecture (wood and adobe are nice, but Renzo Piano’s work, for example, relies on advanced polymers and metal alloys), painting (most pigments these days are born in the laboratory, and colors that are unnatural, in all senses, are crucial to painting today), and music (the electronic manipulation of voices etc).

The second argument involves politics. The “organics only!” philosophy is a not particularly covert arm of the neurotic leftist anti-modernity movement, and “I’m against synthetics” is too often code for “I’m against science.” As has been widely noted, the definitions of “natural” and “organic” are more theological than empirical, and “All-Natural” in its fanatic form is the Left’s creationism. There is nothing wrong with synthetic raw materials in scent, architecture, painting, or music.

That said, there is something profoundly important about any sincere effort to reverse the systematic destruction of the planet and to create a healthier environment. And if shopping at naturals-centric, organic-venerating houses like Red Flower, the Nolita personal products cult on Prince Street, is as much an act of worship as it is about picking up a great body scrub, so be it. Yael Alkalay, who founded Red Flower in 1999, is not a fanatic; the scents in her candles do contain synthetics, but she tries, for philosophical reasons, to minimize them. This year, Alkalay has launched her first three perfumes. Not surprisingly, all three are organic. The only real surprise is that despite bypassing much of modern perfumery’s raw materials palette, two are quite decent and one, Guaiac, is excellent.

“Red Flower Organic Perfume in Guaiac” (the thing’s official mouthful of a name), created by Alkalay and the perfumer George Devoe, is enchanting. It is also startling, a result of the oddness that comes as much from what you are not smelling: the absence of the ubiquitous synthetic musk Galaxolide, for example: as what you are. Nor does the perfume smell like guaiac wood, at least not patently. It smells like the sweet sunlight-filled citric burst you get from gashing the peel of an exquisitely fresh orange with your thumbnail mixed with the scent of warm hay (very fresh, with no trace of dust) and a clear mint-like freshness that manages not to have the slightest trace of literal “mint.” Its sweet comes without sugar. It is so straightforward that it smells mysterious, and it is so simple, so nakedly, lucidly pure that it smells naive. If Guaiac is a universe away from the rich, plush, Frenchly elaborated pre-war Guerlains, it is just as far from the early 21st century minimalist intellectual art scents of Frederic Malle and Le Labo. Both those schools produce brilliant perfumes. This is something else. One feels about this perfume as one would a tiny blossom, impossibly lovely, ridiculously fragile, evanescent.

Indeed, there is always a compromise. Guaiac is a four-star perfume for one simple reason: Because it lacks synthetics, which often lend substantivity (the length of time the perfume lasts on skin), Guaiac is fleeting. This is the price you pay for an all-natural perfume. (The other price you pay is $186 for 15ml, which makes it one of the most expensive scents on the market.) The missing fifth star represents this technical fact, but it is the perfumers’ choice, and it will be the choice of those who buy it. If you appreciate the Keatsian paradox and find beauty in the ephemeral, you will find in Guaiac one of the most exquisitely lovely perfumes you have ever smelled.

Sienne l'Hiver by l'Eau d'Italie

2009-10-01T09:30:32-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Transcendent

In the winter of 2007, the tiny niche Italian house of l’Eau d’Italie launched a scent called Sienne l’Hiver.

It was crafted under the careful creative direction of the house’s owners (the Italian Marina Sersale and the Argentine Sebastien Alvarez Murena) by the French perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour, who is without a doubt one of the most interesting artists working in the field today.

Duchaufour has range. He can go from fun/perky (in 2003 he did a little travel retail scent, Chris 1947, for Dior) to gold-plated luxury commercial (Amarige d’Amour for Givenchy) to the sweet-transparent English-girl-in-a-summer-dress of Honeysuckle & Jasmine for Jo Malone. But he specializes in the strange, the visceral and the dark, and on entering this territory, he leaves the rest behind.

He has done several of the Comme des Garcons scents, self-consciously artsy, intellectual and, at times, beautiful: Calamus, Harissa, Kyoto and Avignon, the last of these the smell of the shadowed nave of a medieval church coated in the soot of centuries of incense. His Paestum Rose for l’Eau d’Italie is rose mixed into a bowl of dusk, a paradigm of beauty with a tincture of melancholy, ever so slightly eerie. Piment Brulant, for l’Artisan Parfumeur, where Duchaufour has recently been appointed in-house perfumer, is a science fiction masterpiece, an olfactory heat mirage shimmering over a highway, the tingling non-smell of habanero pepper imagined as a transparent tongue of flame. Of all Duchaufour’s works, however, Sienne l’Hiver is arguably the most interesting.

Its name means “Siena in winter,” in reference to the Tuscan town, and in direct contradiction to the extreme abstract expressionism of Piment Brulant, Duchaufour approaches this subject with a literalist/realist style, creating a Renaissance portrait of northern Italy in December. Artistically, the visual analog would not be Titian (Duchaufour’s work is far too masculine) nor Boticelli (whose colors are duller than Duchaufour’s star palette) but Ghirlandaio. For instance, the painter’s self-portrait done in 1488’s “Adoration of the Magi”: the sharp, rich reds, the startling poison green and the black hair that frames the strong Italian male’s face staring straight at you.

Sienne l’Hiver functions with the same aesthetic. Duchaufour used mimosa absolute to give the oily green-and-black-olive aroma that opens the perfume and evolves beautifully over time, a delicious wintery brine; it will later gently transform into a subtler scent, of wood and isobutylquinoline, a molecule that gives the mineral quality of the cold stones in the Sienese streets.

Dimethylsulfide gives a hint of truffle and mushroom. Pyrazines give the smell of earth and the effect of smoke drifting over barren fields. Natural castoreum, an animalic raw material, adds just the right touch of the sweaty armpits of the merchants and traces of leather from the guards’ saddles and the sweat in their horses’ coats.

As a work of art, it is virtually perfect. It smells expensive, which is to say it smells as if it were made of the highest-quality materials by a perfumer who costs a lot. Like all truly intelligent scents, it is unisex. Diffusion is faultless, persistence on skin is excellent, as is structure; its materials mesh into a whole like the brushstrokes in “Adoration of the Magi.” Even the history of the city plays a role. For centuries the iron-oxide-rich earth of Siena has been burnt to form a vibrant brown pigment called burnt sienna that is used by painters. Ghirlandaio loved it. Duchaufour does as well. He gives us the smell of cold, cucumbery water for sadness. A chilly violet leaf-like angle for loneliness. And then, at the end, just in time to save us, a sensation of rich burnt earth for warmth, perhaps for love.

Armani Prive Vetiver Babylone by Armani

2009-10-01T09:38:45-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ Excellent

The idea of a high-end collection of exquisite perfumes is now thoroughly done. Hermès can make a plausible case for having started it with the Hermèssences, for which its perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena revolutionized minimalism and linearity into a new, purified luxury. Chanel’s Exclusifs came along three years later and enriched the approach, as did Tom Ford’s Private Blend three months after that. All are excellent.

Armani’s high-end collection, Privé, was actually launched the same year as its Hermès analogue, and the original four offerings were nicely done, if slightly less breathtaking. The only (minor) mistake of Ambré Soie and its confrères was, in a nod to someone’s insecurity (probably the client’s), a small overlay of the scent of standard luxury, which just smells of money (the olfactory cues are obvious: “rich,” “thick,” “heavy”) and that’s not pleasant. (Also, the perfumes’ names are in French, incoherently enough; when will Italian houses allow themselves the superior, non-pretentious choice of Italian?) Still, they were good, serious efforts, intelligently offered as unisex (none of the truly good collections are gendered), and they’ve only been getting better. The latest are Rose Alexandrie, an excellent piece of rose modernism, the nicely executed Oranger Alhambra and Vetiver Babylone.

Working under the creative direction of Giorgio Armani, with Karine Lebret and David Suffitt on his development team, the perfumer Alberto Morillas has created a marvelously accessible vetiver scent. An Indian grass (the name comes from Tamil) now grown in tropical climates from Haiti to Java, vetiver smells somewhere between fresh pine and lemongrass; it is closely related to the latter. Morillas has avoided vetiver’s rawly earthy, humid, terpenic (think of turpentine) aspects. Instead he has given us an astringent jewel, as natural, fresh, and contemporary as the scent of a breeze filtered through the leaves of eucalyptus trees on the California coast.

Vetiver Babylone is Armani in its cool isolation. But Morillas has transcended the brand’s genre, pulling Privé above the usual relentless Armani mass commercialism and producing something anyone would be proud to put in their collection. The scent’s design cues are all (and this is a statement as categoric as the aesthetic debt is obvious) descended directly from Jean-Claude Ellena. The linearity, the transparent structuralism of the materials that lie smoothly atop each other like gold bars, the minimalist luminosity that feels like sunlight through sheets of tempered glass. The exciting hint of synthetic fresh. There’s nothing wrong whatsoever with borrowing a style when the style is great; the Infiniti designers copied those sleek arcs laid down by the Jaguar designers and wound up outdoing their teachers, and what Morillas has crafted here smells like something that Infiniti, were it to dare, might use as its scent logo. The next generation of “the car smell,” the odor of a luxury sports car of the future.

There are quibbles. The juice’s stability and persistence are not quite engineered to Japanese standards. It eschews daring and innovation in favor of a slightly wider appeal. But in all the basic gears, it drives like a dream. No trace of insecurity. No nod to heavy olfactory tropes of “luxury.” Vetiver Babylone hovers over skin. It radiates quiet, pure as light.

Dianne Brill by Dianne Brill Cosmetics

2009-10-01T09:40:14-07:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

Dianne Brill: fashion icon-cum-queen of 80’s New York nightlife— has created a makeup collection and, now, a fragrance. Perhaps the best way to describe the surprisingly good Dianne Brill Eau de Parfum, which launches this month, is to let Ms. Brill do the job herself:

“I knew [perfumer] Valerie [Garnuch] because we’d done the scents for all the makeup and skincare products together. I’d saved a piece of leather I’d bought in a flea market on 26th and Sixth. I loved the smell. I kept it in a box for years. I also had a Kiehl’s body oil whose smell I loved, a sort of naughty/beachy/salty scent. They no longer make it. I had Valerie deconstruct it, and we finally found the [scent] material in it I loved. I love wood, construction sites. I didn’t want sandalwood, nothing Indian or exotic. I wanted it butch— but feminine. How do you do that? I love the smell of sticky figs that have been sitting out in the sun and became gooey, but we also did a green fig thing. I gave Valerie a cigar box whose smell I loved; I’m pretty sure it was from Cuba. I’d bought it somewhere weird, I think the Strand on Broadway. My mother was born in England but raised in Cuba and left on Castro’s arrival. You have the past always with you.

“I love the smell of old books, the paper, the history. In Germany I found all these great cigar stores geared for an elaborate, elegant, masculine experience. We have woods, fruits, flowers, spices, although the spices were a real tough call for me. My husband and family had just bought a wonderful sailboat, and we were off the coast of Mustique, and we found the producer of an excellent West Indies nutmeg, which has a very weird, disco-nasty smell, people just starting to sweat on the dance floor. So [Valerie] put that in.”

The result is a perfume that gives edgy, but an edginess polished with a gourmand brush. It is pretty polyvalent, actually. This is not in any way Chanel No 22, but neither is it Odeur 53; neither NYPL fund-raiser crystal champagne flute nor Iron Maiden beer mug, which is why it would bring a nice little hint of 3 a.m. from whatever the latest East Village club is: a sweet, sweaty, tobacco-tinged, leather-pants sex-plus-drugs to your Row F seat just before the curtain at the Vivian Beaumont. It won’t be for everyone, and there is a very faint but unnerving trace of the scent (more the tingle, really) of that club’s dry ice and amyl nitrate-impregnated air, but that, I assume, is by design.

According to Garnuch, Brill was in the lab throughout, actually put her nose to the raw materials and smelled each step. If so, excellent. Garnuch built the juice with several interesting materials: Madagascar ylang absolute to give flower, balsamic Peruvian benzoin (“very vanillic and sweet,” says Garnuch, “myrrh is more turpenic,” i.e. turpentine), a chocolate angle (which Garnuch made with vanillin and pyrazines), synthetic stémone for the fig, synthetic damascones plus coumarine for the tobacco. In the end, of course, it is the point where they all touch that counts. That point makes me think of Hermès’ Ambre Narguil, on nitrous oxide. In any case, it is something to experience.

Brooks Brothers for Gentlemen

2009-10-01T09:42:13-07:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

The venerable Brooks Brothers will, in two days, introduce two perfumes, a masculine (obviously) and a feminine (somewhat less obviously; this brand sells very nice women’s clothes, but it is genetically a man’s store).

Given that feminines are almost always superior to their masculine counterparts (see Light Blue, Rive Gauche, Carolina Herrera, et al), it is always a surprise when the masculine smells better. But perhaps when it’s Brooks Brothers, this should have been expected.

Brooks Brothers gave its scent license to Interparfums, which creates fragrances for Burberry and Lanvin, among others. It hired two perfumers from the Swiss scent maker Firmenich. Under the creative direction of Interparfum’s Kellie Como, Ilias Ermenidis made Brooks Brothers New York for Ladies, which unfortunately reiterates a pretty but rather bloodless modern American feminine. Como, playing it supersafe, opted for a sweetish perfume that is worn by a somewhat wan, desultory debutante in a pale pink dress at a garden party in Newport, R.I. Muffy is not completely insensitive to the attraction of a sweet floral, but her tastes stop there. Perhaps she is cautious. Perhaps she is governed by an instinctive allegiance to the G.O.P. Perhaps Spence was just too much. In any case, this does nothing to pull Brooks Brothers out of that Princeton Dining Club reputation it is trying to shed.

Brooks Brothers New York for Gentlemen, on the other hand (created by the perfumer Richard Herpin and also overseen by Como) is not at all bad. Dare one say, it’s just ever so slightly forward-edge if the edge in question is the front door of a co-op on Park and 76th. In fact, though Biff wore a version of this at Choate, he will be packing the update off to Williams next September, and the reason is that Herpin has managed to land in the sweet spot. Leave the neon gourmands, the Abstract Expressionist marvels and brutalist works of olfactory art to the Etat Libre d’Oranges of the world.

“When they approached me, they said, ‘We want to create a great classic for Brooks Brothers. Something without trend,’” Herpin told me. And that is exactly what Herpin has done. The narrowness of the parameters are exactly what will make this scent perfect for its intended demographic, and by that I mean a decent number of men outside the Wall Street-and-Greenwich guys.

“I think perfumes are interactions,” Herpin said. “That’s what’s interesting.” So he pays attention to the engineering. “If in two minutes the top vanishes, it doesn’t work. You can’t have a break, some moment where you sense the perfume shifting gears, second to third. No. It has to be smooth.”

And so Herpin set off. “The idea was to create a tension between the fresh top and the base of mystery and comfort,” he said. The top is natural bergamot and lemon oil from the peel, “but less sharp and without bitterness. Also a bit of hyper-reality mandarin reconstitution [molecules mixed into a mandarin scent] for juicy, smiling, mouth-watering.” He added a trace of the synthetics Calone and Melonal, which give watery/juicy, and petitgrain, the stem and leaves of the orange tree, “which is really there in almost sub-therapeutic dose to fingerprint the thing as a ‘classic.’” Then carnation enhanced with the molecule eugenol, which is crucial in clove. Eugenol smells cold and makes carnation one of the spiciest flowers you can find.

To undergird that, some excellent Firmenich synthetic musks: Muscenone, Muscenone Delta (very expensive, but, Herpin says, Brooks Brothers and Como insisted) and Galaxolide, which is not expensive (but has this magnifying-glass aspect that warms the juice, clarifies it and gives you warm, clean skin, slightly milky sensuality, part maternal, part animal.) Second, vetiver SFE, an extremely high-quality vetiver created with carbon dioxide extraction. “Pure, clear,” Herpin says, “it gives you all the fresh astringent and takes out the potato and earthiness you get in cheaper vetivers.” He sighs. “You’re limited by price. Vetiver SFE is extremely expensive.”

The result is a very nice masculine whose traditionalism is apparent and yet one step ahead of that category. One quibble: the mandarin and lemon simply don’t adhere, and if there is “juicy, smiling, mouth-watering,” it doesn’t wind up in my mouth. What I get is astringent vetiver grass + eugenol spice + musk reassurance + a bit of sharp, biting petitgrain. There is no shock value (e.g., Narciso Rodriguez for Men), but that’s the point. Here is an olfactory Lexus LS: fine-tuned, amazingly stable, solid engine. It won’t blow anyone away. But it will transport you very nicely indeed, in comfort and security. Not such a bad thing.

Reve en Cuir by Indult for Scent Bar

2009-10-01T09:41:45-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Transcendent

Indult is a tiny Parisian perfume house founded and run by Julien Maselli. It functions according to a clubby modus operandi whereby Maselli makes only 999 bottles of each perfume; when you buy a bottle, you get an Indult membership card (the name comes from medieval Latin; an indultum was a privilege accorded by the church or a king) and you can get it refilled until you die. (You can, of course, choose to make your card sufficiently plastic to cover friends, family, your trainer, his accountant and your entire entourage.) All the Indult scents are created by the perfumer Francis Kurkdjian, one of the three or four most talented and innovative artists working in the medium. Currently there are five Indult perfumes. Four are excellent.

Manakara smells like a color-saturated contemporary painting, as if Barnett Newman’s 1966 “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?” somehow exuded scent from its glaring acrylic surface. Kurkdjian olfactorily “photographed” rose and lychee, then treated those natural scents with an acid wash of synthetic perfumery raw materials. The resulting perfume is brilliant, vibrating between real, delicate rose-lychee and an intentionally disorienting neon gas version. The perfume is well-constructed, mesmerizing and slightly outrageous. (The perfumer Sofia Grojsman created a similar work of olfactory color theory, called Outrageous, for Frederic Malle; in that case, it was the scent of a Mondrian.)

Tihota (Indult’s names are slightly precious) is a similar morphing of vanilla bean and musk, though calmer and a bit more literalist. Kurkdjian uses the musks (the smell of warm skin) to nicely punch up vanilla’s roasted aspect. And Isvaraya is a patchouli and plum that takes one of the most marvelous natural raw materials: patchouli’s rich creamy/earthy/grassy scent tinged with tropical humidity and a trace of exquisite rot, and injects a subtle, juicy, darkish fruit into its veins. The grass becomes succulent and edible. It’s magical work.

The least interesting Indult scent was created for the ultra-exclusive Paris store Colette. C16 is not bad, it’s just a bit of a gimmick (16 musks, “all together now!”) and is, in a sense, the exact opposite of the house’s latest, created for the ultra-exclusive Los Angeles perfume outfit Lucky Scent, whose online arm is the only place that sells Indult in the United States. Luckyscent.com is run by Franco Wright and Adam Eastwood, whose physical store, Scent Bar (8327 Beverly Boulevard), is Hollywood’s source for niche, avant-garde perfumes you can’t find anywhere else. One of these will certainly be the new Rêve en Cuir.

Leather: old, dark, smoky, heavy— is diabolically difficult to adapt to an accessible 21st-century format. Under the creative direction of Maselli, Wright and Eastwood, Kurkdjian has succeeded masterfully. Rêve is a delectable, edible, light-infused leather that is instantly legible, deliciously impossible, as if an Hermès belt had been candied and baked by a patissier. Technically perfect (it lasts and diffuses like clockwork), it is also an aesthetic triumph. Hermès’ own Kelly Calèche wonderfully modernized leather; Rêve en Cuir is even better, stronger and more daring. It is not just the leather you never imagined; it is also the gourmand you never imagined. Indeed, membership has its privileges.

He Wood By Dsquared

2009-10-01T09:43:15-07:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

Continuing a startling, fascinating trend, the fashion house of Dsquared, headed by identical twins Dean and Dan Caten, released its first two scents this past September: a feminine and a masculine. And, by God, the masculine is better. Is there some sort of mistake?

This past September, the Catens threw what was, hands down, the best perfume launch in New York City: not merely because it was actually fun and cool instead of self-consciously pretentious, but because the event, astoundingly, was in fact about the perfumes. The PR people checking in guests on the street were wearing the scents and could comment on them intelligently. (A guy with a clipboard cheerfully waved his wrist at me and said the masculine was perfect for a suit-and-tie look.) Guests exiting the giant elevator were greeted by a welcome committee of smiling, organized, intelligent and informed young men and women, each equipped with the two perfumes, She Wood and He Wood, which they actually sprayed on guests— who, for once, were willing to wear the perfumes being launched. This, in the style world, passes for revolutionary. And then these young men and women, with assurance and poise, explained the scents, pleasantly laying out the olfactory themes while leading guests over to a table where they could sample the three basic components of each. Beyond, as decor, was an entire wall of actual perfume. Well.

I say this as a hardened veteran of perfume launches, such as Coty’s big-crowded-loud-hipster launch of ck IN2U, at which there was not a single bottle of ck IN2U to be found— nor anyone remotely interested in smelling it. (Nor any Coty person from the highest to the lowest level who could locate a bottle. Finally a poor PR girl bravely suggested that a sample of the perfume could be found (and I quote) in the toilet; the lines were so long we never got a chance to verify this.) Then there was the B de Boucheron launch, where none of the PR people had even seen, much less smelled, much less worn the perfume. Fittingly, the event had nothing at all to do with the perfume.

At perfume launches, the fragrance usually plays third violin to the TV ad (because we trust the sense of sight, not smell) and the model (because we want to sell sex, not perfume), which evidences how much the houses believe in their scents. The style editors refuse to try it (“Oh, I’m already wearing something,” to which the only possible response is, “Excuse me, darling, but why bother coming to a perfume launch if you’re not going to try the perfume on skin?”). I don’t know for a fact that Dsquared, its licensee and its PR agency are the only groups competent enough to launch a perfume in the United States of America. I’m simply reporting my experience.

Now, the scents. She Wood, the feminine, is a perfectly nice, decently constructed perfume that joins the ranks of many, many other perfectly nice, decently constructed perfumes. It has a wood angle. Okay. It is better than many, seems to use some nice materials and is not particularly innovative.

Then there’s He Wood . Working with the creative directors, the Catens and Giorgia Martone (the marketing director of ICR, Dsquared’s licensee), the perfumer Daphné Bugey has created a wearable, modern wood. Bugey is a rising talent and an artist with a viewpoint, and she’s done a very nice job. I’m assuming this is birch tar, guaiac wood, Iso-E-super (a nice synthetic light wood), cedar, something Galaxolide-like (a good synthetic musk), with perhaps a touch of ionones (violet). Given the materials (if I’m right about them), it has a somewhat surprising lack of persistence on skin, but just reapply. Any man will be able to wear He Wood, and the scent will repay him: clean, well-presented, civilized and (and this is the deal-clincher) an intelligent masculine for once.

In terms of artistry, does it surpass Gucci Homme— which is, in the most ballsy, avant-garde way, nothing more nor less than pencil shavings (a.k.a. cedar)? Arguable. Or the brutalist, violent, toxic, marvelous creature that is Francis Kurkdjian’s Narciso Rodriguez masculine? Absolutely not. Is it a better, more innovative masculine than 90 percent of the stuff out there, with character and good taste, calm and solid as the smile of a handsome guy? Yes.

Azzaro Couture by Loris Azzaro

2009-10-01T09:48:22-07:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

The perfumer Aurélien Guichard, son of the equally talented Jean Guichard (who, with Olivier Gillotin, did the delicate job of reformulating Francis Fabron’s immortal l’Interdit for Givenchy), has excellent creative range. He can go from making the chic, retro-rich Baghari for the contemporary incarnation of Robert Piguet to the delicate translucent-flower-in-a-white-space-station cult favorite Chinatown for Bond No. 9 to the brutalist 21st-century chypre (take out the labdanum, put in asphalt and the scorched scent of steel under a welder’s arc) of Sean John’s Unforgivable.

Loris Azzaro’s first perfume, introduced in 1975, was Azzaro Couture, reportedly a bold, luxurious feminine. The brand’s managers were also behind the commercial megahit Chrome in 1996, a perfect example of the sterile metallic gas scents of the ‘90s, a perfume that smells so metallic and chemical it’s as if it had its own atomic number. Chrome so dominates the Azzaro brand that it is almost strange to see the house revisit Couture, its earlier creation from a profoundly different aesthetic school. But it has. Guichard, under the direction of Vanessa Seward and Pierre Aulas, has created a 2008 version, which was introduced in September.

It is quite well done. Big, rich and gold-plated, this is a scent for women whose hearts lie in the 1970s and 1980s and have been dreaming of someone fusing the two eras. Their gratitude will be infinite. There is a distinct echo of Guichard’s Love in Paris, which he did several years ago for Nina Ricci, a lovely, white-gold floral that didn’t succeed commercially. But Couture is both more retro and, arguably, more up to the minute than Love, coming on like a spotlit runway model wearing all white. It is a floral, but with a huge, neo-‘80s format built; (I’m guessing) primarily out of an accord of mimosa (it has that weird, otherworldly mimosa smell, a flower from a slightly different planet) and Karanal, a knee-trembling synthetic that smells like blood macerated in peony with an electrical current running through it. It lights up the juice like neon and gives the perfume a sheen that has been polished like the hood of a champagne-colored BMW 7-series.

Sleek, the opposite of shy, materialistic— but only in the very best way, of course. Azzaro Couture says, “What bad economy? I still have my job in my big midtown office.” If you actually still have your big job— or if you just want to give the impression that you do, this is your perfume.

Boisy Patyka

2009-10-01T09:48:42-07:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

I have little patience for bio/organic perfume collections, and perhaps less for the people behind them because, to give the most fundamental reason, the perfumes usually smell inferior. For example, I have never really understood (the diplomatic term for “liked”) a single Strange Invisible Perfume scent despite great effort on my part and the sincerity and hard work of its founder. Most organic lines offer various versions of woody mushroom. In fact, I would have told you that a good all-organic was impossible, but I would have been wrong. Recently, Red Flower somehow managed it. Now Patyka proves me wrong again.

Founded by Philippe Gounel, its creative director, and devised by Patyka’s in-house perfumer, Jenny Corless, the organic skin-care and fragrance brand was introduced in the United States in 2005. Patyka’s philosophy makes an immense deal out of being organic and natural, its raison d’être and its political cause. As for its aesthetic approach, Patyka’s is, interestingly, a collection of scent paradigms. All six of its perfumes (originally there were also a floral and a fougere-fern, which have, sadly, been discontinued; I’d be very interested to smell them) bear the names of basic perfumery classifications: Hespéridé (citrus perfumes), Chypre, Bois (woody) and Ambré (amber; ambers are all built on vanilla and patchouli). In one sense, this is a weakness. Take Ambré, for example. Corless and Gounel have created an absolutely classic amber. Like Escoffier’s basic béchamel sauce, this could be used in perfume classrooms as a model, a sort of scented phylogenetic common amber ancestor. Creativity, innovation, zero— but Ambré is very, very nice, creamy as malted milk and smoothed with vanilla.

Before getting to the other perfumes, let’s do the (huge) caveats. First, fundamentalism is reprehensible no matter what form it takes, including PETA and the all-organic fanatics, and there is no scientific reason whatsoever to spit on synthetics, which in his suave French way Gounel unfortunately does. Why do it? It might be good marketing. It might (to be much more charitable) come from an honest desire to care for the planet. But it’s not rational. For one, perfume is not a food; it’s art, and scent raw materials don’t need to be natural any more than do paints. For another, to get geraniol (a gorgeous molecule, green/lemon/rose/fresh) you can grow, then destroy, tons of geranium plants, or you can simply build geraniol in a lab; the molecules are identical, but the synthetic is pure and takes less out of the earth.

Then there’s this question of what is natural. Due to newish E.U. regulations, all perfumes must list known allergens (perfumers have to limit the amounts of these they use in formulas). Patyka packaging lists limonene (found in lemon), citronellol (geranium) and linalol, all of which is fine, except: a) all can be synthesized without taking a toll on the soil, and b) natural linalol is mostly extracted from rosewood, which is going extinct; by not using synthetic linalol, Patyka is contributing to this. (Of course, every time you peel an orange you get more limonene on your hands than in an entire bottle of perfume; some of Europe’s rules are absurd as well.) Benzyle benzoate is found in ylang ylang; because the perfumes contain ylang, they include this molecule, which is an allergen; because Patyka doesn’t believe in the technology that would purify the ylang of this allergen, the allergen goes into the Patyka perfume.

Oh, and the box lists “parfum.” Huh? What does that mean? Everything is “parfum,” an umbrella to hide any number of possible sins.

But all this said, these are four extremely nice perfumes. I dare say wonderfully so. Hespéridé is an absolutely delightful, pure sunlit lemon high on a hill in Sicily. It is a perfectly balanced citrus, which is hard to do, a feeling of both crisp clean and relaxed bliss. I would bet this stuff is more effective than Paxil. The Lauders and LVMHs should take note of Chypre, which masterfully transports the genre’s progenitor, the 1917 Chypre de Coty, into the 21st century, a satin scarf of oak moss and eugenol (gentle spice) and dusky, clear bergamot and bitter orange. (I never comment on packaging, but the packaging here is just too perfectly done not to.)

Perhaps the best is Boisé, a terrific, accessible, stylish wood. No cedar pencil shavings of Gucci Homme, no smoke, no fussiness of Feminité du Bois nor the contemporary cool of He Wood, Boisé is a friendly, warm feather bed of a wood fragrance. It is also the only one that lasts on skin. This is the other problem. Because there are no synthetics, which are technologically much higher performing, you’re paying a hundred bucks for perfumes that vanish in five minutes (Hespéridé) or 20 (Ambré) or 40 (Chypré). Which is why those are two-star perfumes. A scent simply must last to be truly great. Yes, reapplication is an option, but Patyka will make it constant, and you will need more than a little patience. These perfumes are as evanescent as happiness. But, boy, in the brief time that they last, they are just wonderful, and you are so happy.

Tuberoli by Space.NK

2009-10-01T09:57:41-07:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

Space.NK is a British beauty retailer (the “NK” comes from its founder, Nicky Kinnaird) that carries cult products (usually quite expensive, often niche) from skin care and body care to cosmetics. It opened its doors in 1993 in London’s Covent Garden, and in June 2007 opened a flagship store in New York at 99 Greene Street in SoHo. Kinnaird has also introduced a new line of Space.NK-branded scents.

The line’s aesthetics are very English indeed, an approach that carries (as it does for the equally English Jo Malone collection) both a downside and an upside. The downside is that English perfumery has always reflected English reticence. A century ago the French were dumping feline anal cream (civet) reeking of animal armpit and French breath (some say the French still enjoy a casual relationship with oral hygiene) into their ornate works. The Italians were creating classic barbershop citrus waters circa 1955. The Americans were either doing 1970s copies of big neo-French florals (minus the armpits) or 1990s hygienic scents that made you smell like someone had just picked you up in a plastic bag from the local Korean wash-and-fold after a hot cycle in strong detergent. As for the English, they were creating standard thin, lovely, pale florals for English women (lavender and violet are English obsessions) and standard clear-cut yet polite, no-please-after-you-I-insist old-fashioned citrus waters for men. Space.NK’s best seller, Laughter, the scent Kinnaird considers its “iconic fragrance,” is one of the most by-the-book English citrus waters I’ve ever smelled. It’s not bad; it was created, after all, by the uber-talented English perfumer Christopher Sheldrake (this was before Chanel got him), but it is made with the relentless traditionalism of black and white at Ascot. This is intentional.

As for the rest of the collection, they are doing English innovative. Depending on your taste, this is where the upside comes in. If you like light scents that never raise their voices but rather speak in calm, cool BBC tones, you will love Space.NK’s fragrances. These things will be devoured by the Asian market. Kinnaird has had the good sense to have had them made by competent perfumers. Champaca is Azzi Glasser, Jasamber is Trevor Nicholl, and Tuberoli and Santalrosa are again Sheldrake.

Champaca is lily of the valley, cedar and vetiver lightly brushed by the dawn, a flower like a ghost. Kinnaird says that Jasamber was inspired by Northern Scandinavia, and one registers cedar wood sauna plus cold winter. Santalrosa is contemporary London, cool and hip under a light rain, out of the shower and heading for the tube.

Tuberoli is the most interesting of the group. If you like the raw green and hot pink tuberose with beautifully manicured claws of Germaine Cellier’s Fracas, you will have to strain a bit to hear Tuberoli. If you are a slave to the loud, filthy, utterly gorgeous neo-brutalist tuberose hand grenade Carnal Flower by Dominique Ropion, you will register nothing at all. If, however, you want a tuberose that has been given a Percocet and lulled into an unaccustomed polite docile state, greeting you with the brush of a kiss, Tuberoli is on your list. So Norman Foster. So Strand. So Hyde Park. So London.

Lyric Woman by Amouage

2009-10-01T09:57:56-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ Excellent

Amouage is a niche house (and a very expensive one, at that) that is run out of London but has its roots in the Middle East. Those roots are essentially two: the house’s wealthy Omani financial backers (the royal family, actually) and its Arabian peninsula olfactory aesthetic. I have often found that Amouage scents bear more of Arab culture’s obsession with incense than I can assimilate (Arabia is one of the great originators of the use of incense), heavy and thick, perhaps mixed with smoky, all-but-charred roses, the whole contraption’s volume set to “Overwhelm.” (The grimace-inducing French corollary is animalic notes: the civet fecal smell of Jicky; Jicky’s armpit-and-dirty-underwear grandson, Kouros; and so on. The American contribution to this list would be the army of American perfumes smelling of scrubbed shower tile and aluminum foil— though, for the record, this genre was created, inconceivably, by a French perfumer.)

Amouage’s two original perfumes, created by the great perfumer Guy Robert and launched in 1983, might be loaded with raw materials worth more than Citicorp’s bad debt, but it is also weightier than the spirits of a GM exec, and a gold-plated tank is a gold-plated tank. The Amouage character has been evolving, however, and its new creative director, Christopher Chong, has been choosing excellent scent artists like Mark Buxton, Maurice Roucel and Bertrand Duchaufour. The result is the house’s two latest launches, Lyric Woman and Man, which are not just technically excellent but also smell like lighter-than-air, Jules Verne-like machines silvering through the sky.

Both are strong yet almost weightless, a marvelous combination. And the creativity: amid the flood of castrated, clichéd launches, the Lyrics are quanta of solace, solid and sleek as his-and-hers Aston Martins. If there is not a product placement in which a naked Daniel Craig briskly sprays Man on a Rolexed wrist, the Omani royal family is seriously off its feed; Chong may have overseen the creation of these two, but it smells like they were co-directed by Marc Forster.

The perfumer Daniel Visentin created Man, and he’s done a smart job. The scent is like titanium, a metal of incredible strength that is also incredibly light. It goes from 0 to 60 in (get this) a breathtaking chocolate floral gourmand punch, then cruises over the thousand metallic fresh knock-offs of Cool Water. Craig may be just slightly disappointed with Man’s staying power (there are various olfactory Viagra that help keep the effect up), but then again, Bond can simply reapply. For a good hour this is a startling concoction of a block of bittersweet Peruvian cocoa cut to ribbons with a polished high-tech MI6 knife.

Woman is one star better. The perfumer Daniel Maurel has conjured a chimera of citrus, flowers and spice, and the genius of it is that if you narrow your eyes, you can smell each piece moving inside. Mouthwatering warm spices with cream and bergamot zest. And then, when the swirling top clears away after 20 minutes or so, wood and incense, but playing subtle roles. This is Opium’s violet-eyed granddaughter and the more playful niece of Comme des Garcons 2. The bitter orange effect will either turn you on or off. Some like their florals and spices straight. Personally I find it lifts the machine and makes it hover low to the ground over its own shadow. It is a lovely machine, and a lovely shadow, and it is possible that once you start wearing it, you will never be able to feel truly naked without it.

Viridian by Parfums des Beaux Arts

2009-10-01T09:58:40-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ Excellent

The quality of superniche scent collections varies hugely. Filmmakers who shoot at their parents’ homes and produce on credit card-financed shoestrings create, for the most part, erratic movies, and independent perfumers generally produce erratic collections. There are the political perfumes (“all natural! all organic!”), which tend to smell like bottled ideologies, and theme collections (“Japan!”), and the slightly trite “I hunt the planet for the most fabulous materials.” And if the scents are almost always inferior to the Diors and the Tom Fords, it is due to the fact that perfume is not do-it-yourself. It is an excruciatingly difficult art form that requires trained professionals with access to the materials and technicians. And even then they can bomb. Most niche scent makers do forgettable work.

One exception is Dawn Spencer Hurwitz. An independent perfumer in Boulder, Colo., with a house called Parfums des Beaux Arts (why do American perfumers Scotch-tape on French names?), she has produced a collection with a very specific aesthetic. By design or not, she makes scents in the 21st-century manner that was largely pioneered by the perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena’s “big minimalism”: the crafting of intelligent fragrances that melt subtly into skin rather than sitting egotistically on top of it in the grand French manner, that glow quietly instead of shouting about the Champs-Elysées.

The first Spencer Hurwitz perfume I smelled several years ago was Pamplemousse (perhaps we could call this Grapefruit and be done with it), and it was excellent. Crisp, luscious, edible, tangy grapefruit, becoming slightly darker as it evolves into a bergamot/bitter-orange aspect, like a shard of glass under halogen with someone very gradually dimming the lights. We simply move from sparkling to hypnotic. Citrus molecules are as light and bouncy as Ping-Pong balls in an earthquake, and they tend to zip away or decompose, but this is a bitter quinine tonic water delight whose diffusion remains surprisingly excellent. Pamplemousse is not a work of complex art like 2 by Comme des Garcons. But it doesn’t need to be. The molecules ping off skin like an astringent breeze, and the effect is transfixing.

Spencer Hurwitz has two approaches: straightforward literalist and straightforward abstract. Those in the first category are generally good. Sienna is a literalist cinnamon, very nicely done. She’s taken out just enough food reference to make the cinnamon a wearable perfume, and the sharp spice mellows in 20 minutes to the scent of cool, shadowy hallway. Less successful is Prince, a rather inexplicable drugstore spice marine suited to a masculine deodorant stick. Quinacridone Violet is apricot jam plus Japanese plum wine, and while it suffers a bit from the jammy aspect, it remains interesting; Spencer Hurwitz is experimenting in what she calls “color-into-scent” synesthetic art. Umber: Bois de Rose is not the smoky, evil, spectacular Rose Poivrée from The Different Company, but there is room for a pleasant rose. All merit a try.

It is, oddly, in the abstracts that Spencer Hurwitz goes from good to much better. The Color Orange is fun Pop Art. Like Ralf Schwieger’s brilliant Lipstick Rose for Frederic Malle: a powdery, violet-scented tube of lipstick, Spencer Hurwitz gives us a brief opening of acetone (nail-polish remover) for the fizz when you pop open the can followed by, Andy Warhol-like, a photograph of artificially flavored orange soda. Think what you will, Spencer Hurwitz is making artistic choices, and if you own a loft in SoHo, this is your new day scent. Blue Green: Amico is a more complex, avant-garde abstract, a resolute contemporary (think of the smell of a Richard Serra sheet-metal work) that transcends l’Eau d’Issey’s clean water hologram and constitutes an eminently wearable olfactory sculpture. (If natural-world references are needed, the nearest I can come is salt water/cinnamon bark/the scent of the air in Kennedy Airport’s Terminal 1.) Celadon, by contrast, is a marvelously likable nonrepresentational gourmand sweetness calmed and smoothed and hanging in the Guggenheim; Spencer Hurwitz has turned down the volume to a whisper, and it stays, murmuring fructose on your skin.

Let’s stop at Viridian. It’s one of the best examples of the true break with classic French perfumery, of which (despite the collection’s name) there remains zero influence. Again: no natural landmarks, compulsively pleasant, transmitted by a lovely murmur that penetrates the ambient static. Perhaps the way to say it is that if Los Angeles gave off a perfume, this would be it: the scent of the pure desert dust of Runyan Canyon Park in the Hollywood Hills, of ozone and ocean, of the plush, hushed glass offices at HBO and CAA. It may be mesmerizing, but I love it equally for being impossible to nail down.

Love, Ralph Lauren by Ralph Lauren

2009-10-01T09:59:11-07:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

In the 1970s, Ralph Lauren (as all designers do) sold the rights to a licensee to make perfumes under his name in exchange for a royalty. (Usually 2 percent to 7 percent of the return.) The trick is selling to the right licensee, one who employs good creative execs who then hire good perfumers to make juices that are both artistically solid and commercially successful. Among the major licensees are Estee Lauder, LVMH, BPI, Clarins, Coty, Interparfums and L’Oreal.

Lauren sold his license to L’Oreal, which turned out to be a wise decision. BPI has a much better reputation in the industry for putting real money into their juices; l’Oreal’s rep is for being financially tight with a formula. Still, L’Oreal has done a generally good job for Lauren. Still, L’Oreal has done a generally good job for Lauren, even if the performance has been mixed.

Case in point: its two latest feminines for the brand, both 2008 launches, are Notorious and Love, Ralph Lauren. Notorious was created by the perfumer Olivier Gillotin under L’Oreal’s creative director in charge of the Lauren brand, Jennifer Mullarkey, and it is a complete mismatch between name and juice, unless this is Notorious Lite. Its smell is extremely difficult to describe precisely because it has the character of a Jessica Simpson video. Vanilla? Hay? Salt-water taffy? Gillotin has made something that sort of smells like skin (a k a synthetic musks) and sort of smells like flowers, but doesn’t. It is, in fact, an olfactory Gap ad, although that might be too kind.

And why? Look at the terrific scents l’Oreal has done for the brand. Romance is an utterly lovely American fragrance, a girl in a Ralph Lauren summer dress. Romance’s genre is the specialty of Harry Fremont, who perfectly distills clear-skin-and-white-teeth commercial American luxury, Lauren’s specialty. The discontinued Glamourous was nonchalantly gorgeous, another Fremont work that deserved a better fate. And the very first feminine from the Lauren/L’Oreal team, the 1978 Lauren by Bernard Chant, remains a masterpiece of deep, luscious, purple, sweet summer fruit and one of the best retros it is possible to wear.

And then they put out Love, Ralph Lauren ? Mullarkey creative-directed the perfumers Ellen Molner and, again, Gillotin, and here’s one of the problems: it smells like L’Oreal has front-loaded the money a bit. If you put this on, you will have a five-minute window in which you’ll find it difficult to resist buying. After five minutes, a bit of the money burns off (the top notes smell the most expensive to me) but you still may well get out a credit card. The good news is that it stabilizes at a very decent level. It’s as conventionally beautiful as the women in the “Fifth Avenue to Lexington above 70th but below 96th” zone, all getting their hair highlighted at the same salon. There’s zero edge, and this thing will never, ever be worn to a hotel on Rivington Street. That said, it will make quite a few men in the East 80’s lean appreciatively into the necks of quite a few smartly dressed women. It’s safe. It’s pretty.

Ormonde Man by Ormonde Jayne

2009-10-01T10:00:52-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Transcendent

Ormonde Jayne is a niche London perfume house run by its creator, an attractive, well-presented Englishwoman named Linda Pilkington. Pilkington has a keenly refined sense of visual design— the jewel-box store at 28 Old Bond Street is painfully chic (onyx lacquered surfaces and exquisitely wrapped scents, fragranced lotions and candles) but she also has business acumen. For one, she has picked the perfumer Geza Schoen to build her scents from the olfactory blueprints she creates, and Schoen is a fragrance wizard operating at the top of his game. For another, the Ormonde Jayne collection has managed to bottle mesmerizing strangeness that stays, just barely at times, this side of unwearable art scents. Isfarkand is a marvelously startling peppery gas, and Champaca, the translucent smell of (this is more literal than metaphorical) the bamboo-ish leaves of emerald-green rice plants in their watery fields. If anyone creates a perfume collection a century from now, it will quite possibly resemble Ormonde Jayne’s.

No one is perfect, and some of the house’s scents fall short of even the 21st century. Zizan is a masculine cliché done slightly more interesting only in that it pushes forward the 1990s chrome + detergent hygienic equation.

Ormonde Man, however, is spectacular. It disposes of the sharp glass edges and hard bathroom tile of the hygienic school to offer something unusual: masculine gentleness. I can’t imagine a scent more right for this rough time. Citrus and spice are ingeniously hidden inside sweet heavy cream and warm, caressable male skin. (A hay absolute, perhaps.) The overall effect is of clarity mellowing to a golden gourmand, though in reality it is contemporary art whose beauty lies in deftly defying identification. In Italian, furbo means sly and cunning, and this scent is furbo, but nicely. You’re not sure if it’s subtle or sharp. (It’s both.) For Schoen to create, and Pilkington to direct and sell, such a scent to men is one of the small revolutions that make you believe again in the possibility of men wearing intelligent scents.

This new aesthetic reminds me of something the poetry critic Adam Kirsch wrote: “Strange though it may sound, American poetry today is more sentimental, more reassuring, easier on the reader, than at any time in the last 100 years.” Yes, modernist techniques are ingrained, he admitted (complex allusion, surrealism, etc.). “Wordsworth, stylistically, is over.” But the modernist temper is also over. Poetry has resumed its Wordsworthian, 19th-century role as a comfort and consolation, a retreat from the rigors of the world. “The impulse,” he added, “is to restore and heal.” Kirsch proposed this bit of verse:

Meanwhile,
the great sea of compassion
rolled in, rolled out, rolled in.
And the blue mountain
of itself remains,
and the blind shampooers
never tire of their work.

Compassion. A shampoo. And the scent of Ormonde Man.

Citron de Vigne by Fresh

2009-10-01T10:01:37-07:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

Lev Glazman, the co-founder of Fresh and the creative director of its perfumes, is responsible for scent works that range from the excellent, daring Cannabis Rose and Cannabis Santal: strong and challenging, as viscerally striking as a Richard Serra sculpture to the mysterious, marvelous abstraction of Sake to the pretty, if somewhat demotic, literalism of Tangerine Lychee and Pomegranate Anise. Nothing wrong with the last of these; they are breathtakingly lovely. They simply elide into single-accord aromatherapy like a number of Jo Malone scents, and have a similar brief evanescence.

Fresh has produced a few missteps, but its latest, Citron de Vigne (introduced a month ago), is a small jewel that returns the house to its strength. It’s a naturalistic beauty cut with artistry and the subtlest of ornamentation.

In spite of the wisdom of the $30 billion perfume industry, few have done the obvious: wine scents. The French, who in theory know the rich, yeasty, fermented, oaky, moldy, underground tanginess of winemaking, should have put two and two together by now.

Only the Americans have. Dave Apel ingeniously put Cognac oil in Tom Ford’s Black Orchid. Ford got it. Now Glazman is getting it, too. He and the perfumer Alexis Dadier have opened Vigne with an interesting lemon citrus. This is not the uninteresting lemon citrus loaded onto so many perfumes with hopes of lending an illusion of zing. This one bursts onstage, showing as much complexity as one can get from lemon, plus a pink-grapefruit shimmer you get when you pop the Tropicana top.

Like 98 percent of perfumes, the citrus is wrapping paper. You admire it, then rip it off with regret. With Fresh, the payoff is what lies underneath. This is not one of the stupendous wine perfumes, the Cabernet and Sauvignon fragrances someone will eventually produce. I have it on good authority that Glazman was aiming at the pinot noir grape, not the wine, and what is nicest about Vigne is that he nailed not only this excellent grape but, more, the pip inside. You know the juicy/woody/bitter flavor you get when you bite a grape seed? That’s a central piece of the structure here. The fruit plus the raw, wet sapling scent. This is the grape about to become wine.

Citron de Vigne is substantively marred by a basic technical failure common to this modernist school of perfumery: the perfume has at best mediocre substantivity on skin, though given these light, fast-evaporating raw materials, Dadier and Glazman have done a decent job. So reapply.

Neil Morris for Takashimaya

2009-10-01T10:07:45-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ Excellent

The ultraniche perfumer Neil Morris works out of a fragrance studio in his Boston home, where he is his own creative director and perfumer. Morris is self-taught (he started composing in 1975) and you can smell it in his work: this is artisanal, not corporate, perfumery. Lauder, P&G and LVMH, with their creative execs and focus groups, would never put out these scents. Morris’ quality varies, but unlike with many of the large-brand perfumes, you can smell someone trying things out: How about this? How about that?

Morris takes risks. Not all of them work. Exhibit A, Coral, is a fusion of a teenage girl’s bubble-gum-scented breath and the fascinating, synthetic carpet smell of a Florida living room circa 1950. If you perceive Coral as intentional irony, like Yves Saint Laurent’s brilliant Baby Doll, you may consider this a found masterpiece. If not, you will find it facile. Aegean at first smells like a 1990s fresh: excise the citrus in favor of cool synthetics that give, to use the inane marketing jargon, “watery notes.” Except that Aegean’s top lacks the metal-and-freon ice-water shock of Chrome, and its dry-down turns out to smell like a vague, clean countertop.

Which is odd given that other Morris pieces are startling, statement-making olfactory sculptures. Gotham is a modernized leather with a decided animalic angle. (“Animalic” means an animal scent, like the armpit of a stock trader watching the Dow.) Given the current savagery on Wall Street, Gotham is uncomfortably appropriate. After about five minutes, the leather asserts itself, the armpit becomes a background murmur, the whole thing smooths out, and you have another classic British gentleman’s library with a bit of the gentleman. Not original, but who cares? It’s a smooth, perfectly built, rich masculine that deserves a try.

I have never smelled anything quite like Afire. It opens as brandied, minty plum jam, warm as a steam radiator and sweet. Then the mint (which is terrific) does a dive, coming to hover just below the surface (all of Morris’ perfumes do a fast-forward metamorphosis on the skin) and Afire becomes the scent of an ineffable fruit liqueur coming to a boil in a pastry chef’s pot.

But it is Neil Morris for Takashimaya, introduced last year, that is perhaps most striking. Composed as an exclusive for the quixotically beautiful Japanese department store, the scent is a luxury retro with power and a high-gloss, premodernist effect. The scent is purplish fruit, big pinot noir and dark ripe plum, plus the scent of a 1930s boudoir: the fragrances of the old-fashioned creams and makeup and the scarlet velvet drapes thrown in. This is the sister of Tom Ford’s Black Orchid minus the Cognac. Excellent diffusion, excellent persistence and a well-built infrastructure that, while complex, maintains its integrity and balance. It may or may not be you, but it is worth the subway trip to Fifth and 54th to take this olfactory trip.

Cuir Ottoman by Parfum dEmpire

2009-10-01T10:08:30-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ Excellent

Parfum d’Empire is a niche Parisian label run by Marc-Antoine Corticchiato, its owner, creative director and perfumer. A Corsican, Corticchiato has a love of the intense smells of islands: hot dust, sea salt, smoke, arid maritime plants. He also has a fascination with empire, which may be genetic: Corsica has been violently traded between warring powers for centuries, and the island has enjoyed a Mediterranean-side seat to the rises and falls of numerous empires, from Greek to Roman to French. In 1769, Corsica contributed to the last of these a boy named Napoleon, the future Empereur des Francais, born in the port town of Ajaccio.

The house’s guiding creative concept is the scent of empires long disappeared, and even the scent of the people and things that built them: Equistrius is Corticchiato’s homage to the horse, the noble animal without which the world’s empires (save possibly the current, declining American version) would not have existed. Fougere Bengale is the smell of the great Islamic Mughal Empire, begun in 1526 and ended in 1857, when the Indian subcontinent passed under the rule of Imperial Britain and Victoria, Empress of India. Iskander is the name the defeated Persian Empire gave its conqueror, the Greek warrior Alexander. It’s as if Corticchiato were creating a wearable Wikipedia of military history.

Not all men love the scent of leather. Perfumers create it using the smoky, hot-asphalt smell of birch tar, pyrazines (think pyromaniac in molecular form) and isoquinolines. This takes some getting used to. Putting on Andy Tauer’s Lonestar Memories (the smell of smoking tar and mesquite charcoal lingering on a cowboy’s saddle) is like bungee jumping into a volcano. Lancome’s Cuir (“cuir” means leather in French) and Chanel’s Cuir de Russie are leather made more seductive, and Hermes’ breathtaking recent leather, Kelly Caleche, is one of the loveliest, most ingenious perfumes in decades: a supple, luxurious leather band, tanned and oiled, wrapped around a crystal vase holding subtle spring flowers.

Corticchiato’s approach, Cuir Ottoman, is less brutal than Tauer’s, less luxurious than Chanel’s and more butch than Hermes’. Here is a true-to-life leather, a literalist work of art. I have no idea whether the leather used by Ottoman rulers was cured in some particularly pleasant manner, but this leather is wonderfully present and tactile, the scent of straps that held a sheath, or perhaps a sandal in the Sultan’s Topkapi Palace, meant to be slipped onto the delicate, perfumed foot of a harem girl. Put on Cuir Ottoman and smell your arm: the leather sandal, fragrant as a flower, softly heated in the sun, waits for the girl.

L'Eau de Tarocco by Diptyque

2009-10-01T10:09:24-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Transcendent

Perhaps the most impoverished way of conceiving of a perfume (or of describing one) is listing its raw materials. It’s like experiencing Ravel’s “Pavane” by reading the sheet music, or smelling James Heeley’s Menthe Fraiche by looking at its lab formula.

There is one exception. When a perfumer creates a crystalline fragrance using a transparent technique to execute a simple concept, the raw materials illuminate the result. This is the case with the sublime l’Eau de Tarocco, which Diptyque launched this month, crafted by the Ravel of perfumers, Olivier Pescheux.

Pescheux, working with Diptyque’s creative director, Myriam Badault, began with the most elemental of concepts. In Morocco, Pescheux had eaten a simple traditional dish, carpaccio d’orange, a thinly sliced orange sprinkled with rose water, cinnamon and a touch of saffron. Pescheux and Badault decided he would build an olfactory carpaccio d’orange.

He began by choosing the Calabrian orange variety Tarocco. The expression of most oranges (citrus perfume raw materials are always oils expressed/pressed from their peels) differs markedly from the taste of their flesh, which is generally fruitier and more floral. Tarocco’s particularity is that its expressed oil and its fruit match almost perfectly.

Pescheux works in Paris for the scent-maker Givaudan, which produces an extremely high quality of unadulterated raw materials that it designates Orpur. Pescheux selected Givaudan’s Orpur Tarocco first. To it, he added Orpur essences of Sri Lankan cinnamon bark and Laotian turmeric, and a distillation of ginger for bite. Orpur Bulgarian rose for the carpaccio’s rose water. Hedione high-cis (found in jasmine) for its airy floral quality. The molecule Magnolan, which gives both white flowers and a rose touch, and which Pescheux built in to form a bridge linking Hedione to the Bulgarian rose. To polish, he put in Texas cedar essence for the foundation, Somalian olibanum (the incense you smell in a Russian Orthodox church) for mystery, and two Givaudan captive molecules, Cosmone, for powder, richness and softness, and Serenolide, for a dry texture to “carry” the incense.

L’Eau de Tarocco’s is a short formula, only 23 raw materials.

What is interesting about the resulting perfume is that it is supposed to be the fourth in Pescheux’s new and increasingly extraordinary Diptyque eaux de colognes collection. (They are becoming as good as Jean-Claude Ellena’s new eaux de cologne collection for Hermès.) The cologne genre: pale, fleeting, one-dimensional, antiquated watercolors of lemon and grapefruit— is uninteresting. With Pescheux and Ellena, we are seeing a fundamental reworking of the category. Tarocco is an astonishingly perfect piece of scent work, an equilibrium of palely spiced fresh air moving through a dusky orange grove. It effortlessly transcends its genre. It is less watercolor, more oil painting, peaceful as a Buddha, elegant as linen, fresh as grass cooling in the evening.

Signature Blue Mark for Jack Black

2009-10-01T10:10:11-07:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

Emily Dalton and Curran Dandurand had worked long enough in the beauty industry, listening to men increasingly curious about treatment products but at the same time afraid of touching anything either “feminine” or “complicated.” So they decided to solve the problem. They created their own brand, exclusively for the male of the species, called Jack Black.

Dalton and Dandurand have come up with very nice bottles and tubes that recall old-world apothecary potions, reinforced with more than a touch of masculine liquor bottles and cigar-box labels. But the caveat, of course, is that while the packaging may get the thing into a guy’s hand, the brand then lives or dies on the product itself. And the product, to an immense degree, lives or dies on its scent.

So what are traditional masculine smells? Peppermint, menthol, sage, lavender, eucalyptus, rosemary. And gin. If practical, romantic masculinity with a healthy shot of Gordon’s is your muse, then the people to create three scents to accompany your products are Claude Dir and Yann Vasnier at the scent-maker Givaudan.

Vasnier did Jack Black Signature Black Mark; Dir did Blue and Silver Mark. Again, terrific packaging with the right touch of humor (“Splash on responsibly,” reads the back of the box), and all three could have been carried around in a small silver flask in that dopp kit next to the aftershave.

Black is, unsurprisingly, the darkest of the three, the scent of smoky charcoal and charred herbs and seasoned leather. A bit cleft chin for my taste. Silver is somewhat less stoic and more flying ace. Dir used synthetics called isobutylquinolines to create a nice leather; an excellent natural Guatemalan cardamom for a pungent spice exoticism; and a synthetic called Ebanol, a new Givaudan captive (patented) molecule, for a creamy sandalwood finish.

Of the three, I favor Blue Mark. I have been waiting years for a mint fragrance, an idea as obviously ingenious as it is ingeniously obvious, and Dir, Dalton and Dandurand go a decent way to furnishing one. Blue’s basic components result in a culinary masterpiece. Dir began with a marvelous tangy ginger and a Japanese juniper material so gorgeous it takes the breath away. And then he added something as mundane as it is magical, a little molecule called carvone laevo. Carvone laevo is what’s called a “nature identical synthetic,” which is to say you can find the molecule in nature, but it’s cheaper and cleaner to just make it. And it’s quixotic, a scent fluctuating between a sweet, ethereal spearmint and light caraway seed.

The limiting factor in Blue (and Silver and Black) is the target audience. Most men fear fragrances that are too creative. No self-respecting World War I pilot is going to splash on this amount of overt beauty. So Dir wrapped Blue in Agarbois, a straightforward Givaudan woody captive. It reassures the guys. The disappointment is that while this is a wise commercial decision, Dir has used the wood to almost entirely tame this mesmerizing elixir of mint and Asian mountain. The good news is, first, that you can still perceive it on skin, a masculine scent with a great heart. And secondly, Jack Black can always make a fourth scent for men, one that doesn’t reassure but rather blows the guys away. They’ve already got the basic architecture.

Menthe Fraiche by Heeley

2009-10-01T10:10:41-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Transcendent

Discovering an extraordinary new scent is a joy in itself, like unexpectedly coming across a gift. Discovering an entire collection of extraordinary scents adds to this an element of awe, if not anxiety. Where has it been? How will you categorize them? (How will you pay for them?) Which will you wear first?

James Heeley, a young Englishman based in Paris, is a somewhat uncategorizable designer— he makes things that, while having a certain practicality, edge into pure art. Until recently, he worked uniquely in visual media. A few years ago he decided to creative-direct a series of scents. They are sublime, exquisitely done, and they, too, blur the line between product and art. Heeley’s collection joins a select few as among the world’s best.

None of his works are “masculine” or “feminine.” (“These are categories I tend to ignore,” said Heeley.) He has done a literalist postmodern ironic piece, Esprit du Tigre, which is the straight-up scent of the Tiger Balm you used to carry in your backpack; its artistry and the pleasure one takes in it derive from aesthetic transliteration, placing the familiar in a startlingly different context, like Roy Lichtenstein transforming a comic-book image into a painting. With another fragrance, Cardinal, Heeley worked in abstract expressionism, a scent that intentionally cites no identifiable landmarks and instead forces beauty into being on its own terms.

And he has done my current favorite, Menthe Fraiche. Like the rest of the collection, Menthe Fraiche is both cerebral and viscerally immediate. Its realism is deceptive. Technically, it is the scent of mint. In reality, it is a perfume that uses mint’s form to reconceptualize a material into a work.

Heeley’s first scent, Figuier Edition 1, was done for a candle that launched in 1998. “I got interested in creating a wearable perfume from Figuier,” Heeley said of his fig-tree scent, but the company that made his scents was demanding that he order an impractical volume of products. So he started looking for a perfumer to do his fine fragrances. Finally he arrived at APF, a small lab near Grasse in France, and began working with its perfumer, David Maruitte.

Maruitte indeed constructed Figuier as Heeley’s first perfume, released in 2001. But, Heeley said, “I had all these other ideas in my head, one involving fresh mint, which I adore.” He’d smelled a wild mint in Corsica. Before they’d finalized Figuier, they started working on the mint perfume.

“Almost everyone I questioned thought it was a bad idea,” Heeley said. “No one could imagine wearing a mint. I loved the idea. I couldn’t imagine anything better. Mint is very important in English culture. And yes, it exists in chewing gum, candies, chocolates, but I saw a mint perfume as beautifully sophisticated, avant-garde.”

Perfumers have had mint raw materials for years. (It is incomprehensible that no one before Heeley has thought to make a fine fragrance of mint, but there we are.) There are essentially two: la menthe crépue, spearmint, which is sweeter, and mint arvensis, peppermint, the mint in most chewing gums, which is greener and rounder, with an aspect of fresh-cut grass. They built the perfume’s foundation on a natural essence of peppermint for the more vegetal aspect. Peppermint also contains a great amount of menthol, “which gives you a frozen, blue mint,” Heeley said. “Its role is to bring freshness and cold to the perfume.”

From that base, Maruitte began construction. First, the synthetic steryl acetate, a green, lightly aromatic crushed leaf. “Unsurprisingly to anyone who knows perfumery,” he said, “the synthetic is what lends the fragrance a natural aspect.” Methyl pamplemousse, which is actually more lemon than grapefruit, for citrus lift. Alpha and beta ionones, which are generally used to create irises and violets, for conveying a powdery green tea and a refined quality. Maruitte then used the synthetic Hedione, both to refine the tea and to give the perfume air, to let the citrus materials breathe. There are 28 raw materials in all.

Menthe Fraiche smells like mint on a cool summer evening, green leaves refreshing after the heat of the sun, a crisp, natural smell borrowing depth from the scents around it: a lawn, some sun-dried straw, the cooling air. There is no trace of sugar, no paste. Menthe Fraiche is a radical departure from virtually all concepts of “perfume.” I would go so far as to argue that it is, potentially, a new school to be investigated, one that is informed both by quartz-clear minimalism and noir hyper-realism, but lighter, more raw and ethereal. What smoke, old wood and spice are to some perfumers, organic freshness and live vegetation are to Maruitte and Heeley. The scent wears like coolness, like clean white sheets. It is sharp as the prick of a tiny thorn. It is reassuringly good.

“People said to me, ‘Who wants to smell like toothpaste? This is never going to work,’” recalled Heeley. “But done correctly, every scent works.”

Dior Homme by Dior

2009-11-02T15:13:20-08:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

Just marketing an iris scent for men (the flower’s smell is a total synthetic conceit and one usually reserved for women) was an act of creativity. But Dior Homme is also subtle and spectacular. Iris, handled correctly, is liquid good taste. Bois d’Iris by the Different Company is an austere iris, and Iris Poudre by Pierre Bourdon for Frederic Malle is a velvet iris. All are breathtaking. In Dior Homme, its perfumer, Olivier Polge, has used a light, assured, masterly touch to turn out an iris that has the grace of a Japanese maple and the careful, muscular cool of a leopard.

The Dreamer by Versace

2009-11-02T15:15:31-08:00

★ ★ ★ ★ Excellent

Who was the genius at Versace who hired the perfumer Jean-Pierre Bethouart to conjure the Dreamer ? Bethouart has worked magic here, taking Versace’s genetics: its petulant Italian machismo— and adding technical virtuosity (the stuff diffuses perfectly on the skin) to create the scent you’d get if it were possible to combine sugar, steel and graphite. The Dreamer startles you. It’s strangely mouthwatering, like a French pastry crossed with a Thai spice (caramel lemongrass?). Then there’s the hint of ice cream, gunpowder, star fruit, hot cocoa and blood-orange peel crushed on wet rock. There is more creativity in a thimbleful of the Dreamer than in a gallon of almost anything else.

B*Men by Thierry Mugler

2009-11-02T15:17:21-08:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

Buildings are scent machines. At 40 Mercer, the Jean Nouvel-designed building going up in SoHo, the kitchens are Italian walnut, the backsplashes are heavy-gauge stainless steel, and the air is pungent with the scent of fresh concrete. Then there’s my old tenement in the East 30’s, fragrant with prewar brick, old plaster and sweet, aging linoleum tile. The scent of building materials can indeed be wonderful, so it’s not surprising that some excellent perfumes evoke them. Comme des Garcons’ fascinating, perverse and basically unwearable Odeur 53 smells like paving tar. Azzaro created Chrome for men, an idea based on chilled steel. Technically, it’s possible to make a perfume that someone would actually want to wear based on the smell you get walking past the fresh steel skeleton of the Bank of America at 42nd Street and the Avenue of the Americas, but frankly, I’ve never smelled one. However, there happen to be three scents on the market that, by happy chance, smell like three different building materials, each as fragrant as jasmine and as innovative as jet fuel.

One of the most beautiful scents is that of concrete. The raw, noisy gush of aroma from the cement mixer’s mouth, or the smell of a freshly poured sidewalk hot with summer and wet with rain, is the perfume of the city, and in Christine Nagel and Jacques Huclier’s B*Men for Thierry Mugler , you can smell a fresh 50-story tower being born. Nagel and Huclier have added an extra layer to this urban fragrance; if B*Men is a creamy cement wall, this wall has a French patisserie on one side (caramelized sugar, crusty bread) and, on the other, the rich spice aisle of Kalustyan’s at Lexington Avenue and 28th Street. It’s a terrific perfume.

Badgley Mischka by Badgley Mischka

2009-11-02T15:20:38-08:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

Certain perfumes emerge from their bottles like movie stars, pure liquid glamour. What differ are the kind of glamour and the kind of star. The modern paradigm of olfactory glamour is Fragile by Jean Paul Gaultier, a scent like an instantly recognized face passing through a gauntlet of flashbulbs. You glimpse the sleek black dress, and then she’s gone. Chanel No. 19, by contrast, is rather a stunning ingenue; Estee Lauder’s Youth Dew Amber Nude is glamour morphed into sensuality. Juicy Couture’s eponymous first scent is a surprisingly restrained glamour: a starlet wearing pink flowers in the cool Los Angeles air. Roberto Cavalli’s Serpentine is a star in the tropical heat of Rio, where she’s gone for a face lift. Following are three of the more interesting ways glamour is turned into fragrance.

Awards season in Hollywood now has a scent. Badgley Mischka is the abstracted fragrance of gowns and diamonds and the purple smell of lilies around Benedict Canyon pools in the early evening when the caterers are setting up. Lean in, and you also get the hostess’s makeup and that young bartender’s early sweat. Technically solid (it lasts beautifully on the skin), the success of this perfume couture lies in its virtual reproduction of the brand’s clothing couture. Badgley Mischka produces creations that project off the body; the perfume finishes the gown to the degree that it will be hard to imagine getting dressed in one without getting dressed in the other.

Versace Eau de Parfum by Versace

2009-09-15T11:42:24-07:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

I saw Donatella Versace on Italian television once when she was asked about her vision. With extravagant gestures, she cried, “Lusso, lusso, lusso!” (“luxury, luxury, luxury”), throwing her hands in the air as if seeding a catwalk with bits of cubic zirconia. Versace’s perfume licensee, EuroItalia, has faultlessly translated her taste into scent using some of the biggest creative names in the business: Bertrand Duchaufour, Francoise Caron, Francis Kurkdjian, among others; these are some of the best perfumers working and authors in other contexts of very serious olfactory work. Donatella is a master of synthetic luxe, and her perfumes (in particular Bright Crystal and Crystal Noir) are paradigms of the school. Versace Eau de Parfum, however, takes the aesthetic to a new level.

EuroItalia has outdone itself here. They clearly asked for “the Chanel No 5 of Versace” and Donatella, the creative director of the project, and the perfumer Loc Dong have given the company exactly what they wanted. Versace Eau de Parfum is Versace doing elegant feminine classic. This is mixing No 5’s powder, Joy’s rose, and Dioressence’s lily of the valley for the woman with the excellent plastic surgery and a principal residence in Beverly Hills.

The perfume opens beautifully and smells like an early Los Angeles rooftop breakfast at the Peninsula: the scent of jasmine in fresh Pacific air plus the perfume of the guava mango fruit plate the waiter brings, with a bit of the swimming pool water and a hint of the exhaust from the Ferraris being valet-parked in front. The drydown is ever so slightly harsh. This isn’t necessarily a negative. It’s an effect nature uses in freesia, for example, and while in a perfume it can come from not giving the perfumer enough money for the best raw materials, let’s assume that here, it’s intentional. The slight coarseness makes it pure Versace. The white flowers and fresh green fade into a murmur after about 20 minutes. And there you have it.

Like the brand, the perfume should be taken with a pinch of irony. (The press material lists “Jasmine/Angel wing” as an ingredient. Why the hell are they killing angels and distilling their wings to make perfume? Doesn’t the EPA regulate this? Isn’t there some kind of celestial wildlife law?) But for those who love Versace (and the house has made an indelible mark on fashion) this is an extraordinarily faithful distillation of its essence. Chloé and Yves Saint Laurent’s Elle are not greatly inferior as perfumes, but they are distinctly inferior as incarnations of the spirits of their houses. By that measure, Versace Eau de Parfum is a masterpiece.

The Beat by Burberry for Women

2009-09-18T10:29:53-07:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

Burberry is licensed to Inter Parfums, and my principal criticism of Inter Parfums-made scents, which include Christian Lacroix, Lanvin, Banana Republic and the Gap, is a general lack of daring. Inter Parfum’s fragrances can be competent or incompetent, commercial misses or right on the commercial pulse, but to me they most often lack, shall we say, gonads. Now comes the feminine version of The Beat. Under the creative direction of Christopher Bailey (Burberry’s creative director) and Philippe Benacin (the chief executive of Inter Parfums), plus the three-perfumer team of Beatrice Piquet, Dominique Ropion and Olivier Polge, they have made something quite competent, quite well-tailored to the Burberry brand, and almost innovative.

The Beat has amassed both a startling amount of attention and a truly devoted following, and it’s not difficult to understand why. It is a nicely avant-garde scent— nicely in the sense that it is smartly and carefully positioned at that pendulum point where the refreshingly different and startling meets the accessibly commercial. To phrase it differently, the Beat manages a bit of edginess without actually being provocative (like the brilliant Gucci Envy), neuronally overwhelming (Angel, Outrageous) or disorientingly strange (most anything by Comme des Garcons). This is both its weakness (at least for those with sophisticated tastes and a desire for a thrill) and its strength. One could argue that given what Burberry doubtlessly wanted, the balance manages to fall on the side of strength.

The avant garde part of the Beat (its best part) descends from a strong aesthetic predecessor, one of the most innovative, authentically strange scents of the past two decades: Dzing!, created by the extremely talented and quixotic perfumer Olivia Giacobetti for l’Artisan Parfumeur. Giacobetti’s concept was the scent of the circus: the woody sawdust, the animalic smell of the tigers, the caramel apples, the heavy, canvas-tent-covered air. If you know the conceptual blueprint, you can make out these elements rather clearly. But the scent critic Luca Turin has noted that Dzing! in fact smells like cardboard (which testifies to how little a perfume’s concept may have to do with the final work of art), and cardboard is a comforting, subtly succulent mix of wood, spice and cream.

And that is part of what you get. The other part is a decent sleek urban (meaning no flowery stuff but rather the smell (literally) of the interior of an Aston Martin: metal, expensive leather and carpeting, glass and cooled air) fashion feminine. The Beat could have really been a statement. Instead, that potential is mostly subsumed by a well-made gourmand contemporary scent: cake batter and sweetish spices, nicely crafted and reminiscent of Calvin Klein’s new Secret Obsession but with less culinary complexity and less texture, i.e., less daring.

The Beat is good. It’s a very nice, British-feeling scent and a good representative of the new Burberry and today’s London cool. Perhaps the only real reproach is that, pushed farther, it might have been much more.

La Nuit de LHomme by Yves Saint Laurent

2009-09-18T10:44:39-07:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

La Nuit de L’Homme , the brand new masculine by the perfumers Anne Flipo, Dominique Ropion and Pierre Wargnye for Yves Saint Laurent , shows the two roles a flanker can play.

Houses create “brands” (as individual perfumes are known in the industry) and spend millions of dollars to anchor them in overcrowded collective commercial waters. In 2006 Yves Saint Laurent aggressively introduced L’Homme on a PR platform of breathtaking ubiquity and energetic style. From billboards and magazines a man in need of a haircut glared at us. On YouTube, under video ads in which the camera swirled around him, plaintive posts appeared: “what’s the name of this man?” “what’s his phone number?” And responses, from the regretful (“It’s the French actor Olivier Martinez but I don’t have his phone number”) to the awed (“This is a MAN”).

It was, a bit unfortunately, a man. Olfactorily, L’Homme was a well-executed 21st-century update of the traditional masculine: less herbal aromatics, light on the citrus water, and a structure for the machine of dark woods and butch spice polished to the dull shine of a golf club. YSL scored a serious commercial hit (NPD reports that in sales for the second quarter of 2009, L’Homme was No. 11; Martinez may have been induced to let slip his phone number), but the success was a bit generic, dangerously fungible.

Enter L’Homme’s flanker. Here is where things get interesting.

To translate “flanker” into movie terminology: “Spiderman” comes out, is a huge hit, and “Spiderman 2” is its flanker. Yes, La Nuit de L’Homme extended the brand, as a flanker is meant to, leveraged the millions the marketers had invested (the hexagonal cap was repeated, etc.). And in the same manner that Christian Bale inherited the keys to Gotham City from George Clooney, the French actor Vincent Cassel took over for Martinez. (YSL generously supplied YouTube with both the ad and its “making of.”) This marketing role is the first one a flanker plays.

But a flanker’s second (and in the end infinitely more important) role is olfactory. This can go one of two ways. It just redoes the same character. Or it takes the original character and reinterprets it. Happily, La Nuit de L’Homme is a quite successful reinterpretation, and YSL has put something very nice on the market.

Flipo, Ropion and Wargnye have built an appropriately understated but definitive masculine gourmand to surround its traditionalist core (the smoky black Himalayan tea, the fragrant Indian cardamom, the spicy cinnamon bark). Not only does this save Nuit from being just another in a crowd, but Nuit is more viscerally attractive because it is literally more delicious. Not too much either. The gourmand aspect is subtle enough that an hour or so into the flanker it burns off, and the original L’Homme is left on skin. Which is a bit of a shame. Had YSL let the perfumers take this further, really push this particular envelope, it could have been a solid four stars, rare for a masculine.

Sensuous by Estee Lauder

2009-09-15T22:07:18-07:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

On November 5, 2007, after having sat in on a creative meeting at the offices of Firmenich, the Swiss perfume maker, I was offered (briefly) something to smell. It was handed to me by Karyn Khoury, the highest-ranked creative director for the Estée Lauder Companies’ scents. While Khoury did not tell me its name, she did say that the perfume, which she and Firmenich perfumer Annie Buzantian were working on, was to be the next feminine launched by the Estée Lauder brand.

I remember finding the unnamed, unfinished scent jaw-droppingly innovative and beautiful. But I am now uncertain both of my memory of that olfactory sketch and, to a degree, of my impression of the perfume it has become.

Lauder premiered Sensuous earlier this summer with one of the most spectacular launches ever given a fragrance. Gwyneth Paltrow, Elizabeth Hurley, Caroline Murphy and Hilary Rhoda provide no less than four major faces for this one scent. There is a very specific reason for this. Lauder is the queen of American perfume houses, and it was Josephine Esther Mentzer from Corona, Queens, who transformed perfume into an authentic American art and herself into Estée Lauder. Starting with Youth Dew in 1953, Lauder dominated U.S. sales. For four decades American women viewed her perfumes, from Aliage in 1972 to White Linen in 1978 to Beautiful in 1985 as basically mandatory.

Less so now. In 1995, Khoury and Buzantian collaborated on Pleasures, which became a Lauder franchise to rival Warner’s Batman (Pleasures and Beautiful still sit firmly among atop NPD’s U.S. bestseller lists; Beautiful usually at #1), but the last major Lauder perfume, the excellent Beyond Paradise of 2003, was a major disappointment. The brand’s demographics have aged along with its scents, and the buzz (fickle and capricious) has wandered off to grace other, cooler names.

Lauder put everything it has into Sensuous. The risk the company is taking is serious. Sensuous is a wood, and wood scents for women are notoriously perilous since wood is associated with “masculine” (incorrectly; see Feminité du Bois by Shiseido). Lauder scents are historically either florals or aldehydics (i.e. powders like White Linen). But this is a bet on change. If the bet works, Sensuous will lower the all-important age of Lauder’s clientele; if it doesn’t, it may also turn off existing clients. Putting this perfume on the market is a major act of faith at 767 Fifth Avenue.

Is there a way to dissociate this scent from its backstory? Perhaps. Perhaps not. The perfume opens nicely on skin, a wood mixed with such a striking vanillic chewy accord (plus anise and pepper) that it reads like the smell of the firewood waiting to heat the oven of a pastry chef. The wood has bathed in spices and hot creams and kitchen air steamed with bubbling sugar. Buzantian’s construction is solid, the materials mesh expertly, and Khoury has clearly gotten what she wanted. But if Sensuous avoids copying extant perfumes (a serious plus) and states its case clearly (a contemporary oriental) it does so with a somewhat muted voice. I believe, but can’t judge for sure, that the November iteration was reined in. There is no smoke from this wood. That might have been too edgy. In fact, the wood there is has been kept at such a low volume that the perfume morphs into a golden, accessible gourmand rather than anything close to a full-on wood concept (reference: Chanel’s Sycamore). More pretty than striking.

But that’s what Lauder wanted. And despite an inexplicable bottle, Sensuous was NPD-ranked #2 the week of July 20-26. Also what Lauder wanted. We’ll see what happens when the ads stop. I think that my initial reaction to the sketch of the perfume was, in large part, surprise. To dare, even cautiously, is admirable. The final version of Sensuous dares you for a moment, then offers you more conventional charms. There is such good will surrounding the perfume (one gets the sense that even its competitors somehow wish the queen a success) that it was only after wearing it for a while that I placed this smell. Sensuous is the scent of Estée Lauder holding its breath.

Eau de Shalimar by Guerlain

2009-10-01T09:20:40-07:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

The “oriental” category of perfumes is basically defined as scents built on two materials, vanilla and labdanum. Vanilla is slightly problematic; the 1960s turned it into a sort of hippie cliché. Then there’s labdanum, a natural resin from a Mediterranean bush that smells quite strongly like a dock worker’s armpit. Shalimar, created in 1925 by the perfumer Jacques Guerlain, is historically one of the most important perfumes ever made as it is arguably the progenitor of the entire category of parfums gourmands (culinary perfumes). But Shalimar is also a true oriental, which means vanilla plus labdanum, and that in turn means that Guerlain faces the challenge of selling this great early 20th-century work of art in the 21st-century global marketplace.

What to do?

In 2004, Guerlain issued Shalimar Light by perfumer Mathilde Laurent, who brilliantly modernized the juice while keeping its soul. Guerlain has now unaccountably taken Light off the market and is launching an even more updated update, Eau de Shalimar, which debuts in two weeks. For the past week I’ve been wearing the 1925 on my right arm (to be precise, the 1925 perfume updated with new materials, as the original formula contained several ingredients that are no longer legal for allergy reasons) and the new 2008 on my left. When I held my left arm up to a middle-aged Pfizer executive he said, “Nice. I’d definitely buy that.” Right arm? “Old-fashioned.” But a 30-something Lehman Brothers guy loved the old-fashioned perfume. “Vanilla!” he said happily. He then smelled my left arm, frowning, “Yo, dude, after that first one, I can barely smell it.”

This may be a problem. Eau de Shalimar is, at least for the first 20 minutes or so, a case study in how to modernize a scent. While the 1925 version is a darkly lush mystery (the slightly musty hallways of exotic hotels) 2008 comes out of the bottle with the by-the-book bright citrus top note that young perfumers are being instructed to put on their commercial scents. (You can actually smell the creative directors taking aim at the 15-29 market demographic.) When Guerlain modernizes the oriental category untill the labdanum evaporates and the vanilla is soaked in lemon zest, does any of the Shalimar DNA remain? At moments, I’m not convinced; the drydown strikes me as far too hygienic and, yo, I can barely smell it. At others moments, it seems to work. At a recent lunch with an editor friend of mine, I offered my left (2008) arm. “Oh! I like that!” she said. Before I could present my other arm, she added, “You know, it reminds me of Shalimar.”

Daisy by Marc Jacobs

2009-09-15T16:01:54-07:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

What in the world is the point of Daisy? I have rarely smelled a perfume with a personality so impossible to pin down. Chimerical. Start with the most basic question: Is it good or bad? Hard to say. What do you consider good? A perfume with a clear character? Then no. Daisy, a 2007 launch that the perfumer Alberto Morillas crafted under the creative direction of Marc Jacobs and Coty’s vice president of marketing, Michael D’Arminio, is almost mesmerizing in its violent resistance to being mesmerizing. A perfume built to play a specific role? Then emphatically yes. Floral without flowers, sweet without sugar, somehow a pretty face without allowing a single feature of that face ever to come into distinct focus. (The only distinct aspect here is its demographic appeal: the perfume skews young.) It seems to have a peculiar engineering that allows it to melt into any background, to speak with a female voice emanating from invisible speakers somewhere over your head, to travel under any door like smoke and occupy, comfortably if spectrally, any space.

After a few days wearing it, I remembered where I had experienced a similar sensation. In the haunting, eerie science-fiction movie “Sunshine,” the director Danny Boyle faced the problem of casting the role of the voice of a spaceship flying in the future toward a dying sun. He wound up choosing the young British-African RADA-trained actress Chipo Chung, and the movie is brilliantly and quietly suffused in this voice that emanates from the ship’s walls in an accent as elegant as it is unplaceable. (Chung’s natural accent is apparently lightly Zimbabwean.) The spaceship speaks in tones pleasant, female, subtle yet clear, palpable yet diaphanous, ever-present but never seen. It serves as a crystalline, calming and just slightly ominous counterpoint to the movie’s events, and I suspect that Daisy will play that role for those who will wear it. People who come across it on your skin will stop and hesitate, attempting to classify the scent, but will find it impossible to pin down.

Attitude by Giorgio Armani

2009-11-02T15:57:51-08:00

★ Do Not Inhale

The disappointments among scents marketed to men are greater than the number of atoms in the universe. Masculines (the industry term) are generally defined by the vast creativity, beauty, elegance and innovation that have NOT been put into them. Those qualities are usually reserved for feminines, though men who know scent just wear what’s great and ignore the gender distinctions. Marketers be damned.

Armani owes its dominance of the masculine scent market to a wildly successful formula: the olfactory version of weaving silk into a Kevlar vest, light armor having always been Armani’s genius. Armani does not produce perfumes. It produces machines. This is not a negative per se. However, the problem with it is exemplified by Attitude . This scent was created by Alberto Morillas, Annick Meriardo and Olivier Cresp, each an artist possessed of genuine creativity, but marching here in lock step, they have manufactured the smell of a male model photographed through a polarized lens. The man inside is sealed off, untouchable, armored.

Chloe by Chloe

2009-09-15T11:21:47-07:00

★ Do Not Inhale

Perfumers are hired to create perfumes by fashion houses, whose “creative teams,” usually a group of marketers, direct the perfumers in making the juices: “a little sweeter, please,” “no, less floral,” “can you boost the wood in the dry-down?” They also make the final call: “It’s this one!” and there’s the perfume. Perfume-making thus functions very much according to the weakest link theory: the scent is only as good as any given team member’s worst decision.

An exception can occur when someone very talented is able to overcome a mediocre vision. In the perfume industry, Michel Almairac is an artist and artisan of talent and depth, though Almairac’s talents, like every perfumer’s, function inside the parameters of the brands for which he creates. He has made the lovely, ethereal, and beautifully strange Ambrette 9 for Le Labo, the immense innovative hit masculine Farenheit for Dior, the utterly worthless testosterone-filled drugstore masculine Kiton, a stunningly innovative modernist work of art, Gucci Rush, and Voleur de Roses for l’Artisan parfumeur, a delicately luminous perfume of roses macerated in twilight.

Chloé asked Almairac, along with the perfumer Amandine Marie, to make Chloé, which launches exclusively at Saks on February 1. One instantly smells the weak link: the Chloé creative team. Here is a serious fashion house launching a perfume that has absolutely no business representing it. Not only is Chloé an uninteresting, clichéd floral (why are houses still launching saccharine, vaguely unidentifiable composite flowers?) it smells like a perfume masquerading as a fabric softener. What’s worse is that there are some good fabric softener scents out there; this smells cheap and slightly chemical. What went wrong? If pressed, I’d guess from the scent that the Chloé creative team gave Almairac and Marie around $20/lb for formula (i.e. the total cost of the raw materials they can put into 1 pound of pure perfume) to work with. It’s a price that places out of reach all expensive raw materials like Bulgarian rose attar. (It’s hard to do a good scent for under $40 per lb, even harder when it’s a floral.) That this juice smells synthetic is one thing. The graver problem is that it has no depth, no character, no daring, no personality. But the house made the final call. And here’s Chloé.

J'Adore by Dior

2009-09-15T11:13:10-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ Excellent

A perfume’s becoming a wild financial success seems to engender the assumption that it is inferior. This is snobbery.

Snobby consumers like to bandy about the term “mass,” which is shorthand for “easy and accessible.” For their part, perfumers prefer “commercial,” by which they mean “less artistically pure than the exquisite, niche perfume I did that you never heard of.” And while they love making those for the artistic pleasure, every one of them would kill to make a commercial hit. The perfumer Calice Becker created Dior’s J’adore, and because it is pulling in vast amounts of cash (reports have it grossing nearly a half billion euros) it’s not uncommon to hear snarky comments along the lines of, “This is easy stuff.”

J’adore is not easy stuff. First, Becker’s career has demonstrated great range. She has gone from Hilfiger’s Tommy Girl, an excellent neo-electrical (a contemporary perfume so clear and clean, so energized and perfect, that you feel you’re smelling them via an HDTV screen) to the luminous contemporary fruit of Estee Lauder’s Beyond Paradise (both the feminine and the masculine). She is also responsible for the heavy 1970’s luxury pastiche of Donna Karan’s Gold and the delightful leather notes in Cuir de Lancome.

J’adore represents yet another extension of Becker’s range. It also demonstrates her technical prowess: J’adore is, technically, a triumph. It lasts on the skin and diffuses like clockwork.

But it is the scent that is truly remarkable. It smells as if Becker had mixed the perfect operatic aria: grand voice, lush strings, cool woodwinds. J’adore is Ravel-worthy: flower, and fruit, and spring water coming together in unison. It attracts without appearing to try; it’s sweet and yet maintains the proper distance. Forget the ads with Charlize Theron. Some people will buy the first bottle because of a movie star’s face, but it’s the smell that sells the second, and it is only the smell of this thing that has made it a blockbuster. The success tricks people. I was at a party last year where a perfumer said: “Please, J’adore? I could make a commercial scent like that in two minutes.”

Really. Then why don’t you?

Chandler Burr: Making Sense of Scents

2009-11-02T13:54:02-08:00

Chandler Burr— Scent Critic for the New York Times, published author and host of Scent Dinners with chefs Jimmy Sakatos of The Carlyle in New York, Marten Rios of Santa Fe, and Samuel Benne of Laperouse, Paris, to name just a few. His mission is to inform and entertain, describing fragrance in a metaphorical experience so that we, the average person, have a better understanding and appreciation of Perfume as a work of art. Just as there are food, wine and music critics, Chandler’s reviews of the following perfumes and colognes will guide you through though the overwhelming World of Fragrance.

Terre d'Hermes by Hermes

2009-11-02T15:32:23-08:00

★ ★ ★ ★ Excellent

I have a friend who is a film editor. When you go to the movies with him, he doesn’t watch the film but its composition. While you’re enjoying the acting, the plot and the dialogue, he will talk to you with a precise passion about a sequence of jump cuts that barely registered with you. He sees things that you don’t. Similarly, perfumers smell things that you don’t. One whiff and they are deconstructing a perfume and staring down its interior architecture.

Terre d’Hermes is one of the scents that perfumers praise most highly. “Technically perfect,” a pro commented to me in Paris last year. This scent, created in 2006 by Jean-Claude Ellena, is not an aesthetic revolution. It is, however, a work of extreme precision, the raw materials mesh like the guts of a Swiss watch. Terre is flawless in the metrics that perfumers pay attention to: diffusion, structure and persistence on skin. And its elegance derives as much from its mechanics as from its actual smell, which is a masculine iteration: burnished spice, old leather, autumn air, cologned citrus, of the luminous perfumery that Ellena is known for. If you are in the industry, you simply marvel at the technical work.

Glow by J-Lo

2009-11-02T15:39:41-08:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

I once commented to L’Artisan Parfumeur’s creative director, Pamela Roberts, on the surprising (my word) commercial success of Jennifer Lopez’s first scent. “It’s not at all surprising,” she replied. “It’s an ingenious perfume.” Ingenious? Because it smells like make-up, she explained. And it does. Louise Turner’s scent reinforces everything associated with makeup: luxury, status, beauty, reassurance, love. The concept may have come from Lopez or from Coty’s Catherine Walsh, who oversees J.Lo’s hugely successful perfume franchise, but the technical work is Turner’s, and it is rock solid. Glow subtly triggers the right synaptic responses. The parts meld. Its engineering is velvet.

Light Blue Homme by Dolce & Gabbana

2009-11-02T15:59:04-08:00

★ Do Not Inhale

Light Blue for men is the truly heartbreaking disappointment that comes only after the greatest triumph. Dolce & Gabbana’s Light Blue for women is brilliant, a natural Sicilian citron/tart apple/cedar marvel that Olivier Cresp structured into a glowing, Renzo Piano-like jewel. (One perfect for men, incidentally). Under the aegis of Procter & Gamble, which owns the D&G perfume license, Alberto Morillas has made Light Blue Pour Homme a cynical, trite drugstore scent. Baffingly, he has drawn no olfactory connection to the feminine original. So what you have here is an enigma, a beauty paired with a dull photocopy of a 1980s masculine cliché.

Gucci by Gucci for Women

2009-09-15T11:04:59-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ Excellent

When Gucci decided to create its latest fragrance, the house’s artistic director, Frida Giannini, set herself quite a task: to create the perfume equivalent of a Niketown flagship, huge and impressive and filled to the brim with everything a fan could possibly dream of asking from a brand. It would distill the essence of Gucci: the label’s unrestrained luxury, its blatant carnality, so free of French hauteur, so Italian in its joyful, slightly bad-taste abandon. The name said it all: Gucci by Gucci. Given the amount the house had riding on it, to report that the perfume, which came out in November, succeeds in virtually every way is not merely a relief. It is a pleasure.

I say this with some surprise. Giannini and her Procter & Gamble creative team (P & G owns Gucci’s perfume license) wanted a feminine, a perfume for women. The juice they chose was created by the perfumer Ilias Ermenidis— not an obvious choice, by any means. Ermenidis had done some standard masculine-scent engineering, two by-the-book guy-in-a-tie Givenchy masculines (Pour Homme and its Blue Label offshoot), one for Boss (the quintessence of formulaic male scents), and an Ohio-high-school-locker-room scent for Axe Lab. When he switch-hit with a feminine, the result was Vera Wang Princess, a middle-of-the-road pink sugar candy perfume that was a huge hit with women who like to wear completely safe things.

And, suddenly, the guy produces Gucci by Gucci. To go instantly to the basics: What works so well about this perfume is that despite the many incarnations of Gucci, there is still a certain 1950’s Euro elegance that clings to the brand, and Gucci by Gucci is a wonderfully retro 1950’s luxury perfume. But Ermenidis has reconceptualized retro. Gucci by Gucci winks at the memory of Sophia Loren’s breasts busting out of a black silk dress in 1964, and presents it 2007-style. The perfume opens like a Vegas show, all the glorious, rich, crass materialism you could want.

Another nice choice: Ermenidis has put all this into a gourmand perfume. It’s a culinary masterpiece, edible and chewy, the central scent theme a black plum and dark grapes sugared under hot sun. The fructose content couldn’t be higher.

If Gucci by Gucci has a single technical deficiency, it’s that the perfume’s volume fades a bit faster than one might hope. Nor does it add anything aesthetically; this is not an innovative scent. But one can always reapply and, really, who needs innovation when Gucci has produced such a delicious olfactory sauterne? It’s a marvelous fusion of old and new— and that is arguably the genius of the newest incarnation of Gucci.

Secret Obsession by Calvin Klein

2009-09-15T22:15:29-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ Excellent

This perfume is excellent. And it’s Calvin Klein, which means it’s made by Coty, which is the Jerry Bruckheimer of perfume— a production company specialized in the action-adventure genre whose strategy is to place big stars in formulaic commercial vehicles aimed at blockbuster box office.

And Calvin Klein: here is a brand that labors under the psychic yoke of two huge past successes. 1985’s heavy spice/big gold jewelry/knock you over Obsession, by perfumer Robert Slattery, was the niece of the greater 1977 Opium, by Francoise Marin, Jean-Louis Sieuzac and Raymond Chaillan. (Opium is generally held to be the granddaughter of Francois Coty 1905 l’Origan, minus the flowers and with a hell of a marketing campaign.) Obsession became the scent soundtrack of the 80s: power shoulder pads, big hair and “Dynasty.” Today, it’s wearable only as a retro statement.

A decade later, perfumers Alberto Morillas and Harry Frémont (with their precise commercial instincts under Ann Gottlieb’s creative direction) completely reversed course for the brand and, in 1994, created cK ONE, the first of the air-conditioning scents (light flowers lying on top of a washing machine dusted with detergent and cooled by metal air ducts set on “high”) that would come to define the decade.

Where is a brand to go? In 1996 they did a cK ONE flanker called cK BE, built by René Morgenthaler, but it was more detergent, and the flowers had been removed from the air-conditioning ducts. In 2005 they hired Caroline Sabas and David Apel to create (again under Gottlieb) an Obsession flanker, Obsession Night, but there was not only no reference to the original (as is not infrequently the case; the marketers just exploit a brand name into which they’ve poured millions and which is recognized on billboards by commuters exiting the Midtown Tunnel), it was a nondescript bouquet sitting on a chemistry set.

Now comes Secret Obsession , and it’s terrific and sophisticated and subtle. It’s actually a flanker that directly references the original Obsession yet manages to update it perfectly, contemporize it and give it depth and quiet beauty. What’s going on?

What’s going on is that Coty hired three really, really good perfumers, Gottleib got the direction absolutely right, and together they nailed it. The juice was initially sketched out by Dave Apel, the outline filled in a bit by Caroline Sabas and the initial idea painted masterfully by Calice Becker. This is the scent of twilight, but the smell of the shadows lengthening over an early autumn Cobble Hill street: the leaves turning, the scent of the bark of the trees from the park, the sophistication of all those renovated brownstones. And there’s a scent from the local bakery: cake, or spice bread, or cookies.

What makes Secret Obsession so good is that Becker has managed to create a commercial, accessible version of some of the best niche stuff coming out right now. The reference is the work of Bertrand Duchaufour for two houses, l’Artisan Parfumeur, where he has painted dark, somewhat challenging canvases of smoke and ancient wood, and l’Eau d’Italie, the ultra-niche Roman house, for whom he has executed crystalline 15th-century portraits of the towns and hay fields of Tuscany, its medieval stones, its fields and the stacks of firewood in winter.

Whether Becker is familiar with these I don’t know, but she has taken that idea and woven it into a silken, opalescent olfactory skein in which the smoke is both the burning oak and the brown sugared tartlette it is baking, the hay is warm, and the spice smoothed into a spotless pastry, palpable, edible, sleek. No one (and that includes men) should hesitate to wear this. The dry down softens the slight edge, but that simply means the perfume morphs into a slightly more accessible version of itself. This version is, to my mind, what Sensuous should have been. If this is commercial, then Becker has taken commercial to new levels. Lauder and LVMH, watch your backs.

Tom Ford Extreme

2009-11-02T16:02:06-08:00

★ ★ ★ ★ Excellent

How to get out of this mess? Add beauty, daring, and money. Take Tom Ford’s Extreme . The perfumer Pierre Negrin, working under Ford’s creative direction, has created a striking urban scent: the smell of summer asphalt cooling on a tribeca street, black sky overhead, expensive leather shoes. (I bet it’s loaded with birch tar and guaic wood). Extreme is not my favourite. No matter. You smell the quality of the raw materials here. You smell an interested vision, a mind at work: solitary, powerful, dangerous and very dark.

Eau du Soir by Sisley

2009-09-15T11:01:23-07:00

★ ★ ★ ★ Excellent

To call Sisley a niche scent house is almost overstating it. A skincare brand, Sisley has only three perfumes, in limited distribution, and niche houses are usually associated with shock-the-bourgeoisie, Santiago-Calatrava-in-a-bottle olfactive modernity. Exhibit A: The “I’m so cool I can barely stand it” Hotel Costes scents.

This instinct to create for the weird aesthetic margins provides the initial surprise of Eau du Soir Sisley decided to bring out an honest-to-goodness classic French perfume. The second surprise is that it is very good. The third is that it was created by a mystery perfumer, Jeannine Mongin, who as far as I can tell has done exactly one perfume in her life: this one, Eau du Soir, released in 1990— and nothing before or since. But working under the creative direction of the Countess Isabelle d’Ornano (the d’Ornano family owns Sisley), Mongin produced something very, very nice.

Eau du Soir initially registers almost on the subsonic level, a wonderfully dark, deep effect. It is an expert pastiche of the traditional French “animalic” (i.e., the smell of animal – a classic trope of French perfumery) but in a version for the 21st century. This take on animalic is not redolent of an armpit but rather of a mink coat, which is to say it is the smell of real leather plus real hot fur. This is a visceral luxury, and Mongin builds the perfume’s top by welding it to a greenish, sleekly modern floral. It is a brilliant opening. But don’t be surprised if it doesn’t sustain that brilliance through the dry down (when the smell after the “top”- the lighter, brighter materials like lemon, has faded and the perfume settles down on your skin). Tops burn off; her neo-French animalic component and her futuristic floral component calmly mellow into a lovely blend.

If you could see perfumes, Eau du Soir would be a 1920’s sepia photo of Paris shown on a Japanese high-definition screen. A perfume that electrifies and soothes at the same time. Nice.

Mariah Carey's Lastest Frag!

2010-05-11T07:52:59-07:00

Celebrity Scent Watch

Mariah Carey has added another fragrance to her collection, Lollipop Bling! An interesting addition and reflection of her personality. Perhaps she is feeling a little sweet these days, as the name suggests, we can assume it will be sugar and spice, and everything nice!

Jordan Reid's Favorite Fragrances!

2010-05-10T11:08:56-07:00

Welcome to the world of Ramshackleglam by Jordan Reid, a Haphazard Guide to Happiness! Below are Jordan’s top favorite fragrances to delight and inspire a fresh new scent for Spring!

Calvin Klein Secret Obsession
When I was twelve years old, my very first boyfriend gave me Calvin Klein’s original Obsession for my birthday. It might have been an odd choice for a preteen, being deeply sensual, musky, and…well, mature – but I loved it anyway. When I dabbed it onto my wrists I instantly felt adult beyond my years: irresistible despite my de rigueur school-commissioned grey kilt, saddle shoes, and white blouse buttoned right up to the chin.

I still love the dark intimacy of Obsession, but these days my tastes run more towards Calvin’s updated version of the scent: Secret Obsession. Like its predecessor, Secret Obsession is a sensual floriental, but it’s so much lighter and more modern: a little spicy, a little musky, and absolutely perfect for a late-night summer stroll with someone who just might lean in a little closer.

Creed Fleurissimo
I first bought Creed Fleurissimo when I was in college, for the sole reason that the salesman told me that Prince Rainier had the scent commissioned for Grace Kelly to wear on their wedding day. Anything that evokes Grace Kelly is A-OK by me, but this perfume is spectacular all on its own: elegant, floral, and oh-so-pretty. The slight air of formality about the fragrance makes it ideal for the daytime, but be careful: it’s so delicious it just might spark a forbidden romance behind the copy machine.

Bond #9 Nuits de Noho
This is my #1 favorite perfume of all time: quite simply, it smells exactly how I want a perfume to smell. It’s sexy without being over-the-top, perfect from sunup to sundown, and so tasty that you may be tempted to lick your wrists moments after spritzing. I’ve been wearing this on an almost daily basis for about five years now, and it’s rare that a week goes by when someone doesn’t stop me on the street, wanting to know what it is. With notes of vanilla, patchouli and jasmine, Nuits de Noho is unconventional, head-turning…and absolutely guaranteed to stop traffic.

Eva Longoria, A Scent Success?

2010-05-03T08:42:31-07:00

Add Eva Longoria to the line up of Celebrity Scents with her recent launch of her new signature fragrance, Eva, at her LA restaurant Beso! The woman has no fear of adding a new venture to her empire! Described as a clean, just out-of-the-shower fragrance, notes of grapefruit with hints of a floral undertone, she was inspired to launch her own fragrance as she claims she is allergic to other fragrances as they caused the actress headaches and sneeze fits.

“It’s clean, it’s light and it’s fresh. It kind of fades really nicely and it’s not overpowering. That’s what I really wanted – something that smells like you just got out of the shower,” said Eva.

Stay tuned for our experts advice on when and where the scent is a bust or a must! The fragrance will be available later this Spring!

Paris by Yves Saint Laurent

2009-11-02T16:10:01-08:00

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Transcendent

It is universally known inside the fragrance industry that rose reads as “old lady” and tests poorly in focus groups. Which is why you read disproportionately more about rose in press releases (you like the idea of it) than smell rose in perfumes (the reality makes you shy away).

Paris , Sophia Grojsman’s 1983 rose perfume, paved the way for the others. Created for Yves Saint Laurent, it remains relevant today, which is saying quite a lot. In Paris, Grojsman shows how to use rose in a hybridization with violet. While the violet’s almost eerie green angle is crucial to the scent, Paris is still a crepuscular rose, one that, if it reads as classic (the polite word for “of a certain era”) does so with such subtlety and elegance that it reaches as close to timelessness as it is possible to get. Paris glows on your skin. It effortlessly resists the years, equilibrates itself perfectly and renders more beautiful everything it touches. A lovely paradigmatic rose.

Le De by Givenchy

2009-11-02T16:53:02-08:00

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Transcendent

Givenchy did lovers of art history a huge service this year by reissuing its classic scents in an exquisite collection. The gleaming surface of L’Interdit (by the perfumer Francis Fabron) is the olfactory incarnation of gold. Jean Guichard and Olivier Gillotin have updated L’Interdit only slightly (all classics are refurbished to some degree when relaunched), softening the gilt of its rose and jasmine. But it is Givenchy’s Le De , from a 1957 formula by Ernest Shiftan, that is the more miraculous gold. In Pierre Wargnye’s expert hands, Le De (the name comes from the particule in “Hubert de Givenchy”) moves into a golden sunlight, pouring over a field of hay in early fall. It is the scent of tenderness, with a whispered diffusion.

Gucci Rush

2009-11-02T16:24:48-08:00

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Transcendent

Perfumers have structures just as buildings do, and many perfumers, like many architects, have imbibed modernism’s early 20th century precepts: eliminate ornament, simplify line, derive form from contemporary materials.

In 1999, the perfumer Michel Almairac produced a perfume for Gucci that was (and remains) virtually perfect. Its scent is marvelously, explicitly unnatural, as if one were smelling a coat made of the most expensive lycra. But beneath the surface, Gucci Rush runs on lactones, marvelous synthetic molecules that give off the fresh-chilled aspect of yogurt, with a hint of the plastic container it comes in. The genius of Rush is clarity without cleanliness. Its architectural cognate is the Bank of America tower, now rising at Sixth Ave and 42nd St. The skyscraper’s guts are advanced materials like slag-mixed concrete, but its facade even more closely reflects the perfume. This box is angled, complex, multifaceted. Its clear glass skin is washed in a milky, pearly whiteness, keeping it both warm and cool. Astonishing.

L'Eau d'Issey by Issey Miyake

2009-11-02T16:23:18-08:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

Just as steel, the new high-tech metal, allowed the rise of the skyscraper, Pfizer’s 1966 discovery of the methylbenzodioxepinone molecule (trade-named Calone) with its fresh marine/ozonic scent, allowed the creation of the oceanic scents of the 90s. The perfumer Jacques Cavallier’s 1992 l’Eau d’Issey for Issey Miyake is calone’s paradigmatic use. Simplified, linear, it fathered an entire sub-school of oceanic perfumes. Yet the oceanics, which once smelled exciting, are now dated. L’Eau d’Issey, a revolution in its time, and masterfully built, may be coming to the end of its aesthetic usefulness.

Gucci Pour Homme

2009-11-03T09:21:25-08:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

For anyone who has ever walked into a lumberyard and stopped dead in his tracks at the smell: that beautiful, rich, unforgettable smell of mahogany, pine plank, oak, particle board, cedar dust et al.— your fragrances have arrived.

Under Tom Ford’s artistic direction, Michel Almairac has created Gucci Pour Homme , a scent that manages to be something the French call premier degré: the obvious that also happens to be beautiful. Almairac is a prolific Frenchman who concocts scents in every register, from Bond No. 9’s postmodernist the Scent of Peace to Gucci’s gauzy, jet-fueled masterpiece Rush. But in Pour Homme, he created … a cedar. That’s it. Pour Homme is an excellent cedar that lasts on the skin, diffuses nicely and seduces with the guilelessness of a hardware store. If Restoration Hardware was smart, it would install Pour Homme in the air ducts, and every store would smell mesmerizingly alive. It takes talent to create such simplicity. Pour Homme is perfectly premier degré.

Kouros by Yves Saint Laurent

2009-11-03T09:09:58-08:00

★ ★ Nice Effort

Civet, a rich cream taken from the anal gland of the civet cat and used as a raw material in traditional French perfumery, poses a question for perfume criticism: How, in the 21st century, do you judge a piece of scent art that was created for an earlier time? Which is to ask, What is a five-star perfume?

Use civet or a synthetic facsimile up front, and you get Yves Saint Laurent’s Kouros . This men’s fragrance was created by the perfumer Pierre Bourdon in 1981, but for anyone outside of France, it might as well be 1881, when the scent would have been perfectly in sync. The experts agree that Kouros is an excellent juice qua juice: as strong and clear as a Roberto Alagna B flat, persistent on skin, as structured as an ocean liner. “C’est un grand parfum!” a French perfumer told me. It’s a great perfume! The problem is that this strength, clarity, persistence and depth are applied to the hot, ripe smell of a French trucker’s Jockey shorts after a muggy day on the A51. Which illustrates the difference between being great and being wearable. This perfume is fecal. Technical excellence must count: thus two stars, for solid construction. But an era’s aesthetic must count as well, and despite its molecular wizardry, Kouros is as wearable in the 21st century as 19th century spats.

Light Blue by Dolce & Gabbana

2009-11-03T09:22:55-08:00

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Transcendent

Then there is perhaps the most brilliant way to use wood: render it invisible. Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, who frequent Sicily, asked the perfumer Olivier Cresp to locate its soul in scent. Interestingly, Cresp’s father traded in raw perfume materials and would take the boy to Sicily for the harvest. Not surprisingly, then, Cresp’s formula for the women’s scent Light Blue contains about 15 percent of the purest natural Sicilian lemon-peel essence. He mated it to a tart Granny Smith apple (the synthetics cis-3 Hexenol, Liffarome and cis-3 hexenyl acetate) and added Delta Muscenone (the smell of human skin). But the key is wood: three synthetics (Z11, Ambrox and Norlimbanol) as well as plenty of natural cedars. You don’t consciously register the wood, but its smooth surface deepens and warms the citrus. One of the most perfectly executed perfumes of the past decade, it is almost insanely good.

Tommy Girl by Tommy Hilfiger

2009-11-03T09:27:32-08:00

★ ★ ★ ★ Excellent

Just as BMW offers its more accessible 3 Series to younger buyers, many perfume houses offer beginning fragrances for their younger consumers. Each house follows its own logic.

The perfumer Calice Becker chose a different strategy for Tommy Hilfiger. Tommy Girl fuses IN2U’s youth with Coco Mademoiselle’s poise to create a balance: a perfume that incarnates a world in which young women feel utterly at ease. Zero stuffiness, and blissfully free of poseur attitude. Imagine it as a narrative. It is evening. There is the grassy scent of someone’s vast, well-kept lawn out at the beach house, of pure, clear, twilight sea air and of women freshly showered, glowing with apres-sun cream, clean and fresh. The house glows in the dark summer night, and the perfume, cool and young, seems to emanate from the very air itself.

ck IN2U her

2009-11-03T09:41:08-08:00

★ ★ ★ Good Juice

Just as BMW offers its more accessible 3 Series to younger buyers, many perfume houses offer beginning fragrances for their younger consumers. Each house follows its own logic.

Ck IN2U her is a scent created for those still using their parents’ credit cards. In terms of critical assessment, IN2U poses a problem. Classically understood, a perfume is a work of art; YSL’s Paris has (in theory at least) the same artistic integrity as, say, a Rothko painting. IN2U has the artistic integrity of an Abercrombie & Fitch hoodie. This is its intent. The perfumers Carlos Benaim and Loc Dong, along with the fragrance consultant Ann Gottlieb, have engineered not a perfume but a smell. There is nothing wrong with this per se. It’s just a different thing. Where a perfume stakes out an aesthetic position, a smell like IN2U, with its carefully calibrated lock on the vibe of the moment, is a passkey to popularity. What it actually smells like is somewhat secondary. But it’s pleasant enough: a combination of Breck shampoo and the scent of a brand new Jaguar convertible on a clear, warm evening in Los Angeles.

Coco Mademoiselle by Chanel

2009-11-03T09:42:27-08:00

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Transcendent

Just as BMW offers its more accessible 3 Series to younger buyers, many perfume houses offer beginning fragrances for their younger consumers. Each house follows its own logic.

Chanel has gone the Rothko route with Coco Mademoiselle . Chanel’s perfumer Jacques Polge has lowered the age of entry while creating a scent that still appeals to the granddaughters of women who wear Chanel No. 5. He has also created a scent that’s every bit the work of art that the youthful No. 19 is. Here, accessibility is created through straightforward olfactory style, not engineering. Where Ralph by Ralph Lauren condescends shamelessly to the young buyer (pure sugar candy), Coco Mademoiselle graces her with youthful sophistication. This is a Mercedes-Benz C-Class. It is both an entry-level scent and a very smart marketing decision. It smells like a 17-year-old in a divine summer dress. Using a core of beautifully engineered patchouli, its scent is floral without a trace of heaviness, fresh without green, sweet without sugar— in short, the scent of loveliness. Come across someone wearing it, and you want to lean closer.

Agent Provocateur by Agent Provocateur

2009-11-03T09:45:45-08:00

★ ★ ★ ★ Excellent

Dirty is vastly underrated as a perfume aesthetic. There are, of course, several kinds of dirty. Exhibit A is Agent Provocateur , a lingerie concern that, like Victoria’s Secret, professes to sell sex. But while Victoria’s Secret is that great Middle American Walt Disney of sex, Agent is slightly grittier, dirtier. Or it professes to be; sex packaged by marketers tends to promise the real thing but is in fact so sterile you couldn’t even catch the other person’s cold. It’s dirt without germs, an idea of intimacy without actually experiencing it. The surprise is that this turns out to be an excellent concept for a perfume. The brilliance of Agent Provocateur, the company’s rather astonishing first perfume, is that it doesn’t actually smell like unwashed panties. It’s better than that: it just reminds you of them. It smells like crushed raspberries and black plums on hot skin. Expertly constructed by the perfumer Christian Provenzano, the juice lasts beautifully, diffuses perfectly and could raise the fertility rate in Manhattan without raising laundry bills. It’s like a photo of a thong and cheeky ouverts. All image, no dirt.

In Love Again by Yves Saint Laurent

2009-11-03T09:55:35-08:00

★ ★ ★ ★ Excellent

Certain perfumes emerge from their bottles like movie stars, pure liquid glamour. What differ are the kind of glamour and the kind of star. The modern paradigm of olfactory glamour is Fragile by Jean Paul Gaultier, a scent like an instantly recognized face passing through a gauntlet of flashbulbs. You glimpse the sleek black dress, and then she’s gone. Chanel No. 19, by contrast, is rather a stunning ingenue; Estee Lauder’s Youth Dew Amber Nude is glamour morphed into sensuality. Juicy Couture’s eponymous first scent is a surprisingly restrained glamour— a starlet wearing pink flowers in the cool Los Angeles air. Roberto Cavalli’s Serpentine is a star in the tropical heat of Rio, where she’s gone for a face lift. Following are three of the more interesting ways glamour is turned into fragrance.

In Love Again is a star from a 1959 Technicolor film. Here is a perfume of saturated color, hot magentas and yellows and cool cyans bleeding onto celluloid. The juice is backlit— carbon arcs of klieg lights, powered with the scent of the gaffer’s white-hot tungsten-halogen filaments. It surpasses reality like the best movie magic does, its hyperrealism making it a kind of gorgeous olfactory pornography. To a degree, the expertise of the perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena, who created this for Yves Saint Laurent, assuages the guilt: one marvels at its expert construction even as it floods the mental eye.

Envy Me by Gucci

2009-11-03T10:08:27-08:00

★ ★ Nice Effort

Gucci Envy Me , the curious misstep from 2004. Whereas the 1997 Gucci Envy by Maurice Roucel is a masterpiece, Envy Me, by Karine Dubreuil (who did the excellent Mure et Musc Extreme for l’Artisan Parfumeur), is a supermarket fragrance. Its aesthetic poverty is reinforced by its dismal technical construction. In other words, the materials not only smell like plastic flowers and aspartame, they also fit together poorly. The machinery is rough, unfinished, inelegant.

Grace Kelly: Style Icon

2010-04-22T14:38:22-07:00

Style Exhibition in London

Grace Kelly: Style Icon Exhibition, runs from April 17th to September 26th, 2010 at the V and A in London. This exhibition shows the spectacular wardrobe of Grace Kelly, one of the most popular actresses of the 1950s. The display will examine Grace Kelly’s glamorous Hollywood image and induring appeal. Dresses from her films, including High Society, are on show as well as the gown she wore to accept her Oscar award in 1955 and and the original Hermès Kelly bag. Her signature scents include Joy by Jean Patou and Fleurissimo by Creed.

Jennifer Aniston's LolaVie

2010-04-17T12:43:41-07:00

Star Alert! Jennifer Anniston releases her first ad for her signature fragrance, Lolavie with a personal interview with WWD.

On the name Lolavie: “It’s a long story and honestly it’s too personal to tell. But it has special significance.”

On controlling her public image: “I don’t think you can control that at the end of the day. You can’t stunt what you do to please or not please the public. And the media will create stories whether they are true or false. So why stop doing what makes you happy? Be true to yourself and everything else will follow.”

On getting dramatic in her upcoming film Buttercup: “Obviously, I’m drawn to comedy, good or bad. But I love doing parts that are different and I sprinkle those throughout to get creatively unstuck.”

On the possibility of directing: “I have a project in development I’m going to direct. After you get enough movies under your belt, you sit back and go, ‘What’s next?’ It’s getting to be the time where creatively I want to turn in a different direction.”

On the process behind the scent: “It’s been a year-and-a-half journey. I’d been asked to do things before, and it never felt organic. But when Leon [Falic, president of the Falic Fashion Group] approached me to be involved with the process from inception to fruition, I thought, ‘This could be a creative expression.’ And it’s turned out to be an extension of myself as opposed to slapping my name on something.”

On her goals for the scent: “I want people to go, ‘What is that? You smell great!’ But most of all I wanted it to smell natural."On deciding this was the right project: “I felt like a little chemist . . . The way I was approached, given such involvement, I never felt like, ‘Oh, gosh, I shouldn’t do this.’ And if something is good, it doesn’t matter if the marketplace is crowded. I thought it was an opportunity to go behind the scenes, and if it feels good, why not go for it? It’s like being a producer and knowing the writers and stirring up ideas as opposed to being an actor for hire.”

Ooh La La MaMa!

2010-04-15T11:25:35-07:00

The top fashionable fragrances for Mom

A mother’s love is unique, deep and strong, creating a bind and bond that is unparalleled elsewhere in the world of relationships.

No matter your mother’s style or personality, tastes or taboos, every single one is still a woman who appreciates feeling like one every once in a while!

So this Mother’s Day, honor the woman who gave you life with a scent as sweet and exquisite as she is, from PERFUME.COM.

The Sweet Smell of Bruce Willis?

2010-04-15T14:31:05-07:00

Another Star with Scents!

Will his fragrance boast some major star power?
No news on the fragrance notes or his inspiration for his newest scent due for release this July in Germany, but we are left to wonder whether or not the fragrance will be a Die Hard cult collector? The bottle has the makings, but will the fragrance be a Must or a Bust in your fragrance wardrobe? Watch the video below to view the ‘making-of video’. Stay tuned for more updates!

Mom, you smell so good!

2010-04-13T10:33:37-07:00

Is there a bond more ingrained in our genetic make-up than the one between mother and child? And isn’t there a sense more closely tied to this bond that smell is? Like we choose a mate that their natural odor pleases us, so our offspring bear in their genetic makeup the scented fingerprint which ties them to us, making us able to differentiate our own among many. Mothers often linger over their sleeping child inhaling deeply the yummy smell with eyes closed…And I can imagine that an adoptive mother grows to learn _{and eventually love} their children’s smell, just like they learn to recognize their tastes and their idiosyncrasies. Because that personal scent is a constant reminder and a symbol for nurture and love. But babies very quickly show off how they are able to smell their mother out as well! It’s enough to breastfeed once to see how the baby turns its small nose and mouth to the sweet scent of milk like a hungry little puppy; that nectar of nature meant to help it grow, to help it become the man or the woman who will be in later life is naturally scented with a vanillic aroma which is perpetuated through baby food later on for a reason. Reminiscences of those tender moments are never far off, read like a language of smiles and smells.

Presenting our dear mothers with a fragrant gift is therefore a subtle re-affirmation of this special bond. But putting some thought into it is what clinches the deal really. Of course the simplest way would be to refuel her with her tried-and-true favorite. But even though this is a gesture guaranteed to meet with success in what regards tastes, it somehow lacks romanticism, demoting fragrance gifting into a recharging the fridge with milk. No, in order for one’s gift to be more special a little intrigue has to be there. One easy way that reconciles both worlds would be to opt for the bath and body collection products that accompany her favorite fragrance: This is an indulgence that surprisingly not many women opt for themselves and moms deserve the pampering for sure. Lots of classic perfume lines have exquisite ancillary products such as body lotions or creams, scented deodorants and soaps, body powders or shower gels: Shalimar from Guerlain, Beautiful from Estee Lauder, Oscar by Oscar de la Renta, Opium by Yves Saint Laurent, Tresor by Lancome and the beat goes on…Lots of the more recent launches also have products to die for: The body lotion of Yves Saint Laurent’s Cinema is shot with the subtlest mother-of-pearl for a sheen effect that happens to smell and feel delicious. The shower gel of Light Blue by Dolce & Gabanna is a shot of fresh vitamin-juice for the morning run!

Another idea is to take a peek into her favorite rotation and choose something in a similar vein. That usually means you have to click into Perfume.com, find her favorite perfume and see in which family it belongs to. Choices among the same family (automatically generated) have higher chances to succeed! For instance, if she likes Burberry’s Brit (a floral oriental), try the majestic Boucheron pour femme, Versace’s ambery gardenia Crystal Noir or the plush comfort of powdery Contradiction by Calvin Klein. Is she a fan of diaphanous woody fragrances like Soir de Lune by Sisley? Try the modern Rumeur by Lanvin, Pure Turquoise by Ralph Lauren, Kelly Caleche by Hermes or Enjoy by Jean Patou. The delicate floral lover of L’Air du Temps by Nina Ricci could be seduced by the siren song of the eponymous Marc Jacobs fragrance, the subtly spicy Pleasures by Lauder or honeysuckle-rich Burberry London in the cute plaid-covered bottle. And lovers of fresh, zingy or even aquatic fragrances such as Cool Water Woman by Davidoff would definitely give a whirl to the citrusy unisex goodness of Eau d’Hadrien by Annick Goutal, the soapy-fresh Thierry Mugler Cologne and the elegant Eau de Sisley 2.
But tucking in a scented card with heartfelt wishes is probably the best accessory of them all: She will be sure to have a loving memory of the gift for a long time to come…

Invitation to a Dream

2010-04-09T12:32:03-07:00

For me, fragrance is an invitation to a dream. It’s an intimate form of self-expression that amps creativity, encourages tomfoolery, and makes the heart a little happier.

Being alert to smells – everyday odors as well as the perfumed variety – is just another way to be alert to the beauty and stimulation in the world around us. And choosing to wear something inspiring gives us a portable bubble of joy wherever we go.

I invite you to experience five of my favorite, err…“joy bubbles”, and through the generosity of my fragrance enablers, Perfume.com, receive 20% off their purchase. Quote promo code PUCK20 for your 20% discount. Offer ends June 30, 2010.

My selections reflect a range of fume moods:

Bulgari Black – Chic Mystique

Bulgari Black is an intriguingly confounding oriental. It’s simultaneously warm and cool, butch and femme. It’s classy, but not uptight. Its puff of vanilla pleather reads like a skin scent, but whose skin has rubber in it? Only the sexiest android ever, that’s who!

My first time with BB was an in-store spritz at the mall, and when I collected my husband (listlessly waiting for me on a sofa in the “man nook”), he instantly de-glazed and snapped to attention. Black was officially the first fragrance that made him utter the magic words: “Mmmm…you smell good! What’s that perfume?” And before too long, Black was officially the first fragrance that he stole from me.

Fine by me. Makes a nice change from his usual: mosquito repellent, worn while hiking. Black smells a lot better, but I’m not sure how it works on mosquitoes.

Agent Provocateur – Queen of Sheba

At the beginning of this, our second millennium, I experienced Agent Provocateur for the first time. I loved the cool feel of the pink porcelain bottle, shaped like an egg, or a tear, or a breast. I loved the peep show box it came in. I was less sure about the actual perfume, which had the bombast of rose, sharpened by coriander, muted by vetiver, dusted by saffron.

It wasn’t the ingredients themselves that gave me pause, it was their effect. On each other, and on me. After Agent Provocateur’s grand entrance, the rose becomes more languid, raunchier. I’m not sure exactly how this happens, but I’m looking hard at you, jasmine and ylang-ylang.

Ten years ago, I wasn’t woman enough to carry off Agent Provocateur. It’s a sexually aware perfume. Its sultriness is frank. The haze it leaves on the skin smells of intimacy. But now, I feel confident enough to live up to AP’s glamour, and bedazzled enough to follow it down its to sordid depths.

Christian Dior Escale à Pondichéry – Indian Summer

For a perfume to captivate me, it needs to have a point of view. I’m a sucker for drama and flair, too, so a lot of the fumes in my collection are busy and dense with exotic ingredients. But a life continually cranked to eleven eventually starts to wear the enamel off of your teeth, and that’s when soothing music, cashmere wraps, and quiet scents are in order.

Escale à Pondichéry is a quiet scent with a point of view. The view is India, reflected in the eau de toilette’s cardamom, jasmine sambac, black tea and sandalwood. The treatment is sheer, and enough citrus drifts through the composition to keep it clean and refreshing. Over an hour in, Escale à Pondichéry gets warmer, but never heavier. Just like that cashmere wrap. EaP is the perfect fragrance for a late summer twilight, for either flavor of gender.

Miller Harris Fleur Oriental – Perfume Blankie

I love love love this perfume! Perfumer Lyn Harris has created a “night at the opera” fragrance which transitions admirably to one’s private “naughty ballerina” moments. Sweet orange blossom, almondy heliotrope and spicy carnation are the beauties dancing with beastly amber and incense accords, and the whole production stays bewitchingly lilting – never heavy.

Because these classic oriental components are handled with such a light touch, I think of Fleur Oriental as “vintage” with quotation marks. A transparent cloud of soft vanilla powder wisps across the drydown, turning it into an unexpected snugglepuss of a scent. When I want to feel cozy or soothed,
I reach for Fleur Oriental. Wearing it triggers deep, appreciative breaths, calming the squirrels in my head.

Hermès Bel Ami – Leather Lover

It’s only in recent years that I’ve come to appreciate and crave girly flowers in my perfume. Before, my tendency was to cruise the guy’s side of the fragrance aisle, drawn to those irresistible spices, aromatics, incenses, leathers.

These days, boy fumes are increasingly fruity and sweet, and seem to have lost some of their swagger – and all of their class. Thank goodness for Bel Ami, born in 1986 with plenty of swagger and class. This eau de toilette combines citrus and earthy spices with a refined leather.

“Refined” meaning there’s no barnyard in this hide – I mean, c’mon: it’s Hermès leather we’re talkin’ here! There is, however, a smudge of fresh dirt ground into the composition, courtesy of the appealingly rooty vetiver and patchouli. The vetiver shimmers between grass and smoke, and as the long, looooonnng, drydown stretches on, a suggestion of vanilla and musk appears. Bel Ami is ready to become your comfortable, quietly confident, and always-beautiful friend.

Bourgeoisie Backpacking

2010-04-03T14:07:22-07:00

Destination: India

The Republic of India is one of the most densely populated regions in the world as well as one of the most vibrant! Because you’ll have no choice but to be up close and personal with its 1+ billion population during travels through its tight city corridors and jam-packed markets, make sure you always smell your best!

Chrisitian Dior’s new Escale a Pondicher perfume is the perfect fragrance to sport in this rich cultural region. Its exotic scent from spicy notes like Indian jasmine and deep black tea is inspired by the country’s own fragrant and color-rich markets, which stand as bright and lively as the perfume.

This new women’s cologne from Dior is the second instalment in a series entitled “Les Escales de Dior” (“Dior’s Ports-of-Call”), by perfumer François Demachy. François chose India as inspiration for the country’s raw and exotic library of aromas, unveiled in Escale a Pondicher as notes of cardamom, Mysore sandalwood, Indian jasmine, black tea and Balsamic accords. It is like a refreshing shot of a simple, bittersweet drink given fire from light spices and warm amber, taking you on an exotic sensory journey when you’re painfully far away from any tropical destination. But with this wafting from your skin, who cares?

The world’s second most populous country, and most culturally, linguistically and genetically diverse geographical entity after the continent of Africa, also boasts the world’s highest reaching mountain range and some of the world’s most diverse and impressive flora and fauna. Escale a Pondichery releases an aroma of the same breadth of worldliness and elegance, unveiling the exotic airs of India in the raw perfume materials we have come to associate with the country: fragrant jasmine, sandalwood and black teas.

Spring's Scents of Style

2010-02-03T10:05:31-08:00

The perfect way to kick-start any new season, is a fresh new fragrance to lighten and brighten your mood. This spring’s runway fashions delight and inspire something new for everyone to desire and will leave you grinning from ear to ear!

DKNY Set to Play Ball

2010-04-06T07:08:29-07:00

Linking up with professional sports teams seems to be more in fashion than ever for brands. Recently, several nonathletic apparel brands have struck deals with teams or individual players, such as Emporio Armani and Canali enlisting celebrity athletes for their advertising campaigns.

DKNY becomes the first fashion brand to secure a permanent presence in the Yankee Stadium, with an outfield bullpen billboard of the logo, positioned prominently in right-centerfield. The brand will also be the title sponsor of the Dugout Lounge and will feature food while on-site screens show the ongoing game in high-definition, with DKNY footage on rotation.

“Donna Karan created DKNY to capture the spirit of New York and the people who live here, including the most successful baseball team in history: the Yankees,” Mark Weber, chairman and chief executive officer of Donna Karan.

Our Editor’s top fashionable fragrance that goes hand in hand with any Men’s ball game is DKNY Men, a must-have for the modern, cool athletic type.

Healthy Perfumes

2010-04-05T11:41:18-07:00

Steps to Feeling Good

Never mind going Green, Orange is where it’s at. With the presence of beta-carotene, orange foods reduce the risk of chronic disease such as coronary heart disease and cancer. Fragrances containing notes of orange, are mood alternating scents as well. Try our Editor’s Top Orange Scents for an instant pick-me-up such as Concentre D’Orange Verte by Hermes, Boss Orange by Hugo Boss and Orange Tonic by Azzaro.

Jennifer Aniston's Lola Vie

2010-04-05T08:17:03-07:00

Celebrity Scent Watch

Add another celebrity to the growing list of A-listers creating fragrances of their own. Jennifer Anistion is launching her first signature scent, Lola Vie, which translates loosely as “laughing at life”. But really, she will be laughing all the way to the bank. Aniston’s payday on any fragrance deal could be as large as it was for one of her latest movies — she was reportedly paid $8 million for 2008’s “Marley and Me.” According to sources, top Hollywood celebrities can command anywhere between $3 million and $10 million for lending their high-profile names and sculpted cheekbones to fragrances and other beauty deals.

Considering she is a lover of Clean Clean Sweet Layer, and Clean Provence, Fragrances by Dlish, we wonder how squeaky her scent will be! Stay tuned for more updates!

Celebrity Alert!

2010-04-02T08:53:55-07:00

Andy Cohen, Bravo TV executive and on-air host reveals his NYC style secrets this month in Gotham Magazine. His secret ‘sin-sation’ is Creed Millesime Imperial,. Described as warm and romantic, this musky scentsation possesses a blend of musk, lemon and iris that meets with a refreshing marine note.

Coming Soon!

2010-03-29T16:10:50-07:00

Giorgio Armani's Aqua di Gioia

Adding to the success of Aqua Di Gio, Giorgio Armani has turned to the seductive power of the sea in positioning his latest women’s fragrance, Acqua di Gioia.

He describes the new scent as conjuring up “the image of a strong, serene and free-spirited woman who exists in perfect harmony with nature."

“I was inspired by my visits to islands such as Pantelleria and Antigua, where I have for years had holiday homes,” Armani continued. “Both places represent an ideal — a place to escape to and recharge in a natural setting.” Noting that the scent is rooted in nature and in water, Armani stated he developed the bottle’s shape from a drop of water. “For me the bottle is as much a tribute to the shape of woman, as it is to the beautiful form water makes.”

Stay tuned, it will be released this summer and we will be the first to let you know!

The Awakening of Spring

2010-03-15T10:33:33-07:00

With daylight savings time comes the definitive sign of what Paul Gauguin in a famous painting referred to as The Loss of Virginity: the Awakening of Spring, that is. With the days getting longer and the snow melting, optimism returns and just like we want to put away the heavy woolies and galoshes in favor of capris and plimsols, so we need to revise our fragrance wardrobe. But where to start and what does signify spring in regards to perfumes?

The most formulaic answer would be flowers; lots and lots of floral fragrances. Like floral prints is a recurring theme for fashion collections at the roll of every spring catwalk watch, co-coordinating your fragrance with seasonal flowers seems like a romantic idea; just don’t wear them with flowers top to bottom! The first rush of yellow pom-poms of mimosa finds its accompaniment in L’Artisan Parfumeur Mimosa pour Moi, Kenzo Summer or Guerlain’s Champs Elysées. Hyacinths find a perfect foil in Chamade by Guerlain, inspired by a novel by the same name by Françoise Sagan. The writer took the name from the drum-roll that signified retreat during the Napoleonic Wars. There you have it, a romantic scented surrender if there ever was one! Lilies with their Easter connotations bring their spicy piquancy to such fragrances as Eternity or Un Lys by Serge Lutens. Lily of the valley (a greener-smelling blossom than lily) is the May darling, traditionally offered on the 1st of May in France to bring luck: The classic Diorissimo has been the reference, but do try out Envy by Gucci as well for a neon-hued interpretation of the note. Peonies and their fresh ambience are amply highlighted in Ange ou Démon Tendre by Givenchy . Orange blossom and neroli (the latter deriving from the same tree via a different process method) with their uplifting, serene, just plain out happy smell are the leitmotif in fragrances for both men and women, such as Infusion de Fleurs d’Oranger by Prada , Neroli Sauvage by Creed and Lanvin’s Arpège for Men .

But flowers aren’t the whole deal. Clearly not everyone wants to smell of the florist’s or like a garden border (we can count Coco Chanel among them, saying “Women should not smell of roses”). So another direction, which has been enjoying a growing popularity recently, is towards light “green” fragrances evoking snapped leaves, fresh dewy grass and the exhilarating ambience of a sunny, yet still crisp, spring morning. These fragrances usually involve citrusy notes on top of complimentary magnolia, grassy vetiver and fruity greens, the sharp bitter bite of exotic grass galbanum or the use of violet leaf, mostly utilized in men’s colognes. Nevertheless in general green fragrances lend themselves well to both sexes, no matter to whom they’re marketed. Vent Vert by Balmain from 1947 has always been the emblematic “green”, conceived at a time when such categories were frowned upon by the bourgeoisie who expected perfumes to smell rich, decadent and perfume-y. Vent Vert was nature red in tooth and claw years before we began to strive for ‘eco-friendliness’. The update to this idea comes in A Scent by Issey Miyake or the tomato-vine leaves-rich Eau de Campagne by Sisley. Chance Eau Fraîche is Chanel’s reply to the need for fresher, more acidulous fragrances, but you can’t go wrong with their older standby Cristalle either: crisp, young, efficient, tingling your nostrils with gusto! Guys are well catered for in Paradox Green by Jacomo and Eau de Cartier , a clean, subtly “greenish” effect that won’t have you searching from where the green patch sprouted. And of course Creed’s distinguished Green Irish Tweed says it all by its very name…

But perhaps the most intriguing direction of them all would be to pair elements from both groups which evolve into fragrances which read as kaleidoscopic vistas: The synergy of rose and patchouli in Voleur de Roses by boutique-sold L’Artisan Parfumeur evokes a mysterious creature out of a Twilight story, both earthy and rosy-fresh. Narciso for Her and Narciso for Him are so abstract while still “fresh” (yet in a discreetly musky way) that you can’t quite pinpoint their appeal, their woody undercurrent hinting at a sensuality that is budding. Power by Kenzo for men is soft, woody, yet also floral, an anomaly in the canon of men’s fragrances and therefore a prime choice for new awakenings. Pure White Linen by Estee Lauder is touted as “the scent to live in year long” and its core is a “dry” lily of the valley accord, but, really, it’s much more like freshly-pressed shirts with the steamy-iron feel of aldehydes, naturally inviting you to put it on first thing in the morning when the day is full of promise and summer hasn’t even arrived yet.

The ultimate practicality is that spring scents can well transition into summer wearing and they will still bring a smile of joyous cognizance even in the dead of winter: What’s not to love?

Coco At The Oscars

2010-02-27T13:10:13-08:00

The 82nd installment of the Oscars is heading our way on March 7, 2010, and among the big name flicks nominated for Academy Awards, (Avatar, The Blind Side, District 9, An Education, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Precious, A Serious Man, Up, Up in the Air, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Nine, Sherlock Holmes, and The Young Victoria, to name a few) is Coco Avant Chanel, nominated for Best Achievement in Costume Design.

Catherine Leterrier scores the Oscar nomination for Coco Avant Chanel, which starred French actress Audrey Tautou playing the lead in the story of the famed designer who set a new pace for women’s fashion in the Roaring 1920’s, and into today. Leterrier, a French Cesar Award winner in 2000 and 2004, went to great lengths in preparation for the movie, attempting to trace Coco’s inspiration for a number of her iconic looks, including the famous leather quilted hand bag.

Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel came from very humble beginnings and made her clothes from remnants and men’s clothes because she had nothing else to work with. In the movie’s press kit, Leterrier explains: “The aim was not to make a movie about the history of fashion. [The] famous striped mariner’s sweater worn by Chanel in the legendary photos of the 1930s appears earlier in the movie, in the scene where Coco is walking along the beach with Boy and notices the sweaters of the fishermen as they pull in their nets. At another point, as Anne [Anne Fontaine-Film Director] wanted me to imagine how the world-famous Chanel bag originated, I drew a quilted sewing pouch in the shape of the bag, and had it made out of an old, black, flecked cotton canvas that peasants’ clothing used to be made of, as if the young Coco had made it out of a remnant given to her by her aunts.”

“In fashion, every designer has their own line, color and material codes,” she goes on to say. “Chanel’s is instantly recognizable. What Karl Lagerfeld did in adapting the Chanel style to the future, I did backwards towards the past. I went back in time, designing the first models that Chanel might have created and which could have fashioned her style. The Chanel style is distinctive in its cut, the supple hang of its fabric and the perfect simplicity of its finish. The costumes designed for the film had to be up to the exacting standards of haute couture.”

Check out Chanel fragrances and cross your fingers on Oscar night for Catherine Leterrier and Coco Avant Chanel.

Leading Ladies and Gents (& Their Power Scents!)

2010-02-21T17:18:40-08:00

Some leading actors and actresses have creative visions that go well beyond the silver screen and over into musical careers, fashion design aspirations—- and even fragrance creations!

Find out what sparked the inspiration for some of today’s largest celebrity scent lines.

Spring Scent Fever!

2010-02-21T16:56:25-08:00

Spring is all about lightening up—- with clothing, weather and fragrance!

Heavy ambery winter scents can seem overbearing and dramatic during the spring and summer. But lighter fragrances, like citrus and light floral mixtures, are youthful and feminine ways to get into the season—fashion foot first!

Take it from NY Times critic Chandler Burr, who said “Perfume may indeed convey a concept of warmth (Hypnotic Poison’s succulent vanilla) or of cool (Cartier’s Déclaration Bois Bleu, one of the most mesmerizing chilled breezes ever to come out of a bottle) or of autumn (I think Guerlain Homme is the modern equivalent of the impeccable grey wool suit slacks, the ones you put on after packing away the cotton khakis). And then there’s spring; crack open a bottle of Estée Lauder Pure White Linen Light Breeze, and in the dead freeze of early February you will still look around for your gardening equipment.”

So get spring fever even if the buds haven’t popped yet, with a fresh and flirty fragrance made especially for spring and summer!

Scorsese Avant Chanel?

2010-02-17T20:23:21-08:00

The subject of Martin Scorsese conjures up images of raw machismo, cigar smoke, and blazing guns. But the Academy Award-winning director is now trading gangsters for models in a television ad campaign for the sleek and sophisticated house of Chanel.

Scorsese, who directed iconic films like Taxi Driver, Gangs of New York and Goodfellas will be directing the commercial for Chanel’s new men’s scent, to be launched this September 2010. While Andrea D’Avack, President of Chanel Fragrance and Beaute, declined to reveal details about the new cologne (including its name), he did reveal the campaign’s star: French actor Gaspard Ulliel.

Giving a glimpse into the composition of the campaign, D’Avack also revealed to press that Scorsese shot the ads in the midst of a downtown NYC winter, “which is so inherently part of Martin Scorsese’s cinematographic vocabulary.”

It’s not the first time that Chanel has cozied up with celebrity, of course; past pairings include Nicole Kidman, Catherine Deneuve, Audrey Tautou and Marilyn Monroe. But the project with Scorsese holds extra weight with the company. “Chanel works with movie directors because they bring depth, emotion and what we call in French ‘a supplement of soul,’ or an added dimension,” D’Avack explained, citing Scorsese projects Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas. “We knew we would definitely have a man’s world full of complexity that is also adrenaline-driven, and of course, amazing images.”

To tide you over until September shop
Chanel colognes now.

Cupid's Scented Arrows

2010-01-20T10:34:03-08:00

A Valentine's Day fragrance guide

Offering a dozen red roses on Valentine’s Day might be the most classic gesture in the book, but is it time to move beyond? The intimate touch of a special fragrance, offered or worn for a partner’s delight will assuredly create some cherished memories for a while to follow and bond you together even closer. And what a perfect accompaniment to the bedroom eyes and the sultry lips too! But the question is: How possibly pick up something successful in such a confusing labyrinth of hundreds of releases that seem to beckon you with either iterations of Robert Byrnes’ romantic verse, snares of guile and seduction or right-out-of-the-shower sexiness? Luckily for you, we handpicked a few top-drawer choices to make matters easier and classified them by type. The type which you find yourself or your mate falling into, or more interestingly still, the type you’d like to emulate. What fun would that role-playing inspire!

Seasons and Scents

2010-01-12T14:42:36-08:00

You have heard, more times than you can count, “I wear [fill in a perfume], but it’s too heavy / light / floral / rich / powder / citrus for winter / spring / summer / fall.”

Do you need to change your scents with the seasons? Start with a truism: It’s always best to beware of false analogies. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard, “I’m moving to my winter perfume because I just stored my summer clothing.” But perfume doesn’t keep you warm, so why are you equating them? Perfume may indeed convey a concept of warmth (Hypnotic Poison’s succulent vanilla) or of cool (Cartier’s Déclaration Bois Bleu, one of the most mesmerizing chilled breezes ever to come out of a bottle) or of autumn (I think Guerlain Homme is the modern equivalent of the impeccable grey wool suit slacks, the ones you put on after packing away the cotton khakis). And then there’s spring; crack open a bottle of Estée Lauder Pure White Linen Light Breeze, and in the dead freeze of early February you will still look around for your gardening equipment.

So sure, scents reflect seasons just as clothes and food and music do. Composers have regularly created their work based on the coming of snow or surfing, Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and anything by The Beach Boys being merely the most obvious examples. Perfumer Bertrand du Chaufour set out explicitly to create a portrait of winter with L’Eau d’Italie’s Sienne l’Hiver (Sienna in Winter), but l’Eau d’Hiver? Hermès’ perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena told me, “It’s a warm water for winter.” And if you’re going to represent winter with a warm water…

Well, why not bring a shot of spring into a grey January day? Prada Infusion d’Iris. Tommy Girl, which is a liquid summer evening. Flower by Kenzo. In August, believe it or not, a very light application of Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium compliments the heat and adorns the sultry evening to perfection. Armani’s Acqua di Gio, both the masculine and the feminine, are what the French call polyvalent, basically they work in any season, and that goes for Lauder’s Sensuous as well. But Clinique Happy for Men (which women should wear as well) is absolutely summertime and equally absolutely terrific in November.

You have to wear wool in January. Clothing protects you, and your body needs to be kept warm. Your body wants salad in July and pot roast in December. But scent is pure 100% art. Your body doesn’t need it. It merely wants it, craves it, reacts to it. So transport yourself and those around you. Surprise them. Mix season and scent in counterintuitive ways. Flowers in winter, cashmere in summer, and delicate fruit from the warm tropics on a cold fall afternoon are all pure delight.

2010 Scent Resolutions Everyone Can Make!

2009-12-30T07:34:19-08:00

Solve world hunger. Get down to 4% body fat. Clear half of all your debts and form a loving relationship with your mother-in-law.

Are you breaking your own back setting impossible standards of lemon water diets and other New Years’ Resolutions that will have you clawing at the cookie cupboard doors by January 8th? Most of us do, and that’s why they’re so hard to keep!

Perfume.com experts break down five easy new “Scent Resolutions” anyone can make for 2010—ones that you’re sure to keep going well into 2011 and beyond!

Day ‘n’ Night

2009-12-30T08:01:59-08:00

Scents To Last Through NYE

Partying all night and into the wee hours of the New Year can wreck havoc on your make-up, outfit—and fragrance.

The “story” of a perfume varies as you are led through the top, heart and base notes of a scent, and how and where these ingredients are blended within these chapters affects both the smell, and the staying power, of different bottled fragrances.

Don’t be left leaving parties smelling like the champagne you downed at midnight! Check out these long-lasting perfumes from Perfume.com and make sure you start off 2010 smelling fresh!

Just Beachy

2009-10-20T11:02:43-07:00

Aquatic Scents for Oceanic Getaways

Aquatic fragrances invoke images of wide stretches of sand against turquoise waters, the sounds of crashing waves and gulls overhead. Also known as “oceanic” scents, they are the cleanest, freshest-smelling scents of all the olfactory families, used primarily in summer fragrances and men’s colognes.

The Davidoff house popularized aquatic colognes in the 1990s with their ever-growing assortment of fresh fragrances for men and women; among them, the now classic COOL WATER scents which have come to define the aquatic fragrance family.

In oceanic fragrance blends, fresh notes like seawater, mint, marine or ozone accords are layered with lighter floral or citrus to further divide aquatic scents into groups like floral or amber-aquatics. Most oceanic “marine” or “ozone” accords are chemical compounds meant to mimic natural elements of ocean settings, such as the ingredient “calone,” which is designed to duplicate the slightly floral scent of a tropical ocean breeze.

Aquatic scents are fresh, youthful and energetic, used primarily in summer fragrances and men’s colognes. You won’t need to wear much else on the beach.

One of the most scenic beaches in the world is the Anse Du Grand Colombier on the Caribbean island of ST. BART’S. A peaceful escape of calm aqua waters and pristine white sand beaches mixed with modern and luxurious accommodations and gourmet restaurants, St. Bart’s has a distinctly French flavour of a refined yet easy sophistication. Try the sophisticated ISLAND scent, featuring notes like Kauai waterfalls, honeysuckle and driftwood, by designer MICHAEL KORS.

One of the most colourful beaches in the world is the Copacabana Beach in sunny RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL, where the brave of the world bare the best of their beach bods. Copacabana stretches across almost 5km of Rio de Janeiro’s coastline and is the perfect place to soak up the sun and do some serious people watching. To get noticed in the crowd, sport a stronger, more ambery aquatic scent like SICILY BY DOLCE & GABBANA.

If you’re looking for something a little more casual, try Bondi Beach in AUSTRALIA, a great metropolitan beach where you can chill out and watch surfers catch waves or grab a cold one on a nearby patio. Later, dip into nearby Sydney for the chicest restaurant venues in the cosmopolitan capital of New South Wales. Match Bondi’s easygoing attitude with laidback designer Calvin Klein’s ETERNITY SUMMER FOR MEN AND WOMEN.

For something a little closer to home, go no further than the HAWAIIAN island of KAUAI, where Hanalei Beach, unlike most short beaches in Hawaii, stretches white sand across two long miles of the coast. Located in the mouth of a valley filled with lush tropical vegetation and lined with cute cafes, the hip Hanalei Beach is a perfect match for classic aquatic fragrances for him and her: COOL WATER BY DAVIDOFF, fresh fragrances laced with floral undertones and an accord of “pure ocean air” to encapsulate the freshness of sea breeze.

Find more aquatic scents on PERFUME.COM

Perfumed Projections

2009-11-09T12:05:02-08:00

Scents That Let You See Into Your Future

The physiological effect of a just-sniffed fragrance hitting our memory centre allows us to be reminded of places we’ve been or people we’ve been with. But a great scent can also spiral thoughts into the future, and help us to envision where we want to go.

CARIBBEAN DREAMIN’
Perfumes with coconut accords over fresh aquatic notes or soft florals will feel like a gentle breeze wafting around you as you sway in a beach hammock.

Try: Gwen Stefani’s Harajuku Lovers ‘G’ , a fresh woody-oriental with coconut in its top notes and a coconut milk base, and fresh touches of apple skin, mandarin and jasmine.
Or: Jennifer Lopez’s Miami Glow , a crisp citrus floral laced with coconut, fresh grapefruit, exotic passion fruit, blond woods and sunbaked sand.

LAZY LAWN LAYIN’
Scents laced with leafy green and fresh cut grass accords let you feel the simultaneous comfort of the sun on your face and the cool grass tickling the back of your neck.

Try: Paris Jardins Romantiques by Yves Saint Laurent , with the crisp aroma of fresh cut grass around a lush bouquet of mandarin, lilac, rose, violet and light musk.
Or: Annick Goutal Petite Cherie , with a fresh delicious blend of just-cut grass, soft peach, rose and pear vanilla.

ENERGIZE & DIVE
Any blends of zesty citrus notes will revitalize you, just like a quick dip into cold waves during the high heat of summer.

Try: Aquaflore by Carolina Herrera , a spontaneous, dynamic and young fragrance mixing a fresh water accord with mandarin, melon, peach, cyclamen and woods.
Or: CK One Electric , a crisp and exciting bright citrus, emotionally charged by a blend of lime, mandarin, waterlily, violet leaves and light woods.

SUMMER RAIN *
Perfumes with exotic florals, wet’n’fresh aquatic accords and crisp green notes feel like dewey summer raindrops kissing your skin.

Try: Rain by Marc Jacobs , which blends wet cut grass with dewy cypress, teak wood, white orchid, and fresh wild strawberry.
Or: Cool Water Women , a crisp water floral fragrance, laced with aquatic accords, waterlily, pineapple and honeydew melon.

SEA BREEZE
Ultimate getaway scents will radiate with the freshness of tropical waters, as lush blends of pure freshness and exotic accents.
Try: Island by Michael Kors , the ultimate escape scent that sparkles with notes from Kauai waterfalls, fresh kiwi, and a pure oxygen accord over soft florals and driftwood.
Or: Ck One Summer , which fuses fresh citrus with seagrass, lime, blue mint, cucumber green apple, driftwood, and water accords.

Fanatical About Botanicals

2009-10-20T11:27:21-07:00

The World's Best Flowers & Floral Fragrances

The largest fragrance family is the floral family. It’s no surprise, considering there is such a vast multitude of species of flower and tree plants found in different regions around the globe, all with their own beauty, healing properties, and aromas. It is also the largest in terms of timeline; floral perfume’s earliest beginnings date back to ancient Egyptian culture, when people bathed in fragrant oils of jasmine, lily and rose. The first perfumes were simple mixes of oils with crushed herbs and petals.

Some floral fragrances are single-flower scents; others are rich multi-floral bouquets. Floral notes of some kind or another are found in most all fragrances, both men’s and women’s, and can be bisected into scents that are green, fresh, fruity, or amber-y floral, also known as floriental fragrances.

Perhaps the most famous floral perfume is Chanel’s CHANEL NO. 5 perfume, which uses a heavy jasmine flower base. No. 5 set a new stride socially for women’s perfume in 1921, but was also a quality favorite, and has remained a classic scent until today. Its top notes of ylang-ylang and neroli unfold with jasmine and May rose; sandalwood and vanilla round out the elegant composition with unforgettable woody notes. It is a notable example of a floral fragrance for women.

Botanical gardens host some of the world’s most impressive collections of plants in their non-perfume forms, from unusual trees to exotic flowers and lush ferns. The Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden in CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA, is renowned for its 528 acres of beautiful and diverse flora, set against the eastern slope of Table Mountain. Strolling among its indigenous South African plants, including the colourful Cinderella orchid flower, blush pink Belladonna lily, and the African mallow, a dainty evergreen flower that blooms late into autumn, JEAN PAUL GAULTIER SUMMER’S bouquet of lush notes waft well among the hints of natural flora on the breeze.

Up in a colder climate, MONTREAL’s Botanical Gardens is one of the largest of its kind in the world, a 185 acre living museum of plants from around the world. Large outdoor gardens and incubated greenhouses lay across Maisonneuve Park, and are framed by Montreal’s Olympic Stadium. If you visit between the frigid months of February and April, the outdoor gardens may be bare and covered in snow but you can still witness the annual Butterflies Go Free event—- where thousands of species of butterflies and moths are released in the Garden’s exhibition greenhouses. Stay light and fresh around all the wildlife with CASHMERE MIST by DKNY.

You can find one of Europe’s most complete collections of plant species at the Arboretum National des Barres in LOIRET, FRANCE, about 100 miles south of Paris. This lush wonderland of greenery houses about 3,000 species of plants, including 109 species of oak, 85 species of maple, 57 spruce, and 44 types of fir tree. Try woodsy ROMANCE BY RALPH LAUREN while you stroll the garden grounds.

Bogar Botanical Garden in INDONESIA claims to be one of Asia’s oldest gardens; gates to the 200 acre spot of land first opened in 1817. Today, Bogar is filled with over 15,000 species of trees and plants—- its orchid house alone contains 3,000 varieties of the delicate flower. It is also known for housing the world’s largest orchid: a grammatophyllum speciousum, a species that can grow up to 2,000 pounds and produce up to 10,000 flowers on a mature plant. Try sporting orchid-rich EUPHORIA by Calvin Klein.

Find more floral perfumes on PERFUME.COM

Fruit Basket

2009-10-20T10:34:52-07:00

The Origins of Citrus

The sweetness of fresh citrus fruits invites the senses to recall bright suns on hot summer days, fresh cut grass and tall, cool drinks of sweetened iced tea. Their fruity smells are widely loved and widely imitated in all sorts of scented products, from dish soap to candles, cosmetics to juices, alcohols—- and fragrances.

Actual citrus plants like that of the orange, lemon, grapefruit and lime originate in tropical and subtropical regions of the world. Many major commercial growing areas are found in southern China, the Mediterranean Basin, South Africa, parts of South America and southern States like Florida, California, Arizona and Texas.

The citrus fragrance family is made up of a collection of light, fresh notes that have taken inspiration from the plants of these regions, resulting in perfume ingredients like bergamot, orange, lemon, petit grain, and mandarin—- accords which are usually mixed with more feminine floral or deeper woods blends.

Large numbers of limes are imported from MEXICO into other world regions (including Canada and the U.S.) every year— one of the most popular members of the citrus family of fruits. Their yellow cousins, lemons, can be grown in slightly cooler and more moderate temperatures, but are still found primarily along the coast of SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. Freshen up with a lime in a cold beer and a spritz of citrusy-fresh unisex CK ONE, with fresh notes like bergamot, fresh pineapple, and papaya.

The mandarin orange comes from a small citrus tree and largely resembles the orange, but for being less round and more tender. The mandarin orange originated in the Spanish province of VALENCIA, and the country still has over 200,000 acres dedicated to the production of the sweet fruit. Find orange and mandarin in a number of sweet fragrances, like FRACAS BY ROBERT PIGUET and ETERNITY FOR WOMEN by Calvin Klein.

One of SOUTH AFRICA’s largest exports is a variety of citrus fruits, including oranges, clementines, grapefruits, lemons and limes. South Africa is also one of the most diverse regions on the planet, with 48 million people sharing a multitude of different origins, cultures, languages and religions. Celebrate this diversity by tossing up a sweet fruit salad and enjoying it with another citrus blend of fruity-sweet ACQUA DI GIO perfume by Georgio Armani.

The grapefruit, known for its juicy bitterness, is a hybrid fruit from the 18th century that was first bred in JAMAICA. When it was found in Barbados it was nicknamed the “forbidden fruit.” Get a little fresh and naughty with ambery-citrus scents like POISON BY CHRISTIAN DIOR or VERSENSE BY VERSACE.

Find more citrus scents on PERFUME.COM

Bon Voyage!

2009-09-08T15:22:26-07:00

Guerlain Leads Scent Tours With New Fragrances

Been around the world and I-I-I, I can’t find my fragrance.

That is, until Guerlain stepped up last spring with a trio set of scents inspired by three cultural capitals and personally pivotal cities in his history, as seen from his native Paris: Moscow, New York, and Tokyo. The scents of this aptly-named Voyage Collection are meant to conjure the image of a stroll through each respective city and capture their essences through olfactory homage.

In addition to the careful mixology involved in creating scents to capture the spirits of these diverse metropolises, Guerlain has embellished each bottle with drawings by sculptor Serge Mansau and had graphic designers compile a log and scrapbook of cards, images, drawings, photos and symbols that further represent them.

“At Guerlain, it is a tradition. Crossing borders. Encountering new places. Discovering unfamiliar, exotic essences. Capturing the soul of a place by uncovering the emotional enchantment of its raw elements.”

PARIS-MOSCOW tells the tale of a changing city emerging from one political state to another, suddenly able to bask in its love of luxury and ceremony. The scent is all at once musky, fruity and woody, its notes including white musk, tonka bean, vanilla, and red currant; it contains absinthe, sparkling lemon, plum and pine needles. It is soft and ultra feminine, and throbbing with life, much like the city itself. It is also rich, like its namesake— Moscow is home to one of the largest population of billionaires.

PARIS-NEW YORK, like its namesake city, wafts with ambition and richness. It is a woody oriental centered around vanilla, cinnamon, cedar, cardamom and bergamot, reflecting how the city embraces both its skyscrapers and little villages, rife with culture. New York is a melting pot of a metropolis and likewise, notes of Paris-New York melt together to create a sparkling, sweet aroma. It is where everyone wants to flock, to see and be seen. Paris-New York also leaves such an impression.

PARIS-TOKYO is at once thoroughly modern and classic, a rich green floral with notes of jasmine, violet, Hinoki cedar, green tea and jasmine. Tokyo, the capital of Japan “The Land of the Rising Sun” is large, bustling, techy, and fascinating, with solid undertones of tradition. Guerlain’s Paris-Tokyo scent is also bold yet delicate, evoking all strengths and subtleties of the culture over a fresh, clean base.

It has long been known that memory and scent are intertwined. The smell of fresh cut grass, the buttery scent wafting out of a neighbourhood pastry shop, or the lingering cloud of a certain cologne trailing behind a man passing you on the subway can instantly take you back in mind to moments passed. Whether or not you’ve been to New York, Tokyo or Moscow, these Guerlain fragrances take your imagination by the hand and lead you down each of the city’s streets. No airline necessary.

How to Wear It

2009-12-02T12:02:53-08:00

One of the most common questions about scent is actually just how to wear the stuff. Where to put it, how much, when, reapplication. Where is relatively simple: The tops of your forearms (forget the “pulse points” legend; that’s marketing) and your neck. Before I put on my button-down, I lift my T-shirt and give one good shot down my back. And the two unobvious places: Your hair (great for diffusing scent) and the shoulders of your shirt, top, or suit coat.

How much: Watch the volume, and that depends on which scent it is. The original Prada, Sean John’s I Am King, Calvin Klein Secret Obsession, l’Interdit by Givenchy these are scents with good lungs, and you’re going to need just enough so that those within 4 or 5 feet of you get a pleasant olfactory decible level but no more. On the other hand, evanescent scents Hermes’ Un Jardin sur le Nil or Un Jardin en Mediterranee, Nautica Oceans, or Pucci Vivara — you should reapply every 2-3 hours to keep them nicely humming along.

When, which is a variation of “Are there day scents and night scents?” The answer is yes. You’re probably not going to wear Opium or Poison or Cannabis Rose by Fresh to the office, although anytime after 7pm all three of these are good to go. Professional day scents should speak clearly, efficiently, and attractively. Flower by Kenzo, Very Irresistible by Givenchy (both the masculine and the feminine), Bulgari Green Tea. Guerlain’s Rose Barbare, which is sensational, I think easily works for both. Weekends it’s entirely up to you. By day a guy could go for Clinique Happy for Men and (if he wants to be intense) by night, Narciso Rodriguez for Men. A woman could have fun with YSL’s Baby Doll until the dinner party at 8pm, when J’adore or Tommy Girl are excellent.

Speaking of dinner, one last comment: You want a scent that goes with food. Avoid the metallic / air conditioning / ozonic scents. Ambre Narguile by Hermes will always make any meal taste better. So will l’Eau de Tarocco with its light creamy spiced citrus.

Flicks & Frags

2009-11-10T10:20:50-08:00

Cinematic Inspiration for Scent Choices

Hollywood blockbusters can inspire the scents and set the tone for any blockbuster occasion in YOUR life.

All you need is popcorn and Perfume.com to find inspiration for your next adventure!

Winter Wonderland

2009-11-20T11:14:01-08:00

What perfume will you wear this holiday season?

Getting decked out in statement-making scents is the only way to celebrate the rich and vibrant holidays. It is also my favorite season to experiment with all types of fragrances: from edgy, woody chypre scents that channel my inner wild-child to sophisticated scents that represent timeless, classic beauty.

Although I love experimenting with a “wardrobe” of fragrances, a timeless signature scent for the holidays is Coco by Chanel. It seems like just yesterday, the first time I experienced the perfume. I instantly fell in love. My mother, a true die-hard for Chanel No. 5, was elated that I too fell in love with Chanel; a fragrance worthy of calling my own, a timeless piece of history. Unfortunately, the price tag for a 16-year old was far beyond my reach. For weeks I stopped by the Chanel counter on my way to the men’s tie department at the local mall where I worked, to douse myself in the perfume.

It wasn’t until my boyfriend and high school love surprised me just before the holidays with a massive jar of M&M chocolate candies. It seemed rather odd to receive a vat of chocolate that would surely add 5lbs to my thighs and before I had the chance to hide my disapproval, he laughed “No silly, dig deep”.

And what do you suppose was buried among those sweet delights, but my very first bottle of Coco Chanel! A true romantic at heart!

Submit your story and be entered to win a $500 shopping spree on Perfume.com. No purchase necessary. Contest closes November 30th. Winner will be announced on December 7th.

D&G Have It In The Bag (& In The Cards)

2009-10-29T17:26:54-07:00

D&G’s newest fragrance collection draws inspiration from the Tarot card deck, matching personality to perfume in a cosmic rendezvous dictated by the sun, moon and stars.

D&G1: LE BATELEUR
THE CARD: 1 THE MAGICIAN
The Magician card signifies a hopeless romantic with an unmistakable power to charm and seduce; their openness casts a spell that makes them irresistible to others.
THE SCENT: Le Bateleur is a sensual blend of bergamot, pink pepper, cardamom and juniper berry, warmed by birch leaf, wood and musk.
FOR CELEBS LIKE: Grace Kelly, Heather Graham, Kate Beckinsale

D&G3: LIMPERATRICE
THE CARD: 3 – THE EMPRESS
The Empress card represents a soul that is powerful and strong in character. The Empress is a true star with a magnetic, energetic quality that keeps her in the centre of everyone’s attention.
THE SCENT: L’Imperatrice is a sweet fruity-floral fragrance, mixing rhubarb, red currant, and kiwi with a rich floral heart and rounding with a soft base of sandalwood, musk and fresh grapefruit.
FOR CELEBS LIKE: Jennifer Lopez, Brooke Shields, Halle Berry

D&G6: LAMOUREUX
THE CARD: 6 – THE LOVERS
The Lovers Tarot card represents a confident charmer who’s resourceful and passionate nature gets her what she wants, every time.
THE SCENT: L’Amoureux is a spicy and sensual scent, with spicy cardamom and juniper berry atop the freshest aquatic accords; an earthy base of vetiver and white cedar wood grounds the blend.
FOR CELEBS LIKE: Kim Cattrall, Charlize Theron, Katharine Hepburn

D&G10: LA ROUE DE LA FORTUNE
THE CARD: 10 – THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE
The Wheel of Fortune card signifies luck and change, is drawn by adventurous types who enjoy surprises and games of chance.
THE SCENT: La Roue de la Fortune is a fragrance with unexpected turns and flavors, with citrusy pineapple and fresh green notes livening a lush heart of tuberose, gardenia and jasmine over a sweet patchouli, vanilla and orris base.
FOR CELEBS LIKE: Christina Aguilera,- Catherine Zeta-Jones, Hilary Swank

D&G18: LA LUNE
THE CARD: 18 – THE MOON
The Moon card represents the creative dreamer who has a free, charming and ethereal spirit. Like the moon, this card is for someone who is radiant, inspiring and mysterious.
THE SCENT: D&Gs La Lune is a soft and subtle blend of lily, tuberose, and rose mixed with warm and sensual musk, sandalwood and leather. The slightest tinge of bergamot and apple in the introductory notes is the vibrant dusk before nightfall.
FOR CELEBS LIKE: Catherine Deneuve, Gwenyth Paltrow, Natalie Portman

Undue Influence

2009-10-07T12:33:12-07:00

The problem comes when the marketers are really good. Basically because before I smell the perfumes, before the molecules have triggered in my head, turned over old memories and slipped into new olfactory grooves, I’ve had to pass via the marketers to get the scents under my nose. The marketers don’t know scent, it’s not their thing, as they’ve said to me, they’re visual guys, but they control the approach, where you’re captive to your sense of sight, simply because you have to see the damn bottles of Dior or YSL to get them into your hand. The designers are using colors so startling, so mesmerizingly neon (cf: “Ralph Hot”-that box fascinates me, as if it were a tiny entrance to a 3am nightclub in Shinjuku) that with nothing more than a glance they throw up before your eyes a retinal image of the scent. Though scent is invisible. It has no retinal image. It has no seeable identity.

And I don’t want a retinal image of a perfume. I don’t want a visual understanding. That’s not my job, it’s not, at all, what I critique. I want an olfactory understanding. They’re two completely separate neural pathways, two different human senses. I want-and as a critic I need-to smell the juices as free of prejudice as possible. But I open the “Ralph Hot” box, and bottle designer Lara Modjeski leaps at me, she gets to me first via the eyes, she and her marketing team molding what I think I think of the scent, filling in exposition, backstory, dialogue with a single look. You peel away the neon colors, spray the perfume on your arm. Only then is perfumer Pierre Negrin able to get his juice to my nose. Only then can I smell the scent, the thing I’m supposed to focus on exclusively.

The better the marketers, the more ably they guide me into their visions. I do my best to take Pierre’s work at face value, to put Lara’s bottle aside and evaluate what Pierre is doing here. And I hope I’m pretty good at it. But Lara’s already got her shot in.

I have these visions of blindfolding myself and walking into Bloomingdales with a pen and a notebook, but frankly the physical design people are getting so good that even if you felt your way via the bottles to the perfumes, your sense of touch would already be molding your perception of the scents they contain. Annick Goutal’s fluted bottles feel like things found in a drawer belonging to Marie Antoinette, the sanded cool glass monolith of Dolce & Gabbana’s “Light Blue” feels like a man-made undersea stone, the tall organically arcing cylinder of “Flower by Kenzo” is like a tree in another planet’s polymer forest. You feel what the marketers want you to smell.

Optimally I would judge these scents from lab bottles labeled only with codes my assistant controls. She and I would line the bottles up in my office, dip the blotters, take a few minutes to inhale, to process them, without allowing the slightest reaction onto our faces. Then: “What do you think?” Which is what we do now, except that when I smell Bulgari’s “Jasmin Noir,” I’ve got Thierry de Baschmakoff’s lapidary curved black glass bottle before me, as striking as a tiny Richard Serra, or the ingeniously designed, massively heavy bottle of Paul McLaughin providing the perfect opening for Claude Dir’s equally ingenious “Dirty English,” the Juicy Couture masculine.

Would I love “Dirty English” as much without McLaughlin’s frame around it? I’d like to think so. When over three years ago we started the “Scent Notes” column at The New York Times, both my editors and I agreed at that time that it would be better to receive all the perfumes as anonymous, numbered lab samples. It turned out to be completely impracticable. They scent makers, IFF, Givaudan, Symrise, Takasago, Firmenich, and so on, of course make lab samples, but for internal use; there’s no system for getting them to the various brands’ PR people, who in any case would rather slit their wrists than hand their new olfactory launches over to a journalist unsurrounded by the armor of visual baubles and marketing cues, this skein of camouflage that they hope will predispose us to like the product. Many, of course, do take the wrapping for the substance.

Nor is there any protocol for the scent makers to feed lab samples directly to the press. The brands would have hysterics. So they messenger over the scents encased in the bottles wrapped in the packaging. I donï¿½t accept physical press materials any more; theyï¿½re an ecological disaster. I only take electronic press materials. I strip away all the pdf’s and images, file the rest of the stuff in Word folders, and then don’t, I must admit, ever read it.) I try to avoid looking at all the cues. Shannon unwraps everything, organizes it, I take the blotters one by one from her, and we sit in silence at my desk and after a moment one of us says, “I *love this! It’s amazing!” and the other says, “Are you totally high? This thing is baldly derivative / poorly structured / lacking any persistence on skin / a total rip off of [fill in the blank]!” And then we argue about it.

Sometimes there is absolutely no connection between the package, bottle, and scent. Sometimes there is. De Baschmakoff designed the ground glass cylinder with its sloping shoulders to hold Bulgari’s “Eau Parfumï¿½e au Thï¿½ Vert,” and it seems a visual reflection of that olfactory sculpture, mesmeric and cool and both sharp and rounded as the scent Jean-Claude Ellena created. I’ve always maintained that the bottle is irrelevant to the scent, that it’s all about the juice. But Marc Jacob’s Daisy? You take that thing out of the package, you see the plastic petals, that rubbery bouquet on that cap, and you’re dead. They’ve got you. I’m not saying that bottle designer Wilhelm Liden has necessarily made a more perfect creation here than perfumer Alberto Morillas. But I sort of think he has. This visual design of Liden’s mediates-introduces you to, makes you anticipate, perfectly directs your expectations of-Morillas’s perfume, the product you’re buying. Or at least the product you’re theoretically buying, although I’ve never heard so many times, “I saw the bottle, and I had to buy it!” as I did with “Daisy.” The bottle won’t ensure that crucial second purchase, and the test of a perfume is-always-the second purchase, but it sure will get them to reach for the first.

There is a way to use the visual that is much less manipulative, that constitutes simply visual cues for identifying a collection, a house. Hermï¿½s Orange, Chanel White, Jo Malone Daffodil, l’Artisan Parfumeur Black. Houses use marvelous Post-Modernist post-ironic artistic maneuvers, like the sans serif letters and metal cans of l’Eau d’Italie that, entirely by design, could not possibly be more removed from the Romanticist, neo-Renaissance, Symbolist olfactory paintings they enclose.

Sometimes I think they work and at the same time they don’t. The Armani perfumes of several years ago that looked like wrapped toffees, or shaving lotions, or tinned biscuits for astronauts-they were ingenious pieces of packaging, but I never had the sensation that they were anything other than ingenious pieces of packaging, and-I have to go back to my memory of it-weirdly enough I felt like these visually striking wrappings were so removed from the scents they contained that there was no visual contamination. Sometimes they’re iconic. The blood red square of Ralph Lauren’s first, astonishing effort in 1978, “Lauren”-his creative team had called on the legendary perfumer Bernard Chant, but designer Ben Kotyuk carved up Chant’s luscious liquor into blood-red cubes that you can’t forget, and the color is, indeed, a synethetic conversion of Chant’s perfume. Sometimes they’re genius. The brilliantly sublime minimalism of Prada’s packaging, its glass sheets covering the minimalist juices, each subtly seductive as a string of perfect cups of tea.

I told Shannon recently that I’d still prefer the unmarked lab samples. She said, “That’s an ideal for any critic, but then, you know, you wouldn’t be getting people’s real-world experience of the perfume.” Which is true.

A Double Date Where Scents Reciprocate

2009-09-21T15:31:48-07:00

His & Hers Fragrances for Compatibility

Whether you and your man are stepping out in your Saturday night best or meeting other couples for casual happy hour martinis, you want to match your partner on scent and aesthetic levels. Fragrances can work together to complement and define a couple as much as they can fight and create awkward abrasions on each others’ scentspheres.

Check out these cute scent combinations, and let chemistry work in your favor—- after all, alls’ fair in love and fragrance.