To wake up craving the dry, pungent astringency of some proper hippie-oil patchouli first thing in the morning is alarming enough to make me wonder if I’m not pregnant. I mean, I always think I’m pregnant right after things don’t work out with whatever guy, and I’m totally not actually pregnant, but the patchouli thing was weird. I’ve heard stories of the recently impregnated being tipped off to their fertilized state by olfactory hints; things like being able to smell electricity when an appliance is plugged into the wall or finding their own skin scent suddenly and completely foreign to their sense of smell. Female perfume-heads are forever relating to their own menstrual cycles through perfume: much like the taste of food, some things smell better or worse depending on whether you’re ovulating or flush in the middle of Aunt Flo’s consanguine company. It’s not that farfetched to seriously question what’s going on with your body when a perfume component you’ve never gotten along with is suddenly the only thing that makes sense.
Patchouli, in this case. I got home from work last night after thinking about it all day and I needed some right then. I wanted it pure, I wanted it as sharp and bitter and bracing as only patchouli can be. So I went to the all-night CVS and came home with a little 1.5oz bottle of the $13.95 cheapness that is Jovan Fresh Patchouli. I sprayed it on and waited for the moment of truth.
The truth is that this stuff smells a lot more like a horse stable than a head shop. This fragrance packs a blast of ephemeral, strawlike coumarin bolstered up by the peculiar good/bad/weird all-at-the-same-time underpinnings of the patchouli I’d been fiending for all day. The effect reminds me of raisins: something that once was wet is now dry. It’s the smell of a bale of hay drying out after a heavy dewfall on the farm, the smell of that dedicated hour you wake up before school starts to go brush your precious pony, Muffy.
I kind of love it. I’ve never been one of those pony club chicks, although I have been on a horse enough times to be jealous of the pony club’s thinly veiled and completely genius excuse for masturbating all the time. But Jovan Fresh Patchouli, to me, smells like a very specific type of woman that saw its apex of public popularity in the 70s. It’s Katharine Ross in The Graduate and pictures of young Jane Fonda and enjoying the freedom to be “outdoorsy” without having to stop shaving your armpits. You know, you have rich parents but you took acid that one time in Aspen and have taken great pains to discover life beyond your trust fund and the pictures of your backpacking trip through Europe to prove it. You have a bunch of fancy French perfumes that various people have bought for you over the years, but when you discovered Jovan Fresh Patchouli you were very relieved that the one thing that smelled like you in a bottle is actually dirt cheap (so none of your friends know about it).
I mean, it doesn’t smell like me in a bottle. But you know, since I enjoy pretending so much, I’ll probably still pull it out from time to time. Something about it makes me feel kinda thumpety-thumpety-thumpety, like learning how to trot. Hey…. at least it won’t get me pregnant.
Filed under: Perfume | Tags: orange blossom, Serge Lutens, The Last Picture Show
Like many girls, I thought I was hopelessly unattractive when I was seventeen. My reasons for thinking so now seem achingly naive in the context of the things I should have been caring about: my hair didn’t lie right. I occasionally had a pimple. I wasn’t a skinny little nymph, nor had I come to terms with my curves. I hadn’t figured out how to dress myself yet. I didn’t have a boyfriend. Looking back on my senior year of high school, I wish I could go back in time and smack some sense into myself. When I see pictures of myself from that period of time, I realize that I was indeed beautiful despite all of my perceived flaws, the way all but the most unfortunate of seventeen year-old girls are.
Fleurs d’Oranger wasn’t invented yet when I was a senior in high school, nor would I have had the resources, growing up in the tiny town of Upper Black Eddy Pennsylvania, to ever come across Serge Lutens’ exclusive French niche line of perfumes. If I’d had some of this back then, though, I have a feeling that my senior year would have been a completely different beast.
I’d have been her:
Except maybe nicer. Although probably not.
Cybill Shepherd in The Last Picture Show portrayed Jacy Farrow, the high school bombshell of a small town just coming to grips with the repercussions of being part of a larger world in the 1060s. Jacy spends the entire movie seducing every man in sight, on purpose, just to see if it will work. Despite the hearts she breaks, you can’t help but feel that she’s doing it more out of innocence than actual malice. Even when she kicks her bewildered teenaged boyfriend out of bed after recruiting him to take her virginity, you can’t help sympathize with her frustration in still not knowing how to have sex properly afterward. Or maybe you can. I couldn’t.
Fleurs d’Oranger hits the same spot in my personal mythology as The Last Picture Show and my own senior year of high school. It’s hard to explain why, except that the fragrance is so achingly, horribly, beautifully innocent that you get the feeling it’s going to have a long life of mixed blessings and sorrows. Based around the orange flower and supported by notes of white jasmine, tuberose, white rose, green orange peel, musk, hibiscus, cumin, and nutmeg, Fleurs d’Oranger plays out all of the combined freshness and sweat of that long, hot summer right after high school graduation.
The orange blossom sings out most strongly, but it’s far from being the tepid and sticky kiddie cologne sold in Spanish bodegas and health food stores. This orange blossom is hot, lush, itching for trouble, and counting down the days until she can get the hell out of this two-bit town. The cumin and nutmeg suggest not sex and danger themselves, but a pulsing, palpable, frustrated desire for it. It’s sweet and juicy to the point of bursting, which would explain why it reminds me of a time when I still lived at home with my strict parents. I think if a seventeen year-old were to actually wear this perfume, some concerned neighbor would be doing the right thing by calling her parents. It’s for a woman, not a girl.
Yeah, I know it’s just perfume. But this is why I’m so obsessed with it: it tells its story to the obsessed, and probably only the obsessed. And Serge Lutens Fleurs d’Oranger is one of my most obsessed-over obsessions. Not because it’s trying; because it can’t help it.
There is something brisk and responsible about the Kiehl’s store. It has to do with the lab-coated sales associates, apothecary-styled packaging, no-nonsense displays, and the way you feel as though you were doing something good for you, like climbing a mountain, simply by shopping there for beauty products. To walk into a Kiehl’s store and buy a vial of their Original Musk oil or a big glass bottle of the EdT feels as wholesome as a therapy session or sports massage.
Given this context, it is somewhat discordant to discover that Kiehl’s Original Musk goes on with all the subtlety of the rose air freshener hanging in a truck stop restroom. It is a thick, opaque floral tempered by a blast of citrus that seeems to be trying to disguise the dirty load in its drawers. Kiehl’s generous sample policy is an all-important in the case of Original Musk fragrance–this is a fragrance that needs to be brought home and given time to settle.
Back when I was just starting to get into perfume, I thought it would be a good idea to spray some of my Kiehl’s EdT sample directly into my then-man The Red Guard’s gamey armpit. This wasn’t the bitch move it sounds like. I was infatuated with The Red Guard’s gamey armpits and thought that spraying a unisex fragrance into one of them would only make it smell better. Something to do with pheremones, or the already-funky aroma of the Kiehl’s itself which I had not liked on my own skin during initial testings. I didn’t know what I was doing, and the effect was not particularly pleasant, but I will always hold the image of the two of us lying in my bed with both of our faces pressed into his fragrant armpit in my mind as one of those bathetically poignant moments where all is right with the world.
This was in the summer. By Fall, The Red Guard was in (where else?) China, and the weather had cooled down enough for me to dislike sleeping alone. One rainy Sunday afternoon, I missed him enough to spray myself down with the dreaded Kiehl’s in hopes that I could olfactorily summon up a little piece of the armpit-perfume memory to snuggle up to. This time, it worked. The rough-and-ready topnotes melted down into a wistfully human-smelling skin scent, like the back of a much-loved neck. There was a little bit of dirty hair, a little bit of freshly-washed laundry, and a lot of smooth warmth.
The oil strength of Kiehl’s Original Musk is very strong and very oily on the skin, but I like its uncomplicated coziness better then the more-complex, sharper EdT. It’s a little dirtier, a little warmer, and a little closer to the effect I’m looking for. The EdT is similar-smelling enough to the oil to layer the two, though, for when you really want to smell yourself, which I usually do.
This scent’s carnally evocative tendencies, when married to Kiehl’s briskly unisex marketing, makes me think that this is a scent for people who need a little comfort at the top of their various personal mountaintops. The photo above is a still from the Francois Truffaut film Jules et Jim, whose main character (played by Jeanne Moreau) has always seemed to me like someone who still needed a hug even with two boyfriends.
A scent fit for one of Boccacio’s naughty heroines in The Decameron, Fendi’s Theorema conjures up deliciously rustic refreshments such as eggnog and honey mead as well as the spiced-orange pomanders hung in doorways to ward off the plague. The opening fizzes with orange, tangelo, and a smidge of sprightly jasmine that soon knocks over an entire kitchen spice rack in its rum-sodden ebullience. A soothing vanillic swirl of sweet cream, amber, and dry woods rounds out the base, conjuring up the woozy excitement of sitting in front of a fireplace in the country while a bunch of boys tell you dirty stories. Plague? What plague?
Neither coy nor brazen, Theorema is a scent of unchecked laughter, generous quantities of alcohol, good company, and feeling warm and safe while the rest of the world, with all of its complex dangers, blusters around outside without you. Theorema can hardly be faulted for the fact that its lasting power is roughly equal to the duration such a cozy feeling is possible. Oh, well. If re-spraying constantly is all it takes to keep the plague of life at bay, I will gladly carry the entire 3.4oz bottle of the EdP around in my purse.
Described as a white floral fragrance with notes of jasmine, muguet, tree moss, and musk, Heaven Eau de Toilette from the Gap is no more cerebral than a dryer sheet. Its fresh, airy simplicity is as soothing and wholesome as a clean white towel that’s been hung out to dry in the sun. Worn at bedtime or on hot days in the summer when a heavier scent might seem burdensome and overly complicated, I find that Gap’s Heaven fills a slot in my perfume collection emotionally equivalent to opening a window in a stuffy apartment.
At $14.99 for 3.4 oz, I’m pretty sure there’s neither a single natural ingredient in this blend, nor more than two or three different aromachemical compounds. It’s so light that you could probably spray half a bottle of it all over yourself before sitting in a hot, crowded car without garnering much notice. Completely linear from first spritz to its rapid dissipation, Gap’s Heaven is the kind of atmospheric scent that would be equally at home pumped through the air vents of a Japanese hotel as it would be sprayed onto one’s body or clothing.
Although there are four notes listed in Heaven’s makeup, I only smell two prominently: the soapiness of muguet/lily of the valley and clean, inoffensive musk. Jasmine softens the “scratchy” rough qualities of muguet without predominating, and tree moss adds a gentle aridity to the already neutral purr of musk. It chimes softly without disruption, like the muted background music in the facial room at a spa. Gap’s Heaven is no Enya or Yanni, though, rather it is a CD purchased at a health-food store with a waterfall on the cover, something that features muted a capella chanting accompanied by windchimes. If one’s idea of heaven is that of a place where no distractions are possible, Gap’s Heaven would probably fit the bill.
Filed under: Perfume | Tags: Nurse Ratched, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Serge Lutens
It’s easy to be seduced by the idea of Daim Blond, a “haute concentration” among perfumes that, due to their lofty price tag and avant garde sympathies, can hardly be considered plebian to begin with. I’m still in the dark as to what makes this concentration more “haute” than the others, but after reading the notes and reviews of Daim Blond, I was eager to make its suave white-suede acquaintance.
What I found, upon spraying it on my wrists in Bluemercury this morning, was not the rich-bitch confection of JP Tod’s loafers, sun-baked BMW interiors, and gently worn fingerless driving gloves that I’d expected (and sorely wanted) it to be. Daim Blond instead performed something rather ugly and perverse on my skin that called to mind blinding white hospital corridors, antibacterial douche, and a mighty power struggle between good and evil not unlike that of Nurse Ratched and Randle MacMurphy in the Ken Kesey novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” And much like that story, in which a high-spirited mental patient who may or may not actually be crazy meets his match in a quietly castrating and power-hungry ward nurse, this perfume both dismayed and exhausted me.
At first, the medicinal aridity of cardamom butts heads with a rambunctious marmalade note, described in Daim Blond’s official description as “abricot stone.” Malleable, easily-led iris, the other predominant note, sides with apricot, effectively frustrating the dry forces of cardamom’s strict cleanliness and forcing it to use another tactic: leather. This isn’t an animalic leather, wearing chaps and wielding a paddle. Rather, it’s the sort of soft, beaurocratic leather that speaks in a modulated voice and smiles as it efficiently goes about its work of subduing the wayward apricot. There is one last hysterical, jammy shriek, and then it’s over. Apricot has been lobotomized by the forces of order in this perfume.
The dry down of Daim Blond finds the offending apricot note meek, mild, and drooling with the creamy, ephemeral wistfulness of heliotrope. The leather note kicks its soft-soled loafers up on its desk and breathes a musky sigh of relief. Only then does Daim Blond begin to smell as it was meant to smell: like white suede, levelheaded and serene. Still, it’s hard to forget that a rebellion with all of its attendant casualties has just been squashed, and its somehow difficult to look the smooth, calm suede note comfortably in the eye. Her hands are dirty even while spotlessly clean.
Boomtown Boudoir 