Fabulous Fragrances Book Review

By Alyssa In our current world of blogs, Burr, and Turin&Sanchez perfume criticism it’s easy to giggle a little while paging through Jan Moran’s Fabulous Fragrances: A Guide to Prestige Perfumes. Released in 1994, by Moran’s own Beverly Hills-based Crescent House Publishing, Fabulous is proud of its industry and celebrity connections. It features a blurb from Elizabeth Taylor on the front cover (along with a photo of the author), and one from Annette Green, then president of the Fragrance Foundation, on the back. Its perfume “profiles”—they’re not reviews—often include long quoted stories from designers and stars explaining how they created their perfumes, followed up by descriptions of said celebrities’ charitable activities. Many profiles end with a list of “famous patrons.” (Who knew Princess Diana of Wales was such a perfumista? Or that Jackie Onassis, Elsa Peretti and Imelda Marcos had such similar tastes?) In the introduction Gale Hayman—wife of Fred Hayman and co-owner of their Beverly Hills boutique—takes full credit for unleashing Giorgio on the world. (That is, after ignoring the advice Karl Lagerfeld gave her over lunch to “forget it” if it took her longer than two years to create her perfume.) Moran portrays herself as a Texas girl and a savvy businesswoman with a Harvard MBA. She is both—her other industry projects include a collaboration with Michael Edwards—but the persona Fabulous projects is that of a gracious (and quite fabulous) Beverly Hills doyenne. By the time the slightly updated Fabulous Fragrances II comes out in 2000—and I don’t, by the way, find I need both books—Moran has become Countess Moran of Lemnos. With so much smoke and stardust in our eyes we could be excused for missing the fact that Fabulous is, at its core, a fairly solid resource book. Moran’s introductory chapters provide good advice about discovering one’s taste in perfume and the uses of a perfume wardrobe. They also offer cogent historical information on trends in perfume and succinct definitions of traditional perfume categories (chypre, oriental and so on) and the different strengths of perfume (edp, edt and so on). Each of the 350 perfume profiles includes a full list of notes, and the year of release. Moran’s prose is warm and clear. She writes particularly well about older classics, and a surprising number of Carons, Chanels, Goutals and Guerlains and such pop up among soon-to-be-forgotten newer releases and blockbusters from the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. The profiles are arranged alphabetically (I find it confusing to have the perfumes separated from their houses but I must be in the minority since this is common in guides) and they are augmented by a list of “honorable mentions” that didn’t quite make the “prestige perfume” cut. The latter third of the book groups the perfumes by their respective categories, and includes a glossary of “perfume ingredients,” (sometimes these are notes rather than actual materials) and a buyers guide. Obviously the listings are dated, but since I’m reading as a collector rather than a normal person shopping for a signature perfume, I enjoy hearing about underappreciated or now-discontinued scents and find the whole a useful snapshot of the time period. In fact, I enjoy all of Fabulous, from the star-studded bits to Moran’s enthusiastic praise of perfumes she clearly loves. I still giggle, but it’s affectionate laughter: the countess knows her stuff. I bought my copy of Fabulous used, online, where it is widely available, as is Fabulous II.

Encountering Kilian: On Pretension and Back to Black Aphrodisiac

By Alyssa Long, long, ago, back around, oh, 2007 or so, a young man by the name of Kilian took his gothic complexion, a killer pair of cheekbones and a modest portion of his inherited fortune and invested them all in a perfume company. And we laughed. Remember that? Remember the Le Prix Eau Faux-inspiring introductory sales copy re-uniting Baudelaire and Snoop Dogg at long last? Then there was the accompanying press photo (see above) featuring said complexion and cheekbones, and reminding one ever so slightly of Edward Scissorhands or, more recently, of pretty teenage vampires.* We laughed some more. When we were not laughing we were outraged. The prices! The ridiculous packaging! (Lacquered boxes! A key for god’s sakes!) The sheer pretension of it all! And then, well, damn it if some of the perfume wasn’t pretty good. So some of us laughed a little less. And some of us, like me, raged a little more, and refused to smell the stuff on principle. (The principle of saving my money for other perfume.) But then Denyse wrote one of her patented perfumerotica** reviews of Back to Black and Pure Oud over on Grain de Musc, and Patti over on Perfume Posse agreed, and when I came across the By Kilian counter in Bergdorf Goodman’s on recent trip to New York I found myself walking over with a sheepish grin to ask for a sniff or two. “Are you familiar with our line?” asked the beautiful young SA, blonde and gracious, with an Eastern European accent I couldn’t quite place. I hemmed and hawed. Yes, I said, I knew of the line, but no, I hadn’t actually smelled much of it up until now because, well… Then came one of those moments in my life, of which there are rather too many, when I hear myself talking and wonder when on earth I will stop. Because, with much awkward laughter, and no doubt blushing, too, I was explaining that it had taken me a long time to explore the line because of my initial reaction to copy/price/ packaging etc. Somewhere in there, I used the word “posturing.” “But what is this ‘posturing’?” said the SA, puzzled, but not unfriendly. “I am Albanian. Perhaps I do not understand the English. Posture is a good thing, yes? It means to stand up straight?” Oh god, could this get any more awkward? Now I had to explain my rudeness. “Well,” I managed, “some of us”—not just me, really!—“found the ad copy a little pretentious. Posturing as in posing. Striking a pose. Being false.” “But I am not posing!” she cried, horrified. “Oh, no, no, no, no” I hastened to reassure her. “This is not about you. You don’t have anything to do with how the line is marketed! That’s all up to the PR people. And to Kilian himself, I assume.” “Ah, I see,” she said. “But Kilian is very nice!” Apparently it could get more awkward. “Ah, I see,” I repeated back to her. “You’ve met him.” “Oh, yes!” she said. “He comes to visit me every now and then.” And then she said, with what I swear was a twinkle in her eye: “Would you like to meet him? He is standing right over there.” And that, dear friends, is how I met Kilian Hennessy (who is tiny, but otherwise looks exactly like his photo, and who really is very nice, though a little tetchy about the whole Amy Winehouse/Back to Black connection, which must be a question he gets a lot). It is also how I made my New Year’s Resolution to keep my own posturing to a minimum—or at least as private as possible— in 2010. And last, but not least, it is how I met the lovely Bukurije Bardhoshi, who has an excellent sense of humor in addition to her own set of killer cheekbones and who very graciously gave me a sample of Back to Black after I was done talking to Mr. H. Please. Someone out there on the verge of buying something Kilian, go buy it from her, and tell her I sent you. Because I cannot. Buy something, that is. It would be true justice and the best ending to this story to say it was love at first sniff between me and BtB and I’m on my way to get my very own lacquered box. In fact, I’ve been holding on to this post, testing and re-testing, waiting for Aphrodisiac to reveal its magic so I could have that ending. (Maybe when it’s colder? Maybe on a rainy day? Maybe when I’m in a different mood?) I expected to love it. And I smell in it many bits of things I already love: the honeyed, apple-pie opening of Ambre Narguile (though BtB has rather more tobacco), the pipe tobacco and mysterious smoky syrup of Fumerie Turque (though BtB is sweeter, and not so dark), the raw-honey and vanilla of Botrytis, some of the waxy fruitiness that opens Bois de Paradis, a bit of the dusky phase (imortelle?) from Songes, and even a touch of the unbeloved (by me) but fascinating funky hawthorn from Miel de Bois. Alas, Back to Black does not, as those perfumes do, meld with my skin and surround me in a warm glow that makes comfort a sexy thing. Instead, it just sits there, ignoring me. I might as well be walking around with a huge, overscented candle in my purse. And, heresy of heresies, there are moments when BtB’s waxiness veers perilously close to vanilla Yankee Candle. I also regret to say that on the mornings after I apply—it lasts forever—I often detect something bitter and slightly chemical behind the sweetness. So. More for the rest of you who find it purring and stretching and doing all kinds of other unspeakably delicious things on your skin—just drop a note in the comments if you’d like to be in the draw for my sample. I’m holding out for some more Bois des Iles in parfum. Vintage please, if you’ve got it. *Has anyone noticed that make-up wunderkind Edward Bess is working exactly the same pretty vampire look? Or is it just me? **Update: until this post went up I was unaware that fellow PST contributor Beth Gehring had been using the term "perfumerotica" since last May as the title of her beautiful blog over on www.perfumerotica.com. Beth writes that she is also "hard at work on a magazine, book and lifestyle store of the same name" where she will make "beautiful, luxuiant and passionate items" available to all. Stay tuned to her blog for future info! Image © By Kilian. Available via German Vogue and half-a-zillion other places around the internet. The one that used to be on the NST announcement post has disappeared.

The Scented Garden

By Alyssa My first thought, on reading Ann Lovejoy’s Fragrance in Bloom: The Scented Garden Throughout the Year (Sasquatch Books, 2004) was—she’s one of us! I’ve always suspected there is a lot of overlap between perfume fans and gardeners (cooks and wine fans, too), and there are striking similarities Lovejoy’s approach to scent in the garden and the way we discuss perfume. I’m only an armchair gardener, but I was thoroughly charmed by this book and I believe anyone else interested in scent will be, too. Fragrance in Bloom is less a compendium of fragrant plants and gardening directions than a series of chapters about seasonal scents in the garden—how they work, when they don’t, things to try, and most especially how to grow plants next to one another in the garden to create what Lovejoy calls “living perfumes.” In one area we may intermingle a series of gentle scents... Elsewhere, delicate fragrances build up to stronger ones, which are then tempered by sharp or stringent neighbors. We learn to use distinctly contrasting scents for refreshment, pairing the spicy, yarrowlike aroma of lavender cotton…with the velvety jungle perfume of petunias, or mixing dreamy mignonette with brisk living thyme. Lovejoy recommends writing down personal likes and dislikes, noting that our tastes are likely to change as we explore and learn to appreciate the subtleties of scent. She also recommends keeping a few areas of the garden relatively free of scented plants because “Once we become really awake to plant perfumes, it is quite easy to get carried away.” Sound familiar? The author herself is no stranger to getting carried way, and her lack of embarrassment about this is part of what makes the book a delight. The following description of an old honeysuckle vine is a typical example of her style: In my present garden, Hall’s honeysuckle had announced itself to my nose long before it was revealed to the eye by a swinging machete. The enormous old plant had twisted itself around a companionable climbing rose—a sweet old thing with fragrant, crumpled flowers like puffs of pale pink tissue. Twined tightly together, they filled the arms of an elderly apple tree. By night, their combined scents make a wandering, winsome perfume that recalls the old Lee Wiley number called “Honeysuckle Rose,” in which she sings of love far sweeter than sugar. This perfume is like that: sweet yet spicy, soft yet penetrating. It arrives in pulses on the warm evening air, now stronger, now fainter, retreating with the breeze, bolstered by a drop in temperature. After a day of heavy rain, the scent rolls in like fog, luring me out to the garden bench to watch the moon wheel across the luminous night sky. As this passage makes clear, though Fragrance in Bloom is full of pertinent tips and facts, Lovejoy is more interested in bringing us along with her through the garden than in lecturing us. She is a supremely companionable guide, full of good humor and clearly devoted to enjoying herself, as we learn from many anecdotes, including this aside, which appears in a section on jasmine: Spanish jasmine…is a fast grower when happy, producing lots of lacy, twining leaves in opposite pairs. They have a grip like a baby, gentle but implacable, and if you let this vine wander where it chooses, it can be hard to untwine those tight coils without seriously disturbing the unwilling host. (One year, my indoor plant engulfed the vacuum cleaner. Naturally, I was loath to sacrifice all that incipient bloom, so I was forced to wait until spring cleaning to vacuum again…) Well, naturally! When I think about why the vacuum cleaner was parked under the flower basket instead of in the closet, and what life must be like in a household where such a thing could happen without anyone noticing until it was too late (surely someone was watering the flowers?) I feel certain that Ann Lovejoy is a woman who has her priorities straight, and is wholly to be trusted—or, at least, someone who knows how tell a good story. Lovejoy is a Northwesterner and her plant choices are appropriate to that climate. She is also clearly working with a full yard of space. However, she recommends beginning with potted plants to try out scent combinations more easily, and I found much to be inspired by, though I live in the Southwest. The book is roughly organized around the progression of the seasons, with chapters on spring, summer, and so on, but the exception to this rule, the especially wonderful chapter, “Night-Fragrant Plants,” reveals that Lovejoy’s true interest is context—the time of day, the company we keep, whether we require soothing or stimulation, where we are sitting, or walking (or kneeling—many of her wintertime recommendations are for plants that sweeten the chore of digging in the cold mud) in the garden. Thus we learn which plants require sniffing close-up and which require ten feet of space in which to properly announce their scents, the difference between honeysuckle in the morning (“light and floral”), afternoon (faded, slightly spicy) and the evening (“rich and satiny smooth”) and how to make any party better by planting datura, a highly poisonous plant whose lush scent is a natural intoxicant, in pots around your seating areas. This last was a technique Lovejoy discovered one summer when she hosted a friend’s datura collection: “I was commenting that our summer gatherings had been especially hilarious and wonderful lately, when a knowing botanist explained that the cause was more likely the datura than any sudden increase of wit and charm on our parts.” Clearly I’ve been a little intoxicated myself by Fragrance in Bloom, as this is less a review than a fan letter. (I’m even thinking of doing a little gardening!) Do comment if you’ve had experience growing scented plants or have other books on the subject to recommend. Note: Lovejoy has written many other books. You can find more of her writing, including recipes from the garden and tips on organic garden design, at her regularly updated site, annlovejoy.org Photo Credit: Pink Datura by overthemoon on flickr.

Perfumes for a Dame

By Alyssa My junior high school was ruled by perky blondes who believed in Jesus, football, and serious underage drinking. They figured out very early in life that the way to get ahead with the right boys was to play dumb. I will never forget the day I saw the smartest and meanest of these girls, my sworn enemy since the third grade, stop dead in the middle of an elaborate sharp-tongued insult to turn away from me and giggle shyly with one of these boys as he passed her in the hallway. Seconds before, she had been a lean, pointed thing, full of fierce energy. And then, without pause or effort, her face went empty, her body grew soft and round, and her voice went high and whispery sweet, as though to apologize for having anything to say at all. I didn’t understand the drinking, and I wasn’t capable of shutting up which meant that I was incapable of playing dumb. I wanted to be with boys who could argue with me, and I valued a snappy comeback far more than good looks or popularity. I wasn’t sure what kind of girl that made me. I was too bad at sports and too good at flirting to be a tomboy, and while I had more than a dash of nerd I was way too bossy to be a real geek. It wasn’t until my late twenties that I stumbled into the world of classic Hollywood cinema and found out that what I’d wanted to be all along was a dame. Specifically, I wanted to be Barbara Stanwyck. Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Joan Blondell, Rosalind Russell, Jean Harlow, Tallulah Bankhead and Rita Hayworth are all fine dames and the indomitable Mae West belongs in her very own category, but for my money Barbara rules them all. (I stole the fine photo of her above—check out those lips!—from an excellent piece by Mark Feeney of the Boston Globe. Do check it out.) What these ladies have in common is a tough, unromantic view of the world and of men combined with a shining intelligence and a fearless, ferocious sex appeal built from the ground up, the hard way. In fact, everything about dames is built from the ground up, the hard way. The real life Stanwyck, like Crawford and a few others in my list, started out as a chorus girl, and while she could work a formal gown like nobody’s business she never lost her street smarts. Watching her, you have the feeling that if she woke up the next morning with all of her money gone she would be just fine. She’s been there before, and expected to be there again. All of which makes Stanwyck and her compatriots excellent company for our current hard times. I’ve recently descended into the world of vintage perfumes. March from Perfume Posse has been posting on her yen for vintage Rochas’ Femme and red lipstick for awhile now, and it was her comment on Angela’s article on Perfumes for the New Year over on Now Smell This that got this party started. It can’t be an accident that all three of us are feeling the need for a little dame attitude, so I suspect that some of you are, too. We all know nothing captures an attitude like perfume. Well, my friends, what does a dame smell like? The obvious place to start is with vintage leathers and chypres (and the glorious places they overlap) either in their original splendor or, when not totally decimated, their modern versions. Mitsouko and Femme head my list, along with Chanel’s Cuir de Russie, Caron’s Tabac Blond, Gres’ Cabochard, Piguet’s Bandit and Lanvin’s Scandal. A dame in a softer mood might try on a little Vol de Nuit. On the other hand, a dame in evening wear might just go for a room clearing, take-no-prisoners white floral. The photo of Stanwyck and Henry Fonda is a scene from The Lady Eve in which card shark Jean seduces the hapless Hopsy, a millionaire just back from two years up the Amazon without women. She is speaking to him about common sense matters, but for some reason he can’t concentrate. He keeps murmuring “That perfume…” and I can’t help thinking that she’s wearing Fracas. It’s true the past ten years have favored perfumes for girls who play dumb but we can’t just live in the past. How about some less obvious scents for the modern dame? The earthy snap of a good vetiver, a bit of rough patchouli or some smoke might be an excellent replacement for the lost leathers of old. I’ll nominate Paloma Picasso’s Mon Parfum for the dame who needs a good discount on her perfume, and how about Vero Kern’s Onda for the dame who is temporarily flush and Jasmin et Cigarette for the dame who is midway up the ladder? Bulgari Black might work on a slightly intellectual dame, a dame in cool horn-rimmed glasses and a black turtleneck, say. Reaching across the aisle, I think a dame on her day off might enjoy a little Knize Ten or Terre d’Hermes. I could go on like this all day, but I’d rather hear what you think. What perfumes make you feel like a real dame? And when you’re done telling me, go check out Angela’s post on dame perfumes over at Now Smell This and March’s post on Perfume Posse.

Other People’s Perfume Part I: Smoke

By Alyssa When I first fell in love with perfume I was shy about my new affair, but since then I have become a perfume nerd-evangelist, offering up my wrists to all and sundry, and preaching adventure and free samples to the willing victims friends who volunteer for a sniffing session. Along the way I’ve developed a small coterie of enthusiastic converts. Some of these folks started from ground zero I-hate-perfume territory, but most wandered over from stage left, where they were hoarding a small collection of essential oils, or scented candles or that one bottle. You know. The one they bought on a whim, or were given by a fondly remembered lover or stole from a roommate and have been wearing off and on for years, or that they stopped wearing but couldn’t bring themselves to throw away. The bottle you probably had before you tippled over into a world where having ten or more bottles makes perfect sense. That one. Inevitably, my friends want to know what I think of that one perfume. It’s a delicate question, requiring tact and grace, so of course I’ve generally run for the hills. Recently, though, I broke with my tradition of cowardice and gave one of these treasured scents a serious trial run. I learned a lot from the experience. So much that I’ve decided to tackle a few others and share the results with you all in a little series I’m calling Other People’s Perfume. Cross your fingers for my social life. And off we go, with Valentino’s Very Valentino pour Homme. Basenotes lists the following as the notes— Top: Sri Lankan Nutmeg, Crisp Sage, Anise Middle: Virginian Pipe Tobacco, Coriander, Thyme Base: Indian Sandalwood, Amber, Musk —to which I can only say, you wish, Valentino. Or rather, I wish, because this sounds like a really striking perfume and I’d like someone to make it and deliver it to my doorstep. I feel a little uncertain about where the anise fits in, but anything with nutmeg, tobacco and sandalwood in it has got my vote. Alas, it is not what I smell. What I get instead is a bright, herbal opening that just might have something to do with…let’s just say it’s the coriander, shall we? And maybe, just maybe, the “crisp sage,” whatever that is. (If I were Chandler Burr I’d be regaling you with long, impossible-to-remember chemical names, for this opening wears its synthetic origins proudly.) It’s a traditionally manly opening. Not in a chest-pounding sweat and big muscles way, just a lot of freshly showered glad-handing: “Nothing to see here folks. No weirdness, nothing too pretty, just crisply ironed shirts and a new haircut. Move right along.” And so we do, after about twenty or thirty minutes, when the brightness mellows and bits of woody-sweet, dry tobacco come forward under the green, at which point I start to like VV much better. By the time the coriander/sage fades into the background (it never completely goes away) and the dry, transparent vanillic amber of the base emerges, I start thinking about the great-looking square, cobalt blue glass mini bottle of VV I’ve seen on **bay. It’s nothing earthshaking, but it’s delicious. The tobacco and coriander keep it from getting too sweet or foody, and the gentle sillage wafts around me for hours. I’d love to smell it on a man at this stage, but it’s happily unisex in a cashmere sweaters, leather boots and well-worn courdoroy blazer kind of way. I find it comforting, and just a little sexy. So much for my opinion. It was interesting getting to know a perfume I never would have picked up on my own, but the real fun began when I went for a walk on a hot, muggy July 5th morning. The heat and humidity made VV much more diffusive and sped up the opening considerably, and I was suddenly surrounded by the most beautiful combination of its bright top mellowed by smoke. I was very puzzled—how did I miss this bit?—until I realized that the smoke was hanging in the air, a combination of someone’s just-begun pit barbecue project and the gunpowder aftermath of the 4th of July (I do live in Texas, after all). It just got better and better as the development sped along and I was sniffing deeply and thinking about what sort of smoky thing I could send to my friend to layer with VV when I suddenly realized: a) that wouldn’t be necessary and b) why VV worked for him in the first place. He’s a smoker, of course. A serious, dedicated one, of the sort who seem to be increasingly rare these days. He doesn’t smell of cigarettes—which is how I managed to forget that factor in the first place—but clearly smoke is part of the palette of his skin. When I last saw him we tested Osmanthe Yunnan together and it was lovely and deep on him, the tannic smoke of the tea present right from the beginning, when it was still all stewed apricots on me. I will, of course, want to factor smoke into any future recommendations for my friend, but I also found myself thinking more generally about how the shave-and-a-haircut tonic freshness of many classic men’s colognes comes from a time when smoke was everywhere, and how much better they would smell on men redolent with cigarettes, pipes, and cigars, not to mention good shoe leather and wool coats rich with the scent of smoke-filled bars and city streets. I thought about how smoke might marry with various of my own perfumes (it’s an occasional indulgence for me) and how some of my favorites—Coco for example—seem to imply I have already been smoking without my ever having to light up. And then I went into a sort of daydream about the scent of cigarettes and perfume swirling past me in cold winter air from the hair and coats of grown-up women in a dimly remembered or imagined past… I also thought, with some embarrassment, about how I would have to pay much sharper attention for the next round of testing Other People’s Perfume. Smoke is easy. What about those less tangible factors that make a perfume beautiful on someone—timing, place, attitude, love? Note: After I had finished this piece I came across a link to Luca Turin’s August NZZ article about his nostalgia for smoke in public places and the way some classic perfumes seem to call out for a background of cigarettes. He confirms my feeling that Etat Libre’s Jasmin et Cigarette is more nostalgic than provocative—the perfect perfume for an increasingly smoke-free world.

Of the Green and the Purple: Searching for the Souls of Good Violets

By Alyssa "Oh, Marilla, it's a perfectly elegant brooch…I think amethysts are just sweet. They are what I used to think diamonds were like. Long ago, before I had ever seen a diamond, I read about them and I tried to imagine what they would be like. I thought they would be lovely glimmering purple stones. When I saw a real diamond in a lady's ring one day I was so disappointed I cried. Of course, it was very lovely but it wasn't my idea of a diamond. Will you let me hold the brooch for one minute, Marilla? Do you think amethysts can be the souls of good violets?" Anne of Green Gables, by Lucy Maud Montgomery Long ago, before I had ever smelled a violet perfume, I read about them and I imagined they would be lovely, glimmering, deep purple scents. My very first order of samples included several named violette-something-or-other, and when they arrived I eagerly opened them and dabbed onto my skin. They didn’t make me cry—there are advantages to being a woman in one’s late thirties instead of an eleven-year-old orphan girl—but I was deeply disappointed by their strange, sticky-sweetness and it took me a long time to push my original ideas aside and return to my search for the souls of good violets. My mistake was beginning with soliflores. Like most simple things, they are difficult to do well, and violet soliflores are haunted by Victorian ghosts dabbing their pale foreheads with violet-scented handkerchiefs, while they recover from another fainting fit. Much later, I realized there were stealth violets—ionones in their many roles and forms—in some of my favorite perfumes. They were hidden in the velvet heart of my beloved Coco, slipping in and out of Le Parfum de Therese’s elegant layers, blooming in the dark chill of No. 19’s upright spine. It was another complex scent, the gorgeous Attrape Couer, that gave me my first glimpse of a violet I could love. I dabbed on a few precious drops from a sample vial on a frosty winter morning and took the dog for a walk. Twenty minutes later the initial burst of amber sweetness faded and I was brought up short by the most delicious smoky, deep purple violet imaginable. It wasn’t long before it began sinking back into the husky purr of Attrape’s seamless toffee contralto, but for those moments the dog waited in vain while I stood stock still, sniffing the cold morning air. Later that spring, when the morning air was still fresh and all the trees were new and green, I had another violet revelation. My sample of The Unicorn Spell came along with the Les Nez sample set I’d ordered to get my hands on more Let Me Play the Lion (do check it out—it’s a real deal). I almost gave it away, but when I opened the vial and sniffed I broke into a grin. No hankies here, ma’am, just snap bean green sweetness that, on the skin, warms ever so slightly into cool violet—the new-leaved trees, their purple shadows and a touch of the cool dirt at their roots in a single bottle. I wore it all through the last precious days of spring before the Texas heat arrived, feeling as though I were inside the lovely world in the painting above and wondering: Was it just this fabulous beast, or had I learned to love violets? With help from the generous Ms. Colombina, I dug in for a violet testing mini-marathon, working both ends, the green and purple, against the rosy, powdery middle. First I dug up my sample of L’Artisan’s Verte Violette and gingerly dabbed some on. Then I decanted and sprayed. What on earth had I found to dislike about this? Perhaps the fact that I don’t remember is the clue. VV starts out a mild green with just a bare touch of sweet spearmint, rounds into a transparent green violet, and ends a few hours later with a touch of powder. Just a bit of green and purple. The precious discontinued decant of Caron’s Violette Precieuse I received from Ms. C showed me, for an hour or two what VV wants to be when it grows up. The green violet is rounder and more fully present without a trace of powder. Fortunately, given its total unavailability, it dries down to a much more conventional vanillic-musk I also find at the end of the sweeter, but equally gorgeous Aimez-Moi, and which I also wish would stay put in its unabashedly beautiful rosy violet phase. All violets, it seems, must turn into powder, melt into warmth, or simply fade away into nothing… Speaking of which, I would say Christopher Brosius’ Violet Empire is similar to Violette Verte but I seem to be almost totally anosmic to it. After generous application of the oil I get a burst of sweet spearmint followed by…something. It might be violet. Then again, it could be sweetened cardboard. It was tenacious—I caught a whiff of it hours later—but so slight I could hardly count it as a perfume. Do chime in if this one works for you. Next up were the cedar-violet heavyweights from Lutens, Bois de Violette and Feminité de Bois, and the amber/incense of Bond’s purple-hearted Silver Factory. God and L.Turin forgive me, but as much as I love and admire Les Bois, and cannot deny that they bring the deep purple, I prefer Attrape Couer’s ambery base to their sweet dense cedar. However, given my compulsive re-testing of Bois Violette, I sense a volte-face in the offing. (You know the drill: I absolutely must sniff that strange, slightly irritating thing one more time...maybe I need a decant.) Once I get past the blaring manly-amber opening of Silver Factory—I have bad-trumpets problems with the openings of nearly all the Bonds—I enjoy the way the violet flavors it’s beautiful smoky incense, but find myself wishing I did not have the Guerlain quite so recently in mind. I approached the rose-violet family at the heart of the green-purple continuum with trepidation. Frederic Malle’s Lipstick Rose is not my friend, and every time I approach her for another try I am summarily ejected from her dressing room. I was surprised, then, to find myself thoroughly enjoying the Marilyn-in-angora-sweaters sweetness of Stephanie St.-Aignan’s Le Pot Aux Roses lightly powdered confection and Norma Kamali’s cheerfully trashy burst of soapy raspberry-rose-violets. Happy Birthday Mr. President and sign me up for an occasional go-round. Two violets Marina sent were simply lost on me—Parfums d’Histoire’s Violette Blanc (no hour of the wolf for me, just burnt vanilla and powder) and Scent Systems Wild Violet, an all natural blend that seems to have achieved a leaden, unfinished quality at great expense. No doubt it’s just me. Drop a note in the comments if you’d like to be in the draw for these, and do share your own experiences with violets—was it love at first sniff? Are you as picky about your posies as I am? Help me understand what I’m missing. For example, I’m sure you are asking, where is the ur-violet, the Great Classic, Apres L’Ondee? Where is my paen to its melancholy beauty, my admission that it is the one true violet, the indispensable, the nonpareil? I’m sorry, I couldn’t quite hear what you were saying. I seem to have violets coming out of my ears… Notes The gorgeous painting, which I’ve had on my desktop for months now, is Reinhold Edelschein’s Rhythm in Green and Violet. For more on violets please see Victoria’s amazingly compact and erudite essay on ionones over on Bois de Jasmin and Heather Ettlinger’s lyrical and informative reflections on her own troubles with violets on her blog, Memory and Desire. If you’ve never read the children’s classic, Anne of Green Gables you can, amazingly, do so here. God bless the searchable texts of the web, that passage had been haunting me for months and I never thought I’d find it.

La Perfumista par Excellence, Part I: The Other Passions

By Alyssa The shining starpower of Chayaruchama a.k.a. Ida Meister a.k.a. La Perumista Par Excellence is easily measured by the fact that I came to know and crave her presence simply by reading her comments on other people’s blogs. They leapt off the screen: puns and slightly dirty jokes, sophisticated allusions to books and movies, sideways glances at perfumes and perfumers that hinted at a great depth and breadth of knowledge, and huge dollops of motherly love, all of it dancing down the page in a series of her trademark exclamatory lines. Later, I came to know a bit more about her, and realized that she was a kind of one-woman missionary for perfume—cultivating and encouraging independent perfumers, championing a good bargain, spreading the scented gospel wherever she went. I know I’m not the only who’s wondered – who is this woman? So, dear readers, with y’all as my excuse, I sent a series of nosy emails to Chaya (Chaya is her Hebrew given name—Ida, the English approximation of its pronunciation) and she generously answered them. It would be easy to write a book about Chaya—maybe two—so I’ve split the post into two parts: Today, Part I, in which it is clear that a passion for beauty and knowledge can be inborn, and can grow and thrive in spite of all adversity. Next up: Part II, a portrait in scent. Ida was born in Yonkers, New York in 1954, and spent her girlhood in a rough, vibrant, multi-ethnic neighborhood on the wrong side of the tracks by the sewage plant. Isolated in what often felt like a dangerous world, Ida found solace in books—the beginning of a lifelong love affair with language and literature. At the age of six, she became her beloved grandfather’s nurse and companion, cooking for him (“He believed my mother was trying poison him”), bathing him, shaving him with a straight edge razor (“He was on blood thinners!”) and, eventually, moving up to the top floor of the house to live with him. Though it might seem a strange, heavy burden for a child, Chaya remembers her grandfather with joy: “He was an inspiration. A holy man masquerading as a regular Joe, an immigrant who made his way the hard way—a man of few words (many of them profane), infinite mercy, love, and action. He called me "a good boy" and his "little bloody bugger" with pride... I never resented the fact that I was called upon to awaken at any and all hours for G-d-knows-what. He died when I was 12; I named our first son for him.” Those of you who know Chaya later became a nurse will see some heavy foreshadowing here. But though she loves her work, nursing was only a practical fourth choice dream—one that would get her out of New York and assure her economic independence. Chaya declined a scholarship to the Cornell school for veterinary medicine, and opportunities to study languages and music: early and continuing passions rivaling her love of perfume. A flair for languages was a basic survival skill in the multi-family, multi-lingual homes in which Chaya grew up; too which she added a voracious appetite for learning. Asked to share a bed with the Slovenian Frieda Grom (the mother of her mother’s business partner—got that?) at the age of nine, Chaya began her studies: “I didn't think it would be too easy to get my mitts on a Slovene dictionary, so I got myself a Langenscheidt's dictionary, and tried to teach myself German.” Then there was Yiddish from her mother and grandfather, French and more German from her father’s family, a bit of Slovene from Frieda, Italian from her music studies and, oh yes, Flemish from that year she lived with Limburg pig farmers, Swedish, picked up on a trip, biblical Hebrew from studying for her adult Bat Mitzvah and Ladino (the language of Sephardic Jews) from a friend she made in the process. She studied Latin for years “for sheer pleasure (what a geek!).” She’s not done yet: “I’ve been trying to accommodate vocabulary in Sanskrit (from yoga and out of intense curiosity), and in some Asian languages, where I have NO knowledge base…” She regrets never learning ancient Greek, in which she hoped to read the ancient classics, and, perhaps a bit more, listening to her family when they told her she wasn’t bright enough to achieve one of her early goals—working as a translator at the U.N. I can only dream of how Chaya’s presence might have furthered international relations. About her singing, Chaya says: I've always sung; my entire family loved to sing—both sides. The story goes… that my mother awoke in the middle of the night to music. She thought she had left the radio on. I was found sitting on the carpet in my room, singing the chorale from Beethoven's Ninth to myself in German. My mother told me to shut up and go back to bed. I was supposedly three-years-old at the time. I craved singing lessons very early on, but the conventional wisdom of the time was—not until the onset of puberty. My mother mistakenly promised me lessons as soon as my menses began. At 11 ½ I came home from school, thrilled that I could NOW have lessons! Reaching womanhood was a paltry second, for me. However grudgingly, her mother made good on her promise. Later, Ida would return to her music studies, attending the Boston Conservatory of Music full time while she working full time as a nurse and “translating obscure vocal repertoire on the side.” Such was her passion for singing that she went to the Metropolitan Regional Auditions a single week after ten-hour abdominal reconstruction surgery (Ida has struggled with multiple major illnesses, many a fall-out from her difficult youth): “My family wasn't fully aware, my fiancé left me, my boss retired and I had no insurance for the ensuing medical costs of extensive treatment. My best friend carried me down flights of stairs in an evening gown, one week after surgery—with staples still in. And I did it, as my own personal protest against forces beyond my control.” In spite of her valiant resistance, medical issues (and, she says, a refusal to participate in the level of mean competition seemingly required) did finally derail a professional singing career. “There seems to be a tremendous irony surrounding this aspect of my life…” I sang for years, but it wasn't until I had had truly life-threatening events, that the encouragement started coming in. I worked with Eleanor Steber, Boris Goldovsky, and the lovely late Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson. By the time I was finally being noticed, survival was a more urgent issue. She still sings—to her family, to her patients (“I’ve been singing to the unconscious since I was 14.”), and for the occasional charmed and surprised perfumer, including Andy Tauer, in Brooklyn last spring: “I got to embarrass that sweet, shy man by singing Dein blaues Auge and Die zwei blauen Augen von meinem Schatz, as if squeezing him senseless wasn't bad enough.” There’s so much I haven’t described here: The crowded house where Ida spent her adolescence (“Chaos. People came and went as in a play.”). Her fierce mother, a businesswoman and interior designer. Her passion for food and travel. Her passion for poetry, in all it’s languages. And of course the perfume, which is coming next. Here is one last story, of how Ida met and fell in love with her DH, and an image of the young Ida that I carry with me always now, unable to think of her any way else: I met Bernhard on December 19, 1982 at 1:30 pm in Harvard Square, in a snowstorm. The old Coffee Connection—now, a Starbuck's. I was catching my breath, en route to the third grocery store, in order to prepare a Yugoslavian peasant meal for my roommate. Having a French press of Sumatran Mandheling with a pate/ cheese board. I was carrying about 80 lbs. of groceries to the “T” [subway] and wearing precious little clothing (mostly, a red charmeuse camisole, green velvet hiphuggers, English riding boots, waist-length dark hair, and Mitsouko). I wasn't looking for a date, and he was unemployed. He gallantly insisted upon driving me to Whole Foods, then home. I cooked for him, fed him, made him laugh, walked him around Castle Island in the blizzard at 2 am, made him tea, told him stories, and finally gave in and slept with him... And he didn't wait very long to ask me to marry him. I ask you, dear readers, who would? Images are courtesy of Ida Meister. The first image is by Michael Friedlander