If
you have picked up this book, you probably love perfume, and if you love
perfume, it’s more than probable you feel guilty.
You
have been conditioned that way.
Collect
antiques – you have a discerning eye, a love of good workmanship, a nose for a
good investment. Collect stamps – you’ll be respected. Collect beer mats,
butterflies, bottles, pot-lids, prints, song-sheets, 78 records, egg-cups,
bobbins, glass or china shoes, fans, thimbles, postcards, programmes, cigarette
cards, matchboxes, Dinky cars, dolls, teddy bears, or souvenir spoons, and
there will be a society that caters for you and other fanatics.
Collect
theatre memorabilia – posters, playbills – absolutely fascinating! Spend every
last farthing on model trains and vintage cars, fill the garden with model
gnomes and your house with Toby jugs, and people will say: “Oh, how
interesting! It must give you so much pleasure!”
Eat
out every night of your life, buy clothes every day, spend a King’s ransom at
the hairdresser or Bingo, get drunk every day of your life, bet your child’s
piggy bank on the ponies, and people will sigh, but they will understand.
Collect
perfume, however, and be damned as profligate.
Even
if you wash and set your own hair, dress at Oxfam, bake your own bread, paint
your own ceiling, paper your own walls, lay your own lino, [make your
daughter’s dresses] cut your own carpets, darn, sew, mend, cook and clean –
-
and buy perfume?
You’re
a wanton – an extravagant fool.
“What
do you do with it?”
“But
you haven’t used what you had!”
“Not
more perfume! What do you want it all
for?”
Don’t
try to explain. Anyone who has to ask wouldn’t understand. They won’t
understand the importance of shape, of curve or line, the satisfaction of the
weight of a crystal flacon in the palm of your hand, the way it catches the
light, shining by day, glowing by night. The pleasure of a ground-glass stopper
that fits one bottle only and no other.
They
won’t know about the signals sent out by first one scent, and then another,
making their presence felt.
Yet
take heart, you are a soul under the skin, and kin to all those spellbound by
scent for more than 5000 years.
Perfume
always was expensive. When Mary Magdalen bathed Christ’s feet in scented
oil, she was rebuked by all but Christ himself for her extravagance.
Tracing
the origins of perfume, seeing first one civilisation and then another become
its willing slave; watching people who had never bothered with it – the Romans,
the Hebrews, Western Europeans, fall helplessly victim, it is like watching a
sandstorm or a rolling fog. Spreading like a plague, silent, unseen,
unstoppable.
If
perfume had shape it would be that of an octopus, with tentacles spread wide.
Its embrace that of the python, swift, deadly, with no possible escape.
More
absolute even than religious mania, for as an addiction it has never been
conquered. Alcohol, tobacco, narcotics, all can and have been rejected and
discouraged. Perfume, never.
Perhaps
the only public figure truly to recognise the terrifying power of perfume was
Oliver Cromwell, who banned it. Furthermore, he decreed that any woman using
perfume as a means to ensnare a man would be found guilty of witchcraft.
Witchcraft?
Yes, I suppose I’ll settle for that.
The
trouble with perfume is you can’t see it. You can’t hang it on a coat-hanger
and look at it. You can’t eat it (although the Romans did their best), and you
can’t drink it – officially. Unofficially, alcoholics in extremis are not that
choosy.
Therefore,
perfume cannot be said to serve any useful purpose whatsoever, which is why it
is, and always has been, the ultimate luxury.
As
it is my firm conviction that the Art of Perfumery – if not actually
stone-dead, is in its final death throes – and as it is not the intention of
this exercise to be a token framework via which to plug present day “perfumes”
– more numerous than the fleas on a hyena’s back – it will be obvious that
assistance has not been sought, and therefore, not provided by those “houses”
most culpable of hastening the death.
The
age of the Master Perfumer has passed, and like Shakespeare’s “poor player who
struts and frets his hour upon the stage”, the Master Perfumer has passed into
history, leaving a lone survivor in Jean-Paul Guerlain, with no sign of a
successor. Jean-Paul Guerlain has claimed that Guerlain is “The Vatican of the
Perfume World”, and few would dispute his claim.
Great
assistance has been rendered by Guerlain, one of the few remaining houses to
retain standards and keep faith with their past and their public.
[I found the following sentence angrily scored through:]
NEGATED
BY JARDINS DE BAGATELLES – A
FORERUNNER TO POISON AND SAMSARA!
[At
the time of writing] The owner of a rather swish French bistro is offering a
free dinner for two to anyone who can tell her where she can find a bottle of
Robert Piguet’s Visa.
Shall
I wait until my next trip to Paris, bring some back and claim the dinner, or
just tell her where she can find it? The snag is that apart from the fare, it
will cost her £40 for just a ¼ of an ounce. Mind you, with Giorgio costing £52.50 per ¼ ounce, Visa is a snip.
What
she seeks is currently keeping company with Carven’s Vert et Blanc, and Chasse
Gardée, Raphael’s Réplique and Plaisir; Lanvin’s L’Âme Perdue, and Caron’s Coup
de Fouet along with many others including some early Schiaparellis, some
discontinued Molinards and Revillons, the odd Arys, Viville, Grenoville, Ybry,
Vigny, Corday, Lucien Lelong, Pacquin, etc and all on the shelves of a boutique
run by a sharp little Parisien.[i]
For
although we live in a time when new scents are launched every five minutes and
tumble into the shops with unseemly haste at ever more astronomical prices,
there are still some people left with long memories who are not taken in by
slick advertising and can tell the difference between real scent and
insect-spray. In my opinion, compared to pre-1950’s perfumes, that is all
modern scent deserves to be called.
The
companies who produce them and who have taken over all but a handful of the
French perfume houses, are mostly chemical, pharmaceutical and pesticide
conglomerates, so perhaps it would be naïve to expect them to know the
difference.
But
before Estée Lauder launched Youth Dew
in 1953 and the perfume world said goodbye to subtlety forever, perfume was an
Art. The perfumer spent many painstaking months orchestrating the ingredients
of a new creation, ensuring that each would sing in turn before reaching a
crescendo, which would then gradually fade to a gentle murmur.
It
is the function of a great fragrance to suggest
- not to kick you in the stomach, clout you over the head, bring tears to your
eyes or your last meal back into your throat.
A
great fragrance drifts like a cloud; it is not a suffocating fog or a poisonous
gas. It is a slight haze on a summer afternoon, a balmy breeze on a velvet
evening. Elusive as a wisp of smoke or a falling leaf: tantalising, suggestive.
As impossible to catch as a soap-bubble. The great perfumers created potions
designed to react with individual body chemicals and ensured that no fragrance
smelled exactly the same on any two people. The first “top note” gave way to
the “heart” which developed into the longer lasting “base”. [ii]
Sadly,
the other major contribution to the demise of the art of perfume was the part
played by everybody’s High Street favourite: Boots the Chemist.
Boot’s
are one, if not the most influential
and powerful market world-wide for perfume and toiletries, and the conditions
they place on potential orders must be obeyed. Part of those conditions is that
any product they agree to buy must be extensively advertised. If it is not,
they will not carry it. The smaller perfume houses simply could not afford to meet
these conditions, so they either went out of business or were acquired in
take-overs by larger companies – which in a great many cases amounted to the
same thing. The net result was an inevitable drop in standards and a reduction
of choice.
The
situation has produced a desperate nostalgia and yearning in those who can
remember when it was otherwise, and who would willingly wear sack-cloth, walk
bare-foot, eat dry crusts and drink pond-water – or offer free meals at their
restaurants – if they could only find their favourite scents again.
Recently
hearts lifted when rumours flew that Worth was bringing back their legendary Dans la Nuit, only to sink again in
despair when it proved to be with a new formula.
Similarly,
Weil’s re-issue of Bambou proved a
sad disappointment to hopeful afficionados of the original, when they realised
it was not their Bambou, but a new version.
For
whilst “a rose by any other name” may smell as sweet, nothing else can expect
to call itself “rose” and get away with it: as devotees of Coty’s Chypre found to their shock when Coty
reissued something masquerading under that name in the USA last year.
While
most of these beloved old scents have disappeared into legend, some just can’t
be bothered to travel and can be found sitting smugly on the shelves at home.
Carven’s evocation of first nights and taxis: Robe d’un Soir is one. Weil
de Weil is another, and there are many more.
To
Caron’s eternal credit, all their past triumphs are available at their salon in
the Avenue Montaigne (except Adastra
and a very few early creations, e.g., London-Paris)
and in a select few stores in London and New York.
But
now D’Orsay make only two, and neither are available in the United Kingdom.
Rigaud make candles. Corday went into Max Factor and never came out. Houbigant
went Stateside. Lubin went bust. Piver sells only to Africa.
It
would be absurd to pretend that this has any hope of being a rational treatise
on 20th Century perfume. Besotted and bewitched as I am by the sorcerer’s art,
rationality is impossible.
Still
reeling from the experience of Kalispera,
I have fallen into a swoon with Sous le
Vent; before that it was Vert et
Blanc, before that N, and long
before that, and what started all this in the first place? It was Diorama.
Sally Blake
Date unknown
[i]
Sadly, the identity of this shop and its owner
went with my mother to the grave, although I suspect the shop itself may have
beaten her to it.
[ii]
This of course, posed an inevitable threat to
sales and would seem to have been perhaps the chief concern of the large,
target-driven companies who took over the old firms from the 1960’s onwards. If
only a certain amount of customers could wear a particular scent, then it stood
to reason that such a product was not economically viable. The solution was to
ensure that every scent smelled the same on everyone, and thus artificial
“fixatives” were added to every new fragrance invented that guaranteed the
emergence of the “base” note right away, and did not permit any individual “development”.
Penhaligons’ Bluebell is still the
best evocation of Hyacinth one will ever smell, but it’s poisonous on me. To
their eternal credit, they have actually made this its USP – if it works on
you, you’re one of the chosen few. If it doesn’t, buy something else! EWB.
