Some
chap must have got sick of his wife stealing his razor to scrape her legs,
because one day many years ago, someone in a laboratory invented a hair-remover
called “Veet”. It was very effective. You spread a thick layer of paste from a
tube on your legs, waited ten minutes, then washed it off.
“Silky smooth!” Promised the
box. And indeed your legs were silky
smooth - even though a most disgusting scum filled the wash-basin and an even
more disgusting stink filled the air. Nevertheless, it was true; your arms and
armpits were silky smooth.
Responding to public revulsion,
the manufacturers did their absolute best to mask this appalling smell, hastily
bringing out a rose-scented version, which, perversely, just seemed to make
matters worse. Somehow, attempting to cover that appalling stench with a veneer
of roses succeeded only in emphasising it.
Now of course, that same
gut-churning smell is all around us, and far from being a mere depilatory paste
in a humble tube, it comes in fancy bottles and sells for hundreds of pounds,
dollars and yen: they call it “perfume”.
Nobody in their right mind would
consider using a fly-spray or insect killer as a perfume, because no matter how
pleasantly scented, the chemical base always wins through in the end. That
“base” is, for the most part, composed of pyrethrum – a particularly evil
smelling plant hailing from Australia which makes anything with six or more
legs throw up its feelers and drop dead.
We however, do not throw up our
feelers, we spray, dab, and splash it on our pulse-points to choke fellow
travellers on public transport: we call it “perfume”.
Anti-perspirants and deodorants
perform an essential function, and most of us – thankfully - use them. We
recognise that beneath that pleasant “top note”, there is a considerably less
pleasant smelling chemical which gets on with the business of eliminating body
odour.
Up to now, we were happy to
consign such potions to the recesses of our pits – these days, however, we are
dousing ourselves top to tail with them: we call it “perfume”.
More recently, with the
discovery of an intriguing chemical called “kalone” which has engendered a
number of “oceanic” scents, we have been moving away from the pyrethrum based genre.
The most notable of these new “sea” scents would have to be Calvin Klein’s Escape, closely followed by Issey Miyake
and Estée Lauder’s New West. At the
time of writing, the latest addition is Elizabeth Arden’s Sunflowers.
However, the pyrethrum pongs are
still going strong; Yves Saint Laurent’s Champagne
and Jean-Paul Gaultier have enjoyed considerable and enduring
success. The mere name Champagne was
all it took for YSL, whilst the famous Madonna’s basque-inspired bottle was
enough to rock it for JPG (and never mind that that bottle had been done before
by Elsa Schiaparelli with Shocking in
1937. Well, who would remember, right...?)
So, who will win? The oceanics
or the fly-spray?
The short answer is nobody wins.
We have all lost.
As an Art, perfume died in 1953.
As an industry, perfume is set
to stay in the wilderness for at least another 10 years, and possibly very much
longer.
The men in white coats have
indeed come to take it away. Cynics in laboratories mixing up ever more
repugnant and traffic stopping “scents” have killed it with greed, and like the
Emperor’s New Clothes, “perfume” companies with their massive advertising
budgets spend more and more on advertising to convince us, and indeed
themselves, that these modern “fragrances” smell good – and they succeed. Year
after year.
A “good” smell does not, or
rather should not, have the same effect on the stomach as an emetic. For more
than 5000 years, perfume has been an indefinable skill, wrapped in mystique and
magic.
Although the venerable firm of
Guerlain remain the one, single, shining beacon in the present perfume world - “the
Vatican of Perfume” - as they are affectionately known, it has to be said that
their founder, Jacques Guerlain would, without a doubt, reel back on his heels
should anyone wearing Guerlain’s grandest of latter successes, Samsara, waft past him on the Metro.
Samsara set the trend for sandalwood perfumes to contain more than
20% of the essence, where hitherto, a mere 2% had been the norm. It was
immediately copied by Dior with Dune,
which succeeded, quite brilliantly, in cornering world sales.
“Tread carefully, for you are
treading on my dreams...” wrote William Butler Yeats. Perhaps more than
anything else, perfume was the stuff of dreams. The artful perfumer could mix
up a magic carpet ride out of the ordinary and into a world of glamour and
seduction, illusion and delusion.
Before 1953, perfume was elusive;
- one brief whiff would weave a silken web that had to be chased along an arm
or up a neck – if you could get close enough. Now it is the perfume that does
the chasing, and one longs only to escape from it whenever trapped in any
confined space with it.
Here, however, it is the
forgotten fragrances that shall be the subject of this exercise. To place on record,
whilst there are still some people left who can remember them, old friends that
were sold over counters in little glass phials. Indeed, this is an unashamed
exercise in nostalgia, and nostalgia is all we have, because the art of perfume
is dead; it’s gone, it no longer exists.
My aim is solely to take a
glance through crystal glass doors at how perfume used to be, before “Big
Business” killed it.
All around me on shelves, in
cupboards, on trolleys, under beds, in drawers; in fact, on any available surface,
are long-gone scents: discontinued perfumes breathing their last, evaporating
into memory, emptying their sweetness into the desert air of a Regent’s Park
flat.
I can do nothing to prevent this
happening. Once they have gone, there will be nothing to prove they ever
existed. I have as much chance of preserving them as I have of catching a
moonbeam and putting it in a jar.
Would to God, I had chosen to
collect stamps.
So, to begin at the beginning...
Sally Blake
Date unknown
