History & Legends: 29 posts

Perfumer & Flavorist’s December issue includes my article L’Heure Bleue at 100. It talks about the recent celebration of this Guerlain classic’s centenary held by the French Society of Perfumers in Paris. I touch a bit upon the history of this perfume and include quotes from perfumers who consider L’Heure Bleue to be an inspiration. Perfumer & Flavorist is a magazine aimed at the professional audience, but if you are curious about raw materials, you should check their article archives for some fascinating research.

According to Guerlain’s archives, Jacques Guerlain was inspired to create L’Heure Bleue in 1912 during a walk along the Seine when he noticed the vivid blue color of the sky as dusk fell over the city. “I felt something so intense, I could only express it in a perfume,” he later wrote in his notes. To read more, please follow this link.

What are your thoughts on Guerlain L’Heure Bleue?

At one time “drugstore” simply signified the place a fragrance was purchased rather than a pejorative comment on its worth. Consider this–in 1975, Revlon chairman Michel Bergerac pulled the Revlon brand from department stores and placed it into drugstores, at a marketing level known in the trade as the mass market.  Now available at Rexall Drug were Charlie, Revlon’s wildly successful modern chypre; Intimate, Ciara, and Norell. Bergerac made the move when the competing Estée Lauder brand outstripped Revlon in the department stores, where the mid-priced Revlon lost sales to the higher-priced, “premium” Lauder products.

The move enhanced, rather than hurt, the Revlon brand. Its newest fragrance, Jontue, became a bestseller, as did Enjoli a few years later.  Shopping at the drugstores, I would find an array of both classic and modern fragrances that ranged from Dana Tabu to New West for Her to the blockbuster franchise of Elizabeth Taylor. The three decades from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s were halcyon days for drugstore scents, with many of the fragrances becoming near-instant classics, immediately recognizable in their ubiquity and proudly worn by thousands of women. Continue reading →

It is a few weeks before Christmas of 1978 and my grandmother and I are standing in front of an Elizabeth Arden counter in Bonwit Teller as she purchases a face powder.  My grandmother, a tiny woman in a doll-sized mink hat, likes to chat and to take her time making purchases. While she and the sales assistant debate the merits of a rosy powder over a beige one, I wander off to another counter.  I am too young to care about face powder but I am not too young to investigate the contents of the bottles of perfume that each counter has displayed in a prominent place.

There is a good chance I will get lost in this enormous space that smells of flowers, grass, leather, lipstick, vanilla, and powder. I pick up a bottle of Blue Grass, not knowing that this scent is homage to the state of Kentucky, where Elizabeth Arden (nee Florence Nightingale Graham, a Canadian) has a very successful horse-racing stable. Elizabeth Arden is one of three big American cosmetics brands that dominate the department stores. Arden, Helena Rubinstein, and Estée Lauder revolutionize and shape this industry and become American institutions, even if only Lauder was born in America.

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The beginning of my interest in fragrance coincided more or less with a momentous year in perfumery:  1981.  It was in that first year of what would later be called the Big Eighties that a Beverly Hills boutique released an eponymous scent housed in a box with yellow stripes that evoked the store’s awning. Giorgio was an immediate and a ubiquitous smash, a powerhouse floral so outsized that restaurants were said to refuse seating to Giorgio-wearing patrons.

Giorgio was only the beginning of what would prove to be the last era of “big” perfumes.  By the time super-scents Calvin Klein Obsession and Dior Poison were released in 1985, women were already wafting KL and Vanderbilt (1982), Ungaro Diva and Yves Saint Laurent Paris (1983), Chanel Coco, Paloma Picasso Mon Parfum, and Forever Krystle (1984).

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As a graduate student I always loved the serendipity associated with research–when a random reference leads to an Aladdin’s cave of fascinating information. It’s been years since I left the halls of academia, but I’m still a student (read, a geek!) at heart. So when I spotted a mention of E.J. Parry’s Encyclopedia of Perfumery in Nigel Groom’s The New Perfume Handbook, I made it a point to check it out. My reward was a recipe for Armenian paper, which I would like to share with you and to add to Bois de Jasmin’s collection of antique perfume recipes. Armenian paper is a home scent created in the 19th century by entrepreneur Auguste Ponsot and pharmacist Henri Riviere and sold as a natural air sanitizer. With its exotic and mysterious cachet Armenia was a perfect marketing spin for the incense based on benzoin, a resin redolent of sweet vanilla and spices.

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