Suzanna: 65 posts

Oranger en Fleurs (“A celebration of the orange tree”) is a new release from Houbigant, a perfume house with a history dating back to 1775.  The company’s perfumes have for several decades been identified with drugstores, but the release of Oranger en Fleurs signals a return of Houbigant to the luxury market.

Oranger en Fleurs is a fully realized orange blossom fragrance that presents the honeyed floral note in a tableau of leaves and twigs, jasmine, rose, tuberose, ylang-ylang, nutmeg, cedar, and musk, along with something called “eau de brouts” (an absolute with a sharp, green orange blossom aroma).  The moment I sprayed it, the resemblance to Serge Lutens Fleurs d’Oranger was unmistakable.  Substitute Lutens’ cumin for nutmeg and give the composition some airiness and you have, for the most part, Oranger en Fleurs.

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Justin Bieber is a young and very pretty singer, songwriter, and actor who has had a double platinum album, three singles in the Billboard Hot 100, and who has gotten involved in the fragrance industry.  Taylor Swift is a young and very pretty singer, songwriter, and actor who has won a Grammy for Country Album of the Year, for Best Country Song, and for Best Country Solo Performance. Ms. Swift has also gotten involved in the fragrance industry.

What is striking about their fragrances, Justin Bieber Someday and Taylor Swift Wonderstruck, is the similarity of the ad copy and the resemblance to Britney Spears Fantasy, a fruity, frothy thing that, as much as it might seem impossible, broke ground in this category.

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Suzanna on tomato leaf as a perfume note.

Among the smells of summer (suntan lotion, beach rose, vanilla ice cream, jasmine, hot asphalt, and blackberries, to name a few), none is more redolent to me of that golden season than is the scent of tomato leaves. The leaf’s smell transports me to the end of summer, to the dog days where the heat shimmers and the dust in the road rises and seems to hang in the sultry air.  It is then that the season’s tomatoes, fat and bulging globes of red fruit, release their scent in what always seems to me an impromptu act of fragrant pleasure.

The smell of the tomato leaf is precise and yet is impossible to nail down with any accuracy; as with a geranium leaf there is a green/acidic vegetal smell and a nearness to turpentine or pine, plus a hint of almost-acrid dust or chalk resin.  The smell is sharp and suspenseful—one can tell the state of ripeness of the fruit, or so it seems, from the high pitch of this aroma.  Its particular odor is due to an aromachemical of a type that also causes the smell from the geranium leaf.

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Chanel Coco Mademoiselle (2001), currently the USA’s top selling women’s fragrance, has little to do with the 1984 Coco fragrance it allegedly flanks. One isn’t related to the other, except from a marketing standpoint that has Coco Mademoiselle positioned to sell to young women and Coco aimed at an older crowd. Coco Mademoiselle is a patchouli scent that belongs to the species of Thierry Mugler Angel, the groundbreaking 1992 fruit and patchouli techno-gourmand that was responsible for many spin-offs, some of them flops and some of them, like Coco Mademoiselle, bestsellers.

The notes of Coco Mademoiselle–rose, jasmine, patchouli, lychee, orange, grapefruit, vetiver, vanilla, and musk–say absolutely nothing about the scent. It’s not possible to imagine what it smells like from that roster. So many of these notes are rendered completely abstract that what really jumps out is a greenish, herbal patchouli over which have been melted vanilla and the type of fruit syrups used to flavor water.

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Chanel No. 19.  Serge Lutens Chergui.  Robert Piguet Bandit.  Guerlain Mitsouko. Oud. White florals! What these fragrances or perfume notes have in common is that they all are things I have spent time pursuing, trying to understand their appeal.

Perfume lovers know the quandary well.  It seems as if everyone but you “gets” a fragrance, but to your nose the scent in question smells like a wet dog, a stable that needs to be mucked out, or a rotten cantaloupe. You can’t join in the raves and you hate to be the lone naysayer.  What does everyone else smell that you do not?

You put your sample aside to revisit at an unspecified future date.  Perhaps its glory will be revealed at the next sniffing.  A month later—a year later—you try again.  No.  Oud still smells like band-aids to you.

Should you give up or should you continue trying?

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