Suzanna: 65 posts

My first impression of Parfum d’Empire Eau Suave was that it was a rose fit for a king.  I was therefore surprised to find out that I was utterly mistaken and that Eau Suave was inspired by Josephine, love of Napoleon, and was meant for empresses and other women.  I had it backwards. This is the kind of trouble that you get into when you don’t bother to read anything about a perfume but simply smell it from a vial, taking a cue only from the name and more importantly from the vial’s contents.

In this case, “Eau Suave” seemed like the name of a cologne for a dandy or for a dandy’s modern equivalent.  I opened the vial and out rushed a red, red rose that had a pitch characteristic to me of male fragrances.  Shows what I know.  But it did make me think about how we perceive fragrances as masculine or feminine and what signals or clues we use to arrive at that decision.

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If there is such a thing as a Proustian fragrance note, surely patchouli must be it.  The bushy herb that is part of the mint family provokes unbidden (and unwanted) associations with the Sixties, when it became the perfume of choice of the hippie tribe.  In its natural state a green aromatic that is used as natural insecticide, the herb is a basenote staple of perfumery as well as being celebrated as a central theme.

Les Néréides Patchouli Antique is one of a number of patchouli-centric fragrances in niche perfume lines that strips away the past and presents patchouli as something eminently more palatable for modern tastes. Patchouli takes well to a variety of diverse elements, from the overworked fruit to tobacco, amber, vanilla, leather, benzoin, musk, and woods, to name a few.  It does especially well with vanilla, which is the treatment Les Néréides has given it to create a smooth, well-tempered “golden” patchouli that smells as if it has been cask-aged like a fine liqueur.

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It’s vanilla! It’s expensive! Strike that; it’s very expensive! And it’s very, very good.  Bad news: It’s only occasionally sold in America.  Occasionally means three times in five years*. It’s Le Labo Vanille 44, an ultra-smooth vanilla pod with woody kick from the trendy Le Labo line whose price ($290 for 50 ml; $440 for 100 ml) jumps out because, well, I can’t afford it and neither can any of my friends.  On second thought, maybe one friend can, but he’s a movie producer and can also afford a five-bedroom home in the Malibu Colony.

Le Labo is the dual-citizenship Grasse-New York house that in addition its regular line of perfumes has a set of City Exclusives whose number supposedly mirrors the number of ingredients that enter into the composition and whose fragrances are only available in the cities that bear their name.  These cost more than the regular line. First-class travel always does. To that end, they issued Tubéreuse 40 (New York); Aldehyde 44 (Dallas); Poivre 23 (London); Gaiac 10 (Tokyo); Musc 25 (Los Angeles); Baie Rose 26 (Chicago); and Vanille 44 (Paris).  To celebrate the recent opening of their Paris boutique, Le Labo made Vanille 44 available in the US for one month via their website and Luckyscent, which gave me a chance to sample this perfume.

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Parfums M. Micallef is a line of French perfumes that bills itself as “a brand of love” and which has recently issued a quartet of vanilla-themed fragrances it calls “Art Collection Vanille.”  Vanilla aficionados may remember Micallef’s excellent Note Vanillee, a cult vanilla that disappeared from production only to make a brief reappearance before disappearing again. Don’t go looking to replace Note Vanillee in the new Art Collection; the house strikes out in new directions with this “four movement symphony…written to fulfill individual desires.”

Individual desires aside, one cannot escape the hard fact that vanilla collections are so Nineties.  Three words: Comptoir Sud Pacifique.  In quick succession, Molinard had one, Victoria’s Secret had one, Bath and Body Works had one, Henri Bendel had one.  Micallef’s range of olfactory expression extends no further than these earlier lines:  Vanilla Flower, Vanilla Leather, Vanilla Orient, and Vanilla Marine are upscale, more complex variants of their mall-housed predecessors, priced accordingly.

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So Nude is the latest fragrance from Costume National, the design house that previously issued the popular Scent, Scent Intense, Scent Gloss, and 21.  So Nude is authored by none other than Dominique Ropion, creator for the epic Frédéric Malle Carnal Flower.  Since both So Nude and Carnal Flower trade heavily on tuberose, I was curious to see how Ropion would interpret this white-floral note for Costume National.

According to marketing copy, So Nude has quite a big mission ahead of it.  The model in the black-and-white ad is topless and has an almost confrontational gaze.  The marketing copy explains:  “The name of this new opus expresses quintessence, transparency and contours taken to their zenith, an absolute femininity. Infinitely passionate, the fragrance represents a woman who embodies total justness.”  An interesting use of the word “justness,” and I sort of wish they had said “righteousness” instead, but I’ll let it slide.  The copy goes on to say this woman is, “A modern icon, her allure is so timeless, so feminine, so natural, so chic…so nude. Nude is she, today and forever… timeless, direct, true. Her elegance and grace come from the inside.”

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