Last night I finally caught the new Brad Pitt Chanel No 5 commercial, and I don’t even know what to say.  The monologue is so awful, so cringe inducing that it made me feel embarrassed for Pitt. “It’s not a journey. Every journey ends, but we go on. The world turns and we turn with it. Plans disappear. Dreams take over. But wherever I go, there you are — my luck, my fate, my fortune. Chanel no. 5. Inevitable.” Now that I see it written down, it makes even less sense.

I then spent an hour browsing through the Chanel No 5 archives until I found a similar style of No 5 commercial with Catherine Deneuve: subdued tones, simple photography, natural styling.  But you only have to listen to Deneuve to see why her commercial makes you want to run out to smell No 5 and why Pitt’s is inspiring parodies. “I know that he loves me for what I am deeply. I know because he cares about the little things, he brings my coffee always in a small cup, because it is precious to me. He gives me Chanel No. 5 because I love to put it in a special place, behind my knee.”

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Serge Lutens has launched a new website designed for US shoppers. At us.sergelutens.com you can find information on Serge Lutens, his work, creative vision, and of course, his perfumes. The entire collection is available for purchase via internet, bell jars included.

The collection is organized into several groups, such as Fouets de Velours (Sudden Sweetness) that includes perfumes like Ambre Sultan, Chergui, and Boxeuses, or Fleurs San Cueillette (Flowers Unpicked)–Un Lys, Rose de Nuit and Fleurs d’Oranger. The latest launch, Une Voix Noire is described as “jazz, drinks and the night, and, beyond all that, a troubling line of white, gardenia-scented smoke.”  The only thing to keep in mind is that the prices on the bell jars are much higher than what you would pay in Paris.

Via Serge Lutens Facebook page

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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In my past life as a political scientist, I wrote a thesis about the oil rich regimes of the former Soviet countries–Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. I traveled with my father in Uzbekistan when it was still part of the Soviet Union, and I fell in love with the flavors of its foods and the colors of its traditional hand-dyed carpets. But my cursory research into the atrocities committed by the post-Soviet era regime dissuaded me from ever contemplating field research there.

So, when I heard the news of perfumer Bertrand Duchaufоur creating two fragrances, Mystérieusе and Victоrious, for the Uzbekistan dictator’s daughter, Gulnаrа Kаrimоvа, my first reaction was disbelief. I’ve always admired Duchаufour’s dramatic and elegant perfume style as well as his unprecedented break from corporate perfumery. I completely understand that the path of an independent perfumer is a rough one, even for someone as successful as Duchaufour. Moreover, perfumers are used to take on any projects that come their way, because that’s how the supplier houses operate–you get assigned clients and you work with them, your personal preferences notwithstanding.

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