Lists: 150 posts

Classical perfumes smell of another era and are the best way to time travel, but if you’re new to this style of fragrance, it can be challenging. In my fragrance  column, Picking an iconic scent for a perfume wardrobe, I explore classics that would be best suited for beginners. In addition, I mention some interesting modern fragrances that have a classical character.

“I have no luck with classic perfumes,” confessed a friend. “My grandmother wore Jean Patou’s Joy, my mother loved Chanel No 5, but when I wear these fragrances, I feel as if I’m playing dress up.” She wondered why she completely missed the allure of fragrances that are widely considered to be iconic. It is easy to attribute it to personal tastes and associations, but I decided to embark on a classics challenge. Please read the rest by clicking here.

What beginner friendly classical perfumes would you recommend?

Image via FT/HTSPI

Elisa talks about several underrated favorites that she would be glad to keep to herself. Of course, she can’t help but share with us. 

A woman is standing in line at the grocery store. She smells the most amazing perfume wafting by. She turns and realizes it is coming from the woman behind her. “Your perfume is gorgeous!” she says.

The woman smiles, obviously flattered. “Thank you. I’ve been wearing it for 20 years.”

“How wonderful,” the first woman says, “what is it?”

Her smile disappears. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather not say.”

I read a version of this story in a comment on a perfume blog, and I found it both funny and sad – why not share the name of your perfume with a perfect stranger? It’s one thing to hope your coworker or your best friend stays away from your signature scent, but you can’t protect your chosen perfume from everyone. (If nobody but you buys it, it’s not going to be available for long.)

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Elisa plays Scheherazade with her 10 favorite oriental perfumes.

Come winter, you will find me in orientals almost exclusively. An oriental is a fragrance with an emphasis on amber, that fantasy accord of resins and vanilla, often accented with spices, woods, soft florals, or candy-like gourmand notes. Both the phrase and the fragrances remind me of an oriental rug: dark and rich, ornate, intricately patterned, dense but soft.

Orientals tend to be heavy with long-lasting base notes, so they’re perfect in winter, when you want a scent to envelop you all day with comforting sweetness and warmth. Here are my ten favorite oriental perfumes that get me through the cold, dark days of winter.

Flower by Kenzo

The name suggests “floral,” but under the violet and rose lurks this perfume’s true character: a powdery vanilla musk with opoponax that feels plush and white, and seems to sparkle especially when it snows.

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I’m happy to bring back the much requested series on fragrances that influenced perfume history. If you’re new to this feature, please start with Series 1, in which I describe how this project came about and how I made the selections.  Perfumery evolves slowly, and classical ideas continue to influence new creations. As I mentioned before, you need not enjoy classics (and you certainly shouldn’t feel bad about disliking Chanel No 5 or not “getting” Guerlain Mitsouko). Every perfume, as is the case for art, music or literature, has its own era and its special flavor, and some of us gravitate to contemporary examples. But smelling classics at least once is important if you want to understand where modern perfumery gathers its inspiration.

Series 1 :: Series 2 :: Series 3 :: Series 4 :: Series 5 :: Series 6 :: Series 7 :: Series 8 :: Series 9 :: Series 10

41. Coriandre          (Jean Couturier, perfumers Gérard Pelpel and Jacqueline Couturier, 1973) The 1970s were the era of the chypre, a mossy woody fragrance family. It developed much earlier in the 20th century with Coty Chypre giving it a modern form, and then Guerlain Mitsouko making it more accessible, but the love affair with moss really exploded in the 1970s. If you enjoy this genre, the 1970s perfumes are going to be a great discovery.

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Please welcome a contribution from Courtney Humphries, who will join us at Bois de Jasmin. Courtney is a freelance journalist and author living in Boston, and she writes about science, health, and culture for a variety of publications. I especially recommend her article for Wired, Engineering Replacements for Essential Perfume Ingredients. Courtney became enamored with perfume after wandering into a Diptyque shop several years ago and smelling Philosykos, which immediately captured her attention. As she describes, “A quick web search on it led me to perfume blogs and reviews, and my journey went from there.”  

Before I became a perfume lover, I regarded fragrance much the same way most of the people I know do: as an afterthought. Perfume was a functional product to help me smell good in social situations. I usually owned just one bottle of perfume, and if I remembered I’d spritz a tiny bit on before going out to a party or on a date. Just as often, I’d forget to put it on before leaving the house, so the bottle would languish on my dresser for months or years, until I tossed it in the trash (in those days I believed perfume “went bad” after a year or two).

When you own only one bottle of fragrance, your choices are minimal—you’re either perfumed or you’re not. For me, that decision depended on whether the occasion met a certain threshold of “specialness” that justified going scented.

But when I became interested in perfume, I began to see fragrance as a source of personal pleasure. I had to make a leap from what had been my “normal” way of thinking about perfume—that everyone needs just a single fragrance—to the quite radical notion that one can collect an entire wardrobe of fragrances.

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