general perfume articles: 94 posts

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 →

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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One evening my husband and I strolled through the Beguinage in Leuven, a university town in the Flemish part of Belgium. Beguinages (or begijnhofs as they are called in Dutch) were medieval lay sisterhoods in which women led lives of piety and charity without taking permanent vows. At best, the Catholic church had an ambivalent attitude towards the beguines. Women weren’t supposed to have this much freedom or to exist independently from male control. The sisterhoods were prosecuted and labeled as heretics, but despite all of this they maintained their order. Belgium had the highest number of beguinages in the world, and about 30 remain today (albeit non-functioning). If the desire to live free from men counts, then the beguines might very well represent the earliest form of the women’s movement.

Although today Leuven’s Beguinage is a UNESCO heritage site housing university students and faculty, there is an aura of serenity pervading its narrow streets. The setting sun tints the grey cobblestones a rich gold and plays on the still water in the canals. The swallows paint delicate arabesques over the sky, making me strain my neck as I admire their graceful spins. The red geraniums spilling out of the window boxes give off their dusty metallic scent, and each tiny streets ends in a small secret garden awash in roses and privet. The beguines may have vanished, but their oasis of quiet beauty remains. Continue reading →

Summer is a wonderful time to wear fragrance.  It’s the season to break out the cool, the sparkling, and the refreshing.  It’s the season to leave behind the warm, the dense, and the heavy.  Orientals that smelled sumptuous at Christmas smell overstuffed in summer, a lesson I learned when I sprayed a thick woodsy vanilla on my wrist in Manhattan one hot July day.  Hours later, I couldn’t remember what the scent was, but I remember how it smelled.  The vanilla note that was so beguiling in winter had turned sour and unattractive.  The woods smelled not of a curl of smoke but of a soggy, recently doused fire.

I live in a place that I like to refer to as the “heat locker.”  It’s imperative that I have a library of scents that can carry me through six months of the year, most often in high humidity.  The scents I choose range from the effervescent to, paradoxically, the plush. It’s all in the nose (and skin) of the beholder!

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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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