Copyright © 2013 by Barbara Herman

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, P.O. Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

Lyons Press is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.

Project editor: Ellen Urban

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Herman, Barbara.

Scent and subversion : decoding a century of provocative perfume / Barbara Herman.

pages cm

Summary: “An intriguing look at vintage perfume’s powerful past, including reviews of more than 300 scents, with stunning period advertisements throughout”—Provided by publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4930-0201-6 (epub)

1. Perfumes—History—20th century. 2. Perfumes—Social aspects—History—20th century. 3. Perfumes industry—History—20th century. 4. Advertising—Perfumes industry—History—20th century. 5. Perfumes—History—20th century—Pictorial works. I. Title.

GT2340.H46 2013

391.6’30904—dc23

2013027423

In loving memory of my grandmother, Nhieu Thi Tran,

a formidable woman if there ever was one.

Bourjois ad, 1926

Contents

Copyright

PART I: INTRODUCTION

My Chemical Romance: Why the Perfumed Life Is Worth Living

Why Vintage?

Take a Whiff on the Wild Side

Smell Bent: The Subculture of Perfume Lovers and the Resurgence of Scent

Scent Is Subversive

PART II:

Twentieth-Century Perfume Profiles

The Icons of Modernity:

Fougère Royale, Jicky, Chypre (1882–1919)

Fragrance Fantasias:

Shalimar, Emeraude, Chanel No. 5 (1920–1929)

The Dirty ’30s:

Tabu, Scandal, Shocking (1930–1939)

The New Look, The New Scents:

Vent Vert, Femme, Miss Dior (1940–1949)

The Bold and the Beautiful:

Intimate, Cabochard, Youth Dew (1950–1959)

Flower Power:

Norell, Fidji, Calandre (1960–1969)

A Breath of Fresh Air:

Aliage, Diorella, White Linen (1970–1979)

Think Big:

Paris, Poison, Paloma Picasso Mon Parfum (1980–1989)

Water, Water, Everywhere:

CK One, L’Eau D’Issey, Laundromat (1990–2000)

PART III:

The Future of Scent and Subversion

Scent Visionaries Antoine Lie and État Libre d’Orange’s Sécrétions Magnifiques:

Fragrance Meant to Disturb

Christopher Brosius of CB I Hate Perfume:

Mixing Memory with Desire

Sissel Tolaas:

Scent as Communication and Information

Martynka Wawrzyniak:

“Smell Me”: An Artist’s Olfactory Self-Portrait

A Brief History of Animal Notes in Perfume

Perfume 101:

How to Become an Informed Perfume Lover

Starting a Vintage Perfume Collection:

Some Tips

Acknowledgments

Glossary

Recommended Reading

Index

About the Author

PART I

INTRODUCTION

My Chemical Romance:

Why the Perfumed Life Is Worth Living

“Food, clothing, shelter, perfume.” Such was perfume’s power that for many years, this accurately depicted my hierarchy of needs. (Advertisement from 1971)

Why Vintage?

Imagine if a first edition of your favorite book slowly disintegrated each time you read it. You might be able to buy another copy at a yard sale or online, but sooner or later, there wouldn’t be a single copy left. And let’s say, because of a quirk in paper and ink, there was no way to copy its words. What imaginary worlds that reflect back and teach us about our own would be lost forever?

Sadly, this is the fate of many major and minor classic perfumes of the twentieth century, perfumes that have revealed through their liquid language how women and men lived, what they aspired to, and what was forbidden to them. Because perfumes go out of style, change formulas, or get discontinued, most of these mini novels written in liquid will simply disappear.

The threats to perfume come from multiple directions. Sometimes, brands decide to discontinue a fragrance because it doesn’t do well initially. This was the fate of two recent masterpieces: Jacques Cavallier’s Le Feu d’Issey for Issey Miyake (1998) and Isabelle Doyen’s Eau du Fier for Annick Goutal (2000). Reformulations of classic fragrances happen all the time, and because of industry secrecy, consumers simply discover on their own that the new bottle of their favorite perfume smells different. Sometimes the reformulations are by necessity. For example, birch tar was banned by IFRA (The International Fragrance Association), so Guerlain had to eliminate it from their formula for Shalimar. Perfumes are often reformulated to cut costs, using less expensive ingredients than in the original. In other cases, some perfumes are tweaked to conform to prevailing styles.

Whatever the case, Givaudan perfumer Jean Guichard recently made a confession that the perfume industry has never owned up to before: Perfumes do in fact get reformulated. He confirmed what every perfume lover who has ever picked up a new bottle of an old favorite and failed to recognize it already knows. “Consumers know their perfume better than any expert,” Guichard said. “We say nothing to consumers, but they notice when their fragrance has been changed.”

By January 2010, IFRA had instituted a ban on a long list of perfume ingredients crucial to iconic perfumes such as Chanel No. 5, Joy, and Mitsouko. This prompted Paris-based perfume historian Octavian Coifan to declare that “twentieth-century perfumery will become history.” The situation is looking even more dire now. At the time of this writing, in 2013, the EU is proposing severer restrictions on even more natural ingredients used in perfumery, to which perfumer Frédéric Malle of Éditions de Parfums de Frédéric Malle has responded, “If this law goes ahead I am finished, as my perfumes are all filled with these ingredients.” He speaks for most perfume lovers, for whom perfume is more than an accessory—it is personal memory, cultural history, and art.

Perfume is inherently fragile and evanescent, but these regulations that were affecting the very DNA of perfume made seeking out vintage perfume even more urgent for me: Time was running out to discover their disappearing styles and stories. I wanted to smell as many vintage perfumes as I could before they were gone forever. Thanks to eBay, estate sales, Ye Olde Junque Shoppes, online purveyors, and decanted samples from readers of my blog, Yesterday’s Perfume, many of these originals became mine. As I was collecting vintage, I was still seeking out contemporary perfume, but I felt there was time to learn about the new.

My obsession started off small—a decant of vintage perfume here, a bid on a full bottle of perfume on eBay there. But the flame soon grew into a conflagration, if not a full-scale, five-alarm fire, stoked by perfume books, blogs and forums, and conversations with other perfume lovers. Ironically, I would come to learn a great deal from most of my scent interlocutors through the pale light of my computer screen, my love for something so visceral facilitated through the virtual. Soon enough, my romance with what Octavian Coifan calls the “Eighth Art” was in full bloom.

Take a Whiff on the Wild Side

It was a few years ago when I was the editor of a women’s pop-culture website that I started writing about perfume on my blog, Yesterday’s Perfume. The office manager would bring me packages of perfume I’d ordered online, and during breaks from blogging about celebrity hookups or the latest birth-control method, I’d rip them open at my desk. Trying to be discreet in the middle of an open office, I’d pop open a tiny one-milliliter vial of the decanted perfume du jour and dab it on my wrist with its plastic wand. Then, in a ritual that has become as common as having a meal or reading a book, I’d lift my wrist to my nose, close my eyes, and sniff, like a deranged junkie getting her fix.

In that work environment, it would have been appropriate for me to wear perfume in a style that has been popular since the 1990s: the office scent. Usually with citrus notes or oceanic accords that stay close to the skin—notes that project little more than “clean”—an office scent’s raison d’être is to avoid being offensive. It plays well with others. By definition, it is institutional and conformist. CK One, Calvin Klein’s 1994 unisex hit, is the perfect example of an office scent. “CK One,” writes one commenter on Basenotes.net, “prolongs that feeling of being washed and clean.” Another fan says, “This is the ONE true fragrance that could just be worn by practically anyone on earth, including newborn babies.”

As I became bored with office life, my rebellion took an invisible—but odoriferous—turn. I didn’t want to smell clean, I didn’t want to blend in, and I certainly didn’t want to smell like a newborn baby. My perfume tastes began to wander over to the wrong side of the tracks, looking for the rude, the louche, and the difficult. I wanted an anti-office scent, a perfume that would flip office culture the bird and throw a smelly Molotov cocktail through the window for good measure.

I found myself drawn to Difficult-Smelling Perfumes that subverted the clean perfume trend. Among them were vintage perfumes that took me to distant lands and told me stories about fur-clad, misbehaving women who smoked; “animalic,” erotic perfumes that smelled like unwashed bodies and deliberately overturned trite and outdated gender conventions in perfume.

In my honeymoon period with perfume, I fell in love many times. Take Bandit, Robert Piguet’s 1944 perfume for women. Its composer, Germaine Cellier—former model, reputed lesbian, and legendary iconoclast of scent—was the rare female perfumer, celebrated for her daring overdoses of extreme perfume notes. Her masterpiece, Bandit, a green leather perfume for women, was said to have been inspired by the scent of female models changing their undergarments backstage at fashion shows. Whether in fact “odor di femina” was its inspirational referent, Bandit offered a subversive olfactory ideal of femininity: It smelled like the unholy union of a bitter, snapped green flower stem, an overturned ashtray, and a leather whip freshly smacked against someone’s skin. Bandit wasn’t a demure, come-hither scent; it was a masked dominatrix lashing you with her crop. Bandit was introduced to the public during a Robert Piguet fashion show. In a fitting debut for this extreme, provocative scent, models dressed as pirates brandished weapons, and the show ended as a model smashed a bottle of Bandit on the runway, turning on her heels as this gorgeous, bitter, butch perfume filled the air.

Chanel No. 19 (1971) was gentler in its seductions. Rather than slap me with a new and shocking scent, it lulled me into an opiate-like dream state. It unfolded before me, smelling of wet earth and vegetal freshness, inducing visions of a dim, damp forest. Its magical forest intimated—now stay with me on this one—that it was populated with fairy-tale witches casting spells both good and bad. Chanel No. 19 made me realize that a well-made perfume is a Mute Invisible Cinema, with its own mise-en-scène, characters, atmosphere, and even narrative. How it conjured these poetic scenes and moods through perfume notes is a testament both to the limbic system—the part of the brain that processes memory and emotion—and to perfumer Henri Robert’s ability to manipulate it with scent molecules.

A great perfume also invites us to shore up all of our senses…

As the oldest part of the brain, the limbic system connects the brain’s higher and lower functions, and it has a privileged relationship to scent. The amygdala, one organ of that multipart limbic system, is responsible not only for helping to produce emotional responses to sensory stimuli like odors or sounds, but also for making connections between the senses. (Only two synapses separate the olfactory nerve from the amygdala.)

One drop of interesting perfume can prompt the amygdala to flood us with an emotional response. A great perfume also invites us to shore up all of our senses, to borrow their metaphors to make perfume’s story more legible, its cinema more visible. These metaphors help to translate the dizzying complexities of emotional, cognitive, and aesthetic responses that perfume can prompt.

One could argue that that the visions and moods Chanel No. 19 induced were courtesy of the limbic system’s synesthesia-simulating influence. In synesthesia, the neurological condition that produces cross-sensory perception, the synesthete may taste shapes, hear colors, or see sounds. Although only about 5 percent of the population has this intriguing “disorder,” perfume could be said to be an inherently synesthesia-prompting—or at least, simulating—object. The almost druglike, hallucinatory quality of a particularly intense perfume can inspire feelings and visions in even the most buttoned up among us. Every perfume lover has, at one point, experienced and then translated a scent synesthetically, via color (“It smells green”), sound (“It’s high-pitched”), shapes (“It seems round”), taste (“It smells sweet”), and even touch (“This scent has texture.”). Even the oft-heard critique that perfume reviewers write “purple prose” is a synesthetic metaphor!

Unlike Chanel No. 19’s Mute Invisible Cinema, Christian Dior’s 1972 perfume Diorella was an impassioned philosophical argument in perfume form. Its disquieting, overripe melon note reminded me (just momentarily) of an overheated dumpster during a New York City summer, with its sweet, sweaty smell of flowers, fruit rinds, and meat scraps mingling in their first, fetid blush of decay. Of course Diorella didn’t smell like this right away, and some people might not smell anything unusual at all. But that overripe, almost rotting smell, like a microexpression—the fleeting expression on someone’s face that reveals an unconscious, near-imperceptible, and perhaps unsavory truth—gave the perfume character. Perfumer Edmond Roudnitska, in the form of perfume rather than a philosophical treatise, teaches us that ripe smells connote death as much as they do life, and that in fact it’s the mortality of bright and alive things that makes them—and Diorella—beautiful.

Not all of the subversive scents that took me to the Wild Side were vintage. Some contemporary perfumers were pushing their creations into more daring olfactory and cultural directions than the prevailing cult of clean perfumes. Serge Lutens’s Muscs Koublaï Khän (1998), composed by Christopher Sheldrake, emerged repeatedly in online perfume forums as the bad boy of niche perfumes, gossiped about like a dude with a bad reputation. Like all bad boys, there was the good (“Perfection!” “My favorite olfactory pet”) mixed in with the bad (“The way your crotch would smell after dumping talcum powder down your shorts and running the Phoenix marathon”). In the case of Muscs Koublaï Khän, I came to discover that both of these descriptions were true, and both were compliments.

The dirty animal to CK One’s freshly washed baby, Muscs Koublaï Khän smelled like wet fur and unwashed hair and bodies, combined with the faintest, softest hint of sweet wild honey and powdery pollen. Its combination of conventional floral notes with animalic notes also evoked the smell of a man who had just taken a shower and decided to exercise without deodorant, the metallic twang of his body odor, ripe with olfactory facets of cumin, fecal civet, and hamster cage radiating through the fresh, powdery soap he’d just used.

This elegant brute of a perfume, like a pungent bohunk from a Harlequin Romance novel, had truly swept me off my feet. Its atavistic embrace of animalic base notes (albeit in synthetic form) hearkened back to vintage perfume styles, and even to the nineteenth-century dandy’s love of the animal-derived perfume ingredients musk, civet, castoreum, and ambergris. Muscs Koublaï Khän was released by the exclusive brand Les Salons du Palais Royal Shiseido in 1998, a few years after the crystalline transparency of Bulgari’s Au Thé Vert Au Parfumée (1992) and the unisex clarity of Calvin Klein’s CK One (1994). A true dissident in the House of Clean, Muscs Koublaï Khän signaled a return of impolite bodily smells in perfume, smells that had flourished up until the late 1970s, when their popularity began to wane.

In this 1955 ad for Ambush, a well-dressed woman wearing Ambush—and a tiny smirk—awaits her prey like a spider on a web.

Once I was done sniffing Muscs Koublaï Khän, I did what any perfumista worth her salt would do next. I went deeper, and got hazed at the queer, punk Parisian frat house État Libre d’Orange (“Free State of Orange”) via its truly outrageous perfume, Sécrétions Magnifiques, a perfume whose original bottle announced its contents with a charming cartoon rendition of an ejaculating penis.

Sécrétions Magnifiques starts off innocuously enough with a soft, floral note. But things get weird very quickly, as the scent of blood, sweat, and semen—shocking biological accords never before used in perfume—arrive like an assault to the senses. This “olfactory coitus,” according to Sécrétions Magnifiques’s original website copy, smells like “like blood, sweat, sperm, and saliva … when masculine tenseness frees a rush of adrenaline in a cascade of high-pitched aldehydic notes.” If animal notes are the erotica of vintage perfumes, Sécrétions Magnifiques’s biological accords are the new millennium’s first olfactory pornography, exposing body parts where they were earlier merely suggested and using olfaction to turn the body inside out.

SM (note the abbreviation, referencing sadomasochism) smells like fresh spunk, and, as many traumatized sniffers have remarked, also like a car accident or a hospital emergency room. Lest you still aren’t quite getting the gist of how impolite this scent is, even Perfumes: The Guide writer Luca Turin, who found the scent inoffensive and even pretty, remarked on its “bilge” note, a word that describes stagnant water that gathers at the base of a ship.

Civet. Musk. Rotten fruit. Women’s underpants. Dirty ashtrays. Blood. This catalog of smells might seem out of place in a positive discussion of perfume, but all of these scents became metaphors for everything my modern, sterile office life lacked. In the virtual, deodorized, homogenized, and antiseptic world I felt myself dissolving into, these Things That Stink felt alive. As my journey through twentieth-century perfume continued, I began to see that even though perfume is thought of in the popular imagination as something to cover up our bad smells, in many ways, it can also be a meditation on the human body, if not an outright celebration of its riotous odors. A strange little book from the 1930s, Odoratus Sexualis, confirmed my suspicion. Its author Iwan Bloch claims that the animal notes in perfume were often used to highlight the body’s ripe and erotic odors rather than to cover them up.

The popularity of certain smells is cyclical, like hemlines and silhouettes in fashion. The nineteenth century’s popular “soliflore”—or single-note floral scent—was replaced by a new “abstract” perfume style. These abstract perfumes that didn’t attempt to mimic nature were made possible thanks to newly available synthetic perfume ingredients. Dirty, erotic animal notes that were popular in the mid-nineteenth century came back in the early part of the twentieth century and stuck around until even the 1980s, only to give way to the so-called “clean” fragrances of the 1990s. In the virtual Internet Age, perfume became disembodied, and the “baseness” of these base notes was repressed.

These cycles of taste mirror the arbitrary and ever shifting role of gender in perfume—the idea that certain scents are either masculine or feminine. If men wore violet perfumes in the nineteenth century and women wore tobacco and leather perfumes in the 1930s—styles whose “gender” has since been reversed—this seems like more proof in perfume form that gender, like perfume, is fluid, culturally constructed, and wearable in multiple forms on variable bodies.

Smell Bent: The Subculture of Perfume Lovers and the Resurgence of Scent

It’s a strange time for perfume. Laws are being created to ban fragrance in the workplace and in public spaces. The International Fragrance Association (IFRA), the regulatory body that is financed by scent makers such as Givaudan, IFF (International Flavors and Fragrances), and Symrise, is creating increasingly tighter restrictions and banning outright the use of important natural perfume ingredients for fear of their allergenic properties. But perfume is also experiencing a rebirth in the twenty-first century. Books like Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez’s Perfumes: The Guide and Chandler Burr’s The Perfect Scent have created a new audience of informed perfume lovers. A burgeoning group of niche perfumers is providing alternatives to mass-market scents. And the Internet is awash with perfume blogs written by amateur and expert perfume lovers from all over the world. With names like I Smell Therefore I Am, Perfume Posse, Now Smell This, and Australian Perfume Junkies, these blogs indicate an interest in the olfactory that seems to belie the idea that we live in scent-hostile times.

These perfume-centric online spaces—predominantly feminine and queer—represent a veritable subculture of women and men bonding over scent by discussing the aesthetics of perfume, and by reminiscing about scents they and their loved ones wore. People have always been interested in perfume, but an aesthetic and almost academic interest in perfume, a fascination with noncommercial brands, and the desire to talk about perfume seems to be something new altogether. In the past, you might have been encouraged to have a signature scent, or to buy the latest from Chanel, but you wouldn’t have been encouraged to know, as many perfume lovers do now, what aldehydes are, what the first perfume to have a synthetic ingredient in it was, or which “nose” created Chanel No. 5.

It’s a strange time for perfume

While the more conventional want to snatch up the ever-growing number of pseudo-celebrity scents (Paris Hilton’s Heiress, anyone, or Jersey Shore alum Snooki’s latest perfume?), a thriving group of olfactory rebels is seeking out vintage perfumes like Guerlain’s 1919 Mitsouko, or niche perfumes like CB I Hate Perfume’s Old Fur Coat, perfumes that challenge the idea of fragrance as mere ornament. These rebels exist alongside the perfume devotees intent on securing a place for classic twentieth-century perfumes in the pantheon, educating nascent perfume lovers, disseminating esoteric perfume history, and assuring perfume’s neglected cultural status as high art.

The Internet largely accounts for this burgeoning scent subculture by providing perfume education via blogs and forums; online marketplaces for full bottles and decants (milliliter-sized samples), so that perfume lovers can get a whiff of obscure and even vintage scents; perfume swaps on perfume forums between participants; and a community with whom they can discuss perfume. An introduction to the twentieth century’s greatest perfumes is often just a computer click away.

Smelling has become a serious hobby for some, and they’re championing our least-understood and oft-maligned sense. An interest in unconventional perfumes, in our virtual, computer-addicted, celeb-obsessed, and deodorized age, can be read as an act of cultural subversion. I have engaged in dialogue with these scent subversives over the past few years, and I proudly count myself among them.

Scent Is Subversive

Smell is an anarchist among our more socially reputable and mediated senses of vision, hearing, touch, and even taste. It is direct, instantaneous, and nonrational, and it provides data that can elicit in us the primal and the mysterious: sexual desire, appetite, emotion, fear, and memory. Smell bypasses the thalamus and penetrates into the oldest, most primitive part of the brain—the rhinencephalon, also known as the “nose brain” or the “olfactory brain.” The limbic system, the seat of our emotions and memories, resides in this “nose brain,” implicitly challenging the notion that there should be a hierarchy of senses, with smell at the bottom.

Since antiquity, our sense of smell has been both denigrated and exalted, viewed by philosophers with disdain yet also deemed sacred, incorporated for centuries into religious ceremonies and rituals connected to prayer and burial. Aristotle considered smell to be our least distinguished sense, dismissing it as fleeting, hard to analyze, and subordinate to emotion. For Plato, smells have no names and can only be defined relatively, in terms of other smells. Scent’s association with animal instinct and sexuality compounds its unsavory reputation.

Psychologist Wilhelm Fliess (1858–1928) believed that there was a close relationship between the nose and the genitals. Sigmund Freud saw a connection between sexual repression and evolved human beings’ diminished sense of smell, concluding that an atrophied olfactory ability was a precondition of civilization. Scent can be the invisible demarcation line that divides classes, ethnicities, and races. In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell argued that there are many prejudices we can get over, but smell repulsion is one of the most difficult.

“A bold fragrance? Perhaps, but why not let your perfume say the things you would not dare to?”

—PRIMITIF PERFUME AD BY MAX FACTOR (1956)

“There is something carnal about scent,” perfumer Christophe Laudamiel says. “When you look at a picture, you don’t feel the picture is inside you … Scent goes inside you because you have to breathe and because it’s made of molecules. So if I smell melon, there is a little bit of melon that comes inside of me so that I can detect it … If I look at La Joconde (Mona Lisa), I don’t feel like I’m swallowing La Joconde. So there is this extra feeling that makes scent maybe even more sexual, cannibalistic, or engaging.” The intensity and immediacy of smells can become, then, both the source of our fear and the source of their magic.

As a medium that addresses our often-maligned sense of smell, perfume is an inherently subversive art that has a rare opportunity to “speak” to us in its visceral language of aromatic notes. Yet sexism clearly contributes to perfume’s low status in our culture. In spite of the growing market for men’s scents, perfume is still considered a feminine art, a woman’s accessory, and, sadly, we still live in a culture in which that audience alone discredits it.

With their seminal books on perfume, Luca Turin, Tania Sanchez, and Chandler Burr have worked hard to turn around perfume’s status as cultural detritus and to give scent its due as an art just as complex, constructed, or deliberate as painting, music, or architecture. Calling perfumes “chemical poems” and emphasizing their aesthetics, Turin perhaps went in an extreme direction away from the usual discourse about perfume’s relation to memory, sex, and emotion in order to make a case for perfume as art. As if pleading with Aristotle and Plato on their terms, he claims in The Secret of Scent that perfume is not about memory or sex, but rather beauty and intelligence. And Chandler Burr has gone one step further in attempting to raise perfume’s cultural status by literally getting perfume its own museum wing. Thanks to his efforts, in the fall of 2012, NYC’s Museum of Art and Design devoted a portion of its space to an olfactory art exhibit that explored the aesthetics of 12 pivotal twentieth-century perfumes. But are memory, sex, and emotion separate from perfume’s aesthetics? Does perfume need this cultural elevation to be taken seriously?

The paradox and beauty of perfume is that it operates on multiple levels: the rational and the irrational; the visceral, the cognitive, and the aesthetic. Perfume’s power is that it has one foot in the elevated world of language, and one foot in the primal, emotional, and dreamlike. Perfumer Olivia Giacobetti celebrates perfume’s liminal status when she says that “Perfume is the language closest to the unconscious.”

We get cognitive pleasure from perfume. The pleasures of scent are not simply derived from emotions, sex, and gut reactions; they also comes from the satisfaction we get from decoding the meaning of fragrance. Perfume, as a synesthetic object, invites us to process it in a variety of languages, to indulge in synesthesia by translating perfume into shapes, colors, musical pitches, moods, visions, textures, personae, and even narratives. Yet for some, scent cannot enter the hallowed halls of Art. In The Art Instinct, Denis Dutton argues that smell cannot be art because it doesn’t inspire cognition; all it can do, he says, is to provoke nostalgia or memories. But smell scientist and author Avery Gilbert, and any other serious perfume lover, would beg to differ. “Contrary to conventional wisdom,” Gilbert argues on his blog FirstNerve.com, “especially among psychologists who should know better, olfaction is very cognitive. It requires attention, memory, comparison, naming and judgment. There is, after all, a thinking brain behind the smelling nose.”

It seems to me that efforts to elevate perfume to the level of art, worthy of recognition by arbiters of culture, ignore the fact that perfume doesn’t need their imprimatur. The way that scents are loved, disseminated, and analyzed on the wild, wild web nowadays suits its anarchic, nonhierarchical, and antiauthoritarian form. If the medium is the message, perfume’s message is subversive. It doesn’t need validation or ratification; its power is in the underground.

Perfume’s resurgence reflects a profound pendulum swing in our culture that marketers and branders might describe as a desire for authenticity. Perfume offers materiality in the Internet age of disembodied virtuality, an economy of touch, interactivity, and sensuality. In a pornified culture that has raised the visual to the apex of importance in sexuality, perfume shifts the focus of the erotic to the suggestive, the poetic, and the invisible.

There is no denying that perfume is a discourse aimed largely at women, providing a space in which they can express their erotic selves invisibly, autoerotically, and homosocially. Online perfume forums and blogs become occasions for women to talk to other women about their desires, appetites, and histories. It doesn’t take long for a discussion of perfume to wander into a memory of what one person wore in high school, or the scent of their mother or father or first lover.

Some perfumes are subversive because they threaten the American regime of clean and its corollary, scentphobia, by elevating dirty, animal, and bodily smells. “Americans,” Luca Turin has said, “are dedicated to the proposition that shit shouldn’t stink.” He’s not exaggerating by much. If you’re like most people in the United States, you’ve been encouraged to neglect your sense of smell. Like children who have retained a childish fear of foreignness, who associate smell with things dirty and unclean, and who think that everyone else’s home smells like cooked cabbage, you might have been taught to avoid smells. Perhaps you fear the smell of strange neighborhoods or cities, unfamiliar cooking smells, body odor (sadly, even your own!), and maybe, unless it’s antibacterial soap or shampoo, you fear anything that smells. A foray into the wild, wondrous world of perfume can help change that, as it did for me.

In our celebrity-obsessed, perfection-seeking, conventionally aspirational society, perfume invites us to embrace alternative values: the louche, the queer, and the decadent. Subversive perfumes in an already subversive medium posit an indie aesthetic that values art over commerce, niche over blockbuster, and individualism over conformity.

Smell is our underground sense and links us to sex, emotion, memory, and those messy things our allegedly logical culture tries to repress. In other words, scent is subversive, and Scent and Subversion is both a record and a reflection of my journey through twentieth-century perfume.

I view perfume as an aesthetic object of pop culture that is worthy of analysis, shaped by and shaping the culture in which it is embedded. Perfume is a language whose speech is worth learning and unpacking as one would a poem, book, or film. Scent is a path to getting closer to our senses, to instinct, and to our bodies and the earth at a time when those attachments are threatened. As I write this, Google Glasses are promising—or threatening, depending on your position on the ever-increasing encroachment of technology into our lives—to “bring information closer to your senses” by mediating our experience in the most extreme way to date, filling our sight lines with virtual information. As if we need to be even more divorced from our senses!

In Part I of Scent and Subversion, I discuss the path that led me to perfume and the exciting rise in scent-centric culture, including the online communities that continue to facilitate it.

Part II includes descriptions and histories of more than three hundred vintage perfumes, decade by decade, from Jicky to Demeter’s Laundromat (2000), covering drugstore as well as haute perfumes. (A perfume can be considered vintage if it’s been discontinued, if its style is no longer “in,” or if it’s at least twenty years old.) Over the years, I’ve collected more than a hundred vintage perfume ads. Some of my favorites are sprinkled throughout the text, like movie posters to perfume’s invisible cinema.

Part III looks to the future through conversations with perfumers and scent provocateurs who are thinking about perfume in a profound way, some who are even rethinking its importance and purpose in society. Part III’s “A Brief History of Animal Notes in Perfume” explains the aesthetic, historical, and cultural importance of animal-derived ingredients that are no longer used in nonsynthetic form in perfumes, even as it acknowledges both the theoretical and real problems with sourcing animal notes from actual animals.

Finally, a Perfume Glossary helps elucidate terms used in this book, and will arm you with a vocabulary to begin your journey through scent.

I hope that Scent and Subversion inspires you to explore both vintage and contemporary perfume, to pay attention to the smells that surround us, and to see perfume as instructive, a bridge between the world and our oft-neglected sense of smell. Like reading poetry to understand the lyricism possible in demotic, everyday speech, smelling perfume connects us to the olfactory wonderland that is around us.

This 1938 perfume gets the ’60s treatment.

PART II

Twentieth-Century Perfume Profiles

The perfume that started its own category, François Coty’s 1917 Perfume Chypre (Cyprus in French) was named as an homage to the scents that perfumed that Greek island, which included citrus, floral, and moss notes.

The Icons of Modernity

Fougère Royale, Jicky, Chypre (1882–1919)

As single-note floral perfumes began to wane in popularity, perfumes with complex floral bouquets such as Houbigant’s Quelques Fleurs (1912) rose to prominence. With its overdose of raunchy civet, Guerlain’s Jicky (1889) retained the nineteenth century’s love of animalic notes, while bringing in a sense of abstraction to perfumery through a novel use of new synthetic ingredients. It combined notes and accords that, in their sum, smelled like nothing in the world. Even Fougère Royale (Royal Fern), with its beguiling name, didn’t smell like ferns but rather like bergamot, lavender, and coumarin, which at the time was a new and synthetic molecule found in abundance in tonka beans. Fougère, with that trio of notes, remains a perfume category today.

Unless otherwise specified, the perfume notes listed below each entry have come from various editions of Haarmann & Reimer’s The Fragrance Guide: Feminine and Masculine Notes—Fragrances on the International Market. In some cases, H&R’s notes are supplemented with additional sources.

Fougère Royale by Houbigant (1882)

Perfumer: Paul Parquet

With a wonderful balance between sunny, herbaceous top notes and a spicy, warm and rich base, Fougère Royale smells like the cleanest, freshest facets of summertime—a waft of lavender here, some notes of hay and moss there, rounded out by vanilla, tonka, and spice from carnation and florals. Vintage Fougère Royale smells more subtle and natural than its reissued version.

Named after a plant with no smell, Fougère Royale (“Royal Fern”) spawned a whole perfume category: the fresh-aromatic, lavender-accented fragrance accords with oakmoss and woody notes that are still referred to as fougère. Fougère Royale was the first fragrance to use synthetic coumarin, one of the main components in tonka beans with a rich sweetness that rounds off other perfume notes.

Top notes: Lavender, clary sage, spikenard, bergamot, petit grain

Heart notes: Geranium, rose, heliotrope, carnation, orchid

Base notes: Oakmoss, musk, tonka, hay, vanilla

Jicky by Guerlain (1889)

Perfumer: Aimé Guerlain

Unless you are blessed with an adventurous nose, Jicky is not a love-at-first-sniff scent. Between the blast of citrus, lavender, and herbs, followed by the glorious stink of Guerlain’s famous overdose of civet, this icon of modern perfumery is the olfactory equivalent of difficult listening music. But if you acquire a nose for it, particularly the vintage, it will pay you back in spades. A rich animal warmth rises up to meet the herbaceous citrus/lavender opening, warming down to a vanillic smoothness. By turns frisky and indolent, Jicky has the personality of a cat.

Considering Jicky’s longevity—it is considered the oldest continuously produced perfume since the advent of modern perfumery—you realize that sometimes with perfume, more is more.

Top notes: Lemon, mandarin, bergamot, rosewood

Heart notes: Orris, jasmine, patchouli, rose, vetiver

Base notes: Leather, amber, civet, tonka, incense, benzoin

Phul-Nana by Grossmith (1891)

Soft, musky, animalic, woody, and balsamic, with a medicinal and herbal edge, this review of Phul-Nana, or “lovely flower,” is for the twilight phase of this over one-hundred-year-old perfume that was originally inspired by Indian flowers. Touted as a “rare marriage of the herb garden with the flower garden,” its rich woods and spice base is prominent to my nose because its top notes have dissipated.

Notes not available.

Cuir de Russie by Lubin (1900)

Upon first application, Lubin’s Cuir de Russie (Russian Leather) smells like Tabu and Youth Dew mixed with Secret of Venus, rubbed on an old leather club chair—sweet, spicy, dark, and ambery. The unmistakable leather scent, curiously, arrives at the beginning with a pronounced ylang-ylang/jasmine floral bouquet and a spicy balsamic base. An hour into the drydown, this century-plus perfume settles its creaky bones down, and I can get a glimmer of what it might have been once everything settles into place: a velvety dose of dark leather.

Notes not available.

Peau d’Espagne by Santa Maria Novella (1901)

As far back as the sixteenth century, Peau d’Espagne (“Spanish Leather” or “Spanish Skin”) was a scent made of floral and spice essences designed to mask the stinky smell of animal hides, which were traditionally cured with animal urine, pigeon and dog feces, and animal brains. It evolved into scented leather sachets, cooking spices, and women’s perfume. A search of Perfume Intelligence (an amazing online perfume encyclopedia) shows us that in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, there were already over forty brands of Peau d’Espagne, including a Roger & Gallet and L.T. Piver.

If you want to experience a naturalistic leather, look no further than Santa Maria Novella’s Peau d’Espagne, one of the few to survive into the twenty-first century. Even though this is not a review of the vintage version, (one of just a few in this book), the currently available formula is about as close to a true living vintage as any perfume around. It is challenging, difficult, gorgeous, and captivating all at once—definitely one of the strongest leather perfumes I’ve encountered. Herbaceous, anisic, meaty-smoky, and then incongruously sweet and ambery. This stuff is so strong you can almost taste it.

In Studies in the Psychology of Sex, twentieth-century sexologist Havelock Ellis claimed that Peau d’Espagne was “often the favorite scent of sensuous persons,” in part because of its use of “the crude animal sexual odors of musk and civet.” Mysteriously, he also believed it was one of the only perfumes that “most nearly approaches the odor of a woman’s skin.”

Notes from SMN’s website: Linaloe (Linaloe berry has some similarity to bergamot, mint, and lavender), birch, saddle leather

L’Origan by Coty (1905)

A circa 1950 advertisement for Coty’s L’Origan

Perfumer: François Coty

Although L’Origan by Coty was said to have influenced Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleue, it seems less melancholy and more sensual/gourmand, like a licorice-flavored biscotti with floral, clove, and amber notes. Rich, ambery, and powdery, L’Origan’s gentle softness is aided by the addition of methyl ionone, a synthetic note discovered in 1893 that smells like the powdery, orris aspect of violet.

Top notes: Bergamot, mandarin, coriander, pepper, peach

Heart notes: Clove, clove bud, ylang-ylang, orchid, rose, orris, jasmine

Base notes: Sandalwood, cedarwood, labdanum, musk, benzoin, vanilla

Après L’Ondée by Guerlain (1906)

Perfumer: Jacques Guerlain

A century before Christopher Brosius of CB I Hate Perfume evoked nature with his perfumes Soaked Earth and Violet Empire, Jacques Guerlain sought to express in perfume form the scent and mood of nature after a rainstorm. In Après L’Ondée (“After the Rainshower”), the scent of earth, woods, roots, leaves, and flower petals washed by rain and warmed by sunlight radiate from its diaphanous violet/orris heart. Spicy, woodsy, and lightly sweet, Après L’Ondée’s simplicity is in the service-restrained expression rather than minimalism for its own sake, the scent of fragrant things behind a veil of water.

Notes: Violet, anise, orris, carnation, vanilla

Narcisse Noir by Caron (1911)

Perfumer: Ernest Daltroff

Black Narcissus … the name suggests nighttime, malignancy, eroticism. Famously dubbed the “film noir perfume” for expressing in perfume language that genre’s contrast between light and dark, white flowers and animalic musk, Narcisse Noir, like a femme fatale, gives the impression of being both beautiful and dangerous. Just as thick, honeyed florals rise up, the darker animalic base provides the necessary edge—the “noir” of the perfume.

In Black Narcissus (1947), Michael Powell’s hypnotically beautiful film, nuns relocate to a convent in the Himalayas only to become haunted by the earthly delights of their pasts. The film’s namesake Narcisse Noir signifies an enticement to the world of sensuality that contributes to one of the convent dwellers’ undoing. Its outré personality led Chanel No. 5 creator Ernest Beaux to describe Narcisse Noir in one of his notebooks as un parfum d’une vulgarité tapageuse—a perfume of the most striking vulgarity.

Top notes: Narcissus, orange blossom

Heart notes: Rose, jasmine

Base notes: Sandalwood, vetiver, civet, musk

Styx by Coty (1911)

Moody and dark, Styx combines L’Origan’s creamy gentleness with an incensey, spiced base. Its brooding quality befits a perfume named for the river that snakes between Heaven and Earth.

Notes from Octavian Coifan: Orris, vanilla, carnation

L’Heure Bleue by Guerlain (1912)

Perfumer: Jacques Guerlain

Jacques Guerlain is said to have been influenced by the blues used by Impressionist painters when creating the melancholy L’Heure Bleue (“The Blue Hour”). L’Heure Bleue refers to the twilight hour between late afternoon and evening, when it is neither totally day- or nighttime. This liminal hour brings out extremes in flowers: “the blue hour” is when they smell their sweetest. Composed two years before the outbreak of World War I, L’Heure Bleue also evokes a prewar, romantic Paris, before darkness descended upon the city.

Sweet, spicy, and soft, with a warm base hinting of leather, L’Heure Bleue suspends a host of intense and suggestive scents in an uneasy but beautiful balance, just as the blue hour of the perfume’s name holds together, in a melancholy moment, the waning of day’s hopes and the beginning of night’s uncertainty. The almost confectionary sweetness of the perfume is balanced by the spice and sharpness of bergamot, clary sage, an herbal tarragon, and a prominent clove note.

Top notes: Bergamot oil, clary sage oil, coriander, lemon, neroli, tarragon

Heart notes: Clove bud oil, jasmine, orchid, rose, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Benzoin, cedar, musk, sandal, vanilla, vetiver

Quelques Fleurs by Houbigant (1912)

Perfumer: Robert Bienamé

A bouquet in a bottle, Quelques Fleurs modernized the nineteenth-century soliflore by combining so many floral notes into a bouquet that it is difficult to pick out the individual flowers. Not quite abstraction, but complexity and artistry. Citrus oils and leafy-green notes accent this bouquet, civet adds a touch of eroticism, and woods and vanilla and sandalwood add warmth and texture. Quelques Fleurs is a complex, fresh floral whose synthetic-smelling reformulation ironically smells more dated. (Because of its novel use of aldehydes, this is the perfume that Ernest Beaux studied before composing the multiple versions of perfumes that culminated in Chanel No. 5.)

Top notes: Citrus oils, orange blossom, leafy green

Heart notes: Rose, jasmine, lilac, ylang-ylang, carnation, violet, orris

Base notes: Sandalwood, musk, civet, honey, heliotrope, vanilla

Houbigant lays out the case for matching perfume to “frock” in this 1927 ad. I’m also intrigued by the “Things Perfumes Whisper” booklet of perfumes, beauty secrets, and Houbigant-perfumed sachets that you could get just for writing to them.

Drawn by artist Raphael Kirchner, this 1913 ad for Lubin’s Chrysanthème was the first luxury perfume brand to advertise in the nudie mags of the time, including La Vie Parisienne. Lubin targets men with “kept” women in this ad campaign for Chrysanthème perfume.

Bouquet de Catherine by Rallet (1913)

Perfumer: Ernest Beaux

It has been argued quite convincingly that Bouquet de Catherine is an earlier version of Rallet No. 1 (1923), which itself is an earlier incarnation, give or take a few notes and the quality of ingredients, of Chanel No. 5 (see pages 35 and 32).

Notes not available.

Rosine Nuit de Chine by Paul Poiret (1913)

Perfumer: Maurice Schaller

In Paul Poiret’s heartbreakingly beautiful Nuit de Chine (“Chinese Night”), a milk-fed peach rests on a spicy, animalic base to produce sensuous, carnal beauty. Persicol (a peach lactone base that was also used to stunning effect in Mitsouko) is overdosed in Nuit de Chine, according to perfume historian Octavian Coifan, and it creates an aromatic and milky peach that could teach some of the cloying fruity notes in today’s perfumes a lesson or two in restraint. (Persicol is also known as aldehyde C-14.)

Notes from Octavian Coifan: Jasmine, rose, cinnamon, clove, amber, musk, sandalwood, Persicol or Chuit Naef (special bases at the time)

Chypre de Coty (1917)

The perfume that launched an entire perfume category, Chypre de Coty, advertisement c. 1949

Perfumer: François Coty

The chypre that started it all, François Coty’s Chypre was named as an homage to the scents that perfumed the island of Cyprus—an aromatic mix of woods, moss, and citrus. Henceforth, thanks to this groundbreaking perfume, all perfumes in the chypre category have sparkling citrus top notes (usually bergamot) balanced atop a mossy base, with oakmoss and often vetiver, labdanum, and patchouli.

Some classic, early scents can be enjoyed only for their historical notoriety, as the first perfumes that opened the door for later, superior incarnations. But for me, Coty’s Chypre stands alone as an incredibly beautiful and complex scent. At once fresh and herbal, warm and woodsy, and softly floral, Chypre dries down into a powdery, buttery softness. I keep inhaling my wrist for the almost milky richness of what’s left behind, combined with a disquieting hint of civet.

Top notes: Bergamot

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, lilac, orris

Base notes: Vanillin, coumarin, oakmoss, patchouli, vetiver, sandalwood, labdanum, styrax, civet, musk

Mitsouko by Guerlain (1919)

Perfumer: Jacques Guerlain

A sign of its Orientalism-inspired time, Mitsouko is a French olfactory fantasia named after a character in Claude Farrère’s novel, The Battle. Mitsouko falls in love with a British naval officer while married to a Japanese fleet admiral, and decides who she will be with by waiting to see who returns to her alive. But something burns at the heart of Mitsouko that belies its romantic namesake; it’s a perfume that lives in the spiritual as well as the carnal realm.

La Parfum Idéal by Houbigant (Advertisement from 1911)

With a sublimely subtle, milky-soft peach heart (courtesy of the rich Persicol note) and spicy cinnamon, clove, and oakmoss nipping at its tail, Mitsouko reminds me of the Japanese incense that burned during meditation sits I did at the San Francisco Zen Center. It is as delicate as spiced tea with a drop of milk.

Meditative, sophisticated, and subtly sensuous, Mitsouko is considered by many to be the holy grail of chypres. Compare the peach in vintage Mitsouko with the fruity cocktails out now if you want to understand how fruit notes in perfume can be sophisticated instead of vulgar.

Top notes: Bergamot, lemon, mandarin, neroli, peach

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, clove bud, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Oakmoss, benzoin, sandalwood, cistus, myrrh, cinnamon, musk

Tabac Blond by Caron (1919)

Perfumer: Ernest Daltroff

Ernest Daltroff seems to have specialized in creating perfumes for minxes gone wild. Tabac Blond paid homage to the scandalous bad girls who smoked cigarettes in the 1910s and 1920s, and in its heart is the rich, toasted-caramel smell of rolling tobacco.

Unlike Lanvin’s Scandal, a tobacco scent whose sweet floral notes could be said to reveal that it doesn’t have the courage of its tobacco convictions, Tabac Blond’s tobacco and leather notes aren’t upstaged by florals. It starts off with ylang-ylang and leather, and moves into a wonderful, powdery, yet sharp smoke note that continues to sing through to the vanillic, clovey, spicy, and warm drydown.

Habanita has a comforting, more-legible tobacco presence, and if you want a shocking tobacco scent, look no further than Bandit’s badass wet-ashtray-meets-leather-and-isobutyl quinoline. But in terms of projecting dark, sultry, and yet refined, you can’t do much better than Tabac Blond.

Denyse Beaulieu of the wonderful perfume blog Grain de Musc has written that historically, Tabac Blond for women was “meant to blend with, and cover up, the still-shocking smell of cigarettes: smoking was still thought to be a sign of loose morals.”

Top notes: Leather, carnation, linden

Heart notes: Iris, vetiver, ylang-ylang, lime-tree leaf

Base notes: Cedar, patchouli, vanilla, amber, musk

Notes from NowSmellThis.com.

The colonial figure of the “blackamoor,” usually depicting an African man in a turban as a servant, flourished in popular ads, films, and even decorative items like lamps up until the 1970s. In this 1927 advertisement, two highly stylized blackamoors carry a bottle of Shalimar on their backs.

Fragrance Fantasias

Shalimar, Emeraude, Chanel No. 5 (1920–1929)

Luxe and decadent with a hint of the disreputable, the feminine fragrances of the 1920s join the Eros of floral notes with the Thanatos of animal-sourced notes, along with tobacco notes evoking the woman of questionable morality who smoked. In short, they redefined femininity outside of the innocent floral. This was the decade of Lanvin’s My Sin; Molinard’s Habanita, originally made to perfume cigarettes; and the groundbreaking Chanel No. 5, created so that women could smell “like women,” and not roses.

A 1920s advertisement for Un Air Embaumé (“Balmy Air”), by Rigaud

Chanel No. 5 by Chanel (1921)

“A woman must smell like a woman, and not a rose.”

—COCO CHANEL

Perfumer: Ernest Beaux

Perfumer Ernest Beaux got many directives from Coco Chanel for the design house’s first fragrance. Among the qualities Chanel No. 5 was to have: tenacity, versatility, and abstraction. “On a woman,” Chanel said, “a natural scent smells artificial. Perhaps a natural perfume must be created artificially.”

For the other requirement—that it should be a perfume no other perfumer could copy—Beaux complied by using ingredients so expensive that few could have copied them even if they had wanted to; for example, jasmine from Grasse, France; Rose de Mai; and superior ylang-ylang.

What marks Chanel No. 5 as a landmark perfume, however, is its 1 percent overdose of aliphatic aldehydes, the chemical that lends sparkle to fragrances and has been described as fatty, watery, tallowy, like the scent of a snuffed candle. Beaux wanted to use such a strong dose of aldehydes “to let all that richness fly a little.”

Bathed in the golden light of musk and civet, with the crisp edge of aldehydes like the faintest touch of cinnamon or burnt caramel, the florals in Chanel No. 5 come alive, alternately spicy, gourmand, and sensual. Vintage Chanel No. 5 is draped in fur: feminine elegance and restraint plus an animalic extremity. Who knew that an animal lurked beneath its elegant exterior? (See Rallet No. 1 on page 35 to read about its influence on Chanel No. 5.)

Top notes: Aldehydes, bergamot, lemon, neroli

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, lily of the valley, orris, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Vetiver, sandalwood, cedar, vanilla, amber, civet, musk

Emeraude by Coty (1921)

Perfumer: François Coty

This drugstore classic is considered by many to be the inspiration for Guerlain’s Shalimar. Initially sharp, aldehydic, and citrusy-resinous, this comforting and haunting fragrance mellows out into a creamy amber/vanilla drydown with a hint of civet.

Top notes: Orange, bergamot, tarragon

Heart notes: Jasmine, ylang-ylang, rose, rosewood

Base notes: Amber, sandalwood, patchouli, opopanax, benzoin, vanilla

Habanita by Molinard (1921)

Originally marketed in 1921 to perfume cigarettes, Habanita came in two forms: scented sachets made to tuck into a pack of cigarettes, or as a liquid you could apply to your cigarettes with a glass rod, to “perfume the smoke with a delicious, lasting aroma.” By 1924, Molinard had turned their scent into a perfume to be worn rather than smoked, but the decadent connotations remained.

Smoky, fruity, and floral notes rest on a base of vanillic, creamy benzoin and leather, making Habanita a complexly comforting scent of sweetness and warmth. A haze of tobacco smoke and the earthiness of leather tie together what starts out sharp (vetiver), gliding later into a jammy sweetness. As the perfume dries down, it smells like the foil that lines a pack of cigarettes.

An advertising trade card for Habanita and a catalog featuring Habanita perfume for cigarettes. Originally marketed in 1921 to perfume cigarettes, Habanita later became a perfume to be worn rather than smoked. (Courtesy of The Farnsworth Collection)

What might at first sniff seem like sensuality in Habanita comes across instead as gourmand, and the tobacco smoke and leather suggest powderiness rather than roughness. So instead of being the dangerous perfume a femme fatale would wear, Habanita signifies comfort—like being stuck in a cafe in Paris on a cold day, comfortably trapped in a room filled with cigarette smoke, an old lady’s violet-scented dusting powder, and the aroma of buttery baked goods.

Top notes: Vetiver, peach, strawberry, orange blossom

Heart notes: Rose orientale, ylang-ylang, orris, lilac

Base notes: Leather, vanilla, cedarwood, benzoin

Chanel No. 22 by Chanel (1922)

Perfumer: Ernest Beaux

Fizzy, bubbly, and fresh, Chanel No. 22 has the character of a popped bottle of champagne. A precursor to Madame Rochas and White Linen, Chanel No. 22 is one of the best aldehydic florals, those motivational speakers of the perfume world unclouded by darkness and with nary a bad thing to say about anyone.

But this doesn’t mean Chanel No. 22 is uninteresting. Clean, white florals feel overexposed like the whites of surrealist photographer Man Ray’s solarized black-and–white photographs. They are met with scratchy vetiver and incense to give their freshness character, while vanilla warms it all up in the base.

Top notes: Aldehydes

Heart notes: Jasmine, tuberose, ylang-ylang, rose

Base notes: Vetiver, vanilla, incense

Nuit de Noël by Caron (1922)

Perfumer: Ernest Daltroff

Perhaps because Nuit de Noël is a perfume that is supposed to evoke the comforts of Christmas, it is one of the few Ernest Daltroff perfumes that doesn’t smell like it needs to go to reform school. Nuit de Noël starts out with a sharp and intense ylang-ylang note, moves into a cinnamony-rose and jasmine heart, and dries down to a spicy comfort scent that evokes mulling spices and the warmth of a room indoors on a wintry day.

Notes: Rose, jasmine, ylang-ylang, sandalwood, moss, musk

Rallet No. 1 by A. Rallet & Co. (1923),

previously Bouquet of Catherine by A. Rallet & Co. (1913)

Perfumer: Ernest Beaux

Few people know that Chanel No. 5 is a palimpsest—that is, a text that has been reused or altered, which still carries traces of its earlier incarnation. For perfume historians Philip Kraft, Christine Ledard, and Philip Goutell (as they argue in an article for Perfume & Flavorist magazine), Chanel No. 5 is a retweaked version of Ernest Beaux’s earlier Rallet No. 1, which just also happens to be his Bouquet de Catherine (1913) by another name. In a landmark article published in Perfume & Flavorist magazine, they concluded that their research showed that the formulas for Rallet No. 1 and Chanel No. 5—both composed by Ernest Beaux—were strikingly similar.

The story behind these multiple renamings and reformulations involves wars, histories, Gabrielle (aka Coco) Chanel’s love life, some royalty, and the inevitable mythologizing and cover-up that makes the idea of Truth with a capital T recede further into the distance.

Before Ernest Beaux was Chanel’s perfumer, he was the perfumer for A. Rallet & Co., a Russian perfumery founded in Moscow in 1843. In 1896 it was bought by Antoine Chiris of Grasse, France, who moved its operations to Paris in 1917, when Russia nationalized its assets. Rallet catered to wealthy Russians, many of whom would come to Paris to shop. To celebrate the three hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty’s rule in Russia, Rallet had Beaux create his first perfume using aldehydes—Bouquet of Catherine (1913)—inspired by Robert Bienamé’s 1912 floral aldehyde, Quelques Fleurs. Unfortunately, war broke out in Europe the next year, and Beaux enlisted with the French army and was conscripted until 1919.

It’s unclear at what point Bouquet of Catherine was rechristened Rallet No. 1, but it was released with that name in 1923. When the Bolsheviks did away with the Imperial Russia that was in power, the Russian market that had purchased Rallet could no longer afford these perfumes, and Beaux had to hawk Rallet No. 1 elsewhere. First stop: Coty. Denied. Then, a fateful introduction between Beaux and Gabrielle Chanel was made through her purported lover, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, an exile from Imperial Russia, and the Chanel No. 5 we know now, with its over-the-top, expensive jasmine, rose, and ylang-ylang, was born as a high-end reformulation of Rallet No. 1.

A wonderful reader gave me a sample from an original Rallet No. 1 bottle. Sniffing it is like recognizing a movie star’s familiar, if less dazzling, sibling.

A promise of the Orient via Un Air Embaumé from Rigaud

Cuir de Russie (or Russia Leather) by Chanel (1924)

With Russia Leather (also known as Cuir de Russie),Chanel combines a luxurious balsamic creaminess and spice with the animalic smell of leather in a collision this 1941 ad calls paradoxical.

Perfumer: Ernest Beaux

In this legendary leather perfume, flora and fauna are locked in an erotic embrace, a swirl of floral notes fattened by rich balsams and dirtied by animalic leather. I’m not sure that there’s any vintage perfume that telegraphs opulence and elegant languor quite like Cuir de Russie, once called Russia Leather for the American market. Smoke, leather, and bitter birch tar take the floral notes in Cuir de Russie into a dark, erotic place, but then when the darkness subsides, a decadent ylang-ylang, without its characteristic sharpness but with all its richness, blooms with amber and vanilla. As the vintage dries down, Cuir de Russie toggles between creamy balsamic notes with the undeniable animal of fur and hides. Swoon-worthy.

Top notes: Orange blossom, bergamot, lemon, mandarin, clary sage

Heart notes: Orris, carnation, rose, ylang-ylang, jasmine, cedarwood, vetiver

Base notes: Leather, amber, opopanax, styrax, heliotrope, vanilla

Knize Ten by Knize (1924)

Perfumers: François Coty and Vincent Roubert

Started in 1858 by a Czech military man named Joseph Knize, Knize is a Viennese bespoke tailor/men’s clothing house that’s still kicking today. The “ten” in Knize Ten represents the highest handicap in polo, the chic sport whose images Knize used in its advertising.

Knize Ten starts with a hot blast of birch tarry-leather, petit grain, and rosemary that tops its bright notes of bergamot/orange/lemon. Soon after, the woody-powdery center takes the perfume into a desert of dryness, while subtle aromatic cinnamon and spicy carnation provide a bridge to Knize Ten’s smoky-leathery drydown. A touch of vanilla, amber, and a menthol note (is this the resiny, mentholated facet from cedarwood?) intervenes occasionally, but throughout, from top to bottom, a tough, tarry, smoky, rubbery leather is ever-present and my favorite part of this gorgeous leather classic. The reformulation is less dry and leathery.

Top notes: Bergamot, lemon, orange, petit grain, rosemary

Heart notes: Geranium, cedarwood, rose, orris, carnation, cinnamon, sandalwood

Base notes: Leather, musk, moss, amber, castoreum, vanilla

My Sin by Lanvin (1924)

This 1960s ad captures the 1924 perfume’s animal magnetism.

Perfumer: possibly Madame Zed

With the narcotic sweetness of neroli, ylang-ylang, and jasmine, initially pushed in a green, fresh direction by its sharp top notes, My Sin quickly drops it like it’s hot in the base notes, with a lascivious and warm civet-led balsamic drydown.

My Sin’s notes have converged to create a sexual flower, one that is at its most fragrant, from a meadow in full bloom on the hottest spring day, visited by the horniest, healthiest bees at the height of health. It smells lush, overripe, and decadent. This is one of those readily available vintage perfumes that might convince you that the difference between modern and vintage perfumery is akin to the difference between polyester and velvet, a two-dimensional photograph and a 3-D hologram, or digital and analog. Luscious.

Top notes: Aldehydes, lemon, bergamot, clary sage

Heart notes: Neroli, jasmine, clove, rose, muguet (lily of the valley), jonquil, ylang-ylang, lilac

Base notes: Vetiver, vanilla, musk, woods, tolu, styrax, civet

Toujours Moi by Corday (1924)

Masks are a haunting signature icon in Corday’s beautifully surreal ads. This one for Toujours Moi is from the 1940s.

The love child of Tabu and Habanita, Toujours Moi (“Forever Me”) is a must-have for lovers of perfume in the Oriental category. It has the vanillic sensuality of Shalimar, a hint of Tabu’s eroticism, and a comforting whisper of Habanita’s smoky tobacco.

There have been several Toujours Moi formulas, and I’ve had the pleasure of smelling two versions—one from the 1950s and one from the 1960s. (The ’60s box features line drawings of maidens and unicorns, a result of Max Factor buying Corday and moving production to New York.) A reader sent me the ’50s version, which I would describe as rounder, more powdery and amber-vanillic warm than the later version, which leaves a stronger tobacco/incense impression in the drydown. Its woody, balsamic finish hours into the drydown is my favorite part.

Notes: Orange blossom, lavender, jasmine, lilac, vetiver, musk, incense

Crêpe de Chine by F. Millot (1925)

Crêpe de Chine’s floral bouquet is blended so well that only the brightest and sharpest notes—ylang-ylang, lilac, and jasmine—poke their petals out, looking for attention. Its floral come-on is followed by reserve and elegance—it is a chypre, after all—telling you that in spite of its outward friendliness, you should not get too familiar with it. This floral chypre has a nice balance of sweetness and spice, sparkle and depth, friendliness and reserve.

Top notes: Bergamot, lemon, orange, neroli, fruit note

Heart notes: Carnation, rose, jasmine, ylang-ylang, lilac

Base notes: Oakmoss, vetiver, labdanum, benzoin, patchouli, musk

A 1937 ad for F. Millot’s Crepe de Chine

Le Dandy by D’Orsay (1925)

Because of its boozy, leathery scent and its gender trouble-causing name, which refers to the nineteenth-century male fashion plate, Le Dandy has often been mistaken as a men’s fragrance. This 1944 ad makes clear that it was made for women to turn heads.

A precursor to both Lanvin’s Rumeur and Rochas’s Femme, Le Dandy by D’Orsay causes some gender trouble for the researcher even now, nearly ninety years after its creation, begging the question: Why worry about gender at all in perfume?

First, the name refers to that foppish, musk-wearing nineteenth-century clotheshorse whose goal was to turn his life into a work of art. You know—a guy in fancy clothes, a walking stick, and a top hat, throwing out barbs like Oscar Wilde. Then there’s the scent: a fruity, boozy tobacco/leather that could be mistaken (especially with a name like that) for a men’s scent, with accords that are now conventionally masculine.

But when you look at the ads of the time, they often feature men watching a beautiful woman whose intrigue comes, in part, from Le Dandy’s sillage, the trail of scent left by perfume. “Someone lovely has just passed by,” reads one 1937 ad for Le Dandy, “and her loveliness was exquisitely accented by the rare fragrance—Le Dandy.”

Fruity and boozy in its opening—like its contemporary, Rumeur, and the subsequent Femme (1944), but without their restraint—Le Dandy dries down to a decadent vanilla-warmed leather scent with hints of tobacco and musk. A true “huffer”—my term for a scent so good you want to huff it like paint fumes to get high.

Notes: Aldehydes, spicy woods, clove, musks, soapy patchouli, balsams, coumarin

(Notes from Yann Vasnier.)

A photorealistic eye covetously peers through a hole in the wall at Envie perfume on the other side in this surreal 1947 ad by J. Duplan.

Le Numéro Cinq (Le Parfum Connu) by Molyneux (1925)

Like Dana’s Tabu on a particularly drunk and amorous night, Le Numéro Cinq (“The Number Five”) smells like stewed fruit and rich flowers resting on a vanillic and ambery-spicy base kissed with orris. This is Chanel No. 5’s darker, more-complex cousin—the one who went to art school while Chanel No. 5 went to finishing school.

Le Numéro Cinq is often called “the other number 5.” Lore has it that Edward Molyneux (1891–1974), an English fashion designer who started the Molyneux couture house in Paris, made a pact with Coco Chanel in 1921 to make a “Number 5” perfume. As both perfumes launched, so the story goes, they would see which one became more successful. Nigel Groom, in The Perfume Handbook, says that Molyneux named his perfumes after his different addresses: 3, 14, and 5.

Whichever story is correct, we all know which perfume became successful, and which one had to change its name. Ironically enough, Le Numéro Cinq became Le Parfum Connu (“The Known Perfume”), and then languished in obscurity. It was discontinued in the late 1960s or early ’70s.

Notes not available.

Que Sais-Je? by Jean Patou (1925)

Perfumer: Henri Alméras

Although he is best known for Joy, the Depression-era perfume dubbed “the costliest perfume in the world,” Jean Patou also released Ma Collection, twelve perfumes originally launched between 1925 and 1964, and rereleased in 1984 using the original formulas by in-house perfumer Jean Kerléo (1967–97).

The first three perfumes in Ma Collection released in 1925 were inspired by the different stages of falling in love. Amour, Amour (“Love, Love”) is self-explanatory. Que Sais-Je? (“What Do I Know?”) represents the devil-may-care attitude of those who live by their hearts and not their heads. Adieu Sagesse (“Farewell, Wisdom”) means she’s in deep, and there’s no going back. Que Sais-Je? was marketed for brunettes; Amour, Amour for blondes; Adieu Sagesse for redheads.

So what does a perfume called Que Sais-Je? smell like? The first thing that hit me was an intense, honeyed, peachy-suede-leather accord that reminded me of Jacques Fath’s Iris Gris and Courrèges’s Empreinte, both complex peachy affairs. Unlike Iris Gris, which smells monumentally strange (like peach-scented pastry dough, according to some), and Empreinte, which is a more delicate and refined peach-melon leather chypre, Que Sais-Je? is a more straightforwardly fruity-spicy chypre.There is a marzipan-like richness to Que Sais-Je? that perhaps comes from either a hazelnut or almond accord.

Like Colony, another Ma Collection perfume and a strange pineapple-chypre combo, the strong chypre base creates an interesting dissonance with the syrupy sweetness of its beginning. Perhaps like the woman who has given in to love—to hell with the consequences—Que Sais-Je? asks us to think of her as strong and daring as well as girlishly impetuous. The more I sit with Que Sais-Je?, the more I respect its translation into perfume notes of what plunging headlong into love is like, which apparently is a combination of syrupy sweetness and fiery passion.

And if such things sway you, consider this: Indie perfumer Andy Tauer lists Que Sais-Je? as one of the top ten perfumes you should try before you die.

Notes: Peach, honey, hazelnut

Shalimar by Guerlain (1925)

In this 1938 advertisement, Shalimar is this brunette’s type—or is it the other way around?

Perfumer: Jacques Guerlain

Like Picasso’s portrait of Dora Maar, with three colors masterfully representing not only different planes on the subject’s face, but also her exquisite emotions, Shalimar juxtaposes the bracing zest of bergamot, the warmth of sensual vanilla, and the naughty raunch of civet. These should clash, just as those three colors in Maar’s portrait shouldn’t be able to create such an expressive face, and yet they combine to form something both striking and comforting.

Shalimar telegraphs opulence, comfort, and decadence, with a hint of the disreputable from the civet. What is it about civet? It lurks, it jumps out unexpectedly, it emits a low growl, adding mystery to every perfume it’s in. If Shalimar were a gemstone, bergamot, vanilla, and civet would be the facets always hit by the light.

Lore has it that Jacques Guerlain was so taken with the newly available synthetic vanillin that he poured some into Jicky and their beautiful child was Shalimar. The “Guerlinade” found in Shalimar dries down to smell like skin—well, skin that is graced with orris and a hint of heavenly vanilla! As Chanel perfumer Ernest Beaux joked, there’s “crème anglaise” vanilla, and then there’s Guerlain vanilla. (Guerlinade is the name of the secret-formula accord of iris and tonka bean, give or take a few notes, which formed the base that constitutes Guerlain’s early, confectionary signature.) If Jicky is the jolie laide (“ugly beautiful”) of Guerlain scents, Shalimar is her easier-on-the-nose sister.

Top notes: Bergamot, lemon, mandarin, rosewood

Heart notes: Rose, jasmine, orris, vetiver, patchouli

Base notes: Opopanax, vanilla, civet, Peru balsam, benzoin, coumarin (tonka bean), leather

Bois des Îles by Chanel (1926)

Perfumer: Ernest Beaux

Floral notes of jasmine and rose peek out of the thick scent of sandalwood that dominates Bois des Îles’ balsamic forest, with the the not-so-subtle spice of cinnamon from fallen tonka beans blanketing its forest floor, spreading a vanilla-ambery sweetness in its wake. The reformulated and denuded forest that is called Bois des Îles is a lovely light floral with almost no relation to its predecessor.

Notes: Jasmine, damask rose, ylang-ylang, bitter almond, gingerbread, vanilla, tonka bean, sandalwood, vetiver

Djedi by Guerlain (1926)

Djedi was an ancient Egyptian soothsayer and magician famed for being able to make the dead come back to life. Quite a name for a perfume, but then again, Djedi isn’t just any perfume. Described as “the driest perfume of all time” (Roja Dove) and a “tremendous animalic vetiver” (Luca Turin), Djedi, like Chanel No. 19, creates a disquieting atmosphere as soon as you put it on. Vetiver is attended by a hint of clove and vanilla (not in the official list of notes), after which the comforting rank of civet darts around in the back like the actual animal. The rest of the Djedi rests on a chypre leather base.

The magic in Djedi is its ability to be both dramatic and quiet about it, like a secret pagan ritual going on under cover of darkness, with little fanfare. We don’t see Djedi performing his magic rituals, but we note the curling smoke, the burning incense, the fragrant oils, the portent of something heavy and dark. We sense this as if we were intruders on an unseen and unseeable act of alchemy, something happening behind a curtain, just outside our purview.

If Djedi were on a color wheel, there would be nothing bright, but everything rich and deep: chartreuse, saffron, sable brown, inky black. I think of the forest in Guillermo del Toro’s film, Pan’s Labyrinth, filled with creatures that are beautiful, terrifying, and remote, in a fairy-tale land we can only fantasize about.

Notes from Fragrantica.com: Rose, vetiver, musk, oakmoss, leather, civet, patchouli

Arpège by Lanvin (1927)

Perfumers: André Fraysse and Paul Vacher

Arpège is sensual beauty, slightly corrupted, at the end of a night of dining and dancing in stilettos, silk, and furs. The flowers are wilting on the table, sitting next to the fur coat that has absorbed the post-dinner cigarette smoke. This peach-led floral is enriched and fattened and rounded by ambrein, the primary molecule in ambergris, and its contrast of fresh peach with an erotic base make Arpège a classic vintage fragrance that nods both to the good girl and the bad.

Top notes: Bergamot, neroli, aldehydes, peach

Heart notes: Rose, jasmine, lily of the valley, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Sandalwood, ambrein, vetiver, musk

L’Aimant by Coty (1927)

A 1943 advertisement for Coty’s L’Aimant

Perfumers: Vincent Roubert and François Coty

Inspired by Chanel No. 5, L’Aimant (“Loving Her,” or “The Magnet”) is warm and sweet, like cut plums sautéed in butter and brandy and sprinkled with candied violets.

The powderiness in L’Aimant is saved from being too old-fashioned by the round, buttery, and sensual dark fruit and balsamic notes that underly the perfume, like bright oil colors on a dark velvet canvas. Jacques Guerlain’s wife loved L’Aimant so much, it is said that she even preferred it to her husband’s perfumes.

Notes not available.

Bellodgia by Caron (1927)

Caron Perfumes, 1956

Perfumer: Ernest Daltroff

I first approached Bellodgia before I could recognize the “color” of carnation, like a color-blind person looking at one of those visual tests and not being able to distinguish one colored dot in a sea of other colored dots. Now it seems so clear to me, having tried the more-intense carnation scents like Caron’s Poivre, Floris’s Malmaison, and the super-intense Roger & Gallet Blue Carnation. I no longer just smell a stew of cloying florals, and can appreciate, even if I could never wear, the lovely, and well-balanced Bellodgia.

With a bright bergamot/lemon opening, almost immediately warmed and rounded from nutmeg and vanilla, Bellodgia launches into a bouquet of sweet florals spiced with clove-faceted carnation. Musk, sandalwood, and vetiver give the base some carnal heft, but it’s the spicy floral heart that truly makes Bellodgia, the balance between sweetness with spice.

I like to think of perfumes going to the Ernest Daltroff finishing school, but instead of coming out ready to be debutantes and society ladies, they are ready to be ladies of the night or femme fatales. Bellodgia could have just been a well-behaved floral, but Daltroff’s addition of clovey-carnation spice becomes a mark, like an olfactory Scarlet Letter.

Top notes: Bergamot, lemon, nutmeg, pimento berries

Heart notes: Carnation, ylang-ylang, rose, jasmine, orris

Base notes: Vetiver, vanilla, sandalwood, nitromusks

Evening in Paris by Bourjois (1928)

Perfumer: Ernest Beaux

With its luscious bergamot, apricot, and peach opening, a rich rose/jasmine heart greened and lightened by lily of the valley, and a spicy balsamic base, it’s easy to see why Evening in Paris was a hit, described as “The Most Popular Fragrance in the World.” Its opening soars with glamour and joy, like taking a ride down the Champs-Élysées for the first time and seeing the bright lights of Paris, illuminated water fountains, and the feeling of budding romance. In the drydown, an almost coconut sweetness bursts in. (This description is for vintage; the notes below are most likely for the 1991 reformulation.)

Top notes: Bergamot, apricot and peach, green notes and violet

Heart notes: Rose, jasmine, heliotrope, ylang-ylang, lily of the valley, and orris

Base notes: Amber, musk, sandalwood, vanilla

Zibeline by Weil (1928)

This 1928 French advertisement showcases two Weil fragrances created specifically to harmonize with fur.

Seeing as we’re living in an age in which furs are frowned upon and perfume is being regulated out of existence, it’s hard to imagine anything more decadent or anachronistic than “parfum des fourrures” (fur perfumes), but Zibeline was in fact such a perfume. Named after the sable Martes zibellina, Zibeline was once advertised as “strictly an odor for furs,” made to keep furs from smelling musty without damaging them. (The Weil brothers were furriers before they became perfumers.) Spicy, sweet, and balsamic-powdery, Zibeline has a pronounced heliotrope-like almond-cherry note from tonka that recalls Serge Lutens’s ode to Turkish Delight candy, Rahat Lakhoum, which shares Zibeline’s hawthorn, rose, and tonka notes. While it initially smells overwhelmingly of the cherry-almond heliotrope note at the beginning, its drydown brings out its multifaceted glory, with that accord radiating from the center of spice, powder, and balsamic warmth.

Notes from 1964 Dictionnaires de Parfums de France: Neroli, hawthorn, linden, rose, jasmine, ylang-ylang, incense, opopanax, oakmoss, vetiver, tonka bean, and civet

Top notes: Aldehydes, bergamot, lemon, coriander, tarragon

Heart notes: Rose, jasmine, lily of the valley, ylang-ylang, orris, gardenia

Base notes: Vetiver, civet, sandal, amber, musk, honey, tonka

Liù by Guerlain (1929)

Are you Liù’s type? Maybe if you’re a redhead, implies this 1938 advertisement.

Perfumer: Jacques Guerlain

If Chanel No. 5 and Shalimar had a baby, Liù would be their love child: An aldehydic floral based around jasmine and rose, Liù is powdery, sumptuous, and comforting, with a deep amber-vanilla base. Often described as Chanel No. 5 without the musk, Liù’s subtly fresh neroli note keeps the entire perfume from sinking into a decadent stupor, but not by much.

Top notes: Aldehydes, bergamot, neroli

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, orris

Base notes: Woody notes, vanilla, amber

This 1938 ad for Caron’s French Cancan features a sultry close-up of a woman who looks like a movie star.

The Dirty ’30s

Tabu, Scandal, Shocking (1930–1939)

The 1930s was the decade of the Oriental fragrance—not only as a category with sumptuous notes, but because of the decade’s preoccupation with exotic fantasies of distant lands: the hot Moroccan desert winds that blow through Lucien Lelong’s Sirocco; the French colonies of Jean Patou’s Colony, with its tropical plantation accords of pineapple and rubber; and Tuvaché’s campy Jungle Gardenia, invoking an island paradise. Even the decade’s most famous floral, Joy, although not in the Oriental category, is loaded down with that category’s decadence and richness.

Joy by Jean Patou (1930)

This 1937 ad marketed Joy as “the costliest perfume in the world” during the Great Depression.

Perfumer: Henri Alméras

Released during the Great Depression and provocatively described as “the world’s most expensive perfume,” Joy, conceived by Jean Patou as a decadent gift to his American consumers, is considered to be one of the greatest floral perfumes ever created.

Joy is a velvety profusion of florals, with rose, jasmine, and ylang-ylang in their most decadent, gilded glory. Perfumer Jean Kerléo, Alméras’s successor, claimed that Joy’s richness comes from its jasmine and Bulgarian rose—not its base notes. Its voluptuous drydown has an almost tropical flower/coconut feel.

In spite of Joy’s luxe reputation, my favorite anecdote about the perfume is on the louche side, and comes from GQ writer Glenn O’Brien: It’s rumored that the Rolling Stones’s grizzled bassist Keith Richards has worn Joy under his armpits for years. Rather than diminishing Joy, this makes me give even more props to Keith for his excellent taste.

Top notes: Leafy green, aldehydes, peach, blossom-calyx notes

Heart notes: Rose, jasmine, ylang-ylang, orris, orchid, lily of the valley

Base notes: Sandal, musk, civet

Je Reviens by Worth (1932)

Perfumer: Maurice Blanchet

With three floral notes that can be read as irredeemably old-fashioned to modern noses—lilac, hyacinth, and violet—Je Reviens nevertheless balances them with sensuous balsamic notes against smooth sandalwood, moss, and vetiver. The reformulations have been roundly panned (“Like bug spray” was a common refrain), so stick to bottles that are labeled paris, france. What’s missing in later reformulations is the rich, woody base.

Top notes: Aldehydes, orange blossom, violet, bergamot

Heart notes: Clove, hyacinth, jasmine, rose, ylang-ylang, orris, lilac

Base notes: Vetiver, tonka, tolu, amber, musk, sandalwood, moss

Jungle Gardenia by Tuvaché (1932)

Jungle Gardenia by Tuvaché was love at first sniff. Some perfumes dillydally around, making small talk, trying to get to know you, requiring that you buy them dinner and learn their childhood pets’ names and personalities, and so on. You may not be sure how you feel about them at first, but in time, love—true love—can happen. Jungle Gardenia was no such demure date. It bypassed all of my brain’s rational vetting systems and said, “Kiss me, you fool!” And kiss it I did.

With tropical wet gardenia and bubblegum-sweet tuberose bursting from its center, flanked by fresh green top notes and an erotic base of balsams and musk, Jungle Gardenia goes straight to the perfume brain’s pleasure center. Subtlety, thy name is not Jungle Gardenia.

But then again, gardenias are not the most subtle of flowers. Team gardenia up with tuberose, and you can just kiss free will good-bye. I’m convinced now that gardenia and tuberose, two of the girliest perfume notes often disparaged as “too grandma,” are in fact two of the most badass perfume notes in the perfume lexicon.

Billing itself as “The world’s most exotic perfume,” Jungle Gardenia is exotic in the way Hollywood movies set in the South Seas starring Bing Crosby and Bob Hope were exotic, with all the signifiers of exotic exaggerated and staged just so (big flowers, vines, a pile of sand, one coconut tree, tanned women sporting leis). And yet, I could see how this perfume—like an actual white gardenia affixed to an ordinary ’50s hairdo—could have made your average American housewife feel like Dorothy Lamour.

Although it came out in the 1930s, I wonder if Jungle Gardenia didn’t have its heyday in the 1950s. It seems like a very 1950s perfume, sunny and fun yet carnal in that healthy, smiling American-woman way. (It certainly helps that the tuberose in Jungle Gardenia really does smell like pink bubble gum, and it’s reputed to have been a favorite of Elizabeth Taylor.)

Apparently, Tuvaché was a New York–based company that felt it needed to be in French drag to compete with the popularity of French scents at the time. Its owner even went so far as to concoct a pen name, Madame de Tuvaché, and I bet she would have thrown a circumflex in there somewhere if she could have!

Tuvaché’s Jungle Gardenia has been discontinued for a while (in its original form, anyway). I have not tried the Germaine Monteil, Yardley, Jovan/Coty, Irma Shorell, or Evyan versions, which are said to have taken over. A few ways to figure out if you have the original formula?

1. Check to see if it’s by Tuvaché.

2. See if it’s made in New York.

3. Does it make you swoon?

(Heeley’s Bubblegum Chic wouldn’t be a bad substitute if you wanted a modern version.)

Notes not available.

Surrender by Ciro (1932)

From 1923 to 1961, the American perfume brand Ciro created daring perfumes with gorgeous Baccarat-designed bottles and colorful, often surreal perfume ads. With Surrender, violet and white flowers rest on a balsamic base of amber-vanilla with a lovely, spicy incense bite. Powdery orris, like a silk charmeuse gown flowing over the perfume’s body, softens its edges.

Notes not available.

Prior to the 1970s, perfume ads often targeted men as purchasers of perfume for women. In this 1940s-era ad for Ciro’s line of perfumes, the silhouette of a puzzled man simply asks, “Which?” To the left is Ciro’s entire range of perfumes, meant for different types of women. Danger is for the woman who likes “very dry martinis and fast cars,” and New Horizons, for the woman who “looks ahead—moves ahead—and has a head!”

Tabu by Dana (1932)

Perfumer: Jean Carles

In the same way that people want to drink a full-bodied red wine or drink a peaty scotch on winter days rather than, say, a vodka grapefruit, perfume lovers often veer toward fragrances in the Oriental category when it’s cold outside. A classic perfume in this category, Tabu provides the winter warmth you’re looking for and offers heat in other ways: It was created to project overt sexuality.

Created by perfumer Jean Carles of Ma Griffe, Shocking, and Miss Dior fame (which he created with Paul Vacher), it’s said that Dana’s brief to Carles was along the lines of, “Make a perfume a prostitute would wear.” Perhaps this was a signature; fans of Carles’s other fragrance, Ma Griffe, have said that their grandmothers called that perfume “the prostitute’s perfume,” and both Shocking and Miss Dior have a whiff of ladies’ undergarments about them.

This 1950s-era French ad for Tabu, “The Forbidden Perfume,” had a decidedly S&M bent. (Artist: Camilla)

Sweet, ambery, spicy, and complex, Tabu’s sweetness comes from heady florals, clove, benzoin, and amber rather than the expected vanilla, which doesn’t appear, surprisingly, as a note. (Benzoin resin from the styrax tree’s bark has a pronounced vanilla facet embedded in heavy-cream richness, which accounts for the vanillic impression in Tabu.)

Go for demure perfumes if you must, but for me, if loving perfume that was made for prostitutes is wrong—I don’t wanna be right.

Top notes: Bergamot, orange, neroli, coraner, spice notes

Heart notes: Clove bud, ylang-ylang, rose, jasmine, narcissus, clover

Base notes: Patchouli, civet, cedar, vetiver, sandalwood, benzoin, amber, musk, oakmoss

Angélique Encens by Creed (1933)

Angélique Encens (Angelica or angelic incense) is heavenly, an animalic as light as a cloud, but with darkness and bite. Angélique Encens’s angelica, vanilla, and ambergris echo Shalimar’s holy trinity of bergamot, vanilla, and animal base. More ethereal and less carnal than Shalimar, Angélique Encens’s head is in the clouds, befitting its name.

Angélique or angelica is a genus of about sixty kinds of herbs in the family Apiacea that have a peppery, herbal, earthy, woody, and musky odor. Angélique is also a pun on the word angelic, with its connotations of heavenly, sweet, and divine.

Angélique Encens’s initial peppery/herbal notes combine with nose-tickling incense, followed by the downy-softest vanilla, with a musky, civet-like animal note hovering in the background. Its florals are very much in the background like the perfume’s silver lining, adding sensuality from behind the scenes. The animal note recedes in the drydown, and you’re left with a whisper of a vanilla skin-scent. (This is a review of Creed’s final stock of Angélique Encens before they—unwisely—discontinued it.)

Top notes: Angelica

Heart notes: Rose, jasmine

Base notes: Vanilla, incense, ambergris

(Notes from Creed’s website before Angélique Encens was discontinued.)

Reflections by Ciro (1933)

Boozy, rich, spicy, and vanillic, Reflections is in the Tabu/Styx Oriental family of perfumes, with an intense amber, patchouli, and powdery base, maybe with orris and sandalwood.

Notes not available.

Scandal by Lanvin (1933)

A toga-clad woman holds Lanvin’s distinctive, round black bottle like an offering from the gods. The bottle features the Lanvin logo—a stylized depiction of designer Jeanne Lanvin and her daughter in gold—designed by illustrator Paul Iribe.

Perfumer: André Fraysse

Scandal may start off too sweet for some tastes, like a Choward’s violet candy. But once the flowers dissipate, what remains is a cozy (if unscandalous) scent of faintly sweet leather and tobacco. Of course, I think we can understand why it must have seemed scandalous to have an elegant, perfumed lady smell like she’d just smoked a pack of cigarettes (at the time, still seen as déclassé) and fallen asleep in the leather interior of a car the night before!

Top notes: Neroli, bergamot, lemon, mandarin, clary sage

Heart notes: Leather, orris, rose, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Olibanum, civet, oakmoss, vanilla, vetiver, benzoin

Secret of Venus by Weil (1933)

Secret of Venus, Weil’s perfume for women (rather than for furs, like Zibeline and Chinchilla Royal), opens with symphonic herbaceousness, moves into a spicy floral heart, and rests on a velvety, honeyed Oriental base. Its drydown is an irresistible mix of sweet balsams, incense/spice, and an almond-oil facet from tonka. A little like Le Numéro Cinq and Coty’s Styx in style and personality, if a bit sweeter.

The first time I took a whiff, Secret of Venus did that animalic/raunchy lurch that tends to mean that civet is prowling around, but it could just be a really animalic musk. It’s ironic that a perfume in a line meant to hide the smell of the animal in fur can’t resist throwing some animal back into the perfume.

Top notes: Aldehydes, bergamot, lemon, coriander, tarragon

Heart notes: Rose, jasmine, lily of the valley, ylang-ylang, orris, gardenia

Base notes: Vetiver, civet, sandal, amber, musk, honey, tonka

Sous le Vent by Guerlain (1933)

A sculptural face in profile sets sail in artist Darcy’s 1930s-era illustrated interpretation of Guerlain’s Sous le Vent, which literally means “Under the Wind.”

Perfumer: Jacques Guerlain

A forbiddingly beautiful chypre, Sous le Vent (“Under the Wind”) has the depth and sumptuousness of an ornate Oriental tapestry, with threads of gold and pastel satin panels set against a black velvet backdrop.

Initially, it appears to be a friendly chypre with a lavender-bergamot top shot through with lovely amber-vanilla. But like smoothing down velvet to watch it change color from light to dark, I notice as I reapply and resniff Sous le Vent that its complexity comes through with spicy, powdery carnation and the inimitable Guerlain vanilla touched with amber.

Masks are signature images in Corday perfume ads, but they’re usually depicted as festive or beautiful. This one, from 1936, almost looks like a death mask or something from a horror film. Beautiful, but scary.

I get an almost zesty-green top married to rich florals, with Guerlain’s rich base throwing its magic scrim over all the notes, softening them with its moondust. Sous le Vent is said to have been created for Josephine Baker, the American performer who electrified 1930s Paris in shows at the City of Light’s famed Folies Bergère theater.

Top notes: Basil, bergamot, lavender, tarragon

Heart notes: Carnation

Base notes: Oakmoss, iris, woods, patchouli

(Notes from Victoria Frovola’s perfume blog Bois de Jasmin.)

Vol de Nuit by Guerlain (1933)

An ad (c. 1943) for Guerlain’s Vol de Nuit

Perfumer: Jacques Guerlain

Named after the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry novel about night pilots in the early days of aviation, Vol de Nuit (“Night Flight”), the scent, translates the mystery, danger, and poetry of night flying into perfume notes.

Vol de Nuit’s balance of disparate notes is part of its mystery: It starts off green, citrusy, and dry; moves toward a subtle floral heart; and evolves into an orris/vanilla and amber drydown with a mossy finish.

The perfume’s surprise, and what pulls everything together, is its heart of tentative sweetness, from a facet of the narcissus and a subdued jasmine combined with amber and vanilla. It’s as if the dark night sky (the coldness of galbanum and citrus?) suddenly revealed a twinkling star, and the loneliness and danger of flying turns into an existential adventure, exhilarating instead of treacherous. The moss and resins help to maintain the perfume’s austerity and gravity, but it’s that moment of warmth that creates Vol de Nuit’s emotional center.

Notes not available.

A’Suma by Coty (1934)

Perfumer: Vincent Roubert

Nodding its hat to the exoticism and Orientalism of the time, A’Suma has the familiar bergamot, lavender, vanilla, and civet impression of Jicky, Shalimar, and Emeraude. Like Lucien Lelong’s Sirocco, A’Suma, with its haunting addition of incense, adds a flinty, austere character to this otherwise sumptuous perfume, like the smell of a lit match. In advertisements of the time, A’Suma is described as “opulent,” “as exotic as a moonlit beach in Bali,” and with the “sensuous allure of a siren’s song.” I can’t disagree with that.

Notes not available.

Bambou by Weil (1934)

A woody Oriental perfume with a beautiful lavender opening and rich, balsamic drydown, Bambou is akin to Tabu and Youth Dew, without much sweetness. Perhaps due to the age of my sample, Bambou feels like it’s almost all base notes, with an almost cocoa-coffee facet that gives it an earthy quality. The reformulation is its polar opposite: fruity and light.

Notes from ThePerfumedCourt.com: Lavender, jasmine, rose, carnation, lily of the valley, cedar, tonka, musk, sandal

Blue Grass by Elizabeth Arden (1934)

Perfumer: George Fuchs

Lavender and neroli join hands at the beginning of Blue Grass to do a little dance together, lavender’s herbaceousness balancing out neroli’s sweetness, both of them announcing summer. Its intense, sweet florals may be too much for some, but Blue Grass balances its fresh top notes with its woody and balsamic base, interpreting summer as ripeness rather than as freshness. I read somewhere that Elizabeth Arden used to spray her horses with Blue Grass! I bet the smell of this on stinky horsehair would have been amazing.

Top notes: Aldehydes, lavender, bergamot, neroli, orange

Heart notes: Jasmine, carnation, narcissus, rose, tuberose

Base notes: Sandalwood, benzoin, tonka, tonquin musk

Fleurs de Rocaille by Caron (1934)

Perfumer: Ernest Daltroff

With a prominent powdery and sweet floral opening characteristic of this era, Fleurs de Rocaille is nevertheless greened with narcissus, spiced with carnation, and eroticized with Ernest Daltroff’s je ne sais quoi brand of sexy fairy dust. This happy floral has just enough spice and bite to keep it modern.

Top notes: Palisander (Brazilian rosewood), bergamot, gardenia, violet

Heart notes: Jasmine, narcissus, rose, carnation, lily of the valley, ylang-ylang, lilac, mimosa

Base notes: Amber, sandalwood, musk, cedar

Nuit de Longchamp by Lubin (1934)

In Nuit de Longchamp, sweet lilac and moody violet combine with woods, moss, and a nitromusk-rich base to create a perfume that feels paradoxically innocent and erotic. Nitromusks, and perhaps tonka, contribute to a sweet/vanillic/cinnamon heliotrope-like fattiness in the base that provides such a wonderful counterpoint to the delicate lilac note that floats above Nuit de Longchamp’s base of dark woods like an iridescent butterfly in a forest.

Notes from 1982 Dictionnaire des Parfums de France: Lilac, jasmine, oakmoss, violet, musk, chypre base

Rumeur by Lanvin (1934)

Perfumer: André Fraysse

A gourmand leather and tobacco fragrance so beautiful it belongs to a rare scent category for me: perfume so good I want to drink it. Dark vanilla and creamy white florals voluptuously bloom as leather, tobacco, and civet rise up. Peach and plum add some bruised sweetness.

When I visualize Rumeur, I imagine those dark, fleshy, oddly colored orchids that you can hardly believe are flowers. My Sin and Baghari are white and sensual flowers—Rumeur their darker cousin. Its addition of costus, the perfume note that smells a bit like sebum/bed-head, takes Rumeur’s uncanny, singular sexiness to another level. It’s in my top five favorite vintage perfumes of all time.

In this fanciful 1956 ad by artist Al Janvic, who illustrated a whole series of perfume ads for Lanvin featuring street scenes, Lanvin perfumes are individually represented by circus figures.

The 1964 Dictionnaire des Parfums de France describes Rumeur as “a spicy fragrance featuring cyclamen, gardenia, vetiver, patchouli, violet leaves and amber. It evokes a fragrant forest, orchards under the sun, and oriental flowers … It is an evening perfume that will mostly appeal to brunettes.” According to perfume historian Octavian Coifan, Rumeur is a fruity chypre between Mitsouko and Femme.

Notes from Octavian Coifan: Peach, plum, dark vanilla, nutmeg, cardamom, clove, civet, costus, tobacco, and Cuir de Russie (“Russia Leather”) bases prepared by Synarome

Sirocco by Lucien Lelong (1934)

“Here in a serpentine vial is the mystery of the East,” reads the copy on this 1943 advertisement for Lucien Lelong’s Orientalist fantasy in a bottle. Sirocco is the name for the desert wind that blows from North Africa to Europe.

Perfumer: Jean Carles

Named after a Mediterranean wind that comes in from the Sahara, Sirocco, like Emeraude and Shalimar, combines a citrusy top note with rich vanilla and balsams. With a stunning lavender and vanilla heart enriched by benzoin and spiced by patchouli, this gourmand Oriental perfume is a dark, sensual experience, and has a more mysterious aura than the brighter Emeraude and the friendlier Shalimar.

According to the 1964 Dictionnaire des Parfums de France, Sirocco, as befits its name, is “a warm and heady fragrance evoking the immensity of the desert sands … ideal with furs and during elegant society events under starry skies.” Good to know! Its dusty, dry, incensey backdrop adds a wonderful counterpoint to its rich, balsamic base.

Notes from 1964 Dictionnaire des Parfums de France: Citrus, lavender, benzoin, patchouli, vanilla

Indiscret by Lucien Lelong (1935)

A river of clove runs through the kingdom of Indiscret, picking up fresh bergamot, mandarin, jasmine, and rose as it continues to snake its way down. By the time it reaches its incense and amber/vanillic/woody base, it settles into an intensely sensual, rich, spicy, ambery base. Indiscret is said to have been Lauren Bacall’s signature scent, which makes sense, because both of them smolder. Perfumer Yann Vasnier describes Indiscret as a spicy, animalic Oriental perfume, detecting from an intact perfume nip notes of clove, jasmine, carnation, aldehydes, and vanilla.

Notes from 1964 Dictionnaire des Parfums de France: Carnation, rose absolute, jasmine, woodsy notes

Jean Naté by Charles of the Ritz (1935)

If a lemon went to finishing school, it would smell like Jean Naté.

Soft, powdery, complex, and sophisticated, this old gem (the old-school Charles of the Ritz cologne spray, anyway) is sunny without being ditzy. It starts out with an herbal, lemon opening, followed by a smooth, woody finish warmed by tonka.

Notes from Fragrantica.com: Citrus, lavender, jasmine, rose, carnation, lily of the valley, cedar, tonka bean, musk, sandalwood

Voulez-Vous by D’Orsay (1935)

An intensely green/floral chypre with hints of tobacco and civet, Voulez-Vous (or “Would you like to …?”) is about as subtle as its name suggests. Voulez-Vous’s florals, along with its aggressive greenness, can be observed through its tobacco-tinged animalic drydown, which acts like a come-hither veil of smoke. Perfumer Yann Vasnier describes Voulez-Vous as a chypre leather similar to Miss Dior, with galbanum and rose. In a 1960s ad for Voulez-Vous, a woman stares down her unseen prey as she lights a cigarette. Describing her look as “bedroom eyes” would be the understatement of the year.

Notes from 1964 Dictionnaire des Parfums de France: Green, woodsy, and fruity notes with jasmine and lily of the valley

Canoe by Dana (1936)

Perfumer: Jean Carles

Ever the provocateur, Jean Carles not only enjoyed making perfumes for loose women; he also loved gender-bending in fragrances. Even seasoned noses might have a hard time telling the difference between masculine Canoe and Carles’s Ambush, for women. Both are fougères (Canoe more classically, because of its addition of oakmoss), and both differ only by a few notes: Canoe has patchouli, carnation, and oakmoss, and Ambush does not. And the sweetness is more prominent in Ambush, whereas Canoe upped the aromatic quality.

Fougère (for “fern” in French) is a traditionally masculine category of perfume that originated with Fougère Royal (1882). Its base comprises lavender, oakmoss, and coumarin, giving it an herbaceous, mossy, and vanillic-warm character.

Top notes: Lavender, clary sage, lemon

Heart notes: Bourbon geranium, carnation, cedarwood, patchouli

Base notes: Vanilla, tonka, musk, heliotrope, oakmoss

Muguet des Bois by Coty (1936)

Perfumer: Henri Robert

Muguet des Bois (“Lily of the Woods”) smells clean, but unlike some more-abstract clean scents, it’s reminiscent of nature, and therefore impregnated with complexity. From the hint of musty lilac to a bright lemony-rose, there is an artful artlessness to its loveliness.

Edmond Roudnitska, who created his own version of a lily-of-the-valley fragrance with Diorissimo, greatly admired Coty’s Muguet des Bois, and believed that no one had ever created a better lily note. (Unlike most floral notes, lily of the valley’s scent cannot be extracted into a stable essential oil; only reconstructions exist.)

Top notes: Leafy green, bergamot, orange, aldehydes

Heart notes: Lily of the valley, lilac, cyclamen, rose, jasmine

Base notes: Sandalwood, musk

An ad for Muguet des Bois by Coty, c. 1948

Blue Carnation by Roger & Gallet (1937)

When I first dabbed Blue Carnation on, its sharp and herbal opening salvo was so unfamiliar and harsh (with a prominent anise facet) that by the time its predominant, dense clove-cigarette accord arrived, I was truly baffled and put off. This stuff is strong!

But I love acquiring tastes, and it didn’t take long for me to cozy up to Blue Carnation. Or, rather, it cozied up to me. Round, velvety, spicy-sweet clove is a comforting note, not one you encounter very often in modern perfumes, and when you do, as in Serge Lutens’s Vitriol d’oeillet (2011), it seems tame in comparison.

Notes: Carnation, clove, eugenol, iso eugenol, salicylates, vanillin, milky Indian sandalwood

(Notes from Yann Vasnier.)

Ancient Chinese secret, huh? This 1937 ad for Bourjois’ perfume Kobako manages to commit multiple offenses against a progressive person’s idea of ethnic sensitivity. A white woman leans in as a presumably Chinese woman whispers secrets of her “allure and desirability” behind a splayed-out fan. One of those secrets is the “Oriental essence” that can be found in Kobako, which means “small box” … in Japanese. Sigh.

Carnet de Bal by Révillon (1937)

Perfumer: Maurice Schaller

Although it’s often categorized as a spicy Oriental perfume, Carnet de Bal (“Dance Card”) is not heavy, dark, or mysterious. It opens with citrus, fruit, and a prominent ylang-ylang note, but its pronounced mossy, woody, and spicy base gives the fragrance its primary character. Although civet and musk rear their naughty heads now and then, Carnet de Bal never veers into dirty-dancing territory. In the drydown, the floral notes peer through the moss and vanilla, creating a gentle yet spicy scent that lingers on the skin.

Top notes: Citrus oils, chamomile, fruit

Heart notes: Cyclamen, rose, lily, jasmine, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Patchouli, civet, amber, musk, moss, vanilla

Old Spice by Shulton (1937)

Perfumer: Albert Hauck

Old Spice, like so many scents, seems arbitrarily gendered as a masculine fragrance when compared to its contemporaries, and to later women’s spicy Oriental scents (such as Cinnabar and Opium). With citrus and herbal top notes and a spicy balsamic base, Old Spice is simply the more-restrained, less-sweet version of New Spices that came down the pike.

Top notes: Orange, lemon, spice notes, anise, clary sage, aldehyde

Heart notes: Carnation, cinnamon, geranium, jasmine, heliotrope, pimento

Base notes: Musk, vanilla, cedarwood, olibanum, benzoin, tonka, amber

Prétexte by Lanvin (1937)

Perhaps we don’t hear about Prétexte as much as its famous siblings because, as the middle sibling in the Lanvin lineup, it has their features (the animalic base of My Sin, the boozy smoothness of Rumeur, and the woods and hint of Scandal’s tobacco), but in diluted and mishmash form.

Prétexte is a woody-ambery chypre with a smooth, powdery, spicy, and animalic base. At first sniff, I must admit, it does remind me of other scents without necessarily drawing me to it. Still, pretty nice stuff, especially in the sexy drydown. Perfumer Yann Vasnier smelled a spicy powdery rose with hay, leather, and castoreum.

Notes from 1964 Dictionnaire des Parfums de France: Amber, hawthorn, rosewood, narcissus, oakmoss, patchouli, iris

Shocking by Schiaparelli (1937)

Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli’s friendship with and influence from the surrealist movement was evident in her playful designs, including her iconic dress-form-shaped perfume bottle for the perfume, Shocking. In this charming 1940s ad illustrated by Marcel Vertès, a woman wears bunny ears in Schiaparelli’s signature color, “shocking pink.”

Perfumer: Jean Carles

Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli collaborated with surrealist artists like Salvador Dali and incorporated surrealist elements into her beautiful and whimsical designs. Shocking, her first fragrance, was named in part because of the shocking “hot pink” color that was her trademark. Schiaparelli described this electric pink as “bright, impossible, impudent, becoming, life-giving, like all the light and the birds and the fish put together, a color of China and Peru but not of the West — a shocking color, pure and undiluted.”

The perfume translation of shocking pink is equally playful and affirming. A powdery, spicy, honeyed-rose chypre, Shocking’s animalic, sensual, warm base belies its coquettish top notes. To get the full effect of Shocking, one must get a pristine, intact bottle, or crack open a nip, which perfectly preserves perfume in a time capsule.

Top notes: Bergamot, aldehydes, tarragon

Heart notes: Honey, rose, narcissus

Base notes: Clove, civet, chypre

Sortilège by Galion (1937)

This 1930s perfume gets a psychedelic ad in the ’60s.

Strawberry, peach, and orange blossom sweeten Sortilège without rendering it teenagerish or immature. Aldehydes are strong in the opening, as orris’s woody powder adds fairy dust to the voluptuous base of balsams, woods, and animal notes. I’ve noticed that sandalwood in vintage scents seems more intoxicating, buttery, rich, and powdery than in contemporary scents. Perhaps I’m smelling the difference between real and synthetic sandalwood.

Boozy, lush, animalic, but ladylike, this is one of those perfumes that, to the untrained nose, might be described as “smelling like my grandma.” Well, maybe if your grandma was Colette or Marlene Dietrich …

Top notes: Aldehyde complex, bergamot, peach, strawberry, orange blossom

Heart notes: Rose, jasmine, lily of the valley, ylang-ylang, orris, lilac

Base notes: Vetiver, sandalwood, vanilla, tonka, opopanax, civet, musk

Aphrodisia by Fabergé (1938)

Aphrodisia (“for the night-blooming you”) is a luscious and complex floral chypre bursting with fruity sweetness and tempered with spice, mossiness, and animalic warmth.

A great example of an animalic perfume that isn’t dark and brooding, Aphrodisia radiates joy and warmth, and has the olfactory color palette and texture of those rich-hued Art Deco works by Tamara de Lempicka. If this is the drugstore version of a once-grander Aphrodisia, perfume lovers back in the day still had it better than we do. (Or at least, better than women on a budget today.) Perfumer Yann Vasnier described Aphrodisia as spicy (due to its clove note), soapy, and with a “vaguely Mitsouko back.”

Top notes: Bergamot, lemon, neroli, fruit note

Heart notes: Rose, honey, ylang-ylang, carnation, jasmine

Base notes: Oakmoss, vetiver, civet, ambrein, musk

Colony by Jean Patou (1938)

In this 1938 ad for Jean Patou’s Colony perfume, it’s unclear if the eyes peering mysteriously over the pineapple-shaped bottle belong to the colonized or to the white colonizer. Either way, racialized darkness is at the heart of its colonial fantasy.

Combining pineapple with a leather-chypre base, the wonderfully weird Colony was, at Paris’s Exposition Coloniale in 1931, an argument in perfume form for France’s colonial exploits. Colony hits my nose with rubber, chypre mossiness/woods, and a tart-turned-golden-sweet pineapple note, finally drying down to rich amber and benzoin. (Not incidentally, pineapple and rubber are two exports from countries that were colonized by France.) Although there’s not an easy relationship between the pineapple and the leather/moss notes, Colony somehow works.

The Baccarat-designed bottle, which is the design version of a Freudian slip, looks like both a pineapple and a hand grenade, as filmmaker and perfume writer Brian Pera has noted. This visual pun celebrates France’s spoils from the tropics while (unconsciously) intimating that they were gained through violence. Insofar as one can psychoanalyze a perfume bottle (and why not?), the hand grenade / pineapple could be said to embody Colony’s ambivalence as a champion of colonialism.

Top notes: Pineapple, ylang-ylang

Heart notes: Carnation, iris, vetiver, opopanax

Base notes: Leather, musk, oakmoss

Intoxication by D’Orsay (1938)

A pair of lovers straight out of a Marc Chagall painting kiss one another as they float above a city in this intoxicating ad from 1946.

As unabashedly vintage as a cigarette holder in the hands of a woman with a 1930s-style moon manicure, Intoxication by D’Orsay lives up to its name. Its sharp florals are sexy and bright rather than dark and dangerous, like Narcisse Noir, or verging on cloying like Fracas.

A spicy floral with an animalic undertow, Intoxication is similar in personality to Revlon’s Intimate: There’s something playful and fun about its sexiness—something American, maybe, rather than French.

Top notes: Bergamot, lemon, mandarin

Heart notes: Rose, orange blossom, jasmine, lily of the valley, nutmeg, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Vetiver, patchouli, vanilla, sandalwood, tonka, musk, benzoin

Jealousy by Blanchard (1938)

For everything in our pornified world that is shown visually, a dimension seems to be subtracted from perfume. Repression, in other words, must have been really good for scent. Jealousy, a floral chypre, starts off as an innocent corsage of intensely sweet notes (honey, lilac, and hyacinth?). Those “innocent” notes are darkened with spice and musk, and then Jealousy dries down to a soft, powdery, and civety base.

Notes not available.

Mais Oui by Bourjois (1938)

Mais Oui is a happy, bright little thing, calling out its friendliness and openness to life (“Mais, Oui!”) in its notes as well as its name. This beautiful floral aldehydic scent has a Femme-like warmth (peach or plum?) with a lovely animalic base that reads as leather. According to perfume historian Octavian Coifan, Mais Oui is overdosed with Animalis, a Synarome base with civet, musk, castoreum, leather, and costus. Rrreow!

Notes from Yann Vasnier: An animalic fougère with a cresolic or “coal-tar” note, clover, salicylates, coumarin, civet

One of perfume copy’s enduring tropes is that perfume allows the proper woman to subliminally express an otherwise scandalous sexuality. This takes a punningly linguistic turn in the name for Bourjois’s Mais Oui. In English, it sounds like a question, even a proposition: “May we?” And in French, the provocative answer: “But yes!”

In this 1950 ad by artist T.B. Sibia, the Lalique-designed columnar bottle of Je Reviens looms on the horizon like a tall building.

Straw Hat by Fabergé (1938)

Violet sings from the heart of Straw Hat, its sweetness rounded by vanilla and woody, hay-like notes. A poetic rendition of summer with violet suggesting a tinge of sentimentality or reminiscence.

Top notes: Lemon, lavender, and geranium

Heart notes: Rose, violet, heliotrope, patchouli

Base notes: Vanilla, musk, sandalwood

Tigress by Fabergé (1938)

Like a riff on Dana’s iconic Tabu, Tigress starts off with a sharp blast of bergamot and a strong amber component underneath the florals. It has a momentary soapiness/powderiness that makes it a lot more ladylike than you would think a perfume called “Tigress” would be.

That soapy/powdery lady is quickly thawed out by a spicy note that gets this fragrance cooking again. Although you can smell the vanilla in the drydown, Tigress isn’t cloying or overpowering. In fact, one of the things I like best about it is how it develops into something fairly dry and mossy, with incensey and even chalky facets. As it dries down, something animalic (a civet note?) lurches forward, only to retreat back into the shadows. Tigress should be a cacophonous mess, but it’s lovely.

Notes from Yann Vasnier: A powdery woody Oriental with moss and vanilla

Alpona by Caron (1939)

Perfumer: Ernest Daltroff

If you’ve ever hiked near the mountains, you know what it’s like to feel as if you’re in multiple climates at once. You can be cold in the valleys in the morning, smelling fresh herbs, aromatic pine, and juniper trees that cool the air with their pungent camphorous scent. Then suddenly, the sun roars overhead, scorching you as you look, blinkingly, at snow on the side of the mountain as your skin begins to burn. Then, just as suddenly, in front of you lies a meadow full of fragrant flowers and maybe a bush or two of ripe fruit.

Introduced in 1939 for the World’s Fair in New York, Alpona—Daltroff’s olfactory tribute to the Swiss Alps—is considered the first fragrance to combine florals with grapefruit. If you’re thinking of it in terms of the bright and watery citrus fragrances of today, think again. Ernest Daltroff’s perfumes always have an edge.

There is also depth in the chypre base, with incense and resins. As Gaia Fishler said about Alpona on her blog, The Non-Blonde: “This is full of what the bureaucrats consider skin allergens and perfume lovers see and smell as beauty.” Amen.

If Chanel No. 19 is a fairy-tale witch lurking in dark woods, providing cool whiffs from the luxuriant undergrowth, Alpona is Julie Andrews singing atop a mountain in The Sound of Music, swirling, larger than life, and joyous. When you get to the base, a stark and smoky incense smolders, ever so slightly laced with its earlier orange note.

Panoramic in its scope and development, Alpona is like a perfume that has discovered 3-D and Technicolor, and sets out to show off what it can reveal to you, in mind-blowing detail. This perfume’s depth and development make many other perfumes feel like shallow lifetime biopics, with crappy music, one-note actors, and cheap sets and wardrobes.

Top notes: Lemon, grapefruit, bergamot, orange

Heart notes: Rose, jasmine, orchid, thyme

Base notes: Patchouli, myrrh, cedar, sandalwood, musk, and oakmoss

(Notes from NowSmellThis.com.)

Confetti by Lenthéric (1939)

A rich amber Oriental in the vein of Weil’s Secret of Venus and Zibeline, Confetti’s balsamic base probably included vanilla, tonka, tolu, labdanum, and other resins that contribute to its rich feel. Whoever is wearing the dark and sensuous Confetti is not in the middle of the room getting hit by sprays of confetti, but in a hidden corner of the party, making out. Its drydown suggests that the musk and civet are prowling around and whispering sweet nothings in the background.

Notes not available.

It’s hard to imagine perfume brands today getting away with using wartime themes as part of their advertising campaigns, but Corday did it in this 1940s ad.

The New Look, The New Scents

Vent Vert, Femme, Miss Dior (1940–1949)

With the darkness of World War II dominating the first half of the decade, it’s not a surprise that renewal and rebirth in perfumery, in the olfactory form of green scents, would help to represent the reinvigoration of a world in disarray. And no perfumer dominated the 1940s in the way that iconoclast Germaine Cellier did, almost single-handedly jump-starting perfume with adrenaline shots to its olfactory heart with a dizzying array of scents, including Bandit (1944), Coeur-Joie (1946), the galbanum-overdosed Vent Vert (1947), Fracas (1948), and Fleeting Moment (1949).

Some women had to play dual roles in the 1940s—working outside of the home when men were off to war, but then returning to a traditional kind of femininity in the home when they came back. Christian Dior’s New Look in 1947 responded to their homecoming/traditional role with fashion’s return, as has been said, to a kind of Belle Époque femininity: full skirts, soft shoulders, and cinched-in waists. Cellier, one of the few female perfumers of that time, created scents that reflected an awareness of the multiple roles women were supposed to play in the 1940s and scents that seemed to question the idea of gender itself. If one looks at her fragrances from this perspective, their wildly gender-bending ways make historical sense: From the butch, leather-clad masculinity of Bandit to its counterpart, the aggressive, almost-drag femininity of Fracas, these perfumes suggest that gender is something constructed, as arbitrary and labile as a perfume one could put on or take off.

Platine by Dana (1940)

“For the precious blonde,” Platine perfume had silver flecks floating in it like confetti, and its ads were often co-branded with jewelers, such as this one from 1944, with Harry Winston.

A fresh floral aldehydic chypre on the green lily of the valley side, Platine (or “Platinum”) was marketed “for the precious blonde,” complete with platinum flecks floating in its Art Deco bottle. In ads, the platinum blonde woman who was its namesake seemed remote, untouchable, and unreal. Its freshness, perhaps due to vetiver and sandalwood, is much more soft, friendly, and approachable.

Notes not available.

Tailspin by Lucien Lelong (1940)

Perfumer: Jean Carles

A perfume name that matches its character, Jean Carles’s whimsical Tailspin sends you careening and spinning from one incongruous perfume accord to the next, making your olfactory brain work overtime trying to figure out what’s going on. It starts out with an herbal, vegetal green freshness with minimal sweetness, moves to a rich floral that’s hard to identify, then to a tobacco-y, cinnamon spice base that resolves into a soapy floral. Its cinnamon spice seems very Carles-like, like the marriage of cinnamon with gardenia in Carles’s Ma Griffe. The jarring and odd part of Tailspin is a confusing, coal-tar aspect that disappears as quickly as it arrives.

Notes not available.

Chantilly by Houbigant (1941)

In the same way that some perfumes smell insurmountably gendered, some notes smell resolutely old-fashioned; for example, the “powderiness” that sometimes comes from carnation, orris, and sandalwood, all three of which are in Chantilly. If you can get past this modern prejudice against powdery scents, Chantilly will knock your socks off. If you can’t, spicy baby powder will be all you can smell, which would be a pity.

Chantilly starts off with fresh lemony/fruit top notes, evolving into a powdery, spicy floral with flashes of animalic leather and musk. It’s hard to discern specific floral notes, although the carnation’s spice builds a bridge to its rich undertow of sandalwood, and rich balsams. A classical powdery Oriental that smells old-fashioned in one sense and sexy-animalic in another. If you can handle the dichotomy, you’ll love Chantilly.

Top notes: Bergamot, lemon, neroli, fruit note

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, ylang-ylang, carnation, orris

Base notes: Sandalwood, vanilla, leather, benzoin, tonka, musk

Bandit by Robert Piguet (1944)

A bottle of Bandit perfume pierced and shattered by a dagger evokes the perfume’s provocative scent and shocking debut on the designer’s catwalk in this 1947 advertisement.

Perfumer: Germaine Cellier

Perfumer Germaine Cellier was said to have been inspired to create Bandit when she took a whiff of models changing their undergarments backstage at a Robert Piguet show. In a fitting debut for the perfume, models dressed as pirates, complete with masks, toy guns, and knives, introduced Bandit to the public during a Robert Piguet fashion show. Lore has it that one model smashed a bottle of Bandit on the runway, turning on her heels as the bitter, gorgeous, butch perfume filled the air.

So does this bitter, smoky, leather chypre live up to its myth? Yes. Its dominant twin notes—the sting of galbanum with the warmth of leather—encircle any sweetness that could emerge from jasmine or rose. Although Haarmann & Reimer’s perfume notes listed below don’t include isobutyl quinoline (a synthetic leather note that often smells rubbery and bitter), it was Cellier’s daring 1 percent overdose of that ingredient that makes it infamous. Galbanum and isobutyl quinoline make Bandit an extreme scent: Picture a bouquet of flowers wrapped with a black whip instead of a shiny ribbon.

Bandit’s sharp angles make you pause and think. Its cacophonous notes are at the core of its appeal, like an instrument playing off-key in an atonal modern musical composition, or a modernist portrait of a woman with a blue face and green lips. Dry, leathery, mossy—call it what you will, but Bandit makes being bad smell good.

Top notes: Artemisia, bergamot, gardenia, aldehydes, galbanum

Heart notes: Jasmine, orris, rose, carnation

Base notes: Castoreum, patchouli, vetiver, myrrh, oak moss, amber, civet

Femme by Rochas (1944)

This 1957 ad for Femme by Rochas features the curvy bottle inspired by Mae West’s hourglass figure.

Perfumer: Edmond Roudnitska

Like the inside of a woman’s butter-soft suede purse that has accumulated the feminine smells of perfume, lipstick, and other womanly objects, this classic fruit chypre smells like softness. Roudnitska created Femme in 1944 for Marcel Rochas to give to his wife, and the bottle was designed to recall Mae West’s hourglass figure. Its reformulated versions with cumin seem more wearable and modern.

Top notes: Peach, plum, lemon

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, rosewood

Base notes: Patchouli, musk, amber, civet, leather, oakmoss, sandalwood

Réplique by Raphael (1944)

Réplique smells like a lot of good ideas thrown together that just don’t add up.

It first challenges you with its herbaceous top note—sweet, citrusy qualities—followed by its spicy, animalic, almost gourmand base. This complex, overloaded Oriental perfume smells sickly sweet and uncomfortably creamy in the drydown. To me, it’s this herbaceous green quality that throws me off, creating a difficult minor-key element to an already dark-toned perfume.

If Réplique were a drink, it would be Fernet Branca, a mix of herbs, vanilla, and orange in a dark iteration. Was it inspired by Tabu, and a precursor to Opium, Obsession, Youth Dew, and other big-bosomed perfumes? Once it settles down, the drydown gets sexier and more tolerable—a dark Vermeer painting of a perfume.

Top notes: Bergamot, neroli, orange, coriander, clary sage

Heart notes: Clove bud, rose, orris, ylang-ylang, jasmine, tuberose

Base notes: Patchouli, amber, moss, leather, musk, vanilla, civet

Woodhue by Fabergé (1944)

In spite of being advertised as a scent “for the casual you,” the spicy, vanillic, and animalic Woodhue has a darker, more-mysterious vibe than its ad would suggest. As often happens with vintage perfume, Woodhue’s top notes were a bit off the first time I sniffed it, and in this case, initially smelled like hairspray.

Woodhue was most seductive when it was in the last stages of the drydown. A delicate, orris-like veil of powdery softness blended with the spices, vanilla, and touch of civety musk. Perfume historian Octavian Coifan sees Woodhue as built around a floral spicy note that sits between the “fresh rose facet of Chanel No. 5 and the soft, sweet, spicy carnation of L’Air du Temps.”

An hour or so in, a natural vanilla scent blended in with my skin to create a comforting, ambrosial, lightly sweetened milkiness. Occasionally, sniffing my wrist with my nose up close to my skin, jasmine would pierce through the softness like rays of sunshine through a cloud. The rocky road to this drydown is worth it, so if you get some of the old stuff, give it a chance to sputter, screech, and blow smoke like an old jalopy you started up after fifty years of its lying inert. It’ll be worth it once this scent hits its stride, and the resulting ride is smooth.

Notes from Octavian Coifan: Jasmine, ylang-ylang, orris, clove, a green violet note, methyl ionone, ionones, benzoin, vanilla, opopanax, myrrh, amber accord, nitromusks, civet, sandalwood, cedar, vetiver

Antilope by Weil (1945)

Is the woman who holds up antelope antlers and a bottle of Antilope perfume supposed to be hunter or prey?

You’d think that a perfume called Antilope would be a little more, well, gamey or animalic, but Antilope by Weil lives up more to the habitat of the antelope than to the animal the name evokes. One gets the sense that the leaves, woods, and flowers that went into Antilope have dried into a haylike concentration whose scent is stirred into recognition only by a hot sun or a brief summer wind. I imagine a sleeping animal on a bed of herbs, dried grass with flowers in the distance. In sum: dry, sweet, and woody.

Top notes: Aldehydes, spice note, citrus oils

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, orris, lily of the valley, violet

Base notes: Cedarwood, vetiver, leather, musk, amber

Notes from PerfumeIntelligence.co.uk: Tangerine, neroli, galbanum, acacia, farnesiana, narcissus, hyacinth, ylang-ylang, may rose, lily of the valley, oakmoss, civet, sandalwood, and musk

Visa by Robert Piguet (1945)

Perfumer: Jean Carles

There was a little mix-up years ago when I began to collect and write about vintage. I thought I’d ordered vintage Visa, not realizing there was a reissue, and I was baffled as to how on earth a vintage perfume could smell like Thierry Mugler’s Angel. I finally figured it out, got the vintage perfume, and I now realize the two are so different they should be on different planets.

Vintage Visa is a deeply erotic rose scent with a fatty, voluptuous base of Animalis (also in Baghari) and perhaps woods, spice (carnation? cinnamon?), and leather. Leave it to “the whore’s perfumer” (there, I said it!) to make rose, a usually demure floral with a good, old-fashioned reputation, into Rose Red with a Scarlet A on her too-low-cut dress. There’s almost a wine-like element to Visa’s rose, but it’s dancing very closely to Animalis. What any of this sexiness has to do with Visa and air travel is anyone’s guess!

Notes: Aldehydes, rose, florals, and, according to Denyse Beaulieu of the blog, Grain de Musc, Animalis by Synarome. (Animalis was a perfume base with a mix of animal notes: civet, musk, castoreum, and the animalic costus, a plant-based ingredient that’s been described as smelling like wet animal fur or the sebum from unwashed hair.)

Coeur-Joie by Nina Ricci (1946)

Perfumer: Germaine Cellier

When Germaine Cellier does butch, she does butch, and when she does femme, like Fracas and Fleeting Moment, they’re practically in drag. Coeur-Joie (“Joyful Heart”), however, pulls out all the stops. Where Fracas is still a naughty and provocative tuberose, and Fleeting Moment a little inward and reserved, Coeur-Joie, like its bitter-green counterpart Vent Vert, throws open the window and squeezes the beauty out of every floral it touches. Coeur-Joie’s powdery sweetness lifts everything up into a chorus of flowers followed by a warm and buttery base.

Notes from 1964 Dictionnaire des Parfums de France: “A citrusy floral featuring jasmine absolute, violet absolute, iris (from Provence), rose (from the Orient), neroli, acetivenol, and aldehydes.”

Ma Griffe by Carven (1946)

Perfumer: Jean Carles

Composed by a perfumer who had become anosmic (unable to smell), Ma Griffe is nevertheless a more-wearable Bandit or Cabochard, in spite of opening with the magnificently bitter galbanum note. The opening aldehydes will knock you down, but the cinnamon and gardenia will cushion your fall. Many a perfumista has mentioned that her grandmother has tagged Ma Griffe as “the prostitute’s perfume.” I think what they really mean is that it’s the perfume of a woman doesn’t give a damn.

Bright, green, comforting, and yet slightly dangerous—the comfort and the danger, I think, come from the same source: cinnamon—this is one of those fragrances that shouldn’t work, but does. Perhaps I’m reading into this after the fact, but although Carles composed this from his scent memory, it does give one the impression of a perfume based on cerebral abstraction rather than sensual experience.

Top notes: Aldehydes, clary sage, galbanum, bergamot

Heart notes: Gardenia, jasmine, ylang-ylang, rose

Base notes: Cinnamon, tonka bean, vetiver

This World War II–era ad from 1943 touts Pinaud’s bullet-shaped perfume Ammunitia as a military perfume (parfum militaire) that is “[d] edicated to the brave women of America.”

Écusson by Jean d’Albret (1947)

Aldehydic floral Écusson (“Emblem”) distinguishes itself from the well-heeled pack of this category by being quickly and insistently sensuous, animalic, and erotic in the base. This perfume told me, before I even looked at its notes, that it contained civet and nitromusks. A delicate cinnamon spice bridges its girlish flowers from its sensuous base. Écusson is a study in the way a perfumer can add depth to lightness without any appreciable caloric difference.

Top notes: Aldehyde complex, bergamot, orange blossom, peach, strawberry

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, narcissus, ylang-ylang, orris

Base notes: Sandalwood, musk, cinnamon, civet, benzoin, cistus, tonka

Farnesiana by Caron (1947)

Perfumer: Michel Morsetti

An almondy richness reminiscent of heliotrope radiates from the center of Farnesiana, named after the powdery-sweet blooms of the Acacia farnesiana, or mimosa tree. Its violet and lilac heart gives the impression that Farnesiana is a floral confection wrapped in a diaphanous veil of sweet, powdery paper. An anise aftertaste underlies its candylike yet sophisticated sweetness, followed by subtle spice and woods. Unmistakably vintage, multilayered, and beautiful.

Top notes: Cassie, mimosa, bergamot

Heart notes: Jasmine, violet, lily of the valley, lilac

Base notes: Opopanax, vanilla, sandalwood, hay, musk

Iris Gris by Jacques Fath (1947)

In this 1949 ad, artist René Gruau turns a woman’s body into the stem of the iris flower, from whose roots come the powdery, buttery orris note that is the centerpiece of this legendary perfume.

Perfumer: Vincent Roubert

If you’ve ever smelled orris butter, made from the dried roots of the iris flower, you can appreciate how faithful to that sumptuous note Iris Gris is, adorning it minimally to enhance its waxy richness while adding the delicate, milky peach note, Persicol. Peach-scented pastry dough, an oft-used description, is probably the most accurate description of this perfume.

Iris Gris starts out spicy sharp and moves into a smooth, buttery peachy richness, which gives Iris Gris a girlish lightness. It is oily and rich, but rich in the way a stone fruit mixed with cream is both aromatically fresh and rich. It provides the olfactory equivalent of “mouth feel,” a foodie reference describing the tactile pleasure of having something rich in one’s mouth.

Notes from Octavian Coifan: Delta-undecalactone (Persicol), orris, cedar, vetiver, jasmine, lily of the valley, heliotrope, lilac, musk

Le Dix by Balenciaga (1947)

Perfumer: Francis Fabron

Often described as Chanel No. 5 with violets, Le Dix (“The 10”), with its nose-tickling aldehydic sparkle and haunting violet note, holds its head up high among vintage perfumes, like a handsome older woman in a sturdy 1940s suit, hat, and full makeup standing in a sea of Forever 21–clad teenagers. She has to be proud; everyone is telling her she smells “powdery,” “old,” and “soapy.”

Its initial impression of softness and conventional femininity is bound up with a perfume note that has perhaps always signified nostalgia and melancholy: violet. Le Dix is faithful to the melancholy connotations of violet but adds gourmand richness to round it out, and a spicy/woody backbone and the fatty, burnt-caramel note of nitromusks to give it some edge.

I can detect Francis Fabron’s authorial signature in the final stages of Le Dix’s drydown. He’s the nose of one of my favorite perfumes, Robert Piguet’s Baghari. In Baghari’s drydown, there is an absolutely heady and intoxicating richness (courtesy of a boozy-creamy balsamic plus Animalis base) that makes me make swoon. Although Le Dix’s drydown is powdery and gentler, it still packs a punch. (Baghari and Le Dix have the following notes in common: aldehydes, bergamot, lemon; ylang-ylang, rose, lily of the valley; and vetiver, musk, and vanilla.)

Top notes: Bergamot, lemon

Heart notes: Ylang-ylang, rose, lily of the valley, iris (definitely violet, but not listed)

Base notes: Civet, musk, vanilla, sandalwood, vetiver

Miss Dior by Christian Dior (1947)

Perfumers: Jean Carles and Paul Vacher

Miss Dior exemplifies a perfume for the late-1940s woman whose sexuality was, perhaps, under wraps. The first time I smelled it, I detected an animalic note, strangely enough, before I smelled its lushly floral bouquet, the animal dirtiness before the ladylike polish.

But when the flowers do hit—wow. Bruised flowers on a base of leather, moss, and patchouli, sliced with something sharp and green to cut through the lushness and make it sing, the way lemon zest can make a creamy risotto even more delicious. Although this is not a Guerlain, Miss Dior seems to be operating under Jacques Guerlain’s olfactory principle: “Perfume should smell like the underside of my mistress.” It’s said that when Christian Dior debuted his revolutionary “New Look” on February 12, 1947, the runways were also scented with his new perfume, Miss Dior.

Top notes: Gardenia, galbanum, clary sage (sauge sclarée), aldehydes

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, neroli, narcissus, iris, eyelet, lily of the valley

Base notes: Patchouli, cistus-labdanum, oakmoss, ambergris, sandalwood, vetiver, leather (Cuir de Russie)

Robe d’un Soir by Carven (1947)

Sensual and elegant perfumes are often pitted against each other, as if one precludes the other. But Carven’s Robe d’un Soir (“Evening Gown”) proves that a perfume can be both, with its balance of fresh top notes, classical florals, and a sensual base that’s a balance of woods and creamy balsam notes.

This sensual, powdery rose scent marries a Rose de Mai as its queen to the powdery warmth and sensuality of orris and carnation, and a base that is by turns creamy and woody. Like an evening gown, the balance is what makes it special. Sexiness with elegance, skin with structure, voluptuousness with reserve.

Top notes: Bergamot, aldehyde complex, neroli, peach, mandarin

Heart notes: Rose, jasmine, ylang-ylang, carnation, orris, lilac

Base notes: Vetiver, amber, cedarwood, vanilla, sandalwood, benzoin

Vent Vert by Balmain (1947)

With its famous overdose of the ingredient galbanum, which imparts a bitter-green freshness to scents, Vent Vert is herbs, bent stems, and roses. In this advertisement, renowned fashion illustrator René Gruau expresses the perfume’s wild beauty by drawing a laughing woman with flowing green hair. (Ad from 1949)

Perfumer: Germaine Cellier

Composed by the amazing Germaine Cellier, Vent Vert (“Green Wind”) is a synesthete’s dream: It smells like the color green. It sounds off with a bitter, verdant blast of galbanum like a trumpet’s call, and shortly thereafter other flower notes run and swirl onto the stage like ballet dancers in a production of Nijinsky’s paganistic The Rite of Spring.

Composer Harry Revel claimed that Corday’s perfume “Toujours Moi” was the inspiration for turning scent into melody. The result was his interpretation of Corday perfumes into theremin-driven tunes that the album boasts “is probably the only successful attempt to capture and reproduce … the ‘sounds’ of fragrance and scent.” (The operative word here is probably.)

There is something savage, fierce, and raw about Vent Vert, recalling the first lines of T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land”: “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.” Hope, desire, rebirth, renewal—these are all primal feelings, and the perfume respects that with its scent of freshly picked flowers, a green soapy rose, and bent stems with crushed herbs mixed in for spiciness.

Top notes: Galbanum, citrus oils, gardenia, leafy green, peach

Heart notes: Rose, lily of the valley, hyacinth, orris, jasmine

Base notes: Oakmoss, vetiver, styrax, musk

In this 1940s advertisement, a “blackamoor,” the racist figure whose image was ubiquitous in the first part of the twentieth century, opens a bottle of Jet perfume.

Named after a voodoo good-luck talisman, Gri Gri perfume by Weil trades in stereotypical African totem imagery.

Fracas by Robert Piguet (1948)

Perfumer: Germaine Cellier

Germaine Cellier had a camp sensibility about gender and perfume, evidenced in the gender hyperbole of Bandit vs. Fracas, the butch/femme couple of the vintage perfume world.

If Bandit perfume was meant for the butch lady in leather with the sidelong glance and the cigarette dangling out of her mouth, then voluptuous Fracas pays tribute to over-the-top femininity of the Marilyn Monroe / Anita Ekberg variety. Green and bright in its top notes, followed by a deluge of white flower notes resting on a creamy, decadent bed of balsams and musk, Fracas is almost a gourmand version of white flowers. Its carnation evokes images of cloves woven into flower garlands, providing sparks of red-hot heat amidst creamy white florals.

A “fracas” is a noisy, disorderly brawl, and in French, Italian, and Latin, it means to shatter (fracasser), to break (frangere), and to make an uproar (fracasso, fracassare). In Germaine Cellier’s hands, this means that the floral category, usually a proper and ladylike one, gets subverted. This quintessential sex-bomb floral is meant to disturb and not merely to seduce, to disrupt and disquiet in addition to subduing. Fracas’s beauty is not quiet and demure; it enters the stage like an attention-getting troublemaker.

Madeleine de Madeleine, Mollie Parnis by Weil, Dior’s Poison, and sheer little drugstore Jovans have quoted Fracas, but she remains the iconic diva, the Marilyn Monroe of floral perfumes. (The reformulation isn’t as rich and voluptuous as the original. Like Fidji’s reformulation, it lacks the depth of the original base notes.)

Top notes: Bergamot, mandarin, hyacinth, green notes

Heart notes: Tuberose, jasmine, orange blossom, lily of the valley, white iris, violet, jonquil, carnation, coriander, peach, osmanthus, pink geranium

Base notes: Musk, cedar, oak moss, sandalwood, orris, vetiver, Tolu balsam

L’Air du Temps by Nina Ricci (1948)

Perfumer: Francis Fabron

The vintage L’Air du Temps (“Spirit of the Times”) in the eau de parfum concentration has one of the most subtle, beautiful carnations I’ve ever smelled in vintage perfume. In Roger & Gallet’s Blue Carnation, that flower radiates from its heart with a peppery force; it is a clove-heavy carnation on steroids. In Caron’s Bellodgia, its cloveyness is woven into a floral garland as an accent or spice; the florals to the untrained nose are practically unaccompanied. But in L’Air du Temps, fruit and floral notes are balanced with the carnation’s unmistakable spicy, aromatic clove, and their balance creates an incredibly romantic, beautiful, and joyous perfume. As it dries down, woods and balsamic notes add a sensuous warmth.

Like Fleeting Moment by Balenciaga (1949), there is a gentle, wistful quality to L’Air du Temps. The name of the perfume references the beginning of the world’s recovery from World War II, when there was hope for a new prosperity and peace, represented by the Lalique bottle with its kissing doves on the stopper.

My first introduction to L’Air du Temps was through my grandmother. It was her favorite scent. When I resniffed L’Air du Temps for the first time in years, I had a vintage from the 1970s, an eau de toilette, which was much sheerer and had a less emphatically joyous character than the older version. If the 1970s version was a little wan, I can’t imagine what reformulations have done to it.

Top notes: Bergamot, rosewood, neroli, peach, spice notes

Heart notes: Clove bud, Rose de Mai, ylang-ylang, orris, orchid, lily

Base notes: Sandalwood, musk, vetiver, benzoin, cedar, amber, moss

Tuvara by Tuvaché (1948)

Tuvara is a soft, light, Oriental perfume with herbal top notes of chamomile, lavender, and barely perceptible florals. Myrrh, creamy labdanum, and vanilla with the match spark of woods and moss make up the drydown.

Top notes: Chamomile, bergamot, lavender, aldehydes

Heart notes: Ylang-ylang, geranium, jasmine

Base notes: Sandalwood, myrrh, vetiver, labdanum, oakmoss, musk and patchouli, vanilla, patchouli, incense

Ambre Cannelle by Creed (1949)

Ambre Cannelle (“amber cinnamon”), Creed’s animalic, spicy, and warm-ambery-powdery fragrance smells like a good-girl perfume mixed in with perspiration and lust.

At first whiff, I was hit with skanky amber—something a little rude, civety, and haunting. The powdery aspect, as well as the skanky quality, could be ambergris. Or it could be Ambrox. Whatever it is, it is heavenly. (It has recently been discontinued.)

Top notes: Cinnamon leaves, juniper berry

Heart notes: Rose, cinnamon, bay leaves, coriander

Base notes: Ambergris, musk

In this beautiful 1940s-era ad, Corday perfumes hang from the branches adorning the head of a perfume muse who stares dreamily off into the distance.

Witchery seems to have been a buzzword in 1940s perfume ads, signifying women tapping into a powerful and subversive form of seduction. Here, it might be a euphemism for prostitution!

Calypso by Robert Piguet (1949)

Calypso’s rose starts off shy, but soon, this delicate creature flanked by green notes just blooms. That would be enough to make Calypso worth remembering, but its second act is even better. Along with some spice, an unmistakable animal note (ambergris or civet) musses up our sweet rose’s hair and slips her glasses off. Calypso, in other words, is a very sexy rose.

Notes from 1964 Dictionnaire des Parfums de France: Rose, jasmine, carnation, gardenia, patchouli

Good girl, bad girl. Light and dark. White Shoulders and Menace. You get the picture.

Creating a good girl–bad girl split wasn’t just one way to keep women confused; it was also good for business, as perfume brands could find an excuse to market two perfumes to one woman. Adrian’s 1946 Saint and Sinner advertisement depicts this schizophrenic state of affairs.

Diorama by Christian Dior (1949)

Perfumer: Edmond Roudnitska

A cross between Roudnitska’s fruity chypre Femme (in its Prunol buttery plumminess) and Guerlain’s Mitsouko, Diorama might challenge fans of angular minimalism. Its combination of fruity, spicy, and powdery just might be too much. Jean-Claude Ellena, the pope of minimalism himself, declared himself a fan: “No perfume has ever had a more complex form and formula, more feminine contours, or been more sensual, more carnal.”

Top notes: Bergamot, aldehydes

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, gardenia, peach and plum (undecalactone gamma—peach aldehyde—and Prunol), raspberry, strawberry, galbanum, lily of the valley

Base notes: Patchouli, oakmoss, vetiver, violet (methyl ionone gamma), labdanum, castoreum, civet

English Leather by MEM Company (1949)

A friendly, unassuming leather-and-woods scent that smells like it was meant to be splashed on as an aftershave, English Leather balances a leather base with honeyed rose heart and a fresh, herbaceous top. Tonka’s cinnamony-vanilla provides a slightly sweet warmth in the drydown.

Top notes: Bergamot, lemon, petit grain, orange, lavender, rosemary

Heart notes: Rose, orris, honey, fern

Base notes: Cedarwood, leather, tonka, vetiver, musk

Fleeting Moment (La Fuite des Heures) by Balenciaga (1949)

Perfumer: Germaine Cellier

Has the name for a perfume ever so aptly described the quality all perfumes share? Namely, that poetic condition of being something beautiful and rare yet momentary—evaporated almost as soon as we have contact with it.

Fleeting, too, are the notes that make up the perfume. It is hard to tell what exactly I smelled when I first took a whiff. Soapy and aldehydic, but with a soft, organic, herbal base that smelled like nature refracted through synthetics, helping to blend, soften, and blur the recognizable lines of the flowers and herbs.

Fleeting Moment reminds me of the perfume version of a now-discontinued (of course!) drink from the UK I used to splurge on, called Aqua Libra. This lightly carbonated and ever so delicately sweet drink was infused with herbs: tarragon, cardamom, thyme, sesame seeds. It was so interesting I felt like I was drinking perfume.

Top notes: Citrus aldehydic with a slightly aromatic touch (tarragon-like): bergamot, orange, aldehyde C10, aldehyde C11-enique, neroli

Heart notes: Floral bouquet (ylang-ylang, fresh rose, jasmine) with a very light lily-of-the-valley base (more modern than No. 5), and floral powdery notes (orris absolute and methyl ionones)

Base notes: Soft woody with powdery and musky notes like vetiver (plus the acetate), sandalwood, vanilla, sweet coumarine, and musk (musk ketone and natural musk)

(Notes from Octavian Coifan.)

Méteor by Coty (1949)

In the running now as one of my favorite vintage tuberose perfumes, Méteor certainly rocketed into my stratosphere and took me by surprise. Buttery tuberose joins with jasmine and rose to attack on one side while civet and nitromusks get you from the other. It’s an effective little formula, this My Sin–esque combo of sexy florals plus animal notes. Sumptuous and hard to find.

Notes: Jasmine, rose, tuberose, musk, civet

In this 1940s ad by artist Xanti-Pat, three birds make up the trompe l’oeil eyes and mouth of this lovely woman for Bourjois perfumes.

Before Demeter perfumes created Gin and Tonic and Cosmopolitan, Jean Patou had cocktail-scented perfumes. In addition to Dry, featured in this 1952 ad for the 1930s-era perfume by artist Maynard, there was the original Cocktail and Bitter Sweet.

The Bold and the Beautiful

Intimate, Cabochard, Youth Dew (1950–1959)

In the 1950s, perfume was all about “friendly-sexy.” If aggressive 1980s perfumes wore olfactory shoulder pads, as perfume writer Susan Irvine suggests in her book, Perfume Guide, then picture 1950s perfumes wearing those dresses with rounded shoulders and poofy skirts. “Friendly-sexy” was exemplified by Marilyn Monroe’s soft, downward-curving, and rounded eyes, full lips, and pillowy body. Her look screamed sex—but with a smile.

Perfume in the 1950s, represented by Revlon’s Intimate or Robert Piguet’s Baghari, is also steeped in musky sensuality. Intimate’s animalic ballast—castoreum, civet, and musk—is about as subtle as a bullet bra, and Baghari sinks you into a musky vanilla reverie that is heavy and rich. The good girl / bad girl dichotomy was in rare form in 1950s perfumes, exemplified in the Max Factor ad for Primitif, which asks the question, “Why not let your perfume say the things you would not dare to?” Poivre by Caron reminds us that not all 1950s perfumes were addressing the women who would be Marilyn; with its aggressive pepper and clove notes, one is reminded that Sylvia Plath, Diane Arbus, and Anne Sexton inhabited—and set fire to—that decade as well.

Baghari by Robert Piguet (1950)

Perfumer: Francis Fabron

The mark of a beautiful perfume is that even though it may not be your type, it pulls you in anyway. Such is the power of Baghari. Soft, floral, even tropical, Baghari has a lushness, like fur, that has to be experienced to be understood. It smells like fur scented with flowers—animalic and sophisticated yet unintimidating.

Baghari was the first vintage perfume that showed me that vintage perfumes can have a depth—a volume, as some people say—a way of unfolding through time that even complex, modern fragrances don’t have. Baghari’s appeal was its roundness, for lack of a better word, something 3-D and physical about it that I haven’t really encountered in any modern fragrances.

I gave perfumer Yann Vasnier a sample of Baghari, and he smelled aldehydes; orange flower; orris; jasmine; rose; clove; hay; musk; and Animalis, a perfume base by Synarome that contains civet, castoreum, musk, and perhaps costus. Thanks to the depth and boozy richness that come from its animal base, Baghari, like vintage Chanel No. 5, is practically a touchstone for animalic perfumes.

Top notes: Aldehydes, bergamot, orange blossom, lemon

Heart notes: Rose, lilac, ylang-ylang, lily of the valley, jasmine, bourbon vetiver

Base notes: Benzoin, musk, amber, vanilla

(Thanks to Denyse Beaulieu of the blog Grain de Musc for the information on Animalis.)

Eau d’Hermès (1951)

Perfumer: Edmond Roudnitska

Perfumer Edmond Roudnitska said of Eau d’Hermès that it was “the interior of a Hermès bag in which wafted the aroma of a perfume … A note of fine leather, wrapped in a slightly spicy citrus.” And actual wearers of the stuff? “Sweaty balls may be the most accurate description of the scent,” writes one irreverent wag on a perfume forum.

My first impression was somewhere between the haute leather impregnated with spicy citrus and abject bodily smells: I smelled cuminy lemon with a dose of animalic civet, backed up by herbs and spices such as lavender, clove cinnamon, and coriander. Clean shot through with something not exactly dirty, but rather, alive. (Cumin is not listed in the official notes, but it’s unmistakably present.)

Notes: Lavender, lemon, clove, cardamom, cinnamon, coriander, geranium leaf

Poivre by Caron (1951)

In this 1955 ad for Caron’s Poivre (“Pepper”), a red dragon wrapped around the Caron bottle evokes China and the spice trade. The eau de toilette version, Coup de Fouet (“Crack of the Whip”), is lighter, but still spicy.

Perfumer: Michel Morsetti

Many fragrances from the 1950s helped women to express their erotic selves through carnal, animalic perfume notes, or, as the Max Factor Primitif ad put it, these perfumes helped “say the things” that women “would not dare to.” But this is a familiar trope in perfume. Sniffing Caron’s Poivre and thinking about all the metaphors of fire and explosives in its ads and descriptions, I began thinking about how many perfumes express violence and danger in their notes, perfume signifiers not entirely subsumed by sexuality?

Well, Caron’s Poivre, for one. Apparently, Caron’s creative director Félicie Wanpouille, who had collaborated with Caron perfumer Ernest Daltroff on the drop-dead sexy Narcisse Noir, wanted to buck the trend of 1950s well-mannered, ladylike florals, so she asked Caron’s then-perfumer Michel Morsetti to create something fierce and wild.

Caron’s Poivre extrait starts off with a fiery and earthy spark of crushed black pepper and sharp florals (you really smell the ylang-ylang). Then, like a slow-motion olfactive explosion, it unfurls carnation’s clovey facets, weaving together floral and spice, with sweet warmth from clove and opopanax. To add fuel to the fire, so to speak, it turns out that pepper is not the only note that signifies darkness and danger in Poivre: There’s also carnation. Not only has the American carnation largely lost its characteristic spicy smell, but it also appears that we don’t have the dark associations with carnations/cloves that Europeans do. In France, for example, cloves have been considered bad luck for centuries.

Notes: Red and black pepper, clove, carnation, ylang-ylang, jasmine, opopanax, cedar, sandalwood, vetiver, oakmoss, musk

Fille d’Ève by Nina Ricci (1952)

Perfumers: Michel Hy and Jacques Bercia

The word animalic as a perfume descriptor refers to base notes sourced from animal bodies—civet, castoreum, and musk, for example. But sometimes, plant-derived ingredients such as costus root, the dried root of the Saussurea lappa, can also provide the eros and warmth that evokes the human animal.

Fille d’Ève (“Eve’s Daughter”) starts off very brightly, with an herby, citrusy, sweet floral note that is sparkling and feminine. The perfume exists for me in the drydown, when the costus root note rises up like the bed-head scent of a well-washed beauty on her third day without bathing. According to perfume historian Octavian Coifan, costus root references sebum, the smell of dirty hair, and it has a “slightly resinic note, like myrrh, elemi or opopanax.” If you have, as I do, a fetish for hair that smells slightly dirty and greasy—particularly if you can still smell traces of the shampoo from the last wash—then Fille d’Ève is for you.

As the clean, white flowers fade, the velvety sebum takes over, and Fille d’Ève becomes a gorgeous skin scent, a scent someone would have to lean in close to get a whiff of. There’s something very sexy to me about the idea that you’d wear a perfume not to mask your own gorgeous dirty smells with aldehydic flowers, but to enhance them.

The 1964 Dictionnaire des Parfums de France describes Fille d’Ève as “An original chypre subdued by fruity notes … an endearing fragrance combining freshness and seduction.”

Notes from 1964 Dictionnaire des Parfums de France: Oak absolute, jasmine, bouvardia, cistus, bergamot, clove, patchouli, pinang

Snob by Galion (1952)

The rose in Snob is raised an octave by green narcissus, light hyacinth, and a tuberose/jasmine duo that injects Snob with an oomph that momentarily quotes the perfume Joy’s richness. Maybe Snob is Joy’s nouveau riche cousin who’s bragging about being related to Joy? Whatever the case, there’s a family resemblance—and it’s intoxicatingly beautiful. The 1964 Dictionnaire des Parfums de France describes Snob as “a floral aldehyde … [i]deal for society events, cruises and sunny days.”

Notes from 1964 Dictionnaire des Parfums de France: Aldehydes, narcissus, hyacinth, rose, jasmine, tuberose

Youth Dew by Estée Lauder (1952)

Perfumer: Josephine Catapano with Ernest Shiftan

Neither youthful nor dewy, Estée Lauder’s first fragrance, Youth Dew, was initially marketed as a scented bath oil so that women would buy it for themselves. (Men were supposed to buy women perfume and jewlery.) I know it’s a beautifully composed fragrance, and I can even appreciate its beauty in a technical, cerebral way. But its sweet, amber/vanillic heaviness and mossy-spicy-bitter herbaceousness are two great tastes that for me, anyway, don’t taste great together. Hours into it, though, the drydown is fantastic—soft, a little funky, and ambery warm.

Top notes: Orange, spice note, bergamot, peach, aldehydes

Heart notes: Clove, rose, ylang-ylang, cinnamon, cassie, jasmine, orchid

Base notes: Amber, tolu, patchouli, olibanum, oakmoss, Peru balsam, benzoin, vanilla

Eau Fraîche by Christian Dior (1953)

Perfumer: Edmond Roudnitska

A simple, herbal/anisic chypre that Edmond Roudnitska described at the time as “the only true chypre on the market.” To a modern nose, it might come across as a little too lemony.

Top notes: Mandarin, orange, lemon

Heart notes: Rosewood

Base notes: Vanilla, oak moss

Jolie Madame by Pierre Balmain (1953)

This elegant 1950s leather chypre is advertised as a party-girl fragrance … in Playboy.

Perfumer: Germaine Cellier

Perfumer Germaine Cellier often played with olfactory gender conventions in her perfumes, femme-ing up Fracas into a floral so over-the-top it was almost a parody of a feminine fragrance (or at least its campy version), and butching up Bandit into a green leather chypre with a buzz cut and a leather jacket.

In Jolie Madame, masculine and feminine notes coexist in contrast without ever resolving themselves, exposing how arbitrary gender in perfume is, and perhaps also reflecting how complex gender codes were for the 1950s woman.The almost cloying floral notes are undercut with the tough notes of leather, musk, castoreum, and civet, demonstrating in perfume form that a ’50s woman may have appeared all smiles and pleasantness, but underneath she could be the toughest person around, or, to be less literal, more complex than those florals would suggest.

Top notes: Gardenia, artemisia, bergamot, coriander, neroli

Heart notes: Jasmine, tuberose, rose, orris, jonquil

Base notes: Patchouli, oakmoss, vetiver, musk, castoreum, leather, civet

Ambush by Dana (1955)

If 1940s and ’50s perfume ads are any indication, trapping—or in this case, Ambushing—a man was a full-time job. Perfume, as shown here, is apparently one of a woman’s man-trapping tools.

Perfumer: Jean Carles

In one of the many wonderful 1950s ads for Ambush, a woman giving the viewer a cheeky sidelong glance holds a bottle of perfume in which a hapless man is trapped. What’s interesting about this is that Ambush really reads to this modern sniffer as a masculine perfume. It’s a fougère, after all, with pronounced lavender and tonka (coumarin) notes, two of the three notes that characterize that masculine category.

Whatever the arbitrary gender of Ambush, it’s as interesting as all perfumes by Jean Carles, who seemed to love simple formulas with complex outcomes. The herbaceous, citrus top immediately collides with the warm, sweet, practically gourmand base with a touch of powder, anise, and maybe even civet. Flirty, fresh, and comforting.

Top notes: Lavender, bergamot, lemon, clary sage

Heart notes: Geranium, rose, carnation

Base notes: Vanilla, heliotrope, tonka, sandalwood

Princess fantasies, anyone? Before it was a brand, we’re told, Prince Matchabelli really was a prince who indulged in perfume-making as a hobby. (Ad from 1957)

Flambeau by Fabergé (1955)

An ad (c. 1966) for Fabergé’s Flambeau

Like a cross between Baghari (1950) and Intimate (1955), but with more spice and fewer inhibitions, Flambeau (“Torch”) is a candied floral chypre/Oriental with facets of burnt sugar and a spicy, creamy-vanilla, gourmand drydown. Delicious.

Notes: Aldehydes, rose, jasmine, peach, lily of the valley, vetiver, sandalwood, amber, oakmoss, orris

Notes from Yann Vasnier: Jasmine, narcissus, rose, vetiver, aldehydic, metallic spicy

Gin Fizz by Lubin (1955)

In this 1955 ad for three Lubin perfumes, a gloved cat burglar manages to snag one.

Perfumer: Henri Giboulet

In the same way that the vintage cocktail cuts the sharpness and sourness of gin and lemon with the softness of egg white, Lubin’s gorgeous Gin Fizz softens lemon and green notes with a base enriched by balsamic notes.

Lemony-rose hits you first, followed by the mellowest drydown of moss, amber, woods, and benzoin. The 1982 Dictionnaire des Parfums et des Lignes Pour Hommes mentions an herbal aspect. (Thyme? Tarragon? Something that recalls the juniper of gin?) “Gin Fizz is a green, peppery and herbal fragrance … It is a light, fresh and charming eau de toilette for active and sportive youth.” (According to my awesome translator Guy Bertrand, “There is no gender specified in the French. I suppose it is a unisex fragrance, which was quite daring for 1955.”)

Notes from 1982 Dictionnaire des Parfums et des Lignes Pour Hommes: Lemon, iris, ylang-ylang, rose, vetiver, oakmoss, Mysore sandalwood, Siamese benzoin, amber

Intimate by Revlon (1955)

Displaying a bit of an American inferiority complex, this 1956 Intimate ad boasts that “even French women are talking about it!”

This floral/animalic chypre flew out of its 1950s-era bottle like I Dream of Jeannie’s genie from her pink satin-lined abode, hips swaying rhythmically to a cha-cha beat.

Crystal-clear aldehydes clear the way for sensual florals, but their impression is made even more overtly sexual by animal notes that give the perfume immediate libidinal heft. Sandalwood, cedar, patchouli, and coriander add a wonderful, intervening spicy/woody counterpoint, and orris transforms all of Intimate’s angles into a creamy, powdery softness.

Intimate is the perfume that promises sex—and delivers. It’s not fooling around. But there’s something good-natured and happy about its opening floral sparkle—something very American, rather than French.

Top notes: Aldehydes, bergamot, rose, gardenia, coriander

Heart notes: Jasmine, orris, patchouli, sandalwood, cedarwood

Base notes: Amber, castoreum, civet, oakmoss, musk

La Folie de Minuit by Lanier (1955)

With a lavender-prominent bergamot and citrus opening, to an ambery-powdery and spicy drydown, La Folie de Minuit (“Midnight’s Folly”) is categorized or “typed” in the Nips Perfume Guide as a “forest blend,” meaning that these perfumes are “woody, mossy-leafy or resinous … or they stand out alone with aromatic notes of an individual nature.”

Notes not available.

Diorissimo by Christian Dior (1956)

Perfumer: Edmond Roudnitska

Unlike Coty’s Muguet des Bois, the sheer and naturalistic lily-of-the-valley fragrance Roudnitska admired, Diorissimo plunges the innocent lily note into a sensual, narcotic world of creamy jasmine, ylang-ylang, and boronia, the flower from an Australian plant that has a musky, woody-violet scent.

Lily of the valley must be re-created in perfume; extractions from the flower simply don’t hold up. Roudnitska could have tried to give Coty’s Muguet des Bois a run for its money by outdoing the naturalism of that scent. Instead, he decided to dress up the delicate green lily—an ingénue of a flower, really—and take her out for a night on the town. Stunning.

Top notes: Muguet (lily of the valley), ylang-ylang

Heart notes: Amaryllis, boronia

Base notes: Jasmine

Primitif by Max Factor (1956)

Like the cover of a pulp novel whose heroine is a good girl gone bad, this 1956 ad for Primitif tells you, in case you couldn’t figure it out on your own, that the perfume “said the things you did not dare to.” A classic trope—that perfume was a subliminal language speaking forbidden desires.

With a roar of sharp aldehydes, Primitif announces its not-so-innocent intentions. Within seconds, a rich animalic accord of buttery peach flanked by musky civet saunters in, swiveling its hips down to a spicy, mossy base.

In perfumes like vintage Chanel, Baghari, and Intimate, nitromusks curl, crackle, and fatten up the perfumes they’re in. You have to smell this added dimension to understand what I mean, but the best analogy I can think of is the difference between a dish with butter or without it. Musks provide an olfactory “mouth feel.”

Notes from Yann Vasnier: An “oily” accord, powdery accord, aldehydes, green chypre, patchouli, civet

By depicting daydreaming women sitting in front of images of Dana’s iconic kissing couple, these 1950s-era Tabu ads directly addressed perfume’s relationship to fantasy. They didn’t promise women that men would fall over themselves if women wore it; they did something more interesting. They invited women to have a relationship with their own desire, to dream and fantasize about romance and sex. Perhaps the taboo of Tabu is for a woman to have a relationship with her own erotic fantasies, however conventional they may be.

L’Interdit by Givenchy (1957)

With Audrey Hepburn’s expressive, elegant face dominating this 1960s ad for L’Interdit, the equivalence is made between Hepburn’s and the perfume’s chic sensibility. After all, the perfume was first made exclusively for her.

Perfumer: Francis Fabron

L’Interdit (“Forbidden”) was designed exclusively for Audrey Hepburn by French fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy, who struck up a lifelong friendship with the gamine actress on the set of Sabrina and considered her his muse. Poised between sensual and girlish like Audrey Hepburn herself, L’Interdit’s lightly sweet and floral notes perfectly balance with its musky and warm base.

Subtle fruit notes join with elegant, fresh florals. As L’Interdit dries down, a surprising sensuality envelops the atmosphere of the perfume’s initial, ingénue-like scent impression. Creamy balsamic notes pair up with sandalwood, adding both a sensuality and an earthiness that seems a fitting olfactory tribute to the beloved actress. Like Audrey Hepburn herself, L’Interdit perfume is fresh, playful, and understated, with its own je ne sais quoi chic.

Top notes: Aldehyde accord, bergamot, mandarin, peach, strawberry

Heart notes: Rose, jasmine, lily of the valley, ylang-ylang, orris, jonquil, narcissus

Base notes: Vetiver, sandalwood, tonka, amber, cistus, benzoin, musk

Hypnotique by Max Factor (1958)

Introduced in the 1950s by Max Factor “for the woman born to enchant men,” Hypnotique is a floral chypre with less animalic heft than Primitif but with similar seductress tendencies. Like many drugstore fragrances of its day, it dries down to an animalic as well as balsamic base.

Hypnotique was one of the most popular perfumes in the United States during the 1950s, perhaps due in part to its amazing kitsch presentation: Many women will recognize the campy velvet “hypno-cat” with rhinestone eyes that came with the perfume.

Notes not available.

Cabochard by Grès (1959)

Perfumer: Bernard Chant

Trained as a sculptor, Alix Barton, née Germaine Émile Krebs and known later as “Madame Grès,” launched her fashion house Grès in 1942. Her designs were modern, couture renditions of the gowns seen on Greek statues, tailored and flowing at the same time, like moveable sculptures. Classical and columnar, they draped the fashionable bodies of women like Jacqueline Kennedy, Marlene Dietrich, and the Duchess of Windsor.

Grès had wanted her first fragrance to smell like the water hyacinth she’d smelled on a trip to India, fresh and floral. But intense chypres were popular at the time, so Bernard Chant’s leather chypre Cabochard came to represent the Grès fashion line.

Caboche means headstrong or stubborn in French, and Cabochard projects an attenuated toughness. Like a “light” version of Robert Piguet’s Bandit, which it is often compared to, Cabochard also contains galbanum and the chemical isobutyl quinoline, which gives both perfumes a harsh, green, rubbery, and leather note. Yet Cabochard is a kinder, gentler, more floral Bandit, down to the demure gray bow around its neck.

Top notes: Aldehydes, citrus, fruit, spice accents

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, geranium, ylang-ylang, orris

Base notes: Patchouli, amber, vetiver, castoreum, moss, musk

You know what they say about women who smoke cigarettes …

Flower Power

Norell, Fidji, Calandre (1960–1969)

In the HBO drama Mad Men, the Sterling Cooper advertising agency in Manhattan becomes the stage on which the racial, sexual, and political tensions that were beginning to explode in ’60s America are played out in miniature. In one episode, a countercultural, lesbian character named Joyce Ramsay, a Life magazine photographer, befriends the ambitious secretary-turned-copywriter Peggy Olson, taking her downtown to smoke pot, proposition her, and eventually help her to get a pivotal account, which improves Olson’s standing at the agency.

The viewer feels a frisson of excitement when Joyce—a subversive figure who offers a different way of being a woman—enters the picture, invading the buttoned-down, patriarchal space of Sterling Cooper, with its deadeningly rigid gender roles.

The perfumes of the 1960s have within them similar tensions, between the ladylike requirements of matching shoes and bags inherent in a Madame Rochas or Calèche, to the exotic intensities of Dioressence and Azurée or the lighthearted Calandre and Ô de Lancôme, which loosen up the olfactory 1960s.

Madame Rochas by Rochas (1960)

Perfumer: Guy Robert

Like olfactory Prozac, Madame Rochas is light, fresh, and uplifting. I love its leafy, coriander-like green and citrus of the opening; its sheer rose and lily of the valley, with a hint of sweetness from violet and ylang-ylang; and the sunny warmth of the spicy-salty-mossy drydown. (I’m convinced that Calandre, nine years later, paid homage to Madame Rochas. It should practically be called Mademoiselle Rochas, as it is lighter and more metallic.)

When I sniff Madame Rochas, I think of a woman who’s mastered Emily Post’s book on etiquette, matches her shoes to her pocketbook, and who is kind to everyone in equal measure. Elegant, light, crisp, yet warm: Madame Rochas is a beauty.

Top notes: Aldehydes, bergamot, lemon, leafy-green note

Heart notes: Rose, lily of the valley, jasmine, orris, ylang-ylang, violet

Base notes: Sandalwood, amber, vetiver, musk, tonka, benzoin, moss

Calèche by Hermès (1961)

Perfumer: Guy Robert

Although Calèche is categorized as an aldehydic/sweet floral, it was the resiny, woody, and balsamic base that left the biggest impression on me. Like red lipstick for the outdoorsy aristocrat who can’t otherwise be bothered to wear makeup, Calèche is a perfume for the woman who doesn’t have to try too hard. The epitome of Parisian chic, it’s reserved, elegant, and well thought out without being fussy.

Calèche starts off with sharp aldehydes and crisp citrus notes. What follows is a gorgeously blended bouquet of classic floral notes and balsams that provide a hint of Oriental sweetness. Its masculine base makes me think of the leather from Jolie Madame and Chanel’s Cuir de Russie.

Although the floral impression stays throughout Calèche, the more mysterious, resiny and dry base dominates the scent, drying down into an amber/tonka/musk softness and resting, at the end, into an almost-incensey spiciness before disappearing. For brief flashes, the coniferous cypress note suggests the bracing outdoors, an olfactory hint that the Calèche woman is no wilting, indoor flower.

Top notes: Aldehydes, bergamot, lemon, neroli, cypress

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, lily of the valley, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Olibanum (frankincense), vetiver, sandalwood, amber, tonka, musk

Bal à Versailles by Jean Desprez (1962)

When I first started collecting vintage perfume, I discovered that Bal à Versailles was spoken about in revered tones for being dirty and animalic. Having waded through truly glorious stinkers, I must say I just don’t get it.

Bal à Versailles is the perfume version of a rock star’s retro suit: an interpretation of the past through the tripped-out psychedelic fantasies of the ’60s. Attempting to recall decadent ballroom soirées past at Versailles, with powdered ladies exuding aristocratic perspiration, Bal à Versailles combines tinniness with flowers and musk.

It starts off brightly and moves into a powdery sweetness. You can almost smell the smoke from dying-out beeswax candles. An hour or two into it, and Bal à Versailles is a mellow, powdery-gentle, and comforting skin scent.

Top notes: Bergamot, lemon, mandarin, neroli

Heart notes: Rose de Mai, lily of the valley, lilac, orris, jasmine, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Cedarwood, sandalwood, vanilla, benzoin, melilot (sweet clover), Tolu balsam

Chant d’Aromes by Guerlain (1962)

This late-1960s ad for Chant d’Aromes (“Fragrant Songs”) lays out a familiar perfume trope: It speaks for women to men.

Perfumer: Jean-Paul Guerlain

Chant d’Aromes (“Fragrant Songs”) starts off sharp, sweet, and slightly fruity, the latter quality thanks to its plummy mirabelle note. It’s more of a floral than a chypre in character, but those high notes have to land somewhere, and a slightly incensey and mossy base isn’t a bad place to fall.

Heady sweet white flowers combine with almondy heliotrope and a balsamic-mossy base. I’m not even a fan of sweet floral notes, but refusing this perfume is not an option.

Top notes: Mirabelle, gardenia, aldehydes

Heart notes: Jasmine, honeysuckle, clove bud, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Benzoin Siam, musk, olibanum, vetiver, moss, heliotrope

Fête by Molyneux (1962)

Aptly named, Fête is indeed a party—in your nose—and it’s one of the few perfumes I’ve smelled in the odd but wonderful category known as the fruit-animalic chypre. You get a little bit of everything with this: the happy sport-scent opening of rich fruit and florals, and the creaminess of benzoin and vanilla married with a mossy, animalic base. There’s even a mysterious saltiness, and the entire effect is like eating savory and sweet together.

Civet is definitely prowling around the edges of Fête, not officially invited to the party but crashing through its velvet ropes anyway, adding its inimitable louche brand of chic. As you initially approach Fête, luscious and tart peach, plum, and bergamot (maybe galbanum?) hit you like the bubbles from a freshly cracked-open bottle of champagne, lifting your senses. But wait—what’s that eyebrow-raising funky “off” scent that’s lowering your inhibitions? Riffraff Cumin and Leather must have distracted the doorman.

Once Fête starts drying down, you can smell its multiple layers at once. Like perfumes that came later, including 1965’s Aramis for men by Estee Lauder, 1967’s Miss Balmain, and 1971’s Sikkim by Lancome, Fête is a sexy, complex, and well-rounded leather. One of my favorites.

Top notes: Caraway, plum, peach, bergamot, and Brazilian rosewood

Heart notes: Lilac, orris root, jasmine, and ylang-ylang

Base notes: Sandalwood, benzoin, vanilla, oakmoss, civet, leather

Idole by Lubin (1962)

If the chartreuse-colored gown worn by artist Tamara de Lempicka’s Young Lady with Gloves had a scent, it would be the deep, silky glow of Idole. A smooth, elegant jasmine-led floral greened by lily of the valley, Idole (“Idol”) soothes and hypnotizes me with its beauty. Idole is said to to have a chypre-animalic base, and, if anything, I’d agree that some civet might be lurking around, looking to cause some limbic system trouble.

This is such an expertly blended, unhurried floral, languishing on a chaise lounge rather than out and about, trying to win popularity contests, that it’s hard to pinpoint what else is in here. Idole is in the same company as other cool customers like Norell and Marilyn Miglin’s Pheromone. (Lubin’s 2011 rerelease of Idole, made spicy, woody, and almost oud-like by Olivia Giacobetti, bears zero genetic relation to the original. They simply share a name and a heritage.)

Notes not available.

Occur! by Avon (1962)

Please raise your hand if the “coconut-leather chypre” combination would ever occur (!) to you in your wildest perfume dreams. Before you have time to let that sink in, realize that Occur! also includes green notes, spices, creamy florals, civet, and musk.

There’s a photo of boho scenester Talitha Getty in Morocco in the ’60s, posing on the rooftop of her home in Marrakech. This perfume is the olfactory equivalent of the paisley, ethnic print she wore—spicy, exotic, and outré.

Occur! is also the perfume version of a gourmet dish made by a chef with good taste who didn’t know when to stop throwing ingredients in the pot. There’s a little bit of (and too much of) everything in it.

Top notes: Aldehydes, bergamot, cardamom, coriander

Heart notes: Gardenia, carnation, jasmine, rose, lily of the valley

Base notes: Vetiver, white honey, musk, oakmoss, amber, coconut, vanilla, castoreum, civet, leather, patchouli, styrax, myrrh

Ciara by Revson (1963)

If Ciara were a person, she’d have feathered hair and would be sporting a rust-colored vest. Intensely spicy, sweet, powdery, and dry, Ciara is about as far from a contemporary perfume as you could get, and it makes a perfume like Chanel’s 1924 Cuir de Russie seem positively modern. Ciara starts off sweet, with fruit top notes and an intensely powdery orris bridge, and then moves to an incensey, resiny base of frankincense and myrrh. A subtle leather base keeps Ciara from being too cloying, but this is one of those potpourri-like scents I could never imagine coming back in style. Never say never …?

Top notes: Bergamot, raspberry, neroli, lemon

Heart notes: Jasmine, palmarosa, rosewood, ylang-ylang, orris

Base notes: Leather, cedarwood, opopanax, olibanum, vanilla

Diorling by Christian Dior (1963)

Perfumer: Paul Vacher

If you’re looking for a tough, animalic butch leather, Diorling is not your gal. This autumnal scent, balancing bright florals and a touch of fresh green, wears its mossy-leather base like Belle de Jour’s Catherine Deneuve wore leather boots—for a calculated tough accent to its predominantly ladylike personality.

Diorling, like Scandal and Jolie Madame, is the love child of narcotic florals and a leather saddle. It combines sweetness with leather in a combo seen before the 1970s but not to be resurrected until niche houses, within the past decade, revived leather as an accord. Momentarily, its leather base is Bandit-like with its bitter quinolines and its blink-or-you-might-miss-it civet—or is that cumin? In the drydown, however, unlike the harsh-green butchness of Bandit, Diorling seems conventionally feminine: Powdery and mossy, it dries down to an almost fruity, rich-orris powdery base touched with moss and leather.

In the 1964 Dictionnaire des Parfums de France, Diorling is described as “a fruity chypre, a green woodsy and fruity fragrance …” Furthermore, “Spiritual Diorling is a green, floral, young and tender fragrance that will adapt to the lady who wears it. It may be arousing or innocent, sophisticated or casual. The new Diorling has an ambiguous side that allows it to satisfy any demands and any wish.” Maybe I was prescient in evoking Belle de Jour!

Notes: Jasmine, rose, oakmoss, bitter orange, nasturtium, fruit notes

(Notes from 1964 Dictionnaire des Parfums de France.)

Monsieur Balmain by Pierre Balmain (1964)

Perfumer: Germaine Cellier

Monsieur Balmain is like a cross between Coriandre, with its dank herbiness, and Antilope, with its ripe, animalic, sun-drenched hay smell. The great Germaine Cellier tweaked this men’s fragrance the same way she did everything—by subverting expectations. First, you get the freshest, most complex lemon and bergamot, and then, most definitely, the smell of aromatic lemongrass.

If men’s scents are supposed to be as unobtrusive as gray suits, lemongrass should be Monsieur Balmain’s first hint that you’re getting more than you bargained for. Herby, citrusy, animalic, and yet subtle, Monsieur Balmain is a gem—but alas, a discontinued one.

Top notes: Bergamot, lemon, lavender, basil

Heart notes: Jasmine, lemongrass, ginger, carnation, cyclamen

Base notes: Oakmoss, cedar, musk, leather, patchouli

A 1960s ad for Caron’s 1936 perfume

Y by Yves Saint Laurent (1964)

Perfumer: Jean Amic

Like summer in a bottle, Yves Saint Laurent’s first fragrance, Y, is a lighthearted chypre. Its sunny disposition goes along with the traditional intelligence, good taste, and gravitas most chypres convey.

It opens with galbanum and honeysuckle singing the highest notes, as peach and honey smooth their edges with warm sweetness. The honey is particularly intense and signals the unexpected animalic nature of Y, providing volume and depth to the flowers and fruit.

By the time you arrive at the heart notes, the fragrance is already winding down into mossy creaminess. Y’s visual equivalent would be those sunburst reflections you see in ’70s movies. There’s always a kind of melancholy quality to those sun rays, which are visual metaphors for being aware of a happy moment, and as a result, no longer inhabiting it fully. Civet functions here in the perfume’s unconscious like a microexpression of disquiet or melancholy, barely detectable.

Top notes: Galbanum, peach, honey, honeysuckle

Heart notes: Rose, jasmine, orris, hyacinth, ylang-yalng

Base notes: Oakmoss, amber, patchouli, civet, vetiver, benzoin

Zen by Shiseido (1964)

Perfumer: Josephine Catapano

A fruit and floral chypre, Zen manages to be both perfectly composed and yet strangely wild and free, like a haphazard flower arrangement following the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, which values the paradoxical qualities of imperfection, impermanence, and incompletion.

Its initial sparkling fruit and flower notes slide into the rich, plummy plushness of soft woods and warmth. I can’t tell you what I like more—Zen as it’s coming my way, in my first flush of falling in love with its sharp flowery/fruity sparkle, or as it nuzzles up close to me, after I understand it and we spend some time together in its woodsy, ambery state.

Bright, fruity, floral, spicy, warm, ambery—I am dazzled by how much this perfume says in a whisper. Its drydown does not ignore what came before it, but marvelously carries the colors of those notes until they all resolve into a soft reverie—like a camera’s soft-focus image of a garden.

Top notes: Bergamot, galbanum, orange blossom

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, narcissus, violet, orris, mimosa, hyacinth, carnation

Base notes: Sandalwood, cedar, oakmoss, amber, musk

Aramis by Estée Lauder (1965)

Perfumer: Bernard Chant

The short review: Mint, herbs, BO, Naugahyde, and the smell of Burt Reynolds’s chest hair in the 1970s. But seriously …

This glorious leather chypre starts off with a wonderful fresh/bitter herbaceousness combined with a very prominent body-odor note from cumin. Please note: The cumin here doesn’t just suggest your run-of-the-mill perspiration; the body odor note in Aramis is the smell of the armpits of a man who’s been exercising for a while and possibly hasn’t bathed in a couple days. It has that almost-metallic sharpness that accompanies the aroma of an especially ripe pair of pits. Jarring—but sexy, in the way that smelling the body odor of someone you’re attracted to can be both repellent and erotic.

Beautifully blended gardenia, jasmine, amber, and sandalwood sweeten and warm the scent almost immediately, giving Aramis a comforting softness that invites you to snuggle with it on its Naugahyde couch. (Just snuggling, it promises!)

But don’t believe Aramis’s innocent act; this cologne has carnal intent. As it starts to dry down, the well-worn suede portion of the scent comes forth, primarily through the amazingly creamy and smoky castoreum and leather accord.

Although this is a masculine scent, I’m going to wear it myself. It’s reminiscent, in fact, of many 1960s animalic chypres for women, like Fête de Molyneux (1962) and Miss Balmain (1967). Although less animalic, the reformulation is quite nice.

Top notes: Artemisia, aldehydes, bergamot, gardenia, green note, cumin

Heart notes: Jasmine, patchouli, orris, vetiver, sandalwood

Base notes: Leather, oakmoss, castoreum, amber, musk

Crescendo by Lanvin (1965)

Crescendo is a musical term describing a composition’s increasing volume. Crescendo, the perfume, expresses this musical metaphor by amping its notes from feminine to masculine. Soon after I popped open the tiny bottle, Crescendo’s bracing floral to spicy scent went from zero to sixty in record speed. Its light floral heart is surrounded by spice and intrigue, and the crescendo of intensity ends in soft, rich incense. At it lingers on my skin, this floral scent tinged with tobacco and leather seems to get spicier.

Notes: Iris, carnation, hyacinth, amber, incense, spices

(Notes from Fragrantica.com.)

Imprévu by Coty (1965)

Rosy, green, and lemony-geranium notes, lifted by aldehydes, radiate from the core of this ladylike fragrance, as put together as a 1960s suit with matching shoes and pocketbook. As Imprévu (“Unexpected”) dries down, orris and sandalwood, with a touch of animalic honey, create a woody-powdery base that will smell like an “old lady” to the uninitiated, and sensual and dreamy to those of us who are used to it.

Top notes: Aldehydes, leafy green, bergamot, coriander

Heart notes: Rose, geranium, lily of the valley, orris, honey

Base notes: Sandalwood, tonka, cedarwood, oakmoss, musk, vetiver

Vivara by Emilio Pucci (1965)

In this 1970s ad for Vivara, a woman is veiled with a Pucci-printed scarf.

Vivara is an herby green chypre with a subtle rose heart, bitter shots of galbanum and lemon, and a mossy, animalic base reminiscent of Bandit’s. It progresses from a sunny, bright scent to a sensual, galbanumtinged-plus-costus skin accord. Perfume gods, please bring back green-leather chypres! Or at least let me hoard a lifetime supply. Perfumer Yann Vasnier’s assessment: “It’s a green chypre à la Cabochard but spicier, maybe with galbanum, clove, and a really fatty costus.”

Top notes: Galbanum, lemon, bergamot

Heart notes: Cypress, May rose, Bulgarian rose

Base notes: Mysore sandalwood, labdanum

Eau Sauvage by Christian Dior (1966)

Perfumer: Edmond Roudnitska

A classic unisex fragrance that surely influenced the clean scents of the 1990s, Eau Sauvage has been described as Roudnitska’s 1972 Diorella without its peach note. It starts off with wonderfully crisp lemon and basil top notes, enhanced by bergamot and a fruity—maybe melon?—note. Subtle spice and woods add dimension to the radiant citrus notes, and coriander and cumin contribute subtle, disquieting funkiness. Eau Sauvage is a landmark perfume because of Roudnitska’s 2 percent dosage of Hedione, a chemical discovered by Firmenich in 1959 that brings a veil of transparent jasmine to this masculine fragrance. According to perfumer Pierre Bourdon, “[Eau Sauvage] used to be very green and fresh. Today, it has been replaced by something softer and duller.” He attributes this to the removal of furocoumarins, a class of organic chemical compounds found in ingredients like bergamot that have been known to create dark spots on the skin when exposed to the sun.

As clean as Eau Sauvage is, its subliminal civet note evokes the olfactory impression of a freshly showered man who nevertheless retains a whiff of body odor he can’t wash off completely. Clean mixed in with a stubborn, human scent. It’s a sexy combination, particularly striking in a scent so clean and fresh.

Top notes: Bergamot, lemon, basil, cumin, fruit note

Heart notes: Jasmine, patchouli, carnation, coriander, orris, sandalwood

Base notes: Oakmoss, amber, musk

Fidji by Guy Laroche (1966)

In this 1982 ad, we’re given a Gauguinesque fantasy for “Fidji: the perfume of paradise found.”

Perfumer: Josephine Catapano

Fidji starts off green-fresh in its top notes, moves into a radiant jasmine/rose, and, softened by buttery orris, it dries down to a woody and spicy warmth.

By the time Fidji dries down, I smell a golden rose, kept fresh by galbanum and citrus notes, fattened by orris, with the slightest woody spice of sandalwood and oakmoss. The volume of its initial, intense rush of greens and florals is turned down, but Fidji’s quiet, gorgeous presence lingers for hours.

The light-colored reformulation of Fidji isn’t as rich as the vintage; it smells watery and transparent. The florals also aren’t followed up by the warming base notes found in the original formula, making the reformulated Fidji seem one-dimensional and lacking the dreamy mood the multifaceted original creates. The reformulation also just smells cheaper than the original. This lack of evolution from green to floral to spicy/woody/warm in the reformulation is like a day on the beach without a sunset—namely, not good.

Top notes: Galbanum, hyacinth, bergamot, lemon

Heart notes: Carnation, orris, jasmine, rose, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Vetiver, musk, sandalwood, oakmoss

Bat-Sheba by Judith Muller (1967)

Perfumer: Sophia Grojsman

Imagine if a pungent rose petal had been dipped into a pot of honey, sandalwood, and amber, and you get a sense of the narcotic allure of Sophia Grojsman’s first composition, Bat-Sheba. It has the elegance and structure of a chypre, the heady sweetness of a floral, and the sexy spice of an Oriental.

Bat-Sheba’s contrasting intensities of floral, fruit, and green notes heighten the dark and sultry base, and already in Grojsman’s first composition is her signature lush complexity. In the not-so-savory biblical backstory, King David spied Bathsheba bathing and was so taken with her that he lost his senses, committing adultery and who knows what else. Perfumer Yann Vasnier has described Bat-Sheba as reminiscent of Miss Dior.

Notes from Octavian Coifan: Cactus, rosewood, vanilla/cocoa balsamic and chypre-woody base, powders, and isobutyl quinoline woody note

Notes from Yann Vasnier: Aldehydes, citrus, green notes, rose, chypre, patchouli

Futur by Robert Piguet (1967)

Released under Robert Piguet’s name fourteen years after the couturier’s death, Futur had a brief life span, discontinued just seven years later, in 1974. The scent’s longevity, like the perfume’s brief life, has a shooting star (or racing rocket?) quality. As I put it on my skin, its piquant, joyous burst of citrus and flowers turns into something lush and animalic. It is a strangely patched-together perfume, in terms of mood and temperament, with the liftoff of bitter green and florals descending back to earth (and back in time, to the ’50s!) with a lushness reminiscent of Baghari.

Bitter, fresh, floral, smoky, incensey, and then buttery animalic—the new Futur has a lot to live up to. This gorgeous thing reminds me of Piguet’s Baghari, and the near-ripe fruit plus incense I smell reminds me of Jean-Claude Ellena’s green-mango inspired Un Jardin sur le Nil.

Notes from Octavian Coifan: Bitter thyme- and basil-like notes, vetiver, isobutyl quinoline, galbanum, Tamarix

Notes from The Scented Salamander’s Chantal-Hélène Wagner: Galbanum, hyacinth, narcissus, daffodil, leather

Masumi by Coty (1967)

Sporting a not-oft-seen yoga/disco look, the model in this 1977 Masumi perfume ad may be in half lotus position in search of Nirvana, but that doesn’t mean she can’t look faaaabulous while doing it! And you can’t see it, but I’m certain the entire ad is illuminated by an out-of-frame disco ball.

Masumi (“Beauty, Truth, and Purity” in Japanese) starts off tart and gives way to a gorgeous soapy rose, pushed by a galbanum-like greenness into what feels like sport-scent territory, with coriander and tarragon the minor keys in its top notes’ key of green. Momentarily, Masumi smells like Estée Lauder’s Aliage, with that galbanum/peach tartness that makes that scent so beautiful, a not-quite-yet-ripe stone fruit married to a tea rose.

It doesn’t take long for its base to signal that this is no sport scent, however: Classic fresh florals, with Rose de Mai in the lead, are dressed up in elegant powderiness thanks to orris, and the gravitas of mossiness thanks to oakmoss and vetiver. With a subtle warming amber accord like the sun in the backdrop, Masumi feels like a hot summer day that’s coming to a close.

Top notes: Bergamot, lemon, orange, coriander, tarragon

Heart notes: Lily of the valley, Rose de Mai, jasmine, orris, carnation, lily, lilac

Base notes: Vetiver, oakmoss, musk, labdanum, benzoin, amber

Perfume goes electric in this two-page ad for Graffiti.

Miss Balmain by Pierre Balmain (1967)

Perfumer: Germaine Cellier

There are a couple ways to look at Miss Balmain, and both of them involve a comparison with Bandit, which seems to be its reference scent. (Germaine Cellier, the perfumer who composed both of these masterpieces, was known to reuse her famous accords in different compositions.)

In the first comparison, Miss Balmain is Bandit Lite—not as daring, not as angular, and not as harsh as Bandit. Perhaps Miss Balmain is the dominatrix-in-training who will at some point drop all her feminine signifiers (flowers and softness) and take up the whip Bandit saves for her, for when she’s ready to graduate.

If you don’t think of Bandit as the reference scent, but rather as the building-block accord, then Miss Balmain is the perfected, more fully matured Bandit, rounded out with its greens and florals, every note singing in harmony. Bandit is like a saturated, underexposed photograph whose brightness (florals and green notes) glow almost imperceptibly under its cloak of darkness. Miss Balmain is the same picture ratcheted up one full stop, so that those invisible greens and florals come forward. Or, Miss Balmain is like those paintings that get cleaned up by art historians, revealing color and brightness where there was only brooding darkness before.

Unlike Jolie Madame, Miss Balmain’s sweetness isn’t candied and doesn’t stick around for as long as it does in JM, and unlike Jolie Madame, Miss Balmain has a momentary tartness. When I sniff Miss Balmain, I get the same impression of overwhelming beauty I do with Cellier’s Vent Vert. It’s an “everything all at once” scent, joyous and kaleidoscopic in its loveliness.

Top notes: Aldehydes, coriander, gardenia, citrus oils, thujone

Heart notes: Carnation, narcissus, orris root, jasmine, rose, jonquil

Base notes: Leather, amber, patchouli, castoreum, moss, vetiver

English Leather Timberline by MEM Company (1968)

A timberline is the point on a mountain where trees stop growing, so it’s not a surprise that Timberline is less woody than it is aromatic, and even ambery sweet. Categorized by the Haarmann & Reimer Fragrance Guide as a woody, ambery fougère, its anisic, herbaceous, and citrus top gives way to a soft, balsamic base lightly sweetened with honey and heliotrope and spiced with cinnamon and carnation. I have the cologne version, and this wisp of a fragrance, like all the English Leather colognes, has personality without much depth or longevity. The Dana version without the wooden cap doesn’t score a lot of points with commenters in perfume forums, so try to get vintage; they’re still pretty cheap.

Top notes: Bergamot, lavender, lemon, anise, basil, rosemary

Heart notes: Geranium, carnation, cinnamon, fern, heliotrope, aldehyde, cedarwood, pine needle

Base notes: Sandalwood, vetiver, moss, tonka, vanilla, honey, musk

Estée by Estée Lauder (1968)

Sweet, spicy, and powdery, Estée hits all the notes that can scare newcomers away from vintage perfume. Its cloying jasmine leads, followed by spicy carnation as a bridge to oakmoss and smooth, powdery sandalwood. Estée is the rare vintage perfume I think smells too powdery and floral for modern noses.

Notes: Coriander, rose, lily of the valley, jasmine, carnation, oakmoss, sandalwood

Mink and Pearls by Jovan (1968)

Although it’s called Mink and Pearls, as if in homage to the great animalic chypres, Intimate and Primitif, Jovan nevertheless stays true to a late-1960s, early-1970s, back-to-the-earth freshness. Starting with a bracing galbanum, joined with clary sage and bergamot, Mink and Pearls gets a dose of sweet florals with a green glow from narcissus. It’s not long before we’re walking on a blanket of cool, dry moss and woods with a hint of dark animal notes.

Instead of diving too deep into Eros, Mink and Pearls stays in the woods, with clary sage, galbanum, and spice from carnation and patchouli. A classic green-leather chypre, sunny side up.

Top notes: Aldehydes, hyacinch, galbanum, clarry sage, bergamot

Heart notes: Jasmine, narcissus, jonquil, rose, carnation, tuberose

Base notes: Patchouli, castoreum, amber, tonka, moss, leather musk

Azurée by Estée Lauder (1969)

Perfumer: Bernard Chant

Azurée, Estée Lauder’s chypre-floral animalic, is a complex beauty that sends your olfactory brain off into multiple directions at once. It’s often referred to as the sister fragrance to Chant’s other Estée Lauder composition, the hairy-chested Aramis.

Citrusy and herbal (bergamot/artemesia), vaguely tropical and candied (the sweetness and lushness from the gardenia/amber), Azurée ends with a bone-dry, bitter-green leather accord that is Bandit-like yet softer in its elegance and austerity.

One of the most intriguing aspects about Azurée for me is that although the florals are flanked on either side by dry notes, there’s a rich, momentary gourmand quality to the scent because of the sweet amber, and perhaps how it combines with gardenia and ylang-ylang. For a brief second in the midst of these florals-in-the-desert, a beguiling and fleeting Oriental quality wafts into the perfume, as if Azurée had tucked a piece of caramel candy into its otherwise-dry floral pocket.

Top notes: Aldehydes, bergamot, artemesia, gardenia

Heart notes: Jasmine, geranium, cyclamen, orris, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Leather, patchouli, oakmoss, musk, amber

Calandre by Paco Rabanne (1969)

Perfumer: Michel Hy

Calandre by Paco Rabanne is a fresh floral with a spicy leafiness that recalls the coriander note in Jean Couturier’s much bolder and heavier chypre, Coriandre. Its sheer florals—rose, lily of the valley, geranium, and jasmine—are so transparent they’re like watercolors painted with flower petals.

There’s character in Calandre’s notes, but they’re in their lightest, still-adolescent dilution. The perfume is, nevertheless, sensual. Rose and jasmine have their indolic training wheels on, not yet making bedroom eyes or inviting you closer, but telegraphing sexuality from a distance. Musk, amber, and sandalwood give Calandre’s innocent character a kind of inchoate and unknowing sensuality, the kind that is tossed off by beautiful teenage girls between adolescence and womanhood when they’re not yet fully aware of their effect on others.

At the risk of sounding lecherous, I’ll say that Calandre smells like the lovely sweat of a teenage girl. There may be musky notes in her perspiration, but they smell like their own kind of spicy perfume. I think of Lolita smelling like Calandre, or the scent of virgins Patrick Süskind’s sad predator in Perfume wanted to bottle.

Like a Debussy piano piece that fully absorbs you when you’re listening to it, but floats away just as quickly, Calandre is ever-so-slightly melancholy and heartbreaking in its fragile beauty.

Top notes: Leafy green, aldehydes, bergamot

Heart notes: Rose, lily of the valley, geranium, jasmine, orris

Base notes: Sandalwood, vetiver, musk, amber, oakmoss

Chamade by Guerlain (1969)

Perfumer: Paul Guerlain

Chamade, created by Guerlain in homage to Françoise Sagan’s novel, La Chamade, means a kind of drumbeat or trumpet sound that signals surrender to the enemy. It can also describe the kind of beating your heart does when you’re in love.

With orris’s powdery delicacy, sandalwood’s buttery richness, and a rose so fresh and beautiful I can still smell a hallucinatory petal peeking out in the vintage formula, Chamade is not for the faint of heart. I imagine a woman with a little too much makeup on, a ’60s woman who has a spiritualist and makes her own kombucha tea. It’s a fragrance from another time, as wild and loud as a Pucci print.

Top notes: Hyacinth, jasmine

Heart notes: Turkish rose, ylang-ylang, blackcurrant bud, galbanum, lilac, lily of the valley

Base notes: Vanilla, sandalwood, tonka bean, vetiver, amber, iris

Dioressence by Christian Dior (1969)

A woman explodes from a flower in this illustration by Nikasinovich for Chamade, which means either a drumbeat that announces one side’s surrender or a pounding heartbeat.

Perfumer: Guy Robert

Dioressence, a spicy, floral chypre takes off with an intense green note that almost seems to waver for a moment like the undulating note from a theremin. First sour, then garbagey, it returns to its bright greeness and, in the next movement of the perfume, everything settles into the spicy, warm floral that is Dioressence’s basic personality. Glamorous and festive, Dioressence is a party scent.

Lore has it that perfumer Guy Robert was approached by the Christian Dior folks and asked to create an animalic Dior, a perfume that could live up to the tagline, le parfum barbare (“the barbaric perfume”). Given Diorella’s magnificent fruit-gone-bad note and Miss Dior’s not very ladylike whiff-of-underpants note, you could almost call it the Dior formula! Robert had the good fortune (so the story goes) to acquire some ambergris, and while at Dior headquarters, after rubbing his fingers into the oily block (which is how you smell this floral, marine-like scent), he went into the bathroom and washed his hands with a Miss Dior knock-off soap. On the plane ride back, he smelled his hands, Et voila! Le parfum barbare was born. (Although it’s possible that vintage Dioressence in the extrait concentration has natural ambergris, even perfume historian Octavian Coifan thinks that the ambergris note in Dioressence is a skilled reconstitution of synthetic and natural notes, such as ambrox and detalox.)

Heady and intense, not everyone could wear Dioresscence. Like Chamade, which it reminds me of a bit in terms of character, Dioressence makes me think of women like Endora from the television show Bewitched, or Anne Bancroft’s Mrs. Robinson. Lusty, headstrong, a little tipsy at the holiday party, and ready to get into some trouble. She might be in a Pucci maxi dress reeking of Dioressence, and you may have to stand back from her when she’s regaling you with some crazy story in her too-loud voice. But days later when you catch a whiff of it again on a stranger, you think: glamour, parties, experienced women, too many cigarettes, and flowing glasses of champagne. Barbaric? Sounds like the height of sophistication to me.

Top notes: Aldehydes, orange

Heart notes: Jasmine, geranium, cinnamon, carnation, orris, ylang-ylang, tuberose

Base notes: Patchouli, oakmoss, vetiver, vanilla, musk

Musk by Alyssa Ashley for Houbigant (1969)

In the late 1960s, Alyssa Ashley was introduced to the Houbigant Parquet division of perfumes. According to a website that was up until recently, it was the hippie era that influenced perfume’s nostalgic look back to the animal notes of civet, musk, and ambergris, which were actually the names of the Alyssa Ashley perfumes themselves, and part of their “Natural Primitives” collection:

At the end of the ’60s … music changed, habits changed, fashion changed. The young generation, starting from the USA and England, embraced oriental philosophies looking for a simpler, more natural lifestyle. This new style of living also reflected itself in perfume. Young people no longer wanted the sophisticated fragrances worn by their parents, but embraced the simple ones whose roots lay in oriental culture. The hippies and the flower children bought the fashionable essential oils, and in 1969 Alyssa Ashley launched their first product, Musk Oil.

My first introduction to Alyssa Ashley’s musk was via a modern formulation. (Of all the Natural Primitives, Musk is the only one still available, albeit in a reformulated version.) I wasn’t that taken with it, but decided to give the vintage a try. I won an eBay auction of a vintage Musk “roll-on” from the 1970s, for 99 cents. More floral and brighter than Civet and less spicy than Ambergris, Alyssa Ashley Musk is a happy, bright, clean musk with a hint of baby powder, the scent of freshly washed hair and skin, but with warmth.

Notes not available.

In this amazing 1969 ad from Lanvin for My Sin perfume, a man and woman with identical haircuts and sweaters shown from behind represent anxiety over the ways in which feminism, women’s liberation, and the sexual revolution threaten to erase sexual difference altogether. “Once upon a time,” the ad begins, “it was easy to tell the girls from the boys … all you had to do was look.” Where vision fails, the conventionally gendered perfume steps in.

Norell by Norell (1969)

Perfumer: Josephine Catapano

Josephine Catapano’s favorite composition, Norell is a beautifully blended green floral that approaches chypre-hood but stops short, like a woman who removes the one accessory—a statement necklace or stiletto heels—that would make her outfit more formal.

It starts off bright and fresh, moves into radiant floral mode, and dries down to a slightly sweet and soapy/woody floral warmth, like suntanned skin plus flowers.

Lots of women, adhering to Coco Chanel’s dictum that a woman should smell like a woman and not a rose, find the floral category matronly, unsexy, or (gasp!) too conventional. I’m beginning to think, however, that floral beauties like Norell and another Josephine Catapano creation, Fidji, are the little black dresses of the perfume world. Sometimes, you just want to smell good without thinking about it too much.

What distinguishes Norell from some of the flower bombs of today is its green opening and its development toward a soft, ambery/woody drydown. It does its dazzling thing for a bit, and exits softly and with grace.

Top notes: Hyacinth, galbanum, bergamot, narcissus, lemon

Heart notes: Carnation, jasmine, rose, orris, orchid

Base notes: Sandalwood, musk, cedarwood, moss, amber

Ô de Lancôme by Lancôme (1969)

Perfumer: Robert Gonnon

A precursor to Clarins’ Eau Dynamisante, Ô de Lancôme is a light, lemony, fresh chypre with a substantial-enough base to make you wonder why citrus chypres aren’t still made that are rooted to earth. Unlike CK One or other fresh 1990s scents, this has a base that anchors you to a foundation—to earth, moss, trees, vetiver. It smells natural. There’s a gorgeous interplay between the hesperidic top notes and light florals, but it’s the drydown that will captivate your heart. I want to bathe in this stuff. Tart, green, herbal, woody-mossy; one of the best citruses out there. (Word on the street is the reformulation isn’t as nice.)

Top notes: Bergamot, lemon, tangerine

Heart notes: Basil, rosemary, coriander, honeysuckle, jasmine

Base notes: Sandalwood, vetiver, oakmoss, cistus labdanum

You can almost hear marketers thinking in this 1972 ad for Ma Griffe: “How can something as old-fashioned as perfume be relevant to the newly liberated woman?” Easy! By creating nostalgia for the prefeminist utopia of “unliberation”: a world in which men take care of women.

A Breath of Fresh Air

Aliage, Diorella, White Linen (1970–1979)

You can really feel in many 1970s scents a kind of loosening up, a freshness, a breeziness that seems implicitly tied to the women’s movement, and perhaps, an escape from the tinderbox that was the 1960s. Many green, fresh masterpieces populate this decade, allowing women to smell austere, powerful, thoughtful, and delicate—sometimes all at once. (Men’s scents get greened, as well.)

I was looking at an early-1970s issue of Vogue with a friend, and she remarked that unlike today, the young models looked like women and not teenage girls. Just think of the supermodels then: Gia Carangi, Karen Graham, Beverly Johnson, and Lisa Taylor. They were in their twenties, and their faces looked adult rather than adolescent—knowing, womanly, and even sexually intimidating. Perfumes from the 1970s share that unapologetic sophistication. They weren’t afraid of being a little difficult and complex. After all, teens already had their own scents, like Love’s Baby Soft and Blue Jeans by Shulton. This division that once existed between women and girls seems almost nonexistent now in fashion and pop culture in general.

In addition to being unapologetically adult, 1970s perfumes weren’t afraid to gender-bend or get a little dirty. The chypre category, like the ideal 1970s woman, is on the verge of androgyny, and many florals, chypres, and green scents from the 1970s maintained an allegiance to the body by retaining traces of its musky sweat in the notes. They weren’t trying to mask the body—just embrace it.

For a moment, for lines like Coty’s Sweet Earth, there was a return to the nineteenth-century soliflore, with perfumes constructed around one perfume note—for example, Honeysuckle, Gardenia, or Hyacinth. Alyssa Ashley for Houbigant got into the retro mood as well with the Natural Primitives line of perfumes named after animal base notes: Ambergris, Musk, and Civet.

Givenchy III by Givenchy (1970)

A green/floral chypre, Givenchy III is pretty much perfection. It starts off with a mouthwatering combo of green/citrus notes (galbanum and mandarin) and fruit/flowers (peach and gardenia), which add luscious candied juiciness to the dry, refined, and elegant greenness of this chypre. You almost forget its coquettish brightness as it dries down to a woody, powdery, spicy, and warm ambery base.

The peach and galbanum combo must have inspired Estée Lauder’s Aliage, which came out two years later. Aliage distilled, simplified, and amplified those notes, chopping off the almost-melancholy notes that follow in their wake. (After all, what sport scent gets all brooding and philosophical?)

Givenchy III, in contrast, almost immediately moves from that upper register of sunshine and happiness by drying down into a softer, more-contemplative mood with hyacinth and iris in its base.

There are almost two perfumes on top of each other in Givenchy III, each with different personalities. What’s wonderful is Givenchy III’s ability to reconcile these two moods into one; you can actually still smell those early notes as the perfume’s dusk arrives, like the René Magritte paintings that seem to occur on the cusp between daytime and nighttime.

Top notes: Aldehydes, bergamot, mandarin, galbanum, peach, gardenia

Heart notes: Lily of the valley, hyacinth, rose, jasmine, iris root

Base notes: Patchouli, oakmoss, amber, sandalwood

Moon Drops by Revlon (1970)

A little Moon Drops perfume on my pulse points, a polyester maxi dress, some frosty orange lipstick, and this ’70s lady is ready for the Key Party! From its hippie-dippy name to its sexy-musky character, Moon Drops has eBay snipers on high alert when it comes down the pike. Although Moon Drops came out in 1970, it still has one foot in 1960s perfume baroque (Dioressence, Bat-Sheba, and Bal à Versailles).

With honeyed ripe fruit, spicy florals, and a sensuous base of balsams and woods, Moon Drops is dripping with beauty and complexity. Throughout all this richness I can still smell the sharpness of ylang-ylang and lily of the valley, lifting the perfume back up from sinking into its own decadence.

Top notes: Aldehydes, gardenia, peach, raspberry, bergamot

Heart notes: Lily of the valley, rose, jasmine, ylang-ylang, carnation, orris, honey, tuberose

Base notes: Sandalwood, musk, cedarwood, moss, styrax, amber, benzoin

Wind Drift English Leather by MEM Company (1970)

My favorite of the English Leather quad, Wind Drift has a transparency that evokes an Olivia Giacobetti painted from an expressive but sheer palette of olfactory colors, or a minimalist Jo Malone citrus, simple but beautiful. Its little box (I got a group of minis) features a tiny wave, signifying—unlike the mini glade of trees on Timberline, the outline of a citrus fruit on Lime, or the saddle and hat on English Leather—that it will somehow be related to the sea. At its heart, Wind Drift has the scent of wet wood (cedar and sandalwood) surrounded by citrus, herbs, light florals, and subtle musk. For an inexpensive drugstore cologne, this was a charming, restrained little number.

Notes not available.

Chanel No. 19 by Chanel (1971)

Perfumer: Henri Robert

Chanel No. 19, composed by Henri Robert to commemorate Coco Chanel’s eighty-seventh birthday on August 19, is a masterpiece of restraint. Its song sounds like piano notes played with the damper pedal down. Luxuriant, but not dazzling or bright, Chanel No. 19 is also like semiprecious stones before they’re polished, when their opacity hints at their rawness. Although its strange coldness has prompted reviews that conjure up images of ruthless businesswomen, its earthy, rooty notes suggest a witch in an enchanted forest rather than a bitch in a boardroom.

Chanel No. 19 lurks quietly in dark woods, with muted florals and a hint of fresh-cut leaves and watery cucumber. It has a diluted, earthy, vegetal transparency like freshly sliced root, or moss that has just been unmoored from its base at a tree. It doesn’t release its scent right away.

In an interesting way, it’s what Chanel No. 19 holds back—comforting sweetness, melody, and light—that is its virtue. You wouldn’t ask atonal music for a melody, an herbal tincture for sugar, or a fairy-tale witch for kindness. It’s what we might deem missing from Chanel No. 19 (what is, in fact, its restraint) that makes this a haunting fragrance. The disquieting nature of the top and heart notes subside into a dreamy, comforting base of incredibly subtle leather and woods.

Some of perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena’s minimalist creations seem influenced by Chanel No. 19, particularly his 1992 Bulgari Au Thé Vert Au Parfumée. But where Au Thé Vert is a sunny, happy fragrance, Chanel No. 19 is a moody, poetic one.

A perfume appropriate for casting spells and reading tarot cards, Chanel No. 19 is the empress card, or the evil witch from Snow White. Cold, beautiful, and bewitching.

Tawn Limited, “Cupid’s Quiver” (1970)

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, advertising for feminine sprays and douches both celebrated the sexual revolution and exploited women’s insecurities. Jacques Guerlain may have claimed in the earlier part of the century that he wanted perfume to “smell like the underside of my mistress,” but now perfumes were being created to hide women’s purported body odors. Cupid’s Quiver spells it out with a directness rarely seen in today’s ads. The problem? Women’s “vaginal odor.” The solution? Deodorant sprays and douches with “exotic perfume” bases and fragrances, including raspberry, jasmine, and champagne. (Champagne?!)

Norforms, “Norforms Antiseptic Deodorant,” 1972

Doing its best to make women paranoid and hysterical about smelling bad, this Norform vaginal-deodorant suppositories ad suggests that without a suppository to keep “internal odor” away, a woman will (or should?) spend her entire day worrying about how much she’s stinking from within.

(The Chanel No. 19 eau de toilette version is like a ray of sunlight in the dark, damp, eau de parfum forest and features more leather and vetiver.)

Top notes: Galbanum, neroli, bergamot

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, lily of the valley, iris

Base notes: Vetiver, sandalwood, leather, musk

Empreinte by Courrèges (1971)

Perfumer: Robert Gonnon

French fashion designer André Courrèges was known for his geometric, streamlined, space-age designs replete with goggles, boots, and dangerously high miniskirts. (He and Mary Quant vied for the title of miniskirt inventor.) Empreinte (“Imprint”)—his delicate, melon/peach leather—seems to invoke, however, a 1940s-era woman of mystery rather than a miniskirt-clad Mod scenester.

Once the nose-clearing aldehydes get out of the way, Empreinte becomes herby, fruity, and woody-leathery. It’s one of the most delicate leather scents I’ve ever smelled, disarming my olfactory expectations with its rich peach / light melon / herbs combined with its chypre/amber-leather base. It reminds me of Femme, with its plummy-suede sexiness, and they share some notes, too: peach, plum, jasmine, rose, amber, patchouli, leather, sandalwood.

As it dries down, Empreinte continues to confuse and bewitch with its fresh yet worldly personality. It invites you in with its sweetness and warmth while telling you to keep your distance with its formal chypre/leather structure.

Top notes: Peach, bergamot, artemisia, aldehyde, coriander

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, orris, melon

Base notes: Amber, patchouli, cedarwood, sandalwood, oakmoss, castoreum

Rive Gauche by Yves Saint Laurent (1971)

Perfumers: Jacques Polge and Michel Hy

Truly gifted perfumers combine notes in ways that bring out the best in perfume ingredients, and Rive Gauche, thanks to Jacques Polge and Michel Hy, reminds us why rose is such an exemplary note in perfumery.

Like the metallic bottle with its contrast between cold silver and electric cobalt blue, Rive Gauche, the scent, projects a formal, classical elegance (aldehydic floral) underneath whose frozen veneer flows a heartbreakingly beautiful rose. The birch tar and resins in the vintage provide drama, like a drum roll, or the parting of dark velvet curtains on a stage, which doesn’t exist in the reformulation.

Without this preamble, there isn’t the same shock when the beautiful rose appears center stage. And it is truly radiant, like a movie star in her prime on the red carpet, when you know you’ll never see her looking as beautiful as you saw her that night. The subtle fruit from the peach, the sparkle from the bergamot and aldehydes, and the sheerness of lily of the valley—all of these notes lift Rose up on their shoulders, elevating it and helping it shine.

Drama, contrast, dissonance, surprises, multidimensionality, temporality—this is what has been cut out of the reformulated Rive Gauche. It’s like watching Hitchcock’s Vertigo without Technicolor or Bernard Herrmann’s score: an interesting movie, but just 50 percent (if such a thing can be quantified) of what it could be.

Top notes: Aldehydes, bergamot, leafy green, peach

Heart notes: Rose, jasmine, geranium, lily of the valley, orris, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Vetiver, tonka, sandalwood, moss, musk, amber

Sikkim by Lancôme (1971)

Perfumer: Robert Gonnon

I love extremes in perfume. If it’s a green fragrance, I want it to be so green as to be bitter and slightly scary. If it’s a floral, I want it indolic, overripe, and decadent. If it’s animalic, I want … well, you get the picture.

My love of extremes can also be satisfied by perfumes that try to do it all and succeed—multitaskers that are able to provide a whole host of extreme notes together in a symphony of excess. Sikkim by Lancôme makes me feel as if I’m getting everything at once: sweetness, freshness, bitterness, richness, spiciness, warmth, and depth—the whole shebang. It starts off mouthwateringly juicy and fresh, moves into a lush floral, and ends on an elegant, dry leather/moss accord.

Like Aramis (1965) and Miss Balmain (1967), but mossier than both, Sikkim combines green and herbaceous top notes with lush florals and a mossy-leathery-ambery drydown that is both sexy and elegant. (Thujone, an ingredient in the hallucination-inducing drink, Absinthe, is listed as a note for both Sikkim and Miss Balmain, and it’s basically a variety of artemisia, which is also a note in Aramis.) This combination provides a roller-coaster ride for your nose—and your brain—because you’re challenged to process these wonderful extremes you wouldn’t find in nature.

Sikkim’s bracing greenness offsets lush gardenia and makes it even sweeter and richer. For the longest time, the gardenia just lingers, its creamy-white petals offered up like a hallucination right in front of your nose. Its chypre-animalic drydown is spicy and mossy, while amber, castoreum, and leather accords create a warming and comforting base.

Sikkim is named after a tiny country in the Himalaya Mountains between Nepal, India, Bhutan, and Tibet that became a state of India in 1974. Sikkim is supposed to have a climate that ranges “from arctic to temperate to tropical as a traveler journeys up or down the lofty Himalayas.” The climate of Sikkim, the perfume, similarly cycles from arctic to temperate to tropical as its wearer travels from its top notes to its base notes.

Notes not available.

Via Lanvin by Lanvin (1971)

Bitter greens and powdery, woody florals balance each other out in this chic, put-together perfume. Harder (and greener) than florals today, yet also softer and more powdery, Via Lanvin exposes the balancing act that was femininity at the dawn of the women’s liberation movement. As it dries down, it gets warmer and sweeter (thanks to amber), like a person who takes her time getting to know you before showing a softer side, but its backbone remains wonderfully and bracingly green. An hour or so in, and the most complex and interesting mix of clovey carnation, amber, and moss mingle and continue the perfume’s conversation.

Top notes: Leafy green, bergamot, aldehyde, violet, lemon

Heart notes: Lily of the valley, jasmine, orris, carnation, rose, ylang-ylang, narcissus

Base notes: Vetiver, cedar, sandalwood, musk, amber, moss

Weil de Weil (1971)

Weil de Weil starts off with a wonderfully bitter green accord—galbanum, leafy-green notes, and facets from neroli and narcissus. Just as these tart, minor-key notes sing out, Weil subtly evolves into something softer and dreamier, thanks to a plump gardenia and powdery—almost rotten-sweet—hyacinth. The combination of the almost-too-strong hyacinth and leafy-green note (coriander?) mixed with musk, amber, sandalwood, and leather creates a momentary note of perspiration. (I didn’t include civet, but I’ve seen it mentioned.)

Weil de Weil manages to evoke the transformation of spring to summer, of freshness to ripeness, of innocence to the first stirring of erotic desire. Its animalic and woody base notes turn the perfume’s springtime coolness into a hot, languid summer. Or, more accurately, it deconstructs those oppositions and suggests that spring already contains the last days of summer; that innocence always contains experience; and that every beginning has the seeds of its ending.

Top notes: Galbanum, leafy green, gardenia, hyacinth, neroli

Heart notes: Rose, orris, jasmine, narcissus, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Sandalwood, cedarwood, oakmoss, musk, amber, leather

Aliage by Estée Lauder (1972)

Perfumer: Francis Camail

Marketed as a sports fragrance, Aliage is as tart as a zested lemon, with a drop of musky peach and a greener-than-green galbanum note, a perfume whose initial notes soar like high keys in a musical composition. Like Balmain’s Vent Vert in terms of its citrus brightness and galbanum piquancy, Aliage packs a punch.

Aliage is fresh and citrusy, with a forest backdrop of resiny pine, thyme, oakmoss, and vetiver. And there’s a shadow of musk just behind all these bright, fresh notes. A hint of ripe fruit from the peach doesn’t exactly make Aliage sweet, but it does round out and mellow its sharp notes. Aliage is one of the few scents I fantasize about finding the cocktail equivalent of, so I can drink it. Although it’s still being made, I’ve heard the more-modern formulation isn’t the same.

Top notes: Green notes (galbanum?), citrus oils, peach

Heart notes: Jasmine, rosewood, thyme, pine needle

Base notes: Vetiver, myrrh, musk, oakmoss

Aromatics Elixir by Clinique (1972)

Perfumer: Bernard Chant

Aromatics Elixir, a green chypre, smells like a mixture of dried, pressed roses, coriander, and carnation whose arid herbiness has been reconstituted with a few drops of sweet flower essences. This contrast between dry and sweet rests on a warming, animalic, and spicy base of sandalwood, vetiver, and a heaping dose of patchouli, with its camphoraceous-medicinal, oily darkness.

Aromatics Elixir is so different in style from the prevailing style of clean and fruity that it surprises me it is actually still at the Clinique counter rather than behind museum glass. It has that air about it that Private Collection by Estée Lauder has—that it would rather be admired than loved, described as chic rather than pretty.

When I was a perfume-obsessed tween at the mall, trying on everything I could get my hands on, I remember thinking that Aromatics Elixir stunk to high heaven, and I wondered who would want to smell so harsh, so unlike a flower. That was then …

Top notes: Bergamot, green notes, coriander, rosewood, aldehyde (palmarosa, a rose-scented species of lemongrass also called Indian geranium)

Heart notes: Rose de Mai, jasmine, carnation, ylang-ylang, tuberose, orris

Base notes: Patchouli, vetiver, civet, sandalwood, oakmoss, cistus, musk

Audace by Rochas (1972)

Referencing the women’s movement, this 1972 ad for Rochas’s Audace claims cryptically that “what has happened to women” has also happened to perfume.

A green floral chypre in the style of Sikkim, Fête de Molyneux, and Aramis, Audace is a perfect balance of bracing green, rich florals, and mossiness. In some ways, the International Fragrance Association (IFRA) restrictions—and possible future EU ban—on oakmoss will not matter to perfumes like this. No one is making them, anyway; the style is too old-fashioned for some. As I sniff the drydown on my hand, I seriously question why, and plan on hoarding this stuff.

Notes not available.

Diorella by Christian Dior (1972)

Perfumer: Edmond Roudnitska

Fur rubbed with mint toothpaste. Vietnamese beef salad. Like fruit on the verge of going bad. More than any other vintage perfume that I’ve encountered, the fresh yet funky-ripe perfume Diorella provokes the most hyperbolic metaphors from perfume critics.

Christian Dior’s Diorella, 1972 (Artist: René Gruau)

Diorella was Roudnitska’s favorite perfume, described by many as similar to Eau Sauvage, but with a drop of peach. If Eau Sauvage is Roudnitska’s overexposed olfactory photograph, and Femme, with its saturated, sueded fruit notes the underexposed one, then Diorella is the perfect picture, bright yet warm.

Kaleidoscopically complex, Diorella starts off citrus fresh and transitions to a body-odor-tinged (cumin-like) floral accord with honeysuckle and jasmine. The musky base adds weight to its sparkling top notes, never wearing Diorella down but rather giving it a little depth and darkness. Like Suzanne from Leonard Cohen’s song, Diorella “shows you where to look / amid the garbage and the flowers,” through its olfactory juxtaposition of ripe smells and floral notes. Diorella smells—this is actually an endorsement—like not-yet-going-bad garbage that someone has thrown a pile of flowers onto.

I even smelled a touch of the notoriously pungent durian fruit in the sweet/rotten undertones of Diorella, or maybe more accurately, jackfruit, which could be an aspect of its melon note.

Honestly, does anyone do “funk” as well as Roudnitska? It’s as if he’s reminding us that these ripe smells connote death as much as they do life, and that it is the mortality of these bright and alive things that makes them beautiful. It’s been said that Diorella was the first perfume to break free from the notion that flowers were wholesome. Whether or not it was the first, I agree that one would definitely think of flowers and citrus fragrances differently after spending some time with Diorella. There’s a living, breathing, dirty animal underneath the clean citrus and the ladylike flowers.

Top notes: Sicilian lemon, peach, basil, Italian bergamot, lemon, green notes

Heart notes: Honeysuckle, jasmine, violet, rosebud, carnation, cyclamen

Base notes: Oakmoss, clove, sandalwood, vetiver, musk, patchouli

Infini by Caron (1972)

Perfumer: Gerard Lefort

Like a mini Coriandre (1973), rosy and herby Infini by Caron is an edgy floral aldehyde with a distinctly ’70s kind of sophistication.

It starts out with a strong coriander note, which creates an interesting dry counterpoint to the juicy peach, sweet neroli, and rich rose that bloom as the fragrance evolves into its floral heart. Infini then dries down to a wonderful base of woody sandalwood and vetiver, with tonka, musk, ambrein (an ambergris-like extract from cistus labdanum), and civet, the animalic notes adding subtle sexiness and warmth. Hours after I’ve applied it, Infini, befitting its name, seems to go on forever, echoing the faintest rose and coriander veiled by warm base notes.

Top notes: Aldehyde complex, bergamot, peach, neroli, coriander

Heart notes: Rosa centifolia, jasmine, lily of the valley, orris, ylang-ylang, carnation

Base notes: Sandalwood, vetiver, ambrein, tonka, musk, civet

Charlie by Revlon (1973)

Model turned Charlie’s Angels actress Shelley Hack confidently struts in slacks through this iconic 1978 ad for Charlie perfume.

Created during the heyday of the women’s movement in the 1970s, Charlie, with its androgynous name, studiously carefree signature, and jaunty green / floral aldehydic personality, could be said to be one of the first feminist fragrances ever created.

I say feminist because it was marketed to American women during an era when feminist consciousness was at its pop-culture height, and because it features independent ladies (mainly model turned Charlie’s Angels actress Shelley Hack) confidently strutting through print and television ads wearing slacks.

Charlie has some interesting tensions going on within it that make it quite interesting. As a feminist fragrance (just humor me on this one), it seems to be saying, “I can be pretty, independent, and strong.” As a pretty green floral that’s almost a chypre, it’s wearable, and, to my nose, still modern-smelling.

First off, the citrus oils and tarragon give it a bright and slightly green/herby beginning with a minuscule dose of licorice from the tarragon. Its radiant florals are more sporty than they are sexy—the cyclamen and lily of the valley greening the fragrance even more.

In its drydown, I get a whiff of Bandit, arguably the first feminist fragrance in a prefeminist era. What do I smell? Something leathery/rubbery, as fragrances with galbanum or isobutyl quinoline would give off. It has a faint chypre-like drydown, which makes sense because of its citrusy top note and oakmoss/sandalwood/cedarwood base notes. Chypres, to me, signify “strong woman,” and Charlie retains a trace of that in the drydown.

Top notes: Citrus oils, peach, hyacinth, tarragon

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, lily of the valley, cyclamen, carnation, orris

Base notes: Cedarwood, sandalwood, oakmoss, musk, vanilla

Cialenga by Balenciaga (1973)

Perfumer: Jacques Jentzen

Cialenga would belong to the beautiful, austere green chypres of the 1970s, but a magical drop of black currant or cassie warms it up with a subtle sweetness that rounds out its angles and makes it a little more approachable. It starts off with a citrusy fresh, green, slightly warm-fruity top, and progresses to a fresh lily of the valley/rose heart, and dries down to a mossy, smooth sandalwood finish. Perfectly balanced. Perfectly chic.

Top notes: Citrus oils, fruity nuances, cassie, green notes

Heart notes: Rose, lily of the valley, orris, clove buds, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Vetiver, cedarwood, oakmoss, fruity notes

Civet by Alyssa Ashley for Houbigant (1973)

I’ve been fascinated by Alyssa Ashley’s cult hit Civet for some time, dying to know how a 1970s perfume that dared to name itself after the fecal-smelling base note would smell. I also wanted to know why a bottle of Civet is now on eBay for $700. (Two answers to the latter question: [1] The bottles are almost extinct; and [2] It’s an animalic beauty.) After three years of searching, I finally found it on a decant site for (gulp) $20 per ¼ ml.

What a strange, mysterious treat this was. It starts off green and fresh. There’s an herbal, barely detectable mint aspect to Civet which reminds me just for a moment of Serge Lutens’s Tubereuse Criminelle, with its crazy camphory minty opening notes. Soon, Civet develops into a fresh, creamy white floral—my guess is gardenia. In my first few whiffs, I was certain that this perfume was animalic in name alone. If there was civet in this polite floral, I thought, it’s working subliminally. Its heart is a soft, creamy floral.

Boy, was I wrong. After days of sniffing nothing and hence resetting my nose, I decided to pull out my tiny decant again and dip a tiny wand into a tiny vial, which gathered a few tiny drops that I smeared on my skin. Wow—how did I miss this, I wondered. Civet in all its stinky glory had been there all along, hiding amid the indolic, rottenish facets of its white flowers, like the bruised, brown petal of a gardenia that’s been sitting around too long.

Notes not available.

Coriandre by Jean Couturier (1973)

Perfumer: Jacqueline Couturier

Coriandre’s beautiful rose blooms next to the dank herbiness of coriander, which almost smells like dried fenugreek, an herb used in Persian cooking. Coriandre gets a little soft, soapy, and woody in the end, but its primary note, musky and dusky in a cooking-herb-in-an-ethnic-market way, never leaves.

Like downtown artsy types who get invited to ritzy parties to provide some edge, stink notes are usually hidden in the background of perfumes, where they lurk around and provide depth and interest to more-acceptable florals and fruits. (Examples: The civet in Shalimar and the cumin in one of the Femme reformulations.) But to give a musky, musty, and dank herb the starring role in a perfume? Pretty brazen.

Top notes: Coriander, angelica, orange blossom, aldehydes

Heart notes: Rose, geranium, jasmine, orris, lily, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Patchouli, oakmoss, vetiver, sandalwood, civet, musk

Private Collection by Estée Lauder (1973)

Smelling Estée Lauder’s Private Collection is like being presented with a flower genetically engineered for maximum impact, the perfume equivalent of a beautiful face Photoshopped to erase imperfections and magnify beauty.

But this isn’t just any beauty; it’s angular, a little harsh, and definitely mature. I remember turning my nose up at Private Collection as a kid, wondering why anyone would want to smell so … bitter. This doesn’t smell like perfume should, I said in my innocence.

At once inviting and formal, Private Collection is poised somewhere between Vent Vert in its orchestral floral nature and Inoui in its piney, woody verdancy, like a white flower whose face is turned toward the sun while behind it are cool, dark woods.

The greening of Private Collection by galbanum (no doubt part of the “green accord”), pine, and citrus oils serves as the Photoshop tools that perfect, sharpen, and enhance what’s natural about this perfume, raising it to an almost-scary level of beauty. Private Collection is like a beautiful woman who catches your eye and who you cannot look away from, etiquette be damned.

And what floral notes! Private Collection features hyacinth, jasmine, and rose, and the complex, sharp, almost urinous narcissus. The cumulative scent effect is akin to ripping a white flower bloom like Datura from its tree and taking in its peppery, bright freshness for a split second before it dies away. Private Collection ups the ante on beautiful green florals.

Top notes: Green accord, citrus oils, hyacinth

Heart notes: Jasmine, reseda, narcissus, rose, pine needle

Base notes: Oakmoss, cedar, musk, amber

Wild Musk by Coty (1973)

Part of the appeal of Perfume with a capital P is the development—the movement from top notes to base, and all the permutations in between. But in some cases, and I think musk falls under this category, it’s the lyrical, aphoristic quality, its quick painting with moods using one or two words, that is its virtue. Lavender plus vanilla, or some variation thereof, is what makes these fragrances appealing to people. Plus the rich, emotionally comforting quality that works on an almost primal level, happening in the limbic system rather than consciously.

Comforting often describes 1970s musks, and in the case of Coty Wild Musk, it’s hard not to agree. Starting off with a very herbaceous bergamot/lavender, similar to a man’s drugstore cologne or deodorant, sharp and fresh, it then veers into a creamy vanilla. Florals feel “invisible” in CWM, prompting me to believe that a commenter on a perfume forum perfectly sums up Coty Wild Musk’s appeal: “It’s more a feeling than a fragrance.”

Notes from Yann Vasnier: Musk, musk ketone, powdery musk, lily of the valley, vanilla, milky accord

Amazone by Hermès (1974)

Perfumer: Maurice Maurin

Earthy, grassy vetiver combines with light florals, and galbanum’s clean-green scent balances Amazone’s warm berry sweetness and ambery-woody base. Amazone reminds me a little of Weil’s 1945 ode to the savanna, Weil’s Antilope. (The latter had galbanum, acacia farnesiana, and oakmoss—surprisingly, no vetiver, but a dry grass / hay smell nevertheless.) Amazone is warmth, subdued fruit, and open meadows.

Top notes: Hyacinth, galbanum, cassis (black currant), bergamot

Heart notes: Jasmine, lily of the valley, orris, rose

Base notes: Oakmoss, cedarwood, vetiver, amber

Cristalle by Chanel (1974)

Perfumer: Henri Robert

Cristalle bursts forth with a green citrus opening, and settles down to something velvety, sueded, and mossy. It smells like the inside of an expensive leather purse in which someone has spilled a citrusy perfume.

Apparently, it’s hard to find the eau de toilette Cristalle now. In 1993, Jacques Polge created an eau de parfum Cristalle with heavier notes, including civet. I can’t speak to that formula, but many commenters elsewhere say it is very different from the superior original.

Top notes: Bergamot, Sicilian lemon

Heart notes: Rosewood, hyacinth

Base notes: Oakmoss, vetiver

Geminesse by Max Factor (1974)

A perfect balance between so-called feminine and masculine notes, Geminesse, even more than Enjoli and Charlie, could be described as an exemplary 1970s-era “feminist” perfume. A rich and flirty heart of florals is balanced against a classic leather chypre base with vetiver and amber, the latter making Geminesse warm and approachable rather than austere. By using ylang-ylang, Geminesse’s composer prolongs the heady sweetness from jasmine and tuberose, tipping Geminesse over into feminine territory. Full-bodied and substantial while being sexy and fun, Geminesse says you can indeed have it all.

Notes: Jasmine, rose, ylang-ylang, muguet, tuberose, vetiver, oakmoss, amber, musk, leather

Gucci No. 1 (1974)

Perfumer: Guy Robert

A smoldering, spiced rose tarted up with green notes, Gucci No. 1 will take you in so many exciting directions you won’t know where to start.

In its drydown, this masterpiece of restraint gets the Dioressence treatment from Robert with a wavy green note that wavers in scent the way the theremin instrument wavers in sound. Sweet heliotrope is followed by an aromatic, almost green mango/gasoline note that fortifies the floral heart, drying down to a balsamic and powdery base. One of the most interesting rose scents I’ve ever encountered.

Top notes: Rosewood, bergamot, lemon, green note, hyacinth

Heart notes: Rose, carnation, lilac, lily of the valley, orchid, jasmine, heliotrope

Base notes: Cedar, musk, sandalwood, vetiver, amber, tonka, benzoin, vanilla

Skinny Dip by Leeming Pfizer (1974)

The 1970s were a big decade for lemon-based scents, cutting through the heaviness of the big Oriental perfumes of the 1950s and ’60s, the way the 1990s clean scents would take on the big-shouldered shouters of the 1980s. Like a freshly cut lemon minus the harsh angles, Skinny Dip is as short and sweet as a jump in the pool sans skivvies. You can almost smell the softness of the pith used to round out the citrus. If there’s more going on here, I can’t smell it. And there doesn’t need to be.

Notes not available.

Ambergris by Alyssa Ashley (1975)

Ambergris is the substance that starts out as the secretion in a whale’s stomach to protect it from the undigestible and sharp beaks of cuttlefish. It moves on as a floating mass of what is essentially whale vomit/excrement, and then, following months or years of oxidation in the ocean, it hardens, darkens, forms a crusty wax on its outside, and washes ashore. Perfumers prize it for its sweet, earthy, marine, animalic, and even tobacco scent. (Just to give you an idea of how prized it is in perfumery, I read a recent news story about an Englishman who found a seven-pound lump of ambergris while walking on the beach. Within days, a French perfumer had offered him—gulp—$50,000 for it.)

Alyssa Ashley’s Ambergris starts off sharp, medicinal, and with an aromatic citrus note. A sweet, warm ambergris accord emerges (it’s highly unlikely this has the real stuff), but is overwhelmed by what smells like a men’s cheap fougère cologne. Alyssa Ashley’s Ambergris is much more of a classic 1970s musk than a scent that will give you an idea of what ambergris smells like.

Notes not available.

Aviance by Prince Matchabelli (1975)

In this 1979 ad, this let-down-your-hair fragrance turned working girl Clark Kents into smokin’ hot Superwomen.

Aviance starts off aldehydic and leafy green, and combined with lily of the valley, for a moment it feels fresh and light. Radiant rose, jasmine, and an herbal/vegetal note benefit from the delicate touch of the top notes’ freshness, but its spicy, animalic, and disturbingly rich base casts a spell of erotic mystery over its initial floral lightness. (Think of an herbal tea with a drop of milk.)

The sweet and even rich dimension of Aviance might come from its tonka bean note. (Tonka beans, the seeds of the Dipteryx odorata, a legume tree, have an earthy vanilla scent with facets of almond and cinnamon.) In Aviance, tonka gives its floral brightness a more-decadent dimension.

Green, spicy-woody, and dirty-rich, this floral chypre definitely smells perfumey and vintage, but I love how forward it is. And it has significant longevity: If I put this on at night, the next morning, there’s a gorgeous, lightly floral and sandalwood-spiced veil on my skin. Yann Vasnier describes Aviance as a green herbal scent with spice, coumarin (there’s that tonka), and musk.

Top notes: Aldehyde complex, leafy green, bergamot

Heart notes: Rose, lily of the valley, jasmine, orris

Base notes: Sandalwood, vetiver, moss, tonka, musk

Chloe by Lagerfeld (1975)

Chloe starts off fruity green, with a rich coconut note that offsets the sharpness of bergamot and green notes and envelops the peach note in a gourmand, milky nuttiness.

Its floral heart comes forth like the scent of flowers on a summer night, intoxicating, intense, and erotic, the jasmine blooming just enough to keep you interested without scaring you off. There’s a softness and youthfulness to Chloe that belies its intensely sensual base.

As Chloe dries down, the sandalwood-moss-musk combo is quite prominent; its happy floral character shines throughout, never allowing anything to weigh it down.

Top notes: Green notes, coconut, bergamot, aldehydes, peach

Heart notes: Tuberose, jasmine, ylang-ylang, hyacinth, orris

Base notes: Musk, sandalwood, moss, amber, cedar, benzoin

Halston by Halston (1975)

At once masculine and feminine, friendly and formal, and chic and sexy, Halston perfume for women embodies the mixed-crowd ethos of the Studio 54 denizens who wore it. Steve Rubell, co-owner of the legendary late-1970s, early-1980s discothèque, was famous for letting beautiful unknowns past the velvet ropes to hobnob with the celebrities who had debaucherous fun there: Jack, Angelica, Andy, Bianca, Liz, Liza, Calvin, Brooke (Astor and Shields), et al.

Like the nightclub its namesake helped make famous, Halston perfume is less interested in who comes to its party than that everyone, because they look like they’re having fun, looks beautiful.

Green, fruity, floral, fresh, spiced, mossy, and woody (talk about a mixed crowd!), Halston for women typifies late-1970s fashion when simplicity—thanks, in part, to Roy Halston—was chic. Its somewhat austere green/mossy/chypre soul has done a bump of coke and decided to put on some lip gloss and a slinky Halston column dress and dance the night away.

The chypre category, like the ideal 1970s woman, is on the verge of androgyny. Flanked by bitter, herbaceous green and mint on one side and woods and oakmoss on the other, the “feminine” fruit-floral peach-rose-jasmine heart of Halston is like a woman’s body in one of those fabuous “Le Smoking” suits YSL made famous for women in the 1970s. Hours into Halston’s drydown, I smell an artifact of the past: a whiff of the powdery Doublemint gum wrapper, sweetly scenting Halston with its mint and refreshing its base of resins, moss, woods, and warm amber.

Even the famous Halston bottle has a chic lineage. Designed by Elsa Peretti, model turned interior designer turned jewelry designer for Tiffany’s in the 1970s, the biomorphic bottle is modern in its stark simplicity and soft with its curves, like her famous teardrop-heart necklace and thumbprint ring.

There was a time when Halston was the second-top-selling perfume in history, next to “le monstre” Chanel No. 5. Sniff out some vintage Halston, and you’ll know why.

Top notes: Tagetes (marigold), green notes, spearmint, peach, bergamot

Heart notes: Jasmine, cedarwood, rose, carnation, orris, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Moss, patchouli, vetiver, sandalwood, olibanum (frankincense), musk, amber

Musc Oil by Bruno Acampora (1975)

Bruno Acampora appears to have been quite the bon vivant in the 1960s and 1970s, traveling from Capri to Marrakech to New York City, stopping long enough to have Andy Warhol do a portrait. So maybe the raves I’ve heard about his Musc Oil come from the accumulated lore that surrounds the man, because this strange little musk just confused me. There are moments when Bruno’s musk smells a bit like men’s cheap cologne (and cheap it is not: $185 for 10 ml), but its complexity keeps me interested.

CB I Hate Perfume’s Musk Reinvention seemed to take out most of what’s in Bruno Acampora’s musk, leaving only the dirty-skin smell, which means taking out a lot: notes that are green, herbaceous, camphory, Band-Aidy, mushroomy, humid, sharp, earthy, and woody. This is not a shy musk, or a skin musk, or a subtle musk. It is very long-lasting, spicy, and strange. It’s still growing on me (and I might mean that literally!), given the mushroom note that seems to hover over it.

Notes: Musk, rose, violet, cloves, amber, sandalwood, patchouli

Nuance by Coty (1975)

For a perfume whose tagline was, “If you want someone’s attention, just whisper,” Nuance sure is loud. A woody-powdery, aldehydic floral chypre, Nuance starts off with rich fruit notes of peach and plum. Those notes join with a spicy violet and herbaceous heart with a classic chypre base. These days, Nuance has all the hallmarks of “perfumey” perfume that would prompt many to say, “That smells like my grandma.” It hits all the right notes, but without being particularly distinguished.

Notes: Aldehydes, lemon, plum, peach, rose, orange blossom, violet, cinnamon, lavender, herbs, trees, moss, vanilla, musk

This 1978 Nuance ad suggests that “Nuance says yes.”

Parure by Guerlain (1975)

The citrus and galbanum in Parure (“Jewelry Set”) is bracing and bitter. Herbal notes of thyme and clary sage soften this brightness and prepare you for the sweet warmth of a jasmine that shines like the sun within Parure’s dry, mossy, leather impression.

Soon enough, the “formal” part of the perfume announces itself: leather, moss, styrax, and vetiver, with amber and Tolu balsam’s warmth echoing the jasmine. For a moment, there’s an interesting caramel note that recalls Azurée and Miss Balmain, an evanescent gourmand quality in an otherwise fresh and moss-dry fragrance. Parure’s balance of citrus, warmth, and mossy-dry-leather is perfection.

Top notes: Aldehydes, citrus oils, thyme, galbanum, clary sage

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, lilac, lily of the valley, orris, narcissus, jonquil

Base notes: Leather, styrax, vetiver, moss, Peru balsam, amber

Skin Musk by Bonne Bell (1975)

“If warmth had a smell, it would be SKIN.”

—1979 AD FOR SKIN MUSK BY BONNE BELL

We learn in Chandler Burr’s The Perfect Scent that Skin Musk was a favorite of Sarah Jessica Parker, which is interesting both because it’s a cheapie drugstore scent and because it smells like a masculine scent—albeit a modern, niche masculine scent! It starts off with some kind of bright note, probably bergamot or lavender, but its development is what makes it interesting. It has the rich sensuality of many simple 1970s musks, which were like one modulated low growl in a bottle. And although it has some overly synthetic-smelling moments, Skin reminds me a bit of L’Artisan’s Dzing in its “What the hell am I smelling exactly?” effect.

As its name suggests, you have to get really close to it on skin to smell it. Skin starts off with an indistinguishable floral note (rose?) embedded in a complex mix of wet cardboard, that flinty, sulfurous scent after a match is lit, sandalwood, and, of course, musk. As it dries down, a wonderful nutty, nonsweet vanilla warms the skin and stays as a sheer veil of spicy warmth.

The idea that Skin (or Skin Musk) was marketed to teen girls in the ’70s just goes to prove that perfume styles are culturally determined, changing with the mores, lifestyles, and politics (gender and otherwise) of the times. What are teen girls wearing now? Princess by Vera Wang? The latest schlock from Kim Kardashian?

I had it on last night and, after a couple hours, asked some friends to smell my wrists. The words they used to describe it were “fresh” and “transparent.” Not bad for a little dime-store beauty!

Notes not available.

Yendi by Capucci (1975)

Can perfume smell fluorescent? After my first hit of Yendi, an odd and intriguing floral by Capucci, I can say that the answer is yes. Yendi opens on a high note that combines fizzy citrus that reads like lime, soft-powdery sweet hyacinth, clear rose, and bright florals, including an intense lily of the valley. I also detect a leafy-green facet reminiscent of coriander.

Yendi warms up fast, thanks to a fleeting clove-bud note that bridges the perfume’s crisp top and heart to its woody-musky-incensey and powdery drydown.

The styrax and musk base gives Yendi a fresh, clean-but-slightly-dirty aspect. After about an hour, Yendi left a faint amber/vanilla impression with a whiff of powdery orris.

This juxtaposition of fizzy citrus and clear florals with a subtle musky drydown makes Yendi bright but complex. Unlike the “clean” fragrances that came to dominate the 1990s, Yendi—and many other 1970s florals, chypres, and green scents—maintains an allegiance to the body by retaining traces of its musky sweat in the notes. These scents aren’t trying to mask the body, just embrace it.

Top notes: Aldehydes, bergamot, hyacinth, peach, raspberry

Heart notes: Rose, honey, lily of the valley, cyclamen, clove bud, orris, orchid

Base notes: Sandalwood, musk, cedarwood, amber, styrax, vanilla, moss

Babe by Fabergé (1976)

With its cheesy name and designation as a floral in my Haarmann & Reimer Fragrance Guide, Babe could easily be passed over by the perfumista hunting for an interesting vintage perfume. That would be a shame, because like many 1970s scents, Babe is complex and interesting without being overbearing. Babe is really a floral chypre whose sheer light florals (kissed by a hint of ripe raspberry) are balanced with a touch of spice and sweet warmth from carnation and amber, earthiness from vetiver and treemoss, and a rich golden woodiness from sandalwood.

Top notes: Aldehydes, raspberry, hyacinth, bergamot (aldehydic fresh)

Heart notes: Lily of the valley, honey, rose, orris, carnation, jasmine (romantic floral)

Base notes: Vetiver, musk, sandalwood, amber, treemoss (sensual powdery)

Blazer by Anne Klein (1976)

With a name that couldn’t be more dated unless it was called Gauchos or Shoulder Pads, Blazer is nevertheless a gorgeous fresh floral whose chypre base ensures that it smells unlike anything out these days. A fresh, lemony-citrus top is warmed and sweetened by a plum note, while a rich, buttery sandalwood joins with musk and moss to put a more-formal jacket—er, blazer—over the casual Friday that is this perfume’s top and heart notes.

Top notes: Bergamot, lemon, mirabelle (plum), hyacinth

Heart notes: Oeillet (carnation), orris, lily, jasmine, rose

Base notes: Mysore sandalwood, cedar, musk, moss

The Competition: Sisterly love takes a hit with this 1977 retrograde ad for Ambush.

Cardin by Pierre Cardin (1976)

Poised between a big ’80s scent and a strong ’70s chypre, Cardin straddles these two eras in its top and heart notes. Green, sweet, and fruity in its aggressive opening, Cardin moves into a rich floral that’s topped by sweetness, tempered by green notes and lifted by aldehydes.

Top notes: Green note, raspberry, bergamot, aldehyde

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, carnation, ylang-ylang, orris, honey, lily

Base notes: Sandalwood, musk, oakmoss, amber, civet

First by Van Cleef & Arpels (1976)

Perfumer: Jean-Claude Ellena

Some perfumes are lyrical poems that capture the fleeting emotion of particular moments or times. And some perfumes are epic dramas, dressed up with multigenerational characters, crisscrossing plots and subplots, and a Moral to the Story. First is in the latter category.

A big, elegant floral in the vein of an Arpège (1920s) or L’Air du Temps (1940s), First seems almost out of its time in the 1970s. First is Jean-Claude Ellena’s uptown creation before he went downtown and became minimalist, and as befits a perfume for the haute Parisian jeweler, Van Cleef & Arpels, First just smells expensive. It’s the perfume equivalent of those floral arrangements one sees in the lobbies of expensive hotels.

From the first note of sweet fruit to the burst of fresh florals, followed by their deepening into woods and animal notes, there is drama and development, all in the service of making the florals sing a gilded tune.

Top notes: Aldehyde complex, peach, raspberry, hyacinth

Heart notes: Jasmine, Rose de Mai, lily of the valley, orris, tuberose, orchid, carnation

Base notes: Vetiver, musk, amber, oakmoss, honey, civet, sandalwood

Grey Flannel by Geoffrey Beene (1976)

Perfumer: André Fromentin

When I was a teenager in Fort Worth, Texas, I was constantly getting into trouble for wearing clothes and accessories—red jackets, weird shoes, no socks—that fell outside of my private school’s uniform code.

Grey Flannel was the scent that taught me perfume could be an invisible form of rebellion—olfactory instead of sartorial. I wore it because I loved the way it smelled (I remember thinking it smelled like cucumbers and Pimm’s Cups), but also because it was a men’s cologne. Sniffing Grey Flannel now, my rebellion seems pretty tame. This fresh, herbaceous chypre seems as conventionally feminine as it is masculine. Its green, citrusy notes are sweetened by an elegant, old-fashioned whiff of violet, a signifier of retro formality in the middle of bracing freshness. Vanilla joins the comforting chorus started by violet, and in the drydown, all the notes—green, sweet, and mossy—nestle together in comforting harmony.

Top notes: Green note, galbanum, lemon, petit grain, bergamot

Heart notes: Violet, rose, clary sage, fern, geranium

Base notes: Musk cedarwood, moss, tonka

Inoui by Shiseido (1976)

Like Chanel No. 19, there’s an uncanniness to Inoui’s evocation of the forest. But where Chanel No. 19 was muted, vegetal, and ethereal, Inoui is hardy and brisk—its aggressive opening of galbanum and lemon (lightly softened and sweetened by peach) is backed up by a forest whose trees, herbs, and berries are almost medicinal in their aromatics (pine, juniper, cedar). Inoui is a symphony in the key of Fresh.

You almost forget there are florals in this perfume at all, although the quiet jasmine does act as a bridge to the soft, comforting drydown of myrrh, musk, and the subtle-but-present civet, acting, as it always does, to provide a bit of disquiet and moodiness.

I’ve smelled enough perfume to know that if anything has peach and galbanum in it, I’m a goner (Y, Aliage, Givenchy III). These are two great notes that smell great together, whetting the olfactory appetite the way a Negroni aperitif gets your taste buds excited for a big meal.

Thyme paired with jasmine floats through Inoui’s green forest like a soft breeze, though its beauty is primarily austere rather than delicate. Once its piquancy dies down, it still manages, even in the warmth of the base notes, to convey freshness through a kind of powdery, clean-skin scent.

Top notes: Galbanum, peach, juniper, lemon, green accord

Heart notes: Pine needles, freesia, thyme, jasmine

Base notes: Cedarwood, myrrh, musk, civet, oakmoss

Lancetti by Lancetti (1976)

Lancetti combines intense green galbanum and citrus with delicate, soft-focus florals. The balancing act between green and powdery and light florals seems characteristic of 1970s feminine fragrances, but in Lancetti’s case, even the chypre base of vetiver and oakmoss can’t keep the scent’s flowery gentleness from dominating. The Silences fragrance by Jacomo, however, reverses this duality …

Top notes: Galbanum, gardenia, bergamot, lemon, rosewood

Heart notes: Rose, orris, lily of the valley, cyclamen, jasmine

Base notes: Oakmoss, musk, vetiver, sandalwood, amber, cedar

Love’s Baby Soft by Love Cosmetics (1976)

Like the Bay City Rollers and feathered hair, Love’s Baby Soft’s iconic pink hue and baby powderiness defined the ’70s for many a teenage girl. (I can barely take a tiny whiff of this stuff without feeling like I’m about to break out in pimples.) What’s fascinating in retrospect is the way that largely masculine notes of the fougère fragrance category exist at the heart of this girly fragrance.

With its combination of lavender and vanilla (standing in for the sweetness and warmth of coumarin from tonka), Love’s Baby Soft transmogrifies from a hairy man getting his hair cut at a barbershop into a fourteen-year-old girl who smells like baby powder and affixes unicorn stickers to her Meade kitten spiral notebook. Even teenage girls in the ’70s were able to get in their perfumes the complexity many grown women are denied in today’s mainstream scents. In Love’s Baby Soft’s drydown, a sophisticated mix of herbaceous fougère, baby powder, and an almondy-vanillic heliotrope that was featured promininently in Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleue mingles like it’s no big deal.

Top notes: Syringa (a genus that includes lilac), aldehyde, lemon, lavender, rosewood

Heart notes: Heliotrope, lilac, rose, lily of the valley, orchid, carnation

Base notes: Vanilla, benzoin, musk

Yatagan by Caron (1976)

Perfumer: Vincent Marcello

With bitter herbs touched with hesperidic notes, fresh aromatics, and a mossy-warm leathery base, Yatagan is heir to other chypre animalics like Aramis and, believe it or not, Miss Balmain. (So much for gender consistency in perfume.) The combination of these bracing outdoor notes with the sweet and warm animalic note of castoreum makes Yatagan cuddlier-sounding than its namesake, a curved, Turkish saber used during the Ottoman Empire.

Perhaps like its brother Aramis, who I can only ever picture as a naked Burt Reynolds on a bearskin rug, Yatagan needs only a come-hither stare to stop his playacting, drop his Yatagan prop, and get down to business. Sporty-fresh and carnal-sexy all in one fell swoop, Yatagan also just happens to be Nasomatto perfumer Alessandro Gualtieri’s favorite vintage scent.

Top notes: Bergamot, artemisia, wormwood, lavender, petit grain, galbanum, origanum (genus of aromatic herbs including marjoram and oregano)

Heart notes: Jasmine, vetiver, patchouli, carnation, pine needle, geranium

Base notes: Olibanum, leather, labdanum, moss, castoreum, styrax, amber, musk

J’ai Osé by Guy Laroche (1977)

Opulent, mysterious, and restrained, J’ai Osé (“I Dared”) takes a while to get to know. Unlike many scents in today’s crowded marketplace that rush at you with their olfactory elevator pitches in one spritz, desperate to tell you in one breath what they’re all about, J’ai Osé makes you sit a spell to figure it out.

Speaking of spells, J’ai Osé casts a beautiful one. After a rather unpleasant and unpromising opening of harsh aldehydes, J’ai Osé leads you to dark woods. The dryness of vetiver, woods, and patchouli are met with the creamy lush warmth of amber, olibanum, and benzoin. It’s so inky-dark in the J’ai Osé forest that your nose has to adjust to the subtle gradations of accords and notes, like stepping into a dark, seemingly empty room and having to adjust your eyes to see the furniture.

Once you’re fully under its spell and accept its inky atmosphere, the vegetation in its lush forest shows itself—a flash of white jasmine and deep rose, the dusky leafiness of coriander—the restraint of scents exuded in the cold dawn, a bracing mix of beautiful things holding back. Sticking with J’ai Osé’s temporality and style, though, pays back big-time. The drydown blooms with the creamiest jasmine and rose touched by powdery orris. You can see with this fragrance that even as late as the 1970s, perfumers were still allowed to play with time, to actually take their sweet time. It is a great loss that this happens less.

Top notes: Peach, citrus oils, coriander, aldehyde

Heart notes: Jasmine, patchouli, rose, orris, cedarwood, sandalwood, vetiver

Base notes: Amber, olibanum, oakmoss, musk, benzoin

Opium by Yves Saint Laurent (1977)

Perfumers: Jean Amic and Jean-Louis Sieuzac

It now seems quaint that YSL’s American backers at Squibb were mortified both by the perfume’s proposed name and bottle designer Pierre Dinand’s idea for the bottle, which was based on the Japanese inro, a wooden box holding medicines and opium that Japanese samurai hung from their belts. But before women became Dior Addicts, and Tom Ford could boast that his scent Tuscan Leather smelled like high-end cocaine, it first had to be culturally acceptable for a perfume to be named after a drug. Hence, Opium, Yves Saint Laurent’s olfactory Orientalist fantasy, was born.

Opium starts with a sharp blast of aldehydes, like the olfactory representation of a struck match lighting an opium pipe. The perfume gives the impression of being both an experience of seamless sensuousness, as it caresses you with its crushed velvet notes in one touch, and a perfume that unfolds languidly. Both of these befit a fragrance that is supposed to conjure up images of wan, dreamy, supine opium smokers in dens punctuated with curling pipe smoke. Vanillic orange notes recalling spiced tea combine with sweet flowers and subtle fruit notes, warmed by a sensuous and musky base. Raymond Chaillan, who assisted in Opium’s creation, is convinced its formula no longer contains large doses of eugenol (found in clove and carnation), or linalool and limonene, found in lavender and citrus respectively. And according to perfume historian Octavian Coifan, who knew someone involved with its production, Opium was inspired by two French, pre-WWI fragrances.

Top notes: Aldehydes, orange, pimento, bay

Heart notes: Carnation, rose, ylang-ylang, cinnamon, peach, jasmine, orris

Base notes: Benzoin, tolu, vanilla, sandal, patchouli, olibanum, amber, musk (Notes from Haarmann & Reimer’s guide.)

Notes: Plum, coriander, lemon, bergamot, clove, cistus, castoreum, myrrh, lily of the valley, cedar

(From Michael Edwards’s Perfume Legends: French Feminine Fragrances.)

Woman by Jovan (1977)

You can really feel in many 1970s scents a kind of loosening up, a freshness, a breeziness that seems implicitly tied to the women’s movement. Although the notes in Jovan’s Woman suggest something strong and maybe heavy, Woman ends up being remarkably restrained for a perfume that has fruit accords, leafy greens, clove, patchouli, moss, and vetiver. Although sometimes characterized as an Oriental, it really has a chypre character, with a mossy, spicy, and green personality that rises above everything. Sometimes Jovan scents surprise me, and with so many of them around, I would almost argue it’d be worth trying all of them. As it turns out, the nose does know: This fragrance won a couple of FiFi Awards in 1978, including Most Successful Women’s Fragrance and Best National Advertising Campaign for a Women’s Fragrance. (The Fifi Awards are an annual event sponsored by The Fragrance Foundation that honors the fragrance industry’s creative achievements.)

Top notes: Aldehydes, citrus oils, leafy green, spicy and fruity accord

Heart notes: Rose, geranium, clove buds, jasmine, ylang-ylang, orris

Base notes: Patchouli, vetiver, moss, musk

Azzaro by Azzaro (1978)

Perfumers: Gerard Anthony, Martin Heiddenreich, and Richard Wirtz

For a split second, Azzaro’s opening salvo of basil, lemon, and bergamot recalls Diorella, and even as it developed, that reminder sealed the deal for me. For as complex a formula as Azzaro is, it manages to be well-behaved and even subdued in its complexity, its balancing act a wonder to behold. Mossy, ambery, spicy, and woody, Azzaro is soft-spoken sexy. The leather in Azzaro is supple, broken-in, comforting.

Top notes: Lavender, bergamot, clary sage, lemon, petit grain, basil

Heart notes: Patchouli, caraway, juniper berry, sandalwood, cedar

Base notes: Amber, oakmoss, tonka, musk, leather

Bill Blass by Bill Blass (1978)

This paternalistic 1984 ad for Bill Blass perfume belies the designer’s reputation for wearable, woman-friendly fashions in an era of stiff, over-the-top museum pieces.

Bill Blass smells like it’s on the cusp between the sporty, green chypres for the newly liberated ’70s woman and the sweet scent bombs worn by Dynasty-watching, big-shoulder-sporting ’80s divas. A nice floral chypre with a touch of golden pineapple for fruitiness, Bill Blass perfume exudes a fresh, happy warmth that makes this an approachable floral with personality.

Top notes: Galbanum, pineapple, hyacinth, bergamot, green complex

Heart notes: Tuberose, jasmine, ylang-ylang, carnation, orris

Base notes: Musk, sandalwood, cedar, amber, oakmoss

Calvin Klein by Calvin Klein (1978)

Calvin Klein’s first fragrance was my first perfume love. As a little perfume-obsessed tween, I distinctly remember falling for Calvin Klein among the dozens of perfumes I’d spray on myself before I left the mall. I loved the simple, squat, oblong bottle, the perfume’s golden amber hue, and what I concluded—as a child with no reference points for perfume notes—was its apple scent.

Finding it again as an adult, I think I smelled “apple” back then because of the fruity top notes, and I must have sensed that it was no ordinary perfume because of the depth and warmth the spicy/musky base notes gave to the fruit and flowers. Calvin Klein perfume seemed autumnal and sophisticated.

Top notes: Aldehyde complex, hyacinth, gardenia, peach, raspberry

Heart notes: Carnation, jasmine, muguet (lily of the valley), rose, orris

Base notes: Sandalwood, cedarwood, oakmoss, musk, amber

Cinnabar by Estée Lauder (1978)

Cinnabar, a spicy/ambery floral Oriental, is a perfect cold-weather comfort scent. It progresses from gourmand warmth to spice to indolic florals / ripe fruit in a seamless and intoxicating way. At first, the volume on amber and vanilla in Cinnabar are turned up to add gourmand richness to the cinnamon note, while the spices and soapy-powdery florals hover in the background.

What you’d normally consider base notes (amber and vanilla) recede as Cinnabar develops; it’s as if the normal sequence of notes moves backward. The indolic florals combined with powdery orris and incense notes take over, drying down to a funky-fruity note of peach, the lingering note of bruised florals remaining steady throughout. An occasional waft of amber/vanilla returns in the drydown, but it becomes a mulling-spice kind of floral, for the most part, as the scent disappears. Although it’s often compared to Opium, according to perfume historian Octavian Coifan, Cinnabar is actually a Youth Dew flanker, the “extreme” version to Soft Youth Dew’s softer flanker. As Coifan describes it, Cinnabar is “a cinnamon orgy on a Youth Dew scented altar.”

Top notes: Aldehydic notes, bergamot, peach, spicy notes

Heart notes: Cinnamon, ylang-ylang, clove, orris, jasmine

Base notes: Amber, patchouli, vanilla, vetiver

Enjoli by Charles of the Ritz (1978)

This 1978 ad for the “8-hour perfume for the 24-hour woman” depicts the working woman as whirling dervish; “having it all” has never looked so exhausting.

Enjoli starts out in the high, happy register of one of my favorite combinations: galbanum and peach. Its juicy, ripe fruit note balances with green tartness and bergamot—not too sweet, not too sour … just right.

A radiant and uplifting floral heart then announces—via the bridge of powdery-sweet hyacinth and orris—that this is not merely a sport scent like the brisk and wonderful Aliage or the elegant but lighthearted Givenchy III. Nor is Enjoli only a well-behaved floral that speaks only when spoken to. Nope. Hear that thud? It’s the frying pan being thrown onto the stove. The rustle of silk? The nightgown being slipped into …

Introducing: Enjoli’s third act. The one that doesn’t let you forget you’re a man. You know—the sexy part. Mossy and woody, soft and sensual, the drydown has an amazing sandalwood smoothness and lingering spiciness that makes you forget that the perfume started out with a completely different personality.

And let’s not forget the oakmoss! I don’t know how $5.95 a bottle would be adjusted for today’s inflation, but Enjoli was an inexpensive drugstore chypre with balance and chic. A quick tour through today’s Walgreens should tell you that era is over. The crapola they have locked in glass cases? I wouldn’t take any of it from the free bin …

But back to Enjoli. It’s actually kind of remarkable the way Enjoli tries to “have it all,” like the fantasy ’70s feminist the ad is addressing. Its development is an exaggeration of extremes. Its top notes are the go-getting woman working outside of the home, the heart notes traditional florals that tend to hearth and home, and the base notes are warm, spicy, and sensual. (Haarmann & Reimer just blends its parts together and calls it a floral. C’mon, H & R! Maybe today’s Enjoli is that, but my vintage tells a different story.This thing has a lot of spice and woods.)

Top notes: Bergamot, green note, aldehyde, hyacinth, peach

Heart notes: Tuberose, jasmine, rose, orris, carnation, orchid

Base notes: Sandalwood, musk, cedar, oakmoss, amber, vanilla

Lauren by Ralph Lauren (1978)

In the original formulation, Lauren’s spicy marigold, oakmoss, and woody notes balanced out the floral nature of the perfume. The woodsy floral character created a sense that its wearer was elegant and refined but still dynamic and earthy.

Fans of the scent are convinced that the reformulation, according to one person, caused the perfume to “lose its soul.” I picked up a $14 bottle sans box on a sad and disheveled shelf at T.J.Maxx in Los Angeles. Wearing the modern reformulation now, it seems that not only have the floral notes been amped up and the spices toned down, but the reformulation just doesn’t have vintage Lauren’s depth and balance.

Top notes: Pineapple, spearmint, marigold (tagetes), rosewood

Heart notes: Cyclamen, rose, jasmine, lily of the valley

Base notes: Musk, cedarwood, oakmoss, sandalwood

Madeleine de Madeleine by Madeleine Mono (1978)

Like a really good Parfums de Coeur remake of Robert Piguet’s Fracas, Madeleine de Madeleine smells to me like a big wad of bubble gum scented with tuberose, mimosa, orange flower, jasmine, and happiness. There might also be oakmoss and sandalwood in the base.

Some scents, if you smell them at certain developmentally important times in your life, imprint on your olfactory brain as “positive” forever, no matter what you subsequently learn about taste or quality. Pleasure is pleasure. As a result, I don’t know if I can write a proper review of this perfume; it’s a perfume associated with a particular time and place, making me unable to objectively assess it.

In a category that I don’t even usually go for (florals), Madeleine de Madeleine nevertheless stuns me with its bodacious, slightly over-the-top, and maybe even tacky beauty. Made by self-described cosmetics “glitter queen” Madeleine Mono, the perfume dazzles with the sensuous sweetness of tuberose, mimosa, and orange flower. A tropical white flower tucked into a disco queen’s hair would smell something like this. Tuberose’s bubblegum facet is prominent, and helps to emphasize the perfume’s sweetness rather than greenness. Madeleine de Madeleine is of questionable taste, like a lot of great things in life.

Perfumer Yann Vasnier sniffed out a rhubarb note, tuberose, fruit notes, spice notes, and styrallyl acetate, which is prominent in gardenia blossoms. He also found it similar to Fracas and Poison.

Notes from retail websites: Tuberose, mimosa, jonquil, orange flower, rose, jasmine, chamomile, oakmoss

Magie Noire by Lancôme (1978)

Perfumer: Gérard Goupy

Magie Noire is in the category of perfumes that actually might scare romantic prospects away rather than attract them. But if you aspire to be a retro femme fatale rather than a fruit cocktail–scented Girl Gone Wild, add this to your arsenal to weed out the wusses from the keepers.

From its animalic rose scent, to its goth name, to its Satanic bottle design, suggestive of blood-red setting suns during harvest—Magie Noire is a perfume to fall in love with.

I write about it as if it’s the first time I’ve smelled it, but in fact, this was my mother’s perfume when I was growing up. I wonder sometimes if I’m so drawn to the chypre category because that’s what my mother wore, and it signifies what perfume is for me, or if, as with food tastes, part of it is genetic and I share her tastes. Whatever the reason, revisiting it in vintage form after becoming a serious perfume collector and developing a better sense of what makes a good fragrance has created a whole other set of associations beyond “Mom.” And thank god for that—who wants to think of her mother as a High Priestess of the Dark Side?

In Magie Noire, there are the narcotic elements of honey, tuberose, narcissus, and rose (a dark, forbidding rose rather than a come-hither one). This is intensified by top notes that don’t sweeten or even introduce the perfume so much as stand behind the heart notes and back up their message of dark beauty. Ripe berries and currants recall magical fairy-tale forests.

By the time you’re hooked by the perfume’s confusing sensuality, the way a bug might be attracted to a carnivorous plant, you’re happy to be dissolving in its poison if that means lolling about in patchouli, civet, and castoreum. This stuff leaves me bewitched, bothered, and bewildered. Although Magie Noire is categorized as a floral Oriental, its personality to me is chypre.

Top notes: Cassis, bergamot, hyacinth, raspberry, green note

Heart notes: Honey, jasmine, lily of the valley, tuberose, narcissus, orris, rose oriental

Base notes: Patchouli, castoreum, civet, vetiver, musk, oakmoss, benzoin

Mollie Parnis by Weil (1978)

Mollie Parnis was an American designer, and like her namesake perfume, she’s been largely forgotten in the canon. It’s a shame more people don’t know about this beautiful fragrance, because it could teach those overbearing “fruitchoulis” the kids are wearing these days a thing or two.

A rich, waxy peach that perfumer Yann Vasnier describes as “lactonic” morphs into an almost candied, Jolly Rancher-esque tartness. Throw a lush gardenia and a spicy base into the mix, and Mollie Parnis will tickle the edges of your olfactory brain with pleasure. There are certain perfumes that take me to the point of wanting to drink them, even though I know my desire is in vain. This is one of them.

Mollie Parnis’s spice reads as mossy/patchouli to me, so perhaps we can categorize it as a fruity-floral chypre. Vasnier notes something interesting that’s almost impossible to not notice after you look for it: Mollie Parnis’s odd, hovering mushroom note that gives this otherwise “girly” perfume an uncanny, humid, and savory quality.

Notes from Yann Vasnier: Fruit notes, lactones, peach, gardenia, spices, osmanthus, mushroom note

Mystère by Rochas (1978)

Perfumer: Nicolas Mamounas

Certain secret societies have initiation rites or hazing rituals to test the worthiness of its potential members. Because civet greets you at the doorway chez Mystère, plunging its wearer into its civety netherworld from the beginning, you might be inclined to back away slowly, stammering that you have the wrong address before, horror-movie style, you book it in the other direction. That would be a shame, however, because the longer you linger in Mystère’s world, the more beautiful it gets.

Luscious citrus notes join with bitter galbanum and rich florals as the backbone of a perfume that nevertheless emphasizes its base. And what a base it is. It’s hard to imagine a series of notes more anathema to the 1990s office scent perfume genre than Mystère’s dusky coriander, spicy carnation, and musk/moss/incense.

Once you’re initiated into Mystère’s dark and beautiful world, you can settle into its lush kingdom of spices, comforting moss, and rich balsams.

Top notes: Coriander, hyacinth, citrus oils, green notes

Heart notes: Rose de Mai, jasmine, tuberose, orris, carnation, ylang-ylang, lily of the valley

Base notes: Cedar, oakmoss, patchouli, sandalwood, musk, civet, styrax

Pheromone by Marilyn Miglin (1978)

Pheromone opens with a mouthwatering galbanum-citrus combo followed by sharp, luscious aromatic and floral notes. A mossy, ambery, resiny base rises up to meet those already-complex top notes, butching up the perfume’s femininity like a leather jacket over a sheer floral dress.

As Pheromone dries down, its beautiful symphony of greens, florals, and animal notes gets turned down, and they settle themselves into a mossy-warm bed. An occasional disquieting note wafts in that I can only describe as savory and meaty, even garbagey. It must be an indolic facet of one of the floral notes, or maybe musk. Hours into applying Pheromone, I can smell a veil of complex florals over my skin, sweetened and warmed by its animal notes and earthy spice.

I wonder if Pheromone is not as talked about as I think it deserves to be because of its misleading name. (Shouldn’t a perfume called Pheromone be muskier?) Either that, or because it’s in that strange category that I love, and will probably never come back into fashion: the green floral-animalic chypre. They’re not really conventionally feminine perfumes (Joy is a feminine perfume), nor could you call them masculine. No, the floral-animalic chypre perfumes are the Lipstick Lesbians of the feminine perfume categories, enjoying the conventions and trappings of femininity while not quite sticking to the program.

Pheromone is still being produced today, and this is the description on Marilyn Miglin’s website: “A blend of 179 rare essences including flower, roots, wild grasses, exotic barks, seeds, rare wine resins and essential oils from France, Italy, Belgium, Madagascar, Portugal and Egypt.” One perfume forum commenter remembers that Pheromone was once marketed with an Egyptology angle. Miglin apparently claimed that, with the help of Egyptologists, she was able to learn the names of seven sacred oils writ in hieroglyphics, oils that served as the basis for Pheromone.

Top notes: Bergamot, green notes, lemon, aldehyde, galbanum, juniper berries

Heart notes: Jasmine, magnolia, narcissus, rose, orris, ylang-ylang, carnation, hyacinth, lily of the valley

Base notes: Cedarwood, musk, vetiver, olibanum, myrrh, amber, oakmoss

Polo by Ralph Lauren (1978)

The misnamed Polo takes you deep into a magical olfactory forest of greens and woods. This classic men’s scent with unfortunate associations of popped-collared preppies (remember those?) is a Platonic Ideal of a men’s fragrance—or any fragrance, for that matter. It’s green and bracing, like a walk in cool woods, but it also has warmth and depth, even succulence, thanks to the addition of amber. As with Azurée, Estée Lauder’s oft-described “feminine” companion to the “masculine” Aramis, this momentary gourmand accord rounds out the perfume’s bitter and herbaceous qualities.

The leather in Polo is dirtier and darker than I remember it being, and as it dries down, the unmistakable waft of smoky campfire comes into play, signaling that one of my favorite perfume notes—birch tar, a note that may soon be gone in perfumery altogether—must be part of the leather accord.

Top notes: Juniper berry, artemisia, bergamot, cumin, basil, green note

Heart notes: Pine needle, jasmine, carnation, geranium, thyme, rose

Base notes: Patchouli, leather, moss, cedar, amber, musk, olibanum

Silences by Jacomo (1978)

Perfumers: Gérard Goupy and Jean-Claude Niel

Some women are scared of scents that are too green, or whose predominant notes include violet leaves, herbs, cut grass, or galbanum, a bitter aromatic gum resin that famously greened up Chanel No. 19, Bandit, and Vent Vert.

To those folks I say, I’m sorry; Silences is not going to change your mind. Silences by Jacomo is green to the extreme. With a bitter, herbaceous, and almost chalky galbanum beginning, Silences starts off with a tiny drop of sweetness from orange blossom, but then throws lemon and bergamot into the mix just so you know it’s not kidding around about this “green” business. (Galbanum resin is obtained from the Persian Ferula gummosa plant.)

A soft, powdery whisper of orris bridges the green with the delicate and clean florals of rose, lily of the valley, and jasmine. By the time it dries down, this austere beauty is delicately soapy, spicy, and soft all at once.

In Vent Vert, galbanum signaled the Rites of Spring, the rawness and near-savagery of things coming to life. In Chanel No. 19, as in Silences, galbanum suggests contemplation, stillness, and—well, silence. To some, Silences feels melancholic and pensive. I would add spooky. From its opaque, black, urn-like bottle to its name, which is a little deathly, Silences is something of a surreal perfume. It’s connected to life, with green notes and florals that signify renewal, yet it’s oddly disconnected from the familiar, a little uncanny.

Top notes: Galbanum, bergamot, green notes, orange blossom, lemon

Heart notes: Orris, jasmine, rose, lily of the valley, hyacinth

Base notes: Moss, sandalwood, cedar, musk

Sport Scent for Women by Jovan (1978)

Very similar to Estée Lauder’s Aliage, Sport Scent for Women starts off with a beautiful galbanum and neroli one-two punch (much like Aliage’s galbanum and peach), producing the nasal version of a pucker-inducing sour/sweet candy. Fresh, green florals sing at its heart, while a very “perfumey” base of moss, woods, and amber functions as the short tennis skirt to feminize the scent that started out so bracing. An hour into the drydown, and all the hullabaloo of green dies down to a wonderful fresh and ambery warm base.

Top notes: Galbanum, leafy green, bergamot, neroli, marjoram, angelica

Heart notes: Orris root, hyacinth, rose, geranium, ylang-ylang, carnation, lily, jasmine

Base notes: Sandalwood, musk, cedarwood, vetiver, oakmoss, amber, civet

White Linen by Estée Lauder (1978)

Perfumer: Sophia Grojsman

There are some perfumes with names that perfectly align with your first impression of them. You almost wish you had been present at the creative meeting when all the great minds (and noses) converged—like directors, set designers, producers, costumers, and actors on a movie set before the shooting begins—to hash out the vision for the fantasy to come.

That’s what I feel about White Linen. The name itself is poetic, and immediately conjures up summer, heat, and the casual but chic fabric whose wrinkled, organic imperfections are at the heart of its charm. Bright yet warm, crisp but yielding to softness, White Linen has always been an olfactory puzzle for me. Even now, it’s hard to isolate the notes even as I read them and furiously sniff my wrists. Perhaps this is the effect of the powerful aldehydes, which work to abstract the notes to suit the perfume’s larger concept.

The same way that the sun and heat in summer can subsume a host of impressions (flowers, trees, grass, picnic, breeze, feelings, thoughts) into one blinding image or feeling, White Linen’s initial aldehydic blast blurs the individual notes.

It’s no surprise to me that Sophia Grojsman is the mind/nose behind White Linen. She is a magician at conjuring up not just beautiful scents and visual impressions, but also complex feelings associated with a perfume’s theme/concept.

When I smell White Linen, I smell the detergent that was used to wash the fabric and the smell of it vaporizing as it’s ironed. I can also smell the sun and the garden and perhaps the woods that surround the veranda I’m sitting on, drinking lemonade or a mint julep. But not many perfumers can add that extra dimension to a fragrance: mood, feelings, psychology. I’m not sure how she does it, but she’s a wizard.

Like a pointillist painting by Seurat, White Linen, if looked at up close, will yield its individual components. Its genius is that its first—and lasting—impression is what you’ll remember: crisp, laundered white linen on a beautiful summer day.

Top notes: Aldehydes, citrus oils, peach, blossom-calyx note

Heart notes: Rose, lily of the valley, jasmine, orris, ylang-ylang, lilac, orchid

Base notes: Cedar, amber, sandalwood, civet, honey, benzoin, tonka

Perfume ads often paid lip service to the women’s movement and more-fluid gender roles, as in this 1975 example. At the same time, they also tried to make women feel insecure about their femininity—a problem easily remedied by perfume, of course.

Anaïs Anaïs by Cacharel (1979)

Cacharel hearkened back to the 1930s and ’40s for its fashion inspiration, and this 1986 ad for Anaïs Anaïs reflects that vintage influence.

Perfumers: Roger Pellegrino, Robert Gonnon, Paul Léger, Raymond Chaillan

In its milk-white squat bottle featuring delicate pink flowers in a vintage design, Anaïs Anaïs was a perfume I liked as a teenager—fun and light while still being sophisticated. Described as a fresh floral by the Haarmann & Reimer Fragrance Guide, Anaïs Anaïs starts out with the signature 1970s combination of galbanum plus fruit. The sweetness from fruit is there, but just long enough to signal a lighthearted warmth; it soon recedes into the background, and Anaïs Anaïs moves on to transparent, delicate green florals.

Unlike the fruit bombs today that are marketed to young women, which translate “light and fun” into dreadful, fruity sweetness, Anaïs Anaïs doesn’t condescend to youth; it even provides a hint of chypre gravitas in the base. A sheer veil of Anaïs Anaïs stays on your skin long after you put it on.

Anaïs Anaïs ads reinforce the delicate personality of the perfume by featuring dreamy-looking women from another era, which perfume writer Brian Pera calls a soft-focus “reimagining of the erotica popular in the twenties.” Budding sexuality was respectfully represented as dreaminess. I wonder if we could ever get back to this ’70s euphemism and delicacy, or, in our pornified age, do we even want to?

Top notes: Leafy green, bergamot, galbanum, fruit notes

Heart notes: Jasmine, lily of the valley, rose, tuberose, ylang-ylang, orris

Base notes: Cedarwood, sandalwood, vetiver, musk, moss, amber

Mētāl by Paco Rabanne (1979)

Perfumer: Robert Gonnon

Trained as an architect, fashion designer Paco Rabanne distinguished himself by using unusual materials like metal, plastic, and paper. He was prominent enough to have earned Coco Chanel’s scorn for his designs, including his space age–themed metal dresses made famous in Barbarella. “He’s not a couturier,” she sniffed, “but a metal worker.”

His perfume Mētāl is as innovative as his dresses. You’d think a perfume called Mētāl would be cold, steely, and harsh, but a surprise comes when you sniff this one: It’s a joyous, sheer floral, so light and fresh it feels like it’s going to float away into the ether at any moment. By highlighting the lightest, freshest facets from a field of flowers and marrying them with green and citrus notes, touched with basil, Mētāl is able to convey coolness without itself being cold. Its subtle chypre drydown, with salty vetiver and oakmoss, adds chic to a perfume that might otherwise seem too jejune. And unlike a dress made of metal, Mētāl doesn’t age; it smells completely modern.

Top notes: Aldehydes, citrus oils, basil, hyacinth, green note

Heart notes: Jasmine, lily of the valley, rose, tuberose, ylang-ylang, orris, cyclamen

Base notes: Vetiver, sandalwood, amber, oakmoss, musk

Nahéma by Guerlain (1979)

Perfumer: Jean-Paul Guerlain

If you’ve ever left a red rose to dry somewhere, you’ll recognize the winey, rich scent, halfway between dried petals and a stewed fruit / mulled wine accord in Guerlain’s Nahéma. This dark honeyed rose gets a bit of wispy lightness from lilac, followed by an embrace of rich, waxy balsams and woods in the base.

Top notes: Peach, bergamot, green notes, flower calyx note

Heart notes: Rose, ylang-ylang, jasmine, lily of the valley, lilac

Base notes: Peru balsam, tolu, benzoin, vanilla, styrax, vetiver, sandalwood

Scherrer 1 by Jean-Louis Scherrer (1979)

Scherrer 1, Jean-Louis Scherrer’s grand 1970s chypre, has the bitter, green, and slightly intimidating tough-lady air of Bandit, Cabochard, and later, Paloma Picasso’s homage to those bitch-on-wheels fragrances. Its haughty and austere character, however, is tempered by a warmth in the drydown that adds an animalic, approachable softness that belies the tough-gal act.

Scherrer 1 is no perfume for an ingénue. Its florals are funky and indolic; its green notes, rather than being fresh, are bitter and bracing; its softness and warmth, provided by costus root (according to perfume historian Octavian Coifan), suggests unwashed hair, the sensuality of a woman who neglects herself, as the French say by way of a compliment.

Top notes: Cassis, hyacinth, violet, aldehyde, green note

Heart notes: Jasmine, tuberose, rose, carnation, orris, gardenia

Base notes: Sandalwood, vanilla, musk, cedar, vetiver, amber, moss, civet

In this hilarious 1974 ad for Ambush, the word becomes a catchall phrase for the let-it-all-hang out ’70s.

An iconic 1980s perfume, Diva, as its name announces, thinks big—big flashy bottle, big bold chypre, and, in this 1984 ad, a big bosom.

Think Big

Paris, Poison, Paloma Picasso Mon Parfum (1980–1989)

It was the decade of Dynasty, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, and Falcon Crest. Yet for all its tacky excesses, the 1980s was also the last decade in perfumery of unselfconsciously grand perfumes. Chypres, mossy-fruity-animalics, and complex Oriental perfumes still gave perfumers’ imaginations—and its wearers’ noses—a workout. Perfumes got so strong and loud in the 1980s that New York restaurant owners were putting signs in their windows that said PLEASE, NO WEARERS OF PASSION, GIORGIO, OR POISON.

Gauloises by Molyneux (1980)

Named after the intensely strong, powdery, and almost-perfumey brand of French cigarettes, Gauloises is a rosy, tobacco-y floral chypre with fresh-green top notes and a powdery base. Perhaps one of the last perfumes to pay homage to smoking culture, with a bottle that looks like an open pack of cigarettes and juice inside that—reminiscent of 1930s perfumes like Scandal—was probably made to harmonize with (cover up) the smell of cigarette smoke.

Top notes: Bergamot, aldehyde, green note, coriander, hyacinth

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, orris, tuberose, lily of the valley

Base notes: Musk, sandalwood, vetiver, oakmoss, amber, civet

Ivoire by Pierre Balmain (1980)

A 1981 ad for Pierre Balmain’s Ivoire

If you relied solely on random reviews of Ivoire on the Internet, you might believe that this early-1980s perfume merely screams “old lady” and “soapy” and call it a day. That would be a pity, because you’d miss out on a scent experience equivalent to going to a Sherwin-Williams paint shop and realizing, after an hour or so of comparing paint chips, that the shades in between stark white and cream can be staggering and infinitesimal.

Ivoire is an olfactory meditation on how a clean fragrance can have depth and texture, and how its individual notes can reverberate and resonate with one another to signify “clean” and “fresh” in a complex, even sensual, way. By evoking the tusk of an elephant or the keys of a piano, the name Ivoire asks us to think about the richness of white—its “off-whiteness” rather than its purity.

Upon first whiff, Ivoire gives us the whitest paint chip on the olfactory color wheel: fresh, bright, and citrusy top notes, further lifted by aldehydes. This first impression is a white of the blinding-flashbulb variety. This is only for a second, as the aldehydes die down and the piquancy of galbanum provides a wonderful first variation on clean—the resiny, piney, vegetal version, backed up by a hint of lemon and bergamot. Ivoire then moves subtly and almost seamlessly to its floral, spicy, and, yes, soapy heart.

Where Ivoire gets interesting for me is in the drydown. Its woody-incense finish is followed by ambery musk, like the burn you get when lighting incense is followed by its mellow diffusion. A whisper of the warmth from these notes moves you subtly from that white paint chip to the cream one. Or you could say they move your eye from the smoothness of the ivory tusk to a nick filled in with dirt that creates an interesting texture on the pristine surface. Like a Mark Rothko painting meditating on white, Ivoire’s notes hum and vibrate in unison.

Top notes: Green accord, galbanum, bergamot, lemon, aldehydes

Heart notes: Lily of the valley, rose, hyacinth, jasmine, carnation, orris, orchid, geranium

Base notes: Cedar, musk, oakmoss, amber, raspberry, sandalwood

Macassar by Rochas (1980)

Perfumers: Nicolas Mamounas and Roger Pellegrino

Macassar Ebony is a kind of wood with dinstinctive, contrasting streaks that was particularly popular with furniture makers during the Art Deco period. In an ad for Macassar perfume by Rochas, the image of a handsome man in a tux sits atop the pattern from Macassar Ebony wood, and his right cheek bears the mark of its unusual pattern.

Little known outside of the small circle of ex-lovers still mourning its loss, Macassar by Rochas is a stunning leather/woody chypre that balances aromatic herbs, fruit, spice, and florals with moss and leather. Its rich amber and spice notes could easily move it over into the Oriental category.

Bitter artemisia, fruit, and green notes launch Macassar, and it evolves into smooth, sweetish cedar warmed by a mossy animalic base. Hours into it, a camphory bitterness predominates, as its aromatic, mossy base reminds the fruit and florals who is boss.

Top notes: Bergamot, artemisia, green note, pine needle, fruit note

Heart notes: Jasmine, carnation, patchouli, vetiver, geranium, cedar

Base notes: Leather, oakmoss, castoreum, amber, olibanum, musk

Murasaki by Shiseido (1980)

Murasaki, which means “purple” in Japanese, is a green floral that starts off with a galbanum pucker of brightness soon softened by fresh florals and a subtle chypre base. (Rose and lily’s quiet duet can be heard most prominently.) Perfectly balanced and secure enough to not have to shout, Murasaki is poised somewhere between a 1970s green chypre and a 1990s clean scent. An hour into it, musk and amber turn Murasaki into a gorgeous, clean skin scent.

Top notes: Galbanum, bergamot, gardenia, peach, hyacinth

Heart notes: Orris, rose, lily of the valley, jasmine, lily

Base notes: Sandalwood, oakmoss, vetiver, leather, musk, amber

Antaeus by Chanel (1981)

Perfumer: Jacques Polge

A soft cloud of cedar, coriander, and olibanum (with its cinnamon facets) hangs over the kingdom of Antaeus, named after the son of Gaia and Poseidon, Greek mythological deities of the earth and sea. Antaeus is a perfect balance of citrus, floral, spice, herbs, leather, and amber, and projects a dreamy and gentle Eros rather than a raunchy one, in spite of a base with a roster of the usual (animalic) suspects. Unlike some men’s fragrances from the 1980s that haven’t aged well, Antaeus could be a new release from a niche house, and easily considered unisex. Gorgeous.

Top notes: Bergamot, lemon, lime, fruit note, coriander, cedarleaf

Heart notes: Orris, thyme, basil, rose, jasmine

Base notes: Patchouli, leather, amber, olibanum, musk, castoreum, moss

Giorgio by Giorgio of Beverly Hills (1981)

You know it. You may love it. But once you put it on, you won’t be able to get away from it, and those around you may hate you forever. That’s right—I’m talking about Giorgio. Giorgio of Beverly Hills.

In the late 1970s, Gale and Fred Hayman decided they needed an exclusive fragrance for their clothing boutique on Rodeo Drive. This exclusive fragrance, ironically (or, more likely, intentionally), ended up scenting every magazine, mall, big-haired salad eater, and Gucci bag–carrying Texas debutante in the 1980s like the “airborne toxic event” that threatens the characters in Don DeLillo’s surreal fantasia on consumerism and suburbia, White Noise.

This airborne toxic event starts off with a bright hit of green, followed by a massive synthetic-smelling accord of fruit notes plus orange blossom plus every cloyingly sweet facet that could be wrenched from Giorgio’s florals. There’s something kind of pleasant about the powdery and slightly rich drydown, but you can’t really experience it because the tuberose-gardenia-fruit monster stuns your nose into submission.

Giorgio doesn’t really develop so much as Enter the Building and stage a sit-in, demanding to be noticed: inert, bright, soapy, floral, and in-your-face sweet. It’s sunny and pretty in the way an immaculately made-up face Photoshopped within an inch of its life in a magazine is pretty, but there is no movement, multidimensionality, or life inside.

Giorgio is always described as a “big” scent, like many 1980s scent bombs, but it’s not Giorgio’s bigness or boldness that bothers me. I like the perverse Poison by Christian Dior, in small doses, and what some say is Giorgio’s reference scent, Robert Piguet’s Fracas, is as alive as a carnivorous plant. It’s Giorgio’s inorganic obtrusiveness that offends.

I may just be unable to objectively assess Giorgio’s aesthetic merits because there was a time growing up in Texas that I simply could not get away from it. It arrived with every fashion magazine that came in the mail in scent-strip form. (It was, in fact, the very first perfume that advertised itself not only through an image and a tagline, but also by actually smelling up the room.) You couldn’t go to the mall without being inadvertently sprayed with it. And on top of everything, its celebration of “exclusivity” (it’s from Rodeo Drive!) was a bit ridiculous. (If you’ve ever watched soap operas, it’s as if Giorgio is being positioned as the “exotic” European dude who stirs up trouble for the townsfolk in Port Charles.)

Giorgio set the volume way up. Among other loud scents of the decade: Obsession, Poison, Amarige, and so many others. It actually makes sense that by the 1990s, our exhausted noses were proffered androgynous office scents that had wiped off all their fuchsia lipstick and purple eye shadow and retired their sequined evening gowns. Improbably, Giorgio is still available, but to me, it smells as dated as Robin Leach’s sign-off sounds: “Champagne wishes and caviar dreams!”

Top notes: Green note, bergamot, fruit note, orange blossom, aldehyde

Heart notes: Tuberose, gardenia, ylang-ylang, orchid

Base notes: Sandalwood, cedarwood, musk, amber, moss, vanilla

K by Krizia (1981)

Perfumer: Maurice Roucel

Created for designer Mariuccia Mandelli for Krizia, a brand known for designs with bold shoulders, animal imagery, and intricate pleating, K by Krizia is a grand floral chypre that screams ’80s in the best possible way. Like Arpège or Crescendo, K is a creamy floral whose hint of velvety peach adds ripe fruitiness to this already lush perfume.

Top notes: Aldehydes, peach, hyacinth, bergamot, neroli

Heart notes: Jasmine, narcissus, tuberose, rose, lily of the valley, orris, orchid, carnation, orange blossom

Base notes: Sandalwood, vetiver, musk, amber, moss, civet, vanilla, styrax, leather

Kouros by Yves Saint Laurent (1981)

Perfumer: Pierre Bourdon

Anyone who has ever had her nose directly in the armpit of a man who is sweating and not wearing deodorant knows that the sharp, ammonia-like sting can either be pleasurable (say, you like the man) or unpleasurable (you don’t know this man from Adam and he’s raised his arm in front of your face on public transit).

Kouros’s extreme evocation of body odor arrives simultaneously with the scent of men’s cleaning products: fougère aftershave, the Pinaud powder that someone sprinkled on a man’s neck after a haircut, and, for those who despise Kouros, the oft-cited smell of a urinal cake in the men’s bathroom of the club where he ended up. It’s an olfactory deconstruction of the ’80s man, from the moment he “smells,” to the shower he takes, to the aftershave he throws on, to his putting on a leather belt and shoes.

This olfactory slap in the face—bitter, sour, nose-clearingly spicy, and animalic—has to be smelled to be believed. It’s as if Bourdon took Robert Piguet’s Bandit’s training wheels off and decided to ride down the stink highway screaming, “Look, Ma—no hands!” The artemisia in Kouros is some of the bitterest, thorniest, and sharpest I’ve ever encountered in perfume, in spite of friendlier notes of honey, geranium, and bergamot.

Kouros belongs in that rarefied “love it or hate it” Difficult-Smelling Perfumes drawing room where Poison, Angel, and Bandit are smoking cigarettes, drinking scotch, and trading war stories. For those who love Kouros, its incense and woods are wrapped in the Eros implied by the name, which is the Greek word for the white statues of nubile young men that dot Greek islands. And for the others? The following sentiment from a commenter on a perfume forum says it all: “I would rather burn money than buy this fragrance.”

Top notes: Aldehydes, artemisia, bergamot, coriander, clary sage

Heart notes: Geranium, iris, jasmine, carnation, patchouli, vetiver, cinnamon

Base notes: Oakmoss, honey, leather, musk, tonka, civet

Must de Cartier (1981)

Perfumer: Jean-Jacques Diener

In the same way that certain chic people are able to mix stripes with crazy prints, Must de Cartier combines fresh notes with a decadent gourmand base in a daring way that reads as beautiful for some people. For me, it bypassed rational analysis and went straight to my limbic system’s Decider, who nodded her head and said, “Yes, please. More.”

Must’s backstory, as recounted by Michael Edwards in Perfume Legends, is interesting. When Cartier was sending around perfume briefs to perfumers that described their ideal first fragrance, they had in mind two perfumes: a fresh perfume for daytime, and a more-seductive perfume for nighttime, probably in the Oriental family.

They were most interested in the young Givaudan perfumer Jean-Jacques Diener’s brief, so he decided, essentially, to put two fragrances together. Diener said he was inspired by Shalimar’s animalic-vanilla base, but wanted to change the top note from bergamot to galbanum, as he loved the way Aliage’s top notes were constructed. (Aliage is a green “sport scent,” remember!) He also gave it a civet overdose to make it even more animalic than Shalimar. Must’s “cool/warm accord,” according to Edwards, inspired Obsession, Roma by Laura Biagiotti, and Dune, among others.

The early Must eau de toilette was not constructed by Diener. It was supposed to be the “fresh” Cartier fragrance they had originally envisioned, which (rightly) confused the Must-lovers audience, who just expected a less-concentrated version. Cartier scrapped it in 1993 and replaced it with Must de Cartier II. (So if you want to try this odd perfume for yourself, either go to Sephora and spray it on, or get the vintage parfum. The vintage eau de toilette was not a favorite of mine.)

Must’s beguiling rush of galbanum and brightness at the beginning soon evolves into the lush floral, vanillic Oriental that is its true character. It goes from galbanum-pineapple to vanilla-amber-civet in a roller-coaster lurch that might make your stomach feel funny but Must’s intoxicating, animalic/gourmand drydown is 1980s excess at its unapologetic best.

Top notes: Bergamot, aldehyde, lemon, rosewood, green notes, peach

Heart notes: Jasmine, orris, carnation, orchid, ylang-ylang, leather, lily

Base notes: Vanilla, amber, benzoin siam, opopanax, oakmoss, sandalwood, vetiver, musk, civet

Nocturnes de Caron by Caron (1981)

Perfumer: Gerard Lefort

Nocturnes has all the hallmarks of a femme fatale perfume, but its restraint and subtlety mark it as a charming ingénue rather than a dangerous lady. A restrained, balanced, and yet multifaceted floral with a lot going on, Nocturnes de Caron could change the minds of all but the most stubborn haters of the floral category.

A combination of green notes, the freshest facets from florals (such as lily of the valley and rose), with a touch of ripe fruit and mandarin, Nocturnes gets a little curvier and more erotic with the introduction of rounder, fatter notes of vanilla, benzoin, and amber in the drydown, with a veil of powdery orris to blur and soften all the angles and curves.

Nocturnes starts off with an intense and gorgeous contrast between sharp green/fruity notes and the undertow of a voluptuous vanilla/amber base. The richer notes actually seem to rise up to meet the green beginning, only to disappear and rejoin them later after the florals have had their say.

Nocturnes’s spirit reminds me a bit of Ysatis, a lovely floral with a touch of coconut to fatten things up, or YSL’s Y. Its balance is my favorite part, managing to project “fresh and joyful,” with creamy warmth in the base.

As I’m sniffing my slightly sweet, slightly spicy/woody, gorgeously floraled hand, I wonder where all those well-behaved and yet still-interesting florals are now? There are a few contemporary florals that interest me (Frédéric Malle’s Carnal Flower, Mona di Orio’s Carnation), but they’re few and far between. What with all the ouds and exotic notes out there in perfume, it would almost be more subversive to make a truly interesting floral. Or, you could just buy some vintage Nocturnes de Caron.

Top notes: Aldehydes, bergamot, mandarin, leafy green, fruity note

Heart notes: Lily of the valley, rose, jasmine, cyclamen, lily, orris

Base notes: Vanilla, sandalwood, vetiver, benzoin, musk, amber

Nombre Noir by Shiseido (1981)

Perfumer: Jean-Yves Leroy

If Vent Vert smells like the color green, then Nombre Noir (“Black Number”) smells purple. Jammy, plummy, woody, and rosy, with a specially sourced osmanthus flower and high-powered damascones—molecules that come from Bulgarian rose oil and can impart rosy, fruity, woody, and/or tobacco facets—Nombre Noir was Shiseido’s first Western perfume under the creative direction of Serge Lutens and Yusui Kumai.

In the drydown, the woody-rosy, lipstick-waxiness of Nombre Noir settles into a bed of powdery honey with a not-unpleasant little chemical kick.

Top notes: Aldehydes, coriander, fruity note, bergamot, marjoram, rosewood

Heart notes: Rose, geranium, orris, jasmine, ylang-ylang, carnation, lily of the valley, osmanthus

Base notes: Sandalwood, vetiver, honey, amber, musk, benzoin, tonka

Ombre Rose by Broussard (1981)

Perfumer: Françoise Caron

In Michael Edwards’s Perfume Legends, we learn that Ombre Rose got its start as an old Roure perfume base, with a cosmetic note that smelled like vintage face powder. (Roure was a perfume school started by perfumer Jean Carles that is now a part of Givaudan.) “The fragrance of the original base has a very cosmetic note,” perfumer Pierre Bourdon said of Ombre Rose’s predecessor. “It rings a bell. That’s why it is so successful.” From there, Françoise Caron gave it a huge dose of coumarin (along with vanillin) to create a praline note. Perfumer Pierre Bourdon goes so far as to say that he considers Ombre Rose the first gourmand scent that was ever created.

One defining characteristic of postmodern texts is self-reflexivity—a self-conscious reference within the film, book, poem, or painting, for example, of its constructedness as a text. Ombre Rose is the first instance I’ve encountered in perfume of self-reflexivity; it’s a perfume that reflects on its Perfume-ness. Where Balenciaga’s Fleeting Moment addresses, in its name, perfume’s evanescent nature—its character as a substance that by definition disappears as soon as you encounter it—Ombre Rose calls out perfume as a medium for memory and nostalgia by using, as its base, a vintage perfume formula that smells like vintage face powder.

That reused Roure perfume base was itself being self-reflexive: By reproducing the scent of face powder (rather than a flower or something “natural”), it’s commenting on its own status as a cosmetic, but also on itself as an aesthetic medium. It reflects; it doesn’t merely reproduce. (I wonder if Ralf Schwieger, the nose for Frédéric Malle’s Lipstick Rose, was influenced by Ombre Rose. Lipstick Rose was constructed to smell, in part, like vintage lipstick—some say vintage Chanel, others vintage L’Oréal.)

Angela Sanders of the perfume blog Now Smell This wrote a post once about wit in perfumes. It seems to me that there’s something inherently witty about a perfume that calls attention to the scent of cosmetics, and to women’s relationship to the whole culture of cosmetics: the ritual, the aesthetics, and (let’s face it) the fetishization of it. What could be more fetishy than liking the smell of lipstick or face powder? Maybe wanting to smell it in your perfume and on your skin!

Top notes: Aldehydes, rosewood, geranium

Heart notes: Rose, sandalwood, orris, lily of the valley, cedarwood, vetiver

Base notes: Vanilla, musk, tonka, cinnamon, heliotrope

Sophia by Coty (1981)

There are some perfumes one encounters while sniffing through the twentieth century that don’t entirely fit into the style of that era. It’s as if the perfumer—in the case of Sophia Loren’s namesake perfume, unknown and unsung, as so many perfumers were—didn’t really bother to conform, and just did whatever he or she felt like doing.

Sophia is a little drugstore gem that is considered by many to be the first celebrity fragrance. It could be mistaken today for a $200 bottle of niche perfume, in terms of its quality and complexity. Caught on the cusp of the 1970s and ’80s, Sophia also smells like it could be a Lucien Lelong or Ciro perfume from the 1930s.

Although Sophia initially blooms with fresh, aldehydic florals and citrus notes, it balances its dry, spicy, and incensey qualities with its fresh, sweet ones. The voiceover in Sophia’s television commercial tells us that it is “the most female fragrance you’ll ever experience,” which is essentially meaningless when, thirty years later, one could say that leather, incense, and musk don’t exactly read as feminine.

This 1980 example is another in the genre of perfume ads that touted the newly liberated woman’s dual roles—in the boardroom and the bedroom—the latter role aided by perfume.

Top notes: Aldehyde complex, bergamot, orange, spice oils

Heart notes: Clove, cinnamon bark, jasmine, rose, orris, ylang-ylang, orchid

Base notes: Musk, amber, vetiver, sandalwood, vanilla, benzoin, leather, incense

Drakkar Noir by Guy Laroche (1982)

Perfumer: Pierre Wargyne

As a woman who loves green fragrances, I sidle up pretty quickly to men’s green scents, as they often take greenness to an extreme that happens only rarely in women’s fragrances. In Drakkar Noir’s case, this green is sustained throughout, from the herbaceous top to its piney center, down to its mossy, patchouli base. A hint of spice radiates from its center, but its freshness is its predominant character. From a comparison of notes, the difference between the 1972 Drakkar and its more-popular, ’80s “noir” version is largely the addition of leather and patchouli.

Top notes: Bergamot, artemisia, lemon, rosemary, green note

Heart notes: Cinnamon, cardamom, basil, pine needle

Base notes: Patchouli, moss, cedarwood, leather, amber, sandalwood

Island Gardenia by Jovan (1982)

Soft, subtle, and warm, like a humid gardenia flower midday in some tropical paradise, Island Gardenia is a sturdy little rendition of this voluptuous flower. There’s not a lot of development to it, but gardenia is backed up by tuberose’s wonderful bubblegum and rubber note, with a touch of creamy coconut. For a quick gardenia pick-me-up that didn’t break the bank, Island Gardenia was a wonderful drugstore choice. I can’t vouch for the present-day version.

Top notes: Green notes, coconut, peach, aldehydes

Heart notes: Gardenia, tuberose, jasmine, orange blossom, cyclamen

Base notes: Vanilla, civet, benzoin siam

Le Jardin by Max Factor (1982)

There’s a happy and secure tuberose in Le Jardin, pulling the same tricks it often does in other more-expensive perfumes, but this time, without making a big deal of itself. The momentary menthol plus tuberose combination reminds me of a less-potent version of mentholated tuberose in Serge Lutens’s Tubéreuse Criminelle. Although no one would mistake Le Jardin for Patou’s Joy, this little floral perfume manages to create a good impression on a small budget.

The fruit and green notes of Le Jardin’s opening are aerated by a subtle and charming spearmint note, made even more exotic with tarragon. This green, herbal aspect joins with buttery tuberose and light-green freshness from lily of the valley, and dries down to a powdery woody base with a smidge of spice, moss, sandalwood, and civet.

Le Jardin is a child of the ’70s much more than of the sweet ’80s, and an example of the kind of quality sadly missing from today’s drugstore fragrances.

Top notes: Fruit notes, green notes, bergamot, spearmint, tarragon

Heart notes: Jasmine, tuberose, cyclamen, lily of the valley, orris, rose, magnolia, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Cedar, sandalwood, moss, musk civet, amber

Amouage Gold by Amouage (1983)

Perfumer: Guy Robert

For their first fragrance, “Go big or go home” seems to have been Amouage’s perfume brief to perfumer Guy Robert, who called this fragrance the “crowning glory” of his career. Jasmine and rose are transformed into the Platonic Ideals of those flowers, casting off any dross, smoothing down their gowns, and flying up to the heavens in a purifying, religious ascension. As Amouage Gold dries down and the florals get more powerful, resinous myrrh warms them, and frankincense adds its cinnamon-like spice. The animal drydown pulls the perfume right back down to earth, with ambergris, civet, and musk melting with resins and florals into an animal/warm skin whisper.

A green aspect subtly merges with its lush, animalic base, and the slight cinnamon/incense of frankincense helps light up this perfume with a golden light from within, making the flowers feel even warmer and more opulent than they already are. Amouge Gold demonstrates the difference between couture versus a run-of-the-mill floral perfume. Seamless, beautiful, sensual, and heavenly.

Notes: Rose, lily of the valley, jasmine, frankincense, myrrh, orris, ambergris, civet, musk, cedarwood, sandalwood

Diva by Ungaro (1983)

Perfumer: Jacques Polge

When I was a teenager in the 1980s, my mother bought me a giant bottle of Diva in the crystal bottle with glass stopper. I would wear it occasionally, but it struck me as inappropriate, the equivalent of a fourteen-year-old in a pleated Emanuel Ungaro evening gown with plunging neckline.

Honeyed, creamy, spicy, and soft, Diva is at once fresh/floral and animalic/rich. The sweetness of ylang-ylang and jasmine are tempered with the soft-focus effects of orris, musk, and cistus (aka, labdanum), the resin from the rockrose bush that lends lush creaminess to scents. Patchouli, vetiver, and oakmoss add rough drama, while civet and honey (the civet more subtly than honey) add a touch of Eros to Diva’s ladylike demeanor.

One way of wearing such an outmoded scent like Diva today would be to put on a judicious amount early in the morning, with at least an hour for it to rest on your skin. (I have the parfum concentration, and one tiny drop has filled the air in a friend’s tiny apartment. Beware.) In the drydown, Diva retains its character while mellowing out enough so as not to scare your neighbors. Diva is like one of the big cats at the zoo: less intimidating, almost friendly while it’s napping.

Top notes: Bergamot, aldehyde, coriander, rosewood, hyacinth

Heart notes: Rose, jasmine, tuberose, carnation, orris, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Patchouli, vetiver, honey, oakmoss, civet, musk, cistus

Jardins de Bagatelle by Guerlain (1983)

With a retro violet leading the way, Guerlain’s Jardins de Bagatelle has a lovely warm sweetness that pushes a green aspect. It doesn’t get interesting until its drydown, when its fruity-violet-lemon top, and heart that’s both green and sweet, settles into a spicy base with a hint of civet.

Top notes: Violet, blossom-calyx notes, bergamot, aldehyde, lemon

Heart notes: Rose, jasmine, narcissus, cassie, ylang-ylang, orris, orchid, lily of the valley

Base notes: Vetiver, cedarwood, civet, musk, patchouli, benzoin

Jil Sander Woman 2 by Jil Sander (1983)

Feminine, masculine. Floral, leather. Sweet, bitter. Rich, dry. Light, intense. It’s hard to believe Jil Sander Woman 2 came out in the ’80s, the decade that brought us scent bombs I love like Poison and Loulou. Known for her minimalist fashions and even called “The Queen of Less,” German designer Jil Sander became famous for her separates in black, white, and cream that could be mixed and matched, made for working women with big bank accounts and an eye for avant-garde style.

But her complex perfume is a different story. Jil Sander Woman 2 is a stunning, enigmatic floral-chypre animalic perfume that comes closest to Piguet’s iconic Bandit than any modernish perfume I’ve come across so far, in character if not in notes.

It opens with a burst of juicy-sweet green fruit and bergamot reminiscent of Miss Balmain’s mouthwatering intro (and that of Sikkim, Aramis, and Azurée), which contrasts with its Mojave Desert of a base: leathery, woody, bitter, dry—and ridiculously chic.

Woman 2 may also have a touch of IBQ (isobutyl quinoline), which is the love-it-or-hate-it arochemical Cellier so famously overdosed Bandit with. It creates a rubbery-tobacco ash-and-leather accord that sent some scared Bandit sniffers running for the hills. I’m sniffing my wrists now and get IBQ plus patchouli, sandalwood, moss, and incense, combined with the faintness of the green fruit/floral top and heart. A huffer, for sure.

Top notes: Aldehydes, fruit note, neroli, green note, bergamot

Heart notes: Tuberose, jasmine, rose, lily of the valley, orris, orchid, carnation

Base notes: Amber, cedarwood, castoreum, patchouli, civet, sandalwood, olibanum, benzoin, moss

Niki de Saint Phalle by Niki de Saint Phalle (1983)

Befitting a perfume that shows two entangled snakes on its cap, Niki de Saint Phalle is a heady green floral chypre that practically hisses and rattles its tail. Sour, green, fruity, and intense, the perfume smells like the collision between a lime, a peach, and rattlesnake venom. As it dries down (I visualize this poison elixir literally dripping down a wall), the florals snake their way past the hissing top notes, and the mossy, musky, woody base provides some antivenom to the bracing beginning.

Niki de Saint Phalle was a French model-turned-painter-sculptor-filmmaker-provocateur-perfumer who was influenced by Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi. Her most famous work is a sculpture garden in Tuscany called The Giardino dei Tarocchi (The Tarot Garden). Opened in 1998 after twenty years of work, The Tarot Garden pays homage to tarot card symbolism, and its garish colors and found-object style of construction informs the style of this extreme perfume. (She also did “shooting paintings,” in which colors underneath a plaster canvas were not revealed until she used a shotgun to expose them. No shrinking violet, this one! Way to move on from a modeling career!)

Initially the cacophony of green notes, fruit, spearmint, and herbaceous artemisia/marigold at the beginning just scared me off.

Now I’m more receptive to its nuances: the way the amber and olibanum hum their low, warm, sweet songs at the opening as the top notes are screeching; the fact that the spearmint note adds an unusual freshness; and the way the rich florals are almost guarded by the top notes, as if we’re thrown off the treasure by the snake-guards / top notes. (Or maybe the true character of this perfume lies in the top notes? I think so.)

A lot of floral chypres mellow significantly from their bright top notes to their chypre bases. Niki de Saint Phalle’s joyous and intimidating green/sour/sweet/floral freshness sings through the chypre base. It’s there hours into the drydown, and as I’m sniffing my wrists now, I smell a mossy/woody green note kissed with a touch of fruit.

Top notes: Green notes, tagetes (marigold), artemisia, peach, bergamot, spearmint

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, carnation, orris, ylang-ylang, cedar, patchouli

Base notes: Oakmoss, vetiver, sandalwood, olibanum, leather, amber, musk

Paris by Yves Saint Laurent (1983)

Perfumer: Sophia Grojsman

How does a perfumer compose a fragrance that smells like joy, hope, and innocence? Ask Sophia Grojsman, the nose behind beauties such as Calyx, White Linen, and Eternity. The word joy was the first word that came to mind when I revisited her perfume, Paris, the rose-based scent that doesn’t so much scream rose as it does interpret, with the help of other notes, what this flower stands for in the popular imagination.

Green, fresh, and bursting with sweet—but not oppressive—florals, Paris knocks you over with its good mood. If you’ve ever been to Paris in the spring, you know the kind of blinding beauty it can offer. At times it can seem like everything about Paris was made to give you sensory pleasure—the food, the architecture, the smells—and Grojsman’s Paris translates that flash of joy into perfume notes.

Violet and hyacinth bloom most prominently around Paris’s intense rosiness, while cedar and sandalwood give it an almost cinnamony spice. The drydown is a powdery whisper of musk and orris, which soften the perfume’s floral brightness.

What’s interesting to me about Paris is how recognizable the floral notes are, and yet their composition together signifies an idea, a mood, and a place. It’s also a painterly fragrance. You can almost “see” the artist painting her canvas made of flowers—a giant rose with a dab of lily here, a splash of violet there, creating (to switch metaphors) a kind of musical tension in its notes that sustains a happy, almost bittersweet mood, like a bubble that just might burst, or happiness that surely couldn’t sustain itself.

Top notes: Green notes, bergamot, hyacinth, blossom-calyx notes

Heart notes: Violet, rose, orris, jasmine, linden, lily of the valley, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Musk, cedarwood, moss, sandalwood, heliotrope

Sand and Sable by Coty (1983)

A simple but beautiful little drugstore tuberose/gardenia gem fattened by a suntanlotion-like accord, with green notes to offset the richness.

Notes: Tuberose, gardenia, jasmine, rose, green notes, and peach

Trussardi by Trussardi (1983)

Seeming more like a perfume from decades before it, heir to Fête de Molyneux, Miss Balmain, and other chypre-leather animalics, Trussardi is beautifully balanced between green/mossy and sweet/warm. It starts off with a rosy-green galbanum/rose/coriander accord that’s offset with a surprising touch of sweetness from sensual tuberose and ylang-ylang. Its freshness continues with transparent florals and leafiness, with geranium and lily of the valley leading the pack.

Once we reach Trussardi’s drydown, this gorgeous fragrance’s basic (basest) instincts come out with a dose of patchouli, musk, and leather. Aside from the amber and vanilla, it’s like a who’s who of animalic notes. Hours into it, the fresh, green, incensey-woody-mossy-leather impression remains, touched by subtle greens and florals. If you like Sinan, Paloma Picasso’s Mon Parfum, and other intense chypres, you’ll love Trussardi. It was clearly a child of the 1960s and 1970s.

Top notes: Coriander, green note, aldehydes, hyacinth, galbanum, bergamot

Heart notes: Ylang-ylang, jasmine, rose, tuberose, orris, geranium, lily of the valley

Base notes: Cedarwood, sandalwood, patchouli, styrax, olibanum, moss, vanilla, amber, musk, leather

Coco by Chanel (1984)

Perfumer: Jacques Polge

Fruity, spicy, and warm, Coco’s honeyed amber, benzoin, and vanilla represents the ’80s version of tasteful excess, with a perfect balance of shiny fabric, gold bracelets, rings, and glossy makeup. I really love the dose of patchouli in Coco, which gives it a touch of wildness and noir excitement that belies its other, friendlier notes.

Top notes: Fruit note, mandarin, pimento, aldehyde, coriander

Heart notes: Rose, carnation, ylang-ylang, cinnamon, orris, patchouli, vetiver, sandalwood, tuberose

Base notes: Olibanum, amber, benzoin, vanilla, musk, honey, civet

Lutèce by Houbigant (1984)

Lutèce is a spicy, powdery Oriental perfume that balances bright orange and lemony geranium with a rich base of woods, spice, and vanilla. Its nutty, confectionary heliotrope and vanilla recalls Ombre Rose, but it tones down the gourmand aspect and ups the citrus, dry woods, and cinnamon spice. Surprisingly well-balanced for a powdery, ’80s Oriental perfume. (The Dana version is largely the same.)

Top notes: Aldehydes, mandarin orange, brazilian rosewood, geranium

Heart notes: Peony, rosemary, orris root, vetiver, lily of the valley, cedar

Base notes: Tonka bean, cinnamon, musk, vanilla, heliotrope

Maxim’s de Paris by Cardin (1984)

Featured in Gigi, mentioned in Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion, and frequented by a who’s who of twentieth-century icons including Jean Cocteau, Marcel Proust, Maria Callas, and Jackie Onassis, Maxim’s was a legendary restaurant in Paris famous for its Art Nouveau decor, beautiful women, and visiting luminaries.

Maxim’s de Paris, the perfume, doesn’t stun its wearer into submission like many ’80s fragrances, balancing as it does floral and green notes, and sweetness with spice. (Its base is reminiscent of Rumba’s.) Maxim’s, in short, speaks softly, although it carries some big olfactory sticks.

Top notes: Bergamot, tagetes, green note, fruit note, mint, melon

Heart notes: Lily of the valley, cyclamen, rose, jasmine, ylang-ylang, orris, tuberose

Base notes: Sandalwood, musk, honey, vanilla, heliotrope, amber

Paloma Picasso Mon Parfum by Paloma Picasso (1984)

Daughter of Pablo Picasso turned Tiffany jewelry designer and perfumer, Paloma Picasso added her name and input to one of the best scents of the 1980s: the castoreum-rich green chypre that bears her name.

Paloma Picasso Mon Parfum has the sillage of an ’80s perfume but the gravitas and depth of a 1940s chypre. Green, floral, woody, spicy, mossy, and animalic—Mon Parfum is overdosed with castoreum, a leather note prominent in men’s scents, making it a classic feminine scent with masculine signifiers. It’s one of my favorite chypres of all time.

Subtler yet more animalic than the versions in black plastic bottles, Mon Parfum in the white glass bottle roars with a savage blast of civet and aldehydes in its opening, combined with innocent and transparent rose and lily of the valley. Leafy coriander and geranium then encircle the florals, both narcotic (tuberose, jasmine, ylang-ylang) and delicate (rose, lily of the valley), transposing them into another, more haunting key.

Every time I would put on Mon Parfum, I’d notice another nuance. Sometimes lily of the valley and rose seemed to waltz in with civet in the opening, and at other times the civet hid from me, and all I could smell was aldehydes. With the later formulas, there’s an everything-all-at-once quality, like a meal that was blended together, taking away your pleasure in sampling each part at your leisure. You get all the notes, but they’re roughly corralled and herded into your nose; you miss the delicate entrances, exits, and interplay of notes.

If you can only find Paloma Picasso in the black plastic bottles (and they are everywhere to be found), you’re still going to have a gorgeous fragrance on your hands, but what will be missing is what I got to finally experience with this Mon Parfum in the white bottle: real development, movement, and depth.

Top notes: Coriander, rosewood, bergamot, green note, aldehyde

Heart notes: Rose, geranium, tuberose, jasmine, lily of the valley, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Patchouli, vetiver, amber, musk, civet, benzoin, oakmoss

Sinan by Jean-Marc Sinan (1984)

The love child of Coriandre and Paloma Picasso’s Mon Parfum, Sinan has everything the adventurous chypre lover would want: soul, depth, eroticism, and wearability, with a whiff of the exotic. This spiced chypre, shot through with angular green florals, is the olfactory equivalent of putting on a turquoise-blue caftan and wearing big gold hoop earrings. (Think of brocaded silk, or Loulou de la Falaise during Yves Saint Laurent’s Orientalist phase.)

Sinan starts off green and herby, and its coriander, although prominent, is dosed with a lighter hand than it is in Coriandre. Geranium’s piquancy, lily of the valley’s green facet, and ylang-ylang’s sharp sweetness—all are lightly cloaked with the musty damp herbaceous blanket that is coriander.

Top notes: Bergamot, green note, coriander, aldehydes, rosewood

Heart notes: Rose, geranium, lily of the valley, jasmine, orris, ylang-ylang, cardamom

Base notes: Patchouli, vetiver, amber, moss, musk, cistus

Ysatis by Givenchy (1984)

Perfumer: Dominique Ropion

Ysatis is not only a pleasure to pronounce (look in the mirror, purse your lips, and whisper “Eee-saht-ees, by Jee-vahn-shee” just for kicks), it is also a gorgeous and sensual floral. The surprise (and indispensable) note is coconut, giving the perfume a hint of richness, fat, and calories. It acts like a soft-focus camera lens to blur the crisp florals and give them a vaguely nutty, milky, and ever-so-slightly sweet tropical feel that could have veered into gourmand territory but stops short. It’s Ysatis’s hint of the tropical that makes it interesting, and its sexy drydown is my favorite part. That’s when the notes, all tucked into bed and spooning together, melt onto your skin.

Top notes: Green note, aldehydes, fruit note, rosewood, coconut

Heart notes: Tuberose, jasmine, narcissus, carnation, rose, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Patchouli, sandalwood, castoreum, civet, oakmoss, amber, honey, cistus

Anne Klein II by Anne Klein (1985)

Subtle, by ’80s standards, the distinguished and lovely Anne Klein II bowed to the decade’s passion for Oriental fragrances with amber-colored hues but comes out unscathed: It doesn’t smell too outré or dated.

Anne Klein II starts off surprisingly green, and then transitions to a beautiful blend of flowers. Orange blossom and ylang-ylang in particular continue to peek through the perfume’s third stage, which is the perfume’s primary character: creamy, ambery, woody, and orris-caressed vanilla.

Top notes: Bergamot, green note, peach, rosewood, lemon

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, ylang-ylang, carnation, orris

Base notes: Vanilla, amber, sandalwood, musk, patchouli, civet, benzoin

Derby by Guerlain (1985)

Perfumer: Jean-Paul Guerlain

Not many scents have mint notes in them—not only because of the association mint has with things like toothpaste, and, in England, cleaning products, but because it would take a steady hand to figure out how much to add in order to keep mint from taking over. But Derby, Guerlain’s chypre leather, puts peppermint to good use. What would otherwise be a beautiful but typical chypre leather transforms, through the addition of peppermint, into something sparkling, shot through with a cold, almost metallic quality, as if something otherwise dark were lit from within.

Top notes: Bergamot, lemon, artemisia, peppermint (fresh herbaceous)

Heart notes: Pimento, rose, pepper, mace, jasmine

Base notes: Leather, vetiver, sandalwood, patchouli, moss (leathery, mossy, woody)

La Nuit by Paco Rabanne (1985)

Perfumer: Jean Guichard

Three words: spiced, honeyed leather. (It’s also a contemporary version of Schiaparelli’s 30s scent, Shocking.)

Top notes: Citrus, basil

Heart notes: Rose, honey

Base notes: Oakmoss, woods, leather, patchouli, civet

Obsession by Calvin Klein (1985)

Perfumer: Jean Guichard

Until I picked it up recently, I hadn’t sniffed Obsession since the 1980s, so I was surprised at how restrained it seems to be in hindsight, and how well it’s held up. Part of Obsession’s success lies in its ability to take you in two olfactory directions at once: It balances a sensual, ambery, and powdery base with a radiating orangey heart that’s kept fresh with green notes and bright fruit. Spice and animal warmth never threaten to undo the paradoxical green freshness at its heart. Although updated with the ’80s obsession with bright fruit accords, its Shalimar-like structure of bright/sensual/animalic is familiar, and it works.

Top notes: Bergamot, green note, peach, lemon, rosewood

Heart notes: Jasmine, ylang-ylang, rose, cedarwood, sandalwood

Base notes: Vanilla, amber, musk, moss, civet

Poison by Christian Dior (1985)

For many, this monster floral is aptly named. It is a true love-it-or-hate-it fragrance. (Ad from 1985)

Perfumer: Edouard Flechier

It’s hard to believe that Poison is almost thirty years old. This much-maligned and equally beloved ’80s scent bomb with a bad reputation still grips my imagination. With its aubergine-colored, fairy-tale apple meets vintage apothecary bottle with a crystalline stopper, Poison is nothing if not provocative. You either love it or hate it—usually for the same reasons!

Rich, woody, spicy, and occasionally veering into a grape-bubblegum accord, Poison is like Shiseido’s Féminité du Bois with the cedarwood turned down and the tuberose-jasmine turned way, way up. The continuum of berrylike scents from Femme, to Magie Noire, to Féminité du Bois, shows the versatility of the berry/Prunol note, as well as its goth-erotic sensibility.

Although Poison comes on strong, the scent balances its intensity with a symphony of background notes that keeps it from being one-dimensional. Poison’s spice (cinnamon, coriander, carnation), woods, and musk temper its floral sweetness. It mellows out with an opiate-like softness, partly sweet, partly woody, musky, and incensey. Perfumer Edouard Flechier confirms that IFRA restrictions have continuously changed its original formula since its inception.

Top notes: Coriander, pimento, plum, anise, mace, rosewood, carnation

Heart notes: Rose, tuberose, ylang-ylang, carnation, cinnamon, jasmine, lily of the valley

Base notes: Cedarwood, vetiver, sandalwood, musk, heliotrope, vanilla, opoponax

Sables by Annick Goutal (1985)

Perfumer: Isabelle Doyen

If bigness is the mark of a 1980s scent, then Sables (“Sands”) is very much of its time. This out-of-character Goutal fragrance for men explodes on your skin with the smells of burnt sugar, fenugreek, the savory-sweet Immortelle flower, buttery sandalwood, and amber, like a dessert doused with brandy and lit on fire.

In addition to its bigness, Sables also smells like a twenty-first-century unisex niche perfume, its striking weirdness due in part to its being built around the maple syrup/savory bacon/ham note of the Immortelle flower. (This “Everlasting” flower is notorious for challenging perfumers to construct something that doesn’t simply smell like Sunday brunch.) Sables’s slight anisic, herbaceous, and celery-like scent recalls the dried cooking herb, fenugreek, which is used in curries and Middle Eastern cooking.

The perfume’s heat—suggested in notes like cinnamon and pepper—is also the metaphorical heat from sand dunes, summer, and perhaps the oft-imagined “exotic” winds that carry floral and food spices from markets across stretches of desert. It places itself, then, in the middle of this recurring trope in perfumes such as Lucien Lelong’s Sirocco and Serge Lutens’s olfactory Orientalist fantasy, Chergui (2001), both names for hot, Moroccan desert winds. (Speaking of Serge Lutens, his Christopher Sheldrake–composed Santal de Mysore [1991], with its buttered popcorn and cumin notes, smells like a toned-down homage to Sables, minus the cinnamon and maple syrup.)

Sables takes a few tries to get, and you might just end up appreciating it without loving it, but that it came out in the 1980s—the era of big flowers and big fruit—is a testament to Isabelle Doyen’s prescience, brilliance, and daring. (Get thee to an Annick Goutal counter and try this stuff! Miraculously, it’s still around.)

Notes: Immortelle, cinnamon, pepper, black tea, sandalwood, amber

Calyx by Prescriptives (1986)

Perfumer: Sophia Grojsman

Equal parts guava and grapefruit, Sophia Grojsman’s stunner Calyx is arguably one of the best of its fruity genre. Its genius? Reproducing the funky fruit-going-bad ripeness of tropical fruits like guava, jackfruit, and durian. Added to Calyx’s overripe sweetness—more aromatic than sweet—is the bitter freshness of a grapefruit accord so authentic-smelling I can almost taste the rind.

Calyx’s initial slightly rotting fruit note dips down low, like an orchestra that opens by allowing the musical saw to sound its first wavering, carnivalesque note. Once the rest of its song gets back on its feet to a “normal” register, that fruit-on-the-verge-of-going-bad note lingers, coloring the way the rest of Calyx’s fruity floral notes are experienced.

With as much fruit that’s packed into this perfume, you’d think that it would be cloying and overbearing, like the fruit bombs that stink up Sephora’s perfume aisles today. But, again, Calyx’s intelligence belies its often ditzy fruity-floral perfume category.

Top notes: Peach, apricot, cassis, green notes, tagetes (marigold), spearmint, bergamot

Heart notes: Lily of the valley, lily, jasmine, rose, cyclamen, melon, orris

Base notes: Cedar, musk, moss, raspberry

Jil Sander Woman 3 by Jil Sander (1986)

JSW3 starts off with a juicy galbanum-laced start, its pronounced masculine feel (perhaps) from the coriander, rosewood, and bay leaf combo. JSW3’s heart is gorgeous: It retains traces of the green, fresh top notes, and then moves to a powdery orris that transitions to spring-fresh florals. By the time it begins to dry down, you feel you’ve been on a roller-coaster ride of personalities. As the fresh green opening hovers over florals and powder, its animalic base rounds it all off with with a mossy, incensey, leathery, creamy sandalwood finish.

As much as I like Jil Sander Woman 3, it confuses me a little. Its pieces don’t fit together or even clash in a way that makes sense. It feels unfinished, although each time I sniff my wrists I get something gorgeous. It resembles a scent you could find at Barneys now—niche, and a little experimental.

Top notes: Green note, bergamot, coriander, aldehyde, rosewood, bay

Heart notes: Rose, ylang-ylang, carnation, jasmine, lily of the valley, geranium, orris, tuberose

Base notes: Patchouli, castoreum, sandalwood, olibanum, benzoin, amber, moss, vanilla

Panthère by Cartier (1986)

Perfumer: Alberto Morillas

There was once a myth that the panther was the one animal that smelled so amazing that its prey would voluntarily approach it just to catch a whiff of its narcotic fragrance. It seems that Cartier missed an opportunity to make this perfume as animalic as its name suggests. Instead, Panthère is a voluptuous, complex, sweet floral that dries down to woods, and balances fruit notes with white flowers.

Top notes: Karo Karounde, tagetes, peach, mace

Heart notes: Coriander, jasmine, gardenia, rose, heliotrope, carnation, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Cedar, sandalwood, patchouli, moss, musk, amber, vanilla, tonka

Parfum de Peau by Claude Montana (1986)

Perfumer: Jean Guichard

Known as the “King of the Shoulder Pads,” and an influence on wild designers like the late Alexander McQueen, Claude Montana gifted the 1980s with extreme, sculptural silhouettes and shoulder pads Lady Gaga eagerly borrowed from. But alas, the House of Montana, founded in 1979, went kaput in 1997.

Parfum de Peau starts off with tangy green notes, ripe cassis, and peach, laid over a veil of pepper and spices (cardamom). The unspecified green note almost has a vegetal green pepper smell—an odd note to marry with ripe fruit! Spicy ginger, sandalwood, and carnation join classic florals to the divine base that lasts for hours and evolves into a true “parfum de peau” (skin scent/perfume).

Depending on when I sniff my arm, Parfum de Peau gives me spicy fruit, an intense rose, or the amazing spicy-woody-powdery, animalic base that makes this perfume more of a floral Oriental to me than a fruity chypre, as the Haarmann & Reimer Fragrance Guide classifies it. (Or it’s some hybrid of both.)

What makes this fruity concoction sexy rather than innocent or cloying is its animalic nature. Cardamom and cassis are both notes that can reference the body, BO in the first instance and urine (cat pee, specifically!) in the second. Joined with the more-obvious animalics—castoreum and civet—you can see why this is not a perfume to put on before you go to church on Sunday.

Parfum de Peau represents everything the 1980s stands for in the popular imagination: It’s loud, daring, and cacophonous. But it’s also incredibly beautiful, and I’ve had it on my mind since I put it on last night. Even though the version I have is a mere eau de toilette, I can smell its subtle woody-ambery powderiness on my skin almost an entire day later.

Top notes: Peach, cassis, pepper, green note, plum, cardamom

Heart notes: Ginger, rose, tuberose, jasmine, ylang-ylang, carnation, sandalwood

Base notes: Patchouli, vetiver, civet, castoreum, amber, musk, olibanum (frankincense)

Parfum Rare by Jacomo (1986)

Parfum Rare belongs to an uncommon and wonderful perfume category: the animalic fruity-floral chypre. Ripe, spicy, and mossy, it starts at a low register, with hooded eyes and slurred speech, and goes from its fruity-fresh green note to a rottenish base of leather (probably castoreum in all its overdosed glory), amber, musk, and moss. Grab it (or its kind) while you can, before The Man takes away every ingredient that’s special about this perfume from the olfactory palettes of perfumers.

Top notes: Cassis, tagetes, aldehydes, bergamot, green note

Heart notes: Jasmine, tuberose, rose, lily of the valley, orris, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Patchouli, leather, benzoin, styrax, olibanum, amber, musk, moss

Scherrer 2 by Jean-Louis Scherrer (1986)

Pineapple is not a note you encounter often in perfume. In Patou’s Colony, it joined with an unusual chypre leather base and somehow worked. Scherrer 2 almost approaches a chypre elegance and counterpoint to sweet pineapple with its woody base, but it falls short of justifying the use of pineapple.

Top notes: Aldehydes, bergamot, mandarin, pineapple, anise, green note

Heart notes: Lily of the valley, rose, jasmine, lily, orris, tuberose, honey

Base notes: Vanilla, sandalwood, benzoin, amber, musk, heliotrope

Eau Dynamisante by Clarins (1987)

Perfumer: Jacques Courtin-Clarins

One of the most beautiful lemon-forward perfumes available, Eau Dynamisante was marketed as the first perfume with firming, toning, and energizing benefits. It could be dismissed as a mere aromatherapy product, but that would be a pity. With a soaring aromatic-green citrus opening supported by the spice of carnation and patchouli, by the time it blends and dries down on your skin, what’s left is an herbal-citrus skein of happiness. A refreshing aperitif in a decade of rich sauce-heavy entrees.

Top notes: Orange, coriander, caraway, lemon, petit grain

Heart notes: Rosemary, carnation, cardamom, thyme

Base notes: Patchouli

Loulou by Cacharel (1987)

Perfumer: Jean Guichard

I’ve never been into perfumes that are “seductive” in a conventionally feminine way. While some women wear Viktor & Rolf’s Flowerbomb or Victoria’s Secret Very Sexy, I’m happy smelling like overripe flowers (Diorella) or someone’s overripe armpit (Aramis).

This doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate perfume in that girly genre, if done well, and Loulou by Cacharel does it well. With a gently sweet opening of black currants, fresh top notes and florals, and a decadently rich vanilla heart, Loulou dries down to incense and woods, adding mystery to the perfume’s more-conventional come-on. Loulou lives up to the supposed perfume brief Jean Guichard was given by Cacharel: to create a perfume that projects both “tenderness and seduction.”

Loulou was the sequel to Anaïs Anaïs (1978), a straight-up “innocent” floral, and it was also heir to Ombre Rose (1981), whose praline and vanilla notes proved popular. (Until Ombre Rose, vanilla had been out of vogue for decades.) We’re told that Loulou also attempted to soften the harshness of Dior’s Poison (1985) through its intense vanilla note. Among everything else 1980s perfumes overdosed on, apparently vanilla was one of them.

I could never wear Loulou, but its vanilla/incense–sandalwood combination is pretty intoxicating. The vanilla is so rich and gourmand, it runs through Loulou like a vanilla version of the chocolate river that ran through Willy Wonka’s candy factory. By the end, the scratchy-spicy base notes add a maturity and sophistication to the fragrance’s sweetness.

Top notes: Bergamot, violet, plum, mace, cassis (black currant buds), tagetes (marigold), anise

Heart notes: Jasmine, tuberose, orange blossom, ylang-ylang, rose, orris, lily of the valley

Base notes: Cedar, vetiver, sandalwood, tonka, heliotrope, vanilla, benzoin, musk

Passion by Elizabeth Taylor (1987)

In 1957, Audrey Hepburn was the face in ads for Givenchy’s L’Interdit, a perfume created exclusively for her a few years before. In the 1970s and 1980s, untold numbers of Chanel No. 5 ads featured Catherine Deneuve staring impassively at the viewer, her iconicity and elegance synonymous with the Chanel brand. But it wasn’t until the 1980s that the celebrity scent as we know it—the perfume branded with and marketed by the celebrity himself or herself—came into being. Sophia Loren had one (Sophia, in 1980), Cher had one (1988), and Elizabeth Taylor, starting with Passion, ended up with roughly a dozen fragrances.

Passion was La Liz’s first fragrance, and it is surprisingly “difficult” for a celebrity scent, with a lot of leather, musk, patchouli, sandalwood, artemisia, and coriander to offset the easier tuberose-y florals and honey that make it so unmistakably an 1980s scent.

Top notes: Aldehydes, bergamot, gardenia, coriander, artemisia

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, tuberose, orris, honey, heliotrope, patchouli, sandalwood, cedar

Base notes: Oakmoss, castoreum, civet, cistus, leather, musk, vanilla

Boucheron by Boucheron (1988)

Perfumers: Francis Deleamont and Jean-Pierre Bethouart

Boucheron starts off, well, very sweet: Orange blossom is flanked with fruit and a tiny bit of herbal basil. It’s got that Amarige screech of sweetness that so many ’80s fragrances do, and which today in perfumes stands out like Dynasty-style shoulder pads. The “fruit complex,” which must be laboratory-made, smells very synthetic and contributes to the difficulty I have with this perfume. Its floral heart joins treacly jasmine and tuberose with a dose of some angles (geranium? narcissus?) and lightness, perhaps from lily of the valley. Boucheron’s drydown makes the sweetness a little more tolerable, and it evolves into a warm and woody/spicy base that veers toward the Oriental. I’m not a huge fan, but I may be in the minority.

Top notes: Bergamot, lemon, cassis, fruit complex, basil, orange blossom

Heart notes: Jasmine, orris, lily of the valley, tuberose, geranium, cedarwood, sandalwood

Base notes: Ambrein, tonka, benzoin, oakmoss, olibanum (frankincense), civet, musk

A science brief as perfume ad, Jovan Andron claims that it contains the human pheromone Alpha Androstenol. (Ad from 1983)

Ex’cla.ma’tion by Coty (1988)

Perfumer: Sophia Grojsman

You can detect Sophia Grojsman’s signature of joy in the absurdly named Ex’cla.ma’tion; however, it’s like a Forever 21 dress with great ideas but poor materials. Although lovers of Ex’cla.ma’tion say that it was an affordable perfume at a time when department-store perfumes were too expensive for young women and teens, I just can’t get past how cheap this perfume smells.

Fruity, vanillic, and musky, Ex’cla.ma’tion’s green note is dissonant, putting it in the Eden and Must de Cartier school of perfumes that invite the question, “Where is that strange note coming from?” Haarmann & Reimer list it as a floral, but to me this is a fruity Oriental perfume. The green note and bergamot keep it from being too weighed down (after all, it’s an exclamation point, not a semicolon or ellipses). It’s like a teenager in a woman’s gown. Try as she might, she’s in an ill-fitting dress.

Top notes: Peach, apricot, green note, bergamot

Heart notes: Orris, rose, jasmine, heliotrope, lily of the valley

Base notes: Cedar, amber, sandalwood, vanilla, musk, cinnamon

Fahrenheit by Christian Dior (1988)

Perfumers: Jean-Louis Sieuzac and Maurice Roger

Fahrenheit’s temperature rises from its chilly, fresh opening to its warming base of ambery leather. As its thermostat adjusts itself, the less-volatile climes of violet and cedar create an equanimity that seems like its true personality. Because this is the kind of scent men wore when I was growing up, it smells classically masculine to me, but in comparison to men’s fragrances now, this “masculinity” wrapped itself around a surprisingly floral and sweet center.

Top notes: Bergamot, lemon, lavender, violet, mace, chamomile

Heart notes: Jasmine, lily of the valley, cedarwood, sandalwood

Base notes: Amber, patchouli, leather, tonka, musk

Knowing by Estée Lauder (1988)

Perfumer: Jean Kerleo

Knowing is a bold, green, 1980s-style green floral chypre with fruit and woods, and with a hint of Paloma Picasso’s intense animalic base. In the way that you might pause when eating a delicious Vietnamese meal and wonder, suspiciously, if you just ingested loads of MSG, you might pause when sniffing Knowing and ask yourself which note is synthetic and projecting like it’s on steroids? Sometimes beauty and pleasure can bypass such questions, and for me, Knowing is one of those cases: Ignorance is bliss.

Top notes: Green note, coriander, orange, aldehyde

Heart notes: Rose, jasmine, lily, cardamom, cedarwood, vetiver

Base notes: Patchouli, oakmoss, honey, musk, amber, civet

Roma by Laura Biagiotti (1988)

Take Shalimar, with its bergamot, vanilla, and civet base; add a big dose of amber, a smidgen of black currant, and the scent from Doublemint gum’s powdery foil—and you have the sparkling, warm, sweet-spicy floriental perfume, Roma, by Italian fashion designer Laura Biagiotti.

Like some perfumes in the Oriental category, Roma gets a lift from hesperidic top notes. They seem to linger throughout Roma’s development, lightening the perfume’s mood so that we don’t take it too seriously. The uplift from bergamot and pink grapefruit plus that quirky touch of powdery mint keeps Roma’s character from falling into the brooding or overly decadent. It seems fresh and carefree for a perfume in this category. (The fluted, frosted bottle looks like a Roman column.)

Mint is said to be a difficult note to use in fragrance without evoking Scope mouthwash or toothpaste, so it’s surprising it works so well in a floriental with such prominent vanilla and amber. You’d think it would clash or seem unappetizing, but its freshness works well with richer notes.With a fresh, sparkling opening with extra zip from mint; a floral heart that gives it a soft femininity; and a vanillic/ambery/civet base with creamy/spicy sandalwood for depth and warmth, Roma is an approachable, unpretentious beauty.

Top notes: Bergamot, pink grapefruit, black currant, mint

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, lily of the valley

Base notes: Sandalwood, vanilla, amber, musk, patchouli, oakmoss, civet

Rumba by Balenciaga (1988)

Perfumers: Jean-Claude Ellena with Ron Winnegrad

To discover that Jean-Claude Ellena was a co-nose of Rumba is like stumbling upon a photo of a chic movie star before she had a stylist, wearing some ’80s getup with big shoulders, a profusion of ruffles, and huge hair. Like a pre-stylist starlet, Rumba is a beautiful, hot mess.

Some may know that before Ellena had his Minimalist Phase (Bulgari’s Eau Parfumée Au Thé Vert, Hermès’s Un Jardin Sur Le Nil, etc.), he was in what could only be described as a Maximalist Phase. Among his Maximalist creations: First by Van Cleef & Arpels (1976), with its huge floral bouquet, and the honeyed floral animalic Rumba, which starts out loud and fruity and dries down to a husky-throated woody-leather-musk affair.

A rumba, derived from the Cuban-Spanish word rumbo, meaning “party” or “spree,” is a ballroom dance based on a folk dance in duple time of Cuban-Spanish-African origins. It’s heavy on the hip-swaying and passion, and Ellena does his best to translate this larger-than-life drama into perfume.

If you can get past the huge fruity-floral opening (usually my least favorite style, but maybe you love that sort of thing), you might find yourself liking parts of Rumba in spite of yourself. It has that Amarige/Poison-like syrupy fruit-tuberose-honey opening that could put you into a diabetic coma, but then in a flash, Rumba gets incensey and a little rough. Rumba’s drydown is, in fact, dry, and such a welcome counterpoint to its fruity treacle: Cedar, sandalwood, and styrax create an incense effect that’s both mysterious and sexy.

Styrax is an interesting note often used to create leather scents. A gum-resin from the bark of a styrax tree, it imparts a leathery, smoky, balsamic (powdery-ambery) effect that perfumer Olivier Polge has said can give a chypre-like quality to perfumes. (Maybe this is why my Haarmann & Reimer guide has categorized Rumba as a floral-chypre animalic, even though there is no bergamot or oakmoss—the usual chypre ingredients—listed in the notes?)

I read a description somewhere of Rumba that stuck with me—that its drydown is like the inside of an old cathedral during mass, the smell of dripping beeswax candles combined with burning frankincense. If this aspect of the perfume were foregrounded and just slightly sweetened with the other notes, what a completely different dance Rumba would be. But then, it wouldn’t be the ’80s fragrance that it is …

Maybe Rumba is the perfume that sent Jean-Claude Ellena fleeing into the arms of Perfume Minimalism, like a drunk to rehab after a weekend bender.

Top notes: Peach, raspberry, green note, orange blossom

Heart notes: Tuberose, jasmine, rose, carnation, heliotrope, lily of the valley, honey

Base notes: Cedar, sandalwood, amber, tonka, vanilla, musk, styrax

Ça Sent Beau by Kenzo (1989)

When I was a kid, I used to love this strange candy at my corner store that consisted of flavored water injected into a wax cylinder. Usually, the candy was very sour or bright, which wildly and wonderfully contrasted with the wax you’d chew to get into the juicy center.

That’s what Ça Sent Beau (“It Smells Good”) reminds me of: a juicy, fruity floral (and not just any floral, a one-two tuberose/jasmine punch brightened by mandarin and orange blossom) embedded in beeswax, amber, and heavy musk. You can smell the sharpness of fruit, orange blossom, tuberose, and lily of the valley, but they’re clouded, enriched, thickened by an inexplicable waxy heaviness. A beautiful chypre base keeps the perfume from being confectionary. It smells good, indeed.

Top notes: Fruit complex, spice, notes, bergamot, mandarin, green complex, orange blossom

Heart notes: Tuberose, lily of the valley, jasmine, rose, carnation, coriander, cumin, orris, cedarwood, sandalwood

Base notes: Vetiver, patchouli, moss, amber, musk

Samsara by Guerlain (1989)

Perfumer: Jean-Paul Guerlain

When I first smelled Samsara a few years ago, I concluded that it was a polite jasmine scent without much character. It didn’t seem to make the most of the opportunity it had to express in perfume form the dramatic Buddhist notion of samsara, or the endless cycle of birth and suffering and death and rebirth.

I still don’t know if a perfume can express samsara, but my thinking on Samsara has itself cycled to a new place. Did I get a better version of Samsara? Was my first sniff of a reformulated Samsara, without the depth? Or perhaps it is I who have become deeper, more open, about what I can appreciate, if not wear?

All I know is, the second time around, Samsara won me over. Its top notes momentarily reference the fruitiness of many 1980s scents, but its main character is a buttery-rich sandalwood infused with decadent jasmine. Smooth and slightly spicy, Samsara is an ’80s power fragrance with more class than crass.

Top notes: Bergamot, lemon, green note, peach, tarragon

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, ylang-ylang, orris, carnation

Base notes: Sandalwood, vanilla, benzoin, amber, musk, tonka

Calvin Klein’s CK One is the representative 1990s “clean” scent. Stripped of any olfactory representations of the body in its base notes, CK One was marketed as a unisex scent, and even its utilitarian-looking, nondescript bottle seems bare.

Water, Water, Everywhere

CK One, L’Eau D’Issey, Laundromat (1990–2000)

It’s not a surprise that the first airbrushing program for computers, Adobe Photoshop 1.0, was released in 1990. Many perfumes in this era, no matter how beautiful or technically interesting, seemed to similarly have erased away imperfections—the olfactory kinds deliberately put into perfumes in earlier eras to give them depth, notes that referenced the body, or any true base notes that expressed “baseness.” Whether a reflection of the virtual, disembodied Internet era, an expression of post-AIDS germaphobia, or an aesthetic reaction to 1980s excess, Sunflowers, Happy, and L’Eau d’Issey (“Issey’s Water”) and their clean, uncomplicated freshness ruled the day.

In fits and starts toward the end of the decade, however, perfumers sounded much-needed dissonant notes, including the rubber in Bulgari Black (Annick Menardo), the truly difficult birch-tar smoke of Eau du Fier (Isabelle Doyen), and the unwashed beauty of Muscs Koublaï Khän (Christopher Sheldrake), with its trifecta of the animal notes, castoreum, civet, and musk, proudly on olfactory display.

Byblos by Byblos (1990)

Perfumer: Ilias Ermenidis

A fresh, happy, green floral, Byblos’s mandarin note is enriched by rose, lily of the valley, bright raspberry, and a warm orris base that fattens it up a bit. One of the earliest fruity florals whose category, alongside clean scents, went on to dominate the 1990s.

Top notes: Green note, bergamot, mandarin, cassis, peach, marigold (tagetes)

Heart notes: Mimosa, lily of the valley, orris, rose, orchid, heliotrope, lily, violet

Base notes: Vetiver, musk, raspberry

Cabotine by Grès (1990)

Perfumer: Jean-Claude Delville

Here is the Big Bad Eighties in perfume form: a collision of soaring green candied fruits—peach, plum, and cassis—with old-school lipstick and cosmetic face powder. Strong, but beautiful for its type.

Top notes: Cassis, peach, plum, green note, tagetes, coriander

Heart notes: Rose, tuberose, ylang-ylang, carnation, jasmine, orris, heliotrope

Base notes: Vetiver, cedar, civet, musk amber, vanilla, tonka

Jil Sander Woman 4 by Jil Sander (1990)

Time was seriously out of joint for the Jil Sander house nose if you situate a few of Sander’s perfumes in the context of their respective decades. In the 1980s, when huge fruity florals were taking over the smellosphere, in waltzed Jil Sander Woman 2. With its dry mossy/leathery personality, JSW2 stood out like a severe-looking conceptual artist from Berlin smoking a cigarette in the middle of a Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous party hosted by Robin Leach.

Jil Sander Woman 3 at least tried to chat with a few ladies with poofy sleeves and big hair, having a touch of fruit and friendliness herself. But then, just as the 1990s rolled around and began to get more minimalist and clean, and Dynasty dresses were replaced by minimalist black-and-white, along comes Jil Sander No. 4, right at the cusp, a fruity floral of no particular distinction acting like nothing had changed since the 1980s.

Top notes: Plum, peach, anise, mace, coriander, bergamot

Heart notes: Rose, tuberose, ylang-ylang, pimento, orris, jasmine, carnation, orange blossom, heliotrope

Base notes: Cedar, sandalwood, vanilla musk, amber, tonka, civet

Parfum Sacré by Caron (1990)

Perfumer: Jean-Pierre Bethouart

Does anyone do pepper and carnation fragrances better than Caron? To add to their peppery roster of Poivre and Bellodgia, Parfum Sacré (“Sacred Perfume”) ups the ante with a smidgen of cardamom, a gorgeous velvety rose dusted with powdery-woody orris, and a decadent balsamic base.

Released on the cusp of the over-the-top 1980s with the clean and minimalist 1990s, Parfum Sacré is practically anachronistic in the 1990s, a doomed historical figure in the movies knowing that his demise is near. By turns elegant and opulent, with a warm mix of spices, indolic florals, and woody balsams, Parfum Sacré seduces with its embarrassment of riches.

It’s the skanky civet and musk that meet you at the door to this gilded palace, however, that give this perfume a thrilling dimension it wouldn’t have without them. Like a 1-percenter inviting some artistic riffraff he met at the local watering hole to his fancy home for a dinner party, Parfum Sacré knows that there’s nothing more elegant than to invite the demimonde to your soirée. Sacrilege, after all, is just the flip side of sanctity. Perhaps one commenter on a perfume forum said it best: “It smells of sacred mysteries and incense, much like the inside of an Orthodox church—if that church were being run by Mary Magdalene.”

Top notes: Lemon, pepper, mace, cardamom, aldehyde

Heart notes: Orange blossom, rose, jasmine, rosewood, ylang-ylang, orris, carnation

Base notes: Vanilla, myrrh, amber, musk, civet, cedar

Safari by Ralph Lauren (1990)

Perfumer: Dominique Ropion

Categorized as a green floral, the sweetness and fruit note in Safari dominate its greenness, which is surprising given how galbanum is an opening note. Although there’s a significant—and welcome—touch of spice from carnation and styrax, you’ll have to like your green florals on the sweet side to get along with Safari.

Top notes: Galbanum, green note, mandarin, hyacinth, aldehydes

Heart notes: Rose, lily of the valley, narcissus, carnation, jasmine, orris, orchid, honey

Base notes: Cedar, vetiver, moss, tonka, vanilla amber, styrax

Trésor by Lancôme (1990)

Perfumer: Sophia Grojsman

A powdery apricot-rose that dries down to a musky vanilla, Trésor has a romantic, waxy quality to it, like vintage scented lipstick or face powder. Its dose of syrupy-sweet violet-rose is headache-inducing for some, and suspends everything in a synthetic cloud that is hard to get past. More of a 1980s than a 1990s scent.

Notes: Rose, heliotrope, orris, apricot, iris/violet, sandalwood

Wrappings by Clinique (1990)

Perfumer: Elie Roger

With its oddly prosaic name and season-bending freshness, Clinique’s Wrappings is offered only during the holiday season, and tends to be pretty hard to find even then at Clinique counters. A few Clinique sales associates didn’t even know what I was talking about when I asked if they had a tester bottle and at the San Francisco Macy’s, a (criminal) Wrappings fan had swiped theirs.

Wrappings starts off green and herbaceous, with the freshest facets peeking out of its juicy, spicy floral bouquet. It seems more like a summer than a winter scent. (It has that ’90s-style ozonic quality I don’t particularly like, but that just ups the ante on its freshness.) The drydown is my favorite part: mossy and dry with a touch of leather, its top and heart notes softened by orris and pleasantly powdery.

Top notes: Green note, artemisia, aldehydes, lavender, mace

Heart notes: Cyclamen, rose, jasmine, orris, hyacinth, carnation, ozone

Base notes: Cedar, patchouli, leather, moss, marine, musk

Amarige by Givenchy (1991)

Perfumer: Dominique Ropion

The olfactory version of a last gasp, Amarige represents the beginning of the end of the big fruity floral of the 1980s. With a jumble of synthetic-smelling fruit notes that smell as jarring as spandex shorts with headbands and fanny packs now look, Amarige’s predictable progression into a tuberose-sweet floral heart and vanilla/amber woody base makes it hard to separate from its sisters (Cabotine, Giorgio, Animale, etc.). Tuberose can usually do a lot of olfactory damage on its own to sensitive noses, but just in case, Amarige threw in chemical-laden reinforcements.

Amarige’s sandalwood and cedar base at least helps redeem it by providing depth and texture to the chemical stew that bubbles at its heart. Once you’re well ensconced in its fruity world, like a cult member who has been thoroughly brainwashed, you might begrudgingly appreciate Amarige. But it’s hard to imagine this style of sweetness will ever come back to perfume, even ironically.

Top notes: Plum, peach, orange blossom, violet, green notes

Heart notes: Ylang-ylang, jasmine, tuberose, rose, orchid, carnation

Base notes: Sandalwood, cedar, musk, amber, tonka, vanilla

Asja by Fendi (1991)

Perfumer: Jean Guichard

A sumptuous Oriental perfume smoking a berry-scented hookah in Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium den, Asja balances spicy carnation/cinnamon with a sandalwood-smooth balsamic base. Just don’t judge a perfume by its bottle, unless you want your perfume bottles to look like two laquered miso soup bowls stacked together.

Top notes: Bergamot, green notes, peach, apricot, raspberry

Heart notes: Rose, carnation, lily of the valley, jasmine, orris, orchid, cinnamon, honey

Base notes: Vanilla, benzoin, styrax, cedar, sandalwood, amber, musk

Escape by Calvin Klein (1991)

Perfumer: Ann Gottlieb

One of the first aquatic, clean, and fruity-floral fragrances of the 1990s, a scent category that came to be an olfactory version of white noise. Fresh, pleasant, and, because functional fragrances like shampoo came to take on these clean scents, redolent of freshly washed hair.

Top notes: Peach, melon, green note, bergamot, apricot

Heart notes: Rose, lily of the valley, orris, cyclamen, heliotrope, ylang-ylang, rosewood, carnation

Base notes: Cedar, vanilla, amber, musk, sandalwood

Jitrois by Jitrois (1991)

Perfumers: Jean-Claude Jitrois and Jean-Claude Ellena

From its rad bottle to its oddball scent—it smells like a fantastic version of a green fragrance tree–scented New York City cab—Jitrois is a truly strange beast.

Fresh, sharp, green, and rich with luscious-sweet gardenia in the opening, Jitrois transforms into something altogether surprising in the drydown. (Perhaps we are given a hint by the gorgeous bottle that not all will remain the same: One side is rippled and rough, as if it were raw material, and the other side is smooth and refined, as if civilized by the left side.)

I thought at first that I was smelling tarragon, combined with new-car smell, and it turns out that I’m not entirely wrong: Jitrois starts off with green notes and coriander. It dries down to a pretty intense animalic base that is synthetic-smelling but familiar somehow, and hence, not entirely unpleasant. Those dissonant notes—green and sweet from gardenia, and a mossy leather base—recall 1944’s Bandit in its homage to leather (designer JC Jitrois’s material of choice, as it turns out).

Top notes: Bergamot, green note, gardenia, coriander, aldehyde

Heart notes: Jasmine, carnation, rose, lily of the valley, orris

Base notes: Patchouli, leather, moss, castoreum, amber, labdanum, civet

Krazy by Krizia (1991)

Perfumer: Dominique Ropion

Krazy by Krizia shares its DNA with its precursor, 1981’s Must de Cartier, the amber Oriental perfume that dared to combine what Luca Turin referred to as the “indigestible” combo of bitter green galbanum with ambery vanilla accords. In fact, Krazy is closer to 1985’s Anne Klein II, with its emphasis on amber, over Must’s Shalimar-like vanilla. And both perfumes are steeped in 1980s intensity, the sweetness in both, even more so in Krazy, is ratcheted up a notch.

Although there’s civet, patchouli, sandalwood, and cedar in Krazy, at a certain point in the drydown, all I smell is a fun and fruity amber shot through with vanillic notes. Krazy doesn’t always mean deep.

Top notes: Green notes, bergamot, mandarin, rosewood, peach, cassis, lemon

Heart notes: Jasmine, lily of the valley, rose, orris

Base notes: Patchouli, cedar, vanilla, benzoin, tonka, ambrein, musk

L’Arte di Gucci (1991)

Black, inky, and goth, L’Arte di Gucci is an Edward Gorey-esque animalic-rose chypre with a cult following among certain perfume lovers. In my fevered imagination, its rose comes from the rose bushes surrounding the dilapidated and haunted Victorian home of Merricat, the witchy protagonist from Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

A fruit note is prominent in the beginning, flanked by herby coriander and bright and green notes, but it’s of the Lancôme Magie Noire dark-woods character rather than the froufrou fruit variety. Patchouli rises up almost immediately, cloaking the bright top notes and taking them down to the Underworld with its other beautiful poisonous-smelling flowers and woody, masculine smells. As L’Arte di Gucci dries down, the rose just radiates from its dark lair lined with leather, vetiver, musk, and oakmoss, the patchouli prominent throughout.

For some strange reason, this beauty was discontinued—and resurrected, one could argue, in Calvin Klein’s Angel-esque Euphoria in 2005. I wonder if a stake was driven through its dark-rosed heart around the time CK One (the reference scent for all clean scents to come) came around in 1994.

Top notes: Fruit note, bergamot, aldehyde, coriander, green note

Heart notes: Rose, jasmine, geranium, tuberose, orris, lily of the valley

Base notes: Patchouli, vetiver, leather, amber, musk, oakmoss

Angel by Thierry Mugler (1992)

Perfumers: Olivier Cresp and Yves de Chiris

With its alien, star-shaped “lay down” bottle and unearthly pale blue juice (a first for perfume), Angel announced its landing on Earth as an unusual event before anyone even smelled the innovation inside. Although Angel smells nothing like a vintage perfume, Olivier Cresp and Yves de Chiris did borrow a page from the old-school playbook when composing it: They dared to overdose, and they combined unusual notes together.

Gourmand accords—including an unusual cotton-candy accord supplied by ethyl maltol—combine with honeyed berries and an overdose of patchouli to create a scent at once sexy, fun, earthy, and uncanny. Angel, in other words, did not get the memo that the ’90s were going to be about “clean and transparent.”

Angel has been called the first of a perhaps unfortunate perfume category—the “fruitchouli” (the portmanteau word combining “fruit” and “patchouli”) and has spawned imitators far and wide, from Calvin Klein’s tamer Euphoria to Viktor & Rolf’s Flowerbomb. Angel, however, does what those watered-down versions don’t do. It creates a pastiche of moods as well as scents. Its “celestial” top notes, as Mugler called them, are remote and cold; its gourmand accords, comforting and childlike; and the patchouli overdose grounds the perfume with earth and spice. That everyone across the land now wears Angel should not make you forget that it is a landmark in perfumery.

Top notes: Bergamot, helional, jasmine, hedione

Heart notes: Red berries, dewberry, honey

Base notes: Patchouli, vanilla, coumarin, chocolate, caramel

(Notes and anecdotes from Michael Edwards’s Perfume Legends: French Feminine Fragrances.)

Au Thé Vert Au Parfumée by Bulgari (1992)

Perfumer: Jean-Claude Ellena

Like a palate cleanser after an incredibly rich meal, Bulgari’s Au Thé Vert Au Parfumée arrived in the early 1990s at around the same time scent bombs like Amarige were still being produced. This wan, gentle little thing was like a Zen temple next to the Trump Towers of its day, and in its famous or infamous minimalism, it both hearkened back to restrained perfumes like Chanel No. 19 and looked forward (for better or worse) to the clean scents of the 1990s, a good two years before CK One had come onto the scene and added androgyny to the mix.

With a joyous, lemony-herbal top note with prominent ’70s-esque coriander, Au Thé Vert then moves to green parts of lily of the valley and a minimal floral bouquet. It’s the incensey-woodsy base that gives this perfume its kick and its exoticism. It’s almost a perfume version of Spanish chef Ferran Adrià’s meals encapsulated in foam. Easily underestimated, but pioneering and beautiful, Bulgari’s Au Thé Vert Au Parfumée really did help put the brakes on ’80s excess by stripping down, sitting in a lotus position, and lighting some incense. That this bred, ironically, an excess of minimalism is not its fault.

Top notes: Coriander, orange blossom, mandarin orange, bergamot, cardamom, lemon

Heart notes: Jasmine, lily of the valley, Bulgarian rose

Base notes: Sandalwood, amber, musk, green tea, woods, cedar

Féminité du Bois by Shiseido (1992)

Perfumer: Christopher Sheldrake

Of the many praises I’ve heard about Christopher Sheldrake’s Féminité du Bois, not one that I’ve found mentions that it smells like a poetic perfume rendition of a woman’s nether regions.

Like Belgian surrealist painter Paul Delvaux’s association of women with woods, Féminité du Bois is Femininity in the Key of Woods. Cumin is often referred to as a body odor note—disparagingly by those who hate it, and as a compliment by those who love it, as I do, when properly balanced in a perfume. Like civet, musk, or castoreum, those legendary notes that make a perfume “animalic,” the cumin puts this perfume into a “human animalic” (humanimalic?) category.

Sensual and intense, Féminité du Bois comes on strong. But after the intial blast of cumin, you can smell a whiff of medicinal menthol mixed with cedar, cardamom, cinnamon, honey, beeswax, and plum. There’s a hint of sexuality, after which time it all dries down into something quite soft, if still a bit spicy. To echo the perfume’s sexual connotations, the 4 ml. mini parfum bottle I own looks like a tiny, phallic mushroom shoot, with a naturalistic little curve that hints at a woman’s body but looks more like something organic growing out of the ground. Plummy, woody, mysterious.

Top notes: Peach, bergamot, rosewood, tarragon, cardamom

Heart notes: Carnation, mace, cinnamon, orris, rose, jasmine, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Cedarwood, sandalwood, patchouli, musk, amber, civet, vanilla

L’Eau d’Issey by Issey Miyake (1992)

Perfumer: Jacques Cavallier

In discussing the perfume he wanted with perfumer Jacques Cavallier, it’s said that Japanese designer Issey Miyake, famous for his minimalist yet sculptural, pleated clothes, asked for a perfume that was “as clear as spring water,” combining the spray of waterfall, flowers, and forest. One of the first late-’80s, early-’90s Calone-driven acquatics, L’Eau d’Issey has a light melon and transparent leafy greenness with a seaweed/salt note characteristic of this synthetic. (The arochemical Calone smells of cucumber, melon, and a marine-like salt spray.)

Top notes: Green note, melon, orange blossom, lemon, peach, rosewood, tagetes

Heart notes: Cyclamen, lily of the valley, rose, jasmine, orris, carnation

Base notes: Cedar, amber, musk

Parfum d’Été by Kenzo (1992)

Perfumer: Christian Mathieu

When Kenzo’s Parfum d’Été (“Summer Perfume”) opens, a candied, violet-like accord blasts out, edged with a very sharp greenness that keeps it from being cloying. That almost-screeching green note becomes more herbaceous and less artificial-smelling, giving Parfum d’Été’s sweetness a touch of dried coriander, or what my Haarmann & Reimer guides call “leafy green.” Although Parfum d’Été is quite sweet at the beginning, it’s also pitched toward green, and floating in the direction of light, transparent florals—lily of the valley, cyclamen, rose. (Those flowers bloom as the perfume progresses, warmed up by amber.)

I like the way that you can still distinguish the predominant notes even in the drydown—the fruit, the florals sweetened by hyacinth, and the leafiness that keeps it fresh and true to its intended season. It’s a charming little green fruity-floral with a quirky personality and enough subtlety to work in the summer heat.

Top notes: Leafy green, peach, hyacinth, rosewood

Heart notes: Lily of the valley, cyclamen, rose, jasmine, ylang-ylang, orris

Base notes: Sandalwood, musk, cedar, amber

Sublime by Jean Patou (1992)

Perfumer: Jean Kerléo

Sublime makes an imperious entrance into a decade that will make her as incongruous as a dolled-up Alexis Carrington walking into an after-hours cocaine party on the Lower East Side. After all, 1992 was the year CK One launched and kicked this grand ’80s style of perfume to the curb.

This doesn’t mean that Sublime isn’t sublime. With accords that recall Must de Cartier’s juxtaposition of galbanum and vanilla, Sublime starts with an intense opening of sweet mandarin and sharp green notes. It quickly becomes spicy, creamy, and woody-ambery while the mandarin continues to cut through the buttery base. When I smell Sublime, I think of that Dior commercial for J’Adore perfume that shows Charlize Theron strutting down the halls of Versailles in a ball gown. As she walks, she pulls off her accessories one by one—earrings, necklace, bracelet—as she says, “Gold is cold. Diamonds are dead.” And I think of all of the notes we will not see for a while in perfume as the clean, unisex, office scents take over.

Top notes: Bergamot, mandarin, coriander, green note

Heart notes: Rose, jasmine, orris, ylang-ylang, carnation, lily of the valley

Base notes: Sandalwood, vetiver, cedar, tonka, styrax, vanilla, musk, amber, civet

Champagne (now Yvresse) by Yves Saint Laurent (1993)

Perfumer: Sophia Grojsman

(The name, and perhaps formula, were changed to Yvresse after Champagne producers threatened Saint Laurent with lawsuits. This review is for Champagne.)

Champagne lies somewhere between the sour-sweet tropical-fruit lusciousness of Calyx (1986) and the rose-violet floral joy that is Paris, Grojsman’s other ultrafeminine rose-hearted scents. What it also has in common with those scents is Grojsman’s ability to create uncanny bouquets, to make the familiar strange, alien, exotic, and shot through with exuberance. “Brooding” is just not a mood you’re going to find in Grojsman’s oeuvre.

Although Champagne is sometimes characterized as a fruity chypre, it seems more like a fruity Oriental perfume to me. Peach and apricot are exoticized with green notes and anise, giving its gorgeous rose-violet heart a push into alien floral territory. And its complex base seems too powdery and creamy to be a chypre: It’s a dizzying combination of animalic (from castoreum and styrax, which gives the base a creamy, even waxy warmth some compare to lipstick or crayons), balsamic, woody, and mossy, with a continuation of subtle spice from carnation, cinnamon, and patchouli.

I was expecting effervescence from Champagne, a translation in the notes of the bubbles and lightness of the celebratory drink that was originally its namesake. But Champagne gives me something even better—it feels itself like a celebration, with an all-at-onceness of notes and accords that bubble up to gorgeous fun. As I sniff the drydown, I can smell perfectly formed rose petals touched by anisic, spiced fruit and surrounded by an ambery Oriental warmth.

Top notes: Green notes, peach, apricot, anise, cumin, violet

Heart notes: Rose, orris, lily of the valley, carnation, cinnamon, jasmine

Base notes: Vanilla, patchouli, cedar, styrax, benzoin, oakmoss, musk, amber, castoreum

Eau de Gucci (1993)

Perfumer: Michel Almairac

A surprisingly demure and nineteenth-century perfume for the early 1990s in its top notes, Eau de Gucci reads as delicately sweet, with hyacinth, ylang-ylang, and jasmine leading the way. Green and fruity top notes remind us that it is modern (and possibly hearkening back to the 1980s), while its woody/ambery base keeps it from being cloying. Eau de Gucci practically walks you through twentieth-century perfumery, from top to bottom.

Top notes: Bergamot, galbanum, green notes, fruity notes, lemon, hyacinth

Heart notes: Jasmine, lily of the valley, rose, orris, ylang-ylang, tuberose

Base notes: Cedar, sandalwood, oakmoss, musk, amber

Nuits Indiennes by Jean-Louis Scherrer (1993)

Perfumer: Nathalie Feisthauer

Nuits Indiennes (“Indian Nights”) is an Oriental perfume in the grand tradition, a David Lean film in Cinemascope with lots of desert scenes and teeming throngs in town squares filled with exotic, ingredient-stocked markets. How does Feisthauer evoke an Indian night? By surrounding a heliotrope center like chewy marzipan with lush florals and a boozy-amber-woody base with civet. What gives it away as an early-1990s scent is that era’s love for fruity top notes. Here, they’re prominent, but greened to keep them from being too cloying. Powdery, sweet, and gourmand, Nuits Indiennes is a perfume for those for whom size (and projection) matter. For some reason, one year later, Nuits Indiennes was renamed and relaunched (but not reformulated) as Nuits de Scherrer.

Top notes: Bergamot, lemon, mandarin, green notes, peach, aldehyde, fruity note

Heart notes: Jasmine, lily of the valley, rose, ylang-ylang, lilac, heliotrope

Base notes: Sandalwood, cedar, vanilla, benzoin, ambrein, musk, tonka, civet

Sunflowers by Elizabeth Arden (1993)

Perfumer: David Apel

That Sunflowers would sit next to Silences in my Haarmann & Reimer guide under the floral-green category is a testament to how broad perfume categories are, as well as to the differences between the 1970s and the 1990s.

Where Silences is extreme, forbidding, and mysterious, Sunflowers is amiable, inviting, and ordinary, like a lovely face that adheres to the rules of symmetry in a world where beauty is defined by excess or imperfection. Pleasant, but undistinguished.

Top notes: Green note, lemon, rosewood, orange blossom, fruit note, mandarin

Heart notes: Cyclamen, lily of the valley, rose, jasmine, orris

Base notes: Cedar, musk, amber, moss

CK One by Calvin Klein (1994)

Perfumers: Alberto Morillas and Harry Fremont

I like to rag a lot on CK One for being the perfume that ushered in the clean office scent to the late twentieth century, but when I really give it a chance, minus its cultural meaning, it’s quite a lovely and happy fragrance. A complex citrus, CK One soars with orange, lemon, and bergamot notes enhanced by aromatic fruits (papaya, pineapple) and greened by lily of the valley and probably galbanum. As bright and oily as freshly grated citrus rinds, with only the greenest iterations of lily and rose, and warmed by the subtlest chypre base, CK One—famously marketed as a unisex fragrance—is practically an eau fraîche in the style of Ô de Lancôme, or Eau Dynamisante (but not quite as herbaceous).

Top notes: Bergamot, cardamom, mandarin orange, lemon, pineapple, papaya, green notes

Heart notes: Jasmine, violet, rose, nutmeg, orris, lily of the valley

Base notes: Sandalwood, amber, musk, cedar, oakmoss

Eden by Cacharel (1994)

Perfumer: Jean Guichard

People often complain that they hate perfumes that smell synthetic. But what if a perfume is made intentionally to smell synthetic? I can’t guess at the intention of Eden’s author, Jean Guichard, but I think that an aspect of Eden is too weirdly synthetic to have been an accident. Why would a perfumer want the flowers in his Garden of Eden to smell like overheated plastic? And why on earth do I kind of dig it?

Eden’s heart and base are classic ’80s. It’s a big, gourmand Oriental. But something very strange happens at the beginning. The top half of Eden smells like it’s made of hot plastic soured by green notes and herbalized by anise (from tarragon). These alien top notes join with their more earthbound counterparts: a sumptuous floral heart that is softened and fattened by orris, drying down to a fruit-sweetened, mossy gourmand base reminiscent of Loulou, also a Jean Guichard creation. But no matter how beautiful its heart and base are, that herbal, hot-plastic note (which reminds me a little of unripe mango skin) announces a wonky, artificial, and compelling accord that haunts the rest of the perfume.

Eden was released the same year as CK One, and although Eden and CK One would seem, initially, to be diametrically opposed, they both introduced different versions of unnatural. In CK One’s case, it offers up clean and androgynous as something to aspire to in the olfactory realm. The baroque, hyper-gendered stylings of the ’80s were denuded with CK One, and the scentless, sex-ambiguous body was laid bare.

Eden repudiates the natural not through disembodied, but rather artificial-smelling accords. Its wet, plastic, anise-licorice smell travels through to the drydown, which is mostly classically ’80s in its loud too-muchness. Scents from the 1990s attempted to get rid of human smells in order to make way, as perfume historian Octavian Coifan muses in a dystopian prediction, for a computerized generation preparing for a disembodied, virtual future.

It could be argued that some perfumers introduced strangely plastic notes to 1980s and ’90s fragrances when they could have just as easily created “natural” smells. Synthetic and unnatural were introduced as a virtue—not synthetics in place of more-expensive ingredients, but rather perfumers making the aesthetic choice to create accords that smell synthetic. Think of Poison’s sickly-sweet tuberose/grape bubblegum accord, or Angel’s bizarre cotton candy / patchouli accord.

The Eden Jean Guichard has proposed for us—in keeping with Angel and Poison—is a garden of plastic delights.

Top notes: Bergamot, lemon, mandarin, green note, peach, tarragon, orange blossom

Heart notes: Tuberose, jasmine, lily of the valley, rose, ylang-ylang, orris

Base notes: Cedar, patchouli, sandalwoood, musk, moss, vanilla, tonka, amber

Premier Figuier by L’Artisan (1994)

Perfumer: Olivia Giacobetti

Premier Figuier, Olivia Giacobetti’s Garden of Eden fragrance, in contrast to Guichard’s interesting artificial Eden, has one tree—a fig tree. The school of naturalism to which it belongs is in sharp contrast to Eden’s postmodern expressionism.

A beautiful compromise between the sweet, gourmand 1980s and the clean, fresh 1990s, Premier Figuier (“First Fig”) is as much a special, landmark perfume as Sophia Grojsman’s Calyx, both for making complexity look (or smell) simple, and for making elegant notes that, in others’ hands, could become cloying and cliché. (It’s not Giacobetti’s fault that we are now saturated with fig scents; remember, hers was “le premier.”)

Premier Figuier evokes every part of the fig tree—its sweet fruit, its green leaves, the tree’s bark, and, via almond milk and coconut, fig’s sensuous mouth feel and what she’s described as “the white milk at the tip of its stem.” The fig tree, she says, “is absolutely my totemic tree, the one from my childhood … This evokes my first memories of the Mediterranean, my first taste of happiness.” You can feel and smell that sense of Edenic childhood in the pure and almost elemental notes of this iconic perfume.

Notes: Fig, fig leaf, milk of almond, sandalwood, coconut

24, Faubourg by Hermès (1995)

Perfumer: Maurice Roucel

Named after the address of Hermès’s flagship store in Paris, 24, Faubourg starts with sunny orange blossom and decadent jasmine, warmed by amber and a touch of spice from patchouli. Like a jaunty print on one of Hermès’s scarves, 24, Faubourg’s sunniness is tempered by its formality and rich materials. This could be considered matronly and a little forbidding by some.

Notes: Orange blossom, jasmine sambac, iris, ambergris, vanilla

Poème by Lancôme (1995)

Perfumer: Jacques Cavallier

It’s hard to believe that it’s been eighteen years since Poème came out, but one whiff, and the fruity-floral gourmand automatically dates itself. The first note sounded is a lovely, sourish-green black currant, followed by a juicy lineup of fruit and intensely indolic and sweet white flowers. A gourmand drydown gives the notes a place to rest their heads. In the intervening years, this style of perfume has crept into functional scent territory, so it’s a little hard to smell this without associating it with synthetics and shampoo.

Top notes: Black currant, mandarin, bergamot, and peach

Heart notes: Orange blossom, clove, freesia, jasmine, and tuberose

Base notes: Vanilla, tonka bean, amber, musk

Jungle L’Éléphant by Kenzo (1996), Dominique Ropion

Gourmand without being overbearing, Jungle L’Éléphant’s spiced mango heart is rounded off with the almondy goodness of heliotrope and the richness of vanilla. Cardamom, clove, and licorice pull the fragrance in a direction that seems at once elegant, playful, and exotic, as if Willy Wonka decided to take the children to a foreign land instead of the Chocolate Factory. The spicy drydown smells like chai or spiced cookies.

Top notes: Mandarin, cardamom, cumin, clove

Heart notes: Ylang-ylang, licorice, mango, heliotrope

Base notes: Patchouli, vanilla, amber, cashmere

Envy by Gucci (1997)

Perfumer: Maurice Roucel

A tart green rose that soars with galbanum and coriander and then plummets to earth with a dissonant powdery-anise accord, with facets of celery and violet leaf, Envy mimics the bipolarity of its namesake emotion. It feels like two different perfumes, so violently does its first half differ from its second. Because I love the galbanum and rose opening, this powdery-licorice base tempers my affection for this scent, but I admire its dramatic two-act play.

Notes: Green notes, coriander, cumin, hyacinth, lily of the valley, rose, jasmine, magnolia, iris, woods, musk

Jungle Le Tigre by Kenzo (1997)

Perfumer: Dominique Ropion

Like Jungle L’Éléphant, Jungle Le Tigre thinks outside of its perfume-category box by evading the heaviness that comes with being designated an “Oriental” perfume. Le Tigre starts off with a jubilant mix of kumquat, tangerine, and orange made elegant with the warmth of apricot-like osmanthus and sharp ylang-ylang. Amber and cinnamon unifies Le Tigre with its heavier L’Éléphant brother. With this duo, Ropion pulls off quite a feat: He creates a happy Jungle Book bestiary that’s playful, chic, modern, and something even more elusive for perfume—charming.

Top notes: Kumquat, tangerine, and orange

Heart notes: Osmanthus, ylang-ylang

Base notes: Amber, cinnamon

Bulgari Black by Bulgari (1998)

Perfumer: Annick Menardo

Powder, tea, rubber, leather, savory-smoke, tar, lemony-bergamot, vanilla … Wow.

A masterpiece of twentieth-century perfumery, Bulgari Black is one of those “Where were you when you first smelled it?” kind of fragrances for me. In fact, I was at Nordstrom’s in San Francisco with a friend in the men’s department when the fantastic Thierry de Baschmakoff bottle caught our eye. Squat and round, with a silver cap, rubber-encased glass with a bit of clear glass peeking out of the top, this fetish-like object beckoned us to it. It was confused love at first spray. Powdered rubber and a smoky, meaty-smelling lapsang souchang tea note snake around the perfume’s more-conventional base notes of bright bergamot and vanilla/amber. Bulgari Black is an updated Shalimar for romantic types who frequent leather and latex fetish bars. It’s also the smell of a bat’s powdered, webbed wings as it flies around Manhattan in an urban goth fantasy …

Top notes: Lapsang souchang accord, bergamot

Heart notes: Jasmine

Base notes: Cedar, sandalwood, leather, vanilla, musk, amber

Le Feu d’Issey by Issey Miyake (1998)

Perfumer: Jacques Cavallier

Reminiscent of the scent of xí muôi, the Vietnamese preserved-plum snack I used to eat as a child that assaulted the palate with a difficult mix of salt, licorice, and dessicated plum, Le Feu d’Issey (“Issey’s Fire”) confronts the nose with some intensely conflicting information. (It’s this perfume that prompted Luca Turin to rhapsodize that perfume was “the most portable form of intelligence.”)

At the heart of Le Feu d’Issey’s pyre is a smoky, milky rose surrounded by an extraordinarily complex mélange of gourmand sweetness, saltiness, and savoriness. Gauiac wood provides the savory smoke; anise adds a dissonant herbal aspect; and vanilla, caramel, and coconut create the lush gourmand accords that are this perfume’s centerpiece. As if Le Feu d’Issey were not complex enough, there’s also a smell of wet and burnt woods. A love-it-or-hate-it perfume that is likened by some haters to baby vomit. Proceed with caution. (Le Feu d’Issey is almost impossible to find, unless you want to spend $300-plus for a bottle. Blood Concept’s RED+MA, a woody, spicy lactonic, and similarly challenging perfume, would make a good substitute.)

Top notes: Bergamot, coconut, rosewood, anise

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, milk, caramel

Base notes: Cedar, sandalwood, guaiac wood, vanilla, musk

Muscs Koublaï Khän by Serge Lutens (1998)

Perfumer: Christopher Sheldrake

With its atavistic embrace of animal notes (albeit in synthetic form) that hearkened back to vintage perfume styles and even to the nineteenth-century dandy’s love of musk, civet, and ambergris, Muscs Koublaï Khän not only subverted the clean, office-scent genre, but also sounded a dissonant note in the same decade in which bland pop celebutante Paris Hilton came to fame. It smells like wet fur, unwashed hair, and cedar chips, combined with the faintest, softest hint of something sweet and powdery, like wild honey and pollen. Its combination of conventional floral notes with animalic notes also evokes the smell of a man who has just taken a shower and decided to exercise without deodorant, the metallic twang of his body odor, ripe with olfactory facets of cumin and hamster cage, radiating through the fresh, powdery soap he’d just used.

Thirteenth-century ruler of the Mongol Empire in China and nephew of Ghengis, Koublaï Khän isn’t exactly the aspirational figure most people fantasize about being when spritzing on perfume, and it’s hard to imagine a focus group okaying the idea of creating a perfume that evokes a musky, thirteenth-century warmonger. And yet Muscs Koublaï Khän led the way for a future wave of “skank” perfumes, as they’re affectionately called, including the mania for the difficult, earthy oud wood note that rages on today.

Notes: Civet, castoreum, cistus labdanum, ambergris, Moroccan rose, cumin, ambrette seed (musk mallow), costus root, patchouli

Theorema by Fendi (1998)

Perfumer: Christine Nagel

What a strangely dry and intellectual name for such a sexy, spicy scent. This gourmandish woody-spicy Oriental has a peppery, smoky character that cloaks the florals in a garment of dark mystery. The blast of pepper and spices coincides with the earthy, smoky character of guaiac wood and patchouli in the base, giving the perfume a dirty edge that distinguishes it from other, more eager-to-please Oriental perfumes. It’s less difficult than Issey Miyake’s gorgeous Le Feu d’Issey, although it shares its rose, pepper, amber, and guaiac wood notes.

Several times in Theorema’s drydown, I smelled what seemed like smoky leather or earth combined with the comforting gourmand notes of amber and benzoin. (The balance of disquiet and comfort is part of what makes Theorema so exciting and actually untheoretical/cerebral.) Benzoin can impart a creamy vanilla or chocolate note to perfumes, and in Theorema’s case, it combines with a candied orange note that smells like Terry’s Orange Chocolate candies.

As many have said elsewhere, Theorema is a wonderfully comforting winter scent. Hours later on my skin, it smells like milky, spiced rose.

Top notes: Citrus, orange blossom, nutmeg, pepper, cardamom, rosewood, rose hips

Heart notes: Jasmine, rose, osmanthus, ylang-ylang, cinnamon, spices

Base notes: Benzoin, guaiac wood, sandalwood, amber, patchouli

Gucci Rush by Gucci (1999)

Perfumer: Michel Almairac

In ads for Gucci Rush, a bright red tint washes over the entire image of a woman’s face thrown back in ecstasy, eyes closed, with parted lips. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to guess what’s going on: She is either in the throes of an orgasmic rush or a drug rush.

Rush, the perfume, lives up to the metaphor of its name, in that its beautiful notes seem to come at you all at once, rushing forth as if from a higher altitude, their elevation probably due to aldehydes. Milky, peachy, and with a dose of syrupy florals, Rush is cut with a bit of warmth and spice from coriander and patchouli. It never fails to give me a perfume high. The spell may not last long for me, but even after it settles on my skin, that hit of happiness continues for anyone who nuzzles up against my neck.

Top notes: Gardenia and freesia

Heart notes: Jasmine, Turkish rose, coriander

Base notes: Vanilla, patchouli, vetiver

Eau du Fier by Annick Goutal (2000)

Perfumer: Isabelle Doyen

Like Bulgari Black’s more-intense sibling, Eau du Fier (“Proud Water”) dispenses with the softness of vanilla and powder and primarily stays in the keys of bitter and smoky. It opens with an aromatic, bitter orange flanked by the smoky, savory, meaty scent of Chinese lapsang souchang tea as the tar, burnt wood, axle grease, and smoke scent of birch signs the scent with a signature flourish. (As with Santa Maria Novella’s Peau d’Espagne, you can almost taste Eau du Fier’s bitter smoke in the back of your throat.)

It may be off-putting at first, but like many genius things, you soon adapt to its reality. In Eau du Fier’s case, it’s like entering a smoldering, Mad Max–like postapocalyptic olfactory world. Aromatic orange, delicate osmanthus, and sweet-spicy clove are still inhabitants, but they’ve been overtaken by the Dark Overlords of birch and black tea. If ever a scent deserved to be called fierce—Eau du Fier(ce)?—this is it. And of course, it’s discontinued and getting harder and harder to find. Maybe that letter I wrote to Annick Goutal’s online customer service begging them to bring it back will work? A perfume lover can dream.

Top notes: Bitter orange and mint

Heart notes: Osmanthus, clove, black tea, a salt flower

Base notes: Birch bark

Laundromat by Demeter (2000)

Perfumer: Christopher Brosius

Laundromat doesn’t just smell like detergent—it smells like clothes coming out of a dryer while they’re still hot, along with static electricity and dryer sheets. In the era of clean fragrances, this witty scent took that trend to its logical conclusion.

Notes: Lily of the valley, mint, starch, slight warm/balsamic note

PART III

The Future of Scent and Subversion

With over a thousand perfume launches a year, including more slapdash celebrity fragrances than there are T.J.Maxxes on which to unload them, it’s hard not to feel that perfume has exhausted its possibilities, and that all we have to expect from scents are rehashes of what’s already been created. And for perfumers who still believe perfume is an art, bad news has come in the form of the EU’s recent announcement that it will propose even more severe restrictions on natural perfume ingredients, including oakmoss, rose, jasmine, and lavender. By limiting and even forbidding the use of certain ingredients, these restrictions destroy perfumers’ palettes. Imagine telling a painter she could no longer use cobalt blue or yellow. As Frédéric Malle of Éditions de Parfums Frédéric Malle said in a recent article, “If this law goes ahead, I am finished, as my perfumes are all filled with these ingredients.” He is no doubt speaking for Guerlain, Chanel, Christian Dior, and any future perfumer who wants a real perfume palette to work with.

Leaving aside the fact that perfumers will be limited in what they can “say” with their perfumes, what lies in store for its future? Will it still be exciting? What are its possibilities? What do we have to look forward to?

In addition to the beautiful perfumes that manage to eke their way through the dreck, there are also perfume provocateurs who are moving perfume and even the idea of perfume forward. Whether by “queering” perfume, creating scents that smell like things in the world, emphasizing perfume’s decadent associations or imagining perfume’s function beyond the aesthetic—into the politically progressive—the following figures in the perfume world are nudging perfume in exciting directions.

Scent Visionaries

Antoine Lie and État Libre d’Orange’s Sécrétions Magnifiques: Fragrance Meant to Disturb

In 2006, Étienne de Swardt launched a new perfume house whose dadaist name and punk ethos, État Libre d’Orange (The Free State of Orange), hinted that their perfume would be iconoclastic. In press materials, interviews, and on the brand’s website, État Libre d’Orange (ELD) declared itself liberated from the restrictions of modern, mass-market perfumery. The brand would promote “licentiousness and seduction,” “craftsmanship and creativity,” and “olfactory insubordination.” This declaration of independence would be a return, they claimed, “to the ideals of perfume—its carnal energy, sensual power, and the essential, erotic expression of the body and its desire.”

It was a good time for État Libre d’Orange to stage its olfactory and cultural insurgency. Perfumery was just beginning to emerge from a decade that had privileged perfumes with transparent, clean, aquatic accords—when it wasn’t producing fruity, gourmand scents. And in place of the aspirational ethos reflected in the names of such mass-market hits of the late 1980s and 1990s, scents called Beautiful, Knowing, and Happy, État Libre d’Orange offered the louche and the antiaspirational: perfumes with names like Putain des Palaces (“Hotel Slut”), Delicious Closet Queen, Fat Electrician, and État Libre d’Orange’s anti-clean cri de coeur and first commercial perfume, the magnificently outré Sécrétions Magnifiques (2006).

If the body had been absent from most 1990s perfumes, État Libre d’Orange’s creative director de Swardt and the perfumer he chose to help realize his vision, Antoine Lie, brought it back with a vengeance and a twist with Sécrétions Magnifiques. Wanting to create a perfume that would shock people out of their office-scented complacency, de Swardt approached Lie with an offer he couldn’t refuse. For État Libre d’Orange’s first commercial scent, he wanted Lie to help him create a revolutionary, shocking perfume. They would work together, but as with all this brand’s perfumes, the perfumer would have the final say in what ended up in the bottle, and, ultimately, the marketplace. The perfume brief? Sécrétions Magnifiques was to be a perfume that smells like the body right before orgasm—literally and metaphorically. It wouldn’t simply be suggestive of bodily smells, it would smell, according to the original perfume description, “Like blood, sweat, sperm, saliva … as real as an olfactory coitus.” And thus Sécrétions Magnifiques, État Libre d’Orange’s first scent, was unleashed upon the world.

Facilitating heterosexual seduction, romance, and love was twentieth-century perfume’s raison d’etre, if perfume advertisements from the past are any indication. Evening in Paris, Intimate, and Ambush, for example, were all promised as aids to heterosexual union, each one offering feminine elixirs that could lure and trap men for romance. From their cartoonish pop packaging, campiness, and pervy/queer sensibility, État Libre d’Orange shifted perfumery from this old-school, aspirational, heterosexual matrix onto a countercultural, explicitly queer one. And although its website copy suggests that the sex represented in Sécrétions Magnifiques is missionary style, its acronym refers to sex that combines violence with tenderness, and shifts us from the twentieth-century perfume ethos of heterosexual romance and gender conformity to a kind of no-limits queer space.

Notes for Sécrétions Magnifiques: Iodized accord (fucus [seaweed], Azurone), adrenaline accord, blood accord, milk accord, iris, coconut, sandalwood, opopanax (known as sweet myrrh)

In a phone interview, Lie told me the thinking behind all of Sécrétions Magnifiques’s notes.

“Because your blood pumps quicker when you’re excited,” Lie explained, “there was the blood accord.” Adrenaline, which doesn’t have a smell, was something he translated into perfume notes. He wanted to create an accord that was energizing, so he created an accord with a lime and grapefruit effect, “with a touch of sulfur,” he adds, bitter and slightly metallic. Next up, the molecule Azurone, for its saliva aspect. “There’s an overdose of Azurone in Sécrétions Magnifiques,” he says. “It’s usually a part per million dilution, but I used it without dilution at all. It plays the role of something wet, animalic, sweaty. It smells a bit like saliva when you lick your skin and then smell it. It might not be that pleasant for a fragrance, but for this fragrance, it was good. It was perfect.”

To make the scent smell a bit more pleasant, he added a milky accord, which also references, even if in a token suggestion, feminine body fluids.

“When I mixed up the four accords—sweat, sperm, saliva, and blood—it was very difficult. Sharp. Very metallic/animalic. I needed to wrap it in something pleasant and sensual, but also something that would make it easier. I added this milky accord, and since milk is also a fluid from the female body, it was perfect; it was coherent with this story.”

Lie says that although he has a molecule that smells uncannily of sperm, he was adamant with de Swardt that he did not want the perfume to smell overwhelmingly sperm-like. I gingerly asked him, “But Sécrétions Magnifiques still kinda smells like sperm, right?” He laughs. “Yes, it’s kind of there. You have a feeling of it because you’ve got elements that are salty and slightly mushroomy, but I did not include the molecule that really smells like sperm. For some people, Sécrétions Magnifiques is very sperm-like, and some don’t smell it at all. So that’s the beauty of it … because it still means that at the moment of the ejaculation, it’s there; it’s just not quite in your face, you know!”

To understand the scents that Lie creates now, like Comme des Garçon’s Eau de Parfum, with its brown Scotch tape and glue accords, and Blood Concept’s RED+MA, a scent inspired by milk and blood, it’s important to see the milieu Lie emerged from. He came of age in perfumery during the regime of clean. From 1993 to 1999, he moved to the United States and worked as a perfumer in what he called a new generation of fragrance. “I was in the new clean, very transparent, American school at the time,” he says. “Fragrance was not here to disturb but to make you feel clean.”

In addition to the clean style of perfumery in the 1990s, there was a big shift between the classical, artisanal fragrance industry to a more-international industry, in which perfume-by-committee became the norm. “Suddenly, we went from a situation where perfumes were developed only by a few people—from one perfumer with the guy who decides to put the fragrance in a bottle—to suddenly a team of marketing developers and fragrance testers. More people were involved, and suddenly everybody was providing input. And because so many people were involved, perfume lacked personality and daring.” He says that after about ten years of working in this environment, he got bored.

After my conversation with Lie, it occurs to me that there is something neither of us discussed, but that adds another layer to Sécrétions Magnifiques’s subversiveness. De Swardt and Lie’s creation deviated from the School of Clean, but it didn’t abandon it altogether. The brilliant irony is, Sécrétions Magnifiques is a fresh, marine fragrance, but in a radically different way than the watermelon-y and ozonic Cool Water and L’Eau d’Issey are fresh marine scents. After all, bodily fluids captured at the moment of / right before their emission could be described as fresh. And Sécrétions Magnifiques’s Azurone accord, which has a seaweed aspect, is certainly an element of the sea, and surely accounts in part for what Luca Turin described as its “bilge” note. In addition, its milky/marine accords also archly reference female bodily fluids. Women’s bodily scents have long been linked misogynistically with “fishy” smells, but Sécrétions Magnifiques’s evocation of the feminine body—in however an attenuated form compared to its masculine bent—seems to cleave more closely to the olfactory version of writer Jeanette Winterson’s poetic paean to women’s bodily smells, in Written on the Body: “She smells of the sea. She smells of rockpools when I was a child …”

So what does Sécrétions Magnifiques actually smell like? Sniffing it has become an initiation rite for every self-described perfumista, and there’s even a genre of YouTube videos depicting sniffers’ “first time” with the scent. (The video of Katie Puckrik’s “first time” with Sécrétions Magnifiques is practically required viewing!) Although it often elicits exclamations of disapproval to downright revulsion (a friend of mine—true story—got a migraine after sniffing it and promptly went home and vomited), it also inspires curiosity and a begrudging admiration, if not outright devotion.

Sécrétions Magnifiques starts out like a dreamy, soft floral, but soon (cue the Psycho soundtrack), the perfume begins to take a decidedly biological turn. A metallic blood accord with a lightly marine smell combines with what soon becomes a milky (to my nose), overly sweet drydown whose unnerving longevity on skin is like no other perfume I’ve ever smelled. Scrub it off if you will, Sécrétions Magnifiques does not come off until it wants to. I’ve had people confirm my experience—that trying to wash it off made it even stronger!

Sécrétions Magnifiques is also a complex olfactory representation of bodies and sex. The website copy says in purple prose that it’s “an ode to the pinnacle of sexual pleasure …,” but initially, its scent evokes male pleasure. Sécrétions Magnifiques smells, to put it bluntly, like fresh ejaculate. But it also smells like the scents of sex, providing an almost-olfactory montage of a sex scene: first, the smell of mouths on mouths and other body parts, the scent of saliva, skin, and even excitement represented by the adrenaline accord. Although the blood and adrenaline accord are representative of fluids inside our body, they also represent the smells of violence and accidents. Freud likened our sex drives to the death drive. Sécrétions Magnifiques meditates on this in the olfactory realm. It folds the violence of its sexual referents into its acronym, SM, sadomasochism. And it folds olfactory metaphors of death, like blood and decay, into its more-ordinary perfume notes. Love it or hate it, Sécretions Magnifiques is a perfume masterpiece.

I recently came across notes I took in 2008 after smelling Sécrétions Magnifiques for the first time, shortly after I began my foray into perfume. I never meant for anyone to read them, and I was embarrassed to write my true impressions, which seemed shocking even to me. However, in hindsight, these notes seem like a more-accurate description of Sécrétions Magnifiques than the politer, more-censored versions I’ve come up with over the years. So to stay true to the perfume’s daring, I’m going to take a risk; here are my notes in their entirety, unedited.

The tang of metal or blood with an incongruous and dirty, funky floral tinged with salt. I may end up liking this later, but for now, I find it revolting and ill-mannered, like a good-looking, good-smelling guy who just shot a wad in my face without warning. Truly one of the most bizarre smells ever. Funk. Spunk. Spit. Sweat. Not musky sweat, but rather sweet-sour, fresh, metallic sweat. And that leering floral! This perfume is leering at me. Someone please make it stop. This is one of the louchest things I think I’ve ever encountered in perfume form. And it keeps rising up in a waft to insult me. The scent doesn’t unfold like a regular perfume. It has the quality of compulsion. It won’t go away. It forces itself on you. This ill-mannered thing is swirling high in a milky plane of sweat, a register unfamiliar to my everyday polite nose, but well-familiar in the bedroom. The scent manages to mimic (how does one write about this without being dirty?!), in its longevity, the staying power of semen in your mouth. That tenacious, bleach-flavored mucous that seems as if it will never go away. A truly obscene, bodily fragrance. My nose just lost its virginity.

Christopher Brosius of CB I Hate Perfume: Mixing Memory with Desire

There’s a magic trick I like to play when I’m introducing people to perfume, and it involves pulling out CB I Hate Perfume’s Soaked Earth, an uncanny rendition not only of the smells of dirt—mineral elements, stones, twigs, water—but also the emotion embedded in the memories of that smell. No one is indifferent to this scent, so powerfully does it pull you into the memory experience we all have of what the ground smells like after rain.

One day, walking through the French Quarter in New Orleans after a huge rainstorm, I found myself smiling and thinking, “This smells just like Soaked Earth.” The Simulacrum, just as postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard had predicted, had superseded the Real. A century after perfume styles shifted from representational, one-note florals to abstract perfumes that seemed more modern, Christopher Brosius and his perfume line CB I Hate Perfume returns to a naturalistic ethos—but with a twist. Nature is not a privileged olfactory obsession; it is but one referent among many.

“Every perfumer has a unique … vocabulary; mine is based on Reality.”

—CHRISTOPHER BROSIUS

For Christopher Brosius, the world’s smells are already their own perfume. In 1993, after a stint at Kiehl’s as a perfumer, Brosius started his own perfume brand, Demeter, where he created an extraordinary scent library: a collection of scents that smelled like things in the world, from Dust, Vinyl, Playdough, and Paperback books, to Snow. The latter, an uncanny olfactory representation of snow and its effect—its coldness rendered with a touch of mint, and a bit of earth representing what’s beneath—garnered him a FiFi award for Best Fragrance of 2000.

After Brosius left Demeter in 2004 and created his niche line, CB I Hate Perfume, he retweaked and renamed some of his classics from Demeter, making explicit what was only implicit in Demeter: Christopher Brosius hates perfume, or, to be specific, commercial perfume—its synthetic musks, and its encouragement of people to smell like everyone else. His online manifesto is nothing if not emphatic about what he hates about perfume. In some perfumers’ hands, perfume becomes “an ethereal corset trapping everyone in the same unnatural shape,” or “An opaque shell concealing everything—revealing nothing.” And if you can’t be shamed into buying niche over mass-market perfume, perhaps my favorite Christopher Brosius quote will change your mind: “People who smell like everyone else disgust me.”

Like an olfactory found-objects artist, Brosius reminds us that there is an enchanted forest of scents right under our noses. His love for the world’s scents is democratic: Floral accords and scents traditionally considered beautiful exist alongside scents that smell like dirt, bubble gum, paperback books, roast beef, an old fur coat (with its stale smells and hints of faded, vintage perfume), and even plastic doll heads. All of these and more are offerings at his CB I Hate Perfume scent gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The eccentric scents can be charmingly specific. Brosius doesn’t just have a scent that smells like mittens, for example, but rather, wet mittens. There are even two versions of the scent of gum: chewing gum and Bazooka bubble gum, the 1974 edition!

His scents are both fully realized perfumes—like the one he made to honor actor Alan Cumming—and what he calls “premium accords.” In evocative categories such as Archetype Series, Experience, and Secret History, they blend realism and a novel, explicitly autobiographical approach to perfume. Smelling his perfume Walking in the Air, for example, is to understand that one is smelling a particular person’s reconstruction of a memory, complete, as his website puts it, with “a Field of Untouched New Fallen Snow [one of his accords], handknit woolen mittens covered with frost, a hint of frozen forest and sleeping earth.” In Greenbriar 1968, he tells us, “This scent is a memory of my Grandfather, the sawmill that he owned and the stone house where he lived. It is blended with Sawdust, Fresh Cut Hay, Worn Leather Work Gloves, Pipe Tobacco and a healthy amount of Dirt. There is also a faint whiff of cotton overalls covered in Axle Grease …”

If the world as we know it were going to end, like the sci-fi Paris of Chris Marker’s short film, La Jetée, I hope that in our underground bunkers, someone will have a stash of CB I Hate Perfume’s scents to remind us of how our lost world once smelled.

Sissel Tolaas: Scent as Communication and Information

What does a neighborhood, a city, or fear smell like? What does it mean that there are olfactory puns in the world—that a dirty foot can smell like fancy cheese; cat urine, like black currant buds; or body odor, like cumin? For Sissel Tolaas, beginning to ask Westerners who are obsessed with covering up body odors and often fearful of any smells at all to begin thinking about these questions could have personal and political ramifications we cannot foresee. Whether she’s gathering scents representative of cities, collecting the sweat of men with anxiety disorder, or taking bacteria from human sweat and turning it into cheese, Tolaas’s goal is to expand our awareness of smell—to understand how it communicates with us, and how we communicate with each other through smell. She also wants us to see the way in which smell can create prejudice or be a tool in helping us open up to each other.

But none of it can happen until we educate our noses and explore.

In the late 1980s, Sissel Tolaas, who was born in Norway and now lives and works in Berlin, became curious about smell. This polymath—trained in science, art, and languages—realized that not too many people were working in this realm, so she began to train her nose by going out into the world to gather anything she could that caught her fancy, preserving scraps of found objects in sealed, labeled cans for later study.

Among the items in her “smell archive,” which has surely exceeded the 7,000-plus number of objects last recorded in 2008, Tolaas has pieces of stinky dried fish, forty different varieties of stinky socks, and hundreds of samples of dog feces. Tolaas, in other words, takes the dictum that one should “stop and smell the roses” to a whole new level. If Christopher Brosius thinks that the world is already its own perfume, self-described “professional provocateur” Sissel Tolaas takes that one step further by refusing to require that something smells “good” for her to be interested in it. In the West, smell is thought of in aesthetic terms: It smells “good” or it smells “bad.” But Tolaas recognizes that in other cultures, scent is also communication and information, and her work seeks to reopen our connection to scent’s other dimensions and purposes.

Since 2004, Tolaas has worked with the commercial research institution International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF), the biggest provider of smells and taste molecules in the world. In exchange for doing conceptual research for them, with clients including IKEA and Adidas, IFF finances her office in Berlin and her use of headspace technology, an expensive process whereby scent molecules are captured, analyzed, and stored for later analysis or to use as a blueprint for reproducing the scent.

Traditionally, headspace technology has been used in perfumery to capture scent molecules from flowers resistant to giving up their fragrance by traditional perfumery methods—like lily of the valley, gardenia, and certain orchids. It’s also allowed perfumers like Christopher Brosius to have a starting point for perfumes that smell like books and leather, scented objects whose smells could not be captured by other means.

Tolaas thinks that Westerners are “smell-blinded,” disconnected from our most intimate sense and encouraged to cover our own smells with deodorant and scented products. What her projects all have in common is to remove smell from its original context so that we might think about it without prejudice, or at least with the acknowledgment that we have a filter around what we smell and how we’re reacting to it. All of her noncommercial projects work toward this end, to expand our senses of smell in the hopes that we will create a better world and be more tolerant of one another. This might sound like a tall order for stinky socks, but you might rethink their power after reading some of her fascinating projects.

In 2006, MIT commissioned Tolaas to do a project with a new microencapsulation technology. At the time, there was still a discourse in the United States around terror, fear, and paranoia. She was curious about whether or not fear could be smelled by people, so she found a group of men around the world with panic disorder who agreed to collect their sweat during panic attacks and overnight the collection to her, so she could reproduce those scent molecules. The molecules were then microencapsulated into paint and applied to walls. One night in 2006, at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, an art gallery full of blank walls introduced Tolaas’s “The FEAR of smell—the smell of FEAR” exhibit.

For Tolaas, paint served as a metaphor for skin. When a visitor approached one part of the wall, touching it, it would break open the capsules, releasing the scent of one of the twelve panicky men. Some visitors, knowing what was in store for them, refused to enter the gallery, or refused to touch the walls. Others, released from the original context of the smell (a phobic man’s armpit!), were able to approach the scents with curiosity and wonder. One woman became enamored of Guy No. 9, whose sweat was particularly pungent, and was seen visiting his scent every day until the exhibit ended.

Although I didn’t attend this show, I was able to get a sense of its power through mono.kultur’s Issue No. 23, which used the same microencapsulation on its pages, reproducing the same twelve men’s sweat. PLEASE RUB THE PAGE, I was instructed, and I did. I, too, was strangely drawn to Guy No. 9, smelling in his reproduced sweat, so far from its origin and context, the scent of Germaine Cellier’s Bandit perfume from the 1940s. Fascinating that a woman’s perfume that drew its energies from bodily smells and a kind of masculine energy (bandits, pirates, and violent imagery) would be similar to the sweat of scared men seventy-something years later.

Sweat is of particular fascination to Tolaas, and if you think about it, sweat is our human perfume. Tolaas, in fact, has worn some of this panic sweat out to parties as if it were perfume just to see what jamming the olfactory lines of communication would do. Answer: People stepped away from her instinctively, whether because she smelled “bad,” or because her smell communicated fear, we can’t know. The closest she’s gotten to creating a line of perfume has been to discuss how interesting it would be to create a bespoke scent based on your own inimitable scent molecules as the base.

So much of culture is about its relationship to smells and cleanliness. “People manipulate their olfactory identity and surroundings to establish or to maintain their class identity—to fit in,” she observes. “With sweat, it’s the same—they’re difficult smells for a lot of people. If you see a person and smell his sweat up front, you back off. But if I position the same smell in an aesthetic displacement, you approach it differently: You come back and you’re fascinated!” Her work, she argues, is mainly about tolerance.

For the 2004 Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, she and perfumer Geza Schoen created two maps of Berlin, one geographic and the other olfactory. They went to each corner of Berlin and gathered over 7,000 scents, and Schoen created scents that represented each one for east, west, south, and north, culminating in one final Berlin scent that blended them all together.

In a project she did with the University of Edinburgh and Stanford University called “Synthetic Aesthetics,” bacteria and microorganisms become metaphors for culture and community. In order to explore how differences often separate us from “other” cultures, she worked with scientists to cultivate cheese from human sweat. Many intense-smelling cheeses have similar bacterial components as those found in stinky feet and armpits, and by creating cheese whose smell was similar, the question becomes, What happens when differences between us collapse—when the way we separate things in the world begins to seem arbitrary? In this instance, it is similarity in smells that bridges the gap.

Ultimately, Sissel Tolaas’s project is to take the scent out of context so that we can reorient ourselves toward smell in an open way. There are evolutionary reasons, of course, why we don’t like the smell of decay or sulfur or excrement, but there are also ways of recognizing that many of our biases about scent are not only culturally determined, but also injurious to our relationships with others and with our own bodies, ultimately dampening our curiosity about the world.

Martynka Wawrzyniak: “Smell Me”: An Artist’s Olfactory Self-Portrait

NYC-based visual artist Martynka Wawrzyniak is no stranger to visceral experiences. For her video, “Chocolate,” the photographer and video performance artist endured having chocolate poured onto her face for nine minutes while submerged in a tub. In the ten-minute video, “Ketchup,” she’s the target of squirting ketchup bottles wielded by young boys. And in “Lipstick,” she and three friends smear lipstick over their faces in a grotesque parody of women’s beautification rituals.

Last year, the Warsaw-born Wawrzyniak decided to take that interest in visceral experiences a step further by creating a work that combined her interest in self-portraiture with her lifelong interest in smells. Like Christopher Brosius, Martynka Wawrzyniak hates perfume. None of the products she uses are scented, and she’s never worn perfume. Yet scent has always intrigued her—from the abject smells of strangers on buses in her childhood memories of Poland, to the warm smells of her lover’s body odor.

Over the space of a year, Wawrzyniak and a team of undergraduate chemistry students from Hunter College became benevolent versions of Patrick Süskind’s antihero Jean-Baptiste Grenouille in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, who wanted to extract the scent of murdered girls for his macabre perfume. Under the aegis of chemistry professor Donna McGregor, they extracted essences from Wawrzyniak’s hair, sweat, and tears using perfumery techniques. Through a friend, she met some people from the perfume world who agreed to help her re-create those extracted bodily smells into scents. Scent director and self-described synesthete Dawn Goldworm of 12.29 (who worked on Lady Gaga’s recent fragrance, Fame) and award-winning Givaudan perfumer Yann Vasnier worked together to synthesize these essences into the four “perfumes” that would greet the visitor of Wawrzyniak’s installation: the smell of her hair, tears, night sweat, and Bikram yoga sweat.

In the installation entitled “Smell Me” at Envoy Enterprises on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which ran for one month in 2012, visitors were invited to walk into a specially constructed scent chamber that dispensed Wawrzyniak’s four “perfumes.” In place of a visual self-portrait, as the installation’s name spells out, there was an olfactory one. Outside of the scent chamber, visitors were invited to buy the actual extracted Wawrzyniak essences displayed in chemistry vials, essences she reminds me are parts of her body that contain her DNA. (These cost thousands of dollars.)

“I wanted to create a self-portrait that was completely stripped of the visual prejudice that we usually associate with judging a person,” Wawrzyniak has said, “or judging a woman specifically.” In place of the visual self-portrait, Wawrzyniak added a dimension that has largely had no place in the art world: the sense of smell. She didn’t want the smell to be about perfume, but rather the body itself, stripped of all perfumes, “like becoming more naked than naked,” she told me. “I was a little nervous at first at how absolutely exposing this was … it’s the ultimate level of exposure, the next level of a nude portrait.”

In Ways of Seeing (1972), art critic John Berger says of the history of Western art that “according to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but by no means have been overcome—men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), film theorist Laura Mulvey extends this critique by theorizing about gendered looking in cinema. In her enormously influential essay, she famously coined the term “the male gaze” to describe the way in which classical Hollywood cinema constructs its viewer—whether male or female—as a heterosexual male, by creating the female object on film as an erotic object to be visually objectified and consumed.

Although Wawrzyniak felt more exposed by revealing herself in a self-portrait through smell, “Smell Me” actually subverts centuries of the kinds of male/female power dynamics in the history of the visual arts described by Berger and Mulvey, and it subverts those dynamics in a couple of powerful ways. Unlike her other art pieces in which her body—and things that are done to it—are visually front and center, in “Smell Me,” Wawrzyniak removes herself as a visual object, subverting the dictum that “men act and women appear.” (Wawrzyniak is, of course, already challenging that dictum by acting or creating, that is—being an artist herself.) And because of the physiology of smell, it is the visitor to the scent chamber of “Smell Me” who becomes the object, in a sense, of Wawrzyniak’s odors, passively penetrated—with all of the sexual and political connotations that verb carries—by her olfactory self-portrait rather than a subject voyeuristically gazing upon her as an object. To echo perfumer Christophe Laudamiel, her scent “goes inside” the gallery visitor.

“I wanted to take the nude self-portrait to the next level of intimacy.”

—MARTYNKA WAWRZYNIAK

Wawrzyniak is clearly indebted to Sissel Tolaas’s pioneering 2006 work for MIT, “The FEAR of smell—the smell of FEAR” exhibit. But her project, although clearly inflenced by Tolaas’s body-odor work, differs in several ways. First off, Wawrzyniak was both the sample provider and the chemist performing the extractions using chemical washes to remove impurities from the gathered essences to extract, as they say in perfumery, the “absolute.”

“What we did is different from what Sissel does,” said Wawrzyniak. “She uses headspace technology, and we did hands-on essential-oil extraction. I really wanted to do that whole process and learn about it.” (She enrolled in a summer program in Hunter College’s chemistry department in order to get access to the chemicals she needed to do the extractions.) Second, it was her body whose smells would be on exhibit, which she describes as making her feel very vulnerable.

“The process itself,” Wawrzyniak told me, “required this level of intimacy between myself and the people I was working with … I had to bring in my stinky, sweaty T-shirts, greasy hair, and tears, and I had to work with these three twenty-year-old chemistry students—boys from Hunter College! I had to have no shame left.”

The students got to know Wawrzyniak so well that, one day, they remarked that her sweat smelled like chocolate; interestingly, it was during the ovulation phase of her menstrual cycle. In acts both clinical and intimate, they removed extracts from T-shirts she wore to bed several days in a row, and other T-shirts she wore to Bikram yoga. And in the most dramatic extraction—of Wawrzyniak’s tears—she would listen to Polish folk music her father brought back from her native land that would prompt her to cry, which she would do into a sterilized bottle for half an hour! Afterward, she would seal it up and jump on a subway to get to Hunter so that they could extract what small portion they could from this precious fluid.

“I was basically a living, walking extraction sample for the whole summer, because I would collect my hair and cry into vials,” she said. “I still have jars full of hair in my room because I don’t want to stop collecting my hair. I had to sleep in a T-shirt for five nights or go to Bikram yoga class in it and then put it in a sterile Mason jar. Then I would go straight to the lab and wash it in ethanol to get all the sweat out, evaporate all the water and ethanol off, and be left with the essential oil of my sweat. It was pretty cool.”

The extracted essences were not enough for a month-long gallery show, however, so Dawn Goldworm and Yann Vasnier stepped in to offer … their noses. After smelling the extractions, and supplementing them by actually sniffing Wawrznyniak, they came up with synthesized replicas that would eventually be part of the gallery show by puffing out of the scent chamber.

In addition to subverting the way women have been represented in art for centuries, Wawrzyniak’s project is also fascinating if situated in the history of perfume. There was a time when animal scents were used as “olfactory corsets” to highlight the body’s similarly erotic, disturbing smells. As that fashion waned, the mania for soliflores (single-note perfumes) took over, and heavy, animalic scents redolent of bodies (animal and human) fell out of favor. Animal notes that recalled the body remained in the base notes of perfumery for a period, but almost completely dropped out in the 1990s, in favor of transparent, clean, and ethereal oceanic scents. Unwittingly, Wawrzyniak, with the help of her Hunter College students and Goldworm and Vasnier, returns the body to perfume’s trajectory.

Martynka Wawrzyniak’s Four “Smell Me” Scents (2012)

Perfumer: Yann Vasnier, with Scent Director Dawn Goldworm:

Tears

Notes: Black pepper, nutmeg, celery seed; watery floral notes: bourgeonal, calone, florhydral, indole, jasmine; green hexenols and styrallyl acetate

Night T-shirt

Notes: Indole, jasmine, honey, caramel, beeswax, oakwood

Bikram T-shirt

Notes: Sulfurs, bucchu oil, green pepper, coconut, tonka beans, butyric acid, decanoic acid

Hair

Notes: Skatol, civet, coconut CO2, costus, cumin, pepper, everlasting (immortelle), and watery green notes

I had the opportunity to smell the scents Goldworm and Vasnier collaborated on together. They’re not commercially available but rather scented the “Smell Me” installation. It’s fascinating the way in which one can smell hints of twentieth-century perfumery in what is an attempt to replicate a specific woman’s homely and bodily smells. In the same way that some of Sissel Tolaas’s reproductions of men’s anxiety sweat reminded me of certain twentieth-century perfumes (namely, Germaine Cellier’s Bandit), Wawrzyniak’s scents—reconstructed as they were with perfume notes—were perfume-like and yet also naturalistic, recognizable body odors. Her hair smelled warm, lightly green, spicy, sebum-y, with a hint of gardenia. Her Bikram sweat smelled like musty peach and coconut, a not-unpleasant scent of stale, dirty clothes that need to be laundered. Night sweat had a delicate floral top note with a pronounced cocoa and nut scent in the base, and her tears smelled like black pepper with a light, transparent floral aspect. The body’s perfume isn’t so unlike perfume after all.

Goldworm’s assessment of Wawrzyniak’s extracted essences reads like poetry: “Overall, being a vegan, her body smells very wet and sweet, like lactones and coconut water, with an infusion of fresh green notes and spices … Her nightshirt smell is deep and warm like a small, delicate animal in hibernation … Her hair smells like a memory from my childhood.”

Wawrzyniak’s project brings perfume’s modern history full circle. The body comes back to perfume as its own perfume. Although these scents made me appreciate bodily smells more, they also made me appreciate the way in which perfumery has been negotiating with the body in a fascinating dialectic, from the beginning. We can run from the body, but we can’t hide.

A Brief History of Animal Notes in Perfume

For those of us weaned on years of desexualized, clean scents, the idea that a woman would wear a perfume that enhanced her “not so fresh feeling” might sound scandalous, if not downright deranged. Although animal scents in perfumes largely fell out of favor after the 1980s, there are signs that a love for all things ripe in an otherwise odor- and germaphobic society may be making a comeback after almost two decades of the Rule of Clean.

Just as the pendulum swung from florals to animalics and back in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, perfume lovers have begun to tire of polite office scents and perfumes redolent of fruit salad. Sex and the City actress Sarah Jessica Parker, in what may be described as a tipping point moment, vowed a few years ago to create a fragrance with a “palatable” body odor note. “I really like B.O.,” she said about her next perfume’s inspiration, “I think it’s sexy.” The name behind the successful mass-market perfumes Lovely and Covet also raised eyebrows when she proclaimed her love for the smell of skunk spray and dirty diapers.

“Perfume should smell like the underside of my mistress.”

—JACQUES GUERLAIN

Parker is jumping on the animalic perfume bandwagon that was already initiated in the twenty-first century by perfume brands such as Serge Lutens (with the Christopher Sheldrake–composed Muscs Koublaï Khän from 1998); L’Artisan Parfumeur (with the Olivia Giacobetti–composed Dzing! from 1999); and Frédéric Malle (with the Maurice Roucel–composed Musc Ravageur from 2000). But as novel as it might seem for Parker to out herself as a skank-o-phile, a love for bodily or animalic smells is actually as old as perfume itself, and it seems to recur in generational cycles.

Before they were replaced with synthetic ingredients from the 1970s, the animal-sourced ingredients civet, musk, ambergris, and castoreum served multiple roles in vintage perfume, and with the exception of ambergris, which originates from the intestinal secretions of the sperm whale, all of them came from or near the sexual glands of animals.

Like all base notes or fixatives in perfume that have a heavier molecular structure, animal notes anchor perfume’s more volatile top notes and middle notes, making fragrances last longer. They also help to enhance or “exalt” the odors of citrus, herbs, and florals that comprise top and middle notes in the same way spices enhance the flavor of food. But in their least analyzed function, animal-derived base notes contribute to vintage perfume’s complexity by adding subliminal, “dirty” bodily smells that prompted perfume writer March Moore of the blog PerfumePosse to coin a new scent category: “skank” perfumes.

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, before it was understood how disease was transmitted, it was believed that plagues were the result of the “odors of pestilence” in the air. Strong essential oils, including the excremental odors of civet, musk, ambergris, and castoreum, were carried in pomanders (containers with aromatic substances), worn on gloves, and applied to skin. The logic? Fight the “odors of pestilence” with even stronger odors! These animal scents were also worn as perfume by nineteenth-century men and women, and the inclusion of animal notes as fixatives (to make perfume last longer) carried over into the twentieth century.

“A woman may buy a perfume made purely of flowers once, but she will never come back for another bottle. There is something in a woman, perhaps she is not conscious of it … that wants an animal odor.”

—SIRENUS HERMLIN, GRASSE PERFUMER, AS QUOTED IN VOGUE, 1945

Although perfume is often thought of as something worn to hide body odor, it also functioned in the past to emphasize bodily smells. In the twentieth century, before Western culture became pornified and graphic displays of sexuality became the norm, perfume was an adornment that helped women to express sexuality in an invisible, subliminal, and hence, socially acceptable way by emphasizing bodily smells with animalic perfumes.

This olfactory corsetry, redolent as it was with the scents of animal secretions, hides, and fur, reveals a vision of femininity that was complex, evolved, and erotic. Women’s prefeministera lives were more constricted than our own, yet in the olfactory realm, the average woman had a wider and more complex array of scents to choose from: she could smell like rubber, moss, and leather (Bandit); tobacco (Habanita); and flowered fur (Chanel No. 5), for example—that is to say, masculine or sexual, according to the codes of perfume language.

Animalic notes and their historical/cultural significance in perfumes are, of course, problematic. For example, animalic perfumes are vestiges of an age when overtly sexual perfumes were worn by women whose sphere of influence was largely confined to the home. In a fascinating post on the original Robert Piguet perfume Baghari, an animalic perfume from 1954, Marie-Hélène Wagner of the perfume blog The Scented Salamander explains that to smell sexual, disturbing, and animalic worked for women in the past, but not so much now:

It is striking in particular to me to see how the greater presence of women in the workforce and hence in public professional spaces has encouraged a movement of de-sexualization of women not only where the length of their hair or their sartorial code are concerned, but also, logically, where their perfumes are concerned …

I think that since fewer women worked in the 1950s in reaction to their mobilization during WWII, a current that pushed women to regain interest in more traditional feminine roles, a good number would be able to wear these more sexual scents in the comfort of their home or in social settings where seduction was encouraged…. A social evolution is thus very much perceptible between the old Baghari and the new Baghari. The new perfume takes more into consideration the larger social circle of the wearer of the perfume wanting to be pleasant and well-behaved rather than advertise an in-your-face and provocative womanhood.

Animalic perfumes remind us not only of how much narrower women’s options were in the past, they’re also relics of a time when it was more socially acceptable for animals to be abused and killed for adornment. The musk deer population was almost eradicated due to perfumers’ lust for musk, and the civet endured—and still does endure on a smaller scale—having its anal glands painfully scraped for civet paste.

“Why do we humans relate to these animalic smells? Well, it’s our own aroma, isn’t it? It would amount to self-hate to detest it.”

—COMMENT FOUND ON PERFUMEOFLIFE.COM FORUM

My interest in vintage animalic perfumes, then, isn’t uncritically nostalgic for the conditions in the world that produced them, nor is there a wish to return to the way those perfumes are made or to the second-class status of the women who wore them. My interest is in trying to examine what the disappearance—or reappearance—of the animalic style of perfume represents. As much as it signaled a particular kind of problematic femininity, and certainly a disregard for the well-being of animals, it nevertheless had other important functions worth analyzing.

What have we lost in our present deodorized age, an age in which strenuous attempts are made to eradicate all signs of our animal nature from the olfactory sphere? A world in which scent is banned in some places, certain unwashed bodies are not welcome in spaces once meant for everyone, and in which the ruling style of clean and fruity perfumes signals a kind of olfactory arrested development?

One answer to that question might lie in the relationship that women used to have to perfume, which, once upon a time, was not even considered a proper topic of polite conversation. Although Wagner describes Baghari as “seductive,” which implies an object of seduction, she then goes on to say something seemingly contradictory, but richly suggestive: “It [Baghari] is a profoundly seductive perfume,” she writes, “because it seems to want to please no one else but the wearer of the perfume first and foremost.” Elsewhere, she says of the older, animalic Baghari, that, “It is a much more self-centered fragrance in terms of its moral makeup.” These quotes suggest that animalic perfumes, although created for seduction, also provided a specifically feminine space of fantasy and pleasure, represented by the 1950s Tabu ad in this book that featured a woman lost in daydreams in front of a romantic painting. This space held more than the erotic; it was also a space for aesthetic appreciation, introspection, self-love/self-reflection, or “self-centeredness,” as Wagner describes it, in an era when feminine self-regard and perfume were both taboo.

In our deodorized age, we’ve also lost our appreciation for our imperfect, bodily, and ultimately human smells. That loss of appreciation for our own scent, which turns into repression and censorship, reflects a disembodied, virtual, mechanized relationship to the world that divorces us from our senses.

The Internet Age coincides with the disappearance of animalic/bodily notes, and it is as if we, too, by participating in the virtual, have become disembodied. Animalic perfumes open up a sensual olfactory world, reminding us to appreciate our human smells, and in this context, then, animalic notes do more than symbolize sex. They remind us of our bodies, that is, they remind us that we have them. As one commenter writes in a blog post about the category of “skank” perfumes, “As evolved as we’d like to think we are, I think we all still have that animal attraction in us to bodily smells. And it’s not just for their transgression; I think they offer comfort at a deep instinctive level. Musks, for example, aren’t simply dirty; they’re reassuringly intimate, like a big warm hug.”

So what are the four main animalic notes, and what do they smell like?

CIVET

More like a mongoose than a cat as it is often referred to, the civet, native to tropical Asia and Africa, is a nocturnal animal, about three feet long, with a spotted body and ringed tail. Perineal glands located in its abdomen and divided into two sacs create a pungent cream that for centuries has been used in perfume, medicine, and even food.

So what’s so special about civet? It takes a lot to wrap your mind around the idea that an intensely fecal-smelling cream obtained from the perineal glands near the anus of the civet animal could have been one of perfumery’s most prized animal ingredients. But when civet, the substance, is diluted and added to more evanescent fragrance notes, it rounds out or “bouquets” them, as perfumers describe it. In Essence and Alchemy, natural perfumer Mandy Aftel writes, “There is no ingredient with which civet does not blend beautifully. It prowls through a blend, transforming each of its elements and giving the whole extraordinary depth.”

Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, KING LEAR (ACT 4, SCENE 6)

A tincture of civet (the absolute dissolved in alcohol) could even be described as a perfume on its own, deliriously complex as all natural odors are: at once humid, fecal, earthy, radiant, floral, and for a moment, even grape and berrylike.

In the famous case of Jicky (1889), Aimé Guerlain decided that rather than make civet lurk in the shadows of the perfume’s famous bergamot, lavender, and vanilla notes, he would have it dart around front and center. As perfumer Roja Dove writes in The Essence of Perfume:

Jicky was launched exactly 100 years after the French Revolution; it too was revolutionary, and shocked in a way that has not been equal[l]ed. The volume of civet in its base is truly outrageous, and any trained nose would wonder how he got away with it: in true Guerlain style, Aimé created something magnificent. No woman in polite society would wear it, and only the most audacious man took the risk (perhaps it reminded them of the civet of the earlier part of the century). It was to take many years before women readily adopted it, but adopted it they certainly did.

Civet was once harvested either by killing the animal and removing the civet gland or by scraping the cream from the animal while it was alive. Although some extant civet farms claim that harvesting civet is not cruel to the animal, animal rights groups have argued that—between the cramped cages civets are often forced to live in, the taunting that some harvesters inflict thinking it will result it a greater yield of civet, and the inevitable pain caused when their internal glands are scraped for civet—there’s no way that natural civet can be humanely harvested.

Natural civet was largely replaced by synthetic civet starting in the 1960s and 1970s, but even Chanel admitted that it still used natural civet in its iconic classic, Chanel No. 5 until 1998, when they switched to synthetic civet. Although it lacks the depth and complex floral radiance of real civet, synthetic civet smells remarkably authentic.

AMBERGRIS

For centuries, ambergris, thought to be an aphrodisiac, has been used in perfumes and as flavoring in food, wine, and tobacco. Before 1,000 AD, ambergris was part of northwest Africa’s imperial trade. It’s said that the first mention of ambergris in history is from Chinese writer Pen Tsa, who imagined sleeping, drooling sea dragons as its source, calling it “dragon’s spittle perfume.” Louis XV used ambergris as a spice in his food, and Queen Elizabeth used it to perfume her gloves.

“Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale! Yet so it is.”

—MOBY DICK, HERMAN MELVILLE

Ambergris, (“gray amber” in French), a solid, waxy substance prized for its haunting scent and fixative properties in perfume, starts out in the irritated stomach of sperm whales. Because the bones and beaks of the squid and cuttlefish that comprise the whales’ diets are indigestible and sharp, its stomach secretes a substance to protect itself. The whale eventually excretes this gelatinous, black, fecal-smelling lump full of bones and beaks, and although it was once thought that the whale vomited ambergris (something no one has ever seen, apparently!), scientists now speculate that ambergris might actually be excreted along with feces. Sperm whale expert Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, delicately explains the reasoning. Fresh ambergris, he says, “smells more like the back end than the front.”

During its time floating in the water and exposed to the sun, air, and saltwater, alchemical magic happens. The foul-smelling ambergris oxidizes, begins to change into a silvery gray or yellow color, and by the time it washes ashore, it has transmogrified into olfactory “floating gold.” In fact, ambergris can be more expensive than gold, the best stuff fetching up to $50 a gram to gold’s $30. The longer ambergris has been floating around, the better it smells, according to ambergris broker Bernard Perrin, because ambergris, he says, “ages like a fine wine.”

Those lucky souls who have gotten a whiff of the gray lump of waxy, oxidized sperm whale excrement have practically written poems about it. “It always reminds me,” Christopher Ash rhapsodized in Whaler’s Eye, “of a cool English wood in spring and the scent you smell when you tear up the moss to uncover the dark soil underneath.” Fragrance chemist Gunther Ohloff chose a series of adjectives to describe ambergris: “humid, earthy, fecal, marine, algoid [algae-like], tobacco-like, sandalwood-like, sweet, animal, musky, and radiant.”

I have a tincture of ambergris on my hand right now, and unlike the other natural animalics, it’s subtle, delicate, and I would even say aloof. Ambergris is animalic, of course, but unlike civet, castoreum, and musk, which are the brutes of the animalic world, roaring in your face and ramming you with their antlers, ambergris projects a gentle, soft eroticism as if from afar. It’s a paradox: both earthy and tantalizingly ethereal. It smells rich, smooth, and slightly sweet, with a hint of tobacco and earth.

Like all base notes, ambergris both imparts its own peculiar scent and exalts the smell of other notes in a perfume composition, making them “rounder” and joined together more harmoniously. Its powers of pulling together the other notes in a perfume are beautifully described by one perfumer on the Italian retail site that sells sustainably sourced animal note tinctures and kits, profumo.it:

Its use in blends is nothing short of magical. I actually work on formulas and create them “pre” and “post” ambergris to savor the difference. Pre-ambergris is a cluster of essences: sandalwood, orris, tuberose, linden, etc. flailing to find structure, balance, harmony. Like walking a tightrope. A careful dose of ambergris is added, and it swims through the blend, filling in the pointy edges with a silky, matted glow. The burnt waxy smell of the orris is softened into a gentle base note of moonlight, and the florals seem to open, rise and coalesce, adding structure and form with almost algebraic precision. It took me a while to find the careful hand necessary to achieve this effect, but once the technique is under your belt, the effects are glorious. Viva la ambergris!

Perfume writer and scientist Luca Turin experimented with ambergris’s ability to amplify the power of other perfume notes. In the comments section of the same website, he described spritzing Yardley’s Lavender twice on each hand, but adding ambergris to one hand and not the other. The result? “Like switching from little speakers to big electrostatics,” he marvels. “Small wonder people value the stuff.” I’ve tried a similar experiment, and he’s absolutely right. It’s as if a flat image suddenly turns into a pop-up book on your skin, materializing and highlighting every note and contour.

According to experts, only around 1 to 5 percent of sperm whales even produce the substance that will become ambergris, and others say that when they do, very little of it is found washed ashore. There is no international restriction on the import and export of ambergris, mainly because ambergris is said to be the only natural animal scent that is found rather than obtained by killing or hurting the animal. But Cropwatch, the self-proclaimed independent watchdog for natural perfumers, says that only 4 percent of ambergris comes from beach finds; 96 percent, they say, comes from the slaughter of whales.

Because ambergris is, and always has been, expensive, real ambergris has rarely been used in perfumery. It’s said that Coty Chypre had it. Creed has long maintained that their costs reflect the use of real ambergris, for example, in the wonderful, yet discontinued Creed perfume Angélique Encens. And even though Dioressence was said to have been the love child of ambergris residue on perfumer Guy Robert’s hands with a knock-off Miss Dior soap he used, it’s doubtful real ambergris was in the mass-market formula.

Enter synthetics. In 1820, French chemists Joseph-Bienaim Carentou and Pierre-Joseph Pelletier isolated, described, and named ambrein as ambergris’s primary odorant. (Not to be confused with ambreine, an extract of the Cistus ladaniferus, which is richly ambery.) By itself, ambrein is odorless but contains the compounds that will oxidize to produce ambergris’s characteristic scent. In 1977, B. D. Mookherjee and R. R. Patel identified nearly 100 volatile substances in ambergris, describing them evocatively as “ozony-seawater-metallic”; “moldy-animal-fecal”; “weak tobacco”; “sea water”; and, of sensuous Ambroxan, “moist, soft, creamy, persistent amber with velvety effect.” Wow. Make that a double, please!

There are a number of synthetic ambergris substitutes, for example, Ambrox by Firmenich. Within the past year, scientists have been isolating and “growing” substances that smell like ambergris. Researchers from the University of British Columbia have identified a gene in balsam fir trees that could lead to synthetic ambergris production, and Firmenich researchers Laurent Daviet and Michel Schalk have isolated the DNA from clary sage, the plant that produces the two enzymes needed to create Ambroxan, putting it into E. coli bacteria and growing it in a bioreactor.

CASTOREUM

We move from the dreamy caresses of ambergris to the thuggish beauty of castoreum, a byproduct of the beaver fur trade and an indispensable note in leather and chypre fragrances like Bandit, Aramis, and Paloma Picasso Mon Parfum.

From the twin castor sacs on the abdomens of North American and European beavers, castoreum is a yellowish cream that both male and female beavers secrete, along with urine, to mark their territory. After the castor sacs are removed, they are dried and aged for two to three years to mellow out castoreum’s initially harsh scent, which German chemist Henri J. Hoffmann has described as “… sharp and burning with a creosote or tar-like note, reminiscent of the ‘glowing’ odor emanating from birch tar or Russian leather.”

In many ways, castoreum is the most animalic of the four animal-derived notes, as it truly smells—underneath its surprising fruit facets—like a pungent animal hide. When diluted in alcohol to form a tincture, castoreum smells musky, fruity, and smoky, the last facet in part due to a chemical that is also in tobacco—tetramethyl-isoquinolinone. So fruity is the scent of castoreum, it has been widely (though not transparently) used for quite some time as an FDA-approved “natural flavor” in raspberry and strawberry candies, ice creams, and yogurts. This goes to show just how complex animalic scents can be, that on the one hand, an ingredient like castoreum can enhance the flavor of raspberry in a soda, and in perfume, impart an intense leather accord.

MUSK

Prized for its intense odor and ability to exalt the fragrance of other scents, musk, which comes from the Sanskrit word meaning “testicle,” has been used in perfume for thousands of years. On its own, it has a dark, intense scent, “an oily warmth between fruit and animal,” as writer Stephen Fowler describes it. But when diluted and mixed with other notes, its animalic funk recedes without disappearing, highlighting and warming those notes while providing a sensuous background texture, like a lamp turned on that bathes a room’s décor with its golden light.

“Musk is to fragrance what MSG is to Chinese food.”

—STEPHEN FOWLER, “MUSK: AN ESSAY”

Musk comes from a small, antlerless deer found in India, Pakistan, Tibet, China, Siberia, and Mongolia. In the early summer, liquid drains into its musk sac, which is in the deer’s abdomen above its penis. In the fall, this liquid ripens into a red, pastelike, and extremely odoriferous musk that the deer sprays, along with urine, to mark its territory and attract females for mating. When the musk deer was killed for its musk, a small hairy sac the size of a golf ball was removed and either dried or soaked in hot oil. Afterward, the extremely odorant red paste would turn into black musk “grains” that look like coffee grinds. Those grains were then diluted in alcohol to create a tincture that was then used for perfume.

In 1973, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna limited the trapping of the musk deer, and in most countries today, it is illegal to trade in natural musk, except in very limited quantities. As a result, almost all musk in perfume and household products is now synthetic, and even though musk has been found in trace amounts in human fat, blood, breast milk, water, and even fish, IFRA considers the synthetic musks in perfume and household products safe.

The first synthetic musk was discovered by scientist Albert Bauer, who had been experimenting with TNT. The first nitro musk, as it came to be known, was a happy, fragrant byproduct. According to IFRA, synthetic musks shouldn’t be considered a single group because they lack a common chemical structure. In fact, what ties this bewildering array of synthetic musks in fragrance together is solely their musky scent—and yet even what constitutes “musky scent” is varied. When we think of musk, we often think of its animalic, bodily, erotic connotations, but some synthetic musks smell clean and in fact are used in detergents and other household cleaning products. Synthetic musks in perfume have fixative powers because their molecules are heavy and they make fragrances last longer. They can play up top notes or work in the background. Depending on which musk or musks are used in a fragrance, they can be fresh, clean, animalic, fruity, floral, creamy, powdery, dry, woody, or ambery.

Certain synthetic musks, because of their ubiquity in cleaning products, are associated with cleanliness itself. While some perfumers may highlight a fragrance’s dirtiness with animalic musks like Muscone, there are also so-called “white musks,” like Galaxolide, that impart a subtle, clean scent. Again, the Scented Salamander’s Marie-Hélène Wagner has something interesting to say, lamenting that musk’s animalic connotations are lost on a deodorant-obsessed younger generation:

[S]ince most of them fall under the “clean musk” umbrella, expect that generation Y will have no mental associations with any of the skanky musks, and will come to regard the symbol musk as the collateral signification (laundry day) rather than the primal one (animal magnetism). Clean musks are marketed as attractants, as powerful aphrodisiacs, as sexually inviting, thus equating clean with sexy! In a culture where personal grooming is a trillion dollar business it somehow logically follows.

Perfume 101: How to Become an Informed Perfume Lover

I am an accidental connoisseur of perfume. I didn’t know I was the “collector” type until I started buying vintage and niche perfume. There’s an addictive quality to the hunt, the find, the purchase, and the joyous first sniff. With vintage perfume, the idea that I could be holding one of the last remaining versions of a scent makes me feel like a keeper of the sacred perfume-culture flame. There have been times, with rare scents like Jacques Fath’s Iris Gris or Guerlain’s Djedi, that I felt like one of those colonial explorers who caught the last glimpse of a dodo bird before it became extinct forever.

There are various ways to learn about perfume, and rather than provide you with a step-by-step method, I’ll lay out here what I think connoisseurship requires. Depending on how you choose to go about it, what you’re willing (or not willing) to spend, and where you live, this could either be a very expensive proposition or a relatively inexpensive one.

Consider the following a perfume version of the game, “Choose Your Adventure.”

Learn the basic categories of perfume. In 1983, industry expert Michael Edwards updated the perfume classification system with his famous “Fragrance Wheel,” which is online with commentary (http://www.fragrancesoftheworld.com/fragrancewheel.aspx).

His classification system puts all perfumes in five main categories—Floral, Oriental, Woody, Fresh, and Fougère—with subdivisions in each one. The last category, Fougère, comprises all aspects of each of the other four. For example, florals can be fruity, soft (with aldehydes), or Oriental (with spices and vanilla). Woods can be dry (with cedar, tobacco, burnt wood, and leather) or mossy (with oakmoss, amber, citrus, floral, woods, musk). As a beginner, your best bet is going to be to keep it simple. Does it smell sweet, floral, green, spicy, rich, leathery, woodsy? Then try to fit your perceptions into these formal categories.

Sniff as many perfumes in as many categories as you can. This can start at the mall. Take a notebook, write down the perfume and your impressions. Look it up on Basenotes.net or Fragrantica.com, or read a blogger’s description. Find out the perfume notes. Does any one note stand out?

You can expand your research by beginning to collect decants, or small 1 ml. vials, from the numerous decanting sites that abound online, and which I’ve listed in this book. Some even organize bundles of vials into educationally useful categories, like “Top 10 Vintage Perfumes” or “Top 10 Niche Perfumes.” This can be a great way to get started.

Look at the perfume pyramids that list perfume notes if you want to delve into perfume appreciation further. Although some people pooh-pooh these lists as often being marketers’ fantasies of what is actually found in perfume (I’ve actually seen “angel’s skin” listed as a perfume note in a press release), they’re often pedagogically useful for the budding perfume lover and can help you understand why a series of perfumes smell similar and how they’re different (example: Diorella and Eau Sauvage; Miss Balmain, Aramis, Sikkim, and Fête de Molyneux; Angel and Flowerbomb).

Begin to smell essential oils like ylang-ylang or clary sage, and perfume molecules such as aldehyde C-14, the famous peach aldehyde. These are readily available (and quite cheap) on the websites listed below. You’re essentially training your nose to detect these scents in perfume.

Here are some scent/perfume descriptors to get you started: floral, fruity, sweet, green, fresh, light, cool, bright, delicate, sheer, sultry, erotic, animalic, aldehydic, powdery, sensual, warm, balsamic, radiant, aromatic, anisic, herbal, medicinal, coniferous, sour, camphory, minty, herbaceous, dusty, urinous, fatty, balsamic, buttery, smoky, vegetal, resinous, round.

“To be a nose you have to practice, just like a pianist plays his scales,” says Jean-Pierre Royet, a neuroscientist at the Claude-Bernard University in Lyon, France, who spearheaded a scientific study to determine if certain people have an innate superiority when it comes to smelling. His conclusion? Perfumers have more nuanced senses of smell not because they were born that way, but because they have trained their noses. People who continually sniff and remember scents, Royet determined, can actually conjure the scent from memory, to the point where the same area in their brain lights up whether they are actually sniffing the scent or simply remembering it.

If you’d like to become a champion scent-lete, or at least understand your favorite perfumes better, below is a list of some useful notes to start your nose-training with. On your mark, get ready … Sniff!

Bergamot, clary sage, jasmine, rose, geranium, ylang-ylang, lavender, coriander, petit grain, galbanum, tuberose, orris, cardamom, patchouli, oakmoss, Peru balsam, labdanum, benzoin, cedar, sandalwood, olibanum, styrax (liquid amber), myrrh, vetiver, tonka beans (I find these at witchcraft stores a lot!), civet (synthetic), castoreum (synthetic), Animalid (synthetic musk blend), costus, aldehyde C-14 (peach).

And read, read, read: blogs, books, perfume forums. One of the most pleasurable things about my foray into perfume has been meeting, virtually or in real life, some of the most creative and kind people I’ve ever met: perfume lovers! They’ve inspired me with their humor and amazing insights right from the beginning.

Essential Oil Sources

PerfumersApprentice.com (They sell both essential oils and perfume-industry molecules and bases, such as aldehydes and synthetic animalic accords, along with useful decanting supplies like plastic pipettes and glass vials.)

EdenBotanicals.com

Gritman.com

Enfleurage.com

Educational Sources Online

•   www.bojensen.net: In my recommended reading list, I suggested Perfume and Flavor Materials of Natural Origin by Steffen Arctander for its wonderful description of natural perfume notes. The book is quite expensive, however, so if you’d like to read an occasional quote of his descriptions, along with other useful information about perfume notes, this is an excellent online reference.

•   Perfumer’s Apprentice: Perfumer Jean Carles (Ma Griffe, Tabu) was also a wonderful teacher. This site has Jean Carles’s method of teaching perfumery in PDFs you can download. This could also be useful as an exercise for the perfume lover who wants to improve her nose (http://shop.perfumersapprentice.com/perfumersworkshop/carles.html).

•   For those who want to go subatomic with smell, Google the article entitled “Understanding the Underlying Dimensions in Perfumers’ Odor Perception Space as a Basis for Developing Meaningful Odor Maps” by Manuel Zarzo and David T. Stanton (you can download it in PDF form). They research the idea of “smell-mapping.” Even if you don’t read it, it’s worth checking out Stephan Jellinek’s brilliant and trippy “odor effects diagram” that divides perfume’s effects into four quadrants: narcotic, sweet (soft); its opposite, stimulating, bitter (active); erogenous, alkaline, animal (rich, musk, vanilla); and its opposite, antierogenous, sour, refreshing (citrusy).

•   “Rallet No1 to Chanel No5 versus Mademoiselle Chanel No1” by Philip Kraft, Christine Ledard, and Philip Goutell is a PDF that can be purchased on www.perfumerflavorist.com.

•   Stephen Fowler’s “Musk: An Essay,” is one of the most entertaining reads on the subject I’ve ever encountered. Originally published in Juice magazine’s Issue #3 (1995), it’s posted in its entirety here: www.pheromonetalk.com/parfum/musk-essay-1923-print.html.

•   This is a wonderful source of quotations, anecdotes, historical facts, and book recommendations on the subject of ambergris: http://www.netstrider.com/documents/ambergris/books.

•   There’s a beautiful perfume appreciation essay by the ambient musician Brian Eno called “Scents and Sensibilities” worth checking out (http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/detail92.html).

1943 ad for Weil’s perfume Noir

Starting a Vintage Perfume Collection: Some Tips

If you love perfume, smelling the classics, obscure gems, and old favorites is a great way to deepen your perfume knowledge. Encountering a vintage perfume like Guerlain’s Shalimar (1925), and then sniffing Bulgari Black (1998), which is a contemporary riff on that classic Oriental fragrance, is like recognizing that the blue dress Naomi Watts wears in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive is a visual quote of the one Kim Novak wore in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. How are Shalimar and Bulgari Black different? What are their similarities? What do you make of the updated notes, and what do you think they mean? For the perfume nerd, teasing out the answers to these questions can be a huge part of the pleasure of collecting vintage perfume.

If art collectors buy pieces whose colors have faded or whose corners have broken off, vintage perfume collectors have it even worse. Some say that a perfume smells good for about six months to a year if properly stored away from heat and light. After that, it can start to evaporate, even in the bottle, and its volatile top notes can start “turning.” So you may not sniff an exact version of what a flapper in the 1920s may have smelled, but if you choose wisely, you can get a pretty good impression. An imperfect glimpse of Lanvin’s Rumeur (1934), or Balmain’s Vent Vert (1947), or (if you can get your hands on it) Guerlain’s Djedi (1926), is definitely better than none.

Here are some tips on how to get started on your vintage perfume journey: First off, where should you shop for vintage? Estate sales, garage sales, flea markets, and antiques malls are fun places to start if you want to be surprised by a find.

If you’re looking for something in particular, you can check out some reputable perfume-decant websites that specialize in niche and vintage perfumes, as well as the online vintage perfume retailers I’ve listed below. Some Etsy sellers have also started to sell decants and full bottles of vintage perfume.

And there’s always good ol’ eBay. Choose a seller with a high score and positive ratings. Ask a lot of questions: Does the perfume still smell relatively fresh? Has it been stored away from heat and light? (You can also tell that by the color of the juice. If it’s way darker than the original juice, it’s probably off.) Does the seller accept returns? Make sure you know what the perfume smells like before you invest in a full bottle. In all my four years of collecting vintage, I’ve only had to ask for one refund, because I knew the juice was new and not vintage.

And finally, after you get a little collection going, you can swap with perfume friends in groups on Makeup Alley, Fragrantica, Basenotes, and Facebook.

•   Start off small, with a decant or mini, or even an almost-empty bottle with just enough perfume left. (I see a lot of almost-finished bottles of perfume on eBay, and they’re an economical way to try a vintage you might be curious about.) You can try an old favorite, or something your mother may have worn, or a classic you’ve read about. There’s no point in spending $100 on a vintage perfume someone raved about on a perfume forum only to find you don’t like it. I was thrilled to find a mini of my first perfume love: Calvin Klein’s little-known first perfume, which was a gorgeous floral chypre from 1980.

•   In addition to decants, minis, and used bottles of vintage, perfume nips are a fun way to try out vintage, and they seem to be all over the Internet. “Nips” is a patented name for perfume samples that come from around 1930 to the 1950s, a precursor to the vials with removable caps we have now. They were narrow little tubes made of plastene or glass, measuring about three inches long, filled with perfume. In order to sample the perfume, you would break off both ends and pour the perfume onto your skin. Sometimes, several different brands of perfume came in one plastic case, so their tips were color-coded to allow you to identify the brand. Otherwise, one brand of several nips came housed in cardboard tubes like miniature poster containers.

Nips were often given away as promotional gifts by companies that had nothing to do with perfume, like airlines or car dealerships. I even saw a nips case with the following etched on the back: FLINT TELEPHONE EMPLOYEES CREDIT UNION. (How glamorous!)

The great thing about nips is, because the perfume is sealed inside with no air to damage it, what you’re smelling is almost identical to a brand-new perfume. The downside? Once you crack that nip open, there’s no closing the genie bottle, so you’d better enjoy those few whiffs. It was definitely worth it for me, for example, to crack open an Evening in Paris nip and to smell the rainbow of fruit notes that came out of it like a Technicolor cartoon.

•   Buy sample vials of vintage perfume. I’ve been seeing more of these on eBay and vintage perfume websites. They were once free, but, hey, now they’re rare.

•   I’ve been able to try multiple vintage perfumes with those wonderful coffrets or gift boxes that have either a collection of mini perfumes from one brand, say, Estée Lauder, or a variety of perfumes. For example, I have a couple of those “Les Meilleurs Parfums de France” coffrets with seven to ten 2 ml. vintage perfumes such as Cabochard, Baghari, Antilope, Miss Balmain, and Ma Griffe. They’re getting more and more expensive, though.

•   If you’re ready to invest in a full bottle, educate yourself. The Internet is your friend. What year was the perfume released? (Basenotes.com, Fragrantica.com, and numerous other perfume websites, including mine, YesterdaysPerfume.com, will provide the date.) Then, go to eBay—or Hprints.com, if it’s a French perfume—to look for a corresponding perfume ad. It will usually feature an image of the bottle along with a date for the ad. Some perfume bottles look exactly the same from first release to ten reformulations later, so this method of dating a bottle won’t help. But when they change (i.e., Balmain’s Vent Vert bottle), this is one way to find out the date of your perfume. A sealed, boxed bottle of perfume is more likely to hold up than a vintage perfume that’s been opened without its box, but the price is going to reflect that.

•   Sometimes the color of the perfume (or “juice”) will tell you its age, too. For example, vintage Chanel No. 19 is straw colored, not green as it is now.

•   No doubt sniffing the classics is a must. (I’ve listed a few must-sniffs below.) But the longer I collect vintage perfume, the more I realize that once you have a few of the classic, iconic vintages under your belt, the real exploration begins with obscurer scents, which you can often find for relatively cheap prices on eBay.

For example, figure out which perfume category you like the best, get the Haarmann & Reimer perfume guide, which lists perfume pyramids and organizes perfume into its fragrance category (floral, green, chypre, Oriental, etc.), and start collecting some obscure perfumes in that category. I’ve found some incredible vintage perfumes that way, particularly in the green and chypre animalic category (both of which are my favorite styles). Lanvin’s rich leather-tobacco-plum-vanilla Rumeur (1934), Trussardi’s Trussardi for Women (1984), and Scherrer 1 (1979) were just a few of the beauties I fell in love with that not everyone was chasing after.

Other tips for dating vintage perfume: Perfume bottles that have stoppers with plastic dowells were made after 1970. If the bottle or box features a zip code, it was made after 1963. It’s a recent bottle if the percentage of alcohol is labeled on the bottle with the “%” symbol. The bottle is from the 1940s if you see any of the following: “SDA” (specially denatured alcohol) on the label; a federal excise tax statement; or the term “dram” to indicate how much perfume is in the bottle. (A dram or drachm is about 5 ml.) If the perfume has a stopper, the numbers on the bottom should match the numbers on the bottom of the bottle’s stopper. Ground-to-fit stoppers are rarely used today, and for the most part, this numbering exists only on pre-1950s vintage perfumes. (Helen Farnsworth, a perfume bottle collector who, with her husband, Craig, also has an amazing collection of vintage perfume ads, provided this last set of tips for dating vintage perfume.)

Which Vintage Perfumes Should You Try First?

The following is just a suggested list; I’m sure there are vintage perfumes I love that I’ve left off! To make it easier, I’ve listed them under their fragrance categories.

Floral: Joy by Patou, Fracas by Piguet, My Sin by Lanvin

Leather: Cuir de Russie by Chanel, Peau d’Espagne by Santa Maria Novella, Empreinte by Courrèges, Azurée by Estée Lauder, Aramis, Miss Balmain

Animalic: Jicky by Guerlain, Narcisse Noir by Caron, Baghari by Piguet, Muscs Koublaï Khän by Serge Lutens

Green: Silences by Jacomo, Vent Vert by Balmain, Inoui by Shiseido

Chypre: Diorella by Dior, Chanel No. 19, Paloma Picasso, Mitsouko by Guerlain, Scherrer No.1

Fruity: Calyx by Prescriptives, Parfum de Peau by Claude Montana, Colony by Patou, Premier Figuier by L’Artisan

Citrus: Ô de Lancôme, Eau Sauvage by Dior

Woody: Féminité du Bois by Shiseido, Samsara by Guerlain, Theorema by Fendi

Oriental: Jicky and Shalimar by Guerlain, Emeraude by Coty, Tabu by Dana, Toujours Moi by Corday, Sirocco by Lucien Lelong, Opium by Yves Saint Laurent, Bulgari Black

Fougère: Fougère Royale by Houbigant, Canoe by Dana, Love’s Baby Soft

My Favorite Perfume and Scent Blogs

Ambergris.fr

BoisdeJasmin.com

Cafleurebon.com

ChandlerBurr.com

FirstNerve.com (about scent culture)

GlassPetalSmoke.com (about flavor and scent)

GraindeMusc.com

IndiePerfume.com

ISmellThereforeIAm.blogspot.com

KatiePuckrikSmells.com

Legerdenez.blogspot.com

NSTPerfume.com

1000Fragrances.blogspot.com

Olfactorama.blogspot.com

PerfumePosse.com

Perfumesmellinthings.blogspot.com

Pinkmanhattan.blogspot.com

SorceryofScent.blogspot.com

TheAlembicatedGenie.com

Themuseinwoodenshoes.com

TheNonBlonde.com

The Scented Salamander (Mimifroufrou.com/scentedsalamander)

Perfume Forums

Basenotes.net

Encyclopedia: http://perfumeintelligence.co.uk/

Facebook Perfume Groups

Fragrantica.com

MakeupAlley.com

PerfumeofLife.com

Vintage and Niche Perfume Decants

Etsy.com

SurrendertoChance.com

ThePerfumedCourt.com

ThePoshPeasant.com

Vintage Perfumes and Minis

MiniaturePerfumeShoppe.com

QuirkyFinds.com

Niche perfume samples

Luckyscent.com

SurrendertoChance.com

ThePerfumedCourt.com

ThePoshPeasant.com

Acknowledgments

The moment I caught a whiff of my first vintage perfume, I was hooked. But to follow my nose and undertake the daunting task of writing a book on the subject required inspiration, encouragement, and support. I would like to express my gratitude and thank the following people who provided all of that in spades.

A big thanks to my glamorous mother, Phuoc Babcock, for your love and support. And because of your Charlie, Magie Noire, Scherrer 1, and Diva-wearing self, I love perfume!

Huge thanks go to my best friends Galadrielle Allman and Catherine Zimmer. I would not have been able to write this book without your love and hand-holding. You both encouraged me to just go for it and were always there for me when I needed you. I love you both.

A shout out goes to my San Francisco and New Orleans crews for their friendship and for letting me spray them, sniff them, and talk to them (ad infinitum!) about perfume: Donna Allman, Tina Boudreaux, Ari Braverman, Misty Costanza, Jonno d’Addario, Debbie de la Houssaye, Noelle Deltufo, Lake Douglas, Jordan Flaherty, Leah Foster, Melissa Hung, Lisa Julien, Brie Mazurek, Elizabeth Pearce, Aesha Rasheed, Richard Read, Elizabeth Steeby, and all my other cute SF/NOLA peeps. You know who you are!

I’m eternally grateful to Gordon Warnock, former literary agent at Andrea Hurst Management and now at Foreword Literary Management, for seeing possibility in my book proposal and getting me my first book deal.

And thank you to the Globe Pequot Press/Lyons Press team for being my first publisher, with special thanks to editors Mary Norris and Ellen Urban for your patience, kindness, and editorial support.

I am also so grateful to both Elizabeth Townsend-Gard, Associate Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Tulane Center for Intellectual Property Law & Culture, and Zachary Christiansen, Chief Legal Engineer of the Durationator Software Project, now Associate Attorney for Bowler & McKinney, APLC, for schooling me on the basics of copyright law and guiding me through the confusing steps of getting permissions for the perfume ad images I wanted to use for my book. Thanks to both of you, Scent and Subversion is teeming with beautiful ads!

A big thank you also goes to all the perfume brands who kindly gave me permission to use their historical perfume ads for the book.

Thanks to Octavian Coifan, Alessandro Gaultieri, Christophe Laudamiel, Antoine Lie, Sissel Tolaas, Yann Vasnier, and Martynka Wawrzyniak for letting me interview them about scent and perfume. And to both Octavian and Yann—thank you so much for sniffing the vintage perfumes I sent you and decoding their notes!

A huge thanks and shout out to the ultra-talented perfume bloggers who help to promote passionate and educated scent-loving with their amazing writing, and whom I learn from every day: Denyse Beaulieu, Octavian Coifan, Gaia Fishler, Victoria Frolova, Avery Gilbert, Donna Hathaway, Wendy Holden, Michelle Krell Kidd, Robin Krug, March Moore, Brian Pera, Katie Puckrik, Lucy Raubertas, Angela Sanders, Patty White, and so many others.

Thanks are also in order to the loyal, whip-smart, and witty commenters on my blog, YesterdaysPerfume.com, from whom I’ve learned so much—and from whom I was gifted so much perfume! Your insights on and enthusiasm for perfume spurred me to go deeper and further. With special thanks to Anne-Marie Conde, Brigitte Denniston, Heather Dwyer, Sheila Eggenberger, Carol “Mals86” Guthrie, Robin Karnes, Tommie-Jean Roosmann, Juliana Sadock Savino, Melissa Tait, Mary Vines, and Christine West. Thanks also to Guy Bertrand for supplying me with notes and translations from the Dictionnaire des Parfum de France and Bruce Bolmes of SMK-Fragrance for providing me with vintage samples of animalic tinctures.

From the beginning, when I began to write about perfume, Leslie Ann White and her husband, Allen, of MiniaturePerfumeShoppe.com have provided me with friendship and untold numbers of vintage perfume vials and mini bottles. Thank you!

Much appreciation goes to MX Justin Vivian Bond, Chandler Burr, Katie Puckrik, and Dita Von Teese for reading portions of my manuscript and writing such wonderful blurbs. Your bold ideas have inspired me, and I’m honored to have your words on my book.

Thanks also to Chandler Burr, Tania Sanchez, and Luca Turin for awakening my dormant love for perfume with your lyrical, thought-provoking, and often hilarious words. Your attention to perfume as an art, a language, and a cultural force that is woven into the fabric of our lives and memories informed the seriousness and passion with which I approached perfume.

Thanks to all my Indie Gogo supporters and donors who helped finance my last leg of perfume research, with special thanks to Michelle Crosby, Christopher Dommermuth, Sheila McLaughlin, and Kim Nguyen (who also happens to be my cousin!).

Thanks and kisses to darling little Flippy, whose kitty cologne smells like sunshine and love.

A big thank you to beautiful, haunting, raucous, and decadent New Orleans for being the perfect city in which to dream and write about perfume.

And last but not least, thank you to all perfumers—past and present—for the sacred and important work you do to keep our senses and imaginations alive and enlivened.

Glossary

Here are some terms you will encounter frequently when reading about perfume. They include perfume ingredients, descriptors (i.e., “herbaceous,” “indolic,” etc.), perfume categories, and methods of extracting scents from plants. This list doesn’t purport to be comprehensive, and the definitions are cursory, but they should help you get through the average blog post on perfume, and they will help to clarify descriptions in this book. Hopefully, the ingredients will sound evocative enough that you’ll want to smell them.

Absolute: The residue left over from solvent extraction of scents using materials like hexane and methyl alcohol from fragrant materials. They’re more concentrated than essential oils, and because the temperature used to process them is lower than the steam distillation used to process essential oils, absolutes have a scent closer to the original.

Accord: The scent that results when a perfumer combines three or more notes together to create a scent distinct from the individual notes. Accords can be abstract scents, and they can be specific scents. Gardenia, for example, is often a constructed accord in perfume because the yield is too low and expensive for extraction from the gardenia itself.

Aldehydes: Aromatic chemicals isolated for the first time in the nineteenth century, but that also occur naturally. Certain aldehydes provide an increased diffusiveness, sparkle, and lift to perfumes, most famously in Chanel No. 5. Aldehydes C-12 and lower add sparkle to fragrances, and aldehydes C-14 and higher add fruit notes (for example, the peachiness of Mitsouko’s C-14 aldehyde).

Amber: An accord in perfumery that is supposed to recall the qualities of ambergris. Amber is often constructed with labdanum, Tolu balsam, or Peru balsam. It’s often an accord in Oriental perfumes.

Ambergris: A highly prized perfume ingredient consisting of the oxidized excretion from a sperm whale. It is rarely used in its natural form in perfumery because of its rarity, exorbitant cost, and concerns about sourcing ambergris from live whales rather than from shore-found ambergris. It’s said to have an earthy, sweet, tobacco, and pleasantly animalic scent. It primarily works to bring out other notes in perfumery rather than to impart a particular scent on its own. Aged ambergris and ambrox, a synthetic substitute, according to Bo Jensen, have the following facets: “1) wet mossy forest soil, 2) strong tobacco, 3) balsamic sandalwood, 4) warm animal musk, 5) seaweed/ocean, and 6) fecal.”

Ambrein: The primary scented molecule in ambergris, isolated and used in perfumery. It’s warm, sweet, vanillic, and ambery, with facets of spice and tobacco.

Animalic: A term used to describe fragrances with animal ingredients in natural or synthetic form, including civet, castoreum, musk, or ambergris. The voluptuous, erotic, and sometimes disturbing quality of animalic perfumes can register in an olfactory way, as something “dirty” or animal-smelling, or as a feeling, a mood, or a quality. Sometimes, it can be both.

Animalis: A base created by Synarome with civet, castoreum, musk, and other animalic notes with a fatty, almost intoxicatingly voluptuous quality. It’s in vintage Baghari and Visa, both by Robert Piguet. To smell a perfume with Animalis in its base is to truly understand what an old-school animalic perfume is.

Artemisia: Artemisia oil, or Armoise in French, comes from steam-distilling white wormwood, a shrub that grows wild in North Africa and the Middle East. The best known form of Artemisia is Artemisia absinthium, (aka “grand wormwood” or “absinthe wormwood”), which was in the alcoholic drink Absinthe made notorious in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by writers and artists. In perfume, Artemisia herba/alba imparts a green, cool, slightly camphoraceous scent and is a note in many grand chypres, including Jolie Madame, Bandit, Azurée, Sikkim, and Aramis.

Balsam, balsamic: The resin from the bark of trees and shrubs (Peru, Tolu, styrax) that have a rich vanilla scent. Balsamic is a term used to describe perfumes with the soft, ambery aspects these resins impart.

Base note: The most molecularly heavy ingredient in a perfume formula, and the longest lasting. Base notes can exalt other perfume notes, fix them (make them longer-lasting), and impart their own particular scent. In the perfume pyramids that sketch out a perfume’s ingredients, base notes are featured in the bottom row.

Benzoin: A sweet, balsamic resin used in incense and as a base note in perfume for its vanillic scent and fixative properties. Also known as styrax because it comes from the bark of the styrax tree.

Bergamot: The essential oil from the peel of the nonedible Citrus aurantium fruit that looks like a small orange. Its sweetish, mellow lemony scent is a crucial top note in perfumery.

Birch tar: Dry-distilled from birch bark, birch tar was used in leather fragrances to impart an earthy, smoky, savory note, as in vintage Rive Gauche, Shalimar, and Annick Goutal’s Eau du Fier. It’s been all but banned for use in perfumery by the IFRA. Birch absolute smells like campfire smoke: warm, savory, and hickorylike.

Calone: A synthetic “marine” note that is supposed to evoke the freshness of the ocean. There is a slight watermelon facet to calone. This was a ubiquitous note in the 1990s, in fragrances such as Cool Water and L’Eau d’Issey.

Cardamom: An intensely aromatic, sweet spice from the ginger family, in the form of a pod filled with seeds.

Carnation: A smoky, sweet, and clove-like scent, the latter facet due to Eugenol, the primary component of clove.

Cassis/black currant bud: A sharp, fruity, almost cat-urine-like scented perfume note. In Magie Noire.

Castoreum: An oily secretion from the abdominal sacs of beavers. Its warm, musky scent with facets of fruit and tobacco is often used to make leather fragrances. Both the vintage castoreum and synthetic-blend castoreum I’ve smelled had a dark, almost soy sauce–like savoriness. German chemist Henri J. Hoffmann described castoreum as being “sharp and burning with a creosote or tar-like note, reminiscent of the ‘glowing’ odour emanating from birch tar or Russian leather.” Paloma Picasso’s Mon Parfum was overdosed with castoreum.

Chypre: A perfume category named after the Greek island of Cyprus. It characteristically has citrus top notes such as bergamot, contrasted with a mossy base of oakmoss and patchouli. In 1917, François Coty’s Chypre launched the category, which waned in popularity in the 1990s. IFRA restrictions on the amount of oakmoss and treemoss in perfumes (except in synthetic form) that went into effect in 2010 means that no true chypres will ever be made again.

Cistus (Labdanum): A resin from the rockrose bush, traditionally gathered from goats’ beards as they fed on the plant. Labdanum is said to be the note closest to the scent of ambergris. Creamy, soft, vanillic.

Civet: In classical perfumery, the cream harvested from the anal gland of the mongoose-like civet animal, often described as cat-like. Fecal-smelling when undiluted, civet “rounds” out other notes when used judiciously. Famous as an overdosed note in Guerlain’s Jicky (1889), it is considered one of the first abstract modern scents. Civet is primarily in synthetic form now. I’m coming around to the belief that civet is added to perfume not just for a little stink, but for a host of psychological effects that can best be described as subliminal tension. It was even used in classic clean scents such as Estée Lauder’s White Linen.

Clove: An aromatic spice similar to cinnamon, but less sweet. Its primary component is Eugenol. Caron’s Poivre and Bellodgia have prominent clovey aspects due to carnation, which also has Eugenol.

Coniferous: A term used to describe scents with notes such as pine, spruce, and juniper. Shiseido’s Inoui (for women) made gorgeous use of notes conventionally used in masculine fragrances.

Costus: An African ginger root whose oil smells like human warmth: sebum from hair and skin; some say dust. A human “animalic.” In Lanvin’s Rumeur, Nina Ricci’s Fille d’Eve, and Scherrer 1.

Coumarin: With a sweet scent described as smelling like new-mown hay, coumarin was used in perfumery for the first time in Fougère Royale (1882), and has come to be a primary ingredient in the fougère catgory of perfumes. It’s found in many natural substances, but in particularly high concentrations in the tonka bean.

Cuir: The French word for leather.

Cumin: An aromatic spice used often in Indian cuisine that smells similar to underarm/body odor. It’s used in perfume to impart an erotic body-odor note. In Shiseido’s Féminité du Bois and reformulations of Rochas’s Femme.

Drydown: This term refers to the scent that remains when your perfume “dries down” on your skin, that is, after the top notes and middle notes have begun to evaporate and the heavier base notes become more prominent.

Essential oil: The oils obtained from a variety of plants via steam distillation or expression (from a citrus fruit rind).

Facet: A term borrowed from gemology to describe the many scent dimensions one perfume note, molecule, or ingredient may have. For example, geranium is often described as having a lemon facet, as well as a rosy one. Labdanum has vanilla and cinnamon facets.

Floral: A perfume category whose predominant scent comes from floral notes. Florals can be described as fresh, green, or fruity, etc., depending on the other notes in the composition.

Fougère: The French word for “fern,” this fragrance category was introduced with Houbigant’s nineteenth-century fragrance Fougère Royale (1882), which was a fantasy fern fragrance, given that ferns don’t have a recognizable smell. It includes notes of bergamot, oakmoss, lavender, and coumarin.

Frankincense: A gum resin from a small shrub that since ancient times has been used for incense. Sweet, spicy, smoky, sharp, and even slightly lemony, it is often used, along with other resins like labdanum and myrrh, in Oriental fragrances. Also called olibanum (Boswellia carteri).

Galbanum: A gum resin from the giant fennel Ferula gummosa, steam-distilled for its essential oil. Bitter, herbaceous, and almost chalky, this is the note that is often present in perfume formulas described as “green.” Germaine Cellier used an overdose of galbanum in Pierre Balmain’s Vent Vert, and it greened up Silences by Jacomo and Lancetti by Lancetti.

Gardenia: A creamy, white floral whose extraction yields too little to be worth the cost for commercial perfumery; gardenia accords are constructed instead.

Geranium: A flower with a lemony-rosy scent.

Gourmand: A modern scent category with notes that smell like food, often confectionary; for example, chocolate, vanilla, and cotton candy.

Green: A term used to describe scents that recall the fresh, aromatic scents of herbs, leaves, and grasses. Galbanum is the ur-green note.

Guaiac wood: The steam-distilled essential oil from tree bark. An intensely smoky scent, used to great effect in Theorema and Le Feu d’Issey.

Habanolide: One of many synthetic musks, with a warm, sweetish, powdery quality.

Headspace technology: A form of olfactory photography, headspace is a method of capturing the scent molecules from scented things, whether organic (a flower whose scent can’t be extracted traditionally) or inorganic (dirt). Basically, a bell-jar-like apparatus is placed over the scented object and the molecules are extracted and saved. After the molecules are painstakingly analyzed and noted, a synthetic version can be re-created by perfumers.

Heart note/middle note: In the perfume pyramid, heart notes are often floral notes and have duration/volatility/weight somewhere between top notes and base notes.

Hedione: A synthetic perfume note (methyl dihydrojasmonate) that smells of radiant jasmine. Used in both Eau Sauvage and Diorella to create a transparent jasmine.

Heliotrope: A purple flower originally from Peru with vanilla, caramel, and almond-cherry facets. Its scent cannot be extracted from the flowers, so synthetic heliotropin substitutes for it.

Herbaceous: A term describing the scent of aromatic herbs such as lavender, sage, basil, and bay leaf.

Hesperidic: Describes citrus notes in perfume.

IFRA: The International Fragrance Association is the perfume industry’s global regulatory body whose purpose is to test fragrance materials for safety and possible allergenic concerns. Much controversy has stemmed from its decision to mandate limited use of classical fragrance ingredients such as oakmoss and jasmine absolute, which perfumers say has created limited perfume palettes and wiped out whole categories of perfume (chypre), threatening the continued creation of classic fragrances with those ingredients.

Immortelle (or everasting flower, Helichrysum): A floral note that smells savory sweet. Immortelle is often described as smelling like a combination between ham and maple syrup.

Indole, indolic: A molecule found in decomposing organic matter and feces, in lower concentrations, indole has a floral aspect. Many white flowers, including jasmine and orange blossom are described as indolic because of the disquieting, ripe, animalic, and almost excremental facet of their scents.

Ionones: Violet is an expensive perfume to extract, so ionones, discovered in 1893, step in to provide the powdery-sweet aspect of the flower.

Isobutyl quinoline: A synthetic perfume note used in chypre, leather, and woody perfumes. It provides dry, green, wood, leather, and tobacco aspects. Overdosed in Germaine Cellier’s Robert Piguet fragrance, Bandit.

Labdanum (Cistus): The resin from the rockrose bush. Said to be the plant ingredient whose scent closest resembles ambergris.

Leather: A perfume accord and category of perfume constructed from various notes, including birch tar, styrax, castoreum, and a variety of synthetic notes.

Limbic system: A component of an ancient part of the brain that processes emotions, memories, and instinctual responses related to fear and sex, and contains the olfactory cortex, which receives and processes information from the olfactory bulb. When deployed to talk about perfume, it’s often used less in a scientific manner (although certainly scent, emotion, and memory are connected in the brain) than to discuss perfume’s power to effect deep, visceral, often memory-tinged, near-automatic responses in people.

Magnolia oil: Extracted from the magnolia flower, its scent has a fresh, lemony, diluted rose scent with subtle fruit notes’ warmth in the drydown.

Maté absolute: On its own, this green tea absolute has green, earthy, complex, smoky, tobacco qualities. In Bulgari’s Au Thé Vert Au Parfumée.

Methyl ionone: Discovered in 1893, methyl ionone is a synthetic note that recalls the woody and orris aspects of the violet flower. Used in L’Origan and L’Heure Bleue.

Mimosa, cassie (Acacia farnesiana): The flowers of A. farnesiana, or cassie, yield an absolute that, according to Steffen Arctander, author of Perfume and Flavor Materials of Natural Origin, is a warm, powdery-spicy, herbaceous, and floral odor with a balsamic and cinnamon undertone. Amarige highlighted the sweet aspects of mimosa; in Caron’s Farnesiana, the more herbaceous, balsamic aspects.

Muguet: French word for lily of the valley.

Musk: Musk is produced by the musk deer and excreted by the male during mating season. Musk deer were killed almost to extinction for their valuable musk glands, which were dried, and whose musk “seeds” were removed and steeped in alcohol to create tinctures for perfume. The scent of real musk is warm, with depth and a dark animalic aroma. Many synthetics now can mimic musk scent, but one of the most superior musk synthetics, nitro-musks, which were in Chanel No. 5 and countless other vintages, has been banned due to toxicity concerns. Musk can also be substituted with plant ingredients including ambrette seed and angelica.

Myrrh: A dried gum-resin from a number of closely related, small, thorny trees (genus Commiphora). Woody and sweet, myrrh oil, made from steam-distilling the gum resin, is used in many Oriental perfume bases. See Opopanax, or sweet myrrh.

Narcissus: An intoxicating green floral note.

Neroli: The essential oil from steam-distilling the orange flowers from the inedible bitter orange tree, also known as the Seville orange, Citrus aurantium. Orange blossom comes from the same flowers, but its method of production, solvent extraction, creates a slightly different fragrance. Other fragrance materials can be obtained from this tree: petit grain (from the twigs and leaves) and bergamot from the rind/peel.

Note: A term in perfumery borrowed from the world of music. A perfume note is essentially a musical metaphor for an ingredient (e.g., rose or civet). Three notes can form a unique scent impression that exceeds each individual note’s scent, resulting in an accord.

Oakmoss (Evernia prunastri): A type of lichen growing on oak trees that is a crucial perfume note for chypre perfumes. In chypres, a mossy base contrasts with the sparkling, citrusy, bergamot top note. Earthy, phenolic, woodsy, and, of course mossy, oakmoss has been severely regulated by the IFRA to the point that some perfumers and perfume experts believe that no true chypres can any longer be made.

Opopanax: Also known as sweet myrrh, opopanax is an herb that grows up to three feet, with yellow flowers. A balsamic note, that is warm, sweet, and creamy, it also has bitter and smoky facets. Also spelled opoponax.

Oriental: The Oriental category of perfume is distinguished by the use of balsamic resins, woody notes, and rich, sometimes sweet notes like amber, vanilla, and tonka. The Haarmann & Reimer guide divides Oriental into two types: fragrances that are structured around amber, and fragrances whose predominant notes are spicy.

Orris: Usually when “iris” is mentioned in perfume notes, what’s actually being referred to is orris, the dried roots of the iris flower which are turned to “orris butter,” a prized (and expensive) ingredient in perfumery that creates a rich, woody, powdery effect that has worked wonders in fragrances like Jacques Fath’s Iris Gris (Grey Iris) and Chanel No. 19. The process of extracting orris is complicated, painstaking, and yields very little orris; hence, its high cost.

Osmanthus: This sweet, apricot-faceted flower, also called “sweet olive” or “tea olive,” is used in perfumery and in some Chinese teas.

Oud/Agarwood: Made from the resin of the aquilaria tree, which exudes the resins when it’s attacked by pathogens, this perfume note has a haunting, earthy, woody scent that has been the breakout perfume note in niche and mainstream scents alike for several years.

Ozonic: A perfume accord that attempts to create the smell of fresh air after a thunderstorm. Big in the 1990s, and often paired with the Calone-produced oceanic accord (for example, in Cool Water).

Peau d’Espagne (Spanish leather): A style of perfume popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that based its scent on the cured Spanish leather saddles that were once perfumed with spices and perfume oils. Psychologist Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) claimed in Studies on the Psychology of Sex that Peau d’Espagne perfumes were “often the favorite of sensuous persons,” and more mysteriously, that “Peau d’Espagne is of all perfumes that which most nearly approaches the odor of a woman’s skin.”

Perfume pyramid: Unlike recipes in cookbooks, perfume pyramids are often a truncated, shorthand list of a perfume’s prominent notes and accords. (A complete perfume formula can have upwards of 100 ingredients, whereas a perfume pyramid’s list of top, heart, and base notes tends to only list around 15 to 20.)

Petit grain: The essential oil from the leaves and twigs of the Citrus aurantium bitter orange tree. It provides a bracing, herbaceous, green effect to fragrances.

Pimento: Pimento essential oil is obtained by distillation from the dried, full-grown, unripe fruit of the Pimenta officinalis plant. Its scent is warm, with a touch of subdued spice, sweetness, and clove. Found in Poison and Opium.

Resins: The term for the exudation from the bark of bushes and trees such as Tolu balsam, Peru balsam, and labdanum. Sometimes called “tears.”

Russian leather: A leather accord in perfumes such as Cuir de Russie by L.T. Piver, Chanel, and others that re-creates the scent of animalic, leather hides tanned with birch tar, with the addition of soft balsamic and floral notes.

Sandalwood: An oil extracted from the sandalwood tree once abundant in India and now more likely to be sourced from Australia, or synthesized. With a rich, buttery, warm and woody scent prized in perfumery. Found in Guerlain’s Samsara.

Sillage: The French word for “trail” or “wake,” as in the mark a ship makes on the water that trails behind it. In perfume language, this describes how far a perfume travels after it’s put on the skin, and if it has minimal sillage, it can be described as a “skin scent.”

Skank: Perfume slang for any scent that has an animalic or “dirty” aspect evoking unwashed bodies. The perfume world is indebted to “Miss March” (real name March Moore), perfume writer for PerfumePosse.com, for adding this most important—and humorous—perfume term to the lexicon in 2006. Jacques Guerlain once said that perfume “Should smell like the underside of my mistress,” and many twentieth-century perfumes complied, wrapping their pretty, more socially acceptable notes over ingredients with baser instincts—substances from an animals’ nether regions, spices redolent of human sweat, and flowers with excremental facets. Whether skank refers to “sex, and only sex” as Miss March argues, or also, as Perfume Posse’s Patty White adds philosophically, our relation to decay and a reminder that we’re going to die, perfume has had a cyclical relationship to skank. Perfumers in the 1950s embraced animal notes and “skank” perfumes, for example, while the clean scents of the 1990s repudiated it.

Soliflore: A single-note-themed perfume that may include multiple notes, but whose predominant scent is structured around one floral note, such as lilac, rose, or lily of the valley. Used in contrast to bouquet florals and more-abstract compositions.

Styrax: Styrax is an interesting note often used to create leather scents. A gum resin from the bark of a styrax tree, it imparts a leathery, smoky, balsamic (powdery-ambery) effect that perfumer Olivier Polge has said can give a chypre-like quality to perfumes.

Tiaré flower (Gardenia tahitensis): Tahiti’s national symbol, Tiaré is in the gardenia family, and is also known as Tahitian gardenia. Monoi perfume oil is made by soaking Tiaré petals in coconut oil.

Tolu balsam: A balsamic resin from a South American tree. It has a creamy, vanillic, and cinnamon scent.

Tonka: Tonka beans are from the seeds of the Dipteryx odorata, a legume tree. They have a powerful confectionary vanilla scent with hints of almond and cinnamon. Tonka beans contain a large amount of coumarin, the ingredient crucial to fougères, and they were once considered safe to use in the United States to flavor food and desserts.

Top note: The lightest, most volatile molecules in a perfume composition, which is why they’re placed at the top of perfume pyramids. They include citrus, fruit, and aromatic notes.

Tuberose: Buttery, tropical, with an almost rubbery facet with bubblegum sweetness, this white flower is a troublemaker in the world of perfumes. Although it can be dressed in the finest clothes and seem elegant (Frédéric Malle’s Carnal Flower is one of my favorite modern florals, with this “carnal” but supremely chic flower at its heart), its tawdry sexiness is also used to spectacular effect in Poison and Fracas. It is proof that perfumers can “push” certain aspects of the flower, whether syrupy sweetness (Fracas and Poison) or freshness (Carnal Flower). Something in tuberose’s DNA, however, keeps it from ever being an “innocent” flower.

Vetiver: Steam-distilled from the roots of the tall grass native to Haiti. Woody, peppery, earthy, dusty, sometimes lemony, vetiver is an earthy, comforting scent. In the nineteenth century, no fashionable Creole lady would have been without dried vetiver roots or vetiver sachets in her drawers.

Violet leaf: In contrast to the violet flower, which is sweet, violet leaf offers a green aspect to fragrances. Violet leaf absolute smells round, fresh, pulpy, wet, and slightly fruity-floral.

Recommended Reading

Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of the Senses. Vintage Books, 1991.

Aftel, Mandy. Essence and Alchemy: A Natural History of Perfume. New York: North Point Press, 2001.

Arctander, Steffen. Perfume and Flavor Materials of Natural Origin. Originally published in Denmark, 1961. Acquired by Allured Publications 2000, Carol Stream, IL.

Barillé, Elisabeth, and Catherine Laroze. The Book of Perfum. Flammarion, 1995.

Beaulieu, Denyse. The Perfume Lover. London: HarperCollins, 2012.

Bloch, Iwan. Odoratus Sexualis: A Scientific and Literary Study of Sexual Scents and Erotic Perfumes. Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, reprinted from 1933.

Burr, Chandler. The Emperor of Scent: A True Story of Perfume and Obsession. Random House, 2002.

Burr, Chandler. The Perfect Scent: A Year inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York. Picador, 2007.

Corbin, Alain. The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. Translated from the French by Anbier Montaigne, 1982.

Drobnick, Jim, ed. The Smell Culture Reader. Berg, NY and Oxford, UK, 2006.

Edwards, Michael. Perfume Legends: French Feminine Fragrances. Published by Michael Edwards & Co. in association with HM Éditions, Levallois, France, 1996.

Ghozland, Freddy, and Xavier Fernandez. L’Herbier Parfumé: Histoires Humaines des Plantes à Parfum (The Scented Herbarium: Human Stories of Fragrant Plants; in French, illustrated). Toulouse: Éditions Plume de carotte, 2010.

Gilbert, Avery. What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life. Crown Publishing, 2008.

Harad, Alyssa. Coming to My Senses: A Story of Perfume, Pleasure, and an Unlikely Bride. Random House, 2002.

Irvine, Susan. Perfume: The Creation and Allure of Classic Fragrances. Crescent Books, 1995.

Le Guérer, Annick. Scent: The Mysterious and Essential Powers of Smell. Translated from the French by Robert Miller, Kodansha International, NYC.

mono.kultur journal, Issue #23 (scratch-and-sniff edition featuring interviews with Sissel Tolaas).

Müller, Julia. The H&R Book of Perfume, Understanding Fragrance, Origin, History, Development, Meaning. English edition by Johnson Publications Ltd., London 1984, Verlags Gesellschaft R. Glöss & Co., Hamburg.

Müller, Julia.The H&R Fragrance Guide, Fragrances on the International Market. Verlags Gesellschaft R. Glöss & Co., Hamburg, 1995.

Müller, Julia, and Brian Wilchek. The H&R Fragrance Guide, Feminine Notes, Fragrances on the International Market. English edition by Johnson Publications Ltd., London, 1984, Verlags Gesellschaft R. Glöss & Co., Hamburg.

Newman, Cathy. Perfume: The Art and Science of Scent. National Geographic Society, 1998.

Stoddart, Michael D. The Scented Ape: The Biology and Culture of Human Odour. Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Turin, Luca. The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell. Harper Perennial, 2007.

Turin, Luca, and Tania Sanchez. Perfumes: The Guide. Viking Penguin, 2008.

Watson, Lyall. Jacobson’s Organ and the Remarkable Nature of Smell. Penguin, 1999.

Index

Perfumes

24, Faubourg by Hermès, 223

A’Suma by Coty, 60

Aliage by Estée Lauder, 140

Alpona by Caron, 74

Amarige by Givenchy, 213

Amazone by Hermès, 147

Ambergris by Alyssa Ashley, 148

Ambre Canelle by Creed, 91

Ambush by Dana, 8, 102, 102, 155, 173

Ammunitia by Pinaud, 84

Amouage Gold by Amouage, 186

Anaïs Anaïs by Cacharel, 171, 171

Andron by Jovan, 202

Angel by Thierry Mugler, 216

Angélique Encens by Creed, 55

Anne Klein II by Anne Klein, 194

Antaeus by Chanel, 177

Antilope by Weil, 82, 82

Aphrodisia by Fabergé, 69

Après L’Ondée by Guerlain, 22

Aramis by Estée Lauder, 119

Aromatics Elixir by Clinique, 140

Arpège by Lanvin, 46

Asja by Fendi, 213

Au Thé Vert Au Parfumée by Bulgari, 216

Audace by Rochas, 141, 141

Aviance by Prince Matchabelli, 149, 149

Azurée by Estée Lauder, 126

Azzaro by Azzaro, 161

Babe by Fabergé, 154

Baghari by Robert Piguet, 98

Bal à Versailles by Jean Desprez, 113

Bambou by Weil, 60

Bandit by Robert Piguet, 79, 79

Bat-Sheba by Judith Muller, 122

Bellodgia by Caron, 47, 47

Bill Blass by Bill Blass, 161, 161

Blazer by Anne Klein, 154

Blue Carnation by Roger & Gallet, 65

Blue Grass by Elizabeth Arden, 60

Bois des Îles by Chanel, 45

Boucheron by Boucheron, 201

Bouquet de Catherine by Rallet, 26

Bulgari Black by Bulgari, 225

Byblos by Byblos, 210

Ça Sent Beau by Kenzo, 206

Cabochard by Grès, 109

Cabotine by Grès, 210

Calandre by Paco Rabanne, 127

Calèche by Hermès, 112

Calvin Klein by Calvin Klein, 162

Calypso by Robert Piguet, 92

Calyx by Prescriptives, 197

Canoe by Dana, 64

Cardin by Pierre Cardin, 156

Carnet de Bal by Révillon, 67

Chamade by Guerlain, 127, 128

Champagne (now Yvresse) by Yves Saint Laurent, 219

Chanel No. 5 by Chanel, 32

Chanel No. 19 by Chanel, 136

Chanel No. 22 by Chanel, 34

Chant d’Aromes by Guerlain, 113, 113

Chantilly by Houbigant, 78

Charlie by Revlon, 143, 143

Chimère by Prince Matchabelli, 184

Chloe by Lagerfeld, 150

Chypre de Coty, 18, 27, 27

Cialenga by Balenciaga, 144

Ciara by Revson, 115

Cinnabar by Estée Lauder, 162

Civet by Alyssa Ashley for Houbigant, 144

CK One by Calvin Klein, 208, 221

Coco by Chanel, 191

Cocktail Dry by Jean Patou, 96

Coeur-Joie by Nina Ricci, 83

Colony by Jean Patou, 70, 70

Confetti by Lenthéric, 75

Coriandre by Jean Couturier, 145

Crêpe de Chine by F. Millot, 39, 40

Crescendo by Lanvin, 119

Cristalle by Chanel, 147

Crysanthème by Lubin, 26

Cuir de Russie (or Russia Leather) by Chanel, 37, 37

Cuir de Russie by Lubin, 21

Derby by Guerlain, 194

Diorama by Christian Dior, 93

Diorella by Christian Dior, 141, 142

Dioressence by Christian Dior, 128

Diorissimo by Christian Dior, 105

Diorling by Christian Dior, 115

Diva by Ungaro, 174, 187

Djedi by Guerlain, 45

Drakkar Noir by Guy Laroche, 185

Eau de Gucci, 220

Eau d’Hermès, 98

Eau du Fier by Annick Goutal, 228

Eau Dynamisante by Clarins, 199

Eau Fraîche by Christian Dior, 101

Eau Sauvage by Christian Dior, 121

Écusson by Jean d’Albret, 84

Eden by Cacharel, 222

Emeraude by Coty, 32, 170

Empreinte by Courrèges, 137

English Leather by MEM Company, 94

English Leather Timberline by MEM Company, 125

Enjoli by Charles of the Ritz, 163, 163

Envie by Lubin, 42

Envy by Gucci, 224

Escape by Calvin Klein, 214

Estée by Estée Lauder, 125

Evening in Paris by Bourjois, 48

Ex’cla.ma’tion by Coty, 203

Fahrenheit by Christian Dior, 203

Farnesiana by Caron, 85

Féminité du Bois by Shiseido, 217

Femme by Rochas, 80, 80

Fête by Molyneux, 114

Fidji by Guy Laroche, 121, 121

Fille d’Ève by Nina Ricci, 100

First by Van Cleef & Arpels, 156

Flambeau by Fabergé, 103, 103

Fleeting Moment (La Fuite des Heures) by Balenciaga, 94

Fleurs de Rocaille by Caron, 61

Fougère Royale by Houbigant, 20

Fracas by Robert Piguet, 90

French Cancan, Caron, 50

Futur by Robert Piguet, 122

Gauloises by Molyneux, 175

Geminesse by Max Factor, 147

Gin Fizz by Lubin, 104, 104

Giorgio by Giorgio of Beverly Hills, 178

Givenchy III by Givenchy, 135

Graffiti by Capucci, 124

Grey Flannel by Geoffrey Beene, 156

Gri Gri by Weil, 89

Gucci No. 1, 148

Gucci Rush by Gucci, 228

Habanita by Molinard, 33, 33

Halston by Halston, 150

Hypnotique by Max Factor, 109

Idole by Lubin, 114

Imprévu by Coty, 120

Indiscret by Lucien Lelong, 63

Infini by Caron, 143

Inoui by Shiseido, 157

Intimate by Revlon, 104, 105

Intoxication by D’Orsay, 71, 71

Iris Gris by Jacques Fath, 85, 85

Island Gardenia by Jovan, 185

Ivoire by Pierre Balmain, 176, 176

J’ai Osé by Guy Laroche, 159

Jardins de Bagatelle by Guerlain, 187

Je Reviens by Worth, 52, 73

Jealousy by Blanchard, 71

Jean Naté by Charles of the Ritz, 63

Jet by Corday, 89

Jicky by Guerlain, 20

Jil Sander Woman 2 by Jil Sander, 188

Jil Sander Woman 3 by Jil Sander, 197

Jil Sander Woman 4 by Jil Sander, 210

Jitrois by Jitrois, 214

Jolie Madame by Pierre Balmain, 101, 101

Joy by Jean Patou, 51, 51

Jungle Gardenia by Tuvaché, 52

Jungle L’Éléphant by Kenzo, 224

Jungle Le Tigre by Kenzo, 225

K by Krizia, 179

Kobako by Bourjois, 66

Knize Ten by Knize, 37

Knowing by Estée Lauder, 204

Kouros by Yves Saint Laurent, 179

Krazy by Krizia, 215

L’Aimant by Coty, 46, 46

L’Air du Temps by Nina Ricci, 90

L’Ardente Nuit, by Corday, 58

L’Arte di Gucci, 215

L’Eau d’Issey by Issey Miyake, 218

L’Heure Bleue by Guerlain, 23

L’Interdit by Givenchy, 108, 108

L’Origan by Coty, 22, 22

La Fête Des Roses by Caron, 117

La Folie de Minuit by Lanier, 105

La Nuit by Paco Rabanne, 194

La Parfum Idèal by Houbigant, 28

Lancetti by Lancetti, 157

Laundromat by Demeter, 229

Lauren by Ralph Lauren, 164

Le Dandy by D’Orsay, 41, 41

Le Dix by Balenciaga, 86

Le Feu d’Issey by Issey Miyake, 226

Le Jardin by Max Factor, 185

Le Numéro Cinq (Le Parfum Connu) by Molyneux, 43

Liberator, The, by Cupid’s Quiver, 134

Liù by Guerlain, 49, 49

Loulou by Cacharel, 200

Love’s Baby Soft by Love Cosmetics, 158

Lutèce by Houbigant, 191

Ma Griffe by Carven, 83, 132

Macassar by Rochas, 177

Madame Rochas by Rochas, 2, 112

Madeleine de Madeleine by Madeleine Mono, 164

Magie Noire by Lancôme, 165

Mais Oui by Bourjois, 72, 72

Masumi by Coty, 123, 123

Maxim’s de Paris by Cardin, 191

Menace by Evyan, 92

Mētāl by Paco Rabanne, 172

Méteor by Coty, 95

Mink and Pearls by Jovan, 126

Miss Balmain by Pierre Balmain, 124

Miss Dior by Christian Dior, 86

Mitsouko by Guerlain, 28

Mollie Parnis by Weil, 165

Monsieur Balmain by Pierre Balmain, 116

Moon Drops by Revlon, 135

Muguet des Bois by Coty, 64, 65

Murasaki by Shiseido, 177

Musc Oil by Bruno Acampora, 151

Muscs Koublaï Khän by Serge Lutens, 226

Musk by Alyssa Ashley for Houbigant, 129

Must de Cartier, 180

My Sin by Lanvin, 38, 38, 130

Mystère by Rochas, 166

Nahéma by Guerlain, 172

Narcisse Noir by Caron, 23

Niki de Saint Phalle by Niki de Saint Phalle, 188

Nocturnes de Caron by Caron, 181

Noir by Weil, 259

Nombre Noir by Shiseido, 182

Norell by Norell, 131

Nuance by Coty, 151, 152

Nuit de Longchamp by Lubin, 61

Nuit de Noël by Caron, 34

Nuits Indiennes by Jean-Louis Scherrer, 220

Ô de Lancôme by Lancôme, 131

Obsession by Calvin Klein, 195

Occur! by Avon, 115

Old Spice by Shulton, 67

Ombre Rose by Broussard, 182

Opium by Yves Saint Laurent, 159

Paloma Picasso Mon Parfum by Paloma Picasso, 192, 192

Panthère by Cartier, 198

Parfum d’Été by Kenzo, 218

Parfum de Peau by Claude Montana, 198

Parfum Rare by Jacomo, 199

Parfum Sacré by Caron, 211

Paris by Yves Saint Laurent, 189

Parure by Guerlain, 152

Passion by Elizabeth Taylor, 201

Peau d’Espagne by Santa Maria Novella, 21

Pheromone by Marilyn Miglin, 166

Phul-Nana by Grossmith, 21

Platine by Dana, 78, 78

Poème by Lancôme, 224

Poison by Christian Dior, 195, 195

Poivre by Caron, 99, 99, 231

Polo by Ralph Lauren, 167

Premier Figuier by L’Artisan, 223

Prétexte by Lanvin, 67

Primitif by Max Factor, 106, 106

Private Collection by Estée Lauder, 145

Que Sais-Je? by Jean Patou, 43

Quelques Fleurs by Houbigant, 24

Rallet No. 1 by A. Rallet & Co., 35

Reflections by Ciro, 56

Réplique by Raphael, 81

Rive Gauche by Yves Saint Laurent, 137

Robe d’un Soir by Carven, 87

Roma by Laura Biagiotti, 204

Rosine Nuit de Chine by Paul Poiret, 27

Rumba by Balenciaga, 205

Rumeur by Lanvin, 61, 62

Sables by Annick Goutal, 196

Safari by Ralph Lauren, 211

Saint and Sinner by Adrían, 93

Samsara by Guerlain, 206

Sand and Sable by Coty, 190

Scandal by Lanvin, 56, 56

Scherrer 1 by Jean-Louis Scherrer, 172

Scherrer 2 by Jean-Louis Scherrer, 199

Secret of Venus by Weil, 57

Shalimar by Guerlain, 17, 30, 44, 44

Shocking by Schiaparelli, 68, 68

Sikkim by Lancôme, 138

Silences by Jacomo, 168

Sinan by Jean-Marc Sinan, 193

Sirocco by Lucien Lelong, 62, 62

Skin Musk by Bonne Bell, 153

Skinny Dip by Leeming Pfizer, 148

Snob by Galion, 100

Sophia by Coty, 183

Sortilège by Galion, 69, 69, 230

Sous le Vent by Guerlain, 57, 57

Sport Scent for Women by Jovan, 168

Straw Hat by Fabergé, 74

Styx by Coty, 23

Sublime by Jean Patou, 219

Sunflowers by Elizabeth Arden, 221

Surrender by Ciro, 53, 54

Tabac Blond by Caron, 29

Tabu by Dana, 54, 55, 107

Tailspin by Lucien Lelong, 78

Theorema by Fendi, 227

Tigress by Fabergé, 15, 74

Toujours Moi by Corday, 17, 39, 39, 88

Trésor by Lancôme, 212

Trussardi by Trussardi, 190

Tuvara by Tuvaché, 91

Un Air Embaumé by Rigaud, 31, 36

Vent Vert by Balmain, 87, 87

Via Lanvin by Lanvin, 139

Visa by Robert Piguet, 82

Vivara by Emilio Pucci, 120, 120

Vol de Nuit by Guerlain, 59, 59

Voulez-Vous by D’Orsay, 63, 110

Weil de Weil, 139

White Linen by Estée Lauder, 169

White Shoulders by Hartness, 93

Wild Musk by Coty, 146

Wind Drift English Leather by MEM Company, 136

Woman by Jovan, 160

Woodhue by Fabergé, 81

Wrappings by Clinique, 212

Y by Yves Saint Laurent, 118

Yatagan by Caron, 158

Yendi by Capucci, 153

Youth Dew by Estée Lauder, 101

Ysatis by Givenchy, 193

Zen by Shiseido, 118

Zibeline by Weil, 48, 48

Perfume Makers

A. Rallet & Co., 35

Adrían, 93

Alyssa Ashley, 148

for Houbigant, 129, 144

Amouage, 186

Anne Klein, 154, 194

Annick Goutal, 196, 228

Avon, 115

Azzaro, 161

Balenciaga, 86, 94, 144, 205

Balmain, 87, 87

Bill Blass, 161, 161

Blanchard, 71

Bonne Bell, 153

Boucheron, 201

Bourjois, iii, 48, 66, 72, 72, 95

Broussard, 182

Bruno Acampora, 151

Bulgari, 216, 225

Byblos, 210

Cacharel, 171, 171, 200, 222

Calvin Klein, 162, 195, 214, 221

Capucci, 124, 153

Cardin, 191

Caron, 29, 34, 47, 47, 50, 61, 74, 85, 99, 99, 117, 143, 158, 181, 211

Cartier, 198

Carven, 83, 87, 132

Chanel, 32, 34, 37, 37, 45, 136, 147, 177, 191

Charles of the Ritz, 63, 163, 163

Christian Dior, 86, 93, 101, 105, 115, 121, 128, 141, 142, 195, 195, 203

Ciro, 53, 54, 56

Clarins, 199

Claude Montana, 198

Clinique, 140, 212

Corday, vi, 39, 39, 58, 76, 88, 89

Coty, 22, 22, 23, 32, 46, 46, 60, 64, 65, 95, 120, 123, 123, 146, 151, 152, 170, 183, 190, 203

Courrèges, 137

Creed, 55, 91

Cupid’s Quiver, 136

D’Orsay, 41, 41, 63, 71, 71, 110

Dana, 8, 54, 55, 64, 78, 78, 102, 102, 107, 155, 173

Demeter, 229

Elizabeth Arden, 60, 221

Elizabeth Taylor, 201

Emilio Pucci, 120, 120

Estée Lauder, 101, 119, 125, 126, 140, 145, 162, 169, 204

Evyan, 92

F. Millot, 39, 40

Fabergé, 15, 69, 74, 81, 103, 103, 154

Fendi, 213, 227

Galion, 69, 69, 100, 230

Geoffrey Beene, 156

Giorgio of Beverly Hills, 178

Givenchy, 108, 108, 135, 193, 213

Grès, 109, 210

Grossmith, 21

Gucci, 224, 228

Guerlain, 20, 22, 23, 28, 30, 44, 45, 49, 49, 57, 57, 59, 59, 113, 113, 127, 128, 152, 172, 187, 194, 206

Guy Laroche, 121, 121, 159, 185

Halston, 150

Hartnell, 93

Hermès, 112, 147, 223

Houbigant, 20, 24, 25, 28, 78, 191

Issey Miyake, 218, 226

Jacomo, 168, 199

Jacques Fath, 85, 85

Jean Couturier, 145

Jean d’Albret, 84

Jean Desprez, 11

Jean Patou, 43, 70, 70, 96, 219, 231

Jean-Louis Scherrer, 172, 199, 220

Jean-Marc Sinan, 193

Jil Sander, 188, 197, 210

Jovan, 126, 160, 168, 185, 202

Judith Muller, 122

Kenzo, 206, 218, 224, 225

Knize, 37

Krizia, 179, 215

L’Artisan, 223

Lagerfeld, 150

Lancetti, 157

Lancôme, 131, 138, 165, 212, 224

Lanier, 105

Lanvin, 16, 38, 38, 46, 56, 56, 61, 62, 67, 119, 130, 139

Laura Biagiotti, 204

Leeming Pfizer, 148

Lenthéric, 75

Love Cosmetics, 158

Lubin, 21, 26, 42, 61, 104, 104, 114

Lucien Lelong, 62, 62, 63, 78

Madeleine Mono, 164

Marilyn Miglin, 166

Max Factor, 12, 106, 106, 109, 147, 185

MEM Company, 94, 125, 136

Molinard, 33, 33

Molyneux, 43, 114, 175

Niki de Saint Phalle, 188

Nina Ricci, 83, 90, 100

Norell, 131

Paco Rabanne, 127, 172, 194

Paloma Picasso, 192, 192

Patou, 51, 51

Paul Poiret, 27

Pierre Balmain, 101, 101, 116, 124, 176, 176

Pierre Cardin, 156

Pinaud, 84

Prescriptives, 197

Prince Matchabelli, 103, 149, 149, 184

Rallet, 26

Ralph Lauren, 164, 167, 211

Raphael, 81

Révillon, 67

Revlon, 104, 105, 135, 143, 143

Revson, 115

Rigaud, 31, 36

Robert Piguet, 79, 79, 82, 90, 92, 98, 122

Rochas, 2, 80, 80, 112, 141, 141, 166, 177

Roger & Gallet, 65

Santa Maria Novella, 21

Schiaparelli, 68, 68

Serge Lutens, 226

Shiseido, 118, 157, 177, 182, 217

Shulton, 67

Thierry Mugler, 216

Trussardi, 190

Tuvaché, 52, 91

Ungaro, 174, 187

Van Cleef & Arpels, 156

Weil, 48, 48, 57, 60, 82, 82, 89, 165, 259

Worth, 52, 73

Yves Saint Laurent, 118, 137, 159, 179, 189, 219

About the Author

Photo courtesy of Caroline Voagen Nelson

Barbara Herman has been the go-to expert on vintage perfume since she began her blog, Yesterday’s Perfume, named as one of the top three perfume blogs by The Huffington Post. A former editor for TrèsSugar.com, she is now a freelance writer and perfume consultant. Her essays on perfume history have appeared in TheState.ae, Refnery21.com, VintageLifeMagazine.com, and Time Out NYC. She lives in New York City. Visit her at yesterdays perfume.com.