The Perfume Lover: A Personal Story of Scent

‘I’ll take it!’

Lapis Lazuli tut-tutted.

‘You need to know if it likes your skin and if your skin likes it. Try it on for a while.’

What, she didn’t want to make the sale now?

‘Try Chloé on one wrist and Azzaro on the other. You can come back later.’

I did come back the next day for a bottle of Chloé. Not because I was particularly smitten with it: for all her frothy blondeness and floaty flowered chiffon, Karl Lagerfeld’s first fragrance felt like she could pogo me off the dancefloor without breaking a stiletto heel. But it would have been hard to find a scent more obnoxious to my father; the olfactory equivalent of the Dior scarlet lipstick I also bought from Lapis Lazuli when I went back.

Needless to say, that huge wake of flowers drew even more Parisian flesh-hounds. Some of Lapis Lazuli’s sexual self-confidence must have seeped under my skin, because I was starting to feel it was fun. I’d even dawdle and throw backwards glances from under my fringe. My body may not have had a Vogue model’s tawny long-limbed elegance or Lapis Lazuli’s dusky wiriness, but it had magnetic power. Men were such animals …

My Parisian initiation came at a turning point for the industry. The 1976 First by Van Cleef and Arpels was actually ‘the last major perfume of this century which was developed in the classical manner, the last perfume not to use marketing’, its author Jean-Claude Ellena told Michael Edwards in Perfume Legends. Later on, in his Journal of a Perfumer, he added that he had ‘collected, borrowed and piled up every sign of femininity, wealth, power’ to compose it.

The following year, a perfume was launched that outdated the bourgeois charms of the Van Cleef and sent perfume executives scurrying to huddle with their marketing teams; a perfume that tapped directly into the subconscious perception of perfume as a mysterious, intoxicating substance that could magically transform women into exotic empresses.

Yves Saint Laurent’s 1977 offering sprung, as fragrances had since Poiret’s day, from the sovereign decision of a couturier. What was unprecedented was the strength and consistency of its scandalous concept.

Opium wasn’t the first perfume to be named after a drug. The 1933 Cocaina en Flor, by the Spanish house of Parera, was promoted as ‘a mysterious perfume … which enthrals, attracts, bewitches’. Further back, the industrial-strength 1927 Russian perfume Krasnyi Mak, ‘Red Poppy’, overtly played on balsamic, spicy notes evocative of opium resin, a product of Soviet Afghanistan. Did the same concept inspire similar olfactory results? ‘Red Poppy’ smells like a forerunner to Opium. But the drug that Yves Saint Laurent was thinking of in his blissed-out Marrakech retreat was LSD, according to the designer Pierre Dinand, who went to meet the couturier in his Villa Majorelle to discuss the bottle. The name Opium sprung from the Japanese inro Dinand brought as an inspiration in a later session. Yves Saint Laurent recognized it instantly as the phial samurais used to carry their salt, spices and … ‘opium!’ he exclaimed. The American pharmaceutical company that owned the licence for Yves Saint Laurent perfumes, Squibb-Myer, was understandably horrified, but Saint Laurent was adamant – and right. The scandalous, exotic, mysterious Opium was appropriated by women all over the world precisely because, like the drug, it promised escape. The perfume itself was of unheard-of strength and concentration for a French fragrance. Up to then, only Estée Lauder had offered such powerful brews and, in fact, the American grand dame was distinctly displeased at recognizing a formula quite similar to her own Youth Dew (she retaliated with Cinnabar, in what would be dubbed ‘the war of the tassels’). Industry insiders also say Opium was actually quite cheap to make, which would induce a downward spiral in budgets.

Opium was Yves Saint Laurent’s swan song as ‘the designer who gave power to women’, in the oft-quoted words of his partner, Pierre Bergé. Despite its transgressive allure, it expressed the couturier’s retreat from the Rive Gauche and the liberated Parisiennes he had induced to wear trousers into the exotic, colour-saturated dream worlds he’d been exploring in Marrakech. The woman ‘addicted to Yves Saint Laurent’ embodied by Jerry Hall in the first print ads had dropped the keys to power to lean back languidly on the gold-embroidered cushions of her Chinese den, where she rested after wild nights at Studio 54 or Le Palace. Or was it that, sated by Opium, the supine Amazon had at last shed her need for men in an ultimate declaration of independence?

Breaking away from the real, albeit privileged, world to set off for imaginary lands, couture became a spectacle. Over the following years, its relevance waned; couturiers ceased to dictate styles and so, essentially, became image purveyors driving the sales of cosmetics, perfumes and accessories. The conception of designer fragrances would be taken over by the marketing departments.

The launch of Opium in North America was also a watershed moment in my olfactory life. I’d come back to Canada after my trip to Paris determined to save up enough money to go back to France to study. Over the Christmas holidays, I worked as a gift-wrapper in a high-end Montreal department store, right next to the perfume counter. This was where I contracted a lasting addiction to cashmere – I had to fold those sweaters before wrapping them up – and a Pavlovian loathing for Opium, which the sharp-taloned Hungarian Lisa would spray all day and sell by the gallon to last-minute male shoppers. My stint as a gift-wrapper, which went on for three years, practically vaccinated me against the whole of the Estée Lauder opus up to 1980 and most of the better-selling classics – N°5, Arpège, L’Air du Temps – whose every waft was tainted with Opium. The potent mix clung to my clothes; it became associated with Lisa’s hypnotic sales pitches, my aching feet and another type of ache, for the beautiful things that passed briefly through my hands and that I couldn’t afford. The experience nearly put me off mainstream fragrances altogether, at an age when most teenagers were scrimping to buy their first bottle of Anaïs Anaïs or Cristalle.

Today, standing in the cavernous Sephora flagship store on the Champs-Élysées, buffeted by waddling bum-bagged tourists and fleet young black-clad sales assistants, I wonder how I’d go about choosing my first grown-up perfume. The wall of fragrances must cover the better part of a kilometre; atomizer-wielding demonstrators lie in ambush and avoiding their spritzes requires ninja-like skills. The conversation I had with that glamorous Parisian shop manager back in the late 70s I could never have here. And the fragrances I was offered then, opulent stuff with breasts and hips and a regal stride, gather dust on the bottom shelves, if they’ve survived at all (the original Chloé hasn’t). Teenage girls are the target demographic for practically every mainstream launch; brands fall all over themselves to cater to their tastes. The Max Factor Green Apple that felt like a slap in the face to me has now grown into a fruit basket the size of the Himalaya and spilled out into every shopping mall.

The cheery, unsophisticated berry had been bumping for decades at the door of perfumers’ labs before someone wondered what that squishy noise was, saw a lick of red juice trickle in, opened up and … Ker-plash! The whole crop spilled into the vats. Soon, even legendary perfume houses such as Guerlain were plonking the notes into the mix: perfume had suddenly gone pink. The berry binge introduced within the codes of fine fragrance a type of note that had come up from functional perfumery. It used to be the other way round: if a perfume was popular, functional fragrances copied it in a simpler, cheaper form. This is why many older brands of hairspray smell of Chanel N°5 or L’Air du Temps; why shampoos in the 70s had the green notes made popular by Chanel N°19 or Givenchy III. Why, at least five products in my bathroom smell of L’Eau d’Issey at this very minute. But in the 90s, the notes of functional fragrances started trickling up into fine fragrance with the synthetic musks used in detergents when the public started craving ‘clean’ in a reaction to the over-saturated scents of the 80s. Perhaps not so coincidentally, this happened at a time when detergent companies were busy buying up perfume houses, their executives smoothly segueing from washing powders to fine fragrance. Fruity notes were the second wave in the 90s, a trend for which the American consultant Ann Gottlieb claimed responsibility. When hired by Bath & Body Works, she said, she introduced ‘things that, up until then, women had found almost nauseating. These fruity notes then came into the public domain much more, and people started loving [them].’

OK, so now those of us who still find them nauseating know who to blame for the wall-o-fruit we crash into as soon as we step into the mall. While I can only congratulate Ms Gottlieb on her success and influence, I can’t quite find it in me to be grateful to her. Especially since her claim demonstrates that the trend sprung from massive clobbering rather than public demand. Granted, the public may have a yen for cheerfully regressive, synthetic scents that remind them of boiled sweets or shampoo – familiar and easy to understand in our sound-bite, mouse-click, twittering ADD world. In a way, Love’s Baby Soft is still what little-girl scents are made of; spayed smells for female eunuchs. If I were sixteen today, what would I do? Probably pick the latest from a brand I liked. Empty the bottle. Then switch to something else. Would it even be possible to feel the fierce commitment I felt for the first fragrance I truly made my own?

Of course, it helped that I’d fallen in love.

10

Onscreen, Fred MacMurray was ringing the doorbell of a Spanish-style Los Angeles house. In a minute, he’d be leering at Barbara Stanwyck’s anklet. In half an hour, they’d be plotting to bump off her husband. I’d seen Double Indemnity before. My eyes wandered from the screen to the silhouettes in the first row, bathed in silvery light. Since Concordia University’s film noir retrospective had begun, I’d been sitting behind them: the tall, quick, witty Michael, slim as a brushstroke of Indian ink in his sharp-shouldered Thierry Mugler suit; Jon, his scruffy friend in the scuffed aviator jacket, with his stubborn jaw, knobby wrists, light-brown curls tumbling on his forehead; Lise, a poised, slant-eyed blonde with a whispery voice, cinched waist and early-60s pumps; and Mimi, a petite, sarcastic brunette with scarlet lips and schoolteacher cat’s-eye glasses. I’d been breathing in the Waft. I couldn’t make out which one of them wore the bitter leather and ashtray fragrance that rose up from the first row they’d commandeered. They all seemed to trail that after-hours cloud. Once, I’d lingered in the auditorium after they’d left – we’d got as far as small nods and half-smiles – and leaned down on the scruffy one’s seat: the still-warm fabric had soaked up the scent. It felt as tough and dark and raspy as Barbara Stanwyck’s voice. I had a crush on all of those kids, but a little bit more on Jon.

‘I don’t need to use up my bottle of Van Cleef. I’ll just sit next to Denyse here.’

Michael plonked himself down on the couch next to me, comically fanning himself with his hands. He was the little gang’s charismatic leader, fuelling our discussion with esoteric references to the Bauhaus, Russian Constructivists, Beat poets and Tamla Motown … This was the first time I wore their Van Cleef and though I’d felt a little self-conscious about appropriating the Waft – they did all wear it, boys and girls, as it turned out – I’d pretty much spray-painted myself with it in Jon’s bathroom.

Danny had been the first to speak to me. After the film, he’d invited me back to his flat, where they all hung out before hitting a gay disco in downtown Montreal – they’d crash into the DJ’s booth to pester him into playing the selection they felt like dancing to that night. By then, I’d become sufficiently adept at manipulating style to impress even this bunch of sartorial semioticians: punk rock had been a liberating experience to which I’d applied my head-of-class analytical skills. Punk meant you could be a scowling mortadella trussed in dayglo fishnet stockings and still be light years cooler than any Farrah Fawcett blow-dried clone. It was all about playing with signs of the ugly, the shocking, the rejects of mainstream codes. Bathed in the Waft, I knew I was finally in with the in crowd, art-school post-punks who revived styles at such an accelerated pace we lurched from 60s bubblegum pop and Star Trek kitsch to Beatniks and free jazz within a single summer.

While I still lived at my parents’, my black bevelled bottle of Van Cleef stayed stashed in Jon’s bathroom to circumvent the paternal ban. The smell of it on my clothing was a way for me to linger in Jon’s aura after I’d gone back home to the suburbs, and then, after that summer, to my campus room. Being eighteen with a hopeless crush on my best friend was a dull, delectable pain I sharpened by wallowing in his smells. Every scrap of the Van Cleef carried a bit of him and of our time together. The bitter herbal aroma of the joints we’d puff on while discussing Adolf Loos’ Ornament and Crime before checking out the local bands. The whiff of soap on his neck when he shaved, as I was leaning next to him over his sink to paint my face on after he’d art-directed my evening’s get-up. The cigarette smoke that lingered in his clothes and hair. The weathered leather jacket I’d snuggle up against as we tottered out of a club at 3 a.m. to have potato latkes at Ben’s Deli. The funky, dark, animal waft of his sheets when I woke up on the box spring of his bed – he was crashing out on the mattress he’d pulled on to the floor. By that time I’d graduated from writing the music column for the college paper to freelancing with the two local rock magazines: the older editors were still into the likes of progressive rock, heavy metal or the local Quebec music scene, so I covered all the punk bands that came to Montreal. I sometimes spent the night with one of the musicians I’d interviewed, kids barely older than I on their first foreign tour sharing rooms with their roadies. Then Jon sulked, but not much.

Though it was meant for men and worn by all my friends, Van Cleef and Arpels was the first scent I truly felt was mine. It marked my belonging to a tribe at last. It marked my belonging to Jon: made me his, and made him mine, and made me him, more than sex would ever have done. It also marked my final emancipation from the belief in femininity. Up to then, there’d always been a girl who had It more than me, that elusive quality of really-being-a-woman – Geneviève, Sylvie or the manager of that perfume shop on the Avenue de l’Opéra. Perfume had been the potion that had promised it could transform me into that woman. Now, like those outfits so camp they could actually get the curvy teenage girl I was mistaken for a cross-dresser – I’d drawn the ultimate consequences of the teachings of The Female Eunuch – wearing the Van Cleef finally drove home the lesson I’d learned from Germaine Greer as a pre-teen: masculinity and femininity, as opposed to being a man, a woman or any combination thereof, were just a matter of signs. And signs could be played with, believed in just enough to derive pleasure from them. They weren’t an identity to be caught up in, yet never felt adequate to. The Waft was the ultimate emblem of my transgression: provocative, invasive, but invisible. People would see a girl and look for the guy who must be lurking behind her. During those heady days in Montreal, fierce in style and intellect, set loose by the crashing chords of punk, I discovered I could be both.

When I sought out Michael thirty years later to ask him how it was that the Van Cleef came into our lives, he answered that he’d been the one to introduce it. It was his return to male fragrances after wearing a mix of Bal à Versailles and 4711, he said, and you couldn’t invent that: the boy who introduced me to olfactory gender-bending wore my mother’s secret perfume …

Van Cleef and Arpels stretched the spectrum of my olfactory tastes from the shameless floral femininity of Chloé to the toughness of leather and tobacco, which is probably why, twenty years later, I’d slip so pleasurably into the work of one of the first female perfumers, and one of the ballsiest of either gender. Germaine Cellier had already straddled that divide back in the 40s.

With Fracas, Germaine Cellier introduced two partners in crime who’d go on to spawn a whole dynasty of divas: orange blossom and tuberose. Think Naomi Watts and Laura Harring in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive: the untapped sexual potency of a fresh-faced ingénue hooked up with the simmering hysteria of an ivory-skinned femme fatale … Cellier also butched up the simpering violet by slapping it with a leather glove (Jolie Madame by Balmain) and invented a whole new perfume family by pouring an overdose of galbanum into Vent Vert (also by Balmain). But she never raised the stakes so much as with her 1944 Bandit. Conceived in the midst of the German occupation, it is the toughest fragrance ever offered to women; the olfactory equivalent of the street-smart, give-as-good-as-they-get dames of 40s movies. In fact, the blonde, couture-clad, potty-mouthed Cellier could’ve probably taught a couple of bitchy comebacks to Barbara Stanwyck.

When Fracas nudged me towards her snarling big sister Bandit, I was thrust back to my punk dandy days. Van Cleef had carried some of Bandit’s kick-ass genes, and that toughness is what drew me in. But what kept me interested were the film-noirish twists and turns of Bandit’s plot: a languid, jasmine, tuberose and gardenia heart, caught up between the earthy green galbanum and bitter artemisia of the top notes and the dark, smoky-leathery base notes – castoreum with its ink and black chocolate facets, the burnt liquorice of isobutyl quinoline, oak moss and smoky vetiver. As though Fracas had slipped on her lover’s leather trench coat to slink off on some secret mission. A crawl through a garden, wet earth and grass sticking to her stockings; a tar-roof shed where she shares black-market American cigarettes with a hunted man. Is that a gun in his pocket or …? Bandit may be an outlaw, but she’s no femme fatale; in a pinch, she’s as good as any man. In a clinch, she’ll stub out her cigarette, take that kiss, and growl, ‘It’s even better when you help.’

Bandit isn’t for wusses, which is probably why it was made for women. But if it were launched today, it couldn’t possibly end up on the feminine side of the aisle. In the mainstream, masculine and feminine scents are not unlike some species of insects where the male and the female look as though they don’t even belong to the same species: their evolution has made them diverge so sharply that several classic women’s fragrances would smell downright hairy-chested to today’s consumers.

Fruit, flowers and vanilla for girls; soap, lavender and wood for boys. So obvious it seems nature-ordained. After all, girls like picking flowers and boys like to whittle sticks, right? Scrap the genetic arguments: men wear floral essences in many cultures – rose in the Middle East, jasmine in India. And they wore them in the West up to the 18th century: perfumes being mainly custom blends, there was no distinction between masculine and feminine fragrances before Marie-Antoinette’s delicately scented head tumbled into a basket.

The great divide yawned open in the early 19th century when upper-class men ditched their coloured and embroidered silks to adopt the black suit as a uniform, leaving it up to their women-folk to showcase the family wealth. Fragrance was contrary to the new bourgeois capitalist ethics, a conspicuous waste of precious materials that evaporated as they were used, as Pliny the Elder was already grumbling all the way back in the Roman Empire. It was also deceitful, suspected of hiding a lack of hygiene or lewd ulterior motives and, as such, clashed with the puritanical values of the Industrial Age. Men were meant to smell clean: the family breadwinner wasn’t out to seduce. Though there were, alongside the non-gendered colognes, a few lotions, vinegars, hair cosmetics and aftershaves designed for men, the ranges were limited. They did, however, establish what was acceptable for men: lavender, citrus, aromatic herbs, moss, leather …

The gendering of fragrance was also a consequence of the industrialization of perfumery. Once products started having original names rather than generic ones like ‘Eau de Chypre’ or ‘Eau de Cologne’, they had to be geared towards a specific clientele. In 1904, Guerlain would put out Mouchoir de Monsieur (‘gentleman’s handkerchief’) to complement its Voilette de Madame, but that was the exception rather than the rule. Men mostly had to make do with what they bought in barbershops, pharmacies or department stores: haute perfumery wasn’t meant for them at all.

It was only in the late 19th century that a fragrance family we’ve come to think of as specifically masculine was introduced, the fougère, (the ‘fern’) named after Houbigant’s Fougère Royale, believed to be the first fragrance in history to use synthetic materials. Fougères are built on a framework of bergamot (an aromatic, peppery citrus), geranium (a rounded note from the rose family, but fresher), oak moss (earthy, green, mossy) and a synthetic called coumarin, initially extracted from the tonka bean (but made much more cheaply through another process), which smells of tobacco, almond and hay. They often incorporate aromatic notes such as lavender and therefore fall within more masculine olfactory codes.