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 Fa
bergé (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 a
nd 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.
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