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.
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
Scent and Subversion Page 13