To find why our skin loves white flowers so much, Octavian takes me on a tour of their chemical plant. Their specifically floral character comes from methyl anthranilate, which basically smells like orange blossom, often associated with benzyl acetate, which bridges the gap between nail polish, banana and jasmine. The spicy notes are eugenols: white flowers share them with cloves, carnations, ylang-ylang and lilies. And then there are the infamous animal notes. Indole, a consequence of the degradation of protein, hence its presence in corpses and faeces, but also paracresol, which is reminiscent of horse manure – unsurprisingly, since horse manure and horse sweat do contain the molecule. This is why narcissus absolute gives off a horsy whiff and why a jasmine bush at a certain distance will make you wonder where the stables are. Tuberose also contains a touch of skatol (as in ‘scatological’) and butyric acid (from the Greek for ‘butter’, but the effect is cheese and feet). Jasmine even contains compounds similar to those found in tobacco, which goes quite a way to explaining why the heady floral perfumes worn by the femme fatales of yore blended so divinely with the blue wisps of their cigarette smoke – picture Bacall growling ‘Anybody got a match?’ to Bogart in To Have and Have Not. Her nickname may have been Slim, but when Bogart had a surreptitious sniff of her perfume bottle, it wasn’t wafting some shower-clean anorexic juice.
Smell jasmine, tuberose or gardenia and you’ll also pick up a fatty/buttery smell with coconut, hay and peach facets. These are produced by molecules called lactones, from the Latin for ‘milk’. Gamma-nonalactone, commonly known as aldehyde C18, is what gives Hawaiian Tropic-type tanning products their characteristic coconut fragrance. Another, C14 (gamma-undecalactone) smells of peach. Certain types of musks, such as the ones naturally found in angelica and ambrette (hibiscus seeds), are lactones too. It just so happens that, like flowers, we are lactone factories: they are produced on our scalps when a certain type of bacteria feeds on sebum. Or rather, they would be if we didn’t lather daily. When Charles Baudelaire wrote, ‘In the downy edges of your curling tresses/I ardently get drunk with the mingled odours/Of oil of coconut, of musk and tar’ in a poem aptly entitled ‘Head of Hair’, he was in fact exercising a keenly analytical nose in the midst of erotic rapture.
My particular favourite, tuberose, is the white flower that contains the greatest quantity and variety of lactones, unlike Duende’s orange blossom, which has none: this is one of the reasons why Bertrand told me that it was a ‘hard’ smell. But if natural jasmine oil is most reminiscent of skin, Octavian explains, it is also because of the several dozen molecules that don’t play a prominent role in its smell and therefore aren’t used in synthetic reproductions of the notes. Esters of fatty acids, for instance: jasmine is a member of the Oleaceae family, just like the olive tree, and contains them more abundantly than any other flowers … just like our skin, where those substances are also present.
It is the combination of the decaying smell of indoles with the skin-and-scalp fattiness of lactones and esters of fatty acids that weds the scent of white flowers to flesh and pulls them halfway into the animal kingdom, which Octavian confirms by two counter-examples. Lily-of-the-valley is one of the most indolic flowers but it isn’t perceived as sensual because it has neither lactones nor spicy molecules; the scent of chestnut blossoms is mostly made up of indoles and molecules containing nitrogen, but similarly devoid of lactones.
‘And they smell like sperm!’ I blurt out, recalling the embarrassingly vivid scent that spreads over the neighbouring avenues in spring. ‘Not quite what you’d want to squirt on skin, at least not from a perfume bottle.’
Octavian tells me that in his native country, Romania, this is also what the peasants say. I pull out a short story by the Marquis de Sade bearing on the very same subject: a young girl innocently exclaims she recognizes the smell of chestnut blossoms, much to the embarrassment of her mother and her confessor … Nature definitely has a one-track mind.
When you smell white flowers, ‘you smell notes that are part of human life from birth to death and on to decomposition,’ enthuses Octavian. Even when they start out with a cut-grass smell as cool as a rain-drenched English garden, they’re also perversely giving off whiffs of decay, and it is this contrast that gives them such depth. Smell a honeysuckle hedge at night, when the flowers are not so fresh, and you’ll get the smell of a human presence, of human breath. Even after they are picked, they go on producing their scent. They are dying, not fading: ‘The white flower is a flower that decomposes in sheer beauty!’ my friend concludes.
We stop to ponder the fascinating continuum of Nature, which bathes vegetal and animal flesh in the same odours: perhaps wearing perfume is our way of reaffirming this atavistic bond? Their oddly compelling blend of erotic attraction and death truly does make white flowers the femme fatales of perfumery. It might also explain why they elicit mixed feelings in certain cultures. The Aztecs used to pile them up on their pyramids, where their smell blended with the stench of their sacrificial victim’s blood – there is a bit of a blood note in the tuberose, and that hint of blood is, again, a bond between death and life, human sacrifice and female fertility, Octavian tells me. In Malaysia gardenias are used exclusively for funerals, I recall reading; lilies are not uncommon ornaments in funeral homes in the US, which is why some Americans have an aversion to lily-centred scents. Octavian read in a trade magazine from the late 30s that tuberose was rejected in the US for that very same reason. At a time when embalming techniques weren’t perfect, the flowers’ indoles mixed with the corpses’ and this boosted the scent of the flowers while masking the stench of death. Win-win.
Oddly enough, tuberose fragrances went on to become highly successful in America: you can lay even money that when a brand comes out with one, it is to court the dollars. This brings us to what I’d call the ‘white flower paradox’.
Why were there so few white floral compositions, we wonder, during the intensely creative era spanning from the 1910s to the 1920s, when most of the great templates of perfumery were invented? After all, jasmine, tuberose and orange blossom had been mainstays of the perfumers’ palette for centuries and their smell was just as sexy as those of the leather, vanilla and resins that were so fashionable at the time. It’s not that there weren’t any. Though tuberose perfumes were sparse after the late 19th century, there wasn’t a perfume house that didn’t have a jasmine or a gardenia (the fragrance of gardenia can’t be extracted but that didn’t keep perfumers from approximating it), including the modernist Chanel, though she’d claimed a woman shouldn’t smell like a flower. But none is known as a milestone of perfumery. Was it because, in a period marked by the invention of great abstract fragrances, a plain old floral seemed distinctly unexciting to perfumers and their clientele? Too reminiscent of the naturalistic blends of the 19th century? The reason, Octavian ventures, may have simply been cost: from World War I onwards, French-grown jasmine and tuberose became so expensive that they couldn’t be used in large quantities. But if perfumers had truly wanted to reconstitute the scent of tuberose by using a blend of less costly natural and synthetic materials, they could have. Everything was available in the 20s, and the major white floral bases that were used up to the 80s were indeed invented during that decade. Jean Patou’s Joy, launched in 1929 as a gesture to his American clients when the Wall Street Crash prevented them from crossing the Atlantic to visit his salon, was overdosed with jasmine, but also rose, and therefore not strictly a white floral. But there was a white floral scent that became a best-seller as far back as 1911 I remind Octavian: my old Narcisse Noir.
‘Yes, but on the American market!’ Octavian shoots back.
‘And what about Fracas? That came out in the 40s and it must’ve been a blockbuster since it managed to survive the demise of the house of Piguet and several changes of hand over the decades,’ I insist.
‘On the American market!’
True. Between the both of us, we can’t name another best-selling white floral before the late 70s. Kar
l Lagerfeld’s Chloé and Cacharel’s Anaïs Anaïs were the first waves of what would become a bona fide tsunami in the 80s, starting with the gaudy – and American – Giorgio Beverly Hills in 1981, followed by Givenchy’s Ysatis, Guerlain’s Jardins de Bagatelle and Dior’s Poison. None was purely a white floral, but all boosted their tuberose, orange blossom and jasmine notes to unprecedented intensities.
So, what happened between the late 70s and the mid-80s, we muse …
‘The American market?’ I venture.
It makes sense. After Opium, which had raised the stakes both in terms of intensity and planetary success, the perfume industry needed products that felt modern – modern in the 80s being vibrant colours, sequins, quarterback shoulders and helmet hair. Products that smelled as brash as Alexis Carrington making a play for Gordon Gekko. Products that gave out a message loud enough to be heard around the world. The intellectual chypre family epitomized by Diorella or cashmere-and-pearls floral aldehydics like First, both expressions of genres invented half a century earlier, were too complex, too classy, too French to make the cut. Even the perennially best-selling N°5 came off like Grandma’s perfume all of a sudden. Whereas tuberose and her sisters were out there – however I love them, one thing they are not is subtle. They are entrance-making, resistance-is-futile perfumes that’ll tattoo your presence all over a room, not to mention a gentleman’s body. Throw me on that couch and ravage me, or else you’ll be sorry. At least that’s the implication, even though any attempt in that direction would probably trigger a swift, spike-heeled kick in the baubles.
‘So … do you think it’s my North American side that makes me love tuberose so much?’ I ask Octavian a bit anxiously – I pride myself on my sophisticated Parisian tastes.
He gives me one of his draw-your-own-conclusions smiles.
‘Mind you, I never wore any of those perfumes in the 80s.’
‘You love Poison, don’t you?’
‘I do now. Back then, I was too much of a snob to wear something that popular.’
‘Women are so complicated,’ he sighs. ‘See what you missed out on all those years?’
* * *
Since then, I’ve caught up with a vengeance. I’m not much of a one for jasmine if it’s not on the bush; orange blossom starts interesting me when it’s a little messed up; gardenia only suits me when it’s as decadent as Tom Ford’s now-discontinued Velvet Gardenia, which exaggerated the smelliest traits of the flower. But I am the Empress of Tuberose, and the perfume that confirmed the addiction sparked off by Tubéreuse Criminelle was the equally aptly named Carnal Flower.
Ironically, just as the Lutens had sounded the opening notes of my love affair with Monsieur, Carnal Flower, unbeknownst to either of us, was its coda. I’d come to one of our lunches in Saint-Germain-des-Prés after dousing myself from the tester. With its eucalyptus and ozonic top notes boosting the tuberose’s minty-camphoraceous bite, Carnal Flower seemed to carry the coolness of the florist’s storage room, just as the blistering air of January was caught in the hairs of my black fur wrap. Its voluptuous creaminess and musk expressed the warmth of the flesh under the fur. Smelling it was like diving in slow motion into the flower, every nuance magnified as though it had been dissected, analysed and reassembled in different proportions by an artist-engineer who’d second-guessed Nature … Monsieur adored both the scent and the name. After lunch, he dropped me off in front of the shop on the rue de Grenelle, practically opposite the Christian Louboutin boutique I’d so often pillaged in his company, clutching a two-hundred-euro banknote – he couldn’t find a parking space and he was late for his next appointment so, if I didn’t mind, I’d have to make the purchase myself.
I’d told Monsieur from the start I wouldn’t be his mistress for more than five or six years. In the meantime I’d divorced, though not for Monsieur: I’d already decided to leave the Tomcat when Monsieur and I met. He hadn’t. I’d never asked him to. And all of a sudden, it was time to end it. I’d made Monsieur happy and that happiness had made him more successful than ever in his profession; success meant he was no longer free to abscond with me for a few days. There were more lunches and fewer trips. Like a tuberose, our affair was fading beautifully, but I wasn’t going to wait for it to turn into compost. So whenever he called I wouldn’t be available and sometimes it was true.
But I didn’t know that Monsieur would never get to smell Carnal Flower on me again when I pushed the door of the red and black shop, banknote crumpled in an elbow-length black leather glove, giddy with champagne and a little wobbly on my Louboutins. I’d found an alternative to Tubéreuse Criminelle, a new incarnation of the flower, and the perspective of a tryst fired me up.
I’d started cheating on Serge, you see. I had been for quite some time – in fact, just about when I’d started cheating on my husband. His name was Frédéric Malle.
19
Remember the scene towards the end of Manhattan when Woody Allen muses on what makes life worth living? He goes on to list Groucho Marx, Louis Armstrong’s recording of ‘Potato Head Blues’, Sentimental Education by Flaubert, ‘those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne…’
For me? Tintoretto’s ‘Lady Baring Her Breasts’ at the Prado; Marcello Mastroianni’s gaze; Serge Gainsbourg’s ‘Sous le soleil exactement’; the first page of Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist; The Ronettes’ ‘Be my baby’ …
Edmond Roudnitska’s Le Parfum de Thérèse.
There are some fragrances whose balance is so perfect you feel the merest whisper would upset it. Le Parfum de Thérèse is one such fragrance. I reach for it when I need to remind myself that, despite the crass commercialism of the perfume industry, it did produce things as unquestionably beautiful as the pages, paintings or songs that give me such joy. The honeyed melon sprinkled with mandarin, bergamot and clove exhaling a tender jasmine breath; the spiced, rounded plum kissed with green tartness; the radiance that keeps unfurling until the dark moss and leather base, anchored to the skin by a warm, creamy base as the jasmine deepens into over-ripe fruit … Each spray sends a shower of sunshine on my skin.
For nearly four decades, Le Parfum de Thérèse was known as La Prune (‘The Plum’) and was exclusively worn by Thérèse, the wife of Edmond Roudnitska. It was on the verge of being commercialized several times, including by Guy Laroche as Fidji: it was already in the stores when the couturier pulled it to replace it with another product. Such was its rotten luck that the Roudnitskas jokingly gave it a nickname that is the French for ‘lame duck’, le pelé, le galeux, le tondu (‘mangy, scabby, shorn’), their son Michel told me.
As a boy, Frédéric Malle had caught wafts of La Prune when the Roudnitskas visited the Dior offices. His grandfather Serge Heftler Louiche, a childhood friend of Christian Dior’s, had founded the couturier’s perfume house. His mother, Marie-Christine de Sayn Wittgenstein, who worked there for nearly five decades, was responsible for image, development and packaging. When Malle decided to open his own house, he asked Mrs Roudnitska, a widow by then, and Michel, who’d gone on to become a perfumer, if he could put out La Prune. The perfumer Pierre Bourdon, who had been trained by Edmond Roudnitska and whose father had been the deputy director of Dior Parfums, had advised Malle to do so: he considered La Prune to be one of the best perfumes in history. This symbolic gesture would make Malle the third generation in his family to offer a Roudnitska masterpiece to the world. He couldn’t imagine starting without it. Deeply moved, Thérèse Roudnitska looked him straight in the eye and answered: ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’
The company Frédéric Malle set up in 2000 is called ‘Éditions de Parfums’ and it works just like a publishing house. Perfumers are granted creative freedom, with no deadlines or budget restrictions; as their editor, Malle supports them throughout the development process. Their authorship is not only acknowledged but put forward: their pictures, names and mini-bios are printed on the box sleeves as they’d be on a book.
The idea sprung from Malle’s dismay at seeing
that no one had thought of inviting Édouard Fléchier, who had composed Poison for Dior, to the spectacular launch party hosted by his mother in 1986. Edmond Roudnistka himself had never been invited to a Dior launch. This was the shocking oversight Malle set out to correct. Treating perfumers as authors seemed like such an obvious move that he wondered why it hadn’t been done before; he even worried there might be a catch he was unaware of. There wasn’t. The concept of ‘author perfumery’ was a turning point within the industry as well as for the public, who had been unaware that there were people behind the scenes who created the products sold under designer labels – something brands always kept silent about, preferring customers to think perfumes somehow sprang full-blown from the mind of designers.
The idea immediately made sense to me when I crossed the street from Christian Louboutin’s rue de Grenelle boutique on the advice of its suave, Franco-Egyptian manager – a boy who could give you the feeling he was sprinkling rose petals at your feet when he leaned down to slip your foot into a shoe. The perfumes I discovered that day had the character and originality of my beloved classics but they felt modern, and that was something I craved. However timeless the beauty of those classics, sticking to them would have been like dressing exclusively in vintage clothing, and sometimes you need to shed the girdle. The Lutens oeuvre had allowed me to do so, but it was exciting to explore other styles: after all, you don’t listen to just one composer or stick to one writer. By the same logic, once you’ve given up on wearing a single, signature fragrance, why not build up a library of scents? A library, not a wardrobe of perfumes to suit various moods, occasions or seasons: the distinction is subtle but far-reaching. Malle’s clients were discreetly encouraged, if such was their pleasure, to contemplate perfumes as aesthetic objects. Their first contact with the fragrance was no longer via skin or its unsatisfactory substitute the blotter, but through its disembodied, invisible presence in the air of glass columns that looked like futuristic phone booths, though you didn’t actually walk into them: you opened a panel and thrust your head inside. The elaborate installation was not just a marketing ploy or a way of keeping the air in the shops untainted: it was the first proper exhibition space for fragrance.
The Perfume Lover Page 13