My purveyor of sweetness saw he wasn’t reeling me in so he took out choicer bait: the oil of Taif roses, the most highly prized in the Middle East, grown at an altitude of two thousand metres in Saudi Arabia. As I kept shaking my head, he whittled it down to a few drops for one hundred dollars. I started backing away slowly as he held out the little crystal bottle:
‘If you want one perfect thing in your house…’ he cooed.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him I didn’t like rose that much.
‘Ma chérie, you should have asked him to show you the oud,’ said Habibi over his morning coffee after greeting me with a spine-dislocating hug. ‘The Saudis keep giving me oud chips. I’ll get you some before you leave.’
He never did.
* * *
Had I dawdled in the shop a little longer, I would have discovered a bit more about the thriving Middle Eastern perfume industry. The region must have the highest per capita consumption of perfumes in the world. Several companies, based locally or in Europe, put out blends that are either secular formulas, knock-offs of successful Western scents in oil, Western formulas with oud added, or products of a new perfume family called ‘French-Oriental’ that typically revolves around an oud and rose accord.
The use of oud, also known as agar wood, aloes wood or jinko, goes back centuries: it is mentioned in the Sanskrit Vedas and the Old Testament. It is the olfactory signature of the Middle East, though it is also highly prized in India and Japan, and either burned in chips to steep rooms or clothing with fragrant smoke. The essential oil can be mixed with other notes, often in homemade blends, or worn as a ‘backdrop’ to Western fragrances.
Oud is a resin that forms when a type of mould infects the heartwood of certain varieties of the Aquilaria species, found mainly in Southeast Asia. Though the trees can be injected with the mould, much of the production is harvested in the jungle. Only one out of a hundred trees is infected, but as it’s impossible to tell from the outside, many trees are just chopped down for expediency, most often by poachers, endangering the species (it is now protected). And as the merchandise usually goes through several middlemen, it can, at times, become costlier than gold.
The note first made its first official appearance in a mainstream Western fragrance with M7, launched in 2002 by Yves Saint Laurent under Tom Ford’s tenure. The scent’s animal sexiness was underscored by the first ever perfume advertisement featuring full-frontal male nudity, dangly bits and all. Since then, in their mad scramble to woo the juicy Middle Eastern market while they figure out how to get a peg in China, Western perfume companies have been chucking oud into their more exclusive collections.
With some niche enthusiasts, oud has become a fetish of sorts, to such an extent that I’ve come to think of it as a cultural artefact rather than an aromatic material. Its leathery, medicinal, smoky facets tick all the right boxes among hardcore perfume aficionados: because it is such an acquired taste for Western noses, embracing oud is a way to show you can take it like a man, whatever your gender, not unlike ‘skank’.
But it’s more than that. I suspect the current Western oud mania is the latest guise of Orientalism. Back when few people actually travelled all the way to the ‘Orient’, dabbing on Shalimar garbed in one of Poiret’s harem get-ups was enough to turn you into an odalisque. Now that booking a flight to Dubai or Bangkok is no more complicated than planning a weekend in Normandy, we need a more genuine marker of exoticism, and oud is that, just as patchouli used to be for the hippies. As such, it is every bit as much of an oriental fantasy as Shalimar; an appropriation of the Other through what is most other: smell. Not to mention that splurging on it puts us, at least symbolically, on the same footing as the sheiks.
But years before the West discovered the Middle Eastern ‘authenticity’ of oud, the Middle East itself was indulging in its own Western fantasy by hiring French perfumers to produce fragrances in the grand French tradition, just as that tradition was dying out in the West. Thus the house of Amouage, founded in 1983 by a member of the royal family of Oman, kicked off with a classic aldehydic floral – probably the first straight-faced interpretation of the genre since First in 1976 – composed by the veteran Guy Robert, who authored Madame Rochas (1960) and Calèche (1961). Jubilation 25, put out in 2007 to celebrate Amouage’s twenty-fifth anniversary, was yet another fin-de-race fragrance, this time from the chypre family.
In English, the expression fin de race translates as ‘degenerate’, which doesn’t convey the aristocratic connotations of the French. Someone who is fin de race is the last of a noble lineage whose excessive inbreeding has exaggerated every family trait to the point of caricature: think Habsburg chin or Bourbon nose. And Jubilation 25 is indeed fin de race in many ways. In it, Femme’s dark plum has fermented into booziness; its spices have risen to nose-tingling prominence, while oak moss is further darkened by leather-scented clouds of incense. The scent also exhibits more than a trace of Opium’s DNA, with its aldehydic shimmer and resinous-fruity myrrh facets: its author Lucas Sieuzac is, after all, the son of Jean-Louis, who co-signed Opium with Raymond Chaillan. Somehow this opulent iteration of a classic genre fatally compromised by the public’s disaffection and increasingly stringent regulations on the use of oak moss feels like a chypre that doesn’t know that chypre is dead. The news may not have reached Oman yet.
The Middle East may actually be the last place really to believe in perfume enough to infuse lifeblood into the decaying flesh of old-school French perfumery, much in the way that the Japanese are the last who truly believe in fashion, as anyone who attends Paris fashion week can observe. As though classic French perfumery, after a century of oriental fantasies, was catching its last reflection in a mirror held up by the real Orient.
* * *
Bertrand has worked for Amouage and his boozy-fruity, incense-laden and spice-sprinkled Jubilation XXV, the masculine pendant of Jubilation 25, was an early foray of his into oud, a note he may have pioneered in the West by introducing it in the 2001 Sequoia for Comme des Garçons. Now he’s nose-deep in it: his clients are frantic for French-Oriental. At first I grumbled that the note had become such a cliché I didn’t even want to smell what he’d come up with: I was ouded-out. Then I caved in and asked him what it was about oud that excited him so, and watched as he became the intense, enthusiastic man-child his favourite raw materials always seemed to turn him into.
He described oud as resinous, ambery, with smoky and leathery facets reminiscent of castoreum, all of which I could figure out for myself. And then it all poured out: why it spoke to him so deeply. And I understood that oud might well be the missing link between his calling as a perfumer, his far-flung journeys and the antique tribal art he collects … He told me how oud had a sour milk note that reminded him of the bottom of old wooden South Ethiopian milk pots he’d bought, of temples in the Himalaya, of kitchens in Nepalese houses, of the antique Tibetan furniture he owned which still held the smell of the rancid yak butter that had been kept inside it. Oud was the smell of the Other for him, I realized, but in a carnal, primal way rather than as a piece of exotica. It was the smell of the Other within; a connection with odours once familiar to our common core of humanity he sought out in his travels.
Oud is burned like incense, and, as it happened, I’d been thinking about incense along those lines. Why it was so profoundly moving to people from so many cultures; why cultures all over the world seemed to burn incense-like substances in their spiritual quest … As though some part of us remembered the bits of fragrant wood our remotest ancestors might have thrown into their campfires in East Africa where our species was born, or perhaps as they migrated through the Arabian Peninsula, the very places where the trees that yield incense grow. And going, further back, I thought of smoke. Couldn’t the smell of one of the things that made us human, the ability to make fire, be somehow imprinted into our genetic memory? Was that why fragrances with smoky notes had such an emotional impact on us? Bertrand agreed as we quietly breathed in
the penetrating wafts of the oud.
‘We’ve cut ourselves off from our ancestral memories,’ he said. ‘Smells are one of the only ways to regain what we’ve lost.’
36
Monsieur likes to keep whatever bit of cigar he hasn’t smoked in the evening and light it up again in the morning. It is, he says, a form of fidelity: what you loved one day, you love the next. No woman of his has ever found this habit bearable, he adds. Then he corrects himself: none save me.
Yesterday’s cigar could be an apt description of our love affair, couldn’t it? He keeps setting it down, then lighting it up and drawing it to his lips again. The one thing I can be sure of is that he’ll always come back for a puff; that he’ll never let it go out completely, though we’ll never go anywhere, least of all to Seville.
I wasn’t surprised when he told me it wouldn’t be possible to make the trip after all. I’d never actually believed it would. I didn’t even truly want it to happen, though I might not have had the courage to turn the trip down if he’d come through … Between us, Seville had better remain what it has always been: the vivid background against which I first emerged in his life. Seville is an aura that trails after me, a reinvention not to be tested against reality, just like Duende. And so the night of the Madrugada has passed once more without me. At any rate, the trip would have been a disaster: for the first time in eighty years, the processions had to be cancelled because of torrential rains.
Today is the date I set for Duende to be finished, one year to the day after my first session with Bertrand. It’s not.
We did meet three weeks ago at a café terrace near the Paris Opéra, but only to catch up. I’d drenched myself with Duende just before our appointment. He analysed it as I reported back on my first round of beta-testing in London the previous week. I’d sprayed mod 63 on a group of friends and I couldn’t recommend a better ice-breaker for a party: these people hadn’t known each other when they walked in but within fifteen minutes they were mingling and chatting as they sniffed each other’s wrists. I’d also skin-tested Duende on my twenty-year-old American students at the London College of Fashion, without telling them what it was. They’d instantly broken into blissful grins, and begged to know when it was coming out.
It had been an odd experience to follow Duende on so many different skins after spending a year being the sole tester of its various iterations. It had turned sour on one young woman, and intensely, soapily floral on a few others. One male friend had brought out the blood note quite strikingly. The green, aldehydic structure held out for hours on some, while others rushed to the tobacco-y tonka bean base notes. Of course, my friends couldn’t very well say they didn’t like it, though one did venture that it wasn’t quite edgy enough for his tastes, but my students’ spontaneous reactions hinted at a crowd pleaser. Perversely enough, that was a slight cause for concern. My students’ tastes do tend to run towards the cloyingly sweet: one of the most popular raw materials during my courses is ethyl maltol, which is literally what gives its flavour to candyfloss.
Bertrand nodded: he might decrease the ethyl vanillin, a powerful vanilla note with caramel effects, to tone down the sweetness. He also thought that the floral notes might be a little too heady but, then, I’d practically spray-painted myself and there was so little space available behind that tiny sidewalk terrace table that I was practically sitting in his lap …
In my new capacity as a muse-slash-evaluator, I had my own remarks to make. I felt that the lavender had been sucked up by the flowers, though Bertrand assured me he’d used the same percentage as in the previous mod we’d loved. And I would have liked the base notes to have a little more texture and darkness. Patchouli maybe, he suggested, to give it a little chypre-ish vibe? But no, we shouldn’t be adding new notes. No more second-guessing. We were close, almost there … Before parting on the sidewalk in front of the Opera, we set an appointment for 22 April. I knew he wouldn’t keep it.
* * *
He hasn’t. I’m starting to feel we’ll never be done, precisely because the scent is almost done: the last adjustments could involve dozens of mods. But, as the French say, the best part of love is climbing the stairs, and in this labour of love it is witnessing the creative process, taking part in it, that is Bertrand’s true gift to me. The staircase has just turned out to be steeper and higher than I’d thought.
So I’ll just have to wait for Bertrand, and wait for Duende. Anyway, Seville has always been about the waiting. Waiting for the beauty to happen – the duende. Waiting for chance to present me with a new adventure. Isn’t the Spanish/Arabic word for orange blossom, azahar, thought to spring from the very word meaning chance, azar? Chance is what led Román to fall into my footsteps that day on the Puente de Triana, when he asked me where I was going and whether he could walk with me. I took that chance without knowing that, some day, the night he gave to me would blossom into a fragrance …
37
What do you wear to the French perfume industry’s biggest event of the year? Killer cleavage, that’s what. More skin to spritz with Femme in the original formula, just to remind yourself and everyone around you of what perfume used to be and can still be when left half a chance. After all, when asked what they consider to be the perfume, Femme is what half the perfumers answer – the others say Mitsouko. Pity the industry isn’t living up to that. The top awards have just been nabbed by two of the blandest launches of the year.
This evening, the Fragrance Foundation France is handing out the equivalent of the Oscars crossed with the People’s Choice Awards (the public gets to vote online), and let’s just say that, if anyone sneezes in the sumptuous Belle Époque ballroom of the Grand Hotel Intercontinental, the industry will grind to a standstill. I’m here because, for the second year running, I sat on the jury of the Specialists Award, given out by journalists, evaluators and bloggers to niche products. My fellow jurors and I have known the result for a week but, when the winner is announced, one of them smirks:
‘Do you realize we’ve just given out the award for a niche perfume to a celebrity fragrance?’
* * *
Unlike the American Fragrance Foundation, which has a specific category for celebrity perfumes, the French have none because there are practically no celebrity perfumes in France. What we have are égéries, the actors and models who front advertising campaigns. The word comes from the name of the Latin nymph Egeria: according to the legend, she secretly advised her lover, King Numa Pompilius, on matters of state religion. In English, it translates as ‘muse’. But although the septuagenarian Jean-Paul Guerlain proclaims that all his feminine scents were inspired by women, there are no muses in the perfume industry, at least none that we know of. What Loulou de la Falaise was to Yves Saint Laurent, Gala to Salvador Dalí, Kiki de Montparnasse to Man Ray, Marlene Dietrich to Josef von Sternberg or Gena Rowlands to John Cassavetes? That’s never been bottled.
There are, however, a handful of European products that do hint at a muse-perfumer relationship. They fit into the celebrity fragrance slot, but barely, because they’re so quirky and original you’ve just got to believe they reflect their namesakes’ decidedly un-Photoshopped personalities – unlike American celebrity juices that give the feeling the stars just slapped their names on the label to rake in the royalties (one of the rare exceptions being Sarah Jessica Parker, a perfume aficionada who had very definite ideas about Lovely). Christopher Brosius’ Cumming for the actor Alan Cumming is ‘a scent that is all about Sex, Scotch, Cigars and Scotland’ – the sex part somehow involving rubber and leather. Miller Harris’s L’Air de Rien for the singer and actor Jane Birkin, a fierce moss and musk blend that ranks high indeed on the skank-o-metre was based, Birkin told Vogue, on ‘a little of my brother’s hair, my father’s pipe, floor polish, an empty chest of drawers, old forgotten houses’. Rossy de Palma, the striking belle laide who graced Pedro Almodovar’s cult Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown, asked for a rose that would also speak of earth, spices, volcanoes and
Africa. For good measure, Antoine Lie and Antoine Maisondieu threw in a drop of blood to conjure the rose’s thorns in her Eau de Protection for État Libre d’Orange.
The brand went on to produce a second celebrity scent with the cult gay artist Tom of Finland, but it was their third offering in that line that whipped up the perfect scented storm. For the occasion, the house forewent its provocatively erotic pitches, names and visuals: the scent was called Like This after a poem by the Sufi mystic Rumi. With it, perfumery’s bad-boy brand seemed to be coming back into the fold of serious, artistic niche houses, so all was forgiven by perfume lovers, who embraced it enthusiastically. The composition itself, a burnished, burning essay in tones of orange, was arrestingly original but as cosy as a weather-worn tweed jacket: beautiful enough to stand judgement on its own, which is how it was evaluated by the jury. But it certainly didn’t hurt that it had a red-hot muse to up its cool factor: Tilda Swinton, Oscar winner, fearless actor, style icon and unearthly beauty.
* * *
As Mathilde Bijaoui steps onstage to accept the Specialists Award for Like This, I wonder whether, once the stardust is swept away, her creative partnership with Tilda Swinton couldn’t be the closest thing to mine with Bertrand: a hybrid project halfway between bespoke and commercial perfumery, predicated on an individual’s story but conceived for public release. I’m curious to find out just how much of herself the actor really put into its development so, after congratulating Mathilde, I ask her the question. She confirms: she really did develop Like This with and for Tilda Swinton.
‘I conceived it for her, first and foremost. I wanted it to touch her.’
But the term ‘muse’ gives her pause.
‘I don’t know that I’d call her that. To me, a muse is someone you’re in love with…’
The Perfume Lover Page 26