Perfume poisoning in Texas

A woman in a Texas bank sprayed "strong perfume", according to the BBC. Two people complained of chest pains and headaches. An announcement was made that anyone feeling ill should leave the building; 150 people did, and twelve were later taken to hospital by ambulance, complaining of dizziness and breathing difficulties.

Now, my feeling is that the vast majority of the 150 were simply grabbing a chance for a few minutes off work, and in general I think the EU's fussing about the allergenic potential of, say, oakmoss is blown completely out of proportion. Nonetheless, I have sympathy with the original two complainants. Because some perfume, while not necessarily allergenic, is just so foul that a person of nasal sensibility cannot put up with it.

It's not a question of "strength", which is a misleading term. Personally, I would find someone wearing the pure parfum of No 5 or Mitsouko unobjectionable, and, in fact, entirely pleasant to be around. Meanwhile, the eau de toilette of many celebrity perfumes – or even something so mild as Lynx/Axe or Impulse body spray – can seriously gross me out. It's a question of quality, and that comes down to composition, ingredients, and intent of the perfumer.

Most perfume is sold in Duty Free, department stores or chemist shops, and this is the key to the problem. In those enclosed spaces, the environment quickly fills up with a high-level chemical hum, which obliterates any subtle notes. To sell, a perfume or body spray must stand out from the crowd. One way to do this is to make it incredibly aggressive. After smelling, say, five or ten similar scents, most buyers are so confused and exhausted that something which smells powerful and different will appeal.

The results are obvious, and probably the reason so many people claim to dislike perfume. I can see where they're coming from: I dislike at least 90% of perfumes. I have on more than one occasion had to move tables at a restaurant on account of somebody else's bad perfume. I've had to scrub bad perfume off my own arms. As Beverley Sutphin has observed, being stuck with bad perfume on a flight is intolerable. Just last week, I was stuck at a restaurant between two women, both of whom were wearing different bad perfumes: the combination was particularly dire, and actually put me off my food. I concur entirely with those people who claim a noseful of something offensive may have a physical effect.

The real question, though, is what perfume caused it? The reports give no clue, but there are so many possibilities! The ones I've had to move away from or scrub off include, of course, Angel, Amarige de Givenchy, a revolting and shockingly overpriced perfume by Lalique once sprayed on me in Roja Dove's shop at the top of Harrod's, and Cinema by Yves Saint Laurent. And the obvious culprits could include Giorgio Beverly Hills – allegedly banned by some shops and restaurants in the 1980s – or the famously wrecking-ball fragrances of Poison or Opium.

Any more guesses? What perfume might make you evacuate the building and call in a HazMat team?

On Pretension

New perfumes! New perfumes! Let's get unwrapping and see what we've got.

Lovely. Rose Noir, Eau de Parfum, nice classy white box. No problems there other than it's huge compared to a bottle of perfume. What's inside?

Er... another box. Good good. With some symbolism. A crown, and a Trivial Pursuit counter, and a thing that's a bit like an aleph with an extra bit. Now we have to break two seals to get in.

Bottle, excellent. What's that on the right?

Oooh, a tiny envelope! Maybe it's ingredients? That would be boring. Or a nice little message from Gorman? Perhaps thanking me for buying his lovely fragrance, like you get with Amouage?

The text reads:

The edges of its petals begin to blacken, and yet the classic damascene rose is no less beautiful--its scent no less evocative. But of what? Not of innocence, nor prurience. No, it's something subtler, something sophisticated yet animal, the aura of Baudelaire. The rarest flowers mingling their fragrance. The Oriental splendor, might whisper: restraint and order, bless; luxury and voluptuousness.

Oh, for god's sake, what the hell is that all about? Why is it that, so often, people writing about perfume descend into rubbish (and slightly illiterate) fifth-form poetry? It's not even poetry, it's faux poetry - fridge poetry, the Vettriano of poetry. It is utterly pretentious and awful. I can just imagine the copywriter staring dreamily at the Lady of Shalott poster above their desk and composing their horrible prose. "It smells of roses... no... too abrupt. It smells of the scent of roses carried on the breeze... much better! What kind of breeze? Oh... It smells of the scent of roses carried on the breath of lovers... wonderful! 'Smells' is clumsy... how about... It resonates with the scent of roses carried on the breath of tragic lovers... I'm a genius."

So much writing about perfume is packed with these kinds of adolescent flights of fancy which tell you nothing whatsoever about how the bloody thing smells. I'm not suggesting that we should replace all perfume writing with dry lists of ingredients, but that we should use comparisons that have meaning - does it smell of libraries? Does it make you think of the sea? Does it remind you of a walk in the woods in the summer? Maybe. Does it whisper 'restraint and order'? Is it evocative of the aura of Baudelaire? I doubt it. I hate it when I spot a piece on perfume and discover, upon reading, that it's nothing about perfume at all, but rather a piece of GCSE-level free association with all the sophistication of My Chemical Romance lyrics.

Let's see how Frédéric Malle does it, shall we?



A black box. With a bottle in it. Full marks to Monsieur Malle.

Green Tea Madness

As I was walking up the stairs towards the dentist's surgery, the other day, I wrinkled my nose in response to a dullish, dank smell. My instant assumption was that the building had developed a problem with rising damp or mildew since my last visit and that something should be done to prevent it from falling down; but, half-way up the stairs, I realised my fears were unfounded. On the first landing, on which the damp smell was overpowering, sat a little bottle filled with sticks, bearing a label that read "Green Tea and Cucumber Room Fragrance".

'Eurgh,' I thought, 'it smells of pondwater.' And then I stopped to wonder why anybody thought it would smell any other way. Who actually likes the smell of green tea? Or, to make the emphasis more clear, who actually likes the smell of green tea? Who lifts a cup of green tea to their lips and thinks, 'Wow, what a wonderful fragrance, I'd love to smell of it'?

I'm thinking nobody, and a quick and highly scientific Google experiment demonstrates my point. A search for "I love the smell of green tea" yields 10 results; but compare that to 392 for "I love the smell of strawberries", 2,140 for "i love the smell of roses" and a tied 4,900 for each of "leather" and "petrol". And yet these ludicrous green tea products sell like pondwater-scented hot cakes. There's not only the room fragrance sticks: there are green tea bubble baths, green tea scented candles, green tea incenses, green tea bloody everything.

Why, then, if nobody actually likes the smell of green tea, do these things sell so well? If people don't like the way they smell, they must be buying them for - well, some other reason, and unfortunately I think the other reason is disappointingly obvious. Fragrances don't sell because of the way they smell; they sell because of the image with which they're associated. Green tea makes people think of health, detoxification, airy white rooms, yoga, freshness, clarity, simplicity; in short, green tea represents a lifestyle, not a scent.

Of course, most fragrances attempt to associate themselves with a lifestyle to some extent: this is why perfume adverts are vastly more likely to feature Nicole Kidman posing on a red carpet in slow-motion than any kind of description of what the fragrance actually smells like. But at least the rubbishy celeb fragrances are honest about their shamelessly simplistic associations with Britney Spears or Jennifer Lopez. These endless green tea fragrances are pulling exactly the same trick except that their attempts to associate themselves with the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna are dishonest, underhanded and unofficial; and, for these reasons, I have significantly less respect for them.

Bond No. 9 boutique, 9 Bond Street, New York

There are a lot of clichés about American perfumery. Americans like to smell clean, while everyone else in the world likes to smell dirty; American perfumes are all about things you can eat, mostly fruit but occasionally coffee, chocolate or cake; the United States produces a lot of smells, but has yet to produce a truly great fragrance house. Bond No. 9 aims to challenge all of these.

But does it succeed?

Hmm.

I spent a long time in the flagship store, fighting off some supercilious assistants, all armed with that overtrained, po-faced, robotic sales patter that some American corporations seem to think the customer would like more than talking to an actual responsive human with a personality, a sense of humour and some opinions.

Bodes badly, right?

Right.

I see the Bon-Bon Box (above) in the window, What a lovely thing! How shiny! Lots of little smells, beautifully packaged! An ideal gift for Violet, Beverly or Mr Atrocity! I sally forth to the testing counter to poke my nose into their business.

Chinatown is supposed to be Bond's truly great scent, so that's where I start. And, yes, it's good. A complex, intelligent peach'n'patchouli oriental that manages to be elegant and pleasing at every stage. But that's it. Pleasing. I am pleased. There's nothing about Chinatown that challenges or surprises me. It is chic and polished, and as it progresses goes through a formal, controlled, unobjectionable sequence. It's a lot like the sales assistants.

It's good, all right? And there's something alluring about perfect poise. But I can't find it in my heart - or, for that matter, my nose - to love something so very orderly. So very safe.

Next I try Andy Warhol Silver Factory, one of a range inspired by the artist. Again, it's good. A smart, careful balancing of Warhol's favourite smells: violet, incense and woods. It dries down to something nice. It is nice. I am pleased. I might be even more pleased than I was with Chinatown. And yet my heart rate is unchanged.

I look bored. "This is our bestseller," monotones the assistant, spraying me with a cloud of something purple called The Scent of Peace. Horrific name, and horrific... at last! Something that produces a reaction! Unfortunately, that reaction is sneezing, because I'm being drowned in grapefruit! Look, if I wanted to smell like The Body Shop, I wouldn't have to spend $130 on a bottle. And that's the small size. (They vary. Silver Factory comes in at a whopping $230.)

I plead for something less like bath gel, and a succession of spicies is paraded in front of me: Nuits de Noho (vanilla/patchouli), Great Jones (cedar), Wall Street (lavender/vetiver), HOT Always (cinnamon/bergamot). They're all fine. Great Jones is very fine. I sniff it again. Yes, very fine. I am pleased.

It's very hard to object to any of them. Except they're so... thin. There's no body, no sensuousness, no emotion.

Tom Wolfe, in that quintessential New York novel Bonfire of the Vanities, describes a certain type of socialite women. These women are ageing but heavily into artificial preservation, rail-thin, perfectly blowdried and manicured: simultaneously satirising their appearance and their brittle vapidity, he calls them "social X-rays".

I bet the social X-rays love Bond No. 9.

I stumbled back on to the street, outwardly pleased but inwardly disappointed, my wallet no lighter. Bond No. 9 makes a very tasteful range of well-produced scents. If you wear one (pretty much any one, apart from that horrible Peace thing), you will project an aura of immaculate luxury, and you won't offend anyone.

That's just not what I'm after in a perfume. But, then again, I am a European.

L'Officina Profumo Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella

朝聖大廳, originally uploaded by Alanmei.

Like everything in Florence, L'Officina Profumo Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella is massively, almost painfully over-decorated with frescoes, statues and patterns. Officially founded in 1612 - although in production from 1221 - this is one of the world's oldest pharmacies, housed in a stunning 14th century monastery on the Via della Scala. The Dominican friars concocted potions using herbs grown in the monastery garden, for use in the infirmary, and thus the pharmacy was born.

The pharmacy is gorgeous beyond compare, with room after room, each more glorious than the one before, crammed with bell jars and flasks and distillation equipment. In glass cabinets sit countless bottles of lotions and potions: a rose tincture for tired eyes, a vinegar ('Vinegar of the Seven Thieves') for fainting fits, an infused water for hysterical women (incidentally, they've changed the label on this one. It just says, mysteriously, 'Santa Maria Novella Water'). There are soaps, incenses, foot lotions, mouthwashes, candles and pretty much everything else, none of which seems to have been updated since the days of mediaeval medicine.

The colognes themselves number about fifty, and I would have tried them all were it not for the typically aloof Florentine staff. The bottles aren't out on display so you have to ask for each fragrance individually by name, and the staff tend to go and serve somebody else between each sniff. Having asked, in broken Italian, to try about ten fragrances, I started to feel a bit awkward and like I should really buy something. Which is, presumably, exactly what they're aiming for. I found the majority of the scents a bit boringly single-note: the rose smells like rose, the violet smells like violet, the vetiver smells like vetiver. I assume these products started out as medicinal extracts which would explain why they haven't been blended, but it can be a little disappointing to smell the topnote and realise that nothing else is coming. Exceptions to this were Amber and Hay, both of which we ended up buying. The Amber starts like a combination of tar and a warm hearth after a wood fire, eventually maturing to amber and then to formaldehyde; the Hay is a lovely, rosy green scent, like a meadow in spring.

If you find yourself in Florence then make sure to visit L'Officina Profumo Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella, but maybe buy the fragrances from one of their other shops around the world. Preferably from a shop that lets you get at the bottles.

Perfumes: The Guide

I've just ordered a copy of what is, to me at least, the most exciting smell book ever, Perfumes: The Guide, by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez.

I've been a huge fan of Mr Turin's since reading Chandler Burr's biography of him, The Emperor of Scent, a few years ago. It was the way he wrote about perfume that inspired me to start writing about it myself.

I'll post something on the book when I've had a chance to read it. In the meantime, here is a link to its website: http://www.perfumestheguide.com/

If you subscribe to or download the newsletter, you'll get a preview of the sort of thing that will be in the book. The review of Knize Ten is a great place to start, even though it's just ruined my morning by telling me that Tabac Blond is no more.

Ajwa

Ajwa calls itself as a 'Muslim clothing and perfumes' shop, although that description doesn't capture the shop's pleasingly eclectic nature. Shop dummies in long robes nestle in among stacks of colourful children's books with such wonderful titles as 'Allah Gave Me a Nose to Smell', and the window is filled with dozens of elegant, glass-stoppered perfume bottles, filled with thick, dark, heavily-scented oils, glowing like stained glass.

The specialities here are musk and oudh (agarwood), of which there are a dozen varities apiece from all over the world. The man in the shop will decant 3, 6 or 12 millilitres of your chosen scent into a little glass bottle for you; he will also wait patiently while you sniff your way through his entire stock, providing a jar of coffee to clear your nose when required. Prices range from three pounds to 50 for the 3ml bottle.

I asked him to recommend a really heavy, dark musk, and he pointed me towards a bottle of something resembling molasses, labelled Japanese Musk. The smell was extraordinary - the darkest of the dark, with amber, frankincense, sandalwood and burnt sugar notes. It made me go 'Phwooaaaar!' and cost me five pounds. And it's even better on skin.

If you find yourself in the area I couldn't recommend a visit to this lovely shop more highly. Best of all, it's right by the spectacularly good New Tayyabs Pakistani restaurant, so you might as well get a curry while you're there.

Ajwa Retail
58 Fieldgate Street
Whitechapel
London E1 1ES

Chembur (ByRedo, 2008, Ben Gorman)

First, the blurb:

Ben's mother is from Mumbai and wonderful family picnics were held outside the city in the Chembur pleasure grounds surrounded by temples and shrines, always filled with smoking fragrant incense and garlands of marigolds and jasmine. It is this nostalgic picture that Ben paints with CHEMBUR - a shimmering, golden Indian perpetual afternoon palpitating with richness, heat and colour. The top notes are bergamot, lemon and elemi - the warm heart blends different incense oils with nutmeg and ginger; the elaborate base is of musks, amber and labdanum. A transcendental experience, an aching memory...

(Thank you, Les Senteurs.)

It is rare that a new fragrance gets me as excited as this one does. I can't think of a time since Dzing! when I've been so filled with intrigue and joy when sniffing my wrist. The beauty of it! The zinginess of it! The dirtiness of it! This fragrance is magnificent.

There's a citrus/resin zing which I think is the elemi, a whack of spicy, nutmeggy incense and a deep, sexy amber and musk base. There's sweat, too. There's also - and I mean this in the nicest possible way - a distinct woodsmoke touch of the Jorvik Viking Centre. Or the Canterbury Tales exhibition if you're more familiar with that one. (You know the one, with the cardboard bum that sticks out of the window. Everybody remembers the cardboard bum.)

I hear that the rest of ByRedo's fragrances - Pulp, Gypsy Water, Green and Rose Noir - are equally good. I assume we should keep our eyes on this Ben Gorman man. Apparently he's only thirty; I can only imagine what other wonderful concoctions he might create during the rest of his career.

Agent Provocateur trio

(The idea for this post came from the excellent Perfume-Smellin' Things blog. Thanks to Colombina and Mr Colombina.)

Today, Mr Atrocity and myself tested three Agent Provocateur fragrances and made notes (no conferring allowed). We sprayed them both on to paper, which we sniffed straight away, and on to my skin, which we sniffed ten minutes later. Here are the results:

1. Agent Provocateur - Eau de Parfum

Mr Atrocity
On paper: Talc then floral. Lavender-fresh cleaner. Bubble bath. Very light. Doesn't smell of much.
On skin: A bit better, but still bubble bath. Inoffensive. Still doesn't smell very much.

Beverly Sutphin
On paper: Rose, lavender. Swimming pool chlorine. Body cream given by elderly relatives. The lily note is OK.
On skin: Talcum powder. A bit acrid. Rose bubble bath. Not awful, but I wouldn't choose to smell of it.

2. Agent Provocateur - Eau Emotionnelle

Mr Atrocity
On paper: Jolly Ranchers. Strawberry jelly. Marzipan. Lavender pot pourri.
On skin: World of Pleather. Too sweet and too artificial to be sexy - overwhelmingly chemical.

Beverly Sutphin
On paper: Sherbet, Love Hearts. Parma Violets. Peppermint foot lotion. Slight sandalwood note isn't bad. OK summer fragrance if you like sweets. A lot.
On skin: Bizarre transformation. Kind of leather, green, ferns. Old man aftershave. PINE like loo cleaner and that pot pourri with pine cones in. Imagine the hotel in Twin Peaks smells a bit like this.

3. Agent Provocateur - Maitresse

Mr Atrocity
On paper: Granny. Icing sugar and artificial rose flavouring. Now with added sink unblocker. Old folks' home just after a spring clean.
On skin: GRANNY! Cheap hotel room. Plugin air freshener. Nastiest by some margin. Bleach.

Beverly Sutphin
On paper: Dear God! Instant rush of bath foam. Incredibly sweet lily/mimosa. Really artificial strawberry/rose. This one's awful. Those jelly sweets shaped like strawberries. Candy shrimps.
On skin: SO DISGUSTING. Watermelon, aeroplane toilets. Like drowning in liquid candy shrimps. I am going to SCRUB this off.

I am not a fan of Agent Provocateur. Some of their underwear is pretty, it's true, but their branding is bloody awful. Take a look at the image at the top of this post: what exactly is going on there? Quite apart from the rather appalling 'Let Them Eat Kate' - which seems to encourage a kind of rapey attack on a supermodel - there's a photo which looks straight out of the pages of Nuts magazine. Can somebody explain to me how they thought this would appeal to their target audience? Or how anybody thought this was sexy?

Which is, of course, exactly what's wrong with these silly fragrances. Here are some things which are sexy: musk, ambergris, sweat. Here's something that isn't sexy: grannytalc. At best, the scents resemble underwear drawer sachets; at worst, strawberry jelly. They're so far from sex it's almost comical.

Don't bother with these, they're crap. And please, don't buy anything from Agent Provocateur until they remove that disturbing photo of Kate Moss from their window displays.

Habanita (Molinard, 1921)

Some time ago, I wrote a very mean post about a small perfumery in Havana. My fellow Smellbound blogger Violet Kolinsky, who has a soft spot for the workers, has been cross with me ever since: apparently, the people in the shop might see it and get upset. Bearing in mind the state of internet access in Cuba, this seems unlikely. Still, I love Cuba and its people very much, and for that reason the subject of today’s sermon will be the ultimate classic of Cuban scent: Molinard’s timeless Habanita.

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that Molinard is, in fact, a French perfume house. Quite so, but Habanita – meaning ‘woman from Havana’ – is much more than a Cuban-inspired perfume. More perfectly than any other fragrance I can think of, Habanita captures the essence of a city. If you have ever been in Havana, one sniff will send you straight back. The evocation is startling, all the more so because Habanita is 87 years old.

Bearing in mind that most people have not been in Havana, some sort of florid description may be called for. Imagine if you will (or Google image search if you won’t) a Spanish colonial town of breathtaking elegance. Every street is lined with a jumble of buildings, each with its own individual and charming architectural features. Now imagine that city surrounded by the azure waters of the Caribbean, fringed with palms, and suffused with sun and heat, brought down to a balmy temperature by the sea breeze. Now imagine that there has been a long period of dictatorship followed by Communist revolution. All these beautiful buildings have slowly decayed and tumbled down. They have been propped up in imaginative ways, and repainted in haphazard colours or with murals of socialist heroes versus American villains.

Along the main boulevards are the grand old mansions that house Havana’s cigar factories. Inside cool, dark rooms, at antique desks, sit dozens of men and women, selecting tobacco leaves, stripping out the stems, artfully twisting them into cigars and packing them into blocks.

All these things are captured by Habanita, even though the Communist revolution happened almost four decades after it was created. The first note is a sweet, sharp slap of cured tobacco leaf with a sort of synthetic-preservative edge, something like formaldehyde. I’m not sufficiently familiar with the process of cigar manufacture to confirm precisely what it is, but it’s exactly the same smell that fills the ground-floor chambers of the Partagas tobacco factory, where sweating, muscular men unwrap and thrash the enormous bundles of leaves.

Soon, the edge softens and Habanita’s heart comes out. And that heart is peach. My weakness for peach is a rare exception to the general disdain in which I hold all non-citrus fruit scents. I had a brief passion for Aqaba, which was only partly influenced by Lawrence of Arabia. I know peach is a lab-created note, not a natural distillation. And Habanita has been reformulated, so it is even less natural-smelling than it used to be. No matter. The synthetic peachy smell is just that of the cheap perfumes and cosmetics worn by the cigar-rolling workers upstairs in the factory.

Inevitably at this point on the tour, someone trots out that tired line about cigars being ‘rolled on the thighs of virgins.’ The workers’ sex lives are none of my business, but they do indeed roll cigars on their thighs, on leather aprons; and, right on cue, Habanita brings in its leathery base note, sinking gently into an exotic, languorous blend of patchouli and amber.

Habanita is a perfume of imaginative genius, and its brash, synthetic edge is all part of the appeal. Famously, it was first sold to scent cigarettes. To use a delightful expression from another part of the Caribbean, the sort of women who scented their cigarettes in 1921 didn't got no behaviour at all. Havana, and Habanita, are about heat, smoking, and sin.

As the sun goes down over Habana Vieja, the tobacco workers come out into the streets to drink mojitos, smoke Cohibas and dance salsa under the winsome gaze of a mural of Che Guevara. It's going to be a long night.