Mystery mocha

I had the misfortune, last night, to be stuck in a tube carriage with a woman wearing one of the most sickening fragrances I've encountered: a chocolate/coffee nightmare which forced me to press my scarf to my nose and breathe through that for the duration of the journey. Does anybody know of such a fragrance? Whatever it is, it has replaced Angel as my very least favourite scent.

Les Nez: Parfums d'Auteurs

Les Nez is a new(ish) perfume house. It comprises two noses, both female - Isabelle Doyen and Sandrine Videault. I like their playful, crazy fragrance names, but they attach textbook examples of wanky, pretentious copy to their packaging, so awful that I almost couldn't bring myself to smell them. Let's compare their descriptions to mine.

The Unicorn Spell

If by dawn still linger on your skin mixed scents of leaves, frost and violet blooms, and that relentless yearning for stellar sights, you will know that, at night, you felt the milky breath of a unicorn.

Smells of ancient ideals of honor and fundamental goodness. The "Joan of Arc" of perfumes.

Parma violets.

Let me Play the Lion

Scents of dusty trails,
Of lightly sweetened ochre,
Of sun-weathered wood,
Of silence swept
by mild breezes,
Of skies open like an endless
azure cut oozing signs
of the coming storm.

Like watching incense smoke curl lazily through a sunbeam as it wafts, disappears, and returns.

Lemon and aniseed to start with; very sweet. Quickly fades to absinthe, but SO bitter. So bitter that I made the Orange Face (i.e. the face I made, the other day, when I tried to eat a whole orange, peel and all, because I heard it was a good cold remedy. I hadn't really predicted how bitter it was going to be. So bitter I nearly threw up). Dries down much better though - spicy and cold, certainly dusty as it claims. Pretty good all in all.

L'Antimatière

An invisible ink that leaves a trace,
Foreseen rather than felt,
Persistent
Yet whispered,
Like a creased bed linen scent
wandering along your curves...

Performs a series of understated scent tricks and olfactory maneuvers that bypass security and sneak in through the back entrance...

Oh god, I really want to hate this. Fact is, when first sprayed, you can't smell it at all. I was hoping to be able to write something about the bloody Emperor and his bloody new clothes. You are selling people water, for god's sake, and writing stupid poetry about invisible ink! But coming back to it after a few minutes and... I like it. I do. It doesn't smell like a thing. It smells like things all around us; it smells like people. The Scented Salamander puts it very well:

It smells like the inside of a leather bag, a familiar coat, a favorite scarf, half-abandoned well-used gloves, a presence and the sum of one's experience of life. It smells as if for years and years this perfume had scented familiar objects around you. It could perhaps even be the smell of your house...

This is precisely correct and I have to admit that it's a very clever scent. I'm not sure I'd buy it as I think it's too subtle for me, but it's definitely the most interesting of the three. Oh, and can I please add: 'back entrance'. Huh huh. Huh-huhh huh.

Sample frenzy

I honestly have no idea how five months have passed without posting; I suppose we've all been busy with work and life and other stuff. I have amassed vast numbers of tiny perfume samples, so I thought I'd attempt to blitz through them all in one session. Here are the results of my tests, accompanied by quick notes, typed as I go.

Many thanks to the man in Liberty who picked up fistfuls of samples and chucked them into my bag, much in the style of coal-shovelling.

Citron Citron from Miller Harris

We start with a kick of lemon and bergamot which reminds me of Eau d'Italie from Le Sirenuse; soon we get other fruits and herbs and now it's even more like Eau d'Italie. Actually, I'm starting to wonder if there's some kind of copyright infringement going on. Not sure which scent came first; I love them both.

Fleur du Matin from Miller Harris

Great big hit of lily and jasmine which fades very fast to a kind of powdery, underwear drawer feel. Not very interesting and not really my thing, to be honest. I can't really imagine why you'd wear it unless you have a great longing to smell like generic hotel soap.

Crystal d'Ambre from Keiko Mecheri

Wow, amber and a bit of sweet patchouli to start; very oriental with frankincense and sandalwood. I'm a sucker for orientals but this ends up a little dull and almost lavendery; not as interesting as some of the alternatives (Alamut by Lorenzo Villoresi, Lyric by Amouage). It's not generic hotel stuff, though, and I will use up the rest of the sample bottle.

Rose d'Homme from Les Parfums de Rosine

Lots and lots and lots of rose, very sweet and not hommey at all. Slight strawberry flavouring topnote which (thankfully) fades quickly, leaving patchouli and leather. Definitely better than it started, but crikey, it smells exactly like pot pourri. Old pot pourri. Dusty and dull.

Gypsy Water from Byredo

This is more like it. Lovely, citric green to start with, and an amber/sandalwood base which is warm and woody and lovely. There's incense too, but not the smoky high church oriental frankincense - it's a much lighter resin, copal I think, perhaps benzoin. It puts me in mind of an old, warm library. Superb.

Passion from SpaceNK

AaaaaarrrrrrgggGGGGHHH get it off get it off jesus christ! Like if you wanted to remove varnish from a chair equipped with nothing but the raw power of jasmine. After a few minutes it smells almost exactly like white wine vinegar. I hear it has been discontinued already, though. Phew.

Winners: Gypsy Water, Citron Citron
Losers: Passion, Fleur du Matin

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.

You know, like, smell and stuff?

Sir William Petty, whose fault this is not.

On Wednesday 22nd March 1665 the great diarist Samuel Pepys dined at the house of the merchant James Houlbon. Also in attendance was the economist and philosopher Sir William Petty. During the meal Sir William described several clauses in his will that were designed to reward those who could address or invent "such and such things" that had intrigued or baffled him during his lifetime. One of the provisions was for an amount to be gifted to the individual "that could invent proper characters to express to another the mixture of relishes and tastes", something Sir William clearly felt lacking from the language. One may surmise that the money remains unclaimed over three hundred years later. It had not really invaded my consciousness until I began to write for this blog that we are woefully under equipped linguistically to describe the myriad smells that surround us.

One approach is to simply list the ingredients and leave it to the reader's imagination to piece together the experience of the scent. This won't really do on two counts. Firstly an inventory does not adequately describe quantity, nor how the constituent parts are combined and secondly the subtle combination of smells can create an overall effect very different, if not greater, than the sum of its parts. In much the same way that hydrogen gas and oxygen gas when combined in the proportion of of two hydrogen atoms to a single oxygen atom make a very different substance than their gaseous components do alone so it goes for combining cedar and galbanum, as Parfumerie Generale do in their wonderful Bois Blond. This mixture creates a scent that is more hay loft than wood and gum. There is a further problem to this "shopping list" approach, that of an assumption of extensive knowledge on the part of the reader. I am new to the world of perfume. It delights me but I am inexperienced and still have much to learn, especially when identifying the more exotic ingredients of the better scents. Comestible scents I have little difficulty with because, as those who know me can attest, I am not short of knowledge in the ancient and noble art of eating heroically, and because I cook I know what makes up the flavour. Thus fragrances like Creed's Neroli Sauvage, whilst delightful, do not really challenge the literary talents of the writer because we all know what oranges smell like. It is when more esoteric ingredients are used and mixed that we find that merely listing ingredients will not help most people get a sense of what the perfume is really about. We are driven to try a different tack, that of attempting to describe scent via simile and metaphor.

If we do not have the words to describe perfumes' olfactory qualities in their own terms, we can at least attempt to describe the experience of smelling them. I might say that Bois Blond has a transportative quality whereby I am taken to a bucolic rural idyll some time in late September; the straw is beginning to ferment and the grass is ripe. I might also add that the fragrance opens with sense of fresher grass and spring time sap. The physical components and procedures in the perfume's manufacture cease to be important, it is the emotional and sensory experience which now come to the fore. This approach, whilst not requiring any specialised knowledge from either reader or writer, still has its pitfalls. One is a matter of taste. When describing scent in this way one walks a very narrow ledge with the precipice of pretension on one side and imprecision on the other. Here the writer invests much of him or herself in the description and this depends upon the experiences of both writer and reader. If I describe Bois Blond as being redolent of silage, a scent I find has strong connotations of my youth in the English countryside, it defines the qualities I experience from the scent precisely, and probably explains why I love it so much - the nostalgia. For someone raised in the city who may not only have no idea what silage smells like but will probably have little emotional connection to the smell if they do, my description is next to useless.

Ultimately the problem with writing about perfume, or indeed any smell, is that they are so profoundly connected to our life experiences: each smell will be evocative in as many different ways as there are people to experience it. Smell is a profoundly emotional experience, it cannot really be clinically analysed or abstracted. This inability to apply scientific rigour is compounded by our linguistic shackles. Not having a specific word for something is a greater handicap than just struggling to find a clumsy synonym or simile. Language and perception are inter-related. It is known that Russian speakers can differentiate between a greater number of shades of blue than English speakers. There is no single word for "blue" in Russian and, it is surmised, this explains the keener perception of the Russians over we poor insensitive English-speaking barbarians. What if the same is true for smell? If we do not have the words to describe them, can we not smell them properly? This I have no answer for but please, gentle reader, if we seem to struggle when attempting, in our own heavy-handed way, to describe the delights that pour forth from the perfume bottle perhaps this piece may give a hint as to why.

Blood, Sweat, Sperm, Saliva

The Metro (dreadful free London paper) has a piece today on Sécrétions Magnifiques:

New perfume smells of semen and sweat

Want a scent with a distinct fragrance that no one else has?
Well, blood, sweat, saliva and a dollop of sperm is just the thing for the stinking rich, if a perfume on sale at Harvey Nichols is anything to go by.
The perfume, Sécrétions Magnifiques, contains the smell of all those things and still sells for £76 a pop.
Maker Etat Libre d'Orange markets it as a raunchy alternative to the likes of Poison and Chanel No.5, calling it 'subversive' and 'disturbing'.
The company said: 'It's love or hate at first sight. Like blood, sweat, sperm, saliva, Sécrétions Magnifiques is as real as an olfactory coitus that sends one into raptures, to the pinnacle of sensual pleasure.
'Tongues and sexes find one another, pleasure explodes and all goes wild.'
The perfume mixes accords - a blending of scents - to recreate the smell of blood, sweat, saliva and semen with the more pleasant odours of coconut and sandalwood. Perfume expert Roja Dove said the aroma was a refreshing alternative to bland fragrances.
'The kind of people who will like this range are people who think they are being really, really alternative and going against the establishment and being really rather racy,' he said.
'But it is a bit of a mystery why anyone would want to smell of sweat, blood, saliva and sperm.'
Another perfume in the range is Jasmin et Cigarette, which does exactly what it says on the tin, stinking of jasmine and uh, cigarettes.
A spokesman for Harvey Nichols, the only shop in the country to stock the range, insisted it was popular. 'Niche fragrances tend to do very well in our fragrance offering,' he said.

Well, this is the Metro we're talking about, so it's not like I expected quality journalism. But... really. Shall I complain first about the glaring factual errors (Harvey Nichols isn't the only shop in the country to sell the range - I was sniffing them in Les Senteurs just the other day) or the horrible writing (Jasmin et Cigarette does not stink of jasmine, thanks very much)? I almost can't decide. I should mention that the print edition of the paper had an extra subtitle for the article which claimed that the fragrance was made from semen and sweat. Nice work, guys.

Putting the journalistic crappiness of the Metro aside for a minute, this part interests me:

Perfume expert Roja Dove said... "But it is a bit of a mystery why anyone would want to smell of sweat, blood, saliva and sperm."

Did Roja Dove really say that, do you think? Dove is one of the world's leading experts on fragrance, so I seriously doubt that he finds body smells 'a bit of a mystery'. I should have thought he's encountered them before. In fact, he once described a fragrance as 'what it would smell like if you inserted your finger into a clean rectum and then sniffed it' - and he was selling that in his shop. Or is he just bad-mouthing Etat Libre d'Orange because Harvey Nichols is his main competitor?

There is, perhaps, a good reason why Dove might dismiss Etat Libre d'Orange's fragrances: it would be fair to accuse the company of prioritising style over substance. Those I smelled the other day weren't particularly great, smelling generic and uninteresting, even though I love the names. I suspect, though, that the most probable explanation for Dove's comment is that the Metro made it up.

A Little More On Perfume and Gender

I'd like to try and refract the powerful arguments Jicky has made below through the prism of masculine mainstream scent marketing to see what strange images can be conjured upon the wall. I use this general term "scent" rather than the more specific "perfume" for reasons I'll come to in a moment.

There is a great deal of truth in the suggestion that clean fragrances can be associated with the suppression of a woman's natural smell and can therefore seen as an instrument of control. Certainly until very recently the state of the union was that most women would wear mass-market perfume, generally something floral or slightly comestible and men would stink of old armpit. Today the same mass-market has shifted and men do now smell of something other than themselves. The trick in selling scent to men is twofold. Firstly, it must be seen to achieve some practical end, usually getting the wearer laid, and second, the scent must be contained within a product which is primarily used for something other than smelling pleasant, for example a deodorant.

The example which leaps inevitably to mind is, sadly, Unilever's Lynx range. This same range is known as Axe in the USA and much of the rest of the world. The brand was devised and launched in 1983 by Fabergé. It has been incredibly successful for Unilever, Fabergé's parent company ever since. Last year men with dysfunctional noses spent $7.3 bn on Lynx products worldwide. According to Unilever the target market for the range of deodorants, shower gels and so on is 18-24 year olds. Whilst many of the glossy men's magazines such as GQ and Esquire will feature expensive identikit adverts for fragrances from Tom Ford, Calvin Klein and Jean Paul Gaultier, these are perfumes aimed at slightly older, professional (read "richer") men. They cannot therefore be seen as a barometer of the mainstream. Lynx certainly can, the numbers do not lie.

Lynx is targeted at the reader of Nuts, FHM and The Sun newspaper: all massive selling publications. The key here is that Unilever do not make a perfume as part of the range, not even sneaking one by disguising it as "after shave". Every product is, first and foremost, something other than perfume. Perfume for perfume's own sake is still a worryingly feminine concept for many men but the paranoia that women will find you attractive only if you smell of something other than old sweat is all pervasive. In order to sell to these men you must employ a carpet bombing marketing strategy of providing a product they can feel confident about buying and mix that with advertisements that promise that its scent will get them some action. It is worth pointing out that Unilever's advertising concentrates entirely on the supposed effect of the scent, no mention is ever made of the product's qualities as a deodorant. Nonetheless, at no point may you suggest that a man might want to wear a scent for his own pleasure; that would be unmanly.

This strategy, bizarrely, often ends up with the same practical result as mass-market women's perfume, that of horribly ersatz, sinus stripping bleach-fresh fragrances with no hint of nature, sex or humanity about them. What is interesting is how differently they are marketed and what this says about society's expectation of gender. Women's fragrances are sold on the basis that the wearer will be seen, by others, as a dazzling starlet, perhaps a little like a Paris Hilton (can you even dare to dream?), presumably because all her foul female odour has been covered with Thierry Mugler's Angel. Contrast this with men, who are sold to on the basis of how wearing the product will change how they are seen in the eyes of women. This is especially true if they wear Lynx's new range, Temptation, a chocolate scented deodorant. In actuality, these two scents, Temptation and Angel are practically the same fragrance. They both smell repugnant: artificially sweet with a hint of Play-doh and vomit, but both claim to be chocolate.

So although identical in the inhalation, it is the service that each is sold as providing which differs, though both pray on the paranoia of what each gender is expected to act and smell like. Both the "virginal woman" and the "machismo man" are painfully dim-witted, insulting and repressive constructs with which no right-thinking individual would identify.

What becomes increasingly clear in my mind is how the mass-market scent manufacturers so cleverly sell the societal status quo of gender expectation, presumably because the actual product they are trying to shift is garbage. In exactly the same way as WKD sells itself on the basis that people's inhibitions diminish the more kaylied they become rather than on the delicious and careful blending of ingredients that no doubt make up its cyan coloured liquid-brain-cell-annihilator, the marketing emphasis of the mainstream perfumer is on the societal effect not the personal experience of their product. The moral seems to be that if you can't make something good, sell it to people so that they understand they will be seen as functional, normal members of their social group if they consume it. This has nothing to do with pleasure and everything to do with submission to the norm and that applies to people regardless of gender.

On perfume and gender

News of a decline in perfume sales appears to have excited the feminist blogosphere. Pandagon's Amanda Marcotte suggests that "The bell tolls for #5", which, if they ever read feminist blogs, would cause conniptions in the Chanel publicity department, but only on the grounds that she hasn't referred to it correctly as "No. 5". She follows up a piece by Feministing's Miriam, which claims that the decline means "Women might actually want to smell like themselves!"

It's a pity and, I think, a mistake that these bloggers associate perfume with anti-feminism. Miriam alleges that perfume reinforces gender stereotypes: "Women need to smell like florals and fruit, while men need to smell like musk and pine trees." Meanwhile, Amanda opines that "The notion that women are inherently foul and need to be scrubbed and covered up with scent is an idea that’s fading." It's clear, then, that neither blogger knows much about the culture, industry or history of perfume, and that both are blinkered by their American-centric viewpoints.

Whatever one may think of its efforts, the United States of America has undoubtedly achieved greatness on a world stage. And yet I still can't name a single great American perfume, ever. The cliché suggests that American beauty is about dehumanisation and homogenisation, while Europeans are into individuality and earthiness, and unfortunately the cliché holds when talking about scent. Big American producers such as Clinique and Elizabeth Arden chuck out new ersatz fruity florals every year. A huge sector of the market is eaten up by gooey celebrity fragrances, notably those attributed to Gloria Vanderbilt and Elizabeth Taylor. Even the smaller and potentially more interesting houses - I'm thinking of Bond No 9 - tend to come out with nothing but fizz, froth and daiquiris. Even Bond's much-lauded Chinatown smells like something from The Body Shop pretending to be a fruit salad.

From an American perspective, then, perhaps perfume does seem like a way of covering up the "filthy" natural smell of women with flowers and fruit. However, step anywhere out of the United States - even to Canada or Mexico - and you'll quickly realise that the American attitude to perfume as anti-body is far from the norm. Perfume has since its invention been used by men, women and intersexuals alike, and the intention has almost always been to enhance one's natural smell rather than to erase it. Try any reputable old-skool cologne on a sweaty armpit, and you'll notice immediately that the point of the citrus/chypre is to blend with the human odour and bring out its natural spiciness, sweetness and sexiness. If you're American and can't bear not washing for five minutes, Jean-Claude Ellena's compelling Bigarrade Concentrée, from Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle, recreates the effect with searing precision.

All the really great European perfumes are based upon challenging, unclean and often distinctly animalic notes. First and foremost, there's the holy trinity of civet, ambergris and musk (none of which can be accused of being clean or unnatural: they are, respectively, cat's bum pus, whale puke and deer spunk). Beyond those, there's the smoky sickliness of tobacco, incense, benzoin and cannabis, the spicy darkness of cinnamon, cumin and coffee, the sharpness of angelica and anise, the full-blown blowsy decadence of wilting jasmine - for both sexes. Think, for example, of Guerlain's Jicky. Marketed to men and women equally since its invention in 1889, it smells of burnt plasticine, tar, chlorine, fleshy bodies and baby sick.

Lest anyone forget, the great European perfumes are all built upon the fragrances of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, whence so many of their ingredients come. None of these places have perfume traditions based around deodorisation or femininity. The rosewaters, musks and vetivers sold in the spice markets of Mombasa or Mumbai are intended for use by any and all sexes, to add an individual edge to your existing smell.

Further does it sadden me that neither Amanda nor Miriam appears to be aware of the feminist history of perfume in the West. When women went out in 1937 wearing Schiaparelli's Shocking, they weren't attempting to efface themselves or scrub clean their dirty lady parts. Rather the opposite. The original Shocking was created, as Sir Ben Kingsley might put it, to smell like a cunt. (Don't bother with the reformulated version: this vagina dentata has been tragically defanged.)

Of course, if your knowledge of perfume starts and ends at Tommy Hilfiger, you're probably going to agree with Amanda and Miriam that the decline in perfume sales represents a feminist victory. I don't think it does, though I'm not lamenting it, either. As long as fewer people are buying the sinus-inflaming likes of Insolence, Angel and Paris Hilton Heiress, I shall be very happy. But the idea that perfume is inherently anti-feminist or anti-woman is an ill-informed slur. Perfume is no more anti-feminist than clothes: some styles are informed by a hatred and/or fetishisation of the female, but plenty are not.

If Amanda and Miriam want to throw out their perfume collections, that is up to them. Meanwhile, I'll be in the corner of the fairtrade café, reading Andrea Dworkin while sitting happily in a cloud of Tabac Blond - created in 1919 to celebrate women's agency and the potency of the suffrage movement. Vive la revolution!

Bois Blond (Parfumerie Generale, 2007, Pierre Guillaume)

The perfume opens with light early summer grass, hints of citrus and fresh wood shavings. There is a note of very green, sappy wood and a hint of spice. This is a heady mixture, it is much brighter than I had expected given the strong presence of cedar. The spice remains and is joined by musk and a more aged wood as the perfume really dries down and warms to skin temperature. The mixture of wood, spices and musk almost evoke old-fashioned wax furniture polish, a rich scent with a little astringent sharpness. This sharpness mellows after an hour or so though a certain spice element remains. Though it isn't actually an ingredient I perceive a coriander undertone: spicy and deep yet not too obviously comestible. This combines with the cedar and musk to create a warm, slightly sweaty skin scent, which for me epitomises the height of summer. The smell of my own skin on a long, hot summer day is a constant source of satisfaction and this perfume really captures the masculine aroma and the spice of drying sweat.

As the day and the season wear on the scent settles with wet hay. It still has a hint of sweat though this element no longer comes to the fore. The whole fragrance settles for the rest of the day and toys with that boundary between perfect ripeness and the onset of decay. Towards the end there is a hint of the sweetness of silage and hay barns. This scent gently fades out as the night itself draws in.

French Lover (known as Bois d'Orage in the US; Frédéric Malle Editions de Parfums, 2007, Pierre Bourdon)

For some reason, the name 'French Lover' made me assume this scent was floral. Now I think about it, I can't imagine why I would have made that assumption. I can only guess that my mind went Lover -> Love -> Romance -> Roses. This Chypre fragrance is a very long way from that.

French Lover undergoes a bizarre and unexpected transformation as it dries down, which takes hours. The first rush is iris and cedar, very bitter and resonant of L'Artisan Parfumeur's Méchant Loup. It's strong and masculine and woody and it lasts for an hour or two, mellowing a little, before taking a strange turn into soft, warm amber, and crystalline-sweet benzoin, like vanilla and church incense. It takes the whole day to change over from one to the other and it lifts my spirits as it does so, moving from fiery, enthusiastic energy to safe, comforting smoky warmth, directly counteracting the increase in my stress levels during a day at work.

(As an aside, why did they feel the need to call this scent 'Bois d'Orage' in the US? Is it the same thing as 'Freedom Fries' - they've decided the word 'French' is bad because they don't like French people? If so, do they really think that it's better to go from the name being French to the name being in French? What difference does that make? Or is it the word 'Lover' to which they object, because sex is an affront to American values or something?)

What a magical and fascinating fragrance this is, with its extraordinary masculine-to-feminine path. I'd have called it French Lovers. And I'll be getting another bottle after this one, I can tell.

L'Eau d'Hiver (Frédéric Malle Editions de Parfums, 2003, Jean-Claude Ellena)

As the ice winds of winter sweep across the northern hemisphere, what better way to warm up than with a spritz of warm, lustrous scent? Well, actually, there are a few, including a roaring log fire, the Slanket, and a one-way ticket to the Maldives. Still, there is something comforting about smelling warm in frosty weather, and certainly the smells of winter – cloves, mulled wine, pine needles, spiced fruit, animal fur – are among the greatest pleasures of the season.

It comes as a surprise that the perfumer who considers that he has the right to bag the name L'Eau d'Hiver – and, furthermore, to declare that it is "the first Eau Chaude" – is Jean-Claude Ellena. Ellena has churned out a few warm-spectrum smells (including L'Artisan's Ambre Extreme, and Acqua di Parma's Colonia Assoluta), but he is the master of fragile, icy freshness. His Bois Farine, for L'Artisan, is ethereal, bitter and woodsy. His Rose Poivrée, for his own Different Company, is stunningly unsweetened and piquant, almost an anti-floral. His Angéliques Sous La Pluie, also for Frédéric Malle, is one of the most peculiar and evasive scents out there, a bit like the olfactory equivalent of that odd shade of pale grey that looks vaguely powder-blue or lilac-tinged or even slightly pink or green or yellow in different lights. Admittedly, with Bigarade Concentrée, he has shown he can work up a sweat; but, just because he can, doesn't mean he wants to. Ellena makes perfumes like Dale Chihuly makes glass sculptures: delicate, intricate, precise; informed by nature, but otherworldly.

Fortunately, with L'Eau d'Hiver, he has played to his strengths. There's a hint of spice at the topnote, but it turns out to be a cool blast of angelica, backed up with iris and heliotrope. A few moments in, the flowers gradually begin to sour down, with a hint of elegant decay coming in; like three-day old water that has been used in a porcelain vase filled with irises and heliotropes, in fact. At this point, there is something distinctly rubbery going on. God knows what. If you're expecting the alleged honey note to impart any sweetness during this process, don't hold your breath. Ellena is far too subtle to pull a Miel de Bois-style overload.

And then it's gone, leaving behind it nothing but the faint sense of having recently been in a snowy garden. Possibly one with a pile of tyres in the corner. I still don't get why those are there, actually. Maybe it's the angelica.

Like all Ellena's best, L'Eau d'Hiver is complex, compelling, and intangible. What it is not, though, is an Eau Chaude. There is nothing chaude about it: this is a mysterious, dreamlike, wintry scent, but it's colder than Nicole Kidman's hands after a long, ungloved yak ride by a fjord on Christmas morning. Brrr. Pass the mulled wine.