Perfume Journal

Back in the nineties, when I was working for the development (professional speak for “fundraising”) arm of Penn State University, I had a boss who confessed to me on a couple of occasions, “I just love it when you wear your blue power-suit.” This suit was very blue indeed: an electric blue, made out of incredibly fine wool, its intense hue demanding I keep everything else low key. (For suavity’s sake, I paired it with a sleek black turtleneck and black high-heels.) Hearing it referred to as my “power-suit” was quite funny, because nothing about my persona suggested I had any real clout, nor did my actual job: I had landed a position a few notches above my previous one of staff assistant—just high enough that it required me to attend some officious monthly meetings where I was expected to rub elbows with my fellow development officers across the university and basically rah-rah (without too much gusto, but in that cool academic way) as a microphone was passed ’round the ballroom and we announced the progress of our multi-million-dollar goals towards the capital campaign.

Since I dreaded these meetings and the hob-knobbing with higher-ups that was expected each time we went, I suppose the blue suit did function much like a power-suit. I purchased it expressly so I could feel a sense of dapper confidence in such settings, and I have to say, it delivered. There were three other expensive suits that I rotated among for these meetings, one a tweedy Ralph Lauren with a fur collar to die for, but none could hold a candle to the daring sense of assertiveness that the blue suit gave me. Nice threads really do make the woman; I don’t care what anyone says. Sure, they’ll never replace that rock-solid foundation known as self-esteem, but they are wonderful props that can bolster a less-than-robust ego and deliver a sense of ownership for the short-haul.

Perfumes are that way, too. If I had to suit up and go back to that office today, I certainly wouldn’t be returning in my blue power-suit, but I would be donning some Byredo Green. (Especially on the days of the Big Meeting.) Notes of orange petitgrain, sage, jasmine, rose, honeysuckle, violet, tonka, almond and musk deliver a green fragrance that reminds me of crisp, well-tailored clothes and the kind of tranquil self-assurance that trumps power plays. Byredo Green is not an intense green scent, as the name might lead you to believe. It comes across as being as “white” as it is green—something I’d describe as an old-time Wimbledon style of green, where emerald tennis lawns meet pleated-white tennis skirts, and both are impeccably groomed. In other words, this is not the kind of fragrance intended to draw a picture frame around the great outdoors, but an urbane green with just enough of a suggestion of the outdoors to make it smell sporting and evince a feeling of the casually formal. (“Polo, anyone?”)

Byredo Green gets off to a sparkling start thanks to the bitter-citrus lift of petitgrain, its inherent green properties combining nicely with the austere note of sage. Where petitgrain leaves off, jasmine and honeysuckle chime in, adding their own lilting qualities to the greenery, keeping it buoyant rather than dense, yet never going so far as to convey sweetness. Always there is enough astringent sage, cool violet (and grassy galbanum, methinks) to effect a reined-in, almost above-it-all aloofness to the whole affair.

The clean musk at the base of Byredo Green, while not usually my cup of tea, works well here. Sillage is of medium strength, leaning towards the softer side of medium, making it office friendly. I should note here that Byredo Green elegantly evades gender issues; my husband wears this fragrance often and every bit as well as I do. In fact, the literature that accompanies Green suggests that it was created with a masculine figure in mind—not that I pay these things any mind of my own, and why should I?

I once wore a suit to work. Now I work at home and wear whatever suits me.

Byredo Green eau de parfum can be purchased at Barneys.com, $195 for 100 ml. I bought my bottle from the Byredo boutique in Stockholm, and am offering decants for sale on the perfume catalog page of my website.

Image, top of page, is a detail of the print (above) by the amazing Danish illustrator Kay Nielsen (1886-1957), taken from his fairytale book In Powder and Crinoline, published in 1913. I'm a huge Kay Nielsen fan, by the way.

Posted by Suzanne Keller, 7/28/2010.
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Profumum D'Ambrosia much like Summer's Lease:

Not Perfect, But Still Beautiful

Sometime back in the early ’90s, Masterpiece Theatre aired a four-part mini-series about an English housewife who, in desperate need of a change, decides to rent a romantic villa in Tuscany for her family’s summer holiday. Molly’s husband and daughters have no interest in going, but she somehow manages to get them there—whereas Molly’s father, an outrageously randy and cagey old coot, knows an opportunity when he sees one and can’t be stopped from tagging along. Once ensconced in their beautiful Italian rental, the kids bicker, the husband writes postcards to his mistress back home in London, and Molly’s father suddenly has designs on a wealthy widow who lives nearby. But that’s not all—there are strange and perplexing goings-on in and around this house: the family soon finds their water supply shut off due to the nefarious dealings of the local water board (the “water racket,” as Molly call it); someone in a nearby parked car seems to be keeping tabs on them; and one of the locals turns up dead in an empty swimming pool, soon after which Molly finds an anonymous note indicating he was murdered.

Titled Summer’s Lease (after the novel of the same name, by esteemed British author John Mortimer), the series juxtaposed two elements that seem at odds with each other: the picturesque beauty of Tuscany (as well as of Italian art, which also features prominently in the series) and the quirkiness of the mysteries that Molly gets caught up in (for they are rather diminutive and murky, these mysteries—even that of the murder). It’s exactly this odd juxtaposition that has made Summer’s Lease stick in my mind all these years. Aside from some wonderful bits of dialogue assigned, almost entirely, to the role of the lecherous father, played by John Gielgud, there was nothing else that could have so compellingly grabbed me: the plot was thin to the point of non-existence, and the mysteries seemed to sputter and go nowhere—their ultimate resolution left to the viewer.

The way I feel about Summer’s Lease is similar to the way I feel about Profumum Roma D’Ambrosia: it’s far from perfect; I’m aware that it has only a cultish number of admirers; and yet I love it all the same. A green, woody fig scent, it presents an olfactory picture of the rural Italian landscape more so than of the fruit itself, and it does an equally strange job at juxtaposing certain elements. When I smell it, I can easily imagine being Molly in that gorgeous Italian villa, bowled over by the beauty of being there but also reminded of life’s tricksy side when the water is shut off. Life’s tricksy imperfections are certainly irritating—but enough to make you want to throw it all away and go home? Sometimes, but not when you are knee-deep in beauty.

Pear, almond, grape, fig and sandalwood. These are the notes that Profumum Roma lists for D’Ambrosia, and though the combination might sound overly sweet, it’s not in this composition. D’Ambrosia is the smell of fruits gathered with the sappy green twigs and leaves still on them, fruits that have been laid out on a table beneath the cypress trees. Though not listed, I can smell lots of tangy cardamom in the opening of D’Ambrosia, and it goes nicely with the sparkling and realistic pear note that grabs my attention before it disappears. The pear note gives way to a cherry-almond smell that I believe (though I could be completely wrong, of course) is achieved via heliotrope—which soon melds with a nuanced amount of coconut and the smell of green fig. While many fig scents take on too much coconut and smell like girly, umbrella’d beach drinks, D’Ambrosia never goes there. It seems to be saved from that fate, in part, by the weirdness that happens next.

I have no idea what accounts for it, but for a portion of its drydown, the fruits meet with something that smells like new shoe leather. It is a green-woody-leather smell that too quickly marries itself to the fruits, making for a strange dissonance that seems to last for at least an hour. Sometimes I wonder if it is iris, as I have noticed that iris can smell that way to me in certain fragrances—not the powdery iris familiar to most fragrances, but the more vegetally bitter iris one finds in Hermès Hiris, for instance. At any rate, here is where the drydown in D’Ambrosia becomes jarring.

Luckily, I can wait that part out (and have even come to crave it in some strange way). What I’m left with at the end of this very long-wearing perfume is a creamy, woody scent accentuated by the smell of figs. The scent of a picnic table under a cypress tree, where the green fruit had been lain out to ripen, its scent impregnating the wood boards after the fruit has been carried into the house. An intoxicating awareness that, as Shakespeare said, “Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.” And a reminder that perfection is not a requisite of beauty.

D'Ambrosia eau de parfum by Profumum Roma is available from LuckyScent.com, $240 for 100 ml. I got my bottle from Cow Parfymeri in Stockholm, and am offering decants for sale on the perfume catalog page of my website.

Image of Summer's Lease video is from Amazon.com; bottle image is from LuckyScent.com.

Posted by Suzanne Keller, 7/19/2010.
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Unlocking an Unknown - Webber Parfum 6T

Joint Blog Project and Prize Drawing

Some people are infatuated with solving the big mysteries of life. Who built the pyramids? How was a primitive culture able to erect the massive stone monoliths at Stonehenge? Where and how did Amelia Earhart’s plane vanish without a trace? Me, I take only a passing interest in the big mysteries, but I’m a fool for the small ones. So when Carol from WAFT invited me to participate in a joint blog project in which each person would receive a bottle of a mystery perfume—one of 22 identical bottles discovered amidst an even larger trove of perfumes she purchased at an estate auction—with the only information known about them being that they were created by the estate’s decedent, Mr. Webber, a chemist who, Carol was told, created the scent for the original and much loved American cleanser Pine-Sol—I couldn’t resist.

Really and truly, I couldn’t.

When Carol revealed in one of her posts that the Webber collection included other curious bottles with cryptic labels, I spent the better part of a day puzzling over them. One of the bottles was labeled “Stepan” and included a hard-to-read description on it that she initially thought said “Maywood Darsion.” Many Google searches later, I emailed her to ask whether she thought Mr. Webber might have been employed by the Stepan Company, a specialty chemical company with a long history of providing aromatics, surfactants and other chemical compositions to the perfume, detergent and even the food industry. (Rather interestingly, they are the only company in the USA authorized by the Drug Enforcement Administration to import coca leaves, which they supply to Coca-Cola.) Stepan is headquartered in Illinois but owns a manufacturing plant in Maywood, New Jersey (once known as the Maywood Chemical Company), the purchase of which helped Stepan become one of the leaders in the field of aromatic chemicals. Carol excitedly wrote back to say that she thought this a good possibility, believing that the hard-to-read label on the “Stepan” bottle could now be interpreted as “Maywood Division.”

I don’t know whether she has since uncovered more about Mr. Webber; I haven’t inquired or pried further because this is, after all, Carol’s mystery. Hers to savor and deliciously ferret out its secrets, some of which she may wish to keep to herself. But the task of sleuthing that Carol did charge us with—analyzing the wondrous perfume Mr. Webber created and bottled in frosted-glass flacons bearing only an enigmatic symbol, a curving 6T—is one that has me happily saying “the game is afoot!” (As well as Thank you, Carol, for taking me along for the ride.)

My bottle of 6T arrived the week after I had written a review of vintage Coty Chypre eau de parfum, and so I was astonished (thinking it too much of a coincidence) when the scent that issued forth from the mystery bottle smelled like Coty Chypre’s fraternal twin. At first I thought that having Coty Chypre so recently on my mind had caused me to imagine the similarity. But after some side-by-side comparisons, I realized it was no hallucination. While the two fragrances aren’t identical, they do indeed share a number of compelling similarities— twenty minutes into their wear, they quite intersect each other in terms of smell, at least for a time—making it natural to compare the two for this review.

I’ll start out by saying that if these fragrances could assume human form, 6T would be the fraternal twin that sings a half-octave lower than Coty Chypre. Its opening is deeper and spicier than the latter: I can smell the warm flush of either clove or carnation, perhaps even a smidgen of anise, intermingling with bergamot and some dry green notes (like sage and vetiver). As it unfolds, revealing its middle notes, 6T smells increasingly like Coty Chypre: both fragrances present a grassy-floral heart—that seemingly old-fashioned style of pretty laid down by the kind of people who eschewed anything overly sentimental or sweet. Guessing as to what the heart notes for 6T might be, I’d name the classic jasmine-rose-iris combination and would be tempted to add carnation.

The drydown of 6T is where the fragrance distinguishes itself again (as it did in the top notes stage) from Coty Chypre. While I do think the two fragrances share a similar base—I smell labdanum, patchouli, oakmoss and sandalwood in each of them—the patchouli is more pronounced in 6T, edged with a hint of vanilla, while Coty Chypre stays woodier and greener. The lasting power—or maybe I should say projection—of 6T’s drydown cannot match that of Coty Chypre eau de parfum: the 6T drydown is much more muted. Though Mr. Webber’s perfume doesn’t have the same long trajectory that Coty Chypre does, all in all it’s one beautiful fragrance—an equally restrained but warmer chypre—and an heirloom in the truest sense of the word.

Which brings me to the heart of the real mystery: Where have all the chypres gone? Why must we always travel back in time to find them? And is that where Mr. Webber was coming from or trying to get back to—year ’60, perhaps—when he created 6T?

For a chance to win a bottle of 6T (given away by Carol), please post a comment on any of the participating blogs as to why you should have a bottle of this rare, unreleased parfum, and we will choose the most creative reply as the winner. (This is a full, 15-ml bottle, identical to the one above in my photo—one of only 22 bottles in existence!!)

Since my site doesn’t have a comments forum, email me at suz@eiderdownpress.com with your response by Wednesday, July 14^th, and I will make sure that you are entered. (Don’t want to email? Then visit and enter to win at any of the wonderful blogs below. Good luck!)

I Smell Therefore I Am

Olfactarama

Parfümieren

sponsored by WaftbyCarol

Image (top of page) provided by Carol; bottle image is a photograph of my own.

Posted by Suzanne Keller, 7/12/2010.